is only so far idealism, as it is at the same time and on that very
account the truest and most binding realism."
To follow the exposition further is unnecessary for the present purpose,
which is to state the fundamental principles of the philosophy, not to
give the processes of reasoning by which they are illustrated. Had
Coleridge been merely a philosopher, his influence on his generation, by
this means, would have been insignificant; for his expositions were
fragmentary; his thoughts were too swift and tumultuous in their flow to
be systematically arranged; his style, forcible and luminous in
passages, is interrupted by too frequent episodes, excursions and
explanatory parentheses, to be enjoyed by the inexpert. Besides being a
philosopher, he was a theologian. His deepest interest was in the
problems of theology. His mind was perpetually turning over the
questions of trinity, incarnation, Holy Ghost, sin, redemption,
salvation. He meditated endless books on these themes, and, in special,
one "On the Logos," which was to remove all difficulties and reconcile
all contradictions. "On the whole, those dead churches, this dead
English church especially, must be brought to life again. Why not? It
was not dead; the soul of it, in this parched-up body, was tragically
asleep only. Atheistic philosophy was, true, on its side; and Hume and
Voltaire could, on their own ground, speak irrefragably for themselves
against any church: but lift the church and them into a higher sphere of
argument, _they_ died into inanition, the church revivified itself into
pristine florid vigor, became once more a living ship of the desert, and
invincibly bore you over stock and stone."
The philosophy was accepted as a basis for the theology, and apparently
only so far as it supplied the basis. Mrs. Coleridge declares, in a note
to Chapter IX. of the "Biographia Literaria," that her husband, soon
after the composition of that work, became dissatisfied with the system
of Schelling, considered as a fundamental and comprehensive scheme
intended to exhibit the relations of God to the world and man. He
objected to it, she insists, as essentially pantheistic, radically
inconsistent with a belief in God as himself moral and intelligent, as
beyond and above the world, as the supreme mind to which the human mind
owes homage and fealty--inconsistent with any just view and deep sense
of the moral and spiritual being of man. He was mainly concerned
with the construction of a "philosophical system, in which
Christianity,--based on the triune being of God, and embracing a primal
fall and universal redemption, (to use Carlyle's words) Christianity,
ideal, spiritual, eternal, but likewise and necessarily historical,
realized and manifested in time,--should be shown forth as accordant, or
rather as one with ideas of reason, and the demands of the spiritual and
of the speculative mind, of the heart, conscience, reason, which should
all be satisfied and reconciled in one bond of peace."
This explains the interest which young and enthusiastic minds in the
English Church took in Coleridge, the verses just quoted from Aubrey de
Vere, one of the new school of believers, the admiring discipleship of
Frederick Denison Maurice, the hearty allegiance of the leaders of the
spiritual reformation in England. Coleridge was the real founder of the
Broad Church, which attempted to justify creed and sacrament, by
substituting the ideas of the spiritual philosophy for the formal
authority of traditions which the reason of the age was discarding.
The men who sympathized with the same movement in America felt the same
gratitude to their leader. Already in 1829 "The Aids to Reflection" were
republished by Dr. James Marsh. Caleb Sprague Henry, professor of
philosophy and history in the University of New York in 1839, and before
that a resident of Cambridge, an enthusiastic thinker and eloquent
talker, loved to dilate on the genius of the English philosopher, and
was better than a book in conveying information about him, better than
many books in awakening interest in his thought. The name of Coleridge
was spoken with profound reverence, his books were studied
industriously, and the terminology of transcendentalism was as familiar
as commonplace in the circles of divines and men of letters. At present
Hegel is the prophet of these believers, Schelling is obsolete, and
Coleridge, the English Schelling, has had his day. The change is marked
by an all but entire absence of the passionate enthusiasm, the
imaginative glow and fervor, that characterized the transcendental
phase of the movement. Coleridge was a vital thinker; his mind was a
flame; his thoughts burned within him, and issued from him in language
that trembled and throbbed with the force of the ideas committed to it.
He was a divine, a preacher of most wonderful eloquence. At the age of
three or four and forty Serjeant Talfourd heard him talk.
"At first his tones were conversational: he seemed to dally with
the shallows of the subject and with fantastic images which
bordered it; but gradually the thought grew deeper, and the voice
deepened with the thought; the stream gathering strength seemed to
bear along with it all things which opposed its progress, and
blended them with its current; and stretching away among regions
tinted with ethereal colors, was lost at airy distance in the
horizon of fancy." At five-and-twenty William Hazlitt heard him
preach.
"It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight,
to walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person
preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such
another walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of
the year 1798. _Il y a des impressions que ni le temps ni les
circonstances peuvent effacer. Dusse je vivre des siecles entiers,
le doux temps de ma jeunesse ne peut renaitre pour moi, ni
s'effacer jamais dans ma memoire._ When I got there the organ was
playing the hundredth psalm, and when it was done Mr. Coleridge
rose and gave out his text. 'He departed again into a mountain
himself alone.' As he gave out this text his voice 'rose like a
stream of rich distilled perfumes;' and when he came to the last
two words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed
to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the
bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated
in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came
into my mind, of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins
girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey. The preacher
then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the
wind. The sermon was upon peace and war, upon church and state, not
their alliance, but their separation; on the spirit of the world
and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to
one another. He talked of those who had inscribed the cross of
Christ on banners dripping with human gore. He made a poetical and
pastoral excursion, and to show the effects of war, drew a striking
contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield,
or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock as though he
should never be old; and the same poor country lad, crimped,
kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an ale-house, turned
into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with
powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the
finery of the profession of blood.
'Such were the notes our once loved poet sung;'
and for myself I could not have been more delighted if I had heard
the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together,
Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction
of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well
satisfied."
The influence of Coleridge was greatly assisted by contemporary
magazines, which helped by their furious efforts to crush him, and won
sympathy for him by their attempts to laugh and hoot him down. Jeffrey
handled the "Biographia Literaria" in the Edinburgh Review, August,
1817; "as favorable to the book _as could be expected_," the editor
quietly says. The numberless varieties of judgment were represented in
the Dublin University Magazine, British and Foreign Quarterly, Fraser,
Blackwood, Christian Quarterly, Spectator, Monthly Review, Eclectic,
Westminster, most of which contained several articles on different
aspects of the subject. In America, Geo. B. Cheever wrote in the North
American Review, F. H. Hedge in the Christian Examiner, D. N. Lord in
Lord's Theological Journal, H. T. Tuckerman in the Southern Literary
Messenger, Noah Porter in the Bibliotheca Sacra. The New York Review,
the American Quarterly, American Whig Review, all made contributions to
the Coleridgian literature,[2] and exhibited the extensive reaches of
his power. The readers of Lamb, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Southey and the
brilliant essayists that made so fascinating the English literature of
the first third of our century must perforce be introduced to Coleridge.
The "Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel," which lay on every table,
excited interest in the man from whom such astonishing pieces proceeded;
so that many who understood little or nothing of his philosophical
ideas, appropriated something of the spirit and tone of them. He had
disciples who never heard him speak even in print, and followers who
never saw his form even as sketched by critics. His thoughts were in the
air; the mental atmosphere of theological schools was modified by them.
They insensibly transplanted establishments and creeds from old to new
regions.
[2] See for references. Poole's Index to Periodical Literature.
In 1851, Thomas Carlyle burlesqued Coleridge, took off his solemn
oracular manner, made fun of his "plaintive snuffle and sing-song," his
"om-m-ject and sum-m-ject," his "talk not flowing anywhither like a
river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable currents and
regurgitations like a lake or sea; terribly deficient in definite goal
or aim, nay often in logical intelligibility; what you were to believe
or do, on any earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to appear
from it, so that, most times, you felt logically lost; swamped near to
drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables spreading out boundless as
if to submerge the world." But in his earlier days the "windy harangues"
and "dizzying metaphysics" had their charm for him too; the philosophy
of the Highgate sage was in essence and fruit his own. He explained at
some length and with considerable frequency, as well as much eloquence,
the distinction between "understanding," the faculty that observed,
generalized, inferred, argued, concluded, and "reason," the faculty that
saw the ideal forms of truth face to face, and beheld the inmost reality
of things. He dilated with a disciple's enthusiasm on the principles of
the transcendental philosophy, painted in gorgeous colors the promises
it held forth, prophesied earnestly respecting the better time for
literature, art, social ethics and religious faith it would bring in,
preached tempestuously against shams in church and state, from the mount
of vision that it disclosed. We have already seen how he could speak of
Kant, Fichte, Novalis, of Goethe and Jean Paul. Thirty-five years ago
Carlyle was the high priest of the new philosophy. Emerson edited his
miscellanies, and the dregs of his ink-bottle were welcomed as the
precious sediment of the fountain of inspiration. In 1827 he defended
the "Kritik of Pure Reason" against stupid objectors from the
sensational side, as, in the opinion of the most competent judges,
"distinctly the greatest intellectual achievement of the century in
which it came to light," and affirmed as by authority, that the seeker
for pure truth must begin with intuition and proceed outward by the
light of the revelation thence derived. In 1831 he carried this
principle to the extreme of maintaining that a complete surrender to the
informing genius, a surrender so entire as to amount to the abandonment
of definite purpose and will, was evidence of perfect wisdom; for such
is the interpretation we give to the paradoxical doctrine of
"unconsciousness" which implied that in order to save the soul it must
be forgotten; that consciousness was a disease; that in much wisdom was
much grief.
Had Carlyle been more of a philosopher and less of a preacher, more a
thinker and less a character, more a patient toiler after truth, and
less a man of letters, his first intellectual impulse might have lasted.
As it was, the reaction came precisely in middle life, and the apostle
of transcendental ideas became the champion of Force. His
Transcendentalism seems to have been a thing of sentiment rather than of
conviction. A man of tremendous strength of feeling, his youth, as is
the case with men of feeling, was romantic, enthusiastic, hopeful,
exuberant; his manhood, as is also the case with men of feeling, was
wilful and overbearing, with sadness deepening into moroseness and
unhopefulness verging towards despair.
The era of despair had not set in at the period when the mind of New
England was fermenting with the ideas of the new philosophy. Then all
was brave, humane, aspiring. The denunciations of materialism in
philosophy, formalism in religion and utilitarianism in personal and
social ethics, rang through the land; the superb vindications of soul
against sense, spirit against letter, faith against rite, heroism and
nobleness against the petty expediencies of the market, kindled all
earnest hearts. The emphatic declarations that "wonder and reverence are
the conditions of insight and the source of strength; that faith is
prior to knowledge and deeper too; that empirical science can but play
on the surface of unfathomable mysteries; that in the order of reality
the ideal and invisible are the world's true adamant, and the laws of
material appearance only its alluvial growths; that in the inmost
thought of men there is a thirst to which the springs of nature are a
mere mirage, and which presses on to the waters of eternity," fell like
refreshing gales from the hills on the children of men imprisoned in
custom and suffocated by tradition. The infinitely varied illustrations
of the worth of beauty, the grandeur of truth, the excellence of simple,
devout sincerity in nature, literature, character; the burning
insistance on the need of fresh inspiration from the region of serene
ideas, seemed to proceed from a soul newly awakened, if not especially
endowed with the seer's vision. It was better than philosophy; it was
philosophy made vital with sentiment and purpose.
Carlyle early learned the German language, as Coleridge did, and drank
deep from the fountains of its best literature. To him it opened a new
world of thought, which the ordinary Englishman had no conception of.
Coleridge found himself at home there by virtue of his natural genius,
and also by the introduction given him by Wm. Law, John Pordage, Richard
Saumarez, and Jacob Behmen, so that the suddenly discovered continent
broke on him with less surprise; but Carlyle was as one taken wholly
unawares, fascinated, charmed, intoxicated with the sights and sounds
about him. Being unprepared by previous reflection and overpowered by
the gorgeousness of color, the wealth was too much for him; it palled at
last on his appetite, and he experienced a reaction similar to that of
the sensualist whose delirium first persuades him that he has found his
soul, and then makes him fear that he has lost it.
With the reactionary stage of Carlyle's career when, as a frank critic
observes, "he flung away with a shriek the problems his youth
entertained, as the fruit by which paradise was lost; repented of all
knowledge of good and evil; clapped a bandage round the open eyes of
morals, religion, art, and saw no salvation but in spiritual suicide by
plunging into the currents of instinctive nature that sweep us we know
not whither"--we are not concerned. His interest for us ceases with his
moral enthusiasm.
A more serene and beneficent influence proceeded from the poet
Wordsworth, whose fame rose along with that of Coleridge, struggled
against the same opposition, and obtained even a steadier lustre. There
was a kindred between them which Wordsworth did not acknowledge, but
which Coleridge more than suspected and tried to divulge. One chapter in
the first volume of the "Biographia Literaria" and four chapters in the
second volume are devoted to the consideration of Wordsworth's poetry,
and effort is made, not quite successfully, to bring Wordsworth's
psychological faith into sympathy with his own.
Wordsworth's genius has furnished critics with materials for speculation
that must be sought in their proper places. We have no fresh analysis to
offer. That the secret of his power over the ingenuous and believing
minds of his age is to be found in the sentiment with which he invested
homely scenes and characters is a superficial conjecture. What led him
to invest homely scenes and characters with sentiment, and what made
this circumstance interesting to precisely that class of minds? What,
but the same latent idealism that came to deliberate and formal
expression in Coleridge, and suggested in the one what was proclaimed by
the other? For Wordsworth was a metaphysician, though he did not clearly
suspect it; at least, if he did, he was careful not to betray himself by
the usual signs. The philosophers recognized him and paid to him their
acknowledgments.
In the "Dial," Wordsworth is mentioned with honor; not discussed as
Goethe was, but pleasantly talked about as a well-known friend. The
third volume of that magazine, April, 1843, contains an article on
"Europe and European Books" in which occurs the following tribute to
Wordsworth:
"The capital merit of Wordsworth is that he has done more for the
sanity of this generation than any other writer. Early in life, at
a crisis, it is said, in his private affairs, he made his election
between assuming and defending some legal rights with the chances
of wealth and a position in the world--and the inward promptings of
his heavenly genius; he took his part; he accepted the call to be a
poet, and sat down, far from cities, with coarse clothing and plain
fare to obey the heavenly vision. The choice he had made in his
will manifested itself in every line to be real. We have poets who
write the poetry of society, of the patricians and conventional
Europe, as Scott and Moore; and others, who, like Byron or Bulwer,
write the poetry of vice and disease. But Wordsworth threw himself
into his place, made no reserves or stipulations; man and writer
were not to be divided. He sat at the foot of Helvellyn and on the
margin of Windermere, and took their lustrous mornings and their
sublime midnights, for his theme, and not Marlowe nor Massinger,
nor Horace, nor Milton nor Dante. He once for all forsook the
styles and standards and modes of thinking of London and Paris and
the books read there, and the aims pursued, and wrote Helvellyn and
Windermere and the dim spirits which these haunts harbored. There
was not the least attempt to reconcile these with the spirit of
fashion and selfishness, nor to show, with great deference to the
superior judgment of dukes and earls, that although London was the
home for men of great parts, yet Westmoreland had these
consolations for such as fate had condemned to the country life;
but with a complete satisfaction he pitied and rebuked their false
lives, and celebrated his own with the religion of a true priest.
Hence the antagonism which was immediately felt between his poetry
and the spirit of the age, that here not only criticism but
conscience and will were parties; the spirit of literature, and the
modes of living, and the conventional theories of the conduct of
life were called in question on wholly new grounds, not from
Platonism, nor from Christianity, but from the lessons which the
country muse taught a stout pedestrian climbing a mountain, and
following a river from its parent rill down to the sea. The
Cannings and Jeffreys of the capital, the Court Journals and
Literary Gazettes were not well pleased, and voted the poet a bore.
But that which rose in him so high as to the lips, rose in many
others as high as to the heart. What he said, they were prepared to
hear and to confirm. The influence was in the air, and was wafted
up and down into lone and populous places, resisting the popular
taste, modifying opinions which it did not change, and soon came to
be felt in poetry, in criticism, in plans of life, and at last in
legislation. In this country it very early found a stronghold, and
its effect may be traced on all the poetry both of England and
America."
This is truly and well said, though quite inadequate. The slighting
allusion to Platonism might have been omitted, for possibly Wordsworth
had caught something of the philosophy that was in the air. Mr. Emerson,
in "Thoughts on Modern Literature," in the second number of the "Dial,"
Oct. 1840, touched a deeper chord.
"The fame of Wordsworth" he says, "is a leading fact in modern
literature, when it is considered how hostile his genius at first
seemed to the reigning taste, and with what feeble poetic talents
his great and steadily growing dominion has been established. More
than any poet his success has been not his own, but that of the
idea which he shared with his coevals, and which he has rarely
succeeded in adequately expressing. The Excursion awakened in every
lover of nature the right feeling. We saw the stars shine, we felt
the awe of mountains, we heard the rustle of the wind in the grass,
and knew again the ineffable secret of solitude. It was a great
joy. It was nearer to nature than any thing we had before. But the
interest of the poem ended almost with the narrative of the
influences of nature on the mind of the Boy, in the first book.
Obviously for that passage the poem was written, and with the
exception of this and a few strains of like character in the
sequel, the whole poem was dull. Here was no poem, but here was
poetry, and a sure index where the subtle muse was about to pitch
her tent and find the argument of her song. It was the human soul
in these last ages striving for a just publication of itself. Add
to this, however, the great praise of Wordsworth, that more than
any other contemporary bard he is pervaded with a reverence of
somewhat higher than (conscious) thought. There is in him that
property common to all great poets--a wisdom of humanity, which is
superior to any talents which they exert. It is the wisest part of
Shakespeare and Milton, for they are poets by the free course which
they allow to the informing soul, which through their eyes
beholdeth again and blesseth the things which it hath made. The
soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any of its works."
In the general Preface to his poems, where Wordsworth discusses the
principles of the poetic art, he wrote: "The imagination is conscious of
an indestructible dominion; the soul may fall away, from its not being
able to sustain its grandeur, but if once felt and acknowledged, by no
act of any other faculty of the mind can it be relaxed, impaired or
diminished. Fancy is given to quicken and to beguile the temporal part
of our nature; Imagination to incite and support the eternal." And in
the appendix: "Faith was given to man that his affections, detached from
the treasures of time, might be inclined to settle on those of eternity:
the elevation of his nature, which this habit produces on earth, being
to him a presumptive evidence of a future state of existence, and
giving him a title to partake of its holiness. The religious man values
what he sees, chiefly as an 'imperfect shadowing forth' of what he is
incapable of seeing." Was this an echo from the German Jacobi, whose
doctrine of Faith had been some time abroad in the intellectual world?