to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite
a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's
attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the
loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.
He explains Wordsworth's gift more fully in another passage:
It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought, the fine
balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying
the objects observed, and, above all, the original gift of spreading the
tone, the _atmosphere_, and with it the depth and height of the ideal
world, around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the
common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the
sparkle and the dew-drops.
Coleridge's censures on Wordsworth, on the other hand, such as that on
_The Daffodil_, may not all be endorsed by us to-day. But in the mass they
have the insight of genius, as when he condemns "the approximation to what
might be called _mental_ bombast, as distinguished from verbal." His
quotations of great passages, again, are the very flower of good
criticism.
Mr. George Sampson's editorial selection from _Biographia Literaria_
and his pleasant as well as instructive notes give one a new
pleasure in re-reading this classic of critical literature. The
"quale-quare-quidditive" chapters have been removed, and Wordsworth's
revolutionary prefaces and essays given in their place. In its new form,
_Biographia Literaria_ may not be the best book that could be written, but
there is good reason for believing that it is the best book that has been
written on poetry in the English tongue.
(2) COLERIDGE AS A TALKER
Coleridge's talk resembles the movements of one of the heavenly bodies. It
moves luminously on its way without impediment, without conflict. When Dr.
Johnson talks, half our pleasure is due to our sense of conflict. His
sentences are knobby sticks. We love him as a good man playing the bully
even more than as a wise man talking common sense. He is one of the comic
characters in literature. He belongs, in his eloquence, to the same
company as Falstaff and Micawber. He was, to some extent, the invention of
a Scottish humourist named Boswell. "Burke," we read in Coleridge's _Table
Talk_, "said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in
talking than writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life."
Coleridge's conversation is not to the same extent a coloured expression
of personality. He speaks out of the solitude of an oracle rather than
struts upon the stage of good company, a master of repartees. At his best,
he becomes the mouthpiece of universal wisdom, as when he says: "To most
men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only
the track it has passed." He can give us in a sentence the central truth
of politics, reconciling what is good in Individualism with what is good
in Socialism in a score or so of words:
That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism
of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy
of the man.
And he can give common sense as well as wisdom imaginative form, as in the
sentence:
Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels
of error, lest you get your brains knocked out.
"I am, by the law of my nature, a reasoner," said Coleridge, and he
explained that he did not mean by this "an arguer." He was a discoverer of
order, of laws, of causes, not a controversialist. He sought after
principles, whether in politics or literature. He quarrelled with Gibbon
because his _Decline and Fall_ was "little else but a disguised collection
of ... splendid anecdotes" instead of a philosophic search for the
ultimate causes of the ruin of the Roman Empire. Coleridge himself
formulated these causes in sentences that are worth remembering at a time
when we are debating whether the world of the future is to be a vast
boxing ring of empires or a community of independent nations. He said:
The true key to the declension of the Roman Empire--which is not to
be found in all Gibbon's immense work--may be stated in two words:
the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the
_national_ character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a
nation.
One must not claim too much for Coleridge, however. He was a seer with his
head among the stars, but he was also a human being with uneven gait,
stumbling amid infirmities, prejudices, and unhappinesses. He himself
boasted in a delightful sentence:
For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance--that, with all my
gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head
of a mountain in blue air and sunshine.
It is to be feared that Coleridge's "gastric and bowel distempers" had
more effect on his head than he was aware of. Like other men, he often
spoke out of a heart full of grievances. He uttered the bitterness of an
unhappily married dyspeptic when he said: "The most happy marriage I can
picture or image to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind
woman." It is amusing to reflect that one of the many books which he
wished to write was "a book on the duties of women, more especially to
their husbands." One feels, again, that in his defence of the egoism of
the great reformers, he was apologizing for a vice of his own rather than
making an impersonal statement of truth. "How can a tall man help thinking
of his size," he asked, "when dwarfs are constantly standing on tiptoe
beside him?" The personal note that occasionally breaks in upon the
oracular rhythm of the _Table Talk_, however, is a virtue in literature,
even if a lapse in philosophy. The crumbs of a great man's autobiography
are no less precious than the crumbs of his wisdom. There are moods in
which one prefers his egotism to his great thoughts. It is pleasant to
hear Coleridge boasting; "The _Ancient Mariner_ cannot be imitated, nor
the poem _Love_. _They may be excelled; they are not imitable._" One is
amused to know that he succeeded in offending Lamb on one occasion by
illustrating "the cases of vast genius in proportion to talent and the
predominance of talent in conjunction with genius in the persons of Lamb
and himself." It is amusing, too, to find that, while Wordsworth regarded
_The Ancient Mariner_ as a dangerous drag on the popularity of _Lyrical
Ballads_, Coleridge looked on his poem as the feature that had sold the
greatest number of the copies of the book. It is only fair to add that in
taking this view he spoke not self-complacently, but humorously:
I was told by Longmans that the greater part of the _Lyrical
Ballads_ had been sold to seafaring men, who, having heard of the
_Ancient Mariner_, concluded that it was a naval song-book, or, at
all events, that it had some relation to nautical matters.
Of autobiographical confessions there are not so many in _Table Talk_ as
one would like. At the same time, there are one or two which throw light
on the nature of Coleridge's imagination. We get an idea of one of the
chief differences between the poetry of Coleridge and the poetry of
Wordsworth when we read the confession:
I had the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim
one of the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but
where I saw them I mostly forget.
The nephew who collected Coleridge's talk declared that there was no man
whom he would more readily have chosen as a guide in morals, but "I would
not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads." The
author of _Kubla Khan_ asserted still more strongly on another occasion
his indifference to locality:
Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact but harmonious
opposites in this--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called
up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations,
just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the
swarming bees; whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I
believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking
more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features.
Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the
battle, in Herodotus, as anyone can. Charles Lamb wrote an essay on
a man who lived in past time: I thought of adding another to it on
one who lived not _in time_ at all, past, present, or future--but
beside or collaterally.
Some of Coleridge's other memories are of a more trifling and amusing
sort. He recalls, for instance, the occasion of his only flogging at
school. He had gone to a shoemaker and asked to be taken on as an
apprentice. The shoemaker, "being an honest man," had at once told the
boy's master:
Bowyer asked me why I had made myself such a fool? to which I
answered, that I had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that I
hated the thought of being a clergyman. "Why so?" said he.
"Because, to tell you the truth, sir," said I, "I am an infidel!"
For this, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me--wisely, as I
think--soundly, as I know. Any whining or sermonizing would have
gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I
laughed at, and got heartily ashamed of my folly.
Among the reminiscences of Coleridge no passage is more famous than that
in which he relates how, as he was walking in a lane near Highgate one
day, a "loose, slack, not well-dressed youth" was introduced to him:
It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so.
After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said: "Let me
carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!"
"There is death in that hand," I said to ----, when Keats was gone;
yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself
distinctly.
Another famous anecdote relates to the time at which Coleridge, like
Wordsworth, carried the fires of the French Revolution about him into the
peace of the West Country. Speaking of a fellow-disciple of the liberty of
those days, Coleridge afterwards said:
John Thelwall had something very good about him. We were once
sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks, when I said to him:
"Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!" "Nay!
Citizen Samuel," replied he, "it is rather a place to make a man
forget that there is any necessity for treason!"
Is there any prettier anecdote in literary history?
Besides the impersonal wisdom and the personal anecdotes of the _Table
Talk_, however, there are a great number of opinions which show us
Coleridge not as a seer, but as a "character"--a crusty gentleman, every
whit as ready to express an antipathy as a principle. He shared Dr.
Johnson's quarrel with the Scots, and said of them:
I have generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very
disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The
Scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the
English.
He had no love for Jews, or Dissenters, or Catholics, and anticipated
Carlyle's hostility to the emancipation of the negroes. He raged against
the Reform Bill, Catholic Emancipation, and the education of the poor in
schools. He was indignant with Belgium for claiming national independence.
One cannot read much of his talk about politics without amazement that so
wise a man should have been so frequently a fool. At the same time, he
generally remained an original fool. He never degenerated into a mere
partisan. He might be deceived by reactionary ideals, but he was not taken
in by reactionary leaders. He was no more capable than Shelley of
mistaking Castlereagh for a great man, and he did not join in the
glorification of Pitt. Like Dr. Johnson, he could be a Tory without
feeling that it was necessary at all costs to bully Ireland. Coleridge,
indeed, went so far as to wish to cut the last link with Ireland as the
only means of saving England. Discussing the Irish question, he said:
I am quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by England from
the disannexing and independence of Ireland at all comparable with
the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to England by
the Union. We have never received one particle of advantage from
our association with Ireland.... Mr. Pitt has received great credit
for effecting the Union; but I believe it will sooner or later be
discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon which, he
effected it made it the most fatal blow that ever was levelled
against the peace and prosperity of England. From it came the
Catholic Bill. From the Catholic Bill has come this Reform Bill!
And what next?
When one thinks of the injury that the subjection of Ireland has done the
English name in America, in Russia, in Australia, and elsewhere in quite
recent times, one can hardly deny that on this matter Coleridge was a
sound prophet.
It is the literary rather than the political opinions, however, that will
bring every generation of readers afresh to Coleridge's _Table Talk_. No
man ever talked better in a few sentences on Shakespeare, Sterne, and the
tribe of authors. One may not agree with Coleridge in regarding Jeremy
Taylor as one of the four chief glories of English literature, or in
thinking Southey's style "next door to faultless." But one listens to his
_obiter dicta_ eagerly as the sayings of one of the greatest minds that
have interested themselves in the criticism of literature. There are
tedious pages in _Table Talk_, but these are, for the most part, concerned
with theology. On the whole, the speech of Coleridge was golden. Even the
leaden parts are interesting because they are Coleridge's lead. One wishes
the theology was balanced, however, by a few more glimpses of his lighter
interests, such as we find in the passage: "Never take an iambus for a
Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do very well. Edith and Rotha
are my favourite names for women." What we want most of all in table talk
is to get an author into the confession album. Coleridge's _Table Talk_
would have stood a worse chance of immortality were it not for the fact
that he occasionally came down out of the pulpit and babbled.