The organic form is innate: it shapes, as it develops, itself from
within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the
perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form.
Nature, the prime, genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is
equally inexhaustible in forms: each exterior is the physiognomy of the
being within, and even such is the appropriate excellence of
Shakespeare, himself a nature humanised, a genial understanding,
directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even
than our consciousness.+
In this late age we are become so familiarised with the greater works
of art as to be little sensitive of the act of creation in them: they
do not impress us as a new presence in the world. Only sometimes, in
productions which realise immediately a profound influence and enforce
a change in taste, we are actual witnesses of the moulding of an
unforeseen type by some new principle of association; and to that
phenomenon Coleridge wisely recalls our attention. What makes his view
a one-sided one is, that in it the artist has become almost a
mechanical agent: instead of the most luminous and self-possessed phase
of consciousness, the associative act in art or poetry is made to look
like some blindly organic process of assimilation. The work of art is
likened to a living organism. That expresses [81] truly the sense of a
self-delighting, independent life which the finished work of art gives
us: it hardly figures the process by which such work was produced.
Here there is no blind ferment of lifeless elements towards the
realisation of a type. By exquisite analysis the artist attains
clearness of idea; then, through many stages of refining, clearness of
expression. He moves slowly over his work, calculating the tenderest
tone, and restraining the subtlest curve, never letting hand or fancy
move at large, gradually enforcing flaccid spaces to the higher degree
of expressiveness. The philosophic critic, at least, will value, even
in works of imagination, seemingly the most intuitive, the power of the
understanding in them, their logical process of construction, the
spectacle of a supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.
Coleridge's prose writings on philosophy, politics, religion, and
criticism, were, in truth, but one element in a whole lifetime of
endeavours to present the then recent metaphysics of Germany to English
readers, as a legitimate expansion of the older, classical and native
masters of what has been variously called the a priori, or absolute, or
spiritual, or Platonic, view of things. His criticism, his challenge
for recognition in the concrete, visible, finite work of art, of the
dim, unseen, comparatively infinite, soul or power of the artist, may
well be [82] remembered as part of the long pleading of German culture
for the things "behind the veil." To introduce that spiritual
philosophy, as represented by the more transcendental parts of Kant,
and by Schelling, into all subjects, as a system of reason in them, one
and ever identical with itself, however various the matter through
which it was diffused, became with him the motive of an unflagging
enthusiasm, which seems to have been the one thread of continuity in a
life otherwise singularly wanting in unity of purpose, and in which he
was certainly far from uniformly at his best. Fragmentary and obscure,
but often eloquent, and always at once earnest and ingenious, those
writings, supplementing his remarkable gift of conversation, were
directly and indirectly influential, even on some the furthest removed
from Coleridge's own masters; on John Stuart Mill, for instance, and
some of the earlier writers of the "high-church" school. Like his
verse, they display him also in two other characters--as a student of
words, and as a psychologist, that is, as a more minute observer or
student than other men of the phenomena of mind. To note the recondite
associations of words, old or new; to expound the logic, the reasonable
soul, of their various uses; to recover the interest of older writers
who had had a phraseology of their own--this was a vein of inquiry
allied to his undoubted gift of tracking out and analysing curious
modes of thought. A [83] quaint fragment of verse on Human Life might
serve to illustrate his study of the earlier English philosophical
poetry. The latter gift, that power of the "subtle-souled
psychologist," as Shelley calls him, seems to have been connected with
some tendency to disease in the physical temperament, something of a
morbid want of balance in those parts where the physical and
intellectual elements mix most closely together, with a kind of languid
visionariness, deep-seated in the very constitution of the "narcotist,"
who had quite a gift for "plucking the poisons of self-harm," and which
the actual habit of taking opium, accidentally acquired, did but
reinforce. This morbid languor of nature, connected both with his
fitfulness of purpose and his rich delicate dreaminess, qualifies
Coleridge's poetic composition even more than his prose; his verse,
with the exception of his avowedly political poems, being, unlike that
of the "Lake School," to which in some respects he belongs, singularly
unaffected by any moral, or professional, or personal effort or
ambition,--"written," as he says, "after the more violent emotions of
sorrow, to give him pleasure, when perhaps nothing else could;" but
coming thus, indeed, very close to his own most intimately personal
characteristics, and having a certain languidly soothing grace or
cadence, for its most fixed quality, from first to last. After some
Platonic soliloquy on a flower opening on a fine day in February, he
goes on-- [84]
Dim similitudes
Weaving in mortal strains, I've stolen one hour
From anxious self, life's cruel taskmaster!
And the warm wooings of this sunny day
Tremble along my frame and harmonise
The attempered organ, that even saddest thoughts
Mix with some sweet sensations, like harsh tunes
Played deftly on a sweet-toned instrument.
The expression of two opposed, yet allied, elements of sensibility in
these lines, is very true to Coleridge:--the grievous agitation, the
grievous listlessness, almost never entirely relieved, together with a
certain physical voluptuousness. He has spoken several times of the
scent of the bean-field in the air:--the tropical touches in a chilly
climate; his is a nature that will make the most of these, which finds
a sort of caress in such things. Kubla Khan, the fragment of a poem
actually composed in some certainly not quite healthy sleep, is perhaps
chiefly of interest as showing, by the mode of its composition, how
physical, how much of a diseased or valetudinarian temperament, in its
moments of relief, Coleridge's happiest gift really was; and side by
side with Kubla Khan should be read, as Coleridge placed it, the Pains
of Sleep, to illustrate that retarding physical burden in his
temperament, that "unimpassioned grief," the source of which lay so
near the source of those pleasures. Connected also with this, and
again in contrast with Wordsworth, is the limited quantity of his
poetical performance, as he himself [85] regrets so eloquently in the
lines addressed to Wordsworth after his recitation of The Prelude. It
is like some exotic plant, just managing to blossom a little in the
somewhat un-english air of Coleridge's own south-western birthplace,
but never quite well there.
In 1798 he joined Wordsworth in the composition of a volume of
poems--the Lyrical Ballads. What Wordsworth then wrote already
vibrates with that blithe impulse which carried him to final happiness
and self-possession. In Coleridge we feel already that faintness and
obscure dejection which clung like some contagious damp to all his
work. Wordsworth was to be distinguished by a joyful and penetrative
conviction of the existence of certain latent affinities between nature
and the human mind, which reciprocally gild the mind and nature with a
kind of "heavenly alchemy."
My voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual mind
(And the progressive powers, perhaps, no less
Of the whole species) to the external world
Is fitted; and how exquisitely, too,
The external world is fitted to the mind;
And the creation, by no lower name
Can it be called, which they with blended might
Accomplish.
In Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken dreaming over the
aspects and transitions of nature--a reflective, though altogether
unformulated, analysis of them.
[86] There are in Coleridge's poems expressions of this conviction as
deep as Wordsworth's. But Coleridge could never have abandoned himself
to the dream, the vision, as Wordsworth did, because the first
condition of such abandonment must be an unvexed quietness of heart.
No one can read the Lines composed above Tintern without feeling how
potent the physical element was among the conditions of Wordsworth's
genius--"felt in the blood and felt along the heart."
My whole life I have lived in quiet thought!
The stimulus which most artists require of nature he can renounce. He
leaves the ready-made glory of the Swiss mountains that he may reflect
glory on a mouldering leaf. He loves best to watch the floating
thistledown, because of its hint at an unseen life in the air.
Coleridge's temperament, aei en sphodra orexei,+ with its faintness,
its grieved dejection, could never have been like that.
My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within.
Wordsworth's flawless temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of
mind, that calm, sabbatic, mystic, wellbeing which De Quincey, [87] a
little cynically, connected with worldly (that is to say, pecuniary)
good fortune, kept his conviction of a latent intelligence in nature
within the limits of sentiment or instinct, and confined it to those
delicate and subdued shades of expression which alone perfect art
allows. In Coleridge's sadder, more purely intellectual, cast of
genius, what with Wordsworth was sentiment or instinct became a
philosophical idea, or philosophical formula, developed, as much as
possible, after the abstract and metaphysical fashion of the
transcendental schools of Germany.
The period of Coleridge's residence at Nether Stowey, 1797-1798, was
for him the annus mirabilis. Nearly all the chief works by which his
poetic fame will live were then composed or planned. What shapes
itself for criticism as the main phenomenon of Coleridge's poetic life,
is not, as with most true poets, the gradual development of a poetic
gift, determined, enriched, retarded, by the actual circumstances of
the poet's life, but the sudden blossoming, through one short season,
of such a gift already perfect in its kind, which thereafter
deteriorates as suddenly, with something like premature old age.
Connecting this phenomenon with the leading motive of his prose
writings, we might note it as the deterioration of a productive or
creative power into one merely metaphysical or discursive. In his
unambitious conception of his function as a poet, and in the very
limited quantity of his [88] poetical performance, as I have said, he
was a contrast to his friend Wordsworth. That friendship with
Wordsworth, the chief "developing" circumstance of his poetic life,
comprehended a very close intellectual sympathy; and in such
association chiefly, lies whatever truth there may be in the popular
classification of Coleridge as a member of what is called the "Lake
School." Coleridge's philosophical speculations do really turn on the
ideas which underlay Wordsworth's poetical practice. His prose works
are one long explanation of all that is involved in that famous
distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination. Of what is
understood by both writers as the imaginative quality in the use of
poetic figures, we may take some words of Shakespeare as an example.--
My cousin Suffolk,
My soul shall thine keep company to heaven
Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly abreast.
The complete infusion here of the figure into the thought, so vividly
realised, that, though birds are not actually mentioned, yet the sense
of their flight, conveyed to us by the single word "abreast," comes to
be more than half of the thought itself:--this, as the expression of
exalted feeling, is an instance of what Coleridge meant by Imagination.
And this sort of identification of the poet's thought, of himself, with
the image or figure which serves him, is the secret, sometimes, [89] of
a singularly entire realisation of that image, such as makes these
lines of Coleridge, for instance, "imaginative"--
Amid the howl of more than wintry storms,
The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours
Already on the wing.
There are many such figures both in Coleridge's verse and prose. He
has, too, his passages of that sort of impassioned contemplation on the
permanent and elementary conditions of nature and humanity, which
Wordsworth held to be the essence of a poet; as it would be his proper
function to awaken such contemplation in other men--those "moments," as
Coleridge says, addressing him--
Moments awful,
Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,
When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received
The light reflected, as a light bestowed.
The entire poem from which these lines are taken, "composed on the
night after Wordsworth's recitation of a poem on the growth of an
individual mind," is, in its high-pitched strain of meditation, and in
the combined justice and elevation of its philosophical expression--
high and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted;
wholly sympathetic with The Prelude which it celebrates, and of which
the subject is, in effect, the generation of the spirit of the "Lake
poetry." [90] The Lines to Joseph Cottle have the same philosophically
imaginative character; the Ode to Dejection being Coleridge's most
sustained effort of this kind.
It is in a highly sensitive apprehension of the aspects of external
nature that Coleridge identifies himself most closely with one of the
main tendencies of the "Lake School"; a tendency instinctive, and no
mere matter of theory, in him as in Wordsworth. That record of the
green light
Which lingers in the west,
and again, of
the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow green,
which Byron found ludicrously untrue, but which surely needs no
defence, is a characteristic example of a singular watchfulness for the
minute fact and expression of natural scenery pervading all he wrote--a
closeness to the exact physiognomy of nature, having something to do
with that idealistic philosophy which sees in the external world no
mere concurrence of mechanical agencies, but an animated body, informed
and made expressive, like the body of man, by an indwelling
intelligence. It was a tendency, doubtless, in the air, for Shelley
too is affected by it, and Turner, with the school of landscape which
followed him. "I had found," Coleridge tells us,
[91]
That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive
Their finer influence from the world within;
Fair ciphers of vague import, where the eye
Traces no spot, in which the heart may read
History and prophecy:...
and this induces in him no indifference to actual colour and form and
process, but such minute realism as this--
The thin grey cloud is spread on high,
It covers but not hides the sky.
The moon is behind and at the full;
And yet she looks both small and dull;
or this, which has a touch of "romantic" weirdness--
Nought was green upon the oak
But moss and rarest misletoe
or this--
There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky
or this, with a weirdness, again, like that of some wild French etcher--
Lo! the new-moon winter-bright!
And overspread with phantom light
(With swimming phantom light o'erspread,
But rimmed and circled with a silver thread)
I see the old moon in her lap, foretelling
The coming on of rain and squally blast.
He has a like imaginative apprehension of the silent and unseen
processes of nature, its "ministries" [92] of dew and frost, for
instance; as when he writes, in April--
A balmy night! and though the stars be dim,
Yet let us think upon the vernal showers
That gladden the green earth, and we shall find
A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.
Of such imaginative treatment of landscape there is no better instance
than the description of The Dell, in Fears in Solitude--
A green and silent spot amid the hills,
A small and silent dell! O'er stiller place
No singing skylark ever poised himself--
But the dell,
Bathed by the mist is fresh and delicate
As vernal cornfield, or the unripe flax
When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve,
The level sunshine glimmers with green light:--
The gust that roared and died away
To the distant tree--
heard and only heard
In this low dell, bowed not the delicate grass.
This curious insistence of the mind on one particular spot, till it
seems to attain actual expression and a sort of soul in it--a mood so
characteristic of the "Lake School"--occurs in an earnest political
poem, "written in April 1798, during the alarm of an invasion"; and
that silent dell is the background against which the tumultuous fears
of the poet are in strong relief, while the quiet sense of the place,
maintained all through them, gives a true poetic unity to the piece.
Good political poetry--[93] political poetry that shall be permanently
moving--can, perhaps, only be written on motives which, for those they
concern, have ceased to be open questions, and are really beyond
argument; while Coleridge's political poems are for the most part on
open questions. For although it was a great part of his intellectual
ambition to subject political questions to the action of the
fundamental ideas of his philosophy, he was nevertheless an ardent
partisan, first on one side, then on the other, of the actual politics
proper to the end of the last and the beginning of the present century,
where there is still room for much difference of opinion. Yet The
Destiny of Nations, though formless as a whole, and unfinished,
presents many traces of his most elevated manner of speculation, cast
into that sort of imaginative philosophical expression, in which, in
effect, the language itself is inseparable from, or essentially a part
of, the thought. France, an Ode, begins with a famous apostrophe to
Liberty--
Ye Clouds! that far above me float and pause,
Whose pathless march no mortal may control!
Ye Ocean-waves! that wheresoe'er ye roll,
Yield homage only to eternal laws!
Ye Woods! that listen to the night-bird's singing,
Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined,
Save when your own imperious branches swinging,
Have made a solemn music of the wind!
Where like a man beloved of God,
Through glooms which never woodman trod,
How oft, pursuing fancies holy,
[94]
My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound,
Inspired, beyond the guess of folly,
By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound!
O ye loud Waves! and O ye Forests high!
And O ye Clouds that far above me soar'd!
Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky!
Yea, everything that is and will be free!
Bear witness for me, wheresoe'er ye be,
With what deep worship I have still adored
The spirit of divinest liberty.
And the whole ode, though, after Coleridge's way, not quite equal to
that exordium, is an example of strong national sentiment, partly in
indignant reaction against his own earlier sympathy with the French
Republic, inspiring a composition which, in spite of some turgid lines,
really justifies itself as poetry, and has that true unity of effect
which the ode requires. Liberty, after all his hopes of young France,
is only to be found in nature:--
Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions,
The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!
In his changes of political sentiment, Coleridge was associated with
the "Lake School"; and there is yet one other very different sort of
sentiment in which he is one with that school, yet all himself, his
sympathy, namely, with the animal world. That was a sentiment
connected at once with the love of outward nature in himself and in the
"Lake School," and its assertion of the natural affections in their
simplicity; with the homeliness and pity, consequent upon [95] that
assertion. The Lines to a Young Ass, tethered--
Where the close-eaten grass is scarcely seen,
While sweet around her waves the tempting green,
which had seemed merely whimsical in their day, indicate a vein of
interest constant in Coleridge's poems, and at its height in his
greatest poems--in Christabel, where it has its effect, as it were
antipathetically, in the vivid realisation of the serpentine element in
Geraldine's nature; and in The Ancient Mariner, whose fate is
interwoven with that of the wonderful bird, at whose blessing of the
water-snakes the curse for the death of the albatross passes away, and
where the moral of the love of all creatures, as a sort of religious
duty, is definitely expressed.
Christabel, though not printed till 1816, was written mainly in the
year 1797: The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner was printed as a
contribution to the Lyrical Ballads in 1798; and these two poems belong
to the great year of Coleridge's poetic production, his twenty-fifth
year. In poetic quality, above all in that most poetic of all
qualities, a keen sense of, and delight in beauty, the infection of
which lays hold upon the reader, they are quite out of proportion to
all his other compositions. The form in both is that of the ballad,
with some of its terminology, and some also of its quaint conceits.
They connect themselves with that revival of ballad literature, of
which Percy's Relics, and, in another [96] way, Macpherson's Ossian are
monuments, and which afterwards so powerfully affected Scott--
Young-eyed poesy
All deftly masked as hoar antiquity.
The Ancient Mariner, as also, in its measure, Christabel, is a
"romantic" poem, impressing us by bold invention, and appealing to that
taste for the supernatural, that longing for le frisson, a shudder, to
which the "romantic" school in Germany, and its derivations in England
and France, directly ministered. In Coleridge, personally, this taste
had been encouraged by his odd and out-of-the-way reading in the
old-fashioned literature of the marvellous--books like Purchas's
Pilgrims, early voyages like Hakluyt's, old naturalists and visionary
moralists, like Thomas Burnet, from whom he quotes the motto of "The
Ancient Mariner, Facile credo, plures esse naturas invisibiles quam
visibiles in rerum universitate, etc." Fancies of the strange things
which may very well happen, even in broad daylight, to men shut up
alone in ships far off on the sea, seem to have occurred to the human
mind in all ages with a peculiar readiness, and often have about them,
from the story of the stealing of Dionysus downwards, the fascination
of a certain dreamy grace, which distinguishes them from other kinds of
marvellous inventions. This sort of fascination The Ancient Mariner
brings to its highest degree: it is the delicacy, the dreamy [97]
grace, in his presentation of the marvellous, which makes Coleridge's
work so remarkable. The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world
in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a
kind of crudity or coarseness. Coleridge's power is in the very
fineness with which, as by some really ghostly finger, he brings home
to our inmost sense his inventions, daring as they are--the skeleton
ship, the polar spirit, the inspiriting of the dead corpses of the
ship's crew. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner has the plausibility,
the perfect adaptation to reason and the general aspect of life, which
belongs to the marvellous, when actually presented as part of a
credible experience in our dreams. Doubtless, the mere experience of
the opium-eater, the habit he must almost necessarily fall into of
noting the more elusive phenomena of dreams, had something to do with
that: in its essence, however, it is connected with a more purely
intellectual circumstance in the development of Coleridge's poetic
gift. Some one once asked William Blake, to whom Coleridge has many
resemblances, when either is at his best (that whole episode of the
re-inspiriting of the ship's crew in The Ancient Mariner being
comparable to Blake's well-known design of the "Morning Stars singing
together") whether he had ever seen a ghost, and was surprised when the
famous seer, who ought, one might think, to have seen so many, answered
frankly, "Only [98] once!" His "spirits," at once more delicate, and
so much more real, than any ghost--the burden, as they were the
privilege, of his temperament--like it, were an integral element in his
everyday life. And the difference of mood expressed in that question
and its answer, is indicative of a change of temper in regard to the
supernatural which has passed over the whole modern mind, and of which
the true measure is the influence of the writings of Swedenborg. What
that change is we may see if we compare the vision by which Swedenborg
was "called," as he thought, to his work, with the ghost which called
Hamlet, or the spells of Marlowe's Faust with those of Goethe's. The
modern mind, so minutely self-scrutinising, if it is to be affected at
all by a sense of the supernatural, needs to be more finely touched
than was possible in the older, romantic presentment of it. The
spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has become plausible, as
The blot upon the brain,
That will show itself without;
and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for which,
according to the scepticism, latent at least, in so much of our modern
philosophy, the so-called real things themselves are but spectra after
all.
It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, fruit of
his more delicate [99] psychology, that Coleridge infuses into romantic
adventure, itself also then a new or revived thing in English
literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in The Ancient Mariner,
unknown in those older, more simple, romantic legends and ballads. It
is a flower of medieval or later German romance, growing up in the
peculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation,
and putting forth in it wholly new qualities. The quaint prose
commentary, which runs side by side with the verse of The Ancient
Mariner, illustrates this--a composition of quite a different shade of
beauty and merit from that of the verse which it accompanies,
connecting this, the chief poem of Coleridge, with his philosophy, and
emphasising therein that psychological interest of which I have spoken,
its curious soul-lore.
Completeness, the perfectly rounded wholeness and unity of the
impression it leaves on the mind of a reader who fairly gives himself
to it--that, too, is one of the characteristics of a really excellent
work, in the poetic as in every other kind of art; and by this
completeness, The Ancient Mariner certainly gains upon Christabel--a
completeness, entire as that of Wordsworth's Leech-gatherer, or Keats's
Saint Agnes' Eve, each typical in its way of such wholeness or entirety
of effect on a careful reader. It is Coleridge's one great complete
work, the one really finished thing, in a life of many beginnings.
Christabel remained a fragment. In The Ancient Mariner [100] this
unity is secured in part by the skill with which the incidents of the
marriage-feast are made to break in dreamily from time to time upon the
main story. And then, how pleasantly, how reassuringly, the whole
nightmare story itself is made to end, among the clear fresh sounds and
lights of the bay, where it began, with
The moon-light steeped in silentness,
The steady weather-cock.
So different from The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in regard to this
completeness of effect, Christabel illustrates the same complexion of
motives, a like intellectual situation. Here, too, the work is of a
kind peculiar to one who touches the characteristic motives of the old
romantic ballad, with a spirit made subtle and fine by modern
reflection; as we feel, I think, in such passages as--
But though my slumber had gone by,
This dream it would not pass away--
It seems to live upon mine eye;
and--
For she, belike, hath drunken deep
Of all the blessedness of sleep;
and again--
With such perplexity of mind
As dreams too lively leave behind.
And that gift of handling the finer passages of human feeling, at once
with power and delicacy, which was another result of his finer
psychology, [101] of his exquisitely refined habit of self-reflection,
is illustrated by a passage on Friendship in the Second Part--
Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain.
And thus it chanced, as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart's best brother
They parted--ne'er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining--
They stood aloof the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between;
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.
I suppose these lines leave almost every reader with a quickened sense
of the beauty and compass of human feeling; and it is the sense of such
richness and beauty which, in spite of his "dejection," in spite of
that burden of his morbid lassitude, accompanies Coleridge himself
through life. A warm poetic joy in everything beautiful, whether it be
a moral sentiment, like the friendship of Roland and Leoline, or only
the flakes of falling light from the water-snakes--this joy, visiting
him, now and again, after sickly dreams, in sleep or waking, as a
relief not to be forgotten, [102] and with such a power of felicitous
expression that the infection of it passes irresistibly to the
reader--such is the predominant element in the matter of his poetry, as
cadence is the predominant quality of its form. "We bless thee for our
creation!" he might have said, in his later period of definite
religious assent, "because the world is so beautiful: the world of
ideas--living spirits, detached from the divine nature itself, to
inform and lift the heavy mass of material things; the world of man,
above all in his melodious and intelligible speech; the world of living
creatures and natural scenery; the world of dreams." What he really
did say, by way of A Tombless Epitaph, is true enough of himself--
Sickness, 'tis true,
Whole years of weary days, besieged him close,
Even to the gates and inlets of his life!
But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm,
And with a natural gladness, he maintained
The citadel unconquered, and in joy
Was strong to follow the delightful Muse.
For not a hidden path, that to the shades
Of the beloved Parnassian forest leads,
Lurked undiscovered by him; not a rill
There issues from the fount of Hippocrene,
But he had traced it upward to its source,
Through open glade, dark glen, and secret dell,
Knew the gay wild flowers on its banks, and culled
Its med'cinable herbs. Yea, oft alone,
Piercing the long-neglected holy cave,
The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,
He bade with lifted torch its starry walls
Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame
[103]
Of odorous lamps tended by saint and sage.
O framed for calmer times and nobler hearts!
O studious Poet, eloquent for truth!
Philosopher! contemning wealth and death,
Yet docile, childlike, full of Life and Love.
The student of empirical science asks, Are absolute principles
attainable? What are the limits of knowledge? The answer he receives
from science itself is not ambiguous. What the moralist asks is, Shall
we gain or lose by surrendering human life to the relative spirit?
Experience answers that the dominant tendency of life is to turn
ascertained truth into a dead letter, to make us all the phlegmatic
servants of routine. The relative spirit, by its constant dwelling on
the more fugitive conditions or circumstances of things, breaking
through a thousand rough and brutal classifications, and giving
elasticity to inflexible principles, begets an intellectual finesse of
which the ethical result is a delicate and tender justice in the
criticism of human life. Who would gain more than Coleridge by
criticism in such a spirit? We know how his life has appeared when
judged by absolute standards. We see him trying to apprehend the
"absolute," to stereotype forms of faith and philosophy, to attain, as
he says, "fixed principles" in politics, morals, and religion, to fix
one mode of life as the essence of life, refusing to see the parts as
parts only; and all the time his own pathetic history pleads for a more
[104] elastic moral philosophy than his, and cries out against every
formula less living and flexible than life itself.
"From his childhood he hungered for eternity." There, after all, is
the incontestable claim of Coleridge. The perfect flower of any
elementary type of life must always be precious to humanity, and
Coleridge is a true flower of the ennuyé, of the type of René. More
than Childe Harold, more than Werther, more than René himself,
Coleridge, by what he did, what he was, and what he failed to do,
represents that inexhaustible discontent, languor, and homesickness,
that endless regret, the chords of which ring all through our modern
literature. It is to the romantic element in literature that those
qualities belong. One day, perhaps, we may come to forget the distant
horizon, with full knowledge of the situation, to be content with "what
is here and now"; and herein is the essence of classical feeling. But
by us of the present moment, certainly--by us for whom the Greek
spirit, with its engaging naturalness, simple, chastened, debonair,
tryphês, habrotêtos, khlidês, kharitôn, himerou, pothou patêr+, is
itself the Sangrail of an endless pilgrimage, Coleridge, with his
passion for the absolute, for something fixed where all is moving, his
faintness, his broken memory, his intellectual disquiet, may still be
ranked among the interpreters of one of the constituent elements of our
life.
1865, 1880.