Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English poet and philosopher, was born at
Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire, October 21st, 1772. He was the ninth and
youngest son of the vicar of the parish,--a man characterized by
learning and also by some of its foibles,--under whose care he passed
his childhood; but on the death of his father he was sent up to London
to be educated at Christ's Hospital, and there spent, in companionship
with Lamb, his school days from 1782 to 1791. He went in the latter year
to Jesus College Cambridge. His career as an undergraduate was marked by
an escapade,--his enlistment in the King's Regiment of Light Dragoons in
the winter of 1793-94, from which he was released by the influence of
his relatives; and in more important ways by his friendship with
Southey, whom he found on a visit to Oxford, and his engagement to Sarah
Fricker in the summer of 1794. He had already been attached to another
young lady, Mary Evans, with whose family he had been intimate. In
December 1794 he left Cambridge without taking a degree, and on October
21st, 1795, he was married. His biography from this point is one of
confused and intricate detail, which only a long story could set forth
plainly and exactly. Its leading external events were a residence in
Germany in 1798-99 and a voyage to Malta, with travel in Sicily and
Italy in 1804-6; in its inward development, the turning-points of his
life were his first intimacy with the Wordsworths in 1797, during which
his best poems were composed; his subjection to the opium habit, with
increasing domestic unhappiness, in 1801-2; and his retreat under
medical control to Highgate in 1816. He was practically separated from
his family from the time of his voyage to Malta. Troubles of many kinds
filled all these years, but he had always a power to attract friends who
were deeply interested in his welfare, and he was never without admirers
and helpers. Before he withdrew to Highgate he had resided first at
Stowey in the neighborhood of Tom Poole, and later at Greta Hall near
the Wordsworths; but he was often away from home, and after he ceased to
be an inmate there, from 1806 to 1816, he led a wandering life, either
in lodgings frequently changed, or in visits to his friends. His
resources were always small, and from the start his friends were his
patrons, making up subscriptions, loans, and gifts for him; in 1798 the
Wedgwoods gave him a pension of L150 for life, which was soon secured
for the support of his family, and in 1812 one-half of this was
withdrawn; in 1825 he was granted a royal pension of one hundred
guineas, and when this lapsed in 1830 Frere made it up to him. De
Quincey had distinguished himself by an act of singular and impulsive
generosity to him, upon first acquaintance. He was always cared for,
though his indulgence in opium made it difficult for those who knew the
fact to assist him directly in a wise way. His pecuniary embarrassment,
however, was constant and trying during a great part of his life; his
own wretchedness of spirit, under the painful conditions of his bodily
state and his moral as well as material position, was very great; but
through all these sufferings and trials he maintained sufficient energy
to leave behind him a considerable body of literary work. He died July
25th, 1834.
The poetic genius of Coleridge, the highest of his many gifts, found
brilliant and fascinating expression. His poems--those in which his fame
lives--are as unique as they are memorable; and though their small
number, their confined range, and the brief period during which his
faculty was exercised with full freedom and power, seem to indicate a
narrow vein, yet the remainder of his work in prose and verse leaves an
impression of extraordinary and abundant intellectual force. In
proportion as his imaginative creations stand apart, the spirit out of
which they came must have possessed some singularity: and if the reader
is not content with simple aesthetic appreciation of what the gods
provide, but has some touch of curiosity leading him to look into the
source of such remarkable achievement and its human history, he is at
once interested in the personality of the "subtle-souled psychologist,"
as Shelley with his accurate critical insight first named him; in
experiencing the fascination of the poetry one remembers the charm which
Coleridge had in life, that quality which arrested attention in all
companies and drew men's minds and hearts with a sense of something
marvelous in him--"the most wonderful man," said Wordsworth, "that I
ever met." The mind and heart of Coleridge, his whole life, have been
laid open by himself and his friends and acquaintances without reserve
in many volumes of letters and memoirs; it is easy to figure him as he
lived and to recover his moods and aspect: but in order to conceive his
nature and define its traits, it is necessary to take account especially
of his incomplete and less perfect work, of his miscellaneous interests,
and those activities which filled and confused his life without having
any important share in establishing his fame.
[Illustration: SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.]
The intellectual precocity which is the leading trait of Coleridge's
boyhood, in the familiar portrait of "the inspired charity-boy" drawn by
Lamb from schoolboy memories, is not unusual in a youth of genius; but
the omnivorousness of knowledge which he then displayed continued into
his manhood. He consumed vast quantities of book-learning. It is a more
remarkable characteristic that from the earliest period in which he
comes into clear view, he was accustomed to give out his ideas with
freedom in an inexhaustible stream of talk. The activity of his mind was
as phenomenal as its receptivity. In his college days, too, he was
fanatical in all his energies. The remark of Southey after Shelley's
visit to him, that here was a young man who was just what he himself had
been in his college days, is illustrative; for if Southey was then
inflamed with radicalism, Coleridge was yet more deeply infected and
mastered by that wild fever of the revolutionary dawn. The tumult of
Coleridge's mind, its incessant action, the lack of discipline in his
thought, of restraint in his expression, of judgment in his affairs, are
all important elements in his character at a time which in most men
would be called the formative period of manhood, but which in him seems
to have been intensely chaotic; what is most noticeable, however, is the
volume of his mental energy. He expressed himself, too, in ways natural
to such self-abundance. He was always a discourser, if the name may be
used, from the London days at the "Salutation and the Cat" of which Lamb
tells, saying that the landlord was ready to retain him because of the
attraction of his conversation for customers; and as he went on to the
more set forms of such monologue, he became a preacher without pay in
Unitarian chapels, a journalist with unusual capacity for ready and
sonorous writing in the press, a composer of whole periodicals such as
his ventures The Watchman and The Friend, and a lecturer using only
slight notes as the material of his remarks upon literature, education,
philosophy, theology, or whatever the subject might be. In all these
methods of expression which he took up one after the other, he merely
talked in an ample way upon multifarious topics; in the conversation,
sermon, leading article, written discourse, or flowing address, he was
master of a swelling and often brilliant volubility, but he had neither
the certainty of the orator nor the unfailing distinction of the author;
there was an occasional and impromptu quality, a colloquial and
episodical manner, the style of the irresponsible speaker. In his
earlier days especially, the dominant note in Coleridge's whole nature
was excitement. He was always animated, he was often violent, he was
always without the principle of control. Indeed, a weakness of moral
power seems to have been congenital, in the sense that he was not
permanently bound by a practical sense of duty nor apparently observant
of what place duty has in real life. There was misdirection of his
affairs from the time when they came into his own hands; there was
impulsiveness, thoughtlessness, a lack of judgment which augured ill for
him; and in its total effect this amounted to folly. His intoxication
with the scheme known as Pantisocracy, by which he with Southey and a
few like-minded projectors were to found a socialistic community on the
banks of the Susquehanna, is the most obvious comment on his practical
sense. But his marriage, with the anecdotes of its preliminaries (one of
which was that in those colloquies with Lamb at the London tavern, so
charmingly described by his boon companion, he had forgotten his
engagement or was indifferent to it), more strikingly exemplifies the
irresponsible course of his life, more particularly as it proved to be
ill-sorted, full of petty difficulties and makeshift expedients, and in
the end a disastrous failure. A radical social scheme and an imprudent
marriage might have fallen to his share of human folly, however, without
exciting remark, if in other ways or at a later time he had exhibited
the qualities which would allow one to dismiss these matters as mere
instances of immaturity; but wherever Coleridge's reasonable control
over himself or his affairs is looked to, it appears to have been
feeble. On the other hand, the constancy of his excitement is plain. It
was not only mental, but physical. He was, as a young man, full of
energy and capable of a good deal of hard exercise; he had animal
spirits, and Wordsworth describes him as "noisy" and "gamesome," as one
who
"His limbs would toss about him with delight,
Like branches when strong winds the trees annoy;"
and from several passages of his own writing, which are usually
disregarded, the evidence of a spirit of rough humor and fun is easily
obtained. The truth is that Coleridge changed a great deal in his life;
he felt himself to be very different in later years from what he was in
the time when to his memory even he was a sort of glorified spirit: and
this earlier Coleridge had many traits which are ignored sometimes, as
Carlyle ignored them, and are sometimes remembered rather as
idealizations of his friends in their affectionate thoughts of him, but
in any event are irreconcilable with the figure of the last period of
his life.
It has been suggested that there was something of disease or at least
of ill health in Coleridge always, and that it should be regarded as
influencing his temperament. Whether it were so or not, the plea itself
shows the fact. If excitement was the dominant note, as has been said,
in his whole nature, it could not exist without a physical basis and
accompaniment; and his bodily state appears to have been often less one
of animation than of agitation, and his correspondence frequently
discloses moods that seem almost frantic. In the issue, under stress of
pain and trouble, he became an opium-eater; but his physical nature may
fairly be described as predisposed to such states as lead to the use of
opium and also result from its use, with the attendant mental moods. His
susceptibility to sensuous impressions, to a voluptuousness of the
entire being, together with a certain lassitude and languor, lead to the
same conclusion, which thus seems to be supported on all sides,--that
Coleridge was, in his youth and early manhood, fevered through all his
intellectual and sensuous nature, and deficient on the moral and
practical sides in those matters that related to his personal affairs.
It is desirable to bring this out in plain terms, because in Coleridge
it is best to acknowledge at once that his character was, so far as our
part--the world's part--in him is concerned, of less consequence than
his temperament; a subtler and more profound thing than character,
though without moral meaning. It is not unfair to say, since literature
is to be regarded most profitably as the expression of human
personality, that with Coleridge the modern literature of temperament,
as it has been lately recognized in extreme phases, begins; not that
temperament is a new thing in the century now closing, nor that it has
been without influence hitherto, but that now it is more often
considered, and has in fact more often been, an exclusive ground of
artistic expression. The temperament of Coleridge was one of diffused
sensuousness physically, and of abnormal mental moods,--moods of
weakness, languor, collapse, of visionary imaginative life with a night
atmosphere of the spectral, moonlit, swimming, scarcely substantial
world; and the poems he wrote, which are the contributions he made to
the world's literature, are based on this temperament, like some Fata
Morgana upon the sea. The apparent exclusion of reality from the poems
in which his genius was most manifest finds its analogue in the
detachment of his own mind from the moral, the practical, the usual in
life as he led it in his spirit; and his work of the highest creative
sort, which is all there is to his enduring fame, stands amid his prose
and verse composition of a lower sort like an island in the waste of
waters. This may be best shown, perhaps, by a gradual approach through
his cruder to his more perfect compositions.
The cardinal fact in Coleridge's genius is that notwithstanding his
immense sensuous susceptibilities and mental receptivity, and the
continual excitement of his spirit, he never rose into the highest
sphere of creative activity except for the brief period called his
_annus mirabilis_, when his great poems were written; and with this is
the further related fact that in him we witness the spectacle of the
imaginative instinct overborne and supplanted by the intellectual
faculty exercising its speculative and critical functions; and in
addition, one observes in his entire work an extraordinary inequality
not only of treatment, but also of subject-matter. In general, he was an
egoistic writer. His sensitiveness to nature was twofold: in the first
place he noticed in the objects and movements of nature evanescent and
minute details, and as his sense of beauty was keen, he saw and recorded
truly the less obvious and less common loveliness in the phenomena of
the elements and the seasons, and this gave distinction to his mere
description and record of fact; in the second place he often felt in
himself moods induced by nature, but yet subjective,--states of his own
spirit, which sometimes deepened the charm of night, for example, by his
enjoyment of its placid aspects, and sometimes imparted to the external
world a despair reflected from his personal melancholy. In his direct
treatment of nature, however, as Mr. Stopford Brooke points out, he
seldom achieves more than a catalogue of his sensations, which though
touched with imaginative detail are never lifted and harmonized into
lyrical unity; though he can moralize nature in Wordsworth's fashion,
when he does so the result remains Wordsworth's and is stamped with that
poet's originality; and in his own original work Coleridge never equaled
either the genius of Shelley, who can identify nature with himself, or
the charm of Tennyson, who can at least parallel nature's phenomena with
his own human moods. Coleridge would not be thought of as a poet of
nature, except in so far as he describes what he observes in the way of
record, or gives a metaphysical interpretation to phenomena. This is the
more remarkable because he had to an eminent degree that intellectual
power, that overmastering desire of the mind, to rationalize the facts
of life. It was this quality that made him a philosopher, an analyst, a
critic on the great lines of Aristotle, seeking to impose an order of
ethics and metaphysics on all artistic productions. But in those poems
in which he describes nature directly and without metaphysical thought,
there is no trace of anything more than a sensuous order of his own
perceptions. Beautiful and often unique as his nature poems are, they
are not creative. They are rather in the main autobiographic; and it is
surprising to notice how large a proportion of his verse is thus
autobiographic, not in those phases of his own life which may be, or at
least are thought of as representative of human life in the mass, but
which are personal, such as the lines written after hearing Wordsworth
read the 'Prelude,' or those entitled 'Dejection.' When his verse is not
confined to autobiographic expression, it is often a product of his
interest in his friends or in his family. What is not personal in it, of
this sort, is apt to be domestic or social.
If we turn from the poems of nature to those concerned with man, a
similar shallowness, either of interest or of power, appears. He was in
early years a radical; he was stirred by the Revolution in France, and
he was emotionally charged with the ideas of the time,--ideas of
equality, fraternity, and liberty. But this interest died out, as is
shown by his political verse. He had none but a social and a
philosophical interest in any case. Man, the individual, did not at any
time attract him. There was nothing dramatic in his genius, in the
narrow and exact sense: he did not engage his curiosity or his
philosophy in individual fortunes. It results from this limitation that
his verse lacks human interest of the dramatic kind. The truth was that
he was interested in thought rather than in deeds, in human nature
rather than in its concrete pity and terror. Thus he did not seize on
life itself as the material of his imagination and reflection. In the
case of man as in the case of nature he gives us only an egoistic
account, telling us of his own private fortune, his fears, pains, and
despairs, but only as a diary gives them; as he did not transfer his
nature impressions into the world of creative art, so he did not
transfer his personal experiences into that world.
What has been said would perhaps be accepted, were it not for the
existence of those poems, 'The Ancient Mariner,' 'Christabel,' 'Kubla
Khan,' which are the marvelous creations of his genius. In these it will
be said there is both a world of nature new created, and a dramatic
method and interest. It is enough for the purpose of the analysis if it
be granted that nowhere else in Coleridge's work, except in these and
less noticeably in a few other instances, do these high characteristics
occur. The very point which is here to be brought out is that Coleridge
applied that intellectual power, that overmastering desire of the mind
to rationalize the phenomena of life, which has been mentioned as his
great mental trait,--that he applied this faculty with different degrees
of power at different times, so that his poetry falls naturally into
higher and inferior categories; in the autobiographic verse, in the
political and dramatic verse which forms so large a part of his work, it
appears that he did not have sufficient feeling or exercise sufficient
power to raise it out of the lower levels of composition; in his great
works of constructive and impersonal art, of moral intensity or romantic
beauty and fascination, he did so exercise the creative imagination as
to make these of the highest rank, or at least one of them.
'The Ancient Mariner,' apart from its many minor merits, has this
distinction in Coleridge's work,--it is a poem of perfect unity.
'Christabel' is a fragment, 'Kubla Khan' is a glimpse; and though the
'Ode to France,' 'Love, Youth, and Age,' and possibly a few other short
pieces, have this highest artistic virtue of unity, yet in them it is of
a simpler kind. 'The Ancient Mariner,' on the other hand, is a marvel of
construction in that its unity is less complex than manifold; it exists,
however the form be examined. In the merely external sense, the telling
of the tale to the Wedding Guest, with the fact that the wedding is
going on, gives it unity; in the merely internal sense, the moral lesson
of the salvation of the slayer of the albatross by the medium of love
felt toward living things, subtly yet lucidly worked out as the notion
is, gives it unity; but in still other ways, as a story of connected and
consequential incidents with a plot, a change of fortune, a climax, and
the other essentials of this species of tale-telling, it has unity; and
if its conception either of the physical or the ethical world be
analyzed, these too--and these are the fundamental things--are found
consistent wholes. It nevertheless remains true that this system of
nature as a vitalized but not humanized mode of life, with its bird, its
spirit, its magical powers, is not the nature that we know or believe to
be,--it is a modern presentation of an essentially primitive and
animistic belief; and similarly this system of human life,--if the word
human can be applied to it, with its dead men, its skeleton ship, its
spirit sailors, its whole miracle of spectral being,--is not the life we
know or believe to be: it is an incantation, a simulacrum. It may still
be true therefore that the imaginative faculty of Coleridge was not
applied either to nature or human life, in the ordinary sense. And this
it is that constitutes the uniqueness of the poem, and its wonderful
fascination. Coleridge fell heir, by the accidents of time and the
revolutions of taste, to the ballad style, its simplicity, directness,
and narrative power; he also was most attracted to the machinery of the
supernatural, the weird, the terrible, almost to the grotesque and
horrid, as these literary motives came into fashion in the crude
beginnings of romanticism in our time; his subtle mind, his fine senses,
his peculiar susceptibility to the mystic and shadowy in nature,--as
shown by his preference of the moonlight, dreamy, or night aspects of
real nature, to its brilliant beauties in the waking world,--gave him
ease and finesse in the handling of such subject-matter; and he lived
late enough to know that all this eerie side of human experience and
imaginative capacity, inherited from primeval ages but by no means yet
deprived of plausibility, could be effectively used only as an allegoric
or scenic setting of what should be truth to the ethical sense; he
combined one of the highest lessons of advanced civilization, one of the
last results of spiritual perception,--the idea of love toward life in
any form,--with the animistic beliefs and supernatural fancies of the
crude ages of the senses. This seems to be the substantial matter; and
in this he was, to repeat Shelley's phrase, the "subtle-souled
psychologist." The material of his imagination, on the sensuous side,
was of the slightest: it was the supernaturalism of the romantic
movement, somewhat modified by being placed in connection with the
animal world; and he put this to use as a means of illustrating
spiritual truth. He thus became the first of those who have employed the
supernatural in our recent literature without losing credence for it, as
an allegory of psychological states, moral facts, or illusions real to
the eye that sees them and having some logical relation to the past of
the individual; of such writers Hawthorne and Poe are eminent examples,
and both of them, it may be remarked, are writers in whom temperament
rather than character is the ground of their creative work. The intimate
kinship between imagination so directed and the speculative
philosophical temper is plain to see. In 'Christabel' on the other hand,
the moral substance is not apparent: the place filled by the moral ideas
which are the centres of the narrative in 'The Ancient Mariner,' is
taken here by emotional situations; but the supernaturalism is
practically the same in both poems, and in both is associated with that
mystery of the animal world to man, most concentrated and vivid in the
fascination ascribed traditionally to the snake, which is the animal
motive in 'Christabel' as the goodness of the albatross in the 'The
Ancient Mariner.' In these poems the good and the bad omens that ancient
augurs minded are made again dominant over men's imagination. Such are
the signal and unique elements in these poems, which have besides that
wealth of beauty in detail, of fine diction, of liquid melody, of
sentiment, thought, and image, which belong only to poetry of the
highest order, and which are too obvious to require any comment. 'Kubla
Khan' is a poem of the same kind, in which the mystical effect is given
almost wholly by landscape; it is to 'The Ancient Mariner' and
'Christabel' what protoplasm is to highly organized cells.
If it be recognized then that the imagery of Coleridge in the
characteristic parts of these cardinal poems is as pure allegory, is as
remote from nature or man, as is the machinery of fairy-land and
chivalry in Spenser, for example, and he obtains credibility by the
psychological and ethical truth presented in this imagery, it is not
surprising that his work is small in amount; for the method is not only
a difficult one, but the poetic machinery itself is limited and meagre.
The poverty of the subject-matter is manifest, and the restrictions to
its successful use are soon felt. It may well be doubted whether
'Christabel' would have gained by being finished. In 'The Ancient
Mariner' the isolation of the man is a great advantage; if there had
been any companion for him, the illusion could not have been entire: as
it is, what he experiences has the wholeness and truth within itself of
a dream, or of a madman's world,--there is no standard of appeal outside
of his own senses and mind, no real world; but in 'Christabel' the
serpentine fable goes on in a world of fact and action, and as soon as
the course of the story involved this fable in the probabilities and
actual occurences of life, it might well be that the tale would have
turned into one of simple enchantment and magic, as seems likely from
what has been told of its continuation; certainly it could not have
equaled the earlier poem, or have been in the same kind with it, unless
the unearthly magic, the spell, were finally completely dissolved into
the world of moral truth as is the case with 'The Ancient Mariner.'
Coleridge found it still more impossible to continue 'Kubla Khan.' It
seems a fair inference to conclude that Coleridge's genius, however it
suffered from the misfortunes and ills of his life, was in these works
involved in a field, however congenial, yet of narrow range and
infertile in itself. In poetic style it is to be observed that he kept
what he had gained; the turbid diction of the earlier period never came
back to trouble him, and the cadences he had formed still gave their
music to his verse. The change, the decline, was not in his power of
style; it was in his power of imagination, if at all, but the fault may
have laid in the capacities of the subject-matter. A similar thing
certainly happened in his briefer ballad poetry, in that of which
'Love,' 'The Three Graces,' 'Alice Du Clos,' and 'The Dark Ladie,' are
examples; the matter there, the machinery of the romantic ballad, was no
longer capable of use; that sort of literature was dead from the
exhaustion of its motives. The great 'Ode to France,' in which he
reached his highest point of eloquent and passionate expression, seems
to mark the extinction in himself of the revolutionary impulse. On the
whole, while the excellence of much of the remainder of his verse, even
in later years, is acknowledged, and its originality in several
instances, may it not be that in his greatest work Coleridge came to an
end because of an impossibility in the kind itself? The supernatural is
an accessory rather than a main element in the interpretation of life
which literary genius undertakes; Coleridge so subordinates it here by
making it contributory to a moral truth; but such a practice would seem
to be necessarily incidental to a poet who was also so intellectual as
Coleridge, and not to be adopted as a permanent method of
self-expression.
From whatever cause, the fact was that Coleridge ceased to create in
poetry, and fell back on that fluent, manifold, voluminous faculty he
possessed of absorbing and giving out ideas in vast quantities, as it
were by bulk. He attended especially to the theory of art as he found it
illustrated in the greatest poets, and he popularized among literary men
a certain body of doctrine regarding criticism, its growth and methods;
and in later years he worked out metaphysical theological views which he
inculcated in ways which won for him recognition as a practical
influence in contemporary church opinion. In these last years of his
lecturing and discoursing in private, the figure he makes is pathetic,
though Carlyle describes it with a grim humor, as any one may read in
the 'Life of Sterling': over against that figure should be set the
descriptions of the young Coleridge by Dorothy Wordsworth and Lamb; and
after these perhaps the contrast which Coleridge himself draws between
his spirit and his body may enable a reader to fuse the two--youth and
age--into one. Whatever were the weaknesses of his nature and the trials
of his life, of which one keeps silent, he was deeply loved by friends
of many different minds, who if they grew cold, had paid at least once
this tribute to the charm, the gentleness, and the delight of his human
companionship.
[Signature: G. E. Woodberry]