The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is,
that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and
Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements. The
accumulation of knowledge has been so great, that we are lost in wonder at
the height it has reached, instead of attempting to climb or add to it;
while the variety of objects distracts and dazzles the looker-on. What
_niche_ remains unoccupied? What path untried? What is the use of doing
anything, unless we could do better than all those who have gone before
us? What hope is there of this? We are like those who have been to see
some noble monument of art, who are content to admire without thinking of
rivalling it; or like guests after a feast, who praise the hospitality of
the donor "and thank the bounteous Pan"--perhaps carrying away some
trifling fragments; or like the spectators of a mighty battle, who still
hear its sound afar off, and the clashing of armour and the neighing of
the war-horse and the shout of victory is in their ears, like the rushing
of innumerable waters!
MR. COLERIDGE has "a mind reflecting ages past:" his voice is like the
echo of the congregated roar of the "dark rearward and abyss" of thought.
He who has seen a mouldering tower by the side of a chrystal lake, hid by
the mist, but glittering in the wave below, may conceive the dim,
gleaming, uncertain intelligence of his eye: he who has marked the evening
clouds uprolled (a world of vapours), has seen the picture of his mind,
unearthly, unsubstantial, with gorgeous tints and ever-varying forms--
"That which was now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water."
Our author's mind is (as he himself might express it) _tangential_. There
is no subject on which he has not touched, none on which he has rested.
With an understanding fertile, subtle, expansive, "quick, forgetive,
apprehensive," beyond all living precedent, few traces of it will perhaps
remain. He lends himself to all impressions alike; he gives up his mind
and liberty of thought to none. He is a general lover of art and science,
and wedded to no one in particular. He pursues knowledge as a mistress,
with outstretched hands and winged speed; but as he is about to embrace
her, his Daphne turns--alas! not to a laurel! Hardly a speculation has
been left on record from the earliest time, but it is loosely folded up in
Mr. Coleridge's memory, like a rich, but somewhat tattered piece of
tapestry: we might add (with more seeming than real extravagance), that
scarce a thought can pass through the mind of man, but its sound has at
some time or other passed over his head with rustling pinions. On whatever
question or author you speak, he is prepared to take up the theme with
advantage--from Peter Abelard down to Thomas Moore, from the subtlest
metaphysics to the politics of the _Courier_. There is no man of genius,
in whose praise he descants, but the critic seems to stand above the
author, and "what in him is weak, to strengthen, what is low, to raise and
support:" nor is there any work of genius that does not come out of his
hands like an illuminated Missal, sparkling even in its defects. If Mr.
Coleridge had not been the most impressive talker of his age, he would
probably have been the finest writer; but he lays down his pen to make
sure of an auditor, and mortgages the admiration of posterity for the
stare of an idler. If he had not been a poet, he would have been a
powerful logician; if he had not dipped his wing in the Unitarian
controversy, he might have soared to the very summit of fancy. But in
writing verse, he is trying to subject the Muse to _transcendental_
theories: in his abstract reasoning, he misses his way by strewing it with
flowers. All that he has done of moment, he had done twenty years ago:
since then, he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice.
Mr. Coleridge is too rich in intellectual wealth, to need to task himself
to any drudgery: he has only to draw the sliders of his imagination, and a
thousand subjects expand before him, startling him with their brilliancy,
or losing themselves in endless obscurity--
"And by the force of blear illusion,
They draw him on to his confusion."
What is the little he could add to the stock, compared with the countless
stores that lie about him, that he should stoop to pick up a name, or to
polish an idle fancy? He walks abroad in the majesty of an universal
understanding, eyeing the "rich strond," or golden sky above him, and
"goes sounding on his way," in eloquent accents, uncompelled and free!
Persons of the greatest capacity are often those, who for this reason do
the least; for surveying themselves from the highest point of view, amidst
the infinite variety of the universe, their own share in it seems
trifling, and scarce worth a thought, and they prefer the contemplation of
all that is, or has been, or can be, to the making a coil about doing
what, when done, is no better than vanity. It is hard to concentrate all
our attention and efforts on one pursuit, except from ignorance of
others; and without this concentration of our faculties, no great progress
can be made in any one thing. It is not merely that the mind is not
capable of the effort; it does not think the effort worth making. Action
is one; but thought is manifold. He whose restless eye glances through the
wide compass of nature and art, will not consent to have "his own nothings
monstered:" but he must do this, before he can give his whole soul to
them. The mind, after "letting contemplation have its fill," or
"Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air,"
sinks down on the ground, breathless, exhausted, powerless, inactive; or
if it must have some vent to its feelings, seeks the most easy and
obvious; is soothed by friendly flattery, lulled by the murmur of
immediate applause, thinks as it were aloud, and babbles in its dreams! A
scholar (so to speak) is a more disinterested and abstracted character
than a mere author. The first looks at the numberless volumes of a
library, and says, "All these are mine;" the other points to a single
volume (perhaps it may be an immortal one) and says, "My name is written
on the back of it." This is a puny and groveling ambition, beneath the
lofty amplitude of Mr. Coleridge's mind. No, he revolves in his wayward
soul, or utters to the passing wind, or discourses to his own shadow,
things mightier and more various!--Let us draw the curtain, and unlock the
shrine.
Learning rocked him in his cradle, and while yet a child,
"He lisped in numbers, for the numbers came."
At sixteen he wrote his _Ode on Chatterton_, and he still reverts to that
period with delight, not so much as it relates to himself (for that
string of his own early promise of fame rather jars than otherwise) but as
exemplifying the youth of a poet. Mr. Coleridge talks of himself, without
being an egotist, for in him the individual is always merged in the
abstract and general. He distinguished himself at school and at the
University by his knowledge of the classics, and gained several prizes for
Greek epigrams. How many men are there (great scholars, celebrated names
in literature) who having done the same thing in their youth, have no
other idea all the rest of their lives but of this achievement, of a
fellowship and dinner, and who, installed in academic honours, would look
down on our author as a mere strolling bard! At Christ's Hospital, where
he was brought up, he was the idol of those among his schoolfellows, who
mingled with their bookish studies the music of thought and of humanity;
and he was usually attended round the cloisters by a group of these
(inspiring and inspired) whose hearts, even then, burnt within them as he
talked, and where the sounds yet linger to mock ELIA on his way, still
turning pensive to the past! One of the finest and rarest parts of Mr.
Coleridge's conversation, is when he expatiates on the Greek tragedians
(not that he is not well acquainted, when he pleases, with the epic poets,
or the philosophers, or orators, or historians of antiquity)--on the
subtle reasonings and melting pathos of Euripides, on the harmonious
gracefulness of Sophocles, tuning his love-laboured song, like sweetest
warblings from a sacred grove; on the high-wrought, trumpet-tongued
eloquence of AEschylus, whose Prometheus, above all, is like an Ode to
Fate, and a pleading with Providence, his thoughts being let loose as his
body is chained on his solitary rock, and his afflicted will (the emblem
of mortality)
"Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny."
As the impassioned critic speaks and rises in his theme, you would think
you heard the voice of the Man hated by the Gods, contending with the wild
winds as they roar, and his eye glitters with the spirit of Antiquity!
Next, he was engaged with Hartley's tribes of mind, "etherial braid,
thought-woven,"--and he busied himself for a year or two with vibrations
and vibratiuncles, and the great law of association that binds all things
in its mystic chain, and the doctrine of Necessity (the mild teacher of
Charity) and the Millennium, anticipative of a life to come--and he
plunged deep into the controversy on Matter and Spirit, and, as an escape
from Dr. Priestley's Materialism, where he felt himself imprisoned by the
logician's spell, like Ariel in the cloven pine-tree, he became suddenly
enamoured of Bishop Berkeley's fairy-world,[136] and used in all companies
to build the universe, like a brave poetical fiction, of fine words--and
he was deep-read in Malebranche, and in Cudworth's Intellectual System (a
huge pile of learning, unwieldy, enormous) and in Lord Brook's
hieroglyphic theories, and in Bishop Butler's Sermons, and in the Duchess
of Newcastle's fantastic folios, and in Clarke and South and Tillotson,
and all the fine thinkers and masculine reasoners of that age--and
Leibnitz's _Pre-established Harmony_ reared its arch above his head, like
the rainbow in the cloud, covenanting with the hopes of man--and then he
fell plump, ten thousand fathoms down (but his wings saved him harmless)
into the _hortus siccus_ of Dissent, where he pared religion down to the
standard of reason, and stripped faith of mystery, and preached Christ
crucified and the Unity of the Godhead, and so dwelt for a while in the
spirit of John Huss and Jerome of Prague and Socinus and old John Zisca,
and ran through Neal's History of the Puritans, and Calamy's
Non-Conformists' Memorial, having like thoughts and passions with
them--but then Spinoza became his God, and he took up the vast chain of
being in his hand, and the round world became the centre and the soul of
all things in some shadowy sense, forlorn of meaning, and around him he
beheld the living traces and the sky-pointing proportions of the mighty
Pan--but poetry redeemed him from this spectral philosophy, and he bathed
his heart in beauty, and gazed at the golden light of heaven, and drank of
the spirit of the universe, and wandered at eve by fairy-stream or
fountain,
----"When he saw nought but beauty,
When he heard the voice of that Almighty One
In every breeze that blew, or wave that murmured"--
and wedded with truth in Plato's shade, and in the writings of Proclus and
Plotinus saw the ideas of things in the eternal mind, and unfolded all
mysteries with the Schoolmen and fathomed the depths of Duns Scotus and
Thomas Aquinas, and entered the third heaven with Jacob Behmen, and walked
hand in hand with Swedenborg through the pavilions of the New Jerusalem,
and sung his faith in the promise and in the word in his _Religious
Musings_--and lowering himself from that dizzy height, poised himself on
Milton's wings, and spread out his thoughts in charity with the glad prose
of Jeremy Taylor, and wept over Bowles's Sonnets, and studied Cowper's
blank verse, and betook himself to Thomson's Castle of Indolence, and
sported with the wits of Charles the Second's days and of Queen Anne, and
relished Swift's style and that of the John Bull (Arbuthnot's we mean, not
Mr. Croker's), and dallied with the British Essayists and Novelists, and
knew all qualities of more modern writers with a learned spirit, Johnson,
and Goldsmith, and Junius, and Burke, and Godwin, and the Sorrows of
Werter, and Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire, and Marivaux, and
Crebillon, and thousands more--now "laughed with Rabelais in his easy
chair" or pointed to Hogarth, or afterwards dwelt on Claude's classic
scenes, or spoke with rapture of Raphael, and compared the women at Rome
to figures that had walked out of his pictures, or visited the Oratory of
Pisa, and described the works of Giotto and Ghirlandaio and Massaccio, and
gave the moral of the picture of the Triumph of Death, where the beggars
and the wretched invoke his dreadful dart, but the rich and mighty of the
earth quail and shrink before it; and in that land of siren sights and
sounds, saw a dance of peasant girls, and was charmed with lutes and
gondolas,--or wandered into Germany and lost himself in the labyrinths of
the Hartz Forest and of the Kantean philosophy, and amongst the cabalistic
names of Fichte and Schelling and Lessing, and God knows who--this was
long after, but all the former while he had nerved his heart and filled
his eyes with tears, as he hailed the rising orb of liberty, since
quenched in darkness and in blood, and had kindled his affections at the
blaze of the French Revolution, and sang for joy when the towers of the
Bastile and the proud places of the insolent and the oppressor fell, and
would have floated his bark, freighted with fondest fancies, across the
Atlantic wave with Southey and others to seek for peace and freedom--
"In Philarmonia's undivided dale!"
Alas! "Frailty, thy name is _Genius_!"--What is become of all this mighty
heap of hope, of thought, of learning, and humanity? It has ended in
swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in the
_Courier_.--Such and so little is the mind of man!
It was not to be supposed that Mr. Coleridge could keep on at the rate he
set off; he could not realize all he knew or thought, and less could not
fix his desultory ambition; other stimulants supplied the place, and kept
up the intoxicating dream, the fever and the madness of his early
impressions. Liberty (the philosopher's and the poet's bride) had fallen a
victim, meanwhile, to the murderous practice of the hag, Legitimacy.
Proscribed by court-hirelings, too romantic for the herd of vulgar
politicians, our enthusiast stood at bay, and at last turned on the pivot
of a subtle casuistry to the _unclean side_: but his discursive reason
would not let him trammel himself into a poet-laureate or
stamp-distributor, and he stopped, ere he had quite passed that well-known
"bourne from whence no traveller returns"--and so has sunk into torpid,
uneasy repose, tantalized by useless resources, haunted by vain
imaginings, his lips idly moving, but his heart for ever still, or, as the
shattered chords vibrate of themselves, making melancholy music to the ear
of memory! Such is the fate of genius in an age, when in the unequal
contest with sovereign wrong, every man is ground to powder who is not
either a born slave, or who does not willingly and at once offer up the
yearnings of humanity and the dictates of reason as a welcome sacrifice to
besotted prejudice and loathsome power.
Of all Mr. Coleridge's productions, the _Ancient Mariner_ is the only one
that we could with confidence put into any person's hands, on whom we
wished to impress a favourable idea of his extraordinary powers. Let
whatever other objections be made to it, it is unquestionably a work of
genius--of wild, irregular, overwhelming imagination, and has that rich,
varied movement in the verse, which gives a distant idea of the lofty or
changeful tones of Mr. Coleridge's voice. In the _Christobel_, there is
one splendid passage on divided friendship. The _Translation of Schiller's
Wallenstein_ is also a masterly production in its kind, faithful and
spirited. Among his smaller pieces there are occasional bursts of pathos
and fancy, equal to what we might expect from him; but these form the
exception, and not the rule. Such, for instance, is his affecting Sonnet
to the author of the Robbers.
"Schiller! that hour I would have wish'd to die,
If through the shudd'ring midnight I had sent
From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent,
That fearful voice, a famish'd father's cry--
That in no after-moment aught less vast
Might stamp me mortal! A triumphant shout
Black horror scream'd, and all her goblin rout
From the more with'ring scene diminish'd pass'd.
Ah! Bard tremendous in sublimity!
Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood,
Wand'ring at eve, with finely frenzied eye,
Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood!
Awhile, with mute awe gazing, I would brood,
Then weep aloud in a wild ecstasy."
His Tragedy, entitled _Remorse_, is full of beautiful and striking
passages, but it does not place the author in the first rank of dramatic
writers. But if Mr. Coleridge's works do not place him in that rank, they
injure instead of conveying a just idea of the man, for he himself is
certainly in the first class of general intellect.
If our author's poetry is inferior to his conversation, his prose is
utterly abortive. Hardly a gleam is to be found in it of the brilliancy
and richness of those stores of thought and language that he pours out
incessantly, when they are lost like drops of water in the ground. The
principal work, in which he has attempted to embody his general view of
things, is the FRIEND, of which, though it contains some noble passages
and fine trains of thought, prolixity and obscurity are the most frequent
characteristics.