1. Coleridge made the acquaintance of this gentleman, who became his enthusiastic disciple, in 1818. His chief interest for us is the fact that for the next seven years he was Coleridge's correspondent. Personally, he was a man of little judgment or critical discrimination, and his sense of the ridiculous may be measured by the following passage. Speaking of the sweetness of Charles Lamb's smile, he says that "there is still one man living, a stockbroker, who has that smile," and adds: "To those who wish to see the only thing left on earth, if it is still left, of Lamb, his best and most beautiful remain – his smile, I will indicate its possessor, Mr.— of Throgmorton Street." How the original "possessor" of this apparently assignable security would have longed to "feel Mr. Allsop's head"!
Life at Highgate-Renewed activity-Publications and re-publications – The Biographia Literaria – The lectures of 1818-Coleridge as a Shakespearian critic.
[1816-1818.]
The results of the step which Coleridge had just taken became speedily visible in more ways than one, and the public were among the first to derive benefit from it. For not only was he stimulated to greater activity of production, but his now more methodical way of life gave him time and inclination for that work of arrangement and preparation for the press which, distasteful to most writers, was no doubt especially irksome to him, and thus insured the publication of many pieces which otherwise might never have seen the light. The appearance of Christabel was, as we have said, received with signal marks of popular favour, three editions being called for and exhausted in the same year. In 1816 there appeared also The Statesman's Manual; or the Bible the best guide to Political Skill and Foresight: a Lay Sermon addressed to the higher classes of Society, with an Appendix containing Comments and Essays connected with the Study of the Inspired Writings; in 1817, another Lay Sermon addressed to the higher and middle classes on the existing distresses and discontents; and in the same year followed the most important publication of this period, the Biographia Literaria.
In 1817, too, it was that Coleridge at last made his long-meditated collection and classification of his already published poems, and that for the first time something approaching to a complete edition of the poet's works was given to the world. The Sibylline Leaves, as this reissue was called, had been intended to be preceded by another volume of verse, and "accordingly on the printer's signatures of every sheet we find Vol. II, appearing." Too characteristically, however, the scheme was abandoned, and Volume II. emerged from the press without any Volume I. to accompany it. The drama of Zapolya followed in the same year, and proved more successful with the public than with the critic of Drury Lane. The "general reader" assigned no "ludicrous objections to its metaphysics;" on the contrary, he took them on trust, as his generous manner is, and Zapolya, published thus as a Christmas tale, became so immediately popular that two thousand copies were sold in six weeks. In the year 1818 followed the three-volume selection of essays from the Friend, a reissue to which reference has already been made. With the exception of Christabel, however, all the publications of these three years unfortunately proceeded from the house of Gale and Fenner, a firm which shortly afterwards became bankrupt; and Coleridge thus lost all or nearly all of the profits of their sale.
The most important of the new works of this period was, as has been said, the Biographia Literaria, or, to give it its other title, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions. Its interest, however, is wholly critical and illustrative; as a narrative it would be found extremely disappointing and probably irritating by the average reader. With the exception of one or two incidental disclosures, but little biographical information is to be derived from it which is not equally accessible from sources independent of the author; and the almost complete want of sequence and arrangement renders it a very inconvenient work of reference even for these few biographical details. Its main value is to be found in the contents of seven chapters, from the fourteenth to the twentieth; but it is not going too far to say that, in respect of these, it is literally priceless. No such analysis of the principles of poetry – no such exact discrimination of what was sound in the modern "return-to-nature" movement from what was false – has ever been accomplished by any other critic, or with such admirable completeness by this consummate critic at any other time. Undoubtedly it is not of the light order of reading; none, or very little, of Coleridge's prose is. The whole of chapter xv., for instance, in which the specific elements of "poetic power" are "distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition by accidental motives," requires a close and sustained effort of the attention, but those who bestow it will find it amply re-paid. I know of no dissertation conceived and carried out in terms of the abstract which in the result so triumphantly justifies itself upon application to concrete cases, As regards the question of poetic expression, and the laws by which its true form is determined, Coleridge's analysis is, it seems to me, final. I cannot, at least, after the most careful reflection upon it, conceive it as being other than the absolutely last word on the subject. Reasoning and illustration are alike so convincing that the reader, like the contentious student who listened unwillingly to his professor's demonstration of the first proposition of Euclid, is compelled to confess that "he has nothing to reply." To the judicious admirer of Wordsworth, to every one who, while recognising Wordsworth's inestimable services to English literature as the leader of the naturalist reaction in poetry, has yet been vaguely conscious of the defect in his poetic theory, and very keenly conscious of the vices of his poetic practice, – to all such persons it must be a profound relief and satisfaction to be guided as unerringly as Coleridge guides them to the "parting of the ways" of truth and falsity in Wordsworth's doctrines, and to be enabled to perceive that nothing which has offended him in that poet's thought and diction has any real connection with whatever in the poet's principles has commanded his assent. There is no one who has ever felt uneasy under the blasphemies of the enemy but must entertain deep gratitude for so complete a discharge as Coleridge has procured him from the task of defending such lines as
"And I have travelled far as Hull to see What clothes he might have left or other property."
Defend them indeed the ordinary reader probably would not, preferring even the abandonment of his theory to a task so humiliating. But the theory has so much of truth and value in it that the critic who has redeemed it from the discredit of Wordsworth's misapplications of it is entitled to the thanks of every friend of simplicity, who is at the same time an enemy of bathos. There is no longer any reason to treat the deadly commonplaces, amid which we toil through so many pages of the Excursion, as having any true theoretic affinity with its but too occasional majestic interludes. The smooth square-cut blocks of prose which insult the natural beauty of poetic rock and boulder even in such a scene of naked moorland grandeur as that of Resolution and Independence are seen and shown to be the mere intruders which we have all felt them to be. To the Wordsworthian, anxious for a full justification of the faith that is in him, the whole body of Coleridge's criticism on his friend's poetry in the Biographia Literaria may be confidently recommended. The refutation of what is untenable in Wordsworth's theory, the censure pronounced upon certain characteristics of his practice, are made all the more impressive by the tone of cordial admiration which distinguishes every personal reference to the poet himself, and by the unfailing discrimination with which the critic singles out the peculiar beauties of his poetry. No finer selection of finely characteristic Wordsworthian passages could perhaps have been made than those which Coleridge has quoted in illustration of his criticisms in the eighteenth and two following chapters of the Biographia Literaria. For the rest, however, unless indeed one excepts the four chapters on the Hartleian system and its relation to the German school of philosophy, the book is rather one to be dipped into for the peculiar pleasure which an hour in Coleridge's company must always give to any active intelligence, than to be systematically studied with a view to perfecting one's conception of Coleridge's philosophical and critical genius considered in its totality.
As to the two lay sermons, the less ambitious of them is decidedly the more successful. The advice to "the higher and middle classes" on the existing distresses and discontents contains at least an ingredient of the practical; its distinctively religious appeals are varied by sound political and economical arguments; and the enumeration and exposure of the various artifices by which most orators are accustomed to delude their hearers is as masterly as only Coleridge could have made it. Who but he, for instance, could have thrown a piece of subtle observation into a form in which reason and fancy unite so happily to impress it on the mind as in the following passage: "The mere appeal to the auditors, whether the arguments are not such that none but an idiot or an hireling could resist, is an effective substitute for any argument at all. For mobs have no memories. They are in nearly the same state as that of an individual when he makes what is termed a bull. The passions, like a fused metal, fill up the wide interstices of thought and supply the defective links; and thus incompatible assertions are harmonised by the sensation, without the sense of connection." The other lay sermon, however, the Statesman's Manual, is less appropriately conceived. Its originating proposition, that the Bible is "the best guide to political skill and foresight," is undoubtedly open to dispute, but might nevertheless be capable of plausible defence upon à priori grounds. Coleridge, however, is not content with this method of procedure; as, indeed, with so avowedly practical an object in view he scarcely could be, for a "manual" is essentially a work intended for the constant consultation of the artificer in the actual performance of his work, and ought at least to contain illustrations of the application of its general principles to particular cases. It is in undertaking to supply these that the essential mysticism of Coleridge's counsels comes to light. For instance: "I am deceived if you will not be compelled to admit that the prophet Isaiah revealed the true philosophy of the French Revolution more than two thousand years before it became a sad irrevocable truth of history. 'And thou saidst, I shall be a lady for ever, so that thou didst not lay these things to thy heart neither didst remember the latter end of it.... Therefore shall evil come upon thee; thou shalt not know from whence it riseth, etc.'" And to this ast-quoted sentence Coleridge actually appends the following note: "The reader will scarcely fail to find in this verse a remembrancer of the sudden setting in of the frost before the usual time (in a country, too, where the commencement of its two seasons is in general scarcely less regular than that of the wet and dry seasons between the tropics) which caused, and the desolation which accompanied, the flight from Moscow." One can make no other comment upon this than that if it really be wisdom which statesmen would do well to lay to heart, the late Dr. Cumming must have been the most profound instructor in statesmanship that the world has ever seen. A prime minister of real life, however, could scarcely be seriously recommended to shape his policy upon a due consideration of the possible allegoric meaning of a passage in Isaiah, to say nothing of the obvious objection that this kind of appeal to Sortes Biblicæ is dangerously liable to be turned against those who recommend it. On the whole, one must say of this lay sermon that it justifies the apprehension expressed by the author in its concluding pages. It does rather "resemble the overflow of an earnest mind than an orderly and premeditated," in the sense, at any rate, of a well-considered "composition."
In the month of January 1818 Coleridge once more commenced the delivery of a course of lectures in London. The scope of this series-fourteen in number was, as will be seen from the subjoined syllabus, an immensely comprehensive one. The subject of the first was "the manners, morals, literature, philosophy, religion, and state of society in general in European Christendom, from the eighth to the fifteenth century;" and of the second "the tales and metrical romances common for the most part to England, Germany, and the north of France; and English songs and ballads continued to the reign of Charles I." In the third the lecturer proposed to deal with the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser, of Petrarch, and of Ariosto, Pulci, and Boiardo. The fourth, fifth, and sixth were to be devoted to the dramatic works of Shakespeare, and to comprise the substance of Coleridge's former courses on the same subject, "enlarged and varied by subsequent study and reflection." In the seventh he was to treat of the other principal dramatists of the Elizabethan period, Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher; in the eighth of the life and all the works of Cervantes; in the ninth of Rabelais, Swift, and Sterne, with a dissertation "on the nature and constituents of genuine humour, and on the distinctions of humorous from the witty, the fanciful, the droll, the odd, etc." Donne, Dante, and Milton formed the subject of the tenth; the Arabian Nights Entertainment, and the romantic use of the supernatural in poetry, that of the eleventh. The twelfth was to be on "tales of witches and apparitions, etc.," as distinguished from magic and magicians of Asiatic origin; and the thirteenth, – "on colour, sound, and form in nature, as connected with Poesy – the word 'Poesy' being used as the generic or class term including poetry, music, painting, statuary, and ideal architecture as its species, the reciprocal relations of poetry and philosophy to each other, and of both to religion and the moral sense.'" In the fourteenth and final lecture Coleridge proposed to discuss "the corruptions of the English language since the reign of Queen Anne, in our style of writing prose," and to formulate "a few easy rules for the attainment of a manly, unaffected, and pure language in our genuine mother tongue, whether for the purposes of writing, oratory, or conversation."
These lectures, says Mr. Gillman, were from Coleridge's own account more profitable than any he had before given, though delivered in an unfavourable situation; a lecture-room in Flower de Luce Court, which, however, being near the Temple, secured to him the benefit – if benefit it were – of a considerable number of law students among his auditors. It was the first time that his devoted guardian had ever heard him in public, and he reports the significant fact that though Coleridge lectured from notes, which he had carefully made, "it was obvious that his audience were more delighted when, putting his notes aside, he spoke extempore...." He was brilliant, fluent, and rapid; his words seemed to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy some delightful poem. If he sometimes paused, it was not for the want of words, but that he was seeking their most appropriate or most logical arrangement.
An incident related with extreme, though in a great measure unconscious, drollery by Mr. Gillman in connection with a lecture delivered at this period is to my mind of more assistance than many of the accounts of his "lay sermons" in private circles, in enabling us to comprehend one element of Coleridge's marvellous powers of discourse. Early one morning at Mr. Gillman's he received two letters-one to inform him that he was expected that same evening to deliver a lecture, at the rooms of the London Philosophical Society, to an audience of some four or five hundred persons; the other containing a list of the previous lecturers and the lectures delivered by them during the course of the season. At seven o'clock in the evening Coleridge and Mr. Gillman went up to town to make some inquiries respecting this unexpected application; but, on arriving at the house of the gentleman who had written the letter, they were informed that he was not at home, but would return at eight o'clock – the hour fixed for the commencement of the lecture. They then proceeded to the Society's rooms, where in due time the audience assembled; and the committee having at last entered and taken their places on the seats reserved for them, "Mr. President arose from the centre of the group, and, putting on a 'president's hat,' which so disfigured him that we could scarcely refrain from laughter, addressed the company in these words: This evening Mr. Coleridge will deliver a lecture on 'the Growth of the Individual Mind.'" Coleridge at first "seemed startled," as well he might, and turning round to Mr. Gillman whispered: "A pretty stiff subject they have chosen for me." However, he instantly mounted his standing-place and began without hesitation, previously requesting his friend to observe the effect of his lecture on the audience. It was agreed that, should he appear to fail, Gillman was to "clasp his ancle; but that he was to continue for an hour if the countenances of his auditors indicated satisfaction." Coleridge then began his address in these words: "The lecture I am about to give this evening is purely extempore. Should you find a nominative case looking out for a verb, or a fatherless verb for a nominative case, you must excuse it. It is purely extempore, though I have read and thought much on the subject." At this the company smiled, which seemed to inspire the lecturer with confidence. He plunged at once into his lecture – and most brilliant, eloquent, and logically consecutive it was. The time moved on so swiftly that Mr. Gillman found, on looking at his watch, that an hour and a half had passed away, and, therefore, he continues "waiting only a desirable moment – to use his own playful words – I prepared myself to punctuate his oration. As previously agreed, I pressed his ancle, and thus gave him the hint he had requested; when, bowing graciously, and with a benevolent and smiling countenance, he presently descended. The lecture was quite new to me, and I believe quite new to himself so far as the arrangement of his words was concerned. The floating thoughts were beautifully arranged, and delivered on the spur of the moment. What accident gave rise to the singular request, that he should deliver this lecture impromptu, I never learnt; nor did it signify, as it afforded a happy opportunity to many of witnessing in part the extent of his reading and the extraordinary strength of his powers."
It is tantalising to think that no record of this remarkable performance remains; but, indeed, the same may to some extent be said, and in various degrees, of nearly all the lectures which Coleridge ever delivered. With the exception of seven out of the fifteen of 1811, which were published in 1856 by Mr. Payne Collier from shorthand notes taken at the time, Coleridge's lectures scarcely exist for us otherwise than in the form of rough preparatory notes. A few longer pieces, such as the admirable observations in the second volume of the Literary Remains, on poetry, on the Greek drama, and on the progress of the dramatic art in England, are, with the exception above noticed, almost the only general disquisitions on these subjects which appear to have reached us in a complete state. Of the remaining contents of the volume, including the detailed criticisms now textual, now analytic – of the various plays of Shakespeare, a considerable portion is frankly fragmentary, pretending, indeed, to no other character than that of mere marginalia. This, however, does not destroy – I had almost said it does not even impair – their value. It does but render them all the more typical productions of a writer, whose greatest services to mankind in almost every department of human thought and knowledge with which he concerned himself were much the most often performed in the least methodical way. In reading through these incomparable notes on Shakespeare we soon cease to lament, or even to remember, their unconnected form and often somewhat desultory appearance; if, indeed, we do not see reason to congratulate ourselves that the annotator, unfettered by the restraints which the composition of a systematic treatise would have imposed upon him, is free to range with us at will over many a flower-strewn field, for which otherwise he could not perhaps have afforded to quit the main road of his subject. And this liberty is the more welcome, because Coleridge, primus inter pares as a critic of any order of literature, is in the domain of Shakespearian commentary absolute king. The principles of analysis which he was charged with having borrowed without acknowledgment from Schlegel, with whose Shakespearian theories he was at the time entirely unacquainted, were in fact of his own excogitation. He owed nothing in this matter to any individual German, nor had he anything in common with German Shakespearianism except its profoundly philosophising spirit, which, moreover, was in his case directed and restrained by other qualities, too often wanting in critics of that industrious race; for he possessed a sense of the ridiculous, a feeling for the poetic, a tact, a taste, and a judgment, which would have saved many a worthy but heavy-handed Teutonic professor, who should have been lucky enough to own these gifts, from exposing himself and his science to the satire of the light-minded. Very rarely, indeed, do we find Coleridge indulging plus 'quo his passion for psychological analysis. Deeply as his criticism penetrates, it is yet loyally recognitive of the opacity of milestones. Far as he sees into his subject, we never find him fancying that he sees beyond the point at which the faculty of human vision is exhausted. His conception of the more complex of Shakespeare's personages, his theory of their characters, his reading of their motives, is often subtle, but always sane; his interpretation of the master's own dealings with them, and of the language which he puts into their mouths, is often highly imaginative, but it is rarely fanciful. Take, as an illustration of the first-mentioned merit, the following acute but eminently sensible estimate of the character of Polonius: –
"He is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it was natural for Hamlet – a young man of fire and genius, detesting formality and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation – should express himself satirically, yet this must not be taken exactly as the poet's conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character had arisen from long habits of business; but take his advice to Laertes, and Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he was meant to be represented as a statesman somewhat past his faculties – his recollections of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge of human nature, while what immediately takes place before him and escapes from him is indicative of weakness."
Or this comment on the somewhat faint individualisation of the figure of Lear:
"In Lear old age is itself a character-natural imperfections being increased by life-long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any addition of individualisation would have been unnecessary and painful; for the relation of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of frightful ingratitude, alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes the open and ample playroom of nature's passions."
Or lastly, in illustration of my second point, let us take this note on the remark of the knight that "since my young lady's going into France the fool hath much pined away ": –
"The fool is no comic buffoon – to make the groundlings laugh – no forced condescension of Shakspeare's genius to the taste of his audience. Accordingly the poet prepares us for the introduction, which he never does with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into living connection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful a creation as Caliban, – his wild babblings and inspired idiocy articulate and gauge the horrors of the scene."
The subject is a tempting one to linger over, did not imperative Exigencies of space compel me to pass on from it. There is much – very much – more critical matter in the Literary Remains of which it is hard to forbear quotation; and I may mention in particular the profoundly suggestive remarks on the nature of the humorous, with their accompanying analysis of the genius and artistic method of Sterne. But it is, as has been said, in Shakespearian criticism that Coleridge's unique mastery of all the tools of the critic is most conspicuous, and it is in the brilliant, if unmethodised, pages which I have been discussing that we may most readily find consolation for the too early silencing of his muse. For these consummate criticisms are essentially and above all the criticisms of a poet They are such as could not have been achieved by any man not originally endowed with that divine gift which was fated in this instance to expend itself within so few years. Nothing, indeed, could more strikingly illustrate the commanding advantage possessed by a poet interpreting a poet than is to be found in Coleridge's occasional sarcastic comments on the banalitès of our national poet's most prosaic commentator, Warburton – the "thought-swarming, but idealess Warburton," as he once felicitously styles him. The one man seems to read his author's text under the clear, diffused, unwavering radiance emitted from his own poetic imagination; while the criticism of the other resembles a perpetual scratching of damp matches, which ash a momentary light into one corner of the dark assage, and then go out.
Closing years – Temporary renewal of money troubles – The Aids to Reflection – Growing weakness-Visit to Germany with the Wordsworths – Last illness and death.
[1818-1834.]
For the years which now remained to Coleridge, some sixteen in number, dating from his last appearance as a public lecturer, his life would seem to have been attended with something, at least, of that sort of happiness which is enjoyed by the nation of uneventful annals. There is little to be told of him in the way of literary performance; little record remains, unfortunately, of the discursively didactic talk in which, during these years, his intellectual activity found its busiest exercise; of incident in the ordinary sense of the word there is almost none. An account of these closing days of his life must resolve itself almost wholly into a "history of opinion," – an attempt to reanimate for ourselves that life of perpetual meditation which Coleridge lived, and to trace, so far as the scanty evidence of his utterances enables us to do so, the general tenor of his daily thoughts. From one point of view, of course, this task would be extremely difficult, if not impossible; from another comparatively easy. It is easy, that is to say, to investigate Coleridge's speculations, so far as their subject is concerned, whatever difficulties their obscurity and subtlety may present to the inquirer; for, as a matter of fact, their subject is remarkably uniform. Attempts to divide the literary life of a writer into eras are more often arbitrary and fanciful than not; but the peculiar circumstances of Coleridge's career did in fact effect the division for themselves. His life until the age of twenty-six may fairly be described as in its "poetic period." It was during these years, and indeed during the last two or three of them, that he produced all the poetry by which he will be remembered, while he produced little else of mark or memorability. The twenty years which follow from 1798 to 1818 may with equal accuracy be styled the "critical period." It was during these years that he did his best work as a journalist, and all his work as a public lecturer on aesthetics. It was during them that he said his say, and even his final say, so far as any public modes of expression were concerned, on politics and on art. From 1818 to his death his life was devoted entirely to metaphysics and theology, and with such close and constant reference to the latter subject, to which indeed his metaphysics had throughout his life been ancillary, that it deserves to give the name of the "theological period" to these closing years.
Their lack of incident, however, is not entirely as favourable a circumstance as that uneventfulness of national annals to which I have compared it; for, though "no news may be good news" in the case of a nation's history, it is by no means as certainly so in the case of a man's biography, and, least of all, when the subject is a man whose inward life of thought and feeling so completely overshadowed his outward life of action throughout his whole career. There is indeed evidence, slight in amount, but conclusive in character-plain and painful evidence enough to show that at least the first four or five years of the period we have mentioned were not altogether years of resignation and calm; that they were embittered by recurring agonies of self-reproach, by
"Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;"
and by the desolating thought that all which had been "culled in wood-walks wild," and "all which patient toil had reared," were to be
– "but flowers Strewn on the corse, and borne upon the bier, In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"
Here and there in the correspondence with Thomas Allsop we obtain a glimpse into that vast half-darkened arena in which this captive spirit self-condemned to the lions was struggling its last. To one strange and hitherto unexplained letter I have already referred. It was written from Ramsgate in the autumn of 1822, evidently under circumstances of deep depression. But there is a letter nearly two years earlier in date addressed to the same correspondent which contains by far the fullest account of Coleridge's then condition of mind, the state of his literary engagements and his literary projects, his completed and uncompleted work. As usual with him it is stress of money matters that prompts him to write, and he prefaces his request for assistance with the following portentous catalogue of realised or contemplated schemes. "Contemplated," indeed, is too modest a word, according to his own account, to be applied to any one item in the formidable list. Of all of them, he has, he tells Allsop, "already the written materials and contents, requiring only to be put together from the loose papers and commonplace in memorandum books, and needing no other change, whether of omission, addition, or correction, than the mere act of arranging, and the opportunity of seeing the whole collectively, bring with them of course." Heads I. and II. of the list comprise those criticisms on Shakespeare and the other principal Elizabethan dramatists; on Dante, Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, Calderon; on Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, Rabelais, etc., which formed the staple of the course of lectures delivered in 1818, and which were published after his death in the first two of the four volumes of Literary Remains brought out under the editorship of Mr. H. N. Coleridge. Reserving No. III. for a moment we find No. IV. to consist of "Letters on the Old and New Testament, and on the Doctrines and Principles held in common by the Fathers and Founders of the Reformation, addressed to a Candidate for Holy Orders, including advice on the plan and subjects of preaching proper to a minister of the Established Church." The letters never apparently saw the light of publicity, at any rate, in the epistolary form, either during the author's lifetime or after his death; and with regard to II. and III., which did obtain posthumous publication, the following caution should be borne in mind by the reader. "To the completion," says Coleridge, "of these four works I have literally nothing more to do than to transcribe; but, as I before hinted, from so many scraps and Sibylline leaves, including margins of blank pages that unfortunately I must be my own scribe, and, not done by myself, they will be all but lost." As matters turned out he was not his own scribe, and the difficulty which Mr. Nelson Coleridge experienced in piecing together the fragmentary materials at his disposal is feelingly described by him in his preface to the first edition. He added that the contents of these volumes were drawn from a portion only of the MSS. entrusted to him, and that the remainder of the collection, which, under favourable circumstances, he hoped might hereafter see the light, "was at least of equal value" with what he was then presenting to the reader. This hope was never realised; and it must be remembered, therefore, that the published record of Coleridge's achievements as a critic is, as has already been pointed out, extremely imperfect. [1] That it is not even more disappointingly so than it is, may well entitle his nephew and editor to the gratitude of posterity; but where much has been done, there yet remains much to do ere Coleridge's consummate analyses of poetic and dramatic works can be presented to the reader in other than their present shape of a series of detached brilliancies. The pearls are there, but the string is wanting. Whether it will be ever supplied, or whether it is possible now to supply it, one cannot say.
The third of Coleridge's virtually completed works there is much virtue in a "virtually"-was a "History of Philosophy considered as a Tendency of the Human Mind to exhibit the Powers of the Human Reason, to discover by its own strength the Origin and Laws of Man and the World, from Pythagoras to Locke and Condillac." This production, however, considerable as it is, was probably merely ancillary to what he calls "My GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which more than twenty years of my life have been devoted, and on which my hopes of extensive and permanent utility, of fame in the noblest sense of the word, mainly rest." To this work he goes on to say:
"All my other writings, unless I except my Poems (and these I can exclude in part only), are introductory and preparative, while its result, if the premises be as I with the most tranquil assurance am convinced they are-incontrovertible, the deductions legitimate, and the conclusions commensurate, and only commensurate with both [must be], to effect a revolution in all that has been called Philosophy and Metaphysics in England and France since the era of commencing predominance of the mechanical system at the Restoration of our Second Charles, and with [in] the present fashionable views not only of religion, morals, and politics, but even of the modern physics and physiology."
This, it must be allowed, is a sufficiently "large order," being Apparently indeed nothing less than an undertaking to demolish the system of Locke and his successors, and to erect German Transcendentalism on the ruins. With anything less than this, however with any less noble object or less faith in their attainments – Coleridge could not, he declares, have stood acquitted of folly and abuse of time, talent, and learning, on a labour of three – fourths of his intellectual life. Somewhat more than a volume of this magnum opus had been dictated by him to his "friend and enlightened pupil, Mr. Green, so as to exist fit for the press;" and more than as much again had been done, but he had been compelled to break off the weekly meetings with his pupil from the necessity of writing on subjects of the passing day. Then comes a reference, the last we meet with, to the real "great work," as the unphilosophic world has always considered and will always consider it. On this subject he says:
"Of my poetic works I would fain finish the Christabel, Alas! for the proud time when I planned, when I had present to my mind the materials as well as the scheme of the Hymns entitled Spirit, Sun, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Man; and the Epic Poem on what appears to me the only fit subject remaining for an Epic Poem – Jerusalem besieged and destroyed by Titus."
And then there follows this most pathetic passage, necessary, in spite of its length, to be transcribed entire, both on account of the value of its biographic details – its information on the subject of the useless worldly affairs, etc. – and because of the singularly penetrating light which it throws upon the mental and moral nature of the man: –
"I have only by fits and starts ever prayed – I have not prevailed upon myself to pray to God in sincerity and entireness for the fortitude that might enable me to resign myself to the abandonment of all my life's best hopes, to say boldly to myself, 'Gifted with powers confessedly above mediocrity, aided by an education of which no less from almost unexampled hardships and sufferings than from manifold and peculiar advantages I have never yet found a parallel, I have devoted myself to a life of unintermitted reading, thinking, meditating, and observing, I have not only sacrificed all worldly prospects of wealth and advancement, but have in my inmost soul stood aloof from temporary reputation. In consequence of these toils and this self-dedication I possess a calm and clear consciousness that in many and most important departments of truth and beauty I have outstrode my contemporaries, those at least of highest name, that the number of my. printed works bear witness that I have not been idle, and the seldom acknowledged but strictly proveable effects of my labours appropriated to the welfare of my age in the Morning Post before the peace of Amiens, in the Courier afterwards, and in the serious and various subjects of my lectures... (add to which the unlimited freedom of my communications to colloquial life) may surely be allowed as evidence that I have not been useless to my generation. But, from circumstances, the main portion of my harvest is still on the ground, ripe indeed and only waiting, a few for the sickle, but a large part only for the sheaving and carting and housing-but from all this I must turn away and let them rot as they lie, and be as though they never had been; for I must go and gather black berries and earth-nuts, or pick mushrooms and gild oak-apples for the palate and fancies of chance customers. I must abrogate the name of philosopher and poet, and scribble as fast as I can and with as little thought as I can for Blackwood's Magazine, or as I have been employed for the last days in writing MS. sermons for lazy clergymen who stipulate that the composition must be more than respectable.'... This" [i.e. to say this to myself] "I have not yet had courage to do. My soul sickens and my heart sinks, and thus oscillating between both" [forms of activity – the production of permanent and of ephemeral work] "I do neither – neither as it ought to be done to any profitable end."
And his proposal for extricating himself from this distressing position is that "those who think respectfully and hope highly of my power and attainments should guarantee me a yearly sum for three or four years, adequate to my actual support, with such comforts and decencies of appearance as my health and habit have made necessaries, so that my mind may be unanxious as far as the present time is concerned." Thus provided for he would undertake to devote two-thirds of his time to some one work of those above mentioned that is to say, of the first four – and confine it exclusively to it till finished, while the remaining third of his time he would go on maturing and completing his "great work," and "(for, if but easy in my mind, I have no doubt either of the reawakening power or of the kindling inclination) my Christabel and what else the happier hour may inspire." Mr. Green, he goes on to say, had promised to contribute £30 to £40 yearly, another pupil, "the son of one of my dearest old friends, £50," and £10 or £20 could, he thought, be relied on from another. The whole amount of the required annuity would be about £200, to be repaid of course should disposal or sale of his works produce, or as far as they should produce, the means. But "am I entitled," he asks uneasily, "have I a right to do this I Can I do it without moral degradation? And lastly, can it be done without loss of character in the eyes of my acquaintances and of my friends' acquaintances?"
I cannot take upon myself to answer these painful questions. The reply to be given to them must depend upon the judgment which each individual student of this remarkable but unhappy career may pass upon it as a whole; and, while it would be too much to expect that that judgment should be entirely favourable, one may at least believe that a fair allowance for those inveterate weaknesses of physical constitution which so largely aggravated, if they did not wholly generate, the fatal infirmities of Coleridge's moral nature, must materially mitigate the harshness of its terms.
The story of Coleridge's closing years is soon told. It is mainly a record of days spent in meditation and discourse, in which character it will be treated of more fully in a subsequent chapter. His literary productions during the last fourteen years of his life were few in number, and but one of them of any great importance. In 1821 he had offered himself as an occasional contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, but a series of papers promised by him to that periodical were uncompleted, and his only two contributions (in October 1821 and January 1822) are of no particular note. In May 1825 he read a paper on the Prometheus of 'schylus before the Royal Society of Literature; but "the series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian in connection with the sacerdotal theology and in contrast with the mysteries of ancient Greece," to which this essay had been announced as preparatory, never made their appearance. In the same year, however, he published one of the best known of his prose works, his Aids to Reflection.
Of the success of this latest of Coleridge's more important contributions to literature there can be no doubt. New editions of it seem to have been demanded at regular intervals for some twenty years after its first production, and it appears to have had during the same period a relatively equal reissue in the United States. The Rev. Dr. James Marsh, an American divine of some ability and reputation, composed a preliminary essay (now prefixed to the fifth English edition), in which he elaborately set forth the peculiar merits of the work, and undertook to initiate the reader in the fittest and most profitable method of making use of it. In these remarks the reverend essayist insists more strongly on the spiritually edifying quality of the Aids than on their literary merits, and, for my own part, I must certainly consider him right in doing so. As a religious manual it is easy to understand how this volume of Coleridge's should have obtained many and earnest readers. What religious manual, which shows traces of spiritual insight, or even merely of pious yearnings after higher and holier than earthly things, has ever failed to win such readers among the weary and heavy-laden of the world? And that Coleridge, a writer of the most penetrating glance into divine mysteries, and writing always from a soul all tremulous, as it were, with religious sensibility, should have obtained such readers in abundance is not surprising. But to a critic and literary biographer I cannot think that his success in this respect has much to say. For my own part, at any rate, I find considerable difficulty in tracing it to any distinctively literary origin. There seems to me to be less charm of thought, less beauty of style, less even of Coleridge's seldom-failing force of effective statement, in the Aids to Reflection than in almost any of his writings. Even the volume of some dozen short chapters on the Constitution of the Church and State, published in 1830, as an "aid towards a right judgment in the late Catholic Kelief Bill," appears to me to yield a more characteristic flavour of the author's style, and to exhibit far more of his distinction of literary workmanship than the earlier and more celebrated work.
Among the acquaintances made by Coleridge after his retirement to Mr. Gillman's was one destined to be of some importance to the history of his philosophical work. It was that of a gentleman whose name has already been mentioned in this chapter, Mr. Joseph Henry Green, afterwards a distinguished surgeon and Fellow of the Royal Society, who in his early years had developed a strong taste for metaphysical speculation, going even so far as to devote one of his hard-earned periods of professional holiday to a visit to Germany for the sake of studying philosophy in that home of abstract thought. To him Coleridge was introduced by his old Roman acquaintance, Ludwig Tieck, on one of the latter's visits to England, and he became, as the extract above quoted from Coleridge's correspondence shows, his enthusiastic disciple and indefatigable fellow-worker. In the pursuit of their common studies and in those weekly reunions of admiring friends which Coleridge, while his health permitted it, was in the habit of holding, we may believe that a considerable portion of these closing years of his life was passed under happier conditions than he had been long accustomed to. It is pleasant to read of him among his birds and flowers, and surrounded by the ever-watchful tendance of the affectionate Gillmans, tranquil in mind at any rate, if not at ease from his bodily ailments, and enjoying, as far as enjoyment was possible to him, the peaceful close of a stormy and unsettled day. For the years 1825-30, moreover, his pecuniary circumstances were improved to the extent of £105 per annum, obtained for him at the instance of the Royal Society of Literature, and held by him till the death of George IV.
Two incidents of his later years are, however, worthy of more special mention – a tour up the Rhine, which he took in 1828, in company with Wordsworth and his daughter; and, some years earlier, a meeting with John Keats. "A loose, slack, not well dressed youth," it is recorded in the Table Talk, published after his death by his nephew, "met Mr.—" (it was Mr. Green, of whom more hereafter) "and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him and spoke. 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 Green when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly."
His own health, however, had been steadily declining in these latter years, and the German tour with the Wordsworths must, I should imagine, have been the last expedition involving any considerable exercise of the physical powers which he was able to take. Within a year or so afterwards his condition seems to have grown sensibly worse. In November 1831 he writes that for eighteen months past his life had been "one chain of severe sicknesses, brief and imperfect convalescences, and capricious relapses." Henceforth he was almost entirely confined to the sick-room. His faculties, however, still remained clear and unclouded. The entries in the Table Talk do not materially dimmish in frequency. Their tone of colloquy undergoes no perceptible variation; they continue to be as stimulating and delightful reading as ever. Not till 11th July 1834 do we find any change; but here at last we meet the shadow, deemed longer than it was in reality, of the approaching end. "I am dying," said Coleridge, "but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that, very recently, bygone images and scenes of early life have stolen into my mind like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope – those twin realities of the phantom world! I do not add Love, for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and, so seen, as one.... Hooker wished to live to finish his Ecclesiastical Polity – so I own I wish life and strength had been spared to me to complete my Philosophy. For, as God hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and design in my heart were to exalt the glory of His name; and, which is the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind. But visum aliter Deo, and His will be done."
The end was nearer than he thought. It was on the 11th of July, as has been said, that he uttered these last words of gentle and pious resignation. On that day fortnight he died. Midway, however, in this intervening period, he knew that the "speedy release" which he had not ventured to expect was close at hand. The death, when it came, was in some sort emblematic of the life. Sufferings severe and constant, till within thirty-six hours of the end: at the last peace. On the 25th of July 1834 this sorely-tried, long-labouring, fate-marred and self-marred life passed tranquilly away. The pitiful words of Kent over his dead master rise irrepressibly to the lips –
"O let him pass: he hates him Who would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer."
There might have been something to be said, though not by Kent, of the weaknesses of Lear himself; but at such a moment compassion both for the king and for the poet may well impose silence upon censure.
Footnotes
1. How imperfect, a comparison between estimated and actual bulk will show. No. I. was, according to Coleridge's reckoning, to form three volumes of 500 pages each. In the Literary Remains it fills less than half of four volumes of little more than 400 pages each.