Samnd ixtglor (ftrlmirge
BY
H.D.TRAILL
^c=P^^
(EngltsI) Mtn of Ccttcrs
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY
COLEEIDGE
BY
H. D. TRAILL
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
FRANKLIN SQUARE
ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS.
Edited by John Morley.
Johnson Leslie Stephen.
Gibbon J. C. Morison.
Scott R. H. Hutton.
Shelley J. A. Symonds.
Hume T. H. Huxley.
Goldsmith William Black.
Defob William Minto.
Burns J. C. Shairp.
Spenser R. W. Church.
Thackeray Anthony Trollope.
Burke John Morley.
Milton ..Mark Pattison.
H AWTHORNR Henry James, Jr.
SouTHEY E. Dowden.
Chaucer A. W. Ward.
BuNYAN J. A. Froude.
Cowper Goldwin Smith.
Pope Leslie Stephen.
Byron John Nichol
Locke Thomas Fowler.
Wordsworth F. Myers.
Dryden G. Saintsbury.
Landor Sidney Colvin-.
De Quincey David Masson.
Lamb Alfred Ainger.
Bentley R. C. Jebb.
Dickens A. W. Ward.
Gray E. W. Gosse.
Swift Leslie Stephen.
Sterne H. D. Traill.
Macaulay J. Cotter Morison.
Fielding Austin Dobson.
Sheridan Mrs. Oliphant
Addison W. J. Courthope.
Bacon R. W. Church.
Coleridge H. D. Traill.
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Z
Tl
LIBRARY
HKiyERsriv oi <;aliforma
gL^JMXA BAItUAJliA
PKEFATORY NOTE.
In a tolerably well-known passage in one of his essays De
Quincey enumerates the multiform attainments and powers
of Coleridge, and the corresponding varieties of demand
made by them on any one who should aspire to become this
many-sided man's biographer. The description is slightly
touched with the humorous hyperbole characteristic of its
author; but it is in substance just, and I cannot but wish
that it were possible, within the limits of a preface, to set out
the whole of it in excuse for the many inevitable shortcom-
ings of this volume. Having thus made an " exhibit " of it,
there would only remain to add that the difficulties with
which De Quincey confronts an intending biographer of
Coleridge must necessarily be multiplied many-fold by the
conditions under which this work is here attempted. No
complete biography of Coleridge, at least on any important
scale of dimensions, is in existence ; no critical appreciation
of his work as a whole, and as correlated with the circum-
stances and affected by the changes of his life, has, so for as I
am aware, been attemjited. To perform either of these two
tasks adequately, or even with any approach to adequacy, a
writer should at least have the elbow-room of a portly vol-
ume. To attempt the two together, therefore, and to attempt
them within the limits prescribed to tlie manuals of this
series, is an enterprise which I think should claim, from all
at least who are not offended by its audacity, an almost un-
bounded indulffcnce.
vi PREFATORY NOTE.
The supply of material for a Life of Coleridge is fairly
plentiful, though it is not very easily come by. For the most
part it needs to be hunted up or fished up — those accustomed
to the work will appreciate tlie difference between the two
processes — from a considerable variety of contemporary doc-
uments. Completed biograjjhy of the poet-philosopher there
is none, as has been said, in existence ; and the one volume
of the unfinished Life left us by Mr. Gillman — a name never
to be mentioned with disrespect, however diflScult it may
sometimes be to avoid doing so, by any one who honours the
name and genius of Coleridge — covers, and that in but a
loose and rambling fashion, no more than a few years. Mr.
Cottle's Recollections of Southcy, Worchwoj'th, and Coleridge
contains some valuable information on certain points of im-
portance, as also does the Letters, Conversations, etc., of S. T. C.
by Mr. Allsop. Miss Jleteyard's Groiij) of Eminent English-
men throws much light on the relations between Coleridge
and his early patrons, the Wedgwoods. Everything, wheth-
04' critical or biographical, that De Quincey wrote on Cole-
ridgian matters requires, with whatever discount, to be care-
fully studied. The Life of Wordsworth, by the BishoiD of
St. Andrews; The Correspondence of Southey ; the Rev. Der-
went Coleridge's brief account of his father's life and writ-
ings ; and the prefatory memoir prefixed to the 1880 edition
of Coleridge's Poetical and Dramatic Works, have all had to
be consulted. But, after all, there remain several tantalising
gaps in Coleridge's life which refuse to be bridged over ; and
one cannot but think that there must be enough uni">ublished
matter in the possession of his relatives, and the rejiresenta-
tives of his friends and corresiJondents, to enable some at
least, though doubtless not all, of these missing links to be
supplied. Perhaps upon a fitting occasion, and for an ade-
quate purpose, these materials would be forthcoming.
CONTENTS.
POETICAL PERIOD.
CHAPTER I.
1772-1794.
BIRTH, PARENTAGE, ANB EARLY YEARS. — CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. —
JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE Page 1
CHAPTER II.
1794-1797.
THE BRISTOL LECTURES. — MARRIAGE. — LIFE AT CLEVEDON. —
THE "WATCHMAN." — RETIRE5IENT TO STOWEY. — INTRODUC-
TION TO "WORDSWORTH 17
CHAPTER III.
1797-1799.
COLERIDGE AND WORDSWORTH. — PUBLICATION OF THE "LYR-
ICAL BALLADS."— THE "ANCIENT MARINER." — THE FIRST
PART OF "CHRISTABEL." — DECLINE OF COLERIDGE'S POETIC
IMPULSE.— FINAL PJEVIEW OF HIS POETRY 37
viii CONTENTS.
CRITICAL PERIOD.
CHAPTER IV.
1799-1800.
VISIT TO GERMANY. — LIFE AT GOTTINGEN. — RETURN. — EX-
PLORES THE LAKE COUNTRY. — LONDON. — THE "MORNING
POST." — COLERIDGE AS A JOURNALIST. — RETIREMENT TO
KESWICK Page 67
CHAPTER V.
1800-1804.
LIFE AT KESWICK. — SECOND PART OP " CHRISTABEL." — FAIL-
ING HEALTH. — RESORT TO OPIUM. — THE " ODE TO DEJEC-
TION." — INCREASING RESTLESSNESS.— VISIT TO MALTA . 84
CHAPTER VI.
1806-1809.
STAY AT MALTA. — ITS INJURIOUS EFFECTS. — RETURN TO ENG-
LAND. — MEETING WITH DE QUINCEY. — RESIDENCE IN LON-
DON. — FIRST SERIES OF LECTURES 101
CHAPTER VII.
1809-1810.
RETURN TO THE LAKES. — FROM KESWICK TO GRASMERE.— WITH
WORDSWORTH AT ALLAN BANK. — THE "FRIEND." — QUITS
THE LAKE COUNTRY FOREVER 117
CONTENTS. ix
CHAPTER VIII.
1810-1816.
LONDON AGAIN. — SECOND RECOURSE TO JOURNALISM. — THE
"courier" articles. — THE SHAKESPEARE LECTURES. —
PRODUCTION OF "REMORSE." — AT BRISTOL AGAIN AS
LECTURER. — RESIDENCE AT CALNE. — INCREASING ILL
HEALTH AND EMBARRASSMENTS. — RETIREMENT TO MR.
gillman's Page 126
METAPHYSICAL AND THEOLOGICAL PERIOD.
CHAPTER IX.
1816-1818.
life at HIGHGATE. — RENEWED ACTIVITY. — PUBLICATIONS AND
REPUBLICATIONS. — THE ' ' BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA. " — THE
LECTURES OF 1818. — COLERIDGE AS A SHAKESPEARIAN
CRITIC 145
CHAPTER X.
1818-1834,
CLOSING YEARS. — TEMPORARY RENEWAL OP MONKEY TROU-
BLES. — THE "AIDS TO REFLECTION." — GROWING WEAKNESS.
— VISIT TO GERMANY WITH THE WORDSWORTHS. — LAST ILL-
NESS AND DEATH 160
CHAPTER XI.
Coleridge's metaphysics and theology. — the "spiritual
philosophy" of MR. GREEN ...,,.... 173
1*
X CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XII.
Coleridge's position in his later years.— his discourse.
— his influence on contemporary thought. — FINAL RE-
VIEW OF HIS INTELLECTUAL WORK Page 185
COLERIDGE.
CHAPTER I.
BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY YEARS. — CITRIST'S HOSPITAL. —
JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.
[1772-1794.]
On the 21st of October, 1772, there was added to that roll
of famous Englishmen of whom Devonshire boasts the par-
entage a new and not its least illustrious name. Samuel
Taylor Coleridge was the son of the Rev. John Cole-
ridge, vicar of Ottery St. Mary in that county, and head-
master of Henry VHI.'s Free Grammar School in the same
town. He was the youngest child of a large family. To
the vicar, who had been twice married, his first wife had
borne three children, and his second ten. Of these latter,
however, one son died in infancy; four others, together
with the only daughter of the family, passed away before
Samuel had attained his majority ; and thus only three of
his brothers, James, Edward, and George Coleridge, out-
lived the eighteenth century. The first of these three sur-
vivors became the father of Henry Nelson Coleridge — who
married his cousin Sara, the poet's accomplished daughter,
and edited his uncle's posthumous works — and of the late
2 COLERIDGE. [chap.
Mr. Justice Coleridge, himself tlie father of the present
Lord Chief-Justice of England. Edward, the second of the
three, went, like his eldest brother William, to Pembroke
College, Oxford, and like him took orders; and George,
also educated at the same college and for the same pro-
fession, succeeded eventually to his father's benefice and
school. The vicar himself appears from all accounts to
have been a man of more mark than most rural incumbents,
and probably than a good many schoolmasters of his day.
He was a Hebrew scholar of some eminence, and the com-
piler of a Latin grammar, in which, among other innova-
tions designed to simplify the study of the language for
" boys just initiated," he proposed to substitute for the
name of "ablative" that of " quale-quare-quidditive case."
The mixture of amiable simplicity and not unamiable ped-
antry to which this stroke of nomenclature testifies was
further illustrated in his practice of diversifying his ser-
mons to his village flock with Hebrew quotations, which
he always commended to their attention as " the imme-
diate language of the Holy Ghost " — a practice which ex-
posed his successor, himself a learned man, to the com-
plaint of his rustic parishioners, that for all his erudition
no "immediate language of the Holy Ghost" was ever to
be heard from him. On the whole the Rev. John Cole-
xndge appears to have been a gentle and kindly eccentric,
whose combination of qualities may have well entitled him
to be compared, as his famous son was wont in after-life
to compare him, to Parson Adams.
Of the poet's mother we know little ; but it is to be
gathered from such information as has come to us through
Mr. Gillraan from Coleridge himself, that, though reputed
to have been a " woman of strong mind," she ^crcised
less influence on the formation of her son's mind and char-
I.] BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL-DAYS. 3
acter than has frequently been tlio case with the not re-
markable mothers of remarkable men. " She was," says
Mr. Gillman, "an uneducated woman, industriously atten-
tive to her household duties, and devoted to the care of
her husband and family. Possessing none even of the
most common accomplishments of her day, she had neither
love nor sympathy for the display of them in others. She
disliked, as she would say, your ' harpsichord ladies,' a:nd
strongly tried to impress upon her sons their little val-
ue" (that is, of the accomplishments) "in their choice
of wives." And the final judgment upon her is that she
was " a very good woman, though, like Martha, over care-
ful in many things ; very ambitious for the advancement
of her sons in life, but wanting, perhaps, that flow of heart
which her husband possessed so largely." Of Coleridge's
boyhood and school - days we are fortunate in being able
to construct an unusually clear and complete idea. Both
from his own autobiographic notes, from the traditionary
testimony of his family, and from the no less valuable
evidence of his most distinguished schoolfellow, we know
that his youthful character and habits assign him very con-
spicuously to that perhaps somewhat small class of eminent
men whose boyhood has given distinct indications of great
things to come. Coleridge is as pronounced a specimen
of this class as Scott is of its opposite. Scott has shown
the world how commonplace a boyhood may precede a
maturity of extraordinary powers. In Coleridge's case a
boy of truly extraordinary qualities was father to one of
the most remarkable of men. As the youngest of ten
children (or of thirteen, reckoning the vicar's family of
three by his first wife), Coleridge attributes the early bent
of his disposition to:eatises the potency of which one may
be permitted to think that he has somewhat exaggerated.
4 COLERIDGE. [chap.
It is not quite easy to believe that it was only through
"certain jealousies of old Molly," his brother Frank's
"dotingly fond nurse," and the infusions of these jeal-
ousies into his brother's mind, that he was drawn " from
life in motion to life in thought and sensation." The
physical impulses of boyhood, where they exist in vigour,
are not so easily discouraged, and it is probable that they
were naturally weaker and the meditative tendency stronger
than Coleridge in after-life imagined. But to continue:
" I never played," he proceeds, " except by myself, and
then only acting over what I had been reading or fancy-
ing, or half one, half the other" (a practice common
enough, it may be remarked, among boys of by no means
morbidly imaginative habit), " cutting down weeds and
nettles with a stick, as one of the seven champions of
Christendom. Alas! I had all the simplicity, all the do-
cility of the little child, but none of the child's habits. I
never thought as a child — never had the language of a
child." So it fared with him during the period of his
home instruction, the first eight years of his life ; and his
father having, as scholar and schoolmaster, no doubt noted
the strange precocity of his youngest son, appears to have
devoted especial attention to his training. " In my ninth
year," he continues, " my most dear, most revered father
died suddenly. O that I might so pass away, if, like him,
I were an Israelite without guile. The image of my fa-
ther, my revered, kind, learned, simple-hearted father, is
a religion to me."
Before he had attained his tenth year a presentation
to Christ's Hospital was obtained for him by that eminent
judge Mr. Justice Buller, a former pupil of his father's ;
and he was entered at the school on the 18th July, 1782.
His early bent towards poetry, thongh it displayed itself
i] CDRIST'S HOSPITAL. 5
in youthful verse of unusual merit, is a less uncommon
and arresting characteristic than his precocious speculative
activity. Many a raw boy " lisps in numbers, for the num-
bers come ;" but few discourse Alexandrian metaphysics
at the same age, for the very good reason that the meta-
physics as a rule do not " come." And even among those
youths ■whom curiosit}', or more often vanity, induces to
dabble in such studies, one would find few indeed over
whom they have cast such an irresistible spell as to es-
trange them for a while from poetry altogether. That
this was the experience of Coleridge we have his own
words to show. His son and biographer, the Rev. Der-
went Coleridge, has a little antedated the poet's stages of
development in stating that when his father was sent to
Christ's Hospital in his eleventh year he was "already a
poet, and yet more characteristically a metaphysician." A
poet, yes, and a precocious scholar perhaps to boot, but a
metaphysician, no ; for "the delightful sketch of him by
his friend and schoolfellow Charles Lamb " was pretty ev-
idently taken not at " this period " of his life but some
years later. Coleridge's own account of the matter in the
Biographia Literaria ' is clear. " At a very premature
age, even before my fifteenth year," he says, " I had be-
wildered myself in metaphysics and in theological con-
troversy. Nothing else pleased me. History and partic-
ular facts lost all interest in my mind. Poetry (though
for a schoolboy of that age I was above par in English
versification, and had already produced two or three com-
* He tells us in the Biographia Literaria that he had translated
the eight hymns of Synesius from the Greek into English anacreon-
tics " before his fifteenth year." It is reasonable to suppose, there-
fore, that he had more scholarship in 1V82 than most boys of ten
years.
6 COLERIDGE. [chap.
positions whicli I may venture to say were somewhat above
mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit than the
sound good sense of my old master was at all pleased with),
— poetry, itself, yea, novels and romance, became insipid
to me." He goes on to describe how highly delighted he
Avas if, during his friendless wanderings on leave-days, " any
passenger, especially if he were dressed in black," would
enter with him into a conversation, which he soon found
the means of directing to his favourite subject of " provi-
dence, foreknowledge, will, and fate; fixed fate, free-will,
foreknowledge absolute." Undoubtedly, it is to this peri-
od that one should refer Lamb's well-known description of
" Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard."
" How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand
still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion
between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear
thee unfold in thy deep and sweet intonations the mysteries of lam-
blichus or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at
such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pin-
dar, while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed with the accents
of the insjnred cJuxrity-boy."
It is interesting to note such a point as that of the
"deep and sweet intonations" of the youthful voice —
its most notable and impressive characteristic in after-
life. Another schoolfellow describes the young philos-
opher as "tall and striking in person, with long black
hair," and as commanding " much deference " among his
schoolfellows. Such was Coleridge between his fifteenth
and seventeenth year, and such continued to be the state
of his mind and the direction of his studies until he was
won back again from what he calls " a preposterous pur-
suit, injurious, to his natural powers and to the progress of
his education," by — it is difficult, even after the most pains-
I.] CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 7
taking study of its explanations, to record the phenome-
non without astonishment — a perusal of the sonnets of
William Lisle Bowles. Deferring, however, for the pres-
ent any research into the occult operation of this convert-
ing agency, it will be enough to note Coleridge's own
assurance of its perfect efficacy. lie was completely cured
for the time of his metaphysical malady, and " well were
it for me perhaps," he exclaims, " had I never relapsed
into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck
the flowers and reap the harvest from the cultivated sur-
face instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver
mines of metaphysic depths." And he goes on to add, in
a passage full of the peculiar melancholy beauty of his
prose, and full too of instruction for the biographer, " But
if, in after-time, I have sought a refuge from bodily pain
and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which
exercised the strength and subtlety of the understanding
without awakening the feelings of the heart, there was a
long and blessed interval, during which my natural facul-
ties were allowed to expand and my original tendencies
to develop themselves — my fancy, and the love of nature,
and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds." This " long
and blessed interval " endured, as we shall see, for some
eleven or twelve years.
His own account of his seduction from the paths of
poetry by the wiles of philosophy is that physiology acted
as the go-between. Ills brother Luke had come up to
London to walk the hospitals, and young Samuel's insatia-
ble intellectual curiosity immediately inspired liim with a
desire to share his brother's pursuit. " Every Saturday I
could make or obtain leave, to the London Hospital trudged
L O ! the bliss if I was permitted to hold the plasters
or attend the dressings. ... I became wild to be appren-
8 COLERIDGE. [chap.
ticed to a surgeon ; English, Latin, yea, Greek books of
medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's Latin Medical
Dictionary I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it \Yas a wild
dream, which, gradually blending with, gradually gave way
to, a rage for metaphysics occasioned by the essays on
Liberty and Necessity in Cato's Letters^ and more by the-
ology." ' At the appointed hour, however, Bowles the
emancipator came, as has been said, to his relief, and hav-
ing opportunely fallen in love with the eldest daughter of
a widow lady of whose son he had been the patron and
protector at school, we may easily imagine that his libera-
tion from the spell of metaphysics was complete. " From
this time," he says, *' to my nineteenth year, when I quitted
school for Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of poetry and love."
Of Coleridge's university days we know less ; but the
account of his schoolfellow, Charles Le Grice, accords, so
far as it goes, with what would have been anticipated from
the poet's school life. Although " very studious," and not
unambitious of academical honours — within a few months
of his entering at Jesus he won the Browne Gold Medal
for a Greek Ode on the Slave-trade* — his reading, his
friend admits, was " desultory and capricious. He took
' Gillman, pp. 22, 23.
* Of this Coleridge afterwards reraarkcd with justice that its
" ideas were better than the language or metre in which they were
conveyed." Porson, with little magnanimity, as De Quincey com-
plains, was severe upon its Greek, but its main conception — an ap-
peal to Death to come, a welcome deliverer to the slaves, and to bear
them to shores whore " they may tell their beloved ones what horrors
they, being men, had endured from men" — is moving and effective.
De Quince}', however, was undoubtedly right in his opinion that
Coleridge's Greek scliolarship was not of the exact order. Xo exact
scholar could, for instance, have died in the faith (as Coleridge did)
that tar>), p. 801) gives the following somewhat
bald outline of wliat were to form the two concluding cantos, no
doubt on the authority of Coleridge himself. The second canto ends,
it may be remembered, with the despatch of Bracy the bard to the
castle of Sir Roland: "Over the mountains the Bard, as directed
by Sir Leoline, hastes with his disciple ; but, in consequence of one
of those inundations supposed to be common to the countr)', the
spot only where the castle once stood is discovered, the edifice itself
being washed awaj'. He determines to return. Geraldine, being
acquainted with all that is passing, like the weird sisters in Macbeth,
vanishes. Reappearing, however, she awaits the return of the Bard,
exciting in the meantime by her wily arts all tlie anger she could
rouse in the Baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is
described to have been susceptible. The old bard and the youth at
length arrive, and therefore she can no longer personate the char-
acter of Geraldine, the daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but changes
her appearance to that of the accepted though absent lover of Chris-
tabel. Next ensues a courtship most distressing to Christabel, who
feels — she knows not why — great disgust for her once favoured
knight. This coldness is very painful to the Baron, who has no
more conception than herself of the supernatural transformation.
She at last yields to her father's entreaties, and consents to approach
the altar with the hated suitor. The real lover returning, enters at
this moment, and produces the ring which she had once given him
in sign of her betrothment. Thus defeated, the supernatural being
Geraldine disappears. As predicted, the castle-bell tolls, the mother's
voice is heard, and, to the exceeding great joy of the parties, the
rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a reconciliation
and explanation between father and daughter."
E
66 COLERIDGE. [chap.
Charles Laml) strongly recommended him to leave it un-
finished, and Hartley Coleridge, in every respect as com-
petent a judge on that point as could well be found, al
ways declared his conviction that his father could not, a\
least qualis ah incejito, have finished the poem.
The much-admired little piece first published in the
Lyrical Ballads under the title of Love, and probably
best known by its (original) first and most pregnant
stanza,' possesses a twofold interest for the student of
Coleridge's life and works, as illustrating at once one of
the most marked characteristics of his peculiar tempera-
ment, and one of the most distinctive features of his
poetic manner. The lines are remarkable for a certain
strange fascination of melody — a quality for which Cole-
ridge, who was not unreasonably proud of his musical
gift, is said to have especially prized them ; and they are
noteworthy also as perhaps the fullest expression of the al-
most womanly softness of Coleridge's nature. To describe
their tone as effeminate would be unfair and untrue, for
effeminacy in the work of a male hand would necessarily
imply something of falsity of sentiment, and from this
they are entirely free. But it must certainly be admitted
that for a man's description of his wooing the warmth of
feeling which pervades them is as nearly sexless in char-
acter as it is possible to conceive ; and, beautiful as the
verses are, one cannot but feel that they only escape the
"namby-pamby" by the breadth of a hair.
As to the wild dream-poem Kabla Khan, it is hardly
more than a psychological curiosity, and only that per-
' " All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs tliis mortal frame,
All are but niiuisters of Love,
And feed his sacred llaiue."
111.] " KUBLA KHAN." 57
liaps in respect of the completeness of its metrical form.
For amid its picturesque but vague imagery there is noth-
ing which might not have presented itself, and the like
of which has not perhaps actually presented itself, to
many a half-awakened brain of far lower imaginative en-
ergy during its hours of full daylight consciousness than
that of Coleridge. Nor possibly is it quite an unknown
experience to many of us to have even a fully-written
record, so to speak, of such impressions imprinted instan-
taneously on the mind, the conscious composition of whole
pages of narrative, descriptive, or cogitative matter being
compressed as it were into a moment of time. Unfortu-
nately, however, the impression made upon the ordinary
bi'ain is effaced as instantaneously as it is produced ; the
abnormal exaltation of the creative and apprehensive power
is quite momentary, being probably, indeed, confined to
the single moment between sleep and waking ; and the
mental tablet which a second before was covered so thickly
with the transcripts of ideas and images, all far more vivid,
or imagined to be so, than those of Avaking life, and all
apprehended with a miraculous simultaneity by the mind,
is converted into a tabula rasa in the twinkling of a half-
opened eye. The wonder in Coleridge's case was that his
brain retained the word-impressions sufficiently long to en-
able him to commit them, to the extent at least of some
fifty odd lines, to paper, and that, according to his own
belief, this is but a mere fraction of what but for an un-
lucky interruption in the work of transcribing he would
have been able to preserve. His own account of this curi-
ous incident is as follows :
"la the summer of 1797 the author, then in ill health, had re-
tired to a lonel.v farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the
Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devon.shire. In consequence of
68 COLERIDGE. [chat.
a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, fromxfthe
effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that
he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same sub-
stance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage : ' Here the Khan Kubla commanded
a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten
miles of fertile ground were enclosed by a wall.' The Author con-
tinued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the ex-
ternal senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence
that he could not have composed less than from two to three hun-
dred lines — if that indeed can be called composition in which all the
images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of
the corresponding expressions, without any sensation or conscious-
ness of effect. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a dis-
tinct recollection of the whole, and, taking his pen, ink, and paper,
instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.
At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on busi-
ness from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his
return to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification,
that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the
general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight
or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like
the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been
oast, but, alas ! without the after restoration of the latter."
This poem, though written in 1*797, remained, lilce Chris-
iabel, in MS. till 1816. These were then published in a
thin quarto volume, together with another piece called the
Pains of Sleep, a composition of many years' later date
than the other two, and of which there will be occasion to
say a word or two hereafter.
At no time, however, not even in this the high-tide of
its activity, was the purely poetic impulse dominant for
long together in Coleridge's mind. lie was born with the
instincts of the orator, and still more with those of the
teacher, and I doubt whether he ever really regarded him-
self as fulfilling the true mission of his life except at those
moments when he was seeking by spol-en word to oxer-
iii.j HE APPEARS IN THE PULPIT. 59
ci|f direct influence over his fellow-men. At the same
time, however, such was the restlessness of his intellect,
and such his instability of purpose, that he could no more
remain constant to what he deemed his true vocation than
he could to any other. This was now to be signally illus-
trated. Soon after the Ancient Mariner was written, and
some time before the volume which was to contain it ap-
peared, Coleridge quitted Stowey for Shrewsbury to un-
dertake the duties of a Unitarian preacher in that town.
This was in the month of January, 1798,* and it seems
pretty certain, though exact dates are not to be ascer-
tained, that he was back again at Stowey early in the
month of February. In the pages of the Liberal (1822)
William Hazlitt has given a most graphic and picturesque
description of Coleridge's appearance and performance in
his Shrewsbury pulpit ; and, judging from this, one can
well believe, what indeed was to have been antecedently
expected, that had he chosen to remain faithful to his new
employment he might have rivalled the reputation of the
greatest preacher of the time. But his friends the Wedg-
woods, the two sons of the great potter, whose acquaint-
ance he had made a few years earlier, were apparently
much dismayed at the prospect of his deserting the library
for the chapel, and they offered him an annuity of £150
a year on condition of his retiring from the ministry and
devoting himself entirely to the study of poetry and phi-
losophy. Coleridge was staying at the house of Ilazlitt's
' It may be suggested that this sudden resolution was forced upon
Coleridge by the res angusta domi. But I do not think that was the
case. In the w^inter of 1797 he had obtained an introduction to and
entered into a literary engagement with Mr. Stuart, of the Morning
Post, and could thus have met, as in fact he afterwards did meet, tU«
necessities of the hour.
60 COLERIDGE. [chap.
father Avlien the letter containing this liberal offer reac^d
him, " and he seemed," says the younger Hazlitt, " to
make up his mind to close with the proposal in the act of
tying on one of his shoes." Another inducement to so
speedy an acceptance of it is no doubt to be found in the
fact of its presenting to Coleridge an opportunity for the
fulfilment of a cherished desire — that, namely, of " com-
pleting his education," as he regarded it, by studying the
German language, and acquiring an acquaintance with the
theology and philosophy of Germany in that country itself.
This prospect he was enabled, through the generosity of
the Wedgwoods, to put into execution towards the end of
1798.
But before passing on from this culminating and, to all
intents and purposes, this closing year of Coleridge's ca-
reer as a poet it will be proper to attempt something like
a final review of his poetic work. Admirable as much of
that work is, and unique in quality as it is throughout, I
must confess that it leaves on my own mind a stronger
impression of the unequal and imperfect than does that of
any poet at all approaching Coleridge in imaginative vigour
and intellectual grasp. It is not a mere inequality and
imperfection of style like that which so seriously detracts
from the pleasure of reading Byron. Nor is it that the
thought is often impar sibi — that, like Wordsworth's, it is
too apt to descend from the mountain-tops of poetry to the
flats of commonplace, if not into the bogs of bathos. In both
these respects Coleridge may and does occasionally offend,
but his workmanship is, on the wholcj^as much more artistic
than Byron's as the material of his poetry is of more uni-
formly equal value than Wordsworth's. Yet, with almost
the sole exception of the Ancient Mariner, his work is in
iii.J HIS POETIC WOEK. 61
a certain sense more disappointing than that of either. In
spite of his theory as to the twofold function of poetry
we must finally judge that of Coleridge, as of any other
poet, by its relation to the actual. Ancient Mariners and
Christabels — the people, the scenery, and the incidents of
an imaginary world — may be handled by poetry once and
again to the wonder and delight of man ; but feats of this
kind cannot — or cannot in the Western world, at any rate
— be repeated indefinitely, and the ultimate test of poetry,
at least for the modern European reader, is its treatment
of actualities — its relations to the world of human action,
passion, sensation, thought. And when we try Coleridge's
poetry in any one of these four regions of life, we seem
forced to admit that, despite all its power and beauty, it
at no moment succeeds in convincing us, as at their best
moments Wordsworth's and even Byron's continually does,
that the poet has found his true poetic vocation — that he
is interpreting that aspect of life which he can interpret
better than he can any other, and which no other poet,
save the one who has vanquished all poets in their own
special fields of achievement, can interpret as well as he.
In no poem of actuality does Coleridge so victoriously
show himself to be the right man at the right work as
does Wordsworth in certain moods of seership and Byron
in certain moments of passion. Of them at such moods
and moments we feel assured that they have discovered
where their real strength lies, and have put it forth to the
utmost. But we never feel satisfied that Coleridge has
discovered where his real strength lies, and he strikes us as
feeling no more certainty on the point himself. Strong
as is bis pinion, his flight seems to resemble rather that of
the eaglet than of the full-grown eagle even to the last.
He continues "mewing his mightv youth" a little too
62 COLERIDGE. [chap.
long. There is a tentativeness of manner which seems to
come from a conscious aptitude for many poetic styles
and an incapacity to determine which should be definitely
adopted and cultivated to perfection. Hence one too often
returns from any prolonged ramble through Coleridge's
poetry with an unsatisfied feeling which does not trouble
us on our return from the best literary country of Byron
or Wordsworth. Byron has taken us by rough roads, and
Wordsworth led us through some desperately flat and
dreary lowlands to his favourite " bits ;" but we feel that
we have seen mountain and valley, wood and river, glen
and waterfall at their best. But Coleridge's poetry leaves
too much of the feeling of a walk through a fine country
on a misty day. We may have had many a peep of beau-
tiful scenery and occasional glimpses of the sublime ; but
the medium of vision has been of variable quality, and
somehow we come home with an uneasy suspicion that we
have not seen as much as we might.
It is obvious, however, even upon a cursory considera-
tion of the matter, that this disappointing element in Cole-
ridge's poetry is a necessary result of the circumstances of
its production ; for the period of his productive activity (at
least after attaining manhood) was too short to enable a
mind with so many intellectual distractions to ascertain its
true poetic bent, and to concentrate its energies thereupon.
If he seems always to be feeling his way towards the work
whicb he could do best, it is for the very good reason that
this is what, from 1796 to 1800, he was continually doing
as a matter of fact. The various styles which he attempted
— and for a season, in each case, witli such brilliant results
— are forms of poetic expression corresponding, on the
face of them, to poetic impulses of an essentially fleeting
nature. The political or politico-religious odes were the
III.] DECLINE OF POETIC IMPULSE. 63
offspring of youthful democratic enthusiasm ; the super-
natural poems, so to call them for want of a better name,
had their origin in an almost equally youthful and more
than equally transitory passion for the wild and Avondrous.
Political disillusion is fatal to the one impulse, and mere
advance in years extinguishes the other. Visions of An-
cient Mariners and Christabels do not revisit the mature
man, and the Toryism of middle life will hardly inspire
odes to anything.
With the extinction of these two forms of creative im-
pulse Coleridge's poetic activity, from causes to be con-
sidered hereafter, came almost entirely to an end, and into
what later forms it might subsequently have developed re-
mains therefore a matter more or less of conjecture. Yet
I think there is almost a sufficiency of a priori evidence as
to what that form would have been. Had the poet in him
survived until years had " brought the philosophic mind,"
he would doubtless have done for the human spirit, in its
purely isolated self-communings, what "Wordsworth did for
it in its communion with external nature. All that the
poetry of Wordsworth is for the mind which loves to hold
converse with the world of things ; this, and more perhaps
than this — if more be possible — would the poetry of Cole-
ridge have been for the mind which abides by preference
in the world of self-originating emotion and introspective
thought. Wordsworth's primary function is to interpret
nature to man : the interpretation of man to himself is witb
him a secondary process only — the response, in almost ev-
ery instance, to impressions from without. This poet can
nobly brace the human heart to fortitude ; but he must
first have seen the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor. The
"presence and the spirit interfused" throughout creation
4
64 COLERIDGE. [chap.
is revealed to us in moving and majestic words ; yet the
poet requires to have felt it " in the light of setting suns
and the round ocean and the living air" before he feels it
" in the mind of man." But what Wordsworth grants only
to the reader who wanders with him in imagination by lake
and mountain, the Muse of Coleridge, had she lived, would
have bestowed upon the man who has entered into his in-
ner chamber and shut to the door. This, it seems to me,
is the work for which genius, temperament, and intellect-
ual habit would alike have fitted him. For while his feel-
ing for internal nature was undoubtedly less profound, less
mystically penetrating than Wordsworth's, his sensibilities
in general were incomparably quicker and more subtle than
those of the friend in whom he so generously recognised
a master ; and the reach of his sympathies extends to forms
of human emotion, to subjects of human interest which lay
altogether outside the somewhat narrow range of Words-
worth.
And, with so magnificent a furniture of those mental and
moral qualities which should belong to " a singer of man
to men," it must not be forgotten that his technical equip-
ment for the work was of the most splendidly effective
kind. If a critic like Mr. Swinburne seems to speak in ex-
aggerated praise of Coleridge's lyrics, we can well under-
stand their enchantment for a master of music like him-
self. Probably it was the same feeling which made Shel-
ley describe France as " the finest ode in the English lan-
guage." With all, in fact, who hold — as it is surely plausi-
ble to hold — that the first duty of a singer is to sing, the
poetry of Coleridge will always be more likely to be classed
above than below its merits, great as they are. For, if we
except some occasional lapses in his sonnets — a metrical
III.] HIS POETIC WOKK. 65
form in which, at his best, he is quite " out of the run-
ning " with Wordsworth — his melody never fails him. lie
is a singer always, as Wordsworth is not always, and Byron
almost never. The ^-Eolian harp to which he so loved to
listen does not more surely respond in music to the breeze
of heaven than does Coleridge's poetic utterance to the
wind of his inspiration. Of the dreamy fascination w-hich
Love exercises over a listening ear I have already spoken ;
and there is hardly less charm in the measure and asso-
nances of the Circassian Love Chant. Christabel again,
considered solely from the metrical point of view, is a veri-
table tour deforce — the very model of a metre for roman-
tic legend : as which, indeed, it was imitated with suffi-
cient grace and spirit, but seldom with anything approach-
ing to Coleridge's melody, by Sir Walter Scott.
Endowed therefore with so glorious a gift of song, and
only not fully master of his poetic means because of the
very versatility of his artistic power and the very variety
and catholicity of his youthful sympathies, it is unhappily
but too certain that the world has lost much by that per-
versity of conspiring accidents which so untimely silenced
Coleridge's muse. And the loss is the more trying to pos-
terity because he seems, to a not, I think, too curiously con-
sidering criticism, to have once actually struck that very
chord which would have sounded the most movingly be-
neath his touch — and to have struck it at the very moment
when the failing hand was about to quit the keys forever.
" Osteudimt terris bunc tantum fata neque ultra
Esse sinunt."
I cannot regard it as merely fantastic to believe that the
Dejection, that dirge of infinite pathos over the grave of
66 COLERIDGE. [cuap. hi.
creative imagination, might, but for the fatal decree which
had by that time gone forth against Coleridge's health and
happiness, have been but the cradle-cry of a new-born po-
etic power, in which imagination, not annihilated but trans-
migrant, would have splendidly proved its vitality through
other forms of song.
CHAPTER IV.
VISIT TO GERMANY. — LIFE AT GOTTINGEN. — RETURN. — EX-
PLORES THE LAKE COUNTRY. — LONDON. — THE "MORNING
POST." — COLERIDGE AS A JOURNALIST. — RETIREMENT TO
KESWICK.
[1799-1800.]
The departure of the two poets for the Continent was de-
layed only till they had seen their joint volume through
the press. The Lyrical Ballads appeared in the autumn
of 1798, and on 16th September of that year Coleridge
left Yarmouth for Hamburg with Wordsworth and his sis-
ter.' The purpose of his two companions' tour is not known
to have been other than the pleasure, or mi.xed pleasure and
instruction, usually derivable from foreign travel ; that of
Coleridge was strictly, even sternly, educational. Imme-
diately on his arrival in Germany he parted from the Words-
worths, who went on to Goslar,^ and took up his abode at
* De Quincey's error, in supposing that Coleridge's visit to Ger-
many to "complete his education" was made at an earlier date than
this journey with the Wordsworths, is a somewhat singular mistake
for one so well acquainted with the facts of Coleridge's life. Had we
not his own statement that this of 1798 was the first occasion of his
quitting his native country, it so happens that we can account in
England for nearly every month of his time from his leaving Cam-
bridge until this date.
^ It has only within a comparatively recent period been ascertained
that the visit of the Wordsworths to Germany was itself another re-
sult of Thomas Wedgwood's generous appreciation of literary merit.
It appears, on the incontrovertible testimony of the Wedgwoods' ac-
68 COLERIDGE. [chap.
the house of the pastor at Ratzeburg, with whom he spent
five months in assiduous study of the language. In Jan-
uary he removed to Gottingen. Of his life here during
the next few months we possess an interesting record in
the Early Years and Late Reflections of Dr. Carrlyon, a
book published many years after the events which it re-
lates, but which is quite obviously a true reflection of im-
pressions yet fresh in the mind of its writer when its
materials were first collected. Its principal value, in fact,
is that it gives us Coleridge from the standpoint of the
average young educated Englishman of the day, sufficient-
ly intelligent, indeed, to bo sensible of his fellow-student's
transcendent abilities, but as little awed by them out of
youth's healthy irreverence of criticism as the ordinary
English undergraduate ever has been by the intellectual
supremacy of any "greatest man of his day" who might
chance to have been his contemporary at O.xford or Cam-
bridge. In Dr. Carrlyon's reminiscences and in the quoted
letters of a certain young Parry, another of the English
student colony at Gottingen, we get a piquant picture of
the poet- philosopher of seven -and- twenty, with his yet
buoyant belief in his future, his still unquenched interest
in the world of things, and his never-to-bc-qucnched in-
terest in the world of thought, his even then inexhaustible
flow of disquisition, his generous admiration for the gifts
of others, and his nalive complacency— including, it would
seem, a touch of the vanity of personal appearance — in
his own. " lie frequently," writes Dr. Carrlyon, " recited
his own poetry, and not unfrequently led us further into
counts with their agents at Hamburg, that tlie expenses of all three
travellers were defrayed by their friend at home. The credits opened
for them amounted, during the course of their stay abroad, to some
£2C0. — Miss Meteyard's A Group of Enr/lishnen, p. 99.
IV.] VISIT TO GERMANY. 69
the labyrinth of his metaphysical elucidations, either of
particular passages or of the original conception of any
of his productions, than we were able to follow him. At
the conclusion, for instance, of the first stanza of Chris-
tabel, he would perhaps comment at full length upon
such a line as * Tu-whit! — Tu-whoo!' that we might not
fall into the mistake of supposing originality to be its
sole merit." The example is not very happily chosen, for
Coleridge could hardly have claimed " originality " for an
onomatopoeia which occurs in one of Shakspeare's best
known lyrics ; but it serves well enough to illustrate the
fact that he " very seldom went right to the end of any
piece of poetry ; to pause and analyse was his delight."
His disappointment with regard to his tragedy of Osorio
was, we also learn, still fresh. He seldom, we are told,
" recited any of the beautiful passages with which it
abounds without a visible interruption of the perfect com-
posure of his mind." He mentioned with great emotion
Sheridan's inexcusable treatment of him with respect to
it. At the same time, adds his friend, "he is a severe
critic of his own productions, and declares " (this no doubt
with reference to his then, and indeed his constant esti-
mate of Christahel as his masterpiece) " that his best
poems have perhaps not appeared in print."
Young Parry's account of his fellow - student is also
fresh and pleasing. " It is very delightful," he tells a
correspondent, " to hear him sometimes discourse on re-
ligious topics for an hour together. His fervour is par-
ticularly agreeable when compared with the chilling spec-
ulations of German philosophers," whom Coleridge, he
adds, " successively forced to abandon all their strong-
holds." He is "much liked, notwithstanding many pe-
culiarities. He is very liberal towards all doctrines and
70 COLERIDGE. [chap.
opinions, and cannot be put out of temper. These cir-
cumstances give him the advantage of his opponents, who
are always bigoted and often irascible. Coleridge is an
enthusiast on many subjects, and must therefore appear to
many to possess faults, and no doubt he has faults, but he
has a good heart and a large mass of information with,"
as his fellow - student condescendingly admits, " superior
talents. The great fault which his friends may lament is
the variety of subjects which he adopts, and the abstruse
nature of his ordinary speculations, extra homines positas.
They can easily," concludes the writer, rising here to the
full stateliness of youth's epistolary style — " they can easily
excuse his devoted attachment to his country, and his rea-
soning as to the means of producing the greatest human
happiness, but they do not universally approve the mys-
ticism of his metaphysics and the remoteness of his topics
from human comprehension."
In the month of May, 1799, Coleridge set out with a
party of his fellow-students on a walking tour tlirough
the Harz Mountains, an excursion productive of much
oral philosophising on his part, and of the composition of
the Lines on ascending the Broclceyi, not one of the hap-
piest efforts of his muse. As to the philosophising, " he
never," says one of his companions on this trip, *' appeared
to tire of mental exercise ; talk seemed to him a peren-
nial pastime, and his endeavours to inform and amuse us
ended only with the cravings of hunger or the fatigue of
a long march, from which neither his conversational pow-
ers nor his stoicism could protect himself or us." It
speaks highly for the matter of Coleridge's allocutions that
such incessant outpourings during a mountaineering tramp
appear to have left no lasting impression of boredom be-
liind them. The holiday seems to have been thoroughly
IT.] RETURN TO ENGLAND. 71
enjoyed by the whole party, and Coleridge, at any rate,
had certainly earned it. For once, and it is almost to be
feared for the last time in his life, he had resisted his
besetting tendency to dispersiveness, and constrained his
intelligence to apply itself to one thing at a time. lie
had come to Germany to acquire the language, and to
learn what of German theology and metaphysics he might
find worth the study, and his five months' steady pursuit
of the former object had been followed by another four
months of resolute prosecution of the latter. He attended
the lectures of Professor Blumenbach, and obtained through
a fellow-student notes from those of Eichhorn. He suf-
fered no interruption in his studies, unless we are to ex-
cept a short visit from Wordsworth and his sister, who
had spent most of their stay abroad in residence at Gos-
iar; and he appears, in short, to have made in every way
the best use of his time. On 24th June, 1799, he gave
his leave-taking supper at Gottingen, replying to the toast
of his health in fluent German but with an execrable ac-
cent; and the next day, presumably, he started on his
homeward journey.
His movements for the next few months are incor-
rectly stated in most of the brief memoirs j)refixed to
the various editions of the poet's works — their writers
having, it is to be imagined, accepted without examina-
tion a misplaced date of Mr. Gillman's. It is not the fact
that Coleridge " returned to England after an absence of
fourteen months, and arrived in London the 27th of No-
vember." His absence could not have lasted longer than
a year, for we know from the evidence of Miss Words-
worth's diary that he was exploring the Lake country
(very likely for the first time) in company with her broth-
er and herself in the month of September, 1799. The
72 COLERIDGE. [chap.
probability is that be arrived in England early in July, and
immediately thereupon did the most natural and proper
thing to be done under the circumstances — namely, re-
turned to his wife and children at Nether Stowey, and re-
mained there for the next two months, after which he set
off with the AVordsworths, then still at Alfoxden, to visit the
district to which the latter had cither already resolved upon,
or were then contemplating, the transfer of their abode.
The 27th of November is no doubt the correct date of
his arrival in London, though not "from abroad." And
his first six weeks in the metropolis were spent in a very
characteristic fashion — in the preparation, namely, of a
work which he pronounced with perfect accurac}'^ to be
destined to fall dead from the press. He shut himself up
in a lodging in Buckingham Street, Strand, and by the
end of the above-mentioned period he had completed
his admirable translation of Wallenstein, in itself a perfect,
and indeed his most perfect dramatic poem. The manu-
script of this English version of Schiller's drama was pur-
chased by Messrs. Longman under the condition that the
translation and the original should appear at the same
time. Very few copies were sold, and the publishers, in-
different to Coleridge's advice to retain the unsold copies
until the book should become fashionable, disposed of them
as waste paper. Sixteen years afterwards, on the publica-
tion of Christahel, they were eagerly sought for, and the
few remaining copies doubled their price. It was while
engaged upon this work that he formed that connection
with political journalism which lasted, though with inter-
missions, throughout most of the remainder of his life.
His early poetical pieces had, as we have seen, made their
first appearance in the Morning Post, but hitherto that
newspaper had received no prose contribution from his
IV.] LOXDOX. Td
pen. His engagement -with its proprietor, Mr. Daniel
Stuart, to whom he had been introduced during a visit to
London in 1797, was to contribute an occasional copy of
verses for a stipulated annual sum ; and some dozen or so
of his poems (notably among them the ode to France and
the two strange pieces. Fire, Famine, and Slaughter and
The Devil's Thoughts) had entered the world in this way
during the years 1798 and 1799.
Misled by the error above corrected, the writers of some
of the brief memoirs of Coleridge's life represent him as
having sent verse contributions to the Morning Post from
Germany in 1799; but as the earliest of these only ap-
peared in August of that year, there is no .reason to sup-
pose that any of them were written before his return to
England. The longest of the serious pieces is the well-
known Ode to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, which
cannot be regarded as one of the happiest of Coleridge's
productions. Its motive is certainly a little slight, and its
sentiment more than a little overstrained. The noble en-
thusiasm of the noble lady who, " though nursed in pomp
and pleasure," could yet condescend to " hail the platform
wild where once the Austrian fell beneath the shaft of
Tell," hardly strikes a reader of the present day as remark-
able enough to be worth " gushing " over ; and when the
poet goes on to suggest as the explanation of Georgiana's
having " learned that heroic measure" that the "Whig great
lady had suckled her own children, we certainly seem to
have taken the fatal step beyond the sublime ! It is to be
presumed that Tory great ladies invariably employed the
services of a wet-nurse, and hence failed to win the same
tribute from the angel of the earth, who, usually, while he
guides
"His chariot-planet round the goal of day,
All trembling gazes on the eye of God,"
li COLERIDGE. [chap.
but who on this occasion " a moment turned his awful
face away " to gaze approvingly on the high-born mother
who had so conscientiously performed her maternal duties.
Very different is the tone of this poem from that of
the two best known of Coleridge's lighter contributions
to the Morning Post. The most successful of these, how-
ever, from the journalistic point of view, is in a literary
sense the less remarkable. One is indeed a little aston-
ished to find that a public, accustomed to such admirable
political satire as the Anti-Jacobin, should have been so
much taken as it seems to have been by the rough ver-
sification and somewhat clumsy sarcasm of the DeviVs
Thoughts. The poem created something like a furore,
and sold a large reissue of the number of the Morning
Post in which it appeared. Nevertheless it is from the
metrical point of view doggerel, as indeed the author
admits, three of its most smoothly-flowing stanzas being
from the hand of Southey, while there is nothing in its
boisterous political drollery to put its composition beyond
the reach of any man of strong partisan feelings and a
turn for street-humour. Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, on
the other hand, is literary in every sense of the word, re-
quiring indeed, and very urgently, to insist on its charac-
ter as literature, in order to justify itself against the charge
of inhuman malignity. Despite the fact that " letters four
do form his name," it is of course an idealised statesman,
and not the I'cal flesh and blood Mr. Pitt, whom the sister
furies. Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, extol as their patron
in these terrible lines. The poem must be treated as what
lawyers call an " A. B. case." Coleridge must be supposed
to be lashing certain alphabetical symbols arranged in a
certain order. This idealising process is perfectly easy and
familiar to everybody with the literary sense. The de-
IV.] LONDON. T5
duction for '* poetic license " is just as readily, though it
does not, of course, require to be as frequently, made with
respect to the hyperbole of denunciation as with respect
to that of praise. Nor need we doubt that this deduction
had in fact been made by all intelligent readers long be-
fore that agitating dinner at Mr. Sotheby's, which Cole-
ridge describes with such anxious gravity in his apologetic
preface to the republication of the lines. On the whole
one may pretty safely accept De Quincey's view of the
true character of this incident as related by him in his
own inimitable fashion, namely, that it was in the nature
of an elaborate hoax, played off at the poet's expense.*
The malice of the piece is, as De Quincey puts it, quite
obviously a " malice of the understanding and fancy," and
^ After quoting the two concluding lines of the poem, "Fire's"
rebuke of her inconstant sisters, in the words
"I alone am faithful, I
Cling to him everlastingly,"
De Quincey proceeds : " The sentiment is diabolical ; and the ques-
tion argued at the London dinner-table (Mr. Sotheby's) was ' Could
the writer have been other than a devil ?' . . . Several of the great
guns among the literary body were present — in particular Sir Walter
Scott, and he, we believe, with his usual good nature, took the apolo-
getic side of the dispute ; in fact, he was in the secret. Nobody else,
barring the author, knew at first whose good name was at stake.
The scene must have been high. The company kicked about the
poor diabolic writer's head as though it had been a tennis - ball.
Coleridge, the yet unknown criminal, absolutely perspired and fumed
in pleading for the defendant ; the company demurred ; the orator
grew urgent ; wits began to smofce the case as an active verb, the
advocate to smoke as a neuter verb ; the ' fun grew fast and furi-
ous,' until at length the delinquent arose, burning tears in his eyes,
and confessed to an audience now bursting with stifled laughter (but
whom he supposed to be bursting with fiery indignation), ' Lo, I am
he that wrote it.' "
16 COLERIDGE. [chap.
not of the heart. There is significance in the mere fact
that the poem was deliberately published by Coleridge two
years after its composition, when the vehemence of his
political animosities had much abated. Written in 1796,
it did not appear in the Morning Post till January, 1798.
He was now, however, about to draw closer his connec-
tion with the newspaper press. Soon after his return from
Germany he was solicited to " undertake the literary and
political department in the Morning Post,'''' and acceded to
the proposal *' on condition that the paper should thence-
forward be conducted on certain fixed and announced prin-
ciples, and that he should be neither obliged nor requested
to deviate from them in favour of any party or any event."
Accordingly, from December, 1799, until about midsummer
of 1800, Coleridge became a regular contributor of politi-
cal articles to this journal, sometimes to the number of two
or three in one week. At the end of the period of six
months he quitted London, and his contributions became
necessarily less frequent, but they were continued (though
with two appai'ent breaks of many months in duration)*
until the close of the year 1802. It would seem, however,
that nothing but Coleridge's own disinclination prevented
this connection from taking a form in which it would have
profoundly modified his whole future career. In a letter
to Mr, Poole, dated March, 1800, he informs his friend that
if he " had the least love of money " he could " make sure
of £2000 a year, for that Stuart had offered him half shares
' Sic ill Ussai/.H on his own Times, by S. T. C, the collection of her
father's articles made by Mrs. Nelson (Sara) Coleridge ; but without
attributing strange error to Coleridge's own estimate (in the Bio-
graphia Literaria) of the amount of his journalistic work, it is im-
possible to believe that this collection, forming as it does but two
small volumes, and a portion of a third, is anything like complete.
ivO COLERIDGE AS JOURNALIST. 7*;
in bis two papers, the Morning Post and the Courier, if
he would devote himself to them in conjunction with their
proprietor. But I told him," he continues, " that I would
not give up the country and tlie lazy reading of old folios
for two thousand times two thousand pounds — in short,
that beyond £350 a year I considered money a real evil."
Startlingly liberal as this offer will appear to the journalist,
it seems really to have been made. For, writing long af-
terwards to Mr. Nelson Coleridge, Mr. Stuart says : " Could
Coleridge and I place ourselves thirty years back, and he
be so far a man of business as to write three or four hours
a day, there is nothing I would not pay for his assistance.
I would take him into partnership, and I would enable him
to make a large fortune." Nor is there any reason to think
that the bargain would have been a bad one for the pro-
prietor from the strictly commercial point of view. Cole-
ridge in later years may no doubt have overrated the effect
of his own contributions on the circulation of the Morning
Post, but it must have been beyond question considerable,
and would in all likelihood have become far greater if he
could have been induced to devote himself more closely to
the work of journalism. For the fact is — and it is a fact
for which the current conception of Coleridge's intellectu-
al character does not altogether prepare one — that he was
a workman of the very first order of excellence in this cu-
rious craft. The faculties which go to the attainment of
such excellence are not perhaps among the highest distinc-
tions of the human mind, but, such as they are, they are
specific and well marked ; they are by no means the nec-
essary accompaniments even of the most conspicuous liter-
ary power, and they are likely rather to suffer than to profit
by association with great subtlety of intellect or wide phil-
osophic grasp. It is not to the advantage of the journal-
78 COLERIDGE. [chap.
ist, as such, that he should see too many things at a time,
or too far into any one thing, and even the gifts of an ac-
tive imagination and an abundant vocabulary are each of
them likely to prove a snare. To be wholly successful,
the journalist — at least the English journalist — must not be
too eloquent, or too Avitty, or too humorous, or too ingen-
ious, or too profound. Yet the English reader likes, or
thinks he likes, eloquence ; he has a keen sense of humour,
and a fair appreciation of wit ; and he would be much hurt
if he were told that ingenuity and profundity were in them-
selves distasteful to him. How, then, to give him enough
of these qu^itiesto please and not enough to offend him —
as much eloquence as will stir his emotions, but not enough
to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry home the
argument, but not enough to make him doubt its sincerity;
as much humour as will escape the charge of levity ; as much
ingenuity as can be displayed without incurring suspicion,
and as much profundity as may impress without bewil-
dering? This is a problem which is fortunately simpli-
fied for most journalists by the fact of their possessing
these qualities in no more than, if in so much as, the min-
imum required. But Coleridge, it must be remembered,
possessed most of them in embarrassing superfluity. Not
all of them indeed, for, though he could be witty and at
times humorous, his temptations to excess in these re-
spects were doubtless not considerable. But as for his
eloquence, he was from his youth upwards Isceo torren-
tior, his dialectical ingenuity was unequalled, and in dis-
quisition of the speculative order no man was so apt as
lie to penetrate more deeply into his subject than most of
his readers would care to follow him. A j^riori, there-
fore, one Avould have expected that Coleridge's instincts
would have led liim to rl.etorise too much in his diction,
IV.] COLERIDGE AS JOURNALIST. 19
to refine too mucli in his arguments, and to philosophise
too much in his reflections, to have hit the popular taste
as a journalist, and that at the age of eight -and -twenty
he would have been unable to subject these tendencies
either to the artistic repression of the maturer writer or to
the tactical restraints of the trained advocate. This emi-
nently natural assumption, however, is entirely rebutted by
the facts. Nothing is more remarkable in Coleridge's con-
tributions to the Morning Post than their thoroughly work-
manlike character from the journalistic point of view, their
avoidance of " viewiness," their strict adherence to the one
or two simple points which he is endeavouring at any par-
ticular juncture in politics to enforce upon his readers, and
the steadiness with which he keeps his own and his read-
ers' attention fixed on the special political necessities of
the hour. His articles, in short, belong to that valuable
class to which, while it gives pleasure to the cultivated
reader, the most commonplace and Philistine man of busi-
ness cannot refuse the, to him, supreme praise of being
eminently "practical." They hit the nail on the head in
nearly every case, and they take the plainest and most di-
rect route to their point, dealing in rhetoric and metaphor
only so far as the strictly "business" ends of the argu-
ment appear to require. Nothing, for instance, could have
been better done, better reasoned and written, more skil-
fully adapted throughout to the English taste, than Cole-
ridge's criticism (31st Dec, 1799) on the new constitution
established by Bonaparte and Sieves on the foundation of
the Consulate, with its eighty senators, the "creatures of
a renegade priest, himself the creature of a foreign mer-
cenary, its hundred tribunes who are to talk and do noth-
ing, and its three hundred legislators whom the constitu-
tion orders to be silent." What a ludicrous Purgatory,
80 COLERIDGE. [chap.
adds be, " for three hundred Frenchmen !" Very vigorous,
moreover, is he on the ministerial rejection of the French
proposals of peace in 1800, arguing against the continu-
ance of the war on the very sound anti -Jacobin ground
that if it were unsuccessful it would inflame French ambi-
tion anew, and, if successful, repeat the experience of the
results of rendering France desperate, and simply reani-
mate Jacobinism.
Effective enough too, for the controversial needs of the
moment, was the argument that if France were known, as
Ministers pretended, to be insincere in soliciting peace,
" Ministers would certainly treat with her, since they would
again secure the support of the British people in the war,
and expose the ambition of the enemy ;" and that, there-
fore, the probability was that the British Government knew
France to he sincere, and shrank from negotiation lest it
should expose their own desire to prosecute the war.' Most
happy, again, is his criticism of Lord Grenville's note, with
its references to the unprovoked aggression of France (in
the matter of the opening of the Scheldt, etc.) as the sole
cause and origin of the war. " If this were indeed true,
in what ignorance must not Mr. Pitt and Mr. Windhapa
have kept the poor Duke of Portland, who declared in the
House of Lords that the cause of the war was the main-
tenance of the Christian religion ?"
To add literary excellence of the higher order to the
peculiar qualities which give force to the newspaper arti-
' Alas, that the facts should be so merciless to the most excellent
arguments ! Colerklge could not foresee that Napoleon would, years
afterwards, admit in his own Memoirs the insincerity of his overtures.
"I had need of war; a treaty of peace . . . would have withered ev-
ery imagination." And when Mr. Pitt's answer arrived, "it filled
me with a secret satisfaction."
IV.] COLERIDGE AS JOURNALIST. 81
cle is for a jonrnalist, of course, a " counsel of perfection ;"
but it remains to be remarked that Coleridge did make
this addition in a most conspicuous manner. Mrs. H. N.
Coleridge's three volumes of her father's Essays on his
oivn Times deserve to live as literature apart altogether
from their merits as journalism. Indeed, among the arti-
cles in the Morninff Post between 1799 and 1802 may be
found some of the finest specimens of Coleridge's maturer
prose style. The character of Pitt, which appeared on
19th March, 1800, is as remarkable for its literary merits
as it is for the almost humorous political perversity which
would not allow the Minister any single merit except that
which he owed to the sedulous rhetorical training received
by him from his father, viz.^ " a premature and unnatural
dexterity in the combination of words." ' The letters to
Fox, again, though a little artificialised perhaps by remi-
niscences of Junius, are full of weight and dignity. But
by far the most piquant illustration of Coleridge's peculiar
power is to be found in the comparison between his own
version of Pitt's speech of iVth Februar)^1800, on the
continuance of the war, with the report of it which ap-
peared in the 2'imcs of that date. With the exception of
' The following passage, too, is curious as showing how polemics,
like history, repeat themselves. " As his reasonings were, so is bis
eloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on
words, finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent that the whole
bears the semblance of argument and still keeps awake a sense of
surprise ; but, when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said ;
no one philosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed apho-
rism. Not a sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed
the favourite i)hrase of the day — a thing unexampled in any man of
equal reputation." With the alteration of one word — the proper
name — this passage might have been taken straight from some po-
litical diatribe of to-dav.
82 . COLERIDGE. [chap.
a few unwarranted elaborations of the arguments here and
tliere, the two speeches are in substance identical ; but the
effect of the contrast between the Minister's cold state-
paper periods and the life and glow of the poet-journalist's
style is almost comic. Mr. Gillman records that Canning,
calling on business at the editor's, inquired, as others had
done, who was the reporter of the speech for the Morning
Post, and, on being told, remarked drily that the report
"did more credit to his head than to his memory."
On the whole one can well understand Mr, Stuart's anx-
iety to secure Coleridge's permanent collaboration with
him in the business of journalism ; and it would be possi-
ble to maintain, with less of paradox than may at first sight
appear, that it would have been better not only for Cole-
ridge himself but for the world at large if the editor's ef-
forts had been successful. It would indeed have been bow-
ing the neck to the yoke ; but there are some natures upon
which constraint of that sort exercises not a depressing but
a steadying influence. What, after all, would the loss in
hours devoted to a comparatively inferior class of literary
labour have amounted to when compared with the gain in
much-needed habits of method and regularity, and — more
valuable than all to an intellect like Coleridge's — in the
constant reminder that human life is finite and the mate-
rials of human speculation infinite, and that even a world-
embracing mind must apportion its labour to its day?
There is, however, the great question of health to be con-
sidered — the question, as every one knows, of Coleridge's
whole career and life. If health was destined to give way,
in any event — if its collapse, in fact, was simply the cause
of all the lamentable external results which followed it,
while itself due only to predetermined internal conditions
over which the sufferer had no control — then to be sure
IT.] REMOVAL TO THE LAKES. 83
cadit qucestio. At London or at the Lakes, among news-
paper files or old folios, Coleridge's life would in that case
have run the same sad course ; and his rejection of Mr.
Stuart's offer becomes a matter of no particular interest to
disappointed posterity. But be that as it may, the " old
folios" won the day. In the summer of 1800 Coleridge
quitted London, and having wound up his affairs at his
then place of residence, removed with his wife and chil-
dren to a new and beautiful home in that English Lake
country with which his name was destined, like those of
Southey and Wordsworth, to be enduringly associated.
CHAPTER V.
LIFE AT KESWICK. — SECOND PAKT OP " CHBISTABEL." — FAIL-
ING HEALTH. — RESORT TO OPIUM. — THE "ODE TO DEJEC-
TION." — INCREASING RESTLESSNESS.— VISIT TO MALTA.
[1800-1804.]
We are now approaching tlie turning-point, moral and
physical, of Coleridge's career. The next few years de-
termined not only his destiny as a writer but his life as
a man. Between his arrival at Keswick in the summer
of 1800 and his departure for Malta in the spring of 1804
that fatal change of constitution, temperament, and habits
which governed the whole of his subsequent history had
fully established itself. Between these two dates he was
transformed from the Coleridge of whom his young fellow-
students in Germany have left us so pleasing a picture into
the Coleridge whom distressed kinsmen, alienated friends,
and a disappointed public were to have before them for
the remainder of his days. Here, then, at Keswick, and
in these first two or three years of the century — here or
nowhere is the key to the melancholy mystery to be found.
It is probable that only those who have gone with some
minuteness into the facts of this singular life are aware
how great was the change effected during this very short
period of time. When Coleridge left London for the Lake
country, he had not completed his eight -and -twentieth
CHAP, v.] LIFE AT KESWICK. 85
year. Before he was thirty he wrote that Ode to Dejec-
tion in wliich his spiritual and moral losses are so patheti-
cally bewailed. His health and spirits, his will and habits,
may not have taken any unalterable bent for the worse
until 1804, the year of his departure for Malta — the date
which I have thought it safest to assign as the definitive
close of the earlier and happier period of his life ; but
undoubtedly the change had fully manifested itself more
than two years before. And a very great and painful
one it assuredly was. We know from the recorded evi-
dence of Dr. Carrlyon and others that Coleridge was full
of hope and gaiety, full of confidence in himself and of
interest in life during his few months' residence in Ger-
many. The annus mirabilis of his poetic life was but two
years behind him, and his achievements of 1797-98 seemed
to him but a mere earnest of what he was destined to ac-
complish. His powers of mental concentration were un-
diminished, as his student days at Gottingen sufficiently
proved ; his conjugal and family affections, as Dr. Carr-
lyon notes for us, were still unimpaired ; his own verse
gives signs of a home-sickness and a yearning for bis own
fireside which were in melancholy contrast with the rest-
lessness of his later years. Nay, even after his return to
England, and during the six months of his regular work
on the Morning Post, the vigour of his political articles
entirely negatives the idea that any relaxation of intel-
lectual energy had as yet set in. Yet within six months
of his leaving London for Keswick there begins a progres-
sive decline in Coleridge's literary activity in every form.
The second part of Christahel, beautiful but inferior to the
first, was composed in the autumn of 1800, and for the
next two years, so far as the higher forms of literature arc
concerned, " the rest is silence." The author of the prcf-
86 COLERIDGE. [chap.
atory memoir in the edition of Coleridge's Poetical and
Dramatic Works (\SSQ) enumerates some half-dozen slight
pieces contributed to the Morning Post in 1801, but de-
clares that Coleridge's poetical contributions to this paper
during 1802 were "very rich and varied, and included
the magnificent ode entitled Dejection.'''' Only the latter
clause of this statement is entitled, I think, to command
our assent. Varied though the list may be, it is hardly
to be described as " rich." It covers only about seven
weeks in the autumn of 1802, and, with the exception of
the Lovers' Resolution and the " magnificent ode " referred
to, the pieces are of the shortest and slightest kind. Nor
is it accurate to say that the "political articles of the
same period were also numerous and important." On the
contrary, it would appear from an examination of Mrs. H.
N. Coleridge's collection that her father's contributions to
the Post between his departure from London and the au-
tumn of 1802 were few and intermittent, and in August,
1803, the proprietorship of that journal passed out of Mr.
Stuart's hands. It is, in short, I think, impossible to doubt
that very shortly after his migration to the Lake country
he practically ceased not only to write poetry but to pro-
duce any raentionablc quantity of complete work in the
prose form. His mind, no doubt, was incessantly active
throughout the whole of the deplorable period upon which
we are now entering; but it seems pretty certain that its
activity was not poetic nor even critical, but purely philo-
sophical, and that the products of that activity went exclu-
sively to marginalia and the pages of note-books.
Yet unfortunately we have almost no evidence, personal
or other, from Avhich we can with any certainty construct
the psychological — if one should not rather say the physio-
logical, or better still, perhaps, the pathological — history of
v.] GRETA HALL. 87
this cardinal epoch in Coleridge's life. Miss Wordsworth's
diary is nearly silent about him for the next few years ; he
was living indeed some dozen miles from her brother at
Grasmere, and they could not therefore have been in daily
intercourse. Southey did not come to the Lakes till 1803,
and the records of his correspondence only begin there-
fore from that date. Mr. Cottle's Reminiscences are here a
blank ; Charles Lamb's correspondence yields little ; and
though De Quincey has plenty to say about this period in
his characteristic fashion, it must have been based upon
pure gossip, as he cites no authorities, and did not himself
make Coleridge's acquaintance till six years afterwards.
This, however, is at least certain, that his gloomy accounts
of his own health begin from a period at which his satis-
faction with his new abode was still as fresh as ever. The
house which he had taken, now historic as the residence of
two famous Englishmen, enjoyed a truly beautiful situa-
tion and the command of a most noble view. It stood in
the vale of Derwentwater, on the bank of the river Greta,
and about a mile from the lake. When Coleridge first
entered it, it was uncompleted, and an arrangement was
made by which, after completion, it was to be divided be-
tween the tenant and the landlord, a Mr. Jackson. As it
turned out, however, the then completed portion was shared
by them in common, the other portion, and eventually the
whole, being afterwards occupied by Southey.
In April, 1801, some eight or nine months after his tak-
ing possession of Greta Hall, Coleridge thus describes it to
its future occupant :
" Our house stands gu a low hill, the whole front of which is one
field and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery gar-
den. Behind the house is an orchard and a small wood on a steep
slope, at the foot of which is the river Greta, which winds round and
G 5
88 COLERIDGE. [chap.
iatches the evening's light in the front of the house. In front we
have a giant camp — an encamped army of tent-like mountains which,
by au inverted arcli, gives a view of anotlier vale. On our right the
lovely vale and the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite ; and on our
left Derwentwater and LoJore full in view, and the fantastic moun-
tains of Borrowdale. Beliind is the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green,
high, with two chasms and a tent-like ridge in the larger. A fairer
scene you have not seen in all your wanderings."
There is here no note of discontent with the writer's sur-
roundings ; and yet, adds Mr. Cuthbert Southey in his L'lfe
and Correspondence of his father, the remainder of this let-
ter was filled by Coleridge with " a most gloomy account
of his health." Southey writes him in reply that he is
convinced that his friend's " complaint is gouty, that good
living is necessary, and a good climate," In July of the
same year he received a visit from Southey at Greta Hall,
and one from Charles and Mary Lamb in the following
summer, and it is probable that during such intervals of
pleasurable excitement his health and spirits might tempo-
rarily rally. But henceforward and until his departure for
Malta we gather nothing from any source as to Coleridge's
normal condition of body and mind which is not unfa-
vourable, and it is quite certain that he had long before
1804 enslaved liimself to that fatal drug which was to
remain liis tyrant for the rest of his days.
When, then, and how did this slavery begin? What
was the precise date of Coleridge's first experiences of
opium, and what the original cause of his taking it ? Within
what time did its use become habitual ? To what extent
was the decline of his health the effect of the evil habit,
and to what, if any, extent its cause ? And how far, if at
all, can the deterioration of his character and powers be
attributed to a decay of physical constitution, brought
about by influences beyond the sufferer's own control ?
v.] OPIUM-EATING. 89
Could every one of these questions be completely an-
swered, we should be in a position to solve the very obscure
and painful problem before us ; but though some of them
can be answered with more or less approach to complete-
ness, there is only one of them which can be finally disposed
of. It is certain, and it is no doubt matter for melancholy
satisfaction to have ascertained it, that Coleridge first had
recourse to opium as an anodyne. It was Nature's revolt
from pain, and not her appetite for pleasure, which drove
him to the drug; and though De Quincey, with his almost
comical malice, remarks that, though Coleridge began in
the desire to obtain relief, "there is no proof that he did
not end in voluptuousness," there is on the other hand no
proof whatever that he did so end — until the hahit was
formed. It is quite consistent with probability, and only
accords with Coleridge's own express afiirmations, to be-
lieve that it was the medicinal efficacy of opium, and this
quality of it alone, which induced him to resort to it again
and again until his senses contracted that well-known and
insatiable craving for the peculiar excitement, "voluptuous"
only to the initiated, which opium-intoxication creates. But
let Coleridge speak on this point for himself. Writing in
April, 1826, he says:
"I wrote a few stanzas threc-and-twenty years ago, soon after my
eyes had been opened to the true nature of the habit into which I
had been ignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium,
in the sudden removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended
with swellings in my knees and palpitation of the heart and pains all
over me, by which I had been bedridden for nearly six months. Un-
happily among my neighbours' and landlord's books were a large
number of medical reviews and magazines. I had always a fondness
(a common case, but most mischievous turn with reading men who
are at all dyspeptic) for dabbling in medical writings ; and in one ai
these reviews I met a case which I fancied very like my own, in which
90 COLERIDGE. [chap.
a cure had been effected by the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour
I procured it : it worked miracles — the swellings disappeared, the
pains vanished. I was all alive, and all around me being as ignorant
as myself, nothing could exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing
else, prescribed the newly-discovered panacea for all complaints, and
carried a little about with me not to lose any opportunity of adminis-
tering 'instant relief and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger
or friend, gentle or simple. Alas ! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh
of gall and bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delu-
sion, and how I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirl-
pool to which I was drawing, just when the current was beyond my
strength to stem. The state of my mind is truly portrayed in the
following effusion, for God knows that from that time I was the
victim of pain and terror, nor had I at any time taken the flattering
poison as a stimulus or for any craving after pleasurable sensation."
The " effusion " in question has parted company with
the autobiographical note, and the author of the prefatory
memoir above quoted conjectures it to have been a little
j)oem entitled the Visionary Hope j but I ara myself of
opinion, after a careful study of both pieces, that it is more
probably the Pains of Sleep, which moreover is known to
have been written in 1803. But whichever it be, its date
is fixed in that year by the statement in the autobiograph-
ical note of 1826 that the stanzas referred to in it were
written " twenty-three years ago." Thus, then, we have
the two facts established, that the opium-taking habit had
its origin in a bodily ailment, and that at some time in 1803
that habit had become confirmed. The disastrous experi-
ment in amateur therapeutics, which was the means of im-
planting it, could not have taken place, according to the
autobiographical note, until at least six months after Cole-
ridge's arrival at Keswick, and perhaps not for some months
later yet. At any rate, it seems tolerably certain that it
was not till the spring of 1801, when the climate of the
v.] OPIUM-EATING. 91
Lake country first began to tell unfavourably on his health,
that the " Kendal Black Drop " was taken. Possibly it may
have been about the time (April, 1801) when he wrote the
letter to Southey which has been quoted above, and which,
it will be remembered, contained " so gloomy an account
of his health." How painfully ailing he was at this time
we know from a variety of sources, from some of which we
also gather that he must have been a sufferer in more or less
serious forms from his boyhood upwards. Mr. Gillman, for
instance, who speaks on this point with the twofold author-
ity of confidant and medical expert, records a statement of
Coleridge's to the effect that, as a result of such schoolboy
imprudences as "swimming over the New River in my
clothes and remaining in them, full half the time from sev-
enteen to eighteen was passed by me in the sick ward of
Christ's Hospital, afilicted with jaundice and rheumatic
fever." From these indiscretions and their consequences
" may be dated," Mr. Gillman thinks, " all his bodily suffer-
ings in future life." That he was a martyr to periodical
attacks of rheumatism for some years before his migration
to Keswick is a conclusion resting upon something more
than conjecture. The Ode to the Departing Year (1796)
was written, as he has himself told us, under a severe at-
tack of rheumatism in the head. In 1797 he describes him-
self in ill health, and as forced to retire on that account to
the "lonely farmhouse between Porlock and London on
the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire," where
Kubla Khan was written.'
' Were it not for Coleridge's express statement that he first took
opium at Keswick, one would be inclined to attribute the gorgeous
but formless imagery of that poem to the effects of the stimulant.
It is certainly very like a metrical version of one of the pleasant va.
riety of opium-dreams described in De Quincey's poetic prose.
92 COLERIDGE. [chap.
Thus much is, moreover, certain, that whatever were
Coleridge's health and habits during the first two years of
his residence at Keswick, his career as a poet — that is to
say, as a poet of the first order — was closed some months
before that period had expired. The ode entitled Dejec-
tion, to Avhich reference has so often been made, was writ-
ten on the 4th of April, 1802, and the evidential impor-
tance which attaches, in connection with the point under
inquiry, to this singularly pathetic utterance has been al-
most universally recognised. Coleridge has himself cited
its most significant passage in the Biographia Literaria as
supplying the best description of his mental state at the
time when it was written. De Quincey quotes it with ap-
propriate comments in his Coleridge and Opium-eating. Its
testimony is reverently invoked by the poet's son in the in-
troductory essay prefixed by him to his edition of his fa-
ther's works. The earlier stanzas are, however, so neces-
sary to the comprehension of Coleridge's mood at this time
that a somewhat long extract must be made. In the open-
ing stanza he expresses a longing that the storm which cer-
tain atmospheric signs of a delusively calm evening appear
to promise might break forth, so that
"Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed,
And sent my soul abroad,
Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,
Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live."
And thus, with ever -deepening sadness, the poem pro-
ceeds :
" A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioncd grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief
In word, or sigli, or tear —
v.] "DEJECTIOX." 93
Lady ! in this wan and heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow green :
And still I gaze — and with how blank an eye !
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars^
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen*.
Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
1 see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel how beautiful they are !
"My genial spirits fail.
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze forever
On that green light that lingers in the west :
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
*' Lady ! we receive but what we give.
And in our life alone does nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud !
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah ! from the soul itself must issue forth,
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth —
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth.
Of all sweet sounds the life and clement !
" pure of heart ! thou need'st not ask of me
Wliat this strong nmsic in the soul may be !
94 COLERIDGE. [cuap.
What, and wherein it doth exist,
This liglit, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making power.
Joy, ■virtuous Lady ! Joy that ne'er was given,
Save to the i)ure, and in their purest hour,
Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower,
Joy, Lady ! is the spirit and the power.
Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower
A new Earth and new Heaven,
Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud —
Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud —
We in ourselves rejoice !
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light."
And then follows the much quoted, profoundly touch-
ing, deeply significant stanza to which we have referred :
" There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness :
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine.
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth :
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth,
But ! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth.
My shaping spirit of Imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel.
But to be still and patient, all I can ;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural Man —
This my sole resource, my only plan :
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul."
Sadder lines than these were never perhaps written by
any poet in description of his own feelings. And what
v.] "DEJECTION." 95
gives them their peculiar sadness — as also, of course, tlieir
special biographical value — is that they are not, like Shel-
ley's similarly entitled stanzas, the mere expression of a
passing mood. They are the record of a life change, a
veritable threnody over a spiritual death. For there can
be no doubt — his whole subsequent history goes to show
it — that Coleridge's " shaping spirit of Imagination " was
in fact dead when these lines were written. To a man
of stronger moral fibre a renascence of the poetical in-
stinct in other foi-ms might, as I have suggested above,
been possible ; but the poet of Christabel and the Ancient
Mariner was dead. The metaphysician had taken his
place, and was striving, in abstruse research, to live in
forgetfulness of the loss. Little more, that is to say, than
a twelvemonth after the composition of the second part
of Christabel the impulse which gave birth to it had passed
away forever. Opium-taking had doubtless begun by this
time — may conceivably indeed have begun nearly a year
before — and the mere mood of the poem, the temporary
phase of feeling which directed his mind inwards into
deeper reflections on its permanent state, is no doubt
strongly suggestive, in its excessive depression, of the ter-
rible reaction which is known to follow upon opium-ex-
citement. But, I confess, it seems to me improbable that
even the habitual use of the stimulant for so comparative-
ly short a time as twelve months could have produced so
profound a change in Coleridge's intellectual nature. I
cannot but think that De Quincey overstates the case in
declaring that " opium killed Coleridge as a poet," though
it may well be that, after the collapse of health, which
appears to me to have been the real causa causans in the
matter, had killed the poet as we know him, opium pre-
vented his resurrection in another and it may be but little
5*
96 COLERIDGE. [chap.
inferior form. On the whole, in fact, the most probable
account of this all-important era in Coleridge's life appears
to me to be this: that in the course of 1801, as he was
approaching his thirtieth year, a distinct change for the
worse — precipitated possibly, as Mr. Gillman thinks, by
the climate of his new place of abode — took place in his
constitution; that bis rheumatic habit of body, and the
dyspeptic trouble by which it was accompanied, became
confirmed ; and that the severe attacks of the acute form
of the malady which he underwent produced such a per-
manent lowering of his vitality and animal spirits as, Ji7'st,
to extinguish the creative impulse, and then to drive him
to the physical anodyne of opium and to the mental stim-
ulant of metaphysics.
From the summer of 1801, at any rate, his malaise,
both of mind and body, appears to have grown apace.
Repeated letters from Southey allow us to see liow deeply
concerned he was at this time about his friend's condition.
Plans of foreign travel are discussed between them, and
Southey endeavours in vain to spur his suffering and de-
pressed correspondent to " the assertion of his supremacy "
in some new literary work. But, with the exception of
his occasional contributions to the press, whatever he com-
mitted to paper during these years exists only, if at all, in
a fragmentary form. And his restlessness, continually on
the increase, appears by the end of 1802 to have become
ungovernable. In November of that year he eagerly ac-
cepted an offer from Thomas Wedgwood to become liis
companion on a tour, and he spent this and the greater
part of the following month in South Wales with some
temporary advantage, it would seem, to his health and
spirits. " Coleridge," writes Mr. Wedgwood to a friend,
"is all kindness to me, and in ))rodiuions favour here.
v.] RESTLESSJ^ESS. 97
He is quite easy, cheerful, and takes great pains to make
himself pleasant. He is willing, indeed desirous, to ac-
company me to any part of the glohe." " Coll and I,"
he writes on another occasion, the abbreviation of name
having been suggested to him by Coleridge himself, "har-
monise amazingly," and adds that his companion "takes
long rambles, and writes a great deal." But the fact that
such changes of air and scene produced no permanent ef-
fect upon the invalid after his return to his own home
appears to show that now, at any rate, his fatal habit
had obtained a firm hold upon liim. And his "writing
a great deal resulted " only in the filling of many note-
books, and perhaps the sketching out of many of those
vast schemes of literary labour of which he was destined
to leave so remarkable a collection at his death. One
such we find him forwarding to Southcy in the August
of 1803 — the plan of a Bibliotheca Britannica, or "His-
tory of British Literature, bibliographical, biographical, and
critical," in eight volumes. The first volume was to con-
tain a "complete history of all Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books
that are not translations, but the native growth of Britain ;"
to accomplish which, writes Coleridge, "I will with great
pleasure join you in learning Welsh and Erse." The sec-
ond volume was to contain the history of English poetry
and poets, including " all prose truly poetical." The third
volume " English prose, considered as to style, as to elo-
quence, as to general impressiveness ; a history of styles
and manners, their causes, their birthplace and parentage,
their analysis." The fourth volume would take up "the
history of metaphysics, theology, medicine, alchemy ; com-
mon, canon, and Roman law from Alfred to Henry VH."
The fifth would "carry on metaphysics and ethics to the
present day in the first half, and comprise in the second
98 COLERIDGE. [chap.
half the theology of all the reformers." In the sixth and
seventh volumes were to be included " all the articles you
(Southey) can get on all the separate arts and sciences that
have been treated of in books since the Reformation ; and
by this time," concludes the enthusiastic projector, " the
book, if it answered at all, would have gained so high a
reputation that you need not fear having whom you liked
to write the different articles — medicine, surgery, chemis-
try, etc. ; navigation, travellers' voyages, etc., etc." There
is certainly a melancholy humour in the formulation of so
portentous a scheme by a man who was at this moment
wandering aimlessly among the lakes and mountains, una-
ble to settle down to any definite piece of literary work,
or even to throw off a fatal habit, which could not fail, if
persevered in, to destroy all power of steady application in
the future. That neither the comic nor the pathetic ele-
ment in the situation was lost upon Southey is evident
from his half -sad, half - satirical, wholly winning reply.
" Your plan," he writes, " is too good, too gigantic, quite
beyond my powers. If you had my tolerable state of
health and that love of steady and productive employment
which is now grown into a necessary habit with me, if you
were to execute and would execute it, it would be beyond
all doubt the most valuable work of any age or any coun-
try ; but I cannot fill up such an outline. No man can
better feel where he fails than I do, and to rely upon you
for whole quartos ! Dear Coleridge, the smile that comes
with that thought is a very melancholy one ; and if Edith
saw me now she would think my eyes were weak again,
when in truth the humour that covers them springs from
another cause." A few weeks after this interchange of
correspondence Coleridge was once again to prove how
far he was from possessing Southey's " tolerable state of
v.] INCREASING RESTLESSNESS. 99
health." Throughout the whole of this year he had been
more restless than ever. In January, 1803, we find him
staying with Southey at Bristol, "suffering terribly from
the climate, and talking of going abroad." A week later
he is at Stowey, planning schemes, not destined to be real-
ised, of foreign travel with Wedgwood. Returning again
to Keswick, he started, after a few months' quiescence, on
IStli August, in company with Wordsworth and his sister,
for a tour in Scotland, but after a fortnight he found him-
self too ill to proceed. The autumn rains set in, and " poor
Coleridge," writes Miss Wordsworth, " being very unwell,
determined to send his clothes to Edinburgh, and make
the best of his way thither, being afraid to face much "wet
weather in an open carriage." It is possible, however, that
his return to Keswick may have been hastened by the cir-
cumstance that Southey, who had paid a brief visit to the
Lake country two years before, was expected in a few
days at the house which was destined to be his abode for
the longest portion of his life. He arrived at Greta Ilall
on 7th September, 1803, and from time to time during the
next six months his correspondence gives us occasional
glimpses of Coleridge's melancholy state. At the end of
December, his health growing steadily worse, he conceived
the project of a voyage to Madeira, and quitted Keswick
with the intention, after paying a short visit to the Words-
worths, of betaking himself to London to make prepara-
tions. His stay at Grasmcre, however, was longer than he
had counted on. " He was detained for a month by a se-
vere attack of illness, induced, if his description is to be
relied on, by the use of narcotics.' Unsuspicious of the
» See Miss Meteyard {A Group of Englishmen, p. 223). Her evi-
dence, however, on any point otherwise doubtful in Coleridge's his-
tory should be received witli caution, as her estimate of the poet
certftlnlv errs soniewliat on the side of excessive harshness.
100- COLERIDGE. [chap. v.
cause, Mrs. and Miss Wordsworth nursed liim with the
tenderest affection, while the poet himself, usually a parsi-
monious man, forced upon him, to use Coleridge's own
words, a hundred pounds in the event of his going to
Madeira, and his friend Stuart offered to befriend him."
From Grasmere he went to Liverpool, where he spent a
pleasant week with his old Unitarian friend, Dr. Cromp-
ton, and arrived in London at the close of 1803. Here,
however, his plans were changed. Malta was substituted
for Madeira, in response to an invitation from his friend
Mr,, afterwards Sir John, Stoddart, then resident as judge
in the Mediterranean island. By 12th March, as we gather
from the Southey correspondence, the change of arrange-
ments had been made. Two days afterwards he receives
a letter of valediction from his "old friend and brother"
at Greta Hall, and on 2d April, 1804, he sailed from Eng-
land in the Speedwell, dropping anchor sixteen days later
in Valetta harbour.
CHAPTER VI.
STAY AT MALTA. — ITS INJURIOUS EFFECTS. — RETURN TO ENG-
LAND. — MEETING WITH DE QUINCEY. — RESIDENCE IN LON-
DON. — FIRST SERIES OF LECTURES.
[1806-1809.]
Never was human being destined so sadly and signally to
illustrate the caelum non animum aphorism as the unhappy
passenger on the Speedwell. Southey shall describe his
condition when he left England; and his own pathetic
lines to William Wordsworth will picture him to us on his
return. " You are in great measure right about Coleridge,"
writes the former to his friend Riclcman, " he is worse in
body than you seem to believe ; but the main cause lies
in his own management of himself, or rather want of man-
agement. His mind is in a perpetual St. Vitus's dance —
eternal activity without action. At times he feels morti-
fied that he should have done so little, but this feeling
never produces any exertion. ' I will begin to-morrow,'
he says, and thus he has been all his life long letting to-
day slip. He has had no heavy calamities in life, and so
contrives to be miserable about trifles. Poor fellow, there
is no one thing which gives me so much pain as the wit-
nessing such a waste of unequalled powers." Then, after
recalling the case of a highly promising schoolfellow, who
had made shipwreck of his life, and whom "a few indi>
102 ^COLERIDGE. [chap.
viduals only remember with a sort of horror and affection,
which just serves to make them melancholy whenever they
think of him or mention his name," he adds : " This will
not be the case with Coleridge ; the disjecta membra will
be found if he does not die early : but having so much to
do, so many errors to weed out of the world which he is
capable of eradicating, if he does die without doing his
work, it would half break ray heart, for no human being
has had more talents allotted." Such being his closest
friend's account of him, and knowing, as we now do (what
Southey perhaps had no suspicion of at the time), the
chief if not the sole or original cause of his morally nerve-
less condition, it is impossible not to feel that he did the
worst possible thing for himself in taking this journey to
Malta. In quitting England he cut himself off from those
last possibilities of self - conquest which the society and
counsels of his friends might otherwise have afforded him,
and the consequences were, it is to be feared, disastrous.
After De Quincey's incredibly cool assertion that it was
" notorious that Coleridge began the use of opium, not as
a relief from any bodily pain or nervous irritations, since
his constitution was strong and excellent (!), but as a source
of luxurious sensations," we must receive anything which
he has to say on this particular point with the utmost
caution ; but there is only too much plausibility in his
statement that, Coleridge being necessarily thrown, while
at Malta, " a good deal upon his own resources in the nar-
row society of a garrison, he there confirmed and cher-
ished ... his habit of taking opium in large quantities."
Contrary to his expectations, moreover, the Maltese climate
failed to benefit him. At first, indeed, he did experience
some feeling of relief, but afterwards, according to Mr. Gill-
man, he spoke of his rheumatic limbs as " lifeless tools,"
VI.] STAY AT MALTA. 103
and of the " violent pains in his bowels, which neither
opium, ether, nor peppermint combined could relieve."
Occupation, however, was not wanting to him, if occu-
pation could have availed in the then advanced stage of
his case. He early made the acquaintance of the gov-
ernor of the island. Sir Alexander Ball, who, having just
lost his secretary by death, requested Coleridge to under-
take that official's duties until his successor should be ap-
pointed. By this arrangement the governor and the pub-
lic service in all likelihood profited more than the provi-
sional secretary; for Coleridge's literary abilities proved
very serviceable in the department of diplomatic corre-
spondence. The dignities of the office, Mr. Gillman tells
us, no doubt on Coleridge's own authority, " he never at-
tempted to support ; he was greatly annoyed at what he
thought its unnecessary parade, and he petitioned Sir Al-
exander Ball to be relieved from it." The purely mechan-
ical duties of the post, too, appear to have troubled him.
He complains, in one of the journals which he kept dur-
ing this period, of having been " for months past inces-
santly employed in official tasks, subscribing, examining,
administering oaths, auditing, etc." On the whole it
would seem that the burden of his secretarial employ-
ment, though doubtless it would have been found light
enough by any one accustomed to public business, was
rather a weariness to the flesh than a distraction to the
mind ; while in the meantime a new symptom of disorder
— a difficulty of breathing, to which he was always after-
wards subject — began to manifest itself in his case. Prob-
ably he was glad enough — relieved, in more than one sense
of the word — when, in the autumn of 1805, the new sec-
retary arrived at Malta to take his place.
On 27th September Coleridge quitted the island on his
H
104 COLERIDGE. [chap.
homeward journey via Italy, stopping for a short time at
Syracuse on his way. At Naples, which he reached on the
15th of December, he made a longer stay, and in Rome his
sojourn lasted some months. Unfortunately, for a reason
which will presently appear, there remains no written rec-
ord of his impressions of the Eternal City ; and though
Mr. Gillman assures us that the gap is "partly filled by his
own verbal account, repeated at various times to the writer
of this memoir," the public of to-day is only indebted to
"the writer of this memoir" for the not very startling
information that Coleridge, " while in Rome, was actively
employed in visiting the great works of art, statues, pict-
ures, buildings, palaces, etc. etc., observations on which he
minuted down for publication." It is somewhat more
interesting to learn that he made the acquaintance of many
literary and artistic notabilities at that time congregated
there, including Tieck, the German poet and novelist, and
the American painter Alston, to whose skill we owe what
is reputed to be the best of his many not easily reconcilable
portraits. The loss of his Roman memoranda Avas indi-
rectly brought about by a singular incident, his account of
which has met with some undeserved ridicule at the hands
of Tory criticism. When about to quit Rome for England
via Switzerland and Germany he took the precaution of
inquiring of Baron von Humboldt, brother of the traveller,
and then Prussian Minister at the Court of Rome, whether
the proposed route was safe, and was by him informed
that he would do well to keep out of the reach of Bona-
parte, who was meditating the seizure of his person. Ac-
cording to Coleridge, indeed, an order for his arrest had
actually been transmitted to Rome, and he was only saved
from its execution by the connivance of the "good old
Pope," Pins VII., who sent him a passport and counselled
Ti.] RETURN TO ENGLAND. 105
liis immediate flight. Hastening to Leghorn, he discovered
an American vessel ready to sail for England, on board of
which he embarked. On the voyage she was chased by a
French vessel, which so alarmed the captain that he com-
pelled Coleridge to throw his papers, including these pre-
cious MSS., overboard. The wrath of the First Consul
against him was supposed to have been excited by his con-
tributions to the Morning Post, an hypothesis which De
Quincey reasonably finds by no means so ridiculous as it
appeared to a certain writer in Blackwood, who treated it
as the " very consummation of moon-struck vanity," and
compared it to " John Dennis's frenzy in retreating from
the sea-coast under the belief that Louis XIV. had com-
missioned commissaries to land on the English shore and
make a dash at his person." It must be remembered,
however, that Mr. Fox, to whose statement on such a point
Napoleon would be likely to attach especial weight, had
declared in the House of Commons that the rupture of the
Peace of Amiens had been brought about by certain essays
in the Morning Post, and there is certainly no reason to
believe that a tyrant whose animosity against literary or
quasi -literary assailants ranged from Madame de Stael
down to the bookseller Palm would have regarded a man
of Coleridge's reputation in letters as beneath the stoop of
his vengeance.
After an absence of two years and a half Coleridge
arrived in England in August, 1806. That his then condi-
tion of mind and body was a profoundly miserable one,
and that he himself was acutely conscious of it, will be
seen later on in certain extracts from his correspondence ;
but his own Lines to William Wordsicorth — lines " com-
posed on the night after his recitation of a poem on the
growth of an individual mind" — contain an even more
106 COLERIDGE. [chap.
tragic expression of his state. It was Wordworth's pen-
sive retrospect of their earlier years together which awoke
the bitterest pangs of self-reproach in his soul, and wrung
from it the cry which follows :
" Ah ! as I listened with a heart forlorn
The pulses of my being beat anew :
And even as life returns upon the drowned,
Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains —
Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart ;
And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope;
And hope that scarce would know itself from fear ;
Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
And genius given, and knowledge won in vain ;
And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild.
And all which patient toil had reared, and all
Commune with thee had opened out — but flowers
Strewn on my corse, and borne upon my bier,
In the same coffin, for the self-same grave !"
A dismal and despairing strain, indeed, but the situation
unhappily was not less desperate. We are, in fact, enter-
ing upon that period of Coleridge's life — a period, roughly
speaking, of about ten years — which no admirer of his
genius, no lover of English letters, no one, it might even be
said, who wishes to think well of human nature, can ever
contemplate without pain. His history from the day of
his landing in England in August, 1806, till the day when
he entered Mr. Gilhnan's house in 1816, is one long and
miserable story of self-indulgence and self-reproach, of lost
opportunities, of neglected duties, of unfinished undertak-
ings. His movements and his occupation for the first year
after his return are not now traceable with exactitude, but
his time was apparently spent partly in London and partly
at Grasmere and Keswick, When in London, Mr. Stuart,
Ti.] UNHAPPY CONDITION. 107
who had now become proprietor of the Courier^ allowed
him to occupy rooms at the ofBce of that newspaper to
save him expense ; and Coleridge, though his regular con-
nection with the Courier did not begin till some years
afterwards, may possibly have repaid the accommodation
by occasional contributions or by assistance to its editor
in some other form. It seems certain, at any rate, that if
he was earning no income in this way he was earning none
at all. His friend and patron, Mr. Thomas Wedgwood,
had died while he was in Malta; but the full pension of
£150 per annum bestowed upon him by the two brothers
jointly continued to be paid to him by Josiah, the senior.
Coleridge, however, had landed in England in ignorance of
his patron's death. He had wholly neglected to keep up
any correspondence with the Wedgwoods during his stay
in Malta, and though " dreadfully affected " by it, as Mr.
Poole records, he seems to have allowed nearly a year to
elapse before communicating with the surviving brother.
The letter which he then wrote deserves quotation, nofc
only as testimony to his physical and pecuniary condition
on his arrival in England, but as affording a distressing
picture of the morbid state of his emotions and the enfee-
bled condition of his will. " As to the reasons for ray si-
lence, they are," he incoherently begins, "impossible, and
the numbers of the causes of it, with the almost weekly
expectation for the last eight months of receiving my
books, manuscripts, etc., from Malta, has been itself a cause
of increasing the procrastination which constant ill health,
despondency, domestic distractions, and embarrassment
from accidents, equally unconnected with my will or con-
duct" [every cause mentioned, it will be seen, but the true
one], " had already seated deep in my very muscles, as it
were. I do not mean to accuse myself of idleness — I have
108 COLEKIDGE. [chap.
enough of self-crimination without adding imaginary arti-
cles — but in all things that affect my moral feelings I have
sunk under such a strange cowardice of pain that I have
not unfrequently kept letters from persons dear to me for
weeks together unopened. After a most miserable pas-
sage from Leghorn of fifty-five days, during which ray life
was twice given over, I found myself again in my native
country, ill, penniless, and worse than homeless, I had
been near a month in the country before I ventured or
could summon courage enough to ask a question concern-
ing you and yours, and yet God Almighty knows that ev-
ery hour the thought had been gnawing at my heart. I
then for the first time heard of that event which sounded
like my own knell, without its natural hope or sense of
rest. Such shall I be (is the thought that haunts me), but
! not such ; O ! with what a different retrospect ! But
1 owe it to justice to say. Such good I truly can do myself,
etc., etc." The rest of this painfully inarticulate letter is
filled with further complaints of ill health, with further
protestations of irresponsibility for the neglect of duties,
and with promises, never to be fulfilled, of composing or
assisting others to compose a memoir of Thomas Wedg-
wood, who, in addition to his general repute as a man of
culture, had made a special mark by his speculations in
psychology.
The singular expression, " worse than homeless," and the
reference to domestic distractions, appear to indicate that
some estrangement had already set in between Coleridge
and his wife. Do Quincey's testimony to its existence at
the time (a month or so later) when he made Coleridge's
acquaintance may, subject to the usual deductions, be ac-
cepted as trustworthy ; and, of course, for aught we know,
it may then have been already of some years' standing.
Ti.] MRS. COLERIDGE. 109
That the provocation to it on the husband's part may be
so far antedated is at least a reasonable conjecture. There
may be nothino- — in all likelihood there is nothing — worth
attention in De Quincey's gossip about the young lady,
" intellectually very much superior to Mrs. Coleridge, who
became a neighbour and daily companion of Coleridge's
walks" at Keswick. But if there be no foundation for
his remarks on " the mischiefs of a situation which exposed
Mrs. Coleridge to an invidious comparison with a more
intellectual person," there is undoubtedly plenty of point
in the immediately following observation that " it was
most unfortunate for Coleridge himself to be continually
compared with one so ideally correct and regular in his
habits as Mr. Southey." The passion of female jealousy
assuredly did not need to be called into play to account for
the alienation of Mrs. Coleridge from her husband. Mrs.
Carlyle has left on record her pathetic lament over the fate
of a woman who marries a man of genius ; but a man of
genius of the coldly selfish and exacting type of the Chel-
sea philosopher would probably be a less severe burden to
a woman of housewifely instincts than the weak, unmethod-
ical, irresolute, shiftless being that Coleridge had by this
time become. After the arrival of the Southeys, Mrs.
Coleridge would indeed have been more than human if she
had not looked with an envious eye upon the contrast be-
tween her sister Edith's lot and her own. For this would
give her the added pang of perceiving that she was spe-
cially unlucky in the matter, and that men of genius could
(" if they chose,"" as she would probably, though not per-
haps quite justly have put it) make very good husbands
indeed. If one poet could finish bis poems, and pay his
tradesmen's bills, and work steadily for the publishers in
his own house without the necessity of periodical flittings
110 COLERIDGE. [chap.
to various parts of the United Kingdom or the Continent,
why, so could another. Witli such reflections as these
Mrs. Coleridge's mind was no doubt sadly busy during the
early years of her residence at the Lakes, and, since their
causes did not diminish but rather increased in intensity
as time went on, the estrangement between them — or rath-
er, to do Coleridge justice, her estrangement from her hus-
band — had, by 1806, no doubt become complete. The
fatal habit which even up to this time seems to have been
unknown to most of his friends could hardly have been a
secret to his wife, and his four or five years of slavery to
it may well have worn out her patience.
This single cause indeed, namely, Coleridge's addiction
to opium, is quite sufficient, through the humiliations, dis-
comfort, and privations, pecuniary and otherwise, for which
the vice was no doubt mediately or immediately responsi-
ble, to account for the unhappy issue of a union which
undoubtedly was one of love to begin with, and which
seems to have retained that character for at least six years
of its course. We have noted the language of warm affec-
tion in which the " beloved Sara" is spoken of in the early
poems, and up to the time of Coleridge's stay in Germany
his feelings towards his wife remained evidently unchanged.
To his children, of whom three out of the four born to
him had survived, he was deeply attached ; and the re-
markable promise displayed by the eldest son, Hartley, and
his youngest child and only daughter, Sara, made them
objects of no less interest to his intellect than to his heart.
" Hartley," he writes to Mr. Poole in 1803, "is a strange,
strange boy, exquisitely wild, an utter visionary ; like the
moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle of light of
his own making. He alone is a light of his own." And
of his daughter in the same poetic strain : " My meek lit-
VI.] HIS FAMILY. Ill
tie Sara is a remarkably interesting- baby, with the finest
possible skin, and large bine eyes, and she smiles as if she
were basking in a sunshine as mild as moonlight of her
own quiet happiness." Derwent, a less remarkable but no
less attractive child than his brother and sister (whom he
was destined long to survive), held an equal place in his
father's affections. Yet all these interwoven influences — a
deep love of his children and a sincere attachment to his
wife, of whom, indeed, he never ceased to speak with re-
spect and regard — were as powerless as in so many thou-
sands of other cases they have been, to brace an enfeebled
will to the task of self -reform. In 1807 ''respect and re-
gard" had manifestly taken the place of any warmer feel-
ing in his mind. Later on in the letter above quoted he
says, " In less than a week I go down to Ottery, with my
children and their mother, from a sense of duty " {i.e. to
his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge, who had succeeded
his father as head-master of the Ottery St. Mary Grammar
School) " as far as it affects myself, and from a promise
made to Mrs. Coleridge, as far as it affects lier, and indeed
of a debt of respect to her for her many praiseworthy qual-
ities." When husbands and wives take to liquidating
debts of this kind, and in this spirit, it is pretty con-
clusive evidence that all other accounts between them are
closed.
The letter from which these extracts have been taken
was written from Aisholt, near Bridgewater, where Cole-
ridge was then staying, with his wife and children, as the
guest of a Mr. Price ; and his friend Poole's description
to Josiah Wedgwood of his state at that time is signifi-
cant as showing that some at least of his intimate ac-
quaintances had no suspicion of the real cause of his bod-
ily and mental disorders. " I admire him," Poole writes,
6
112 COLERIDGE. [chap.
"and pity him more than ever. His information is much
extended, the great qualities of his mind heightened and
better disciplined, but alas ! his health is much weaker,
and his great failing, procrastination, or the incapabil-
ity of acting agreeably to his wish and will, much in-
creased."
Whether the promised visit to Ottery St. Mary was ever
paid there is no record to show, but at the end of July,
1807, we again hear of the Coleridges at the house of a
Mr. Chubb, a descendant of the Deist, at Bridgewater;
and here it was that De Quincey, after having endeav-
oured in vain to run the poet to earth at Stowey, where
he had been staying with Mr. Poole, and whence he had
gone to pay a short visit to Lord Egmont, succeeded in
obtaining an introduction to him. The characteristic pas-
sage in which the younger man describes their first meet-
ing is too long for quotation, and it is to be hoped too
well known to need it; his vivid and acute criticism of
Coleridge's conversation may be more appropriately cited
hereafter. His evidence as to the conjugal relations of
Coleridge and his wife has been already discussed; and
the last remaining point of interest about this memorable
introduction is the testimony which it incidentally affords
to De Quincey's genuine and generous instinct of hero-
worship, and to the deptli of Coleridge's pecuniary em-
barrassments. The loan of £300, which the poet's en-
thusiastic admirer insisted on Cottle's conveying to him
as from an unknown " young man of fortune who admired
his talents," should cover a multitude of De Quincey's
subsequent sins. It was indeed only upon Cottle's urgent
representation that he had consented to reduce the sum
from £500 to £300. Nor does there seem any doubt of
his having honestly attempted to conceal his own identity
VI.] MEETING WITU DE QULVCEY. 113
witli the nameless benefactor, though, according to his
own later account, he failed.'
This occurred in November, 1807, and in the previous
month De Quincey had been able to render Coleridge a
minor service, while at the same moment gratifying a long
cherished wish of his own. Mrs. Coleridge was about to
return with her children to Keswick, but her husband, not
yet master of this £300 windfall, and undoubtedly at his
wits' end for money, was arranging for a course of lectures
to be delivered at the Royal Institution early in the ensu-
ing year, and could not accompany them. De Quincey
offered accordingly to be their escort, and duly conducted
them to Wordsworth's house, thus making the acquaint-
ance of the second of his two great poetical idols within
a few months of paying his first homage to the other. In
February, 1808, Coleridge again took up his abode in Lon-
don at his old free quarters in the Courier office, and be-
gan the delivery of a promised series of sixteen lectures
on Poetry and the Fine Arts. " I wish you could see him,"
again writes Poole to Wedgwood, "you would pity and
admire. He is much improved, but has still less volun-
tary power than ever. Yet he is so committed that I
think he must deliver these lectures." Considering that
the authorities of the Royal Institution had agreed to pay
him one hundred guineas for delivering the lectures, he
undoubtedly was more or less " committed ;" and his vol-
untary power, however small, might be safely supposed to
' " In a letter written by him (Coleridge) about fifteen years after
that time, I found that he had become aware of all the circumstances,
perhaps through some indiscretion of Mr. Cottle's." Perhaps, how-
ever, no very great indiscretion on Mr. Cottle's part was needed to
enable Coleridge to trace the loan to so ardent a young admirer and
disciple.
114 COLERIDGE. [chap.
be equal to the task of fulfilling a contract. But to get
the lecturer into the lecture - room does not amount to
much more than bringing the horse to the water. You
can no more make the one drink than you can prevent
the other from sending his audience away thirsty. Cole-
ridge's lectures on Poetr}'' and the Fine Arts were con-
fused, ill arranged, and generally disappointing to the last
degree. Sometimes it was not even possible to bring the
horse to the water. Charles Lamb writes to Manning on
the 20th of February, 1808 (early days indeed), that Cole-
ridge had only delivered two lectures, and that though
" two more were intended, he did not come." De Quin-
cey writes of " dismissals of audience after audience, with
pleas of illness; and on many of his lecture-days I have
seen all Albermarle Street closed by a lock of carriages
filled with women of distinction, until the servants of the
Institution or their own footmen advanced to the carriage-
doors with the intelligence that Mr. Coleridge had been
suddenly taken ill." Naturally there came a time when
the " women of distinction " began to tire of this treat-
ment. " The plea, which at first had been received with
expressions of concern, repeated too often began to rouse
disgust. Many in anger, and some in real uncertainty
whether it would not be trouble thrown away, ceased to
attend." And what De Quincey has to say of the lectures
themselves, when they did by chance get delivered, is no
less melancholy. " The lecturer's appearance," he says,
" was generally that of a man struggling with pain and
overmastering illness."
"His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often blaclt in col-
our ; and in spite of the water which he continued drinking through
the whole course of the lecture, he often seemed to labour under an
almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower "
VI.] HIS LECTURES. 115
[i.e., I suppose to move the lower jaw]. " la such a state it is clear
that nothing could save the lecture itself from reflecting his own
feebleness and exhaustion except the advantage of having been pre-
eomposed in some happier mood. But that never happened : most
unfortunately, he relied on his extempore ability to carry him through.
Xow, had he been in spirits, or had he gathered animation and kin-
dled by his own emotion, no written lecture could have been more
effectual than one of his unpremeditated colloquial harangues. But
either he was depressed originally below the point from which re-
ascent was possible, or else this reaction was intercepted by continual
disgust from looking back upon his own ill success ; for assuredly
he never once recovered that free and eloquent movement of thought
which he could command at any time in a private company. The
passages he read, moreover, in illustrating his doctrines, were gener-
ally unhappily chosen, because chosen at haphazard, from the diffi-
culty of finding at a moment's summons these passages which his
purpose required. Nor do I remember any that produced much ef-
fect except two or three which I myself put ready marked into his
hands among the Metrical Romances, edited by Ritson. Generally
speaking, the selections were as injudicious and as inappropriate as
they were ill delivered, for among Coleridge's accomplishments good
reading was not one. He had neither voice (so at least / thought)
nor management of voice. This defect is unfortunate in a public
lecturer, for it is inconceivable how much weight and effectual pathos
can be communicated by sonorous depth and melodious cadence of
the human voice to sentiments the most trivial ; ' nor, on the other
hand, how the grandest are emasculated by a style of reading which
fails in distributing the lights and shadows of a musical intonation.
However, this defect chiefly concerned the immediate impression ; the
most afflicting to a friend of Coleridge's was the entire absence of his
own peculiar and majestic intellect; no heart, no soul, was in any-
tiimg he said ; no strength of feeling in recaUiug universal truths ,
' The justice of this criticism will be acknowledged by those many
persons whom Mr. Blight's great elocutionary skill has occasionally
deluded into imagining that the very commonplace verse which the
famous orator has been often known to quote with admiration is
poetry of a high order.
116 COLERIDGE. [chap. vi.
no power of originality or compass of moral relations in his novel-
ties ; all was a poor, faint reflection from pearls once scattered on
the highway by himself in the prodigality of his early opulence — a
mendicant dependence on the alms dropped from his own overflow-
ing treasury of happier times."
Severe as is this censure of the lectures, there is unhap-
pily no good ground for disputing its substantial justice,
and the inferences which it suggests are only too pain-
fully plain. One can well understand Coleridge's being
an ineffective lecturer, and no failure in this respect, how-
ever conspicuous, would necessarily force us to the hy-
pothesis of physical disability. But a Coleridge who could
no more compose a lecture than he could deliver one — a
Coleridge who could neither write nor extemporise any-
thing specially remarkable on a subject so congenial to
him as that of English poetry — must assuredly have spent
most of his time, whether in the lecture-room or out of
it, in a state of incapacity for sustained intellectual effort.
De Quincey's humorous account of the lecturer's shiftless,
untidy life at the Courier office, and even the Rabelaisian
quip which Charles Lamb throws at it in the above-quoted
letter to Manning, are sufficient indications of his state at
this time. "Oh, Charles," he wrote to Lamb, early in
February, just before the course of lectures Avas to begin,
"I am very, very ill. Vixiy The sad truth is that, as
seems to have been always the case with him when living
alone, he was during these months of his residence in
London more constantly and hopelessly under the do-
minion of opium than ever.
CHAPTER VII.
RETUEN TO THE LAKES. — FROM! KESWICK TO GRASMERE. — WITH
AVORDSWORTH AT ALLAN BANK. — THE "FRIEND." — QITITS
THE LAKE COUNTRY FOREVER.
[1809-1810.]
From the close of this series of lectures in the month
of May, 1808, until the end of the year it is impossible
to trace Coleridge's movements or even to determine the
nature of his occupation with any approach to exactitude.
The probability is, however, that he remained in London
at his lodgings in the Courier office, and that he sup-
ported himself by rendering assistance in various ways to
Mr. Daniel Stuart. "VVe know nothing of him, however,
with certainty until we fiud him once more at the Lakes
in the early part of the year 1809, but not in his own
home. Wordsworth had removed from his former abode
at Grasmere to Allan Bank, a larger house some three-
quarters of a mile distant, and there Coleridge took up his
residence, more, it would seem, as a permanent inmate of
his friend's house than as a guest. The specific cause of
this migration from Greta Hall to Allan Bank does not
appear, but all the accessible evidence, contemporary and
subsequent, seems to point to the probability that it was
the result of a definite break-up of Coleridge's own home.
Ee continued, at any rate, to reside in Wordsworth's house
118 COLERIDGE. [chap.
during the whole seven months of his editorship of the
Friend^ a new venture in periodical literature which he
undertook at this period ; and we shall see that upon its
failure he did not resume his residence at Greta Hall, but
quitted the Lake country at once and forever.
We need not take too literally Coleridge's declaration
in the Biographia Literaria that one "main object of his
in starting the Friend was to establish the philosophical
distinction between the Reason and the Understanding."
Had this been so, or at least had the periodical been act-
ually conducted in conformity with any such purpose,
even the chagrined projector himself could scarcely have
had the face to complain, as Coleridge did very bitterly,
of the reception accorded to it by the public. The most
unpractical of thinkers can hardly have imagined that the
"general reader" would "take in" a weekly metaphys-
ical journal published at a town in Cumberland. The
Friend was not quite so essentially hopeless an enter-
prise as that would have been ; but the accidents of
mismanagement and imprudence soon made it, for all
practical purposes, sufficiently desperate. Even the for-
lorn Watchman, which had been set on foot when Cole-
ridge had fourteen years' less experience of the world,
was hardly more certainly foredoomed. The first care of
the founder of the Friend was to select, as the place of
publication, a town exactly twenty -eight miles from his
own abode — a distance virtually trebled, as De Quincey
observes, " by the interposition of Kirkstone, a mountain
only to be scaled by a carriage ascent of three miles,
and so steep in parts that witliout four horses no solitary
traveller can persuade the neighbouring innkeepers to con-
vey him." Here, however, at Penrith, "by way of pur-
chasing intolerable difficulties at the highest price," Coie-
VII.] RETURN TO THE LAKES. 119
ridge was advised and actually persuaded to set up a printer,
to buy and lay in a stock of paper, types, etc., instead of
resorting to some printer already established at a nearer
place — as, for instance, Kendal, which was ten miles nearer,
and connected with Coleridge's then place of residence by
a daily post, whereas at Penrith there was no post at all.
Having thus studiously and severely handicapped himself,
the projector of the new periodical set to work, upon the
strength of what seems to have been in great measure a
fancy list of subscribers, to print and, so far as his extraor-
dinary arrangements permitted, to circulate his journal.
With naive sententiousness he warns the readers of the Bio-
graphia Literaria against trusting, in their own case, to such
a guarantee as he supposed himself to possess. "You can-
not," he observes, " be certain that the names of a subscrip-
tion list liave been put down by sufficient authority ; or,
should that be ascertained, it still remains to be known
whether they were not extorted by some over -zealous
friend's importunity ; whether the subscriber had not yield-
ed his name merely from want of courage to say no ! and
with the intention of dropping the work as soon as possi-
ble." Thus, out of a hundred patrons who had been ob-
tained for the Friend by an energetic canvasser, " ninety
threw up the publication before the fourth number with-
out any notice, though it was well known to them that in
consequence of the distance and the slowness and irregu-
larity of the conveyance " [it is amusing to observe the way
in which Coleridge notes these drawbacks of his own crea-
tion as though they were " the act of God "] " I was com-
pelled to lay in a stock of stamped paper for at least eight
wrecks beforehand, each sheet of which stood me in five-
pence previous to its arrival at my printer's; though the
subscription money was not to be received till the twenty
T G*
120 COLERIDGE. [chap.
first week after the commencement of the work ; and, last-
ly, though it was in nine cases out of ten impracticable for
me to receive the money for two or three numbers without
paying an equal sum for the postage."
Enough appears in this undesignedly droll account of
the venture to show pretty clearly that, even had the Friend
obtained a reasonable measure of popularity at starting,
the flagrant defects in the methods of distributing and
financing it must have insured its early decease. But, as
a matter of fact, it had no chance of popularity from the
outset. Its first number appeared on 1st August, 1809, and
Coleridge, writing to Southey on 20th October of the same
year, speaks of his " original apprehension " that the plan
and execution of the Friend is so utterly unsuitable to the
public taste as to preclude all rational hopes of its success.
" Much," he continues, " might have been done to have
made the former numbers less so, by the interposition of
others written more expressly for general interest ;" and he
promises to do his best in future to " interpose tales and
whole numbers of amusement, which will make the periods
lighter and shorter." Meanwhile he begs Southey to write
a letter to the Friend in a lively style, rallying its editor
on "bis Quixotism in expecting that the public will ever
pretend to understand his lucubrations or feel any interest
in subjects of such sad and unkempt antiquity." Southey,
ever good-natured, complied, even amid the unceasing press
of his work, with the request; and to the letter of lightly-
touched satire which he contributed to the journal he added
a few private lines of friendly counsel, strongly urging Cole-
ridge to give two or three amusing numbers, and he would
hear of admiration on every side. "Insert too," he sug-
gested, "a few more poems — any that you have, except
Christabel, for that is of too much value. And write now
vii.] THE «' FRIEND." 121
that character of Bonaparte, announced in former times for
' to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.' " It was too
late, however, for good advice to be of any avail : the Friend
was past praying for. It lingered on till its twenty-eighth
number, and expired, unlike the Watchman, without any
farewell to its friends, in the third week of March, 1810.
The republication of this periodical, or rather selections
from it, which appeared in 1818, is hardly perhaps described
with justice in De Quincey's words as " altogether and ab-
solutely a new work." A reader can, at any rate, form a
pretty fair estimate from it of the style and probable pub-
lic attractions of the original issue ; and a perusal of it,
considered in its character as a bid for the patronage of the
general reader, is certainly calculated to excite an astonish-
ment too deep for words. We have, of course, to bear in
mind that the standard of the readable in our grandfathers'
days was a more liberal and tolerant one than it is in our
own. In those days of leisurely communications and slow-
ly moving events there was relatively at least a far larger
public for a weekly issue of moral and philosophical essays,
under the name of a periodical, than it would be found easy
to secure at present, when even a monthly discourse upon
things in general requires Mr. Ruskin's brilliancy of elo-
quence, vivacity of humour, and perpetual charm of unex-
pectedness to carry it off. Still the Spectator continued to
be read in Coleridge's day, and people therefore must have
had before them a perpetual example of what it was possi-
ble to do in the way of combining entertainment with in-
struction. How, then, it could have entered into the mind
of the most sanguine projector to suppose that the lon-
gueurs and the difficulty of the Friend would be patiently
borne with for the sake of the solid nutriment which it
contained it is quite impossible to understand. Even sup-
122 COLERIDGE. [chap.
posing that a weekly, -whose avowed object was " to aid in
the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals, and
religion," could possibly be floated, even " with literary
amusements interspersed," it is evident that very much
would depend upon the character of these "amusements"
themselves. In the republication of 1817 they appear un-
der the heading of " landing-places." One of them con-
sists of a parallel between Voltaire and Erasmus, and be-
tween Rousseau and Luther, founded, of course, on the re-
spective attitudes of the two pairs of personages to the
Revolution and the Reformation. Another at the end
of the scries consists of a criticism of, and panegyric on.
Sir Alexander Ball, the governor of Malta. Such are the
landing - places. But how should any reader, wearied
with "forever climbing up the climbing wave" of Cole-
ridge's eloquence, have found rest or refreshment on
one of these uncomfortable little sandbanks? It was
true that the original issue of the Friend contained po-
etical contributions which do not appear in the repub-
lication ; but poetry in itself, or, at any rate, good po-
etry, is not a relief to the overstrained faculties, and,
even if it were, the relief would have been provided at
too infrequent intervals to affect the general result. The
fact is, however, that Coleridge's own theory of his duty
as a public instructor was in itself fatal to any hope of
his venture proving a commercial success. Even when
entreated by Southey to lighten the character of the peri-
odical, he accompanies his admission of the worldly wis-
dom of the advice with something like a protest against
such a departure from the severity of his original plan.
His object, as he puts it with much cogency from liis
own unpractical point of view — his object being to teach
men how to think on politics, religion, and morals, and
vii] THE "FRIEND." 123
thinking being* a very arduous and distasteful business to
the mass of mankind, it followed that the essays of the
Friend (and particularly the earlier essays, in which the
reader required to be "grounded" in his subject) could
hardly be agreeable reading. With perfect frankness in-
deed does he admit in his prospectus that he must "sub-
mit to be thought dull by those who seek amusement
only." He hoped, however, as he says in one of his ear-
lier essays, to become livelier as he went on. "The prop-
er merit of a foundation is its massiveness and solidity.
The conveniences and ornaments, the gilding and stucco-
work, the sunshine and sunny prospects, will come with
the superstructure." But the building, alas! was never
destined to be completed, and the architect had his own
misgivings about the attractions even of the completed
edifice. "I dare not flatter myself that any endeavours
of mine, compatible with the duty I owe to the truth and
the hope of permanent utility, will render the Friend
agreeable to the majority of what is called the reading
public. I never expected it. How indeed could I when,
etc." Yet, in spite of these professions, it is clear from
the prospectus that Coleridge believed in the possibility
of obtaining a public for the Friend. He says that " a
motive for honourable ambition was supplied by the fact
that every periodical paper of the kind now attempted,
which had been conducted with zeal and ability, was not
only well received at the time, but has become popular ;"
and he seems to regard it as a comparatively unimportant
circumstance that the Friend would be distinguished from
" its celebrated predecessors, the Spectator and the like,"
by the "greater length of the separate essays, by their
closer connection with each othei", and by the predomi-
nance of one object, and the common bearing of all to
124 COLERIDGE. [chap.
one end." It was, of course, exactly this plus of prolix-
ity and minus of variety which lowered the sum of the
Friend's attractions so far below that of the Spectator as
to deprive the success of Addison of all its value as a
precedent.
Nor is it easy to agree with the editor of the reprint
of 1837 that the work, " with all its imperfections, is per-
haps the most vigorous" of its author's compositions.
That there are passages in it which impress us by their
force of expression, as well as by subtlety or beauty of
thought, must of course be admitted. It was impossible
to a man of Coleridge's literary power that it should be
otherwise. But " vigorous " is certainly not the adjective
which seems to me to suggest itself to an impartial critic
of these too copious disquisitions. Making every allow-
ance for their necessary elasticity of scope as being de-
signed to " prepare and discipline the student's moral and
intellectual being, not to propound dogmas and theories
for his adoption," it must, I think, be allowed that they
are wanting in that continuity of movement and co-ordi-
nation of parts which, as it seems to me, enters into any
intelligible definition of " vigour," as attributed to a work
of moral and political exposition considered as a whole.
The writer's discursiveness is too often and too vexatious-
ly felt by the reader to permit of the survival of any sense
of theorematic unity in his mind ; he soon gives up
all attempts at periodical measurement of his own and
his author's progress towards the prescribed goal of their
journey ; and he resigns himself in this, as in so many
other of Coleridge's prose works, to a study of isolated
and detached passages. So treated, however, one may
freely admit that the Friend is fully worthy of the ad-
miration with which Mr. H. N. Colcridcfc regarded it. If
Til.] THE "FRIEND." 125
not the most vigorous, it is beyond all comparison the
most characteristic of all his uncle's performances in this
field of his multiform activity. In no way could the pe-
culiar pregnancy of Coleridge's thoughts, the more than
scholastic subtlety of his dialectic, and the passionate
fervour of his spirituality be more impressively exhibited
than by a well-made selection of loci from the pages of
the Friend.
CHAPTER VIII.
LONDON AGAIN. — SECOND RECOUESE TO JOURNALISM. — THE
"courier" articles. — THE SHAKESPEARE LECTURES. —
PRODUCTION OP "remorse." — AT BRISTOL AGAIN AS LECT-
URER. — RESIDENCE AT CALNE. — INCREASING ILL HEALTH
AND EMBARRASSMENTS. — RETIREMENT TO MR. GILLMAN's.
[1810-1816.]
The life led by Coleridge during the six years next en-
suing is diflScult to trace, even in the barest outline ; to
give a detailed and circumstantial account of it from any
ordinarily accessible source of information is impossible.
Nor is it, I imagine, very probable that even the most
exhaustive search among whatever unprinted records may
exist in the possession of his friends would at all com-
pletely supply the present lack of biographical material.
For not only had it become Coleridge's habit to disappear
from the sight of his kinsmen and acquaintances for long
periods together; he had fallen almost wholly silent also.
They not only ceased to see him, but they ceased to hear
of him. Letters addressed to him, even on subjects of
the greatest importance, would remain for months unno-
ticed, and in many instances would receive no answer at
all. His correspondence during tlic next half-dozen years
must have been of the scantiest amount and the most in-
termittent character, and a biographer could hope, there-
CHAP. VIII.] LONDON AGAIN. 127
fore, for but little aid in bridging- over the large gaps in
his knowledge of this period, even if every extant letter
written by Coleridge during its continuance were to be
given to the world.
Such light, too, as is retrospectively thrown upon it by
Coleridge's correspondence of a later date is of the most
fitful description — scarcely more than serves, in fact, for
the rendering of darkness visible. Even the sudden and
final departure from the Lakes it leaves involved in as
much obscurity as ever. Writing to Mr. Thomas Allsop*
from Ranisgate twelve years afterwards (8th October,
1822) he says that he "counts four grasping and griping
sorrows in his past life." The first of these " was when "
[no date given] " the vision of a happy home sank for-
ever, and it became impossible for me longer even to
hope for domestic happiness under the name of husband."
That is plain enough on the whole, though it still leaves
us in some uncertainty as to whether the " sinking of the
vision" was as gradual as the estrangement between hus-
band and wife, or whether he refers to some violent rupt-
ure of relations with Mrs. Coleridge, possibly precipitating
his departure from the Lakes. If so, the second ''griping
' Coleridge made the acquaintance of this gentleman, who became
his enthusiastic disciple, in 1818. Ilis 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 stock-broker, who has that
smile," and adds : " To those who wish to sec the only thing left on
earth, if it is stiU left, uf 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 assign-
able security would have longed to " feel Mr. AUsop's head !"
128 COLERIDGE. [chap.
and grasping sorrow " followed very quickly on the first,
for be says that it overtook him "on the night of his ar-
rival from Grasmere with Mr. and Mrs. Montagu ;" while
in the same breath and paragraph, and as though undoubt-
edly referring to the same thing, he speaks of the " de-
struction of a friendship of fifteen years when, just at the
moment of Fenner and Curtis's (the publishers) bankrupt-
cy " (by which Coleridge was a heavy loser, but which did
not occur till seven years afterwards), somebody indicated
by seven asterisks and possessing an income of £1200 a
year, was " totally transformed into baseness." There is
certainly not much light here, any more than in the equal-
ly enigmatical description of the third sorrow as being
"in some sort included in the second," so that " what the
former was to friendship the latter was to a still more in-
ward bond." The truth is, that all Coleridge's references
to himself in his later years are shrouded in a double ob-
scurity. One veil is thrown over them by his deliberate
preference for abstract and mystical forms of expression,
and another perhaps by that kind of shameful secretive-
ness which grows upon all men who become the slaves of
concealed indulgences, and which often displays itself on
occasions when it has no real object to gain of any kind
whatever.
Thus much only we know, that on reaching London in
the summer of 1810 Coleridge became the guest of the
Montagus, and that, after some months' residence with
them, he left, as the immediate result of some difference
with his host which was never afterwards composed.
Whether it arose from the somewhat trivial cause to
which De Quincey has, admittedly upon the evidence of
"the learned in literary scandal," referred it, it is now im-
possible to say. But at some time or other, towards the
Tin.] LONDON AGAIN. 129
close probably of 1810, or in the early months of 1811,
Coleridge quitted Mr. Montagu's house for that of Mr.
John Morgan, a companion of his early Bristol days, and
a common friend of his and Southey's ; and here, at No. 7
Portland Place, Hammersmith, he was residing when, for
the second time, he resolved to present himself to the
London public in the capacity of lecturer. His services
were on this occasion engaged by the London Philosophi-
cal Society, at Crane Court, Fleet Street, and their pro-
spectus announced that on Monday, 18th November, Mr.
Coleridge would commence " a course of lectures on
Shakspeare and Milton, in illustration of the principles
of poetry and their application, on grounds of criticism,
to the most popular works of later English poets, those
of the living included. After an introductory lecture on
false criticism (especially in poetry) and on its causes, two-
thirds of the remaining course," continues the prospectus,
"will be assigned, 1st, to a philosophical analysis and ex-
planation of all the principal characters of our great dram-
atists, as Othello, Falstaff, Richard the Third, Ligo, Ham-
let, etc., and to a critical comparison of Shakspeare in
respect of diction, imagery, management of the passions,
judgment in the construction of his dramas — in short, of
all that belongs to him as a poet, and as a dramatic poet,
with his contemporaries or immediate successors, Jonson,
Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, and in the en-
deavour to determine which of Shakspeare's merits and
defects are common to him, with other writers of the
same age, and what remain peculiar to his genius."
A couple of months before the commencement of this
course, viz., in September, 1811, Coleridge seems to have
entered into a definite journalistic engagement with his old
editor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, then the proprietor of the Con-
130 COLERIDGE. [chap.
rier. It was not, however, his first connection with that
journal. He had ah-eady published at least one piece of
verse in its columns, and two years before, while the
Friend was still in existence, he had contributed to it a
series of letters on the struggle of the Spaniards against
their French invaders. In these, as though to show that
under the ashes of his old democratic enthusiasm still lived
its wonted fires, and that the inspiration of a popular cause
was only needed to reanimate them, we find, with less of
the youthful lightness of touch and agility of movement,
a very near approach to the vigour of his early journal-
istic days. Whatever may be thought of the historic
value of the parallel which he institutes between the
straggle of the Low Countries against their tyrant, and
that of the Peninsula against its usurping conqueror, it is
worked out with remarkable ingenuity of completeness.
"Whole pages of the letters are radiant with that steady
flame of hatred which, ever since the hour of his disillu-
sionment, had glowed in his breast at the name and
thought of Bonaparte ; and whenever he speaks of the
Spaniards, of Spanish patriotism, of the Spanish Cortes,
we see that the names of "the people," of "freedom," of
" popular assembly," have some of their old magic for
him still. The following passage is almost pathetic in its
reminder of the days of 1792, before that modern Le-
onidas, the young French Republic, had degenerated into
the Xerxes of the Empire :
" The power which raised up, established, and enriched the Dutch
republic — the same mighty power is no less at work in the present
struggle of the Spanish nation — a power which mocks the calculations
of ordinary statecraft too subtle to be weighed against it, and mere
outward brute force too different from it to admit of comparison. A
power as mighty in the rational creation as the clement of electricity
vni.] THE "COURIER" ARTICLES. 131
in the material world ; and, like that element, infinite in its affinities,
infinite in its mode of action, combining the most discordant natures,
fixing the most volatile, and arming tlie sluggish vapour of the marsh
with arrows of fire ; working alike in silence and in tempest, in
growth and in destruction ; now contracted to an individual soul, and
now, as in a moment, dilating itself over a whole nation ! Am I asked
what this mighty power may be, and wiierein it exists ? If we are
worthy of the fame whicli we possess as the countrymen of Hamp-
den, Russell, and Algernon Sidne}', we shall find the answer in our
own hearts. It is the power of the insulted free-will, steadied by the
approving conscience and struggling against brute force and iniqui-
tous compulsion for the common rights of human nature, brought
home to our inmost souls by being, at the same time, the rights of
our betrayed, insulted, and bleeding country."
And as this passage recalls the most striking character-
istics of his earlier style, so may its conclusion serve as a
fair specimen of the calmer eloquence of his later manner :
" It is a painful truth, sir, that these men who appeal most to facts,
and pretend to take them for their exclusive guide, are the very per-
sons who most disregard the liglit of experience when it refers them
to the mightiness of their own inner nature, in opposition to those
forces which they can see with their eyes, and reduce to figures upon
a slate. And yet, sir, what is history for the greater and more useful
part but a voice from the sepulchres of our forefathers, assuring us,
from their united experience, that our spirits are as much stronger
than our bodies as they are nobler and more permanent? The his-
toric muse appears in her loftiest character as the nurse of Hope.
It is her appropriate praise that her records enable the magnanimous
to silence the selfish and cowardly by appealing to actual events for
the information of these truths wliich they themselves first learned
from the surer oracle of their own reason."
But this reanimation of energy was but a transient phe-
nomenon. It did not survive the first freshness of its
exciting cause. The Spanish insurrection grew into the
Peninsular war, and though the glorious series of Welling-
132 COLERIDGE. [chap.
ton's victories might well, one would tbinlc, have sustained
the rhetorical temperature at its proper pitch, it failed to
do so. Or was it, as the facts appear now and then to
suggest, that Coleridge at Grasmere or Keswick — Coleridge
in the inspiring (and restraining) companionship of close
friends and literary compeers — was an altogether different
man from Coleridge in London, alone with his thoughts
and his opium? The question cannot be answered with
confidence, and the fine quality of the lectures on Shake-
speare is sufficient to show that, for some time, at any rate,
after his final migration to London, his critical faculty
retained its full vigour. But it is beyond dispute that his
regular contributions to the Courier in 1811-12 are not
only vastly inferior to his articles of a dozen years before
in the Morning Post but fall sensibly short of the level of
the letters of 1809, from which extract has just been made.
Their tone is spiritless, and they even lack distinction of
style. Their very subjects, and the mode of treating them,
appear to show a change in Coleridge's attitude towards
public affairs if not in the very conditions of his journalis-
tic employment. They have much more of the character
of newspaper hack-work than his earlier contributions. He
seems to have been, in many instances, set to write a mere
report, and often a rather dry and mechanical report, of
this or the other Peninsular victory. He seldom or never
discusses the political situation, as his wont has been, au
large ; and in place of broad statesmanlike reflection on
the scenes and actors in the great world-drama then in
progress, we meet with too much of that sort of criticism
on the consistency and capacity of " our contemporary, the
Morning Chronicle^'' which had less attraction, it may be
suspected, even for the public of its own day than for the
journalistic profession, while for posterity, of course, it
TiiI.J THE "COURIER" ARTICLES. 133
possesses no interest at all. The series of contributions
extends from September of 1811 until April of the follow-
ing year, and appears to have nearly come to a premature
and abrupt close in the intermediate July, when an article
written by Coleridge in strong opposition to the proposed
reinstatement of the Duke of York in the command-in-
chief was, by ministerial influence, suppressed before pub-
lication. This made Coleridge, as his daughter informs us
on the authority of Mr. Crabb Robinson, " very uncomfort-
able," and he was desirous of being engaged on another
paper. He wished to be connected with the Times, and
"I spoke," says Mr. Robinson, "with Walter on the sub-
ject, but the negotiation failed."
^Yith the conclusion of the lectures on Shakespeare, and
the loss of the stimulus, slight as it then was to him, of
regular duties and recurring engagements, Coleridge seems
to have relapsed once more into thoroughly desultory hab-
its of work. The series of aphorisms and reflections which
he contributed in 1812 to Southey's Omniana, witty, sug-
gestive, profound as many of them are, must not of course
be referred to the years in which they were given to the
world. They belong unquestionably to the order of mar-
ginalia, the scattered notes of which De Quincey speaks
with not extravagant admiration, and which, under the
busy pencil of a commentator always indefatigable in
the strenua inertia of reading, had no doubt accumu-
lated in considerable quantities over a long course of
years.
The disposal, however, of this species of literary mate-
rial could scarcely have been a source of much profit to
him, and Coleridge's difficulties of living must by this time
have been growing acute. His pension from the Wedg-
woods had been assigned, his surviving son has stated, to
134 COLERIDGE. [chap.
the use of his family, and even this had been in the pre-
vious year reduced by half. " In Coleridge's neglect," ob-
serves Miss Meteyard, "of his duties to his wife, his chil-
dren, and his friends, must be sought the motives which
led Mr. Wedgwood in 1811 to withdraw his share of the
annuity. An excellent, even over-anxious father, he was
likely to be shocked at a neglect which imposed on the
generosity of Southey, himself heavily burdened, those du-
ties which every man of feeling and honour proudly and
even jealously guards as his own. . . . The pension of £150
per annum had been originally granted with the view to
secure Coleridge independence and leisure while he effected
some few of his manifold projects of literary work. But
ten years had passed, and these projects were still in nubi-
hus — even the life of Lessing, even the briefer memoir of
Thomas Wedgwood; and gifts so well intentioned, had as
it were, ministered to evil rather than to good." We can
hardly wonder at the step, however we may regret it ; and
if one of the reasons adduced in defence of it savours some-
what of the fallacy known as a non causa pro causa, we may
perhaps attribute that rather to the maladroitness of Miss
Meteyard's advocacy than to the weakness of Mr. Wedg-
wood's logic. The fact, however, that this " excellent, even
over-anxious father " was shocked at a neglect which im-
posed a burden on the genarosity of Southey, is hardly a
just ground for cutting off one of the supplies by which
that burden was partially relieved. As to the assignment
of the pension to the family, it is impossible to question
what has been positively affirmed by an actual member of
that family, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge himself; though,
when he adds that not only was the school education of
both the sons provided from this source, but that through
his (Coleridge's) influence they were both sent to colk-ge,
VIII.] TRODUCTIOX OF "EEMORSE." 135
Ills statement is at variance, as will be presently seen, with
an anthority equal to his own.
In 1812, at any rate, we may well believe that Cole-
ridge's necessities had become pressing, and the timely ser-
vice then rendered to him by Lord Byron may have been
suggested almost as much by a knowledge of his needs as
by admiration for the dramatic merits of his long-since
rejected tragedy. Osorio's time had at any rate come.
The would-be fratricide changed his name to Ordonio, and
ceased to stand sponsor to the play, which was rechristened
Hemorsc, and accepted at last, upon Byron's recommen-
dation, by the committee of Drury Lane Theatre, the play-
house at whose doors it had knocked vainly fifteen years
l)cfore it was performed there for the first time on the
2:3d of January, 1813. The prologue and epilogue, with-
out which in those times no gentleman's drama was ac-
counted complete, vv'as written, the former by Charles
Lamb, the latter by the author himself. It obtained a
brilliant success on its first representation, and was hon-
oured with what was in those days regarded as the very
respectable run of twenty nights.
The success, however, which came so opportunely for
Ills material necessities was too late to produce any good
effect upon Coleridge's mental state. But a month after
the production of his tragedy wc find him writing in the
most dismal strain of hypochondria to Thomas Poole.
The only pleasurable sensation which the success of Re-
morse had given him was, he declares, the receipt of his
friend's " heart-engendered lines " of congratulation. " No
grocer's apprentice, after his first month's permitted riot,
was ever sicker of figs and raisins than I of hearing about
the Remorse. The endless rat-a-tat-tat at our black-and-blue
bruised doors, and my three master- fiends, proof- sheets,
K 7
136 COLERIDGE. [chap.
letters, and — worse than these — invitations to large din-
ners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputa-
tion of pride, etc., oppress me so much that my spirits
quite sink under it. I have never seen the play since
the first night. It has been a good thing for the theatre.
They will get eight or ten thousand pounds by it, and
I shall get more than by all my literary labours put to-
getlier — nay, thrice as much." So large a sura of money
as this must have amounted to should surely have lasted
him for years; but the particular species of intemperance
to which he was now hopelessly enslaved is probably the
most costly of all forms of such indulgence, and it seems
pretty evident that the proceeds of his theatrical coup
were consumed in little more than a year.
Early in 1814, at any rate, Coleridge once more returned
to his old occupation of lecturer, and this time not in
London, but in the scene of his first appearance in that
capacity. The lectures which he proposed to deliver at
Bristol were, in fact, a repetition of the course of 1811-
12 ; but the ways of the lecturer, to judge from an amus'
ing story recorded by Cottle, more nearly resembled his
proceedings in 1808. A "brother of Mr. George Cum-
berland," who happened to be his fellow-traveller to Bris-
tol on this occasion, relates that before the coach started
Coleridge's attention was attracted by a little Jew boy
selling pencils, with whom he entered into conversation,
and with Avhose superior qualities he was so impressed as
to declare that " if he had not an important engagement
at Bristol he would stay behind to provide some better
condition for the lad." The coach having started, " the
gentleman " (for his name was unknown to the narrator
of the incident) " talked incessantly and in a most enter-
taining way for thirty miles out of London, and, after-
VIII.] AT BRISTOL AS LECTURER. U1
wards, with little intermission till they reached Marlbor-
ough," when he discovered that a lady in the coach with
him was a particular friend of his; and on arriving at
Bath he quitted the coach declaring that he was deter-
mined not to leave her till he had seen her safe to her
brother's door in North Wales. This was the day fixed
for the delivery of Coleridge's first lecture. Two or three
days afterwards, having completed his detour by North
Wales, he arrived at Bristol ; another day was fixed for
the commencement of the course, and Coleridge then pre-
sented himself an hour after the audience had taken their
seats. The "important engagement" might be broken,
it seems, for a mere whim, though not for a charitable
impulse — a distinction testifying to a mixture of insincer-
ity and unpunctuality not pleasant to note as an evidence
of the then state of Coleridge's emotions and will.
Thus inauspiciously commenced, there was no reason
why the Bristol lectures of 1814 should be more success-
ful than the London Institution lectures of 1808; nor
were they, it appears, in fact. They arc said to have
been "sparsely attended" — no doubt owing to the natural
unwillingness of people to pay for an hour's contempla-
tion of an empty platform ; and their pecuniary returns
in consequence were probably insignificant. Coleridge
remained in Bristol till the month of August, when he
returned to London.
The painful task of tracing his downward course is now
almost completed. Li the middle of this year he touched
the lowest point of his descent. Cottle, who had a good
deal of intercourse with him by speech and letter in 1814,
and who had not seen him since 1807, was shocked by
his extreme prostration, and then for the first time ascer-
tained the cause. " In 1814," he says in his Recollections,
138 COLERIDGE. [chap.
" S. T. C. liad been long, very long, in tlic liabit of taking
from two quarts of laudanum a week to a pint a day, and
on one occasion lie had been known to take in the twenty-
four Lours a whole quart of laudanum. The serious ex-
penditure of money resulting from this habit was, the least
evil, though very great, and must have absorbed all the
produce of his writings and lectures and the liberalities of
his friends." Cottle addressed to him a letter of not very
delicate remonstrance on the subject, to which Coleritigc
replied in his wontedly humble strain.
There is a certain Pharisaism about the Bristol poet-
publisher which renders it necessary to exercise some lit-
tle caution in the acceptance of his account of Coleridge's
condition ; but the facts, from whatever source one seeks
them, appear to acquit him of any exaggeration in his
summing up of the melancholy matter. "A general im-
pression," he says, " prevailed on the minds of Coleridge's
friends that it was a desperate case, that paralysed all their
efforts ; that to assist Coleridge with money which, under
favourable circumstances would have been most promptly
advanced, would now only enlarge his capacity to obtain
the opium which was consuming him. We merely knew
that Coleridge had retired with his friend, Mr. John Mor-
gan, to a small house at Calne, in Wiltshire."
It must have been at Calne, then, that Coleridge com-
posed the scries of " Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher con-
cerning his charge to the Grand Jury of the county of
Wexford, at the summer Assizes in 1814," which appeared
at intervals in the Courier between 20th September and
10th December of this year. Their subject, a somewhat
injndicipnsly animated address to the aforesaid Grand
Jury on the subject of the relations between Catholicism
and Protestantism in Ireland, was well calculated to stimu-
VIII.] KESIDENCE AT CALNE. 139
late the literary activity of a man who always took some-
thing of the keen interest of the modern Radical in the
eternal Irish question ; and the letters are not wanting
either in argumentative force or in grave impressiveness
of style. But their lack of spring and energy, as com-
pared with Coleridge's earlier work in journalism, is pain-
fully visible throughout.
Calne, it is to be supposed, was still Coleridge's place
of abode when Southey (iTth October) wrote Cottle that
letter which appears in his Corresjwndence, and which il-
lustrates with such sad completeness the contrast between
the careers of the two generous, romantic, brilliant youths
who had wooed their wives together — and bctv/een the
fates, one must add, of the two sisters who had listened
to their wooing — eighteen years before : a letter as hon-
ourable to the writer as it is the reverse to its subject.
" Can you," asks Southey, " tell me anything of Coleridge?
A few lines of introduction for a son of Mi". , of St.
James's, in your city, are all that we have received from
him since I saw him last September twelvemonth (1813)
in town. The children being thus left entirely to chance,
I have applied to his brothers at Ottey (Ottery ?) concern-
ing them, and am in hopes through their means and the
assistance of other friends of sending Hartley to college.
Lady Beaumont has promised £30 a year for the pur-
pose, and Poole £10. I wrote to Coleridge three or four
months ago, telling him that unless he took some steps
in providing for this object I must make the application,
and required his answer within a given terra of three weeks.
lie received th-e letter, and in his note by Mr. prom-
ised to answer it, but he has never taken any further
notice of it. I have acted with the advice of Words-
worth. The brothers, as I expected, promise their con-
140 COLERIDGE. [ni.u-.
curi'cncc, and I daily expect a letter stating to what extent
tlicy will contribute." With this letter before him an im-
partial biographer can hardly be expected to adopt the
theory which has commended itself to the filial piety of
the Rev. Derwent Coleridge — namely, that it was through
the father's " influence" that the sons were sent to college.
On a plain matter of fact such as this, one may be per-
mitted, without indelicacy, to uj)hold the conclusions com-
pelled by the evidence. Such expressions of opinion, on
the other hand, as that Coleridge's " separation from his
family, brought about and continued through the force
of circumstances over which he had far less control than
has been commonly supposed, was in fact nothing else but
an over-prolonged absence ;" and that " from first to last
he took an affectionate, it may be said a passionate, inter-
est in the welfare of his children " — such expressions of
mere opinion as these it may be proper enough to pass by
in respectful silence.
The following year brought with it no improvement in
the embarrassed circumstances, no reform of the disordered
life. Still domiciled with Mr. Morgan at Calne, the self-
made sufferer writes to Cottle : " You will wish to tnow
something of myself. In health I am not worse than
when at Bristol I was best ; yet fluctuating, yet unhappy,
in circumstances poor indeed 1 I have collected my scat-
tered and my manuscript poems sufficient to mate one
volume. Enough I have to make another. But, till the
latter is finished, I cannot, without great loss of character,
publish the former, on account of the arrangement, be-
sides the necessity of correction. For instance, I earnest-
ly wish to begin the volumes with what has never been
seen by any, however few, such as a series of odes on the
different sentences of the Lord's Prayer, and, more than
Till.] COLERIDGE AND BYRON. 141
all this, to finish my greater work on * Christianity con-
sidered as philosophy, and as the only philosophy.'"
Then follows a request for a loan of forty pounds on the
security of the MSS., an advance which Cottle declined
to make, though he sent Coleridge " some smaller tem-
porary relief." The letter concludes with a reference to
a project for taking a house and receiving pupils to board
and instruct, which Cottle appeared to consider the crown-
ing "degradation and ignominy of all."
A few days later we find Lord Byron again coming to
Coleridge's assistance with a loan of a hundred pounds
and words of counsel and encouragement. Why should
not the author of Remorse repeat his success ? " In Kean,"
writes Byron, " there is an actor worthy of expressing the
thoughts of the character which you have every power of
embodying, and I cannot but regret that the part of Or-
donio was disposed of before his appearance at Drury
Lane. We have had nothing to be mentioned in the
same breath with Remorse for very many years, and I
should think that the reception of that play was sufficient
to encourage the highest hopes of author and audience."
The advice was followed, and the drama of Zapolya was
the result. It is a work of even less dramatic strength
than its predecessor, and could scarcely, one thinks, have
been as successful with an audience. It was not, how-
ever, destined to see the footlights. Before it had passed
the tribunal of the Drury Lane Committee it had lost the
benefit of Byron's patronage through the poet's departure
from England, and the play was rejected by Mr. Douglas
Kinnaird, the then reader for the theatre, who assigned, ac-
cording to Mr. Gillman, " some ludicrous objections to the
metaphysics." Before leaving England, however, Byron
rendered a last, and, as the result proved, a not unimpor-
142 COLERIDGE. [chap.
tant service to las brotlaer-poet. lie introduced Lim to
Mr. Murraj', who, in the following year, undertook the pub-
lication of Christahel — the most successful, in the sense of
the most popular, of all its author's productions in verse.
With the coming of spring in the following year that
dreary story of slow self-destruction, into which the narra-
tive of Coleridge's life from the age of thirty to that of
forty-five resolves itself, was brought to a close. Coleridge
had at last perceived that his only hope of redemption lay
in a voluntary submission of his enfeebled will to the con-
trol of others, and he had apparently just enough strength
of volition to form and execute the necessary resolve. He
appears, in the first instance, to have consulted a physician
of the name of Adams, who, on the 9th of April, 1816, put
himself in communication with Mr. Gillman, of Ilighgate.
"A very learned, but in one respect an unfortunate gentle-
man, has," he wrote, " applied to me on a singular occa-
sion. Ho has for several years been in the habit of talcing
large quantities of opium. For some time past he has
been in vain endeavouring to break himself of it. It is
apprehended his friends are not firm enough, from a
dread lest he should suffer by suddenly leaving it off,
though he is conscious of the contrary, and has pro-
posed to me to submit himself to any regimen, however
severe. With this view he wishes to fix himself in the
house of some medical gentleman who will have the cour-
age to refuse him any laudanum, and under whose assist-
ance, should he be the worse for it, he may be relieved."
Would such a proposal, inquires the writer, be absolutely
inconsistent with Mr. Gilhnan's family arrangements? He
would not, he adds, have proposed it " but on account of
the great importance of the character as a literary man.
His communicative temper will make his society very in-
Till.] AT MR. GILLMAN'S. 143
teresting as well as useful." Mr. Gillinan's acquaintance
with Dr. Adams was but slight, and he bad bad no pre-
vious intention of receiving an inmate into bis bouse. But
the case very naturally interested bira ; be sought an inter-
view with Dr. Adams, and it was agreed that the latter
sbould drive Coleridge to Iligbgate the following evening.
At the appointed hour, however, Coleridge presented him-
bimself alone, and, after spending the evening at Mr. Gill-
man's, left him, as even in bis then condition be left most
people who met him for the first time, completely capti-
vated by the amiability of bis manners and the charm of
his conversation. The next day Mr. Gilhiian received from
him a letter finally settling the arrangement to place him-
self under tlie doctor's care, and concluding with the fol-
lowing pathetic passage :
"And now of myself. My ever wakeful reason and the keenness
of my moral feelings will seeurc you from all unpleasant circum-
stances connected with me save only one, viz., the evasion of a spe-
cific madness. You will never Jiear anything but truth from me ;
prior habits render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but, unless
carefully observed, I dare not promise that I should not, with regard
to this detested poison, be capable of acting one. Not sixty hours
have yet passed without my having taken laudanum, though, for the
last week, comparatively trifling doses. I have full belief that your
anxiety need not be extended beyond the first week, and for the first
week I shall not, must not, be permitted to leave your house, unless
with you ; delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the
servants, and the assistant, must i-eceive absolute commands from
you. The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts
my mind ; but, when I am alone, the horrors I have suffered from
laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwdielm
me. If (as I feel for the Jirst iitne a soothing confidence that it will
prove) I should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it
is not myself only that will love and honour you ; every friend I have
(and, thank God! in spite of this wretched vice I iiave many and
144 COLERIDGE. [chap. viii.
warm ones, who were friends of my youth, and have never deserted
rac) will thank you with reverence. I have taken no notice of your
kind apologies. If I could not be comfortable in your house and
with your family, I should deserve to be miserable."
This letter was written on a Saturday, and on the fol-
lowing Monday Coleridge presented himself at Mr. Gill-
man's, bringing in his hand the proof-sheets of Christabel,
now printed for the first time. lie had looked, as the let-
ter just quoted shows, with a "soothing confidence" to
leaving his retreat at some future period in a restored con-
dition of moral and bodily health ; and as regards the res-
toration, his confidence was in a great measure justified.
But the friendly doors which opened to receive him on
this 15th of April, 1816, were destined to close only upon
his departing bier. Under the watchful and almost rever-
ential care of this well -chosen guardian, sixteen years of
comparatively quiet and well-ordered life, of moderate but
effective literary activity, and of gradual though never
complete emancipation from his fatal habit, were reserved
to him. lie had still, as we shall see, to undergo certain
recurrences of restlessness and renewals of pecuniary diffi-
culty ; his shattered health was but imperfectly and tem-
porarily repaired ; his " shaping spirit of imagination "
could not and did not return ; his transcendental brood-
ings became more and more the " habit of his soul." But
henceforth he recovers for us a certain measure of his long-
lost dignity, and a figure which should always have been
" meet for the reverence of the hearth" in the great house-
hold of English literature, but which had far too long and
too deeply sunk below it, becomes once more a worthy
and even a venerable presence. At evening-time it was
lio:ht.
CHAPTER IX.
LIFE AT HIGHGATE.— RENEWED ACTIVITY. — PUBLICATIONS AND
KEPUBLICATIONS. — THE " BIOGRAPIIIA LITERARIA." — THE
LECTURES OF 1818.— COLERIDGE AS A SHAKESPEARIAN CRITIC.
[1816-1818.]
The results of tlie step wliich 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 produc-
tion, 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 writ-
ers, was no doubt especially irksome to him, and thus in-
sured the publication of many pieces which otherwise
might never have seen the light. The appearance of
Christahel 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 Lag Sermon addressed
to the higher classes of Socieig, with an Appendix contain-
ing Comments and Essays connected with the Study of
the Inspired Writings; in 1817 another Lay Sermon, ad-
dressed to the higher and middle classes on the existing
distresses and discontents ; and in the same year followed
140 COLERIDGE. [chap.
the most important publication of tliis period, tlie Blo-
graplila Lileraria.
In 1817, too, it was that Coleridge at iast 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 SibtjUine Leaves^ as this reissue
was called, had been intended to be preceded by another
volume of verse, and " accordingly on the printer's signa-
tures 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 Zapolt/a 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 Chrir-tmas
tale, became so immediatel}'^ 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 re-
issue to which reference has already been n;ade. 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 Lileraria., or, to give
it its other title. Biographical Sketches of my Literary
Life and Op>inio7is. Its interest, however, is wholly crit-
ical and illustrative; as a narrative it would be fouYid ex-
tremely disappointing and probably iriitating by the aver-
IX.] RENEWED ACTIVITY. 147
age reader. With tlic exception of one or two incidental
disclosures, but little biog-rapliical information is to be de-
rived 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 inconven-
ient work of reference even for these few biographical de-
tails. 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 crit-
ic, or with such admirable completeness by this consum-
mate critic at any other time. Undoubtedly it is not of
the light order of reading; none, or very little, of Cole-
ridge's prose is. The whole of Chapter XV., for instance,
in which the specific elements of "poetic power" arc
"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 repaid. I know of no dissertation
conceived and carried out in terms of the abstract which
in the result so triumphantly justifies itself upon applica-
tion to concrete cases. As regards the question of poetic
expression, and the laws by which its true form is deter-
mined, 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 con-
vincing that the rcailcr, like the contentious student who
listened unwillingly to his professor's demonstration of the
first proposition of Euclid, is compelled to confess that
148 COLERIDGE. [ciiap.
"he Las notliing to reply." To the judicious admirer of
Wordsworth, to every one who, while recognising Words-
worth'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 satis-
faction 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 liave 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 en-
titled 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 jiages of the Excursion, as hav-
ing 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
IX.] rUBLICATIOXS AND REPUBLICATIONS. 149
as that of Resolution and Independence are seen and sliown
to be the mere intruders which we have all felt them to
be. To the Wordsworthian, anxious for a full justifica-
tion of the faith that is in him, t!ie whole body of Cole-
ridge's criticism on his friend's poetry in the Blographia
Literaria mav be confidently recommended. The refu-
tation of what is untenable in Wordsworth's theory, the
censure pronounced upon certain characteristics of Lis
practice, are made all the more impressive by the tone of
cordial admiration which distinguishes every personal ref-
erence to the poet liitnself, and by the unfailing discrim-
ination with which the critic singles out the peculiar beau-
ties of his poetr\'. No finer selection of finely character-
istic Words\vorthi;m passages could perhaps have been
made than those which Coleridge has quoted in illustra-
tion of his criticisms in the eighteenth and two following
chapters of the Biographia Literaria. For the rest, how-
ever, unless indeed one excei)ts the four chapters on the
Hartleian system and its relation to the German school of
philosophy, the boolc is rather one to be dipped into for
the peculiar pleasure which an hour in Coleridge's com-
pany 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 practi-
cal ; its distinctively religious appeals are varied by sound
political and economical arguments ; and the enumeration
and exposure of the various artifices by which most ora-
tors are accustomed to delude their hearers is as masterly
150 COLEraDCE. [chap.
as only Coleridge could have invade 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 2xxssions, like a fused metal, Jill up
the ivide interstices of thought and supply the defective links ;
and thus incoinjjatible assertions are harmonised hy the sen-
sation icithout the sense of connection.'''' The other lay ser-
mon, however, the Statesman'' s Manual, is less appropri-
ately conceived. Its originating proposition, that the Bible
is "the best guide to political skill and foresight," is un-
doubtedly open to dispute, but might nevertheless be capa-
ble of plausible defence upon a 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 prin-
ciples 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
ni'ithcr didst remember the latter end of it. . . . There-
IX.] THE LECTURES OF 1818. ir.l
fore shall evil come upon tlice ; tliou shalt not know from
■whence it riseth, etc' " And to this last-quoted sentence
Coleridge actually appends the following note : " The
reader will scarcely fail to find in this verse a remem-
brancer 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 Avhicli 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. Camming 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 pollc}' upon a due consideration of the possible alle-
goric meaning of a passage in Isaiah, to say nothing of
the obvious objection that this kind of appeal to Soi'tes
Bihlicce 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 docs rather "resem-
ble the overflow of an earnest mind than an orderly and
premeditated," in the sense, at any rate, of a well-con-
sidered " composition."
In the month of January, 1818, Coleridge once more
commenced the delivery of a course of lectures in Lon-
don. 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 tlie
eighth to the fifteenth century ;" and of the second " the
152 COLERIDGE. [chap.
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 de-
voted to the dramatic works of Shakespeare, and to com-
prise 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 fan-
ciful, the droll, the odd, etc." Donne, Dante, an
X.J RENEWAL OF MONEY TROUBLES. 167
men who stipulate that the composition must be more than respecta-
ble.' . . . 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 oscil-
lating between both " [forms of activit}' — the production of perma-
nent 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 dis-
tressing position is that " those who think respectfully and
hope highly of my power and attainments should guaran-
tee me a yearly sum for three or four years, adequate to my
actual support, with such comforts and decencies of ap-
pearance 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 under-
take 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 e.xclusively 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 Christahel, 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, he re-
lied 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 uneasilj', " have I a right to do this ? 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?"
168 COLERIDGE. [chap.
I cannot take upon myself to answer these painful ques-
tions. The reply to be given to theui must depend upon
the judgment which each individual student of this re-
markable but unhappy career may pass upon it as a whole ;
and, while it would be too much to expect that that judg-
ment should be entirely favourable, one may at least be-
lieve 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 Cole-
ridge's moral nature, must materially mitigate the harsh-
ness of its terms.
The story of Coleridge's closing years is soon told. It
is mainly a record of days spent in meditation and dis-
course, 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 Black-
ivood^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 Liter-
ature; but "the series of disquisitions respecting the Egyp-
tian in connection with the sacerdotal theology and in con-
trast 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 impor-
tant contributions to literature there can be no doubt.
New editions of it seem to have been demanded at regular
'•itervals for some twenty years after its first production.
X.] THE "AIDS TO REFLECTION." 1G9
and it appears to have had during the same period a rela-
tively 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 tlic 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 vol-
ume 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 pene-
trating glance into divine mysteries, and writing always
from a soul all tremulous, as it were, with religious sensi-
bility, 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 beau-
ty of style, less even of Coleridge's seldom-failing force
of effective statement, in the Aids to Rejlectioji 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 Relief Bill," appears to mo
to yield a more characteristic flavour of the author's style,
lYO COLERIDGE. [chap
and to exhibit far more of his distinction of literary work-
manship, 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, after-
wards 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 inde-
fatigable 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 por-
tion 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 sorrounded by the ever-watchful tendance of the af-
fectionate 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, more-
over, his pecuniary circumstances were improved to the ex-
tent 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.
X.] VISIT TO GERMANY. Ill
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 Tahle 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 in-
troduced to me, and stayed a miiuite ov 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 Words-
worths must, I should imagine, have been the last expedi-
tion 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 sick-
nesses, 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 diminish 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
112 COLERIDGE. [ciiai>. x.
without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not straiij^e
that, very recently, by-gone 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 fort-
night he died. Midway, however, in this intervening pe-
riod, 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 —
"0 let him pass; he hates hiin
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.
CHAPTER XL
COLERrOGE'S METAPHYSICS AND THEOLOGY. — THE "SPIRITUAL
philosophy" op MR. GREEN.
In spite of all tlie struggles, the resolutions, and the en-
treaties which displayed themselves so distressingly in the
letter to Mr. Allsop, quoted in the last chapter, it is doubt-
ful whether Coleridge's "great work" made much addi-
tional progress during the last dozen years of his life. The
weekly meeting with Mr. Green seems, according to the
latter's biographer, to have been resumed. Mr. Simon
tells us that he continued year after year to sit at the feet
of his Gamaliel, getting more and more insight into his
opinions, until, in 1834, two events occurred which deter-
mined the remaining course of Mr. Green's life. One of
these events, it is needless to say, was Coleridge's death ;
the other was the death of his disciple's father, with the
result of leaving Mr. Green possessed of such ample means
as to render him independent of his profession. The lan-
guage of Coleridge's will, together, no doubt, with verbal
communications which had passed, imposed on Mr. Green
what he accepted as an obligation to devote so far as nec-
essary the whole remaining strength and earnestness of his
life to the one task of systematising, developing, and es-
tablishing the doctrines of the Coleridgian philosophy.
Accordingly, in 1836, two years after his master's death,
IH COLERIDGE. [cuap.
he retired from medical practice, and thenceforward, until
his own death, nearly thirty years afterwards, he applied
himself unceasingly to what was in a twofold sense a
labour of love.
We are not, it seems from his biographer's account, to
suppose that Mr. Green's task was in any material degree
lightened for him by his previous collaboration with Cole-
ridge. The latter had, as we have seen, declared in his
letter to Allsop that " more than a volume " of the great
work had been dictated by him to Mr. Green, so as to ex-
ist in a condition fit for the press ; but this, according to
Mr. Simon, was not the case, and the probability is, there-
fore, that " more than a volume " meant written material
equal in amount to more than a volume — of course, an
entirely different thing. Mr. Simon, at any rate, assures
us that no available written material existed for setting
comprehensively before the public, in Coleridge's own lan-
guage, and in an argued form, the philosophical system
with which he wished his name to be identified. Instead
of it there were fragments — for the most part mutually
inadaptable fragments, and beginnings, and studies of spe-
cial subjects, and numberless notes on the margins and fly-
leaves of books.
With this equipment, such as it was, Mr. Green set to
work to methodise the Coleridgian doctrines, and to con-
struct from them nothing less than such a system of phi-
losophy as should " virtually include the law and expla-
nation of all being, conscious and unconscious, and of all
correlativity and duty, and be applicable directly or by de-
duction to whatsoever the human mind can contemplate
— sensuous or supersensuous — of experience, purpose, or
imagination." Born under post-diluvian conditions, Mr.
Green was of course unable to accomplish his self-proposed
XI.] METAPHYSICS AND THEOLOGY. 116
enterprise, but he must be allowed to have attacted his
task with remarkable energy, " Theology, ethics, politics
and political history, ethnology, language, aesthetics, psy-
chology, physics, and the allied sciences, biology, logic,
mathematics, pathology, all these subjects," declares his
biographer, " were thoughtfully studied by him, in at least
their basial principles and metaphysics, and most were elab-
orately written of, as though for the divisions of some vast
cyclopaedic work," At an early period of his labours he
thought it convenient to increase his knowledge of Greek ;
he began to study Hebrew when more than sixty years old,
and still later in life he took up Sanscrit. It was not un-
til he was approaching his seventieth year and found his
health beginning to fail him that Mr, Green seems to have
felt that his design, in its more ambitious scope, must be
abandoned, and that, in the impossibility of applying the
Coleridgian system of philosophy to all human knowledge,
it was his imperative duty under his literary trust to work
out that particular application of it which its author had
most at heart. Already, in an unpublished work which he
had made it the first care of his trusteeship to compose, he
had, though but roughly and imperfectly, as he considered,
exhibited the relation of his master's doctrines to revealed
religion, and it had now become time to supersede this un-
published compendium, the Religio Laid, as he had styled
it, by a fuller elaboration of the great Coleridgian position
that " Christianity, rightly understood, is identical with the
highest philosophy, and that, apart from all question of
historical evidence, the essential doctrines of Christianity
are necessary and eternal truths of reason — truths which
man, by the vouchsafed light of Nature and without aid
from documents or tradition, may always and anywhere
discover for himself." To this work accordingly Mr. Green
116 COLERIDGE. [cuap.
devoted the few remaining years of his life, and, dying in
1863 at the age of seventy-two, left behind him in MS.
the work entitled Spiritual Philosophy : founded on the
teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which was
published two years later, together with the memoir of the
author, from which I have quoted, by Mr. John Simon. It
consists of two volumes, the first of which is devoted to
the exposition of the general principles of Coleridge's phi-
losophy, while the second is entirely theological, and aims
at indicating, on principles for which the first voUime has
contended, the essential doctrines of Christianity.
The earlier chapters of this volume Mr. Green devotes to
an exposition (if indeed the word can be applied to what
is really a catalogue of the results of a transcendental in-
tuition) of the essential difference between the reason and
the understanding — a distinction which Coleridge has him-
self elsewhere described as pre-eminently the gradus ad
philosophiam, and might well have called it?, pons asinorum.
In the second part of his first volume Mr. Green applies
himself to the establishment of a position which, funda-
mental as it must be accounted in all philosophical specu-
lations of this school, is absolutely vital to the theology
which Coleridge sought to erect upon a metaphysical ba-
sis. This position is that the human will is to be regarded
as the one ultimate fact of self-consciousness. So long as
man confines himself to the contemplation of his percipi-
ent and reflective self alone — so long as he attends only to
those modes of consciousness which are produced in him
by the impressions of the senses and the operations of
thought, he can never hope to escape from the famous re-
ductio ad inscihile of Hume. He can never afiirm anything
more than the existence of those modes of consciousness,
or assert, at least as a direct deliverance of intuition, that
xr.] METAPHYSICS AND THEOLOGY. Ill
his conscious self is anything apart from the perceptions
and concepts to which lie is attending. But when he turns
from his perceiving and thinking to his wilUng self he be-
comes for the first time aware of something deeper than
tlie mere objective presentations of consciousness ; he ob-
tains a direct intuition of an originant, causative, and in-
dependent self-existence. lie will have attained in short
to the knowledge of a noumenon, and of the only knowa-
ble noumenon. The barrier, elsewhere insuperable between
the subject and object, is broken down ; that Avhicli knows
becomes identified with that which is; and in the con-
sciousness of will the consciousness also of a self, as some-
thing independent of and superior to its own modifications,
is not so much affirmed as acquired. The essence, in short,
of the Coleridgian ontology consists in the alteration of a
single though a very important word in the well-known
Cartesian formula. Cogito ergo sum had been shown by
Hume to involve an illicit process of reasoning. Descartes,
according to the Scottish sceptic, had no right to have said
more than Cogito ergo cogitationes sunt. But substitute
willing for thinking, convert the formula into Volo ergo
sum, and it becomes irrefragable.
So far as I can perceive, it would have been sufficient
for Mr. Green's subsequent argument to have thus estab-
lished the position of the will as the ultimate fact of con-
sciousness, but he goes on to assert that he has thus se-
cured the immovable ground of a phil«sophy of Realism.
For since man, " in aflSrming his Personality by the verb
substantive I am, asserts, nay, acquires, the knowledge of
his own Substance as a Spiritual being, and thereby knows
what substance truly and properly is, so he contemplates
the outward, persons or things, as subjects partaking of
reality by virtue of the same substance of which he is con-
1V8 COLERIDGE. [chap.
scious in his own person." So far, however, from this
being a philosophy of Realism, it is in efiect, if not indeed
in actual terms, a philosophy of Idealism. I, at least, am
unable to see how any Idealist, from Berkeley downwards,
could ask for a better definition of his theory of the ex-
ternal world than that it " partakes of reality by virtue of
the same substance of which he is conscious in his own
person."
But it is, of course, with the second volume of Mr.
Green's work that one is chiefly concerned. Had Cole-
ridge been a mere Transcendentalist for Transcendental-
ism's sake, had there been no connection between his phi-
losophy of Being and his religious creed, it might be a
question whether even the highly condensed and necessa-
rily imperfect sketch which has here been given of it would
not have been superfluous and out of place. But Coleridge
was a Theosophist first, and a philosopher afterwards ; it
was mainly as an organon of religion that he valued his
philosophy, and it was to the development and perfection
of it, as such otyanon, that he may be said to have de-
voted, so far as it could be redeemed from its enthralment
to lower necessities, the whole of the latter half of his
career. No account of his life, therefore, could be com-
plete without at least some brief glance at the details of
this notable attempt to lead the world to true religion by
the road of the Transcendental philosophy. It is difficult,
of course, for those who have been trained in a wholly
different school of thought to do justice to processes of
reasoning carried on, as they cannot but hold, in terms
of the inconceivable ; it is still more diflScult to be sure
that you have done justice to it after all has been said ;
and I think that no candid student of the Coleridgian
philosophico-theology (not being a professed disciple of
XI.] METAPHYSICS AND THEOLOGY. 1V9
it, and therefore bound, at any rate, to feign familiarity
with incomprehensibilities) will deny that he is often com-
pelled to formulate its positions and recite its processes in
somewhat of the same modest and confiding spirit as ani-
mates those youthful geometricians who learn their Euclid
by heart. With this proviso I will, as briefly as may be,
trace the course of the dialectic by which Mr. Green seeks
to make the Coleridgian metaphysics demonstrative of the
truth of Christianity.
Having shown that the Will is the true and the only
tenable base of Philosophic Realism, the writer next pro-
ceeds to explain the growth of the Soul, from its rudi-
mental strivings in its fallen condition to the development
of its spiritual capabilities, and to trace its ascent to the
conception of the Idea of God. The argument — if we
may apply so definite a name to a process which is con-
tinually forced to appeal to something that may perhaps
be higher, but is certainly other than the ratiocinative fac-
ulty — is founded partly on moral and partly on intellectual
considerations. By an analysis of the moral phenomena
associated with the action of the human will, and, in par-
ticular, of the conflict which arises between " the tendency
of all Will to make itself absolute," and the consciousness
that, under the conditions of man's fallen state, nothing
but misery could result both to the individual and the race
from the fulfilment of this tendency — Mr. Green shows
how the Soul, or the Reason, or the Speculative Intellect
(for he seems to use all three expressions indiscriminately)
is morally prepared for the reception of the truth which
his Understanding alone could never have compassed —
the Idea of God. Tliis is in effect neither more nor less
than a restatement of that time-honoured argument for
the existence of some Being of perfect holiness which has
180 COLERIDGE. [chap.
always weighed so much with men of high spiri'tuaficy as
to bHnd thera to the fact of its actually enhancing the
intellectual difficulties of the situation. Man possesses a
Will which longs to fulfil itself; but it is coupled with a
nature which constantly impels him to those gratifications
of will which tend not to self-preservation and progress,
but to their contraries. Surely, then, on the strength of
the mere law of life, which prevails everywhere, there
must be some higher archetypal Will, to which human
wills, or rather certain selected examples of them, may
more and more conform themselves, and in which the
union of unlimited efficiency in operation with unqualified
purity of aim has been once for all effected. Or to put
it yet another way : The life of the virtuous man is a life
auxiliary to the preservation and progress of the race ; but
his will is under restraint. The will of the vicious man
energises fi-eely enough, but his life is hostile to the pres-
ervation and progress of the race. Now the natural and
essential nisus of all Will is towards absolute freedom.
But nothing in life has a natural and essential nisus to-
wards that which tends to its deterioration and extinction.
Therefore, there must be some ultimate means of recon-
oiling absolute freedom of the Will with perfectly salutary
conditions of its exercise. And since Mr. Green, like his
master and all other Platonists, is incapable of stopping
here, and contenting himself with assuming the existence
of a " stream of tendency " which will gradually bring
the human will into the required conditions, he here
makes the inevitable Platonic jump, and proceeds io con-
clude that there must be a self-existent ideal Will in which
absolute freedom and power concur with perfect purity
and holiness.
So much for the moral part of Mr. Green's proof, which
XI.] MR. GREEX'S SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 181
so far fails, it will be observed, to carry us muck beyond
the Pantheistic position. It has, that is to say, to be
proved that the " power not ourselves," which has been
called Will, originates in some source to which we should
be rationally justified in giving the name of "God;" and,
singular as such a thing may seem, it is impossible at any
rate for the logic of the understanding to regard Mr.
Green's argument on this point as otherwise than hope-
lessly circular. The half-dozen pages or so which he
devotes to the refutation of the Pantheistic view reduce
themselves to the following simple -petitio principii: the
power is first assumed to be a Will ; it is next affirmed
with perfect truth that the very notion of Will would
escape us except under the condition of Personality ; and
from this the existence of a personal God as the source of
the power in question deduced. And the same vice un-
derlies the further argument by which Mr. Green meets
the familiar objection to the personality of the Absolute
as involving contradictory conceptions. An infinite Per-
son, he argues, is no contradiction in terms, unless " fiuition
or limitation" be regarded as identical with "negation"
(which, when applied to a hypothetical Infinite, one would
surely think it is) ; and an Absolute Will is not the less
absolute from being self-determined ab intra. For how,
he asks, can any Will which is causative of reality be con-
ceived as a Will except by conceiving it as se finiens, pre-
determining itself to the specific processes required by the
act of causation ? How, indeed ? But the answer of a
Pantheist would of course be that the very impossibility
of conceiving of Will except as se finiens is his very ground
for rejecting the notion of a volitional (in the sense of a
personal) origin of the cosmos.
However, it is beyond my purposes to enter into any
182 COLERIDGE. [chap.
detailed criticism of Mr. Green's position, more especially
as I have not yet reached the central and capital point of
his spiritual philosophy — the construction of the Chris-
tian theology on the basis of the Coleridgian metaphysics.
Having deduced the Idea of God from man's conscious-
ness of an individual Will perpetually affirming itself, Mr.
Green proceeds to evolve the Idea of the Trinity, by (as
he considers it) an equally necessary process from two of
the invariable accompaniments of the above-mentioned
introspective act. " For as in our consciousness," he truly
says, "we are under the necessity of distinguishing the
relation of ' myself,' now as the subject thinking and now
as the object contemplated in the manifold of thought, so
we might express the relations in the Divine instance as
Deus Subjectivus and Deus Objectivus — that is, the Ab-
solute Subjectivity or Supreme Will, uttering itself as and
contemplating itself in the Absolute Objectivity or pleni-
tude of Being eternally and causatively realised in his Per-
sonality." AVhence it follows (so runs or seems to run
the argument) that the Idea of God the Father as neces-
sarily involves the Idea of God the Son as the "I" who,
as the thinking subject, contemplate myself, implies the
contemplated " Me " as the object thought of. Again,
the man who reflects on the fact of his consciousness,
" which discloses to him the unavoidable opposition of
subject and object in the self of which he is conscious,
cannot fail to see that the conscious mind requires not
only the distinction in order to the act of reflection in
itself, but the continual sense of the relative nature of the
distinction and of the essential oneness of the mind itself."
Whence it follows (so runs or seems to run the argument)
that the Idea of the first two Persons of the Trinity as
necessarily involves the Idea of the Third Person, as the
XI.] MR. GREEN'S SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY. 183
contemplation of the "Me" by the "I" implies the per-
petual consciousness that tlie contemplator and the con-
templated — the " I " and the " Me " — are one. In this
manner is the Idea of the Trinity shown to be involved
in the Idea of God, and to arise out of it by an implica-
tion as necessary as that which connects together the
three phases of consciousness attendant upon every self-
contemplative act of the individual mind.'
It may readily be imagined that after the Speculative
Reason has been made to perform such feats as these the
remainder of the work proposed to it could present no
serious difficulty. And in the half-dozen chapters which
follow it is made to evolve in succession the doctrine of
the Incarnation, the Advent, and the Atonement of Christ,
and to explain the mysteries of the fall of man and of
original sin. Considered in the aspect in which Coleridge
himself would have preferred to regard his pupil's Avork,
namely as a systematic attempt to lead the minds of men
to Christianity by an intellectual route, no more hopeless
enterprise perhaps could have been conceived than that
embodied in these volumes. It is like offering a traveller
a guide-book written in hieroglyphics. Upon the most
liberal computation it is probable that not one-fourth part
* Were it not hazardous to treat processes of the Speculative Rea-
son as we deal with the vulgar dialectic of the Understanding, one
would be disposed to reply that if the above argument proves the
existence of three persons in the Godhead, it must equally prove the
existence of three persons in every man who reflects upon bis con-
scious self. That the Divine Mind, when engaged in the act of self-
contemplation, must be conceived under three relations is doubtless
as true as that the human mind, when so engaged, must be so con-
ceived ; but that these three relations are so many objective realities
is what Mr. Green asserts indeed a few pages farther on, but what
he nowhere attempts to prove.
N 9
184 COLERIDGE. [chap. xi.
of educated mankind are capable of so mucli as compre-
hending the philosophic doctrine upon which Coleridge
seeks to base Christianity, and it is doubtful whether any
but a still smaller fraction of these would admit that the
foundation was capable of supporting the superstructure.
That the writings of the pupil, like the teachings of the
master whom he interprets, may serve the cause of relig-
ion in another than an intellectual way is possible enough.
Not a few of the functions assigned to the Speculative
Eeason will strike many of us as moral and spiritual rath-
er than intellectual in their character, and the appeal to
them is in fact an appeal to man to chasten the lower
passions of his nature, and to discipline his unruly will.
Exhortations of that kind are religious all the world of
philosophy over, and will succeed in proportion to the
moral fervour and oratorical power which distinguish them.
But if the benefits of Coleridge's theological teachings are
to be reduced to this, it would of course have been much
better to have dissociated them altogether from the ex-
ceedingly abstruse metaphysic to which they have been
wedded.
CHAPTER XII.
Coleridge's tositiox in nis later years.— nis discourse.
—HIS nSTFLUENCE ON CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT. —FINAL RE-
VIEW OP HIS INTELLECTUAL WORK.
The critic who would endeavour to appreciate the posi-
tion which Coleridge fills in the history of literature and
thought for the first half of the nineteenth century must, if
he possesses ordinary candour and courage, begin, I think,
with a confession. He must confess an inability to com-
prehend the precise manner in which that position was at-
tained, and the precise grounds on Avhich it was recognized.
For vast as were Coleridge's powers of thought and expres-
sion, and splendid, if incomplete, as is the record which
they have left behind them in his works, they Avcre never
directed to purposes of instruction or persuasion in any-
thing like that systematic and concentrated manner which
is necessary to him who would found a school. Cole-
ridge's writings on philosophical and theological subjects
were essentially discursive, fragmentary, incomplete. Even
when he professes an intention of exhausting his subject and
affects a logical arrangement, it is not long before he forgets
the design and departs from the order. His disquisitions
are in no sense connected treatises on the subjects to which
they relate. Brilliant aper^us, gnomic sayings, fl-ights of
fervid eloquence, infinitely suggestive reflections — of these
186 COLERIDGE. [chap.
there is enough and to spare ; but these, though an ample
equipment for the critic, are not sufficient for the construc-
tive philosopher. Nothing, it must be frankly said, in
Coleridge's philosophical and theological writings — noth-
ing, that is to say, -which appeals in them to the mere in-
telligence — suffices to explain, at least to the appreciation
of posterity, the fact that he was surrounded during these
closing years of his life by an eager crowd of real or sup-
posed disciples, including two, at any rate, of the most
remarkable personalities of the time. And if nothing in
Coleridge's writings serves to account for it, so neither
does anything traceable or tangible in the mere matter of
his conversations. This last point, however, is one which
must be for the present reserved. I wish for the moment
to confine myself to the fact of Coleridge's position during
his later life at Highgate. To this we have, as we all
know, an extremely eminent witness, and one from whose
evidence most people, one may suppose, are by this time
able to make their own deductions in all matters relating
to the persons with whom he was brought into contact.
Carlyle on Charles Lamb, few as the sour sentences are,
must always warn us to be careful how we follow Carlyle
"on" anybody Avhomsoever. But there is no evidence of
any ill feeling on Carlyle's part towards Coleridge — noth-
ing but a humorous, kindly-contemptuous compassion for
his weaknesses and eccentricities ; and the famous descrip-
tion in the Life of Sterling may be taken therefore as a
fairly accurate account of the man and the circumstances
to which it refers :
" Coleritlgc sat on the brow of Higbgate Hill in those years look-
ing down on London and its smoke tumult like a sage escaped from
the inanity of life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of
innumerable brave souls still engaged there. Ilis express contribu-
XII.] CARLYLFS nCTURE. 187
tious to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human litera-
ture or enlightenment hud been small and sadly intermittent ; but he
had, especially among young inquiring men, a higher than literary, a
kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold —
he alone in England — the key of German and other Transcendental-
isms ; knew the sublime secret of believing by the ' reason ' what the
'understanding' had been obliged to fling out as incredible; and
could still, after Ilume and Voltaire had done their best and worst
with him, profess himself an orthodox Christian, and say and point
to the Church of England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices
at Allhallowtide, Esto perpdua. A sublime man ; who alone in those
dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood, escaping from
the black materialisms and revolutionary deluges with ' God, Free-
dom, Immortality,' still his ; a king of men. The practical intellects
of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a
metaphysical dreamer; but to the rising spirits of the young genera-
tion he had tliis dusky sublime character, and sat there as a kind of
Magus, girt in mystery and enigma ; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gill-
man's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain wheth-
er oracles or jargon."
Tho above quotation wonkl suffice for rny immediate
purpose, but it is impos.-^lble to deny oneself or one's read-
ers the pleasure of a n-frcslied recollection of the nolle
landscape-scene and tlic masterly portrait tliat follow :
" The Gillmans did not encourage much company or excitation of
any sort round their sage; nevertheless, access to him, if a youth did
reverently wish it, was not diflBcult. He would stroll about the pleas-
ant garden with you, sit in the pleasant rooms of the place — perhaps
take you to his own peculiar room, high up, with a rearward view,
which was the chief view of all. A really charming outlook in line
weather. Close at hand wide sweeps of flowing leafy gardens, their
few houses mostly hidden, the very chimney-pots veiled under blos-
soming umbrage, flowed gloriously down hill ; gloriously issuing in
wide-tufted undulating plain country, rich in all charms of Celd and
town. Waving blooming country of the brightest green, dotted
all over with handsome villas, handsome groves crossed by roads
and human traflic, here inauili'ilc, or heard onlv as a musical hum ;
188 COLERIDGE. [chap.
and beliind all swam, under olive-tinted haze, the illimitable limitary
ocean of London, with its domes and steeples defiuite in the sun, big
Paul's and the many memories attached to it hanging high over all.
Nowhere of its kind could you see a grander prospect on a bright
summer da}', with the set of the air going southward — southward,
and so draping with the city smoke not you but the city."
Then comes tlie invariable final touch, the one dash of
blaclc — or green, shall we call it — without which the mas-
ter left no picture that liad a human figure in the fore-
ground :
" Here for hours would Coleridge talk concerning all conceivable
or inconceivable things; and liked nothing better than to have an
intelligent, or, failing that, even a silent and patient human listener.
lie distinguished himself to all that ever heard him as at least the
most surprising talker extant in this world — and to some small mi-
nority, by no means to all, as the most excellent."
Then follows the well-known, wonderfully vivid, cynical-
ly pathetic sketch of the man :
" The good man — he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps,
and gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings ; a
life heav3'-ladeu, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of
manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were
round and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute.
The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspira-
tion ; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild
astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise,
might be called flabby and irresolute ; expressive of weakness under
possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees
bent, and stooping attitude; in walking he rather shuffled than de-
cisively stepl ; and a lady once remarked he never could fix which
side of the garden-walk would suit him best, but continually shifted,
corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both ; a heavy-laden, high-aspir-
ing, and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and
good, had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and sing-song ; he
spoke as if preaching — you could have said preaching eai'nestly and
almost hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his ' object '
XII.] COLERIDGE'S DISCOURSE. 189'
and ' subject,' terms of continual recurrence in the Kautean prov-
ince ; and liow he sang and snuffled them into ' om-m-ject ' and
'sum-m-mject,' with a Ivind of solemn shake or quaver as he rolled
along.' No talk in his century or in any other could be more sur-
prising."
Such, as he appeared to this half- contemptuous, half-
compassionate, but ever acute observer, was Coleridge at
this the zenith of his influence over the nascent thought
of his day. Such to Carlyle seemed the manner of the
deliverance of the oracles ; in his view of their matter, as
we all know from an equally well-remembered passage, his
tolerance disappears, and his account here, with all its
racy humour, is almost wholly impatient. Talk, " suffering
no interruption, however reverent, hastily putting aside
all foreign additions, annotation, or most ingenuous de-
sires for elucidation, as well-meant superfluities which
would never do ;" talk " not flowing any whither, like a
river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable currents
and regurgitations like a lake or sea;" a "confused unin-
telligible flood of utterance, threatening "to submerge all
known landmarks of thought and drown the world with
you" — this, it must be admitted, is not an easily recog-
nisable description of the Word of Life. Nor, certainly,
does Carlyle's own personal experience of its preaching
and effects — he having licard the preacher talk "with
' No one who recollects the equally singular manner in which an-
other most distinguished metaphysician — the late Dean Mansel — was
wont to quaver forth his admirably turned and often highly eloquent
phrases of philosophical exposition, can fail to be reminded of him
by the above description. No two temperaments or histories, how-
ever, could be more dissimilar. The two philosophei'S resembled each
other in nothing save the "om-mject" and "sum-mject" of their
Btudies.
190 COLERIDGE. [chap.
eager musical energy two stricken hours, Li» face radiant
and moist, and communicate no meaning wliatsoever to
any individual of liis hearers" — certain of whom, the nar-
rator for one, " still kept eagerly listening in hope, while
the most had long before given up and formed (if the
room was large enough) humming groups of their own."
"lie began anywhere," continues this irresistibly comic
sketch; "you put some question to him, made some sug-
gestive observation ; instead of answering this, or decid-
edly setting out towards an answer of it, he Avould ac-
cumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, tran-
scendental life-preservers, and other precautionary and
vehiculatory gear for setting out; perhaps did at last get
under way — but was swiftly solicited, turned aside by the
flame of some radiant new game on this hand or on that
into new courses, and ever into new ; and before long
into all the universe, where it was uncertain what game
you would catch, or whether any." lie had, indeed, ac-
cording to the dissatisfied listener, " not the least talent
for explaining this or anything to them ; and you swam
and fluttered on the mistiest, wide, unintelligible deluge
of things for most part in a rather profitless uncomfort-
able manner." And the few vivid phrases of eulogy which
follow seem only to deepen by contrast the prevailing hue
of the picture. The " glorious islets " Avhicli were some-
times seen to " rise out of the haze," the " balmy sunny
islets of the blest and the intelligible, at whose emergence
the secondary humming group would all cease humming
and hang breathless upon the eloquent words, till once
your islet got wrapped in the mist again, and they would
recommence humming " — these, it seems to be suggested,
but rarely revealed themselves ; but " eloquent, artisticaHy
expressive words you always had ; piercing radiance* of
xii.J COLERIDGE'S DISCOURSE. 191
a most subtle insight came at intervals; tones of noble
pious sympathy, recognisable as pious though strangely
coloured, were never wanting long; but, in general, you
could not call this aimless cloud-capt, cloud-bound, law-
lessly meandering discourse, by the name of excellent talk,
but only of surprising. . . . The moaning sing-song of
that theosophico-mctaphysical monotony left in you at last
a very dreary feeling."
It is tolerably clear, I think, that some considerable dis-
count must be allowed upon the sum of disparagement in
this famous criticism. We have learnt, indeed, to be more
on the look-out for the disturbing influences of tempera-
ment in the judginciits of this atrabilious observer than
was the case when ihe Life of Sierlbig was written, and
it is difficult to doubt that the unfavourable strokes in
the above-quoted description have been unduly multiplied
and deepened, partly in the mere waywardness of a sar-
castic humour, and partly perhaps from a less excusable
cause. It is always dangerous to accept one remarkable
talker's view of the characteristics of another ; and if this
is true of men who merely compete with each other in
the ordinary give-and-take of the dinner-table epigramma-
tist and raconteur, the caution is doubly necessary in the
case of two rival prophets — tv.'o competing oracles. There
are those among us who hold that the conversation of the
Chelsea sage, in his later years, resembled his own de-
scription of the Highgate philosopher's, in this, at any
rate, that it was mightily intolerant of interruption ; and
one is apt to suspect that at no time of his life did Car-
lyle " understand duologue " much better than Coleridge.
It is probable enough, therefore, that the young lay-preach-
er did not quite relish being silenced by the elder, and
that his account of the sermons was coloured by the rec-
9*
l'J2 COLERIDGE. [chap.
ollection that bis own remained undelivered. There is an
abundance of evidence that the "glorious islets" emerged
far more often from the transcendental haze than Carlyle
would have us suppose. Hazlitt, a bitter assailant of
Coleridge's, and whose caustic remark that " his talk was
excellent if you let him start from no premisses and come
to no conclusion," is cited with approval by Carlyle, has
elsewhere spoken of Coleridge as the ouly person from
whom he ever learned anything, has said of him that
though he talked on forever you wished him to talk on
forever, that " his thoughts did not seem to come with
labour and effort, but as if borne on the gusts of genius,
and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him from his
feet." And besides this testimony to the eloquence Avhich
Carlyle only but inadequately recognises, one should set
for what it is worth De Quincey's evidence to that conse-
quence of thought which Carlyle denies altogether. To
Do Quincey the complaint that Coleridge wandered in
his talk appeared unjust. According to him the great dis-
courser only " seemed to wander," and he seemed to wan-
der the most " when in fact his resistance to the wander-
ing instinct was greatest, viz., when the compass and huge
circuit by which his illustrations moved travelled farthest
into remote regions before they began to revolve. Long
before this coming round commenced, most people had
lost him, and, naturally enough, supposed that he had lost
himself. They contiuued to admire the separate beauty
of the thoughts, but did not see their relations to the
dominant theme." De Quincey, however, declares posi-
tively in the faith of his " long and intimate knowledge
of Coleridge's mind, that logic the most severe was as in-
alienable from his modes of thinking as grammar from
his language."
Xn.] COLERIDGE'S DISCOURSE. 193
Nor should wo omit tlio testimony of anotlier, a more
partial, perhaps, but even better informed judge. The
Table Talk, edited by Mr. Nelson Coleridge, shows how
pregnant, how pithy, how full of subtle observation, and
often also of playful humour, could be the talk of the
great discourser in its lighter and more colloquial forms.
The book indeed is, to the thinking of one, at any rate,
of its frequent readers, among the most delightful in the
world. But thus speaks its editor of his uncle's conversa-
tion in his more serious moods :
"To pass an entire day with Coleridge was a marvellous change
indeed [from the talk of daily life]. It was a Sabbath past expres-
sion, deep and tranquil and serene. You came to a man who had
travelled in many countries and in critical times ; who had seen and
felt the world in most of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes
and weaknesses ; one to v/hom all literature and art were absolutely
subject; and to whom, with a reasonable allowance as to technical
details, all science was, in a most extraordinary degree, familiar.
Throughout a long-drawn summer's day would this man talk to you
in low, equable, but clear and musical tones concerning things hu-
man and divine ; marshalling all history, harmonising all experiment,
probing the depths of your consciousness, and revealing visions of
glory and terror to the imagination ; but pouring withal such floods
of light upon the mind that you might for a season, like Paul, become
blind in the very act of conversion. And this he would do without
so much as one allusion to himself, without a word of reflection upon
others, save when any given art foil naturally in the way of his dis-
course ; without one anecdote that was not proof and illustration of
a previous position ; gratifying no passion, indulging no caprice, but,
with a calm mastery over your soul, leading you onward and onward
forever through a thousand windings, yet with no pause, to some
magnificent point in which, as in a focus, all the parti-coloured rays
of his discourse should converge in light. In all these he was, in
truth, your teacher and guide ; but in a little while you might forget
that he was other tlian a fellow-student and the companion of your
wa}' — so playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affection-
ate the glance of his eye ! "
194 COLERIDGE. [chap.
Impressive, 1 owcver, as these displays may have been, it
is impossible to suppose that their direct didactic value
as discourses was at all considerable. Such as it was, more-
over, it was confined in all probability to an extremely
select circle of followers. A few mystics of the type of
Maurice, a few eager seekers after truth like Sterling, may
have gathered, or fancied they gathered, distinct dogmatic
instruction from the Ilighgate oracles ; and no doubt, to
the extent of bis influence over tbe former of these disci-
ples, wo may justly credit Coleridge's discourses witb hav-
ing exercised a real if only a transitory directive effect upon
nineteenth-century thought. But the terms in which his
influence is sometimes spoken of appear, as far as one can
judge of the matter at this distance of time, to be greatly
exaggerated. To speak of it in the same way as we are —
or were — accustomed to speak of the influence of Carlyle,
is to subject it to an altogether inappropriate comparison.
It is not merely that Coleridge founded no recognisable
school, for neither did Carlyle. It is that the former can
show absolutely nothing at all resembling that sort of
power which enabled the latter to lay hold upon all the
youthful minds of his time — minds of the most disparate
orders and associated with the utmost diversities of tem-
perament, and detain them in a captivity which, brief as it
may have been in some cases, has in no case failed to leave
its marks behind it. Over a few spirits already prepared
to receive them Coleridge's teachings no doubt exerted
power, but he led no soul captive against its will. There
are few middle-aged men of active intelligence at the pres-
ent day who can avoid a confession of having " taken "
Carlylism in their youth ; but no mental constitutions not
predisposed to it could ever have caught Coleridgism at
all. There is indeed no moral theory of life, there are no
XII.] INFLUENCE ON CONTEMrORARY THOUGHT. 193
maxims of conduct, such as youth above all things craves
for, in Coleridge's teaching. Apart from the intrinsic dif-
ficulties of the task to which he invites his disciples, it
labom's under a primary and essential disadvantage of post-
poning moral to intellectual liberation. Contrive somehow
or other to attain to just ideas as to the capacities and lim-
itations of human consciousness, considered especially in
relation to its two important and eternally distinct func-
tions, the Reason and the Understanding, and peace of
mind shall in due time be added unto you. That is in
effect Coleridge's answer to the inquirer who consults him ;
and if the distinction between the Reason and the Under-
standing w'cre as obvious as it is obscure to the average
unmetaphysical mind, and of a value as assured for the
purpose to which Coleridge applies it as it is uncertain, the
answer would nevertheless send many a would-be disciple
sorrowful away. Ills natural impulse is to urge the oracle to
tell him whether there be not some one moral attitude which
he can wisely and worthily adopt towards the universe,
whatever theory he may form of his mental relations to it,
or without forming any such theory at all. And it was
because Carlyle supplied, or was believed to supply an
answer, such as it was, to this universal question, that his
train of followers, voluntary and involuntary, permanent
and temporary, has been so large.
It appears to me, therefore, on as careful an examination
of the point as the data admit of, that Coleridge's position
in these latter days of his life has been somewhat mytli-
ically exalted by the generation which succeeded him.
There are, I think, distinct traces of a Coleridgiau legend
which has only slowly died out. The actual truth I believe
to be that Coleridge's position from 1818 or 1820 till his
death, though one of the greatest eminence, was in no sense
196 COLERIDGE. [chap.
one of tlie liiglicst, oi* even of any considerable influence.
Fame and lionour, in the fullest measure, were no doubt
his : in that matter, indeed, he was only receiving payment
of long-delayed arrears. The poetic school with which he
was, though not with entire accuracy, associated, had out-
lived its period of contempt and obloquy. In spite of the
two quarterlies, the Tory review hostile, its Whig rival coldly
silent, the public had recognised the high imaginative merit
of Christahel ; and who knows but that if the first edition
of the Lyrical Ballads had appeared at this date instead
of twenty years before, it would have obtained a certain
number of readers even among landsmen ? * But over and
above the published works of the poet there were those
extraordinary personal characteristics to which the fame of
his works of course attracted a far larger share than for-
merly of popular attention. A remarkable man has more
attractive power over the mass of mankind than the most
remarkable of books, and it was because the report of
Coleridge among those who knew him was more stimulat-
ing to public curiosity than even the greatest of his poems,
that his celebrity in these latter years attained such propor-
tions. Wordsworth said that though " he had seen man}'
men do wonderful things, Coleridge was the only wonderful
man he had ever met," and it was not the doer of wonder-
ful things but the wonderful man that Englisli society in
those days went out to see. Seeing Avould have been
enough, but for a certain number there was hearing too,
with the report of it for all ; and it is not surprising that
fame of the marvellous discourser should, in mere virtue of
^ Tlic Longmans tolJ C(jloridge that the greater part of the first
edition of the Lyrical Ballads iiad been sold to seafaring men, wlio,
having heard of the Ancient 3farincr, took the volume for a naval
song-book.
XII.] FLVAL REVIEW. 197
])is oxtraordinary power of improvised speccli, his limitless
and untiring- mastery of articulate words, have risen to a
heig'lit to which writers whose only voice is in their pens
can never hope to attain.
A reputation of that kind, however, must necessarily
perish with its possessor; and Coleridge's posthumous re-
nown has grown, his place in English literature has become
more assured, if it has not been even fixed higher, since
his death than during his lifetime. This is, in part no
doubt, one among the consequences of those very defects
of character which so unfortunately limited his actual
achievements. lie has been credited by faith, as it were,
with those famous " unwritten books " of which he assured
Charles Lamb that the titles alone would fill a volume, and
such "popular reputation," in the strict sense of the word,
as he has left behind him, is measured rather by what he
was thought capable of doing than by what he did. By
serious students, however, the real worth of Coleridge will
be differently estimated. For them his peculiar value to
English literature is not only undiminished by the incom-
pleteness of his work ; it has been, in a certain sense, en-
hanced thereby. Or, perhaps, it would be more strictly
accurate to say that the value could not have existed with-
out the incompleteness. A Coleridge with the faculty of
concentration, and the habit of method superadded — a
Coleridge capable of becoming possessed by any one form
of intellectual energy to the exclusion of all others — might,
indeed, have left behind him a more enduring reputation
as a philosopher, and possibly (although this, for reasons
already stated, is, in my own opinion, extremely doubtful)
bequeathed to his countrymen more poetry destined to live ;
but, unquestionably, he would never have been able to ren-
der that precise service to modern thought and literature
198 COLERIDGE. [otap.
which, in fact, they owe to him. To have exercised his
vivifying and fertilising influence over the minds of others
his intellect was bound to be of the dispersive order ; it
was essential that he should " take all knowledge to be his
province," and that that eager, subtle, and penetrative mind
should range as freely as it did over subject after subject
of human interest — illuminating each of them in turn
with those rays of true critical insight which, amid many
bewildering cross-lights and some few downright ignes
fatui, flash forth upon us from all Coleridge's work.
Of the personal weaknesses which prevented the just
development of the powers, enough, perhaps, has been in-
cidentally said in the course of this volume. But, in sum-
ming up his history, I shall not, I trust, be thought to judge
the man too harshly in saying that, though the natural dis-
advantages of wretclied health, almost from boyhood up-
ward, must, in common fairness, be admitted in partial ex-
cuse for his failure, they do not excuse it altogether. It
is difficult not to feel that Coleridge's character, apart alto-
gether from defects of physical constitution, was wanting
in manliness of fibre. His willingness to accept assistance
at the hands of others is too manifestly displayed even at
the earlier and more robust period of his life. It would be
a mistake, of course, in dealing with a literary man of Cole-
ridge's era, to apply the same standards as obtain in our
own days. Wordsworth, as we have seen, made no scruple
to accept the benevolences of the "Wedgwoods. Southey,
the type of independence and self-help, was, for some years,
in receipt of a pension from a private source. But Cole-
ridge, as Miss Meteyard's disclosures have shown, was at
all times far more willing to depend upon others, and was
far less scrupulous about soliciting their bounty, than was
either of his two friends. Had he sharcc more of the spirit
sii.] riXAL REVIEW. 199
which made Johnson refuse to owe to the benevolence of
others what Providence had enabled him to do for himself,
it might have been better, no doubt, for the world and for
the work which he did therein.
But when we consider what that work was, how varied
and how wonderful, it seems idle — nay, it seems ungrate-
ful and ungracious — to speculate too curiously on what fur-
ther or other benefits this great intellect might have con-
ferred upon mankind, had its possessor been endowed with
those qualities of resolution and independence which he
lacked. That Coleridge so often only shows the way, and
so seldom guides our steps along it to the end, is no just
ground of complaint. It would be as unreasonable to com-
plain of a beacon-light that it is not a steam-tug, and for-
get in the incompleteness of its separate services the glory
of their number. It is a more reasonable objection that
the light itself is too often liable to obscuration — that it
stands erected upon a rock too often enshrouded by the
mists of its encircling sea. But even this objection should
not too greatly weigh with us. It would be wiser and bet-
ter for us to dwell rather upon its splendour and helpful-
ness in the hours of its efficacy, to think how vast is then
the expanse of waters which it illuminates, and its radiance
how steady and serene.
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Progress." It is, iu my conviction, incomparably the best Summa
Theologice Eoangelicce ever produced by a writer not miraculously in-
spired. * * * It is composed in the lowest style of English, without
slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once
destroy the reality of the vision ; for works of imagination should
be written in very plain language. This wonderful book is one of
the few books which may be read repeatedly, at different times, and
each time with a new and a different pleasure. I read it once as a
theologian, and let me assure you that there is great theological acu-
men in the work ; once with devotional feelings, and once as a poet.
COLEKIDGE.
JOHN BUNYAN.
BY
LOED MACAULAY.
{Together with Macaulay's Essays on " Oliver Goldsmith^'' and ^^ Ma-
dame D^Arblay.'''')
32ixio, 3?aper, 35 cents ; Cloth.,