Coleridge Part 3

These instances of close observation of natural phenomena could be multiplied did s.p.a.ce permit, the poem is full of them, only in the line "the furrow followed free" may he be held to have fallen into error. Yet this excellence has, after all, but a small concern with the poetic worth of the work, and it is astonis.h.i.+ng to find that its music rang harshly in the ears of contemporary criticism, though its awesome and fantastic beauty moves the English-speaking world to this day. One lady (Mrs. Barbauld) told Coleridge that, while she liked the "Ancient Mariner," she had to find two faults. In the first place, the story was improbable, and secondly, it had no moral! Wordsworth himself had his doubts about it, and Southey somewhat obscurely called it "a Dutch attempt at German sublimity," for which quintessential criticism Charles Lamb took him to task.

Looking back upon the life and work of Coleridge, we know that his "Ancient Mariner" reaches the high-water mark of his poetic achievement in narrative verse, and that it will endure when the greater part of his writing, whether in verse or prose, has been forgotten--remembered not only on account of its beauty as a complete work of art, but on account of the irresistible music of many of the stanzas. It stands for the fruit of the supremely inspired hours of a greatly gifted man.

"Christabel," another poem that has gained Coleridge a host of admirers, is, unfortunately, incomplete. In the ponderous preface to the first edition (John Murray, 1816), Coleridge explains that he wrote the first part at Nether Stowey in 1797, and the second part at Keswick three years later. "Since then his powers have been in a state of suspended animation, but he hopes to embody in verse the three parts yet to come in the course of the present year." Twelve or thirteen years later, Coleridge was still full of the thought of completion, but he omits the pious hope from the preface to the 1834 edition--he knew by then that inspiration had long been dead. Yet the failure to complete galled him through many years after the poem was laid aside. We find him writing to Allsop in 1821: "Of my poetic works, I would fain finish 'Christabel.'"

In later years, when he was living with Gillman, he described the story as it was to have been told in verse, but Wordsworth told the late Lord Chief Justice Coleridge that he did not know anything about the plan of completion, and does not think Coleridge had one. In his _Table Talk_ Coleridge himself remarks that the presence of worries and the absence of good music kept him from completing "Christabel," which was received with marked favour by the limited public of its day, three editions being called for in one year. He did not realise, when he spoke to his nephew, that his gifts had pa.s.sed from one form of expression to another.

Hazlitt is suspect, on insufficient evidence, of having reviewed "Christabel" harshly in the _Edinburgh Review_ and the _Examiner_; but the _Quarterly Review_ found that its success in dealing with "witchery by daylight" is complete. It is a matter for regret that the interest taken in the "Ancient Mariner" and in fragments like "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel" has been at the expense of poems like the "Ode to Dejection" and smaller pieces, gems of poetic thought, finely expressed.

As time wore on, the realities of life divorced the poet's muse, now quite a minor quant.i.ty, from its union with cla.s.sicism, to the great advantage of his work, and though he cannot be said to have fulfilled the promise of his best years, he wrote much that his admirers will not willingly let die. One would perhaps hesitate to call it poetry--the work he wrote between his twenty-third and twenty-seventh years was poetry in the fullest sense of the term--it is rather philosophy expressed in set forms with a measure of charm that can never be absent long from any utterance of Coleridge.

It may perhaps be suggested that the poetic genius in Coleridge needed nursing, and failed to get what it required; to a certain extent such a theory is permissible. We have to remember, in the first place, that his health was bad from youth. He was very susceptible to rheumatism; before middle age he was a martyr to gout; he could not endure extreme cold; and yet he elected to go and live at Greta Hall, in the Vale of Derwent.w.a.ter, where the rain it raineth nearly every day, and strong harsh winds are the rule rather than the exception. These surroundings confirmed and strengthened the opium habit. To make matters worse, his home life was not of the kind that makes for poetry. Mrs. Coleridge was in many respects a deserving and worthy lady, but she had grave limitations. With things of the intellect she was not on any terms, however remote, and she had a weakness that is said to extend to others of her s.e.x--she worried incessantly about trifles. Reading closely the history of the unhappy married life that involved husband and wife in so much trouble, the mistake of marrying the wrong woman may be condoned.

To the overstrung "philosopher in a mist," as he describes himself in one of his earliest letters from Greta Hall, a querulous wife who found small grievances everywhere, who judged her husband's talent from the standpoint of what it brought in from the publishers, must have been a sore trial. In the same way, for the sake of justice, let us admit that the man who was always ready to undertake work that he could never be prevailed upon to begin, who was erratic, intemperate, and wholly unreliable, must have been a sore trouble to any woman who could not appreciate his gifts, and could discern nothing in the future save an increasing family and a diminis.h.i.+ng income. But whatever the proper apportionment of praise or blame, one fact remains. At Greta Hall the fine flame of poetic inspiration burned low, and never afterwards recovered its pristine radiance. Professor Alois Brandl does not go too far when he says that at the age of thirty, that is by the year 1802, Coleridge was a broken man; and it was this failure of his health, this prolonged suffering from rheumatism and gout, which he sought so foolishly and so vainly to cure by the aid of opium, that turned him from poetry to the study of philosophy in order to find relief. He sought, as he says in that fine but mournful "Ode to Dejection,"

"By abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man."

And at this point of his life, we find him turning away from the muse, to which nearly all his lasting contribution has long been made, and venturing into a field wherein he was destined to achieve considerable success. Criticism and metaphysics occupied him in turn. The period of study was a very long one; he was forty-four years of age when his _Lay Sermons_ was published, in the wake of much journalism and some desultory and miscellaneous work. Needless to say, he had many brilliant intentions that were never carried out. One of them, a book to supersede all dogmatic philosophy, was designed to fill six hundred pages with "A collection of all possible modes of true, probable, and false reasonings, with a strict a.n.a.lysis of their origin and operation."

But if he did not write the books--and he once declared that the mere t.i.tles of those he had projected would fill a volume--Coleridge accomplished a very considerable amount of work. Much of it must be lost. He was an omnivorous reader, and his clear mind could detect flaws in any reasoning that was not sound. He studied Berkeley, Fichte, Hartley, Hegel, Herder, Hume, Kant, Lessing, Maa.s.s, Sch.e.l.ling, and Spinoza, studied them with complete understanding, and luminous criticism, and could discourse upon them brilliantly. It needed a well-equipped intelligence to follow him; few could, and the majority thought he talked brilliantly but irrelevantly. We know that this was not the case, the truth being that he was too big for the most of his audience.

He pa.s.sed through a very considerable number of religious phases. His earlier Pantheism gave way to Rationalism and Unitarianism, and he arrived by way of the German transcendental philosophers to his ultimate reconciliation with the doctrines of Christianity. In the years in which he lived this ultimate orthodoxy was good alike for his reputation and his circulation. His influence affected profoundly great thinkers like F. D. Maurice and John Sterling, and it may be doubted whether cheap reprints of certain of his prose writings would not find a considerable measure of success to-day, for it is impossible to deny his gift of style, his capacity to reason closely and clearly, or the intense earnestness and conviction that vitalise his message. It is unfortunate, perhaps, that his most popular work as a poet has kept him from receiving due recognition first as a critic and then as a philosopher, and that his work as a philosopher has been clouded by his unfortunate inability to rule his own life on philosophic lines.

In the order of publication, his prose works are the _Lay Sermons_, to which reference has been made; the _Sibylline Leaves_ (a revised edition of his poems); the _Biographia Literaria_ (full of valuable criticism badly arranged); the _Aids to Reflection_ (1824); _Church and State_ (1830); and two posthumous works, the _Confessions of an Enquiring Mind_ (1840), and _Literary Remains_. The _Satyrane's Letters_ was republished in the _Biographia Literaria_.

It is due probably to his troubled health, that he frequently incorporated the reflections of other men among his own, and accusations of plagiarism were not lacking. Among those who attacked him on this ground were Thomas de Quincey, who led the a.s.sault in _Tait's Magazine_, three months after his sometime friend was dead; Professor Ferrier, some years later; and Sir William Hamilton, this last a singularly bitter critic of little judgment. The charge against Coleridge is one that should not have been made, even though it may be sustained to the complete satisfaction of those who like to belittle great minds.

"I regard truth as a Divine ventriloquist, and care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words be audible and intelligible." In this pa.s.sage Coleridge summed up an att.i.tude that will satisfy all who can take a sane and dispa.s.sionate view of his life, and weigh its accomplishments and vicissitudes. Certain thoughts are the children of every era, and will reach more than one thinker at a time; they belong to the man who can make n.o.blest use of them.

It is impossible to deny that for all his shortcomings Coleridge did more for his countrymen than his countrymen did for him, and harsh criticism is unbecoming the present generation, which enjoys the full benefit of his work, and has not suffered any of the disappointments that he inflicted upon his contemporaries. Let us remember, too, that he was a simple and modest man, and nowhere claims to be a distinguished poet or a great philosopher. He knew that he had more than the average mental gift, but instead of pride in his possession we find him regretting deeply his inability to justify it. Indeed, he goes further than this, for he says in one of his letters that Wordsworth taught him to recognise some of his limitations. The letter is written to G.o.dwin when Coleridge was in his thirty-first year, and in it he says that Wordsworth, by showing him what true poetry was, made him know that he himself was no poet.

Coleridge had a very highly developed critical faculty, and exercised it brilliantly in his writings on Shakespeare. His criticisms sparkle with intelligence; terse and virile, they leave the reader regretting that they were not extended. He speaks of Polonius, "a statesman somewhat past his faculties"; of Lear as "the ample and open playground of Nature's pa.s.sions."

Whether as poet, critic, or metaphysician, Coleridge was a progressive thinker, and broke away slowly but deliberately from the fetters of form that cripple his earliest utterances; nor were the flights of his thought less remarkable than his experiments in method.

Whatever his acts, his intentions were of the highest. He sought to do good, and he placed at the service of his countrymen the best that he had to offer. One can only speculate upon the extent of the loss that his chronic ill-health inflicted upon his own and succeeding generations. His were the instincts of the schoolmaster, but of the schoolmaster who takes all his fellow-countrymen for pupils. His discourses on poetry, founded so largely upon prolonged and intimate study of Wordsworth, stand to-day one of the finest examinations of the range and proper limitation of poetic expression.

Coleridge was destined to be overshadowed in his own time, and in the critical years immediately following his death, by more powerful personalities--men whose appeal to the public was more immediate and better sustained; but much that he wrote a hundred years ago is of importance to us to-day, and modern criticism, detached, impersonal, and with a true perspective, can hardly fail to do him justice in any of the departments of his life-work.

How did he appeal to his contemporaries? Criticism was generally undiscerning and hostile, but those who came within the charmed circle were, with rare exception, delighted. The secret of his appeal pa.s.sed with him; there are still some who wonder how it has come about that, the limits of ordered achievement being so marked, Coleridge stands where he does. Poet, critic, and metaphysician, in each capacity he had attracted the interest and retained the regard of a great majority of his most notable contemporaries. His inspiration came by fits and starts, but, when it did come, would find expression in felicitous phrases revealing some aspects of truth that captured the imagination.

At the end of a long unhappy and often ill-spent life, he could command the unstinted admiration of such a sour-tongued old critic as Thomas Carlyle. Hear him in his _Life of Sterling_:

"Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill in those years looking 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.... A sublime man, who alone in those dark days had saved his crown of spiritual manhood, escaping from the black materialism and revolutionary deluges with 'G.o.d, Freedom, Immortality' still his; a king of men."

And later he describes him with the true Carlyle touch as that "heavy laden, high aspiring, and surely much suffering man." Wordsworth said that Coleridge was the only wonderful man he had ever met; Nelson Coleridge said that a day spent with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a "sabbath past expression, deep, tranquil, and serene."

Find him at the right time and in happy mood, he was capable of great feats. For example, he was invited one morning to lecture before the London Philosophical Society. He went with Gillman to the secretary to inquire the subject chosen, but the secretary was out. In the evening Coleridge and Gillman went to the Society's rooms, and heard the announcement made that Mr. Coleridge would deliver an address on "The Growth of the Individual Mind." He spoke extempore for over an hour and a half, holding a critical audience enthralled.

Joseph Henry Green, whose two posthumous volumes ent.i.tled _Spiritual Philosophy_, founded upon the teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were published in 1865, was sufficiently under the spell to devote a whole life-work to his master's teaching.

With Coleridge, the metaphysician, it is impossible to deal here. Dr.

Traill summed up his teaching very concisely in the following sentences:

"There is indeed no moral theory of life, there are no maxims of conduct, such as youth above all things craves for, in Coleridge's teaching. Apart from the intrinsic difficulties of the task to which he invites his disciples, it labours under a primary and essential disadvantage of postponing moral to intellectual liberation. Contrive somehow or other to attain to just ideas as to the capacities and limitations of the human consciousness, considered especially in relation to its two important and eternally distinct functions, 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 Understanding were as obvious as it is obscure to the average unmetaphysical mind, and of a value as a.s.sured for the purpose to which Coleridge applies it as it is uncertain, the answer would nevertheless send many a would-be disciple sorrowful away."

It is not necessary to pursue the subject. Between the reader and the metaphysician stands the poet and the critic, and for the greater part of the present and future generations these will suffice.