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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat.
The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him; and the
penance of life falls on him.
And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to
travel from land to land,
And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God
made and loveth.
p. 27. _Christabel_. Coleridge at his best represents the imaginative
temper in its essence, pure gold, with only just enough alloy to give it
firm bodily substance. "Christabel" is not, like "Kubla Khan," a
disembodied ecstasy, but a coherent effort of the imagination. Yet, when we
come to the second part, the magic is already half gone out of it. Rossetti
says, in a printed letter, with admirable truth: "The conception, and
partly the execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by
fascination the serpent-glance of Geraldine, is magnificent; but that is
the only good narrative passage in part two. The rest seems to have reached
a fatal facility of jingling, at the heels whereof followed Scott. " A few
of the lines seem to sink almost lower than Scott, and suggest a Gilbert
parody:
"He bids thee come without delay
With all thy numerous array.
* * * * *
And he will meet thee on the way
With all his numerous array. "
But in the conclusion, which has nothing whatever to do with the poem,
Coleridge is his finest self again: a magical psychologist. It is
interesting to know that Crashaw was the main influence upon Coleridge
while writing "Christabel," and that the "Hymn to the Name and Honour of
the admirable S. Teresa" was "ever present to his mind while writing the
second part. "
p. 61. _Love_. This poem was originally published, in the _Morning
Post_ of December 21, 1799, as part of an "Introduction to the Tale of
the Dark Ladie. " This introduction begins:
"O leave the lily on its stem;
O leave the rose upon the spray;
O leave the elder-bloom, fair maids!
And listen to my lay.
A cypress and a myrtle bough
This morn around my harp you twined,
Because it fashion'd mournfully
Its murmurs in the wind.
And now a tale of love and woe,
A woeful tale of love I sing;
Hark, gentle maidens! hark, it sighs
And trembles on the string. "
p. 65. _The Three Graves_. Coleridge only published what he calls "the
following humble fragment" of what was to have been a poem in six parts;
but he wrote an imperfect sketch of the first two parts, which was
published from the original MS. by Dykes Campbell in his edition. The poem
as Coleridge left it is sufficiently complete, and I have ventured to
divide it into Part I. and Part II. , instead of the usual Part III. and
Part IV. It is Coleridge's one attempt to compete with Wordsworth on what
Wordsworth considered his own ground, and it was first published by
Coleridge in _The Friend_ of September 21, 1809, on the advice of
Wordsworth and Southey. "The language," we are told in an introductory
note, "was intended to be dramatic; that is, suited to the narrator; and
the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the diction. It is therefore
presented as the fragment, not of a poem, but of a common Ballad-tale.
Whether this is sufficient to justify the adoption of such a style, in any
metrical composition not professedly ludicrous, the Author is himself in
some doubt. At all events, it is not presented as poetry, and it is in no
way connected with the Author's judgment concerning poetic diction. Its
merits, if any, are exclusively psychological. " Exclusively, it would be
unjust to say; but to a degree beyond those of any similar poem of
Wordsworth, certainly.
p. 78. _Dejection_. This ode was originally addressed to Wordsworth,
but before it was published in its first form, the "William" of the still
existing MS. was changed to "Edmund"; in later editions "Edmund" was
changed to "Lady," except in the seventh stanza, where "Otway" is
substituted. The reference in this stanza is to Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray,"
and the germ of the passage occurs in a letter of Coleridge to Poole,
printed by Dykes Campbell in the notes to his edition: "Greta Hall, Feb. 1,
1801. --O my dear, dear Friend! that you were with me by the fireside of my
study here, that I might talk it over with you to the tune of this night-
wind that pipes its thin, doleful, climbing, sinking notes, like a child
that has lost its way, and is crying aloud, half in grief, and half in the
hope to be heard by its mother. "
p. 9O. _Fears in Solitude_. Coleridge, who was so often his own best
critic, especially when the criticism was to remain inactive, wrote on an
autograph copy of this poem now belonging to Professor Dowden: "N. B. --The
above is perhaps not Poetry,--but rather a sort of middle thing between
Poetry and Oratory--_sermoni propriora_. --Some parts are, I am
conscious, too tame even for animated prose. " It is difficult to say
whether, in such poems as this, Coleridge is overtaken by his besetting
indolence, or whether he is deliberately writing down to the theories of
Wordsworth. Another criticism of his own on his early blank verse, where he
speaks of "the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead
_plumb down_ of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle and
sinew in the single lines," applies only too well to the larger part of
his work in this difficult metre, so apt to go to sleep by the way.
p. 1O7. _Hymn before Sun-rise_. Coleridge was never at Chamouni, and
the suggestion of his poem is to be found in a poem of twenty lines by a
German poetess, Frederike Brun. Some of the rhetoric of his poem Coleridge
got from the German poetess; the imagination is all his own. It is perhaps
a consequence of its origin that the imagination and the rhetoric never get
quite clear of one another, and that, in spite of some magical lines
(wholly Coleridge's) like:
"O struggling with the darkness all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars:"
the poem remains somewhat external, a somewhat deliberate heaping up of
hosannas.
p. 114. _The Nightingale_. The persons supposed to take part in this
"conversation poem" are of course William and Dorothy Wordsworth.
p. 134. _A Day-Dream_. "There cannot be any doubt, I think, that the
'Asra' of this poem is Miss Sarah Hutchinson; 'Mary,' her sister (Mrs.
Wordsworth); 'our sister and our friend,' Dorothy and William Wordsworth. "
(DYKES CAMPBELL. )
p. 142. _Work without Hope_. "What could be left to hope for when the
man could already do such work? " asks Mr. Swinburne. With this exquisite
poem, in which Coleridge's style is seen in its most faultless union of his
finest qualities, compare this passage from a letter to Lady Beaumont,
about a year earlier: "Though I am at present sadly below even _my_
par of health, or rather unhealth, and am the more depressed thereby from
the consciousness that in this yearly resurrection of Nature from her
winter sleep, amid young leaves and blooms and twittering nest-building
birds, the sun so gladsome, the breezes with such healing on their wings,
all good and lovely things are beneath me, above me, and everywhere around
me, and all from God, while my incapability of enjoying, or, at best,
languor in receiving them, is directly or indirectly from myself, from past
procrastination, and cowardly impatience of pain. " It was always upon some
not less solid foundation that Coleridge built these delicate structures.
p. 147. _Phantom_. This, almost Coleridge's loveliest fragment of
verse, was composed in sleep, like "Kubla Khan," "Constancy to an Ideal
Object," and "Phantom or Fact? " There is a quality, in this and some other
poems of Coleridge, which he himself has exquisitely rendered in the
passage on Ariel in the lectures on Shakespeare: "In air he lives, from air
he derives his being, in air he acts; and all his colours and properties
seem to have been obtained from the rainbow and the skies. There is nothing
about Ariel that cannot be conceived to exist either at sunrise or sunset:
hence all that belongs to Ariel belongs to the delight the mind is capable
of receiving from the most lovely external appearances. "Coleridge is the
Ariel of English Poetry: glittering in the song from "Zapolya," translucent
in the "Phantom," infantine, with a note of happy infancy almost like that
of Blake, in "Something Childish, but very Natural. " In these poems, and in
the "Ode to the Rain," and the "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath,"
there is a unique way of feeling, which he can render to us on those rare
occasions when his sensations are uninterrupted; by thought, which clouds
them, or by emotion, which disturbs them. He reveals mysterious intimacies
with natural things, the "flapping" flame or a child's scarcely more
articulate moods. And in some of them, which are experiments in form, he
seems to compete gaily with the Elizabethan lyrists, doing wonderful things
in jest, like one who is for once happy and disengaged, and able to play
with his tormentor, verse.
p. 153. _Forbearance_. "Gently I took that which urgently came" is
from Spenser's "Shepherds' Calendar": "But gently tooke that ungently
came. "
p. 154. _Sancti Dominici Pallium_. The "friend," as Dykes Campbell
points out, was Southey, whose "Book of the Church" had been attacked by
Charles Butler. This is one of Coleridge's most masterly experiments in
dealing with material hardly possible to turn into poetry. What exquisite
verse, and what variety of handling! The eighteenth-century smooth force
and pungency of the main part of it ends in an anticipation of the
burlesque energy of some of Mr. George Meredith's most characteristic
verse. Anyone coming upon the lines:
"More than the Protestant milk all newly lapt,
Impearling a tame wild-cat's whiskered jaws,"
would have assigned them without hesitation to the writer of "A Certain
People" and other sonnets in the "Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth. "
p. 158. _Ne plus ultra_. This mysterious fragment is one of the most
original experiments which Coleridge ever made, both in metre and in
language (abstract terms becoming concrete through intellectual passion)
and may seem to anticipate "The Unknown Eros. "
p. 164. _The Pains of Sleep_. In a letter to Sir George and Lady
Beaumont, dated September 22, 1803, Coleridge wrote, describing his journey
to Scotland: "With the night my horrors commence. During the whole of my
journey three nights out of four I have fallen asleep struggling and
resolving to lie awake, and, awaking, have blest the scream which delivered
me from the reluctant sleep. . . . These dreams, with all their mockery of
guilt, rage, unworthy desires, remorse, shame, and terror, formed at the
time the subject of some Verses, which I had forgotten till the return of
my complaint, and which I will send you in my next as a curiosity. "
p. 169. _Names_. Coleridge was as careless as the Elizabethans in
acknowledging the originals of the poems which he translated, whether, as
in this case, he was almost literal, or, as in the case of the Chamouni
poem, he used his material freely. The lines "On a Cataract" are said to be
"improved from Stolberg" in the edition of 1848, edited by Mrs. H. N.
Coleridge; and the title may suit the whole of them.
p. 182. Answer to a Child's Question. I have omitted the four lines,
printed in brackets in Campbell's edition, which were omitted, I think
rightly, by Coleridge in reprinting the poem from the _Morning Post_
of October 16, 1802.
p. 183. _Lines on a Child_. This exquisite fragment is printed in
Coleridge's works in a prefatory note to the prose "Wanderings of Cain. " It
was written, he tells us, "for the purpose of procuring a friend's judgment
on the metre, as a specimen" of what was to have been a long poem, in
imitation of "The Death of Abel," written in collaboration with Wordsworth.
"The Ancient Mariner was written instead. "
p. 188. _The two Round Spaces on the Tombstone_. This poem was printed
in the _Morning Post_ of December 4, 180O, under the title: "The two
Round Spaces: a Skeltoniad;" and it is this text which is here given, from
Campbell's edition. The "fellow from Aberdeen" was Sir James Mackintosh.
Coleridge apologised for reprinting the verses, "with the hope that they
will be taken, as assuredly they were composed, in mere sport. " No apology
was needed; they are the most rich, ripe, and Rabelaisian comic verses he
ever wrote, full-bodied and exultant in their exuberance of wayward and
good-humoured satire.
p. 192. _Sonnets Attempted in the Manner of Contemporary Writers_.
Dykes Campbell quotes a letter of Coleridge to Cottle, which he attributes
to the year 1797, in which Coleridge says: "I sent to the _Monthly
Magazine_ three mock sonnets in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles
Lloyd's, and Charles Lamb's, etc. etc. , exposing that affectation of
unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in commonplace epithets,
flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and
mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, etc. etc. The
instances were all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb. I signed them
'Nehemiah Higginbottom. ' I think they may do good to our young Bards. "
Coleridge's humour, which begins as early as 1794, with the lines on
"Parliamentary Oscillators," is one of the outlets of an oppressively
ingenious mind, over-packed with ideas, which he cannot be content to
express in prose. He delights, as in an intellectual exercise, in the
grapple with difficult technique, the victorious wrestle with grotesque
rhymes. All the comic poems are unusually rich and fine in rhythm, which
seems to exult in its mastery over material so foreign to it.
Yet he has not always or wholly command of this humour. The famous "Lines
to a Young Ass" were first written as a joke, and there is some burlesque
strength in such lines as:
"Where Toil shall wed young Health, that charming Lass!
And use his sleek cows for a looking-glass. "
But the mood went, the jest was so far forgotten as to be taken seriously
by himself, and turned into the sober earnest which it remains; a kind of
timidity of the original impression crept in, and we are left to laugh
rather at than with the poet.
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Title: Specimens of the Table Talk of S. T. Coleridge
Author: Coleridge
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TABLE TALK OF S. T. COLERIDGE ***
Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Jerry Fairbanks, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
[The Greek transliterations throughout this file are either missing or
very suspect. ]
[Illustration: F. Finden sculp.
_London, John Murray, Albernarle St. 1837_]
[autographed:
Dear Sir,
Your obliged servant.
S. T. Coleridge]
SPECIMENS
OF THE
TABLE TALK
OF
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
TO
JAMES GILLMAN, ESQUIRE,
OF THE GROVE, HIGHGATE, AND TO
MRS. GILLMAN,
This Volume IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED.
PREFACE.
* * * * *
It is nearly fifteen years since I was, for the first time, enabled to
become a frequent and attentive visitor in Mr. Coleridge's domestic
society. His exhibition of intellectual power in living discourse struck me
at once as unique and transcendant; and upon my return home, on the very
first evening which I spent with him after my boyhood, I committed to
writing, as well as I could, the principal topics of his conversation in
his own words. I had no settled design at that time of continuing the work,
but simply made the note in something like a spirit of vexation that such a
strain of music as I had just heard, should not last forever. What I did
once, I was easily induced by the same feeling to do again; and when, after
many years of affectionate communion between us, the painful existence of
my revered relative on earth was at length finished in peace, my occasional
notes of what he had said in my presence had grown to a mass, of which this
volume contains only such parts as seem fit for present publication. I
know, better than any one can tell me, how inadequately these specimens
represent the peculiar splendour and individuality of Mr. Coleridge's
conversation. How should it be otherwise? Who could always follow to the
turning-point his long arrow-flights of thought? Who could fix those
ejaculations of light, those tones of a prophet, which at times have made
me bend before him as before an inspired man? Such acts of spirit as these
were too subtle to be fettered down on paper; they live--if they can live
any where--in the memories alone of those who witnessed them. Yet I would
fain hope that these pages will prove that all is not lost;--that something
of the wisdom, the learning, and the eloquence of a great man's social
converse has been snatched from forgetfulness, and endowed with a permanent
shape for general use. And although, in the judgment of many persons, I may
incur a serious responsibility by this publication; I am, upon the whole,
willing to abide the result, in confidence that the fame of the loved and
lamented speaker will lose nothing hereby, and that the cause of Truth and
of Goodness will be every way a gainer. This sprig, though slight and
immature, may yet become its place, in the Poet's wreath of honour, among
flowers of graver hue.
If the favour shown to several modern instances of works nominally of the
same description as the present were alone to be considered, it might seem
that the old maxim, that nothing ought to be said of the dead but what is
good, is in a fair way of being dilated into an understanding that every
thing is good that has been said by the dead. The following pages do not, I
trust, stand in need of so much indulgence. Their contents may not, in
every particular passage, be of great intrinsic importance; but they can
hardly be without some, and, I hope, a worthy, interest, as coming from the
lips of one at least of the most extraordinary men of the age; whilst to
the best of my knowledge and intention, no living person's name is
introduced, whether for praise or for blame, except on literary or
political grounds of common notoriety. Upon the justice of the remarks here
published, it would be out of place in me to say any thing; and a
commentary of that kind is the less needed, as, in almost every instance,
the principles upon which the speaker founded his observations are
expressly stated, and may be satisfactorily examined by themselves. But,
for the purpose of general elucidation, it seemed not improper to add a few
notes, and to make some quotations from Mr. Coleridge's own works; and in
doing so, I was in addition actuated by an earnest wish to call the
attention of reflecting minds in general to the views of political, moral,
and religious philosophy contained in those works, which, through an
extensive, but now decreasing, prejudice, have hitherto been deprived of
that acceptance with the public which their great preponderating merits
deserve, and will, as I believe, finally obtain. And I can truly say, that
if, in the course of the perusal of this little work, any one of its
readers shall gain a clearer insight into the deep and pregnant principles,
in the light of which Mr. Coleridge was accustomed to regard God and the
World,--I shall look upon the publication as fortunate, and consider myself
abundantly rewarded for whatever trouble it has cost me.
A cursory inspection will show that this volume lays no claim to be ranked
with those of Boswell in point of dramatic interest. Coleridge differed
not more from Johnson in every characteristic of intellect, than in the
habits and circumstances of his life, during the greatest part of the time
in which I was intimately conversant with him. He was naturally very fond
of society, and continued to be so to the last; but the almost unceasing
ill health with which he was afflicted, after fifty, confined him for many
months in every year to his own room, and, most commonly, to his bed. He
was then rarely seen except by single visiters; and few of them would feel
any disposition upon such occasions to interrupt him, whatever might have
been the length or mood of his discourse. And indeed, although I have been
present in mixed company, where Mr. Coleridge has been questioned and
opposed, and the scene has been amusing for the moment--I own that it was
always much more delightful to me to let the river wander at its own sweet
will, unruffled by aught but a certain breeze of emotion which the stream
itself produced. If the course it took was not the shortest, it was
generally the most beautiful; and what you saw by the way was as worthy of
note as the ultimate object to which you were journeying. It is possible,
indeed, that Coleridge did not, in fact, possess the precise gladiatorial
power of Johnson; yet he understood a sword-play of his own; and I have,
upon several occasions, seen him exhibit brilliant proofs of its
effectiveness upon disputants of considerable pretensions in their
particular lines. But he had a genuine dislike of the practice in himself
or others, and no slight provocation could move him to any such exertion.
He was, indeed, to my observation, more distinguished from other great men
of letters by his moral thirst after the Truth--the ideal truth--in his
own mind, than by his merely intellectual qualifications. To leave the
everyday circle of society, in which the literary and scientific rarely--
the rest never--break through the spell of personality;--where Anecdote
reigns everlastingly paramount and exclusive, and the mildest attempt to
generalize the Babel of facts, and to control temporary and individual
phenomena by the application of eternal and overruling principles, is
unintelligible to many, and disagreeable to more;--to leave this species
of converse--if converse it deserves to be called--and pass an entire day
with Coleridge, was a marvellous change indeed. It was a Sabbath past
expression 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 whom all literature and genial 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 human and divine; marshalling
all history, harmonizing all experiment, probing the depths of your
consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and of 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 on others, save when any given act
fell naturally in the way of his discourse,--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 for ever through a thousand windings, yet with no pause,
to some magnificent point in which, as in a focus, all the party-coloured
rays of his discourse should converge in light. In all this he was, in
truth, your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that
he was other than a fellow student and the companion of your way,--so
playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate the glance
of his pleasant eye!
There were, indeed, some whom Coleridge tired, and some whom he sent
asleep. It would occasionally so happen, when the abstruser mood was strong
upon him, and the visiter was narrow and ungenial. I have seen him at times
when you could not incarnate him,--when he shook aside your petty questions
or doubts, and burst with some impatience through the obstacles of common
conversation. Then, escaped from the flesh, he would soar upwards into an
atmosphere almost too rare to breathe, but which seemed proper to _him_,
and there he would float at ease. Like enough, what Coleridge then said,
his subtlest listener would not understand as a man understands a
newspaper; but upon such a listener there would steal an influence, and an
impression, and a sympathy; there would be a gradual attempering of his
body and spirit, till his total being vibrated with one pulse alone, and
thought became merged in contemplation;--
And so, his senses gradually wrapt
In a half sleep, he'd dream of better worlds,
And dreaming hear thee still, O singing lark,
That sangest like an angel in the clouds!
But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the general character of
Mr. Coleridge's conversation was abstruse or rhapsodical. The contents of
the following pages may, I think, be taken as pretty strong presumptive
evidence that his ordinary manner was plain and direct enough; and even
when, as sometimes happened, he seemed to ramble from the road, and to
lose himself in a wilderness of digressions, the truth was, that at that
very time he was working out his fore-known conclusion through an almost
miraculous logic, the difficulty of which consisted precisely in the very
fact of its minuteness and universality. He took so large a scope, that,
if he was interrupted before he got to the end, he appeared to have been
talking without an object; although, perhaps, a few steps more would have
brought you to a point, a retrospect from which would show you the
pertinence of all he had been saying. I have heard persons complain that
they could get no answer to a question from Coleridge. The truth is, he
answered, or meant to answer, so fully that the querist should have no
second question to ask. In nine cases out of ten he saw the question was
short or misdirected; and knew that a mere _yes_ or _no_ answer could not
embrace the truth--that is, the whole truth--and might, very probably, by
implication, convey error. Hence that exhaustive, cyclical mode of
discoursing in which he frequently indulged; unfit, indeed, for a dinner-
table, and too long-breathed for the patience of a chance visiter,--but
which, to those who knew for what they came, was the object of their
profoundest admiration, as it was the source of their most valuable
instruction. Mr. Coleridge's affectionate disciples learned their lessons
of philosophy and criticism from his own mouth. He was to them as an old
master of the Academy or Lyceum. The more time he took, the better pleased
were such visiters; for they came expressly to listen, and had ample proof
how truly he had declared, that whatever difficulties he might feel, with
pen in hand, in the expression of his meaning, he never found the smallest
hitch or impediment in the utterance of his most subtle reasonings by word
of mouth. How many a time and oft have I felt his abtrusest thoughts steal
rhythmically on my soul, when chanted forth by him! Nay, how often have I
fancied I heard rise up in answer to his gentle touch, an interpreting
music of my own, as from the passive strings of some wind-smitten lyre!
Mr. Coleridge's conversation at all times required attention, because what
he said was so individual and unexpected. But when he was dealing deeply
with a question, the demand upon the intellect of the hearer was very
great; not so much for any hardness of language, for his diction was always
simple and easy; nor for the abstruseness of the thoughts, for they
generally explained, or appeared to explain, themselves; but preeminently
on account of the seeming remoteness of his associations, and the exceeding
subtlety of his transitional links. Upon this point it is very happily,
though, according to my observation, too generally, remarked, by one whose
powers and opportunities of judging were so eminent that the obliquity of
his testimony in other respects is the more unpardonable;--"Coleridge, to
many people--and often I have heard the complaint--seemed to wander; and he
seemed then to wander the most, when, in fact, his resistance to the
wandering 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 continued to admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but
did not see their relations to the dominant theme. * * * * However, I can
assert, upon my long and intimate knowledge of Coleridge's mind, that logic
the most severe was as inalienable from his modes of thinking, as grammar
from his language. " [Footnote: Tait's Mag. Sept. 1834, p. 514. ] True: his
mind was a logic-vice; let him fasten it on the tiniest flourish of an
error, he never slacked his hold, till he had crushed body and tail to
dust. He was _always_ ratiocinating in his own mind, and therefore
sometimes seemed incoherent to the partial observer. It happened to him as
to Pindar, who in modern days has been called a rambling rhapsodist,
because the connections of his parts, though never arbitrary, are so fine
that the vulgar reader sees them not at all. But they are there
nevertheless, and may all be so distinctly shown, that no one can doubt
their existence; and a little study will also prove that the points of
contact are those which the true genius of lyric verse naturally evolved,
and that the entire Pindaric ode, instead of being the loose and lawless
out-burst which so many have fancied, is, without any exception, the most
artificial and highly wrought composition which Time has spared to us from
the wreck of the Greek Muse. So I can well remember occasions, in which,
after listening to Mr. Coleridge for several delightful hours, I have gone
away with divers splendid masses of reasoning in my head, the separate
beauty and coherency of which I deeply felt, but how they had produced, or
how they bore upon, each other, I could not then perceive. In such cases I
have mused sometimes even for days afterwards upon the words, till at
length, spontaneously as it seemed, "the fire would kindle," and the
association, which had escaped my utmost efforts of comprehension before,
flash itself all at once upon my mind with the clearness of noon-day light.
It may well be imagined that a style of conversation so continuous and
diffused as that which I have just attempted to describe, presented
remarkable difficulties to a mere reporter by memory. It is easy to
preserve the pithy remark, the brilliant retort, or the pointed anecdote;
these stick of themselves, and their retention requires no effort of mind.
But where the salient angles are comparatively few, and the object of
attention is a long-drawn subtle discoursing, you can never recollect,
except by yourself thinking the argument over again. In so doing, the order
and the characteristic expressions will for the most part spontaneously
arise; and it is scarcely credible with what degree of accuracy language
may thus be preserved, where practice has given some dexterity, and long
familiarity with the speaker has enabled, or almost forced, you to catch
the outlines of his manner. Yet with all this, so peculiar were the flow
and breadth of Mr. Coleridge's conversation, that I am very sensible how
much those who can best judge will have to complain of my representation of
it. The following specimens will, I fear, seem too fragmentary, and
therefore deficient in one of the most distinguishing properties of that
which they are designed to represent; and this is true. Yet the reader will
in most instances have little difficulty in understanding the course which
the conversation took, although my recollections of it are thrown into
separate paragraphs for the sake of superior precision. As I never
attempted to give dialogue--indeed, there was seldom much dialogue to give
--the great point with me was to condense what I could remember on each
particular topic into intelligible _wholes_ with as little injury to the
living manner and diction as was possible. With this explanation, I must
leave it to those who still have the tones of "that old man eloquent"
ringing in their ears, to say how far I have succeeded in this delicate
enterprise of stamping his winged words with perpetuity.
In reviewing the contents of the following pages, I can clearly see that I
have admitted some passages which will be pronounced illiberal by those
who, in the present day, emphatically call themselves liberal--_the_
liberal. I allude of course to Mr. Coleridge's remarks on the Reform Bill
and the Malthusian economists. The omission of such passages would probably
have rendered this publication more generally agreeable, and my disposition
does not lead me to give gratuitous offence to any one. But the opinions of
Mr. Coleridge on these subjects, however imperfectly expressed by me, were
deliberately entertained by him; and to have omitted, in so miscellaneous a
collection as this, what he was well known to have said, would have argued
in me a disapprobation or a fear, which I disclaim. A few words, however,
may be pertinently employed here in explaining the true bearing of
Coleridge's mind on the politics of our modern days. He was neither a Whig
nor a Tory, as those designations are usually understood; well enough
knowing that, for the most part, half-truths only are involved in the
Parliamentary tenets of one party or the other. In the common struggles of
a session, therefore, he took little interest; and as to mere personal
sympathies, the friend of Frere and of Poole, the respected guest of
Canning and of Lord Lansdowne, could have nothing to choose. But he threw
the weight of his opinion--and it was considerable--into the Tory or
Conservative scale, for these two reasons:--First, generally, because he
had a deep conviction that the cause of freedom and of truth is now
seriously menaced by a democratical spirit, growing more and more rabid
every day, and giving no doubtful promise of the tyranny to come; and
secondly, in particular, because the national Church was to him the ark of
the covenant of his beloved country, and he saw the Whigs about to coalesce
with those whose avowed principles lead them to lay the hand of spoliation
upon it. Add to these two grounds, some relics of the indignation which the
efforts of the Whigs to thwart the generous exertions of England in the
great Spanish war had formerly roused within him; and all the constituents
of any active feeling in Mr. Coleridge's mind upon matters of state are, I
believe, fairly laid before the reader. The Reform question in itself gave
him little concern, except as he foresaw the present attack on the Church
to be the immediate consequence of the passing of the Bill; "for let the
form of the House of Commons," said he, "be what it may, it will be, for
better or for worse, pretty much what the country at large is; but once
invade that truly national and essentially popular institution, the Church,
and divert its funds to the relief or aid of individual charity or public
taxation--how specious soever that pretext may be--and you will never
thereafter recover the lost means of perpetual cultivation. Give back to
the Church what the nation originally consecrated to its use, and it ought
then to be charged with the education of the people; but half of the
original revenue has been already taken by force from her, or lost to her
through desuetude, legal decision, or public opinion; and are those whose
very houses and parks are part and parcel of what the nation designed for
the general purposes of the Clergy, to be heard, when they argue for making
the Church support, out of her diminished revenues, institutions, the
intended means for maintaining which they themselves hold under the
sanction of legal robbery? " Upon this subject Mr. Coleridge did indeed feel
very warmly, and was accustomed to express himself accordingly. It weighed
upon his mind night and day, and he spoke upon it with an emotion, which I
never saw him betray upon any topic of common politics, however decided his
opinion might be. In this, therefore, he was _felix opportunitate mortis;
non enim vidit_----; and the just and honest of all parties will heartily
admit over his grave, that as his principles and opinions were untainted by
any sordid interest, so he maintained them in the purest spirit of a
reflective patriotism, without spleen, or bitterness, or breach of social
union.
It would require a rare pen to do justice to the constitution of
Coleridge's mind. It was too deep, subtle, and peculiar, to be fathomed by
a morning visiter. Few persons knew much of it in any thing below the
surface; scarcely three or four ever got to understand it in all its
marvellous completeness. Mere personal familiarity with this extraordinary
man did not put you in possession of him; his pursuits and aspirations,
though in their mighty range presenting points of contact and sympathy for
all, transcended in their ultimate reach the extremest limits of most men's
imaginations. For the last thirty years of his life, at least, Coleridge
was really and truly a philosopher of the antique cast. He had his esoteric
views; and all his prose works from the "Friend" to the "Church and State"
were little more than feelers, pioneers, disciplinants for the last and
complete exposition of them. Of the art of making hooks he knew little, and
cared less; but had he been as much an adept in it as a modern novelist, he
never could have succeeded in rendering popular or even tolerable, at
first, his attempt to push Locke and Paley from their common throne in
England.
