No More Learning

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CHAPTER VI
COLERIDGE
COLERIDGE survives for us as poet: a poet unique in inspiration,
unique, also, if sadly fitful, in achievement. But he was also philo-
sopher, critic, theologian, moralist, talker-above all, a talker.
And, with the strongest will in the world, it would have been hard
for one so variously endowed not to dissipate his genius. Given a
will exceptionally infirm, the wonder is that he should have left so
much, rather than so little, as a monument of what he was.
The strange complexity of his nature, reflected, as it is, in the
whole tenor of his life, is a challenge to all who love to follow the
mysterious windings of the soul. His character is an enthralling,
as well as a deeply pathetic, study in itself. And it may even be
that we shall find it throw some light upon his genius, as a poet.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in October 1772; two years
after Wordsworth, one year after Walter Scott. He was crossing
the threshold into manhood at the time when the French revolution
was rousing the more active minds to revolt against the traditions
of the past: a revolt which, in his case as in others, extended to
things literary no less than to those social and political. He reached
middle life with the reaction which followed the downfall of Napoleon.
He died (1834) in the period immediately succeeding the arrest of
that reaction: some dozen years later than Keats and Shelley; ten
years after Byron; two years after Walter Scott. And, of all the
movements connected with those names and events, there was not
one, unless we except the creations of Keats and Shelley, which did
not, whether by way of action or reaction, leave some trace upon
his soul.
From his father he inherited a reverence for verbal niceties
which went with him throughout life; a curious strain of pedantry,
which crops up in the most unlikely places; above all, a dreamy
nature, which always made him a stranger and pilgrim among the
bustling figures and harsh incidents of daily life. To his mother,


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a woman of keen practical instincts, he does not seem to have owed
much beyond the priceless boon of affection. And even this was
largely lost to him when, on the death of his father, he was des-
patched, according to the practice even then too common in
English households, to school (Christ's hospital) at the age of nine
(1781). Henceforth, he was to see his family only at the rarest
intervals; and the outlet of home affections was virtually closed.
Even as a child, he had laid hold on all the books--especially,
imaginative works-that came within his reach. At school, he
—
became a prodigy of youthful learning and philosophy: logician,
metaphysician, bard,' the 'inspired charity boy' of Lamb's wistful
recollections. For a time, as he tells us -and it was not for the
last time—the ‘bard’ was quite driven out by the ‘metaphysician. '
And it needed what we should now consider the rather weak
stimulus of Bowles's sonnets to rouse him from this preposterous
pursuit' (1789). The remedy, such as it was, proved undeniably
efficacious. For the next five years, sentiment, of the kind repre-
sented by Bowles, was the most powerful factor in his growth.
In the excitement of Cambridge life (1791-3)-partly, too,
under the spell of love for Mary Evans--his whole being seems
to have expanded. But there was nothing to mark him off from
the ordinary student of talent until, under the spur of debt or ill-
starred love, or both, he suddenly bolted from the university and
enlisted in a regiment of light dragoons (December 1793). After four
months of this ludicrously unsuitable employment, he was discharged,
by the efforts of his friends, and readmitted, with due penalties, to
his college. Some two months later (June 1794) began that ac-
quaintance with Southey, then an Oxford undergraduate, which
was deeply to colour the next few years of his life.
Up to this time, there is nothing beyond the doubtful evidence
of a school exercise to show that the revolution in France had
roused any deep interest, or even attention, in his mind. Now,
under the tenser will of Southey, he became a fiery revolutionist,
of a brand, however, peculiarly his own! In hatred of Pitt and the
war, he was, no doubt, at one with the other Jacobins of the time.
But the Pantisocracy, which the two friends beat out between them,
ran decisively athwart the main stream of revolutionary aspirations.
It was intended only for the select few; it was no part of a general
1 “We never were, at any period of our lives, converts to the system of French
politics,' he writes, in an article on Jacobinism (1802). And the lightness with which
he dropped the cause of France-as may be seen from his fine, but somewhat rhetorical,
Ode (1798)—bears witness to the fact.


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VI]
The French Revolution
119
scheme of social reconstruction. Again, the ‘Jacobinism’of Coleridge,
though not that of Southey, was always strongly charged with a
mystical and religious element, which stands in the sharpest contrast
with the purely secular, often atheist, temper more common among
the reformers of that day. Lastly-and here, once again, he joins
hands with Southey—the whole creed and being of the young
convert were drowned in a flood of sentiment which woke in him,
for the first time in good earnest, the need of poetic utterance, and
which at once sets a barrier between him and most of the leading
figures among the rebel band: Godwin, for instance, or Holcroft,
or even Thelwall.
It was in pleading the cause of Pantisocracy that he first
discovered—to himself, perhaps, as well as to others—his amazing
powers of eloquence. His letters of that time are full of boyish
delight in the discovery: ‘Up I arose, terrible in reasoning' is a
typical sentence. And, so long as he could convince, or even
vanquish, his opponents, it is clear that he did not much trouble
himself to put his convictions into act. Even his breach with
Southey, who soon became lukewarm in the cause, would seem to
have partly sprung from an uneasy sense that he, too, had said more
than he was willing or able to make good, and from the consequent
impulse, very natural though not very just, to prove that some one
else was yet more guilty than himself. Still more ominous, even
in an age of overwrought sentiment, is the sentimentalism of his
letters. Since I quitted this room,' he writes on his return from
the fateful visit to Oxford, 'what and how important events have
been evolved! America ! Southey! Miss Fricker! Yes, Southey,
you are right. Even love is the creature of strong motive. I
certainly love her. It is small wonder that the love which began
as 'the creature of strong motive'—that is, Southey's fiat-should
have ended disastrously for both. A year later (October 1795) the
marriage duly took place.
The poetry of these years (1794–6) is a mirror of the man :
eloquent, loose-girt, strongly inclined to preach; in all things, the
very reverse of the inspired pieces soon to follow. It is, doubt-
less, the sincere expression of the generous convictions and aspira-
tions which he held in common with others. But it lacks the
individuality which is the soul of poetry; and, only in one passage-
some three or four lines of The Eolian Harpidoes it offer even
a faint promise of the works by which he lives. It is a glorified
6
1 I find that these lines (26—9) were first inserted in the Errata to Sibylline Leares
(1817). Thus, the one redeeming exception falls to the ground.


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I 20
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6
version of sermons such as Hazlitt heard in the enchanted walls of
the Shropshire chapel. It has nothing in common with The Ancient
Mariner, or Christabel, or even the ode Dejection.
It was the genius of Wordsworth-and, with Wordsworth, we
must always think of his 'exquisite sister'—that first revealed him
to himself. It was in daily intercourse with a stronger spirit than
his own-first at Stowey (1797—8), then, more fitfully, in the lake
country (1800—3)—that all his enduring poetry was composed.
The spell of Wordsworth, however, went far deeper than this. It
not only awakened the younger poet to creative energies which
had hitherto lain asleep. It was a transforming influence upon his
whole cast of thought, upon the whole character of his soul. His
whole nature was roused, for the first time, to a full consciousness
of its powers; and powers of which he had hitherto given no
suspicion were suddenly called to light. A sense of the beauty
of outward things, as deep as Wordsworth's, but still more delicate
and more subtle; a sense of the boundless mystery of life—the
inner yet more than the outer life-and a power of interpreting
it in terms of thought: these were the two gifts which came to
him with this new birth; and, however idly he may have used
them, they remained with him to the end. Well might he say
that 'a new earth and a new heaven' were now given to him in
dower. ' For he saw the world with a keener and more radiant
vision than had ever been granted to him before; and he saw into
it more deeply. In the full sense of the terms, he became, for the
first time, both philosopher and poet.
That his use of these magic gifts was not what it might have
been, is too clear. But it is only just to remember that this applies
more to his work as philosopher than as poet. Poetry 'comes not
with observation. ' And, if that be true, in a measure, of all poetry, of
none is it so true as of that to which the peculiar genius of Coleridge
was manifestly ordained. Is it reasonable to
Is it reasonable to suppose that any poet
could have gone on living for ever in an air so rarefied as that of
The Ancient Mariner, or Kubla Khan, or Christabel? Given cir-
cumstances so happy as almost to amount to a miracle, perhaps he
might. But the miracle did not happen to Coleridge; and, even
if his will had been as strong as it was weak, there is no warrant
that it would have happened. To condemn him on this score,
however much he himself would have accepted the condemnation,
seems, therefore, unwarrantably harsh. But his other gifts lay in
a region more under his control. And, had he been a man of
ordinary resolution-above all, had he not let himself become the


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а
vi]
Bondage to Opium
I 21
slave of opium-there was nothing to prevent him from accom-
plishing a giant's work in philosophy and criticism. In criticism
and the theory of criticism, he might have done for his own country
the double work which was done for Germany by Lessing and
Hegel, and something more besides. In philosophy, he might have
recast and even extended the massive fabric of Kant. As it is, in
neither field has he left more than a heap of disjointed, but imposing,
fragments.
The opium habit, the beginnings of which go back as far as 1797,
seems to have grown upon him during his time at Malta (1804-6);
and, by the time he returned to England, the bondage must have
been confirmed. Again and again, he strove to throw off the yoke;
but only to fall back again more helplessly than before. Degraded
in his own eyes, he felt life to be a burden almost too heavy to be
borne; and the letters which, now and again, were wrung from him
by remorse, are, perhaps, among the most terrible ever written. Two
things alone saved him from total shipwreck: the unwearied tender-
ness of friends, old and new-Poole, Wordsworth, Mrs Clarkson and
the Morgans; and the innate rectitude, winged by a strong religious
impulse, which did not cease to assert itself against reiterated
defeat. At length, after ten years of debasement, he nerved himself
to seek refuge with James Gillman, a physician of Highgate (1816).
And, thanks to the devoted friendship and watchfulness of this man
and his wife—he remained their 'inmate' till his death-he slowly
tore himself loose from the bondage in which he had been held.
That he never wholly gave up the drug, is tolerably clear. But he
so far mastered himself as to take it in rarer and smaller doses;
and, for practical purposes, the hard-fought victory was won. Thus,
the last eighteen years of his life were years of inward peace and
of fruitful service to others. The old weakness, no doubt, still
dogged his steps and prevented the fulfilment of the task —a work
on Spiritual Philosophy and half a dozen alternative titles—to
which he was conscious of being called. But, in familiar talk, in
formal lecturing and even in published writings, this was the
richest period of his life; and it left a deep mark upon some of
the strongest and most eager spirits of the younger generation.
The victory was won. But the long years of apparently hopeless
struggle had left scars which nothing could wholly heal. The prime
of his life had been largely wasted. And he had strained the
patience of some of his best friends. Josiah Wedgwood had with-
drawn, perhaps with undue harshness, his half of the pension that
he and his brother had granted in days when nothing seemed beyond


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I 22
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the reach of the young poet and thinker. Southey, who had
gallantly shouldered the charge of the truant's wife and children,
was embittered, if not estranged. Even Wordsworth, by an un-
guarded utterance made with the best intentions, had caused a
breach which could never wholly be made up? This was probably
the deepest sorrow of his life; all else,' he says, 'is as a flea-bite. '
His family life, too-though this was from causes which, in the
first instance, at any rate, had little to do with opium-had been
entirely broken up. And, though a formal separation was avoided,
he never lived with his wife after 1810; and had, in fact, seen as
little as he could of her since 1804. The real secret of the estrange-
ment was that, by temperament, the two were ill sorted with each
other. But it is impossible not to feel the deepest sympathy with
a woman who battled bravely with the hardships of her lot; and
hard to check the suspicion that, but for opium, the difficulties
might have been smoothed over. In any case, the breach was a
worse thing for Coleridge than he was ever willing to acknowledge.
It robbed him of the steadying influences of home life, to which
he was by nature peculiarly open. And it left a sting in his con-
science which he may have ignored, but which, just for that reason,
was never healed.
The strangest thing is that, in the very height of the opium
fever, he should have been capable of efforts which, though
lamentably unequal, still gave evidence of powers which not one
of his contemporaries could have rivalled. It was between 1808
and 1815 that he delivered the bulk of the critical lectures which
make an era in the history of English literary criticism; that he
composed The Friend, in its earlier and, doubtless, far inferior
version (1809); and, finally, that he wrote all save a few passages
of Biographia literaria (1815), the only one of his prose works
which can be said to survive to the present day. Even in the
depth of his debasement, he must have retained an amazing
spring, a power of throwing off weights which would have crushed
another man, of recovering something, at any rate, of the free flight
to which he was born. It was this boundless power of self-retrieval
-
that, at length, enabled him to cast off the yoke of opium. It was
this, even more than his genius, which drew men to him as a magnet
and never allowed him to forfeit the admiration, and even the
respect, of his friends.
i The details of this misunderstanding are set forth in the MS of Robinson's diary,
in the published version of which they are briefly summarised (vol. 1, pp. 210—211).
See, also, Coleridge's Letters, vol. II, pp. 577—8, 586—595.


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VI]
His Relation to Wordsworth
123
The work of Coleridge naturally falls under three heads :
poetry, criticism and philosophy. It remains to attempt a brief
estimate of each.
All that endures of Coleridge's poetry could easily be contained
in fifty pages; and, with few and doubtful exceptions, it was all
written during the six years when he was in constant intercourse
with Wordsworth (1797-1803). The greatest of all his poems,
almost the only one which stands as a rounded and finished whole,
The Ancient Mariner, is an indirect tribute to the liberating
influences which flowed in upon him from the elder poet. And the
ode Dejection, with the lines written after hearing Wordsworth
recite The Prelude, is a direct acknowledgment of the same debt.
Yet, the powers were there before they were set free by the wand
of the enchanter. And it may well be that he had this in mind
when he wrote
O Wordsworth! we receive but what we give,
in the one poem; and
Power streamed from thee, and thy soul received
The light reflected, as a light bestowed,
in the other. So subtle is the action and reaction in such cases
that, if this were so, it would be only just. For, after all, the
spirit of Wordsworth was here met and answered by one as potent
as itself. And what he did for Coleridge was not to mark out the
channels along which his genius was to flow, but only to loose the
springs of a fountain which, till that moment, had lain half frozen
beneath the earth.
A greater contrast than that between the two poets it would,
indeed, be hard to imagine: the one drawing his strength from the
'common things of sky and earth,' to which his vision gave a
meaning they had never taken before; the other building for him-
self a gorgeous palace in the clouds, the colours and forms of
which may have been reflected from those he had known upon the
earth, but which, to us as to him, come charged with a thousand
hints of an unearthly, enchanted world, known only to the spirit.
As both were well aware, there is a central point where the two
visions meet and blend. Biographia and the preface to Lyrical
Ballads speak clearly enough to that. So, to anyone who can
read beneath the surface, do the Ballads themselves. Still,
what is bound to strike us first is not the resemblance, but the
difference. And, however much we may recognise the former, the
more we live ourselves into the world of the two poets, the less
shall we be ready to make light of the latter.


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a
Before 1797, Coleridge had given no promise of what he was to
be. “I cannot write without a body of thought,' he laments in a
letter to Southey (11 December 1794). And the 'thought’his poetry
embodied had little to distinguish it from what we might expect
in the more highly wrought forms of prose. Indignation at the
social wrongs of the old order and the wickedness of its rulers,
pity for the outcast and oppressed, bitter cries to the Spirit in
whom alone is the harmony which can resolve the discord—these
form the staple of such poems as Religious Musings and Ode
to the Departing Year; and the style, stiff with Miltonic phrases,
rich in echoes of Gray and Collins, is no more original than the
matter. Byron was not far wrong when, in his early satire, he
mocked at the bard 'to turgid ode and tumid stanza dear. ' But
the scoff leaves the true Coleridge, the Coleridge of Kubla Khan
and The Ancient Mariner, utterly untouched.
With these poems, the first-fruits of his friendship with Words-
worth, we are in a different world. It is hard to believe they can
have come from the same man. The 'body of thought' and the
imagery which hung round it like an ill-fitting garment have both
vanished. Every idea presents itself unbidden as an image ; and
every image suggests a world of wonder and enchantment-the
world of which he holds the key as no poet has done before or
since, and in which, as poet, he was, henceforth, to have his home.
In Kubla Khan, an enemy might say that the body of thought'
does not obtrude itself for the simple reason that there is no
thought to obtrude. And it is true that, of all poems, this is the
most airy and unsubstantial: a 'vision,' a 'dream,' if there ever was
one; as the author himself tells us, an opium dream--the one good
service the accursed drug' ever did him. This, however, does not
rob the poem either of its power or its charm. On the contrary,
it is, perhaps, the secret of both. And, even if there were no other
argument which forced us to confess it, this one poem would be
enough to prove that, while thought alone, however inspiring, is
powerless to make poetry, pure imagery and pure music, even
without thought (if such a thing be possible), suffice, when working
in absolute harmony, to constitute what pedantry alone could deny
to be a great poem. And, when a poem is so charged with sug-
gestion, when, at each touch, it transports us into a world of the
poet's making, when each shading of the colours, each modulation
of the rhythm, presents that world in a new light, when our own
mood finds itself forced, step by step, to follow the ever-changing
mood of the poet, can we be quite sure that thought is absent?
1
1


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VI]
The Ancient Mariner
I 25
Reflection is ; reasoning is ; but that subtler, more impalpable,
process, which plays a real part not only in our dreams but even
in our waking resolves and inferences--this, assuredly, is not.
Unconscious though this may be in the process, it is conscious
enough in the result. It brings about a frame of mind as distinct, as
unmistakable, as any of those universally recognised to be thought. '
In the case of The Ancient Mariner, no such question could
be raised. There, we have an ordered story which moves on
unchecked, doubtless through a world of wonder, from mysterious
preface to inevitable close. Each incident stands out clear-cut
and vivid; each corresponding change in the soul of the mariner
is registered, no less distinctly, as upon the plate of an enchanted
dial. That is one side of the matter; and a side which sets the
poem in the sharpest contrast with the phantasmagoria of Kubla
Khan. On the other hand, each incident in that long succession-
the sailing of the ship, the gradual disappearance of the land-
marks, the southward voyage and the rest is presented not with
the shorthand brevity which suits the needs of daily life, but in the
successive images, distinct and single, which struck the eye of the
mariner at the moment; and this with a persistency which is clearly
intentional, and which it would be hard to parallel from any other
poem. It is here that the method of Kubla Khan repeats itself.
In one respect, indeed, The Ancient Mariner carries that
method a step further. In Kubla Khan, there is a general sense
of colour diffused throughout the poem. But, when we come to
ask how that impression is conveyed, it is impossible to lay our
finger upon anything more definite than the
forests ancient as the hills,
Enclosing sunny spots of greenery.
In The Ancient Mariner, on the other hand, we are not at loss for
a moment. The ice ‘as green as emerald,' the 'copper sky' of the
tropics, the moonbeams 'like April hoar-frost spread upon the sultry
main,' the moonlight that 'steeped in silentness the steady weather-
cock'-these are but a remnant of the lavish store of colour which
brightens the whole poem. And the touches which mark the more
unearthly moments of the mariner's sufferings are still to add :
The water, like a witch's oils,
Burnt green and blue and white;
The charmed water burnt alway,
A still and awful red;
not to speak of the ghastly colours which 'patched the bones' of
Death, in a verse which the subtle instinct of Coleridge led him
>


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Coleridge
[CH.
2
1
a
動
​subsequently to strike out. Of all the elements that blend to make
an image, colour is the most potent. And, if there be any poem
which drives this truth home, it is The Ancient Mariner.
As to the significance of this imagery-above all, in the super-
natural episodes of the poem-Coleridge himself has done something
to mislead later critics. Even to friendly readers, such as Lamb
and, perhaps, Wordsworth, 'all the miraculous parts' seem to have
been things suspect. And Southey, with however ill a grace, was
probably giving voice to the common verdict when he pronounced
the poem to be 'an attempt at the Dutch sublime. It is small
wonder, therefore, that Coleridge, who was never too confident in
his own genius, should have taken fright. And, in Biographia,
he is a shade too anxious to explain that his stress lay not on the
incidents themselves, but on their working upon the soul of the
mariner. That there is some truth in this, is certain. But it is
not the whole truth, nor anything like it. The incidents them-
selves-and, not least, the marvels-have a compelling power upon
the imagination; the story, as a mere story, is among the most
thrilling ever told. And, when we remember that this story shapes
itself in a succession of images unsurpassed for poetic power and
aptness, how is it possible to deny that all this counts, and counts
unspeakably, in the total imaginative effect? It is, no doubt, still
more surprising that, when all is said, these things should be no
more than an element in a larger whole ; that, side by side with
these outward incidents and images, we should have to reckon,
and reckon at least as largely, with their reflection in the soul of
the man who saw and suffered from them; that, from beginning
to end, we should see them through his eyes and feel them through
his spirit. But this is the miracle of Coleridge. And it is a poor
tribute to his genius if we insist upon isolating one element and
asserting that it is all he had to give. It is only by taking both
elements together and giving full allowance to both that we do
justice to the unique quality of this 'miraculous' poem.
The first part of Christabel was written almost immediately
after The Ancient Mariner, and shortly before the little band of
Stowey was broken up, never again to meet under such ‘indulgent
skies. ' The theme is of the same nature as in the preceding poem.
It is handled with more artifice; but, just for that reason, perhaps
with less of inspiration; certainly, with less of buoyant and exultant
freedom. The 'spring of love' that had gushed from the poet's
heart, as, for the first time, he saw and felt how 'excellently fair'
were the outward shows of sky and earth' and how deep the
6
>
6
6


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VI]
Christabel
127
meaning that lay hidden within, could never again gush ‘unaware. '
And, when he speaks once more of the vision that had come in the
first instant of his awakening, it is only to lament that it had been
withdrawn almost as soon as it was given and had left nothing but
yearning and self-reproach behind. In any case, the personal note,
which is very strong in The Ancient Mariner and which some
have thought has found its way too loudly into its closing verses,
is deliberately banished from Christabel; or finds an echo only in
the poignant passage about broken friendship, which he himself
considered the best and sweetest lines he ever wrote,' and in the
epilogue to the second part, which is partly an obvious suggestion
from the 'breeze-borne' elfish nature of his son, Hartley, partly a
lament over the difficulty—the impossibility, as it proved—of the task
which he had set himself: the solution of which, unlike the hopes and
longings of the child, was always to seek and never, alas, to find.
The same elaboration is manifest, also, in the metre. Never
before had the four-foot couplet been used with such variety and
subtlety of effect. As the author himself points out, that effect is
largely produced by a frequent use of the anapæstic movement,
which had already found its way into the ballad measure of The
Ancient Mariner; as in the lines-
For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky
Lay like a load on my weary eye,
And the dead were at my feet.
But it is here invoked still more persistently; as, indeed, in
general, there is a subtlety, not to say a finesse, about the
rhythmical movement of this poem, which would have been quite
out of place in the rushing narrative and more homely metre of
the other. It is one more proof of the wide gulf by which, in
spirit and in total effect, the two poems are divided. Of the
subtlety which went to the creation of the metre in Christabel
there could be no clearer illustration than the failure both of
Scott and Byron--the one in the opening lines of The Lay of the
Last Minstrel, the other in a cancelled introduction of The Siege
of Corinth—to catch anything like the cadence of the rhythm
which, avowedly, served for their model.
It has been said that the thing attempted in Christabel is
the most difficult in the whole field of romance: witchery by
daylight. ' And nothing could come nearer the mark. The
miraculous element, which lies on the face of The Ancient Mariner,
is here driven beneath the surface. The incidents themselves are
hardly outside the natural order. It is only by a running fire


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I 28
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>
of hints and suggestions—which the unimaginative reader has
been known to overlook—that we are made aware of the super-
natural forces which lie in wait on every side. The lifting of
the lady across the threshold, the moan of the mastiff bitch, the
darting of the flame as the enchantress passes—to the heedful,
all these things are full of meaning ; but, to the unwary, they say
nothing ; they say nothing to Christabel. Yet, the whole signifi-
cance of the poem is bound up with these subtle suggestions ;
though it is equally true that, if they were more than suggestions,
its whole significance would be altered or destroyed. It would
no longer be witchery by daylight,' but by moonlight; which
is a very different thing.
To take a world not markedly different from that given to us
in nature, and fill it with the presence, unseen but felt, of the
supernatural ; to tell a tale of human joys and sorrows, and make
it seem 'a story from the world of spirits '—this, indeed, was the
aim of Coleridge. But no one was more keenly aware than he
what were the obstacles to its achievement. “I have, as I always
had,' he said about a year before his death, the whole plan entire
from beginning to end in my mind'-it may be suspected that
this is one of many similar delusions—but I fear I could not
[now] carry on with equal success the execution of the idea, an
extremely subtle and delicate one. ' So subtle and delicate, in
truth, that it is doubtful whether even a man of stronger will
and more mastery of self could ever have ended the poem in the
same tone in which it was begun. Even of the fragment, as it
now stands, it can hardly be said that the second part carries out
the design so perfectly as the first. The localisation of the scene
in a familiar country may, as has sometimes been said, have some-
thing to do with this comparative failure. But it is due much
more to other causes : to an almost inevitable inability on the
poet's part to maintain himself indefinitely in the doubly distilled
imaginings which were the essence of his undertaking. Even in
the earlier part, it would seem that the right note had not always
come to him at the first effort. For, if we are to believe a con-
temporary reviewer-it may have been Hazlitt-in The Escaminer
(2 June 1816), the original version of
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
was
Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue;
and there are other instances of the same kind. The reviewer
scornfully remarks that the rejected reading was the keystone to
6


## p. 129 (#151) ############################################

vi]
As Poet of Nature
129
the whole poem,' and that it was rejected by the author for that
very reason. In his heart, he must have known better. It is of the
essence of the poem not to feed the mind with facts-still less,
with gruesome facts—but to spur the imagination by a sense of
mystery. It is manifest that the original reading renounces the
latter purpose for the former. And, if this be the case, it is clear
that Coleridge would have ruined his poem by retaining it.
The sketch of the projected continuation, which Gillman gives
on the authority of the poet, reads poorly enough. But it is
impossible to say what it, or any other raw material, might have
become under the transforming breath of inspiration. Still,
temperament and opium between them had so clouded the sense
of fact in Coleridge that it would be rash to pronounce whether
this was really the plan which he had in his mind from the begin-
ning, or nothing more than the improvisation of the moment.
How did Coleridge stand towards outward nature and what
was his place in the poetic movement of his time? It is impossible
to leave his work, as poet, without a few words on each of these
crucial, but widely different, matters.
This was the golden age of the poetry of nature’; and
Coleridge may claim his place in it with the best. It is a place
entirely to himself; and it depends upon two qualities. The first
is a faculty of minute and subtle observation, which he may have
learned, in the first instance, from Wordsworth, but which he
fostered to a degree of delicacy to which neither Wordsworth
himself, nor, perhaps, any other 'worshipper of nature,' Keats
excepted, ever quite attained. The 'creaking of the rook's wing'
and the branchless ash,
Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fanned by the waterfall,
in This lime-tree bower, my prison, and that 'peculiar tint of
yellow-green’ which marks the sunset sky in the ode Dejection,
together with whole poems such as The Nightingale, bear witness
to this extraordinary power. And, if more were wanted, it is
supplied in abundance, though rather as raw material than as
poetic creation, by the notes written when he was once more in
constant communion with Wordsworth (1803), and published in
the book which, of all others, throws most light upon the secret
springs of his genius, Anima Poetve (pp. 34—52). Nor does this
command of minute detail in any sense bar the way to an equal
mastery of broad, general effects. What picture was ever painted
9
6
B. L. XI.
CH. VI,


## p. 130 (#152) ############################################

130
Coleridge
[CH.
>
6
9
with broader brush than that of the ice-fields or the tropical
ocean in The Ancient Mariner? What general effect was ever
caught more precisely than that of the moonlight 'steeping in
silentness the steady weathercock' of the same poem, or of April
as the month of dark brown gardens and of peeping flowers' in
the ode Dejection? It may be doubted whether full justice has
even yet been done to this side of the poet's genius.
Yet, even this quality, great though it be, would have availed
little, if it had not gone hand in hand with one of a very different
order. With such a store of observed images at his command,
there must have been a constant temptation to lavish it at every
turn. Nothing is more surprising than the reserve, the sleepless
sense of poetic fitness, with which it is employed by Coleridge.
Even this, indeed, does not give us the whole truth. It is not only
that such images recur seldom ; but that, when they do, they are
lifted into a rarer atmosphere, a more remote region, than that of
mere outward vision. In all his greater poems—The Ancient
Mariner, perhaps, alone excepted—we are made to feel, and we
should hardly have entered into their spirit unless we did feel,
that the outer world is presented to us not directly, but through
a veil of mystery, which softens all that is harsh in outline or
colour; by a kind of second sight, which rather recalls objects,
once familiar, to the memory, than offers their actual image to the
eye. "Sir George Beaumont,' he notes in Anima Poetae, 'found
great advantage in learning to draw from nature through gauze
spectacles. And, with a success which we may be very sure
Sir George never approached, he seems to have applied a like
process to the forms of nature, as reflected in his poetry. Not
that his eye was ever shut even to the crudest effects of the
‘inanimate cold world. The very chemists' jars of blue and
' '
'
green vitriol,' as reflected in the stagnant reaches of a London
canal, win an entry in his note-book? But when they appear in
his poetry, it is—or, did dates allow, it would be as the 'witch's
oils' that burnt green and blue and white' around the waterlogged
vessel in the charmed water' of the tropical sea. Nothing, in
short, that he found in the outer world attained its rightful value
for him until, ‘by sublimation strange,' it had passed into the
'realm of shadows' which Schiller conceived to be the true region
both of poetry and of action”.
1 Anima Poeta, p. 28.
2 See Das Ideal und das Leben, of which the original title was Das Reich der
Schatten.


## p. 131 (#153) ############################################

vi]
As Romantic Poet
131
>
Of his place in the poetic movement of his time there is no
need to speak at length. It was the hour of romance. And, of all
that is purest and most ethereal in the romantic spirit, his poetry
is the most finished, the supreme, embodiment. No doubt, some
of the strands which went to make up the intricate web of the
romantic tissue appear but faintly, if at all, in the poetry of
Coleridge. Medievalism, which plays a large part in the work
of Scott and others, is to Coleridge commonly no more than a
vague atmosphere, such as would give the needful sense of remote-
ness and supply the fit setting for the marvellous which it is his
purpose to hint at or openly display. Once only does he go
palpably beyond this : in the shadowy picture of
The chamber carved so curiously,
Carved with figures strange and sweet,
For a lady's chamber meet.
But, even this touch of medievalism is studiously vague ; nor are
the allusions to trial by combat which follow in the second part of
Christabel any more precise. Contrast these with the description
of Madeline's chamber in The Eve of Saint Agnes or of the
feudal castle and the moss-troopers in The Lay of the Last
Minstrel; and we have the measure of the gulf which parts
Coleridge from other romantic poets in this matter.
Of the historic instinct, strong both in Scott and Byron,
Coleridge, in truth, was defiantly destitute.
Of all the men I ever knew, Wordsworth himself not excepted,' he writes,
'I have the faintest pleasure in things contingent and transitory. . . . Nay, it
goes to a disease with me. As I was gazing at a wall in Carnarvon Castle, I
wished the guide fifty miles off that was telling me, In this chamber the Black
Prince was born-or whoever it was,'
he adds, as well he might. It is true that, when the first cantos
of Childe Harold appeared, he had the courage to assert: 'It is
exactly on the plan that I myself had not only conceived six years
ago, but have the whole scheme drawn out in one of my old
memorandum books ? . ' But this was a pure delusion, of the same
kind as that which led him to declare he had conceived a poem,
with Michael Scott for hero, much superior to Goethe's Fausta;
with this difference, that, whereas Faust lay within his field of
vision, Childe Harold, or any other poem that should make appeal
to the sense of a former world,' after the manner of Byron,
assuredly did not.
9
1 Letters, vol. 11, p. 583.
3 See Table Talk, vol. II, pp. 108–113.
942


## p. 132 (#154) ############################################

132
[CH.
Coleridge
It was in the subtler, more spiritual, regions of romance that
Coleridge found his home. As to his treatment of the marvellous,
ever 'the main region of his song,' little need be added to what
has been said already. In one form or another, the theme never
ceased to haunt his mind during the brief flowering time of his
genius ; and The Ancient Mariner, Christabel and The three
Graves stand for three quite distinct modes of approaching it.
In The Ancient Mariner, the poet openly proclaims his marvels,
and exults in them. In Christabel, they are thrown into the back-
ground, and conveyed to our mind rather by subtle suggestion
than direct assertion. Finally, in the three Graves, neither
,
incidents nor persons have, in themselves, anything of the marvel-
lous; it appears solely in the withering blight brought by a
mother's curse upon three innocent lives. It is here that Coleridge
most nearly approaches the field and method of Wordsworth;
whose Peter Bell—in another way, perhaps, The Thorn-offers a
curious analogy with this powerful but, as usual, unfinished poem.
In the homelier region, he was, manifestly, less at ease than among
the marvels and subtleties of the two other poems; and it is rather
there that the secret of his unique genius must be sought.
Two things, in particular, may be noted. The indirectness by
which the elusive touches of Christabel are made to work their
cumulative effect may be contrasted with the directness of the
method employed by Keats in his treatment of a like theme, the
transformation of a serpent into the guise of a woman, in Lamia.
But it is more important to bear in mind that, if Coleridge is
haunted by the marvellous, it is less for its own sake than as a
symbol of the abiding mystery which he, like Wordsworth, found
everywhere in life, within man and around him; a sign of the
spirit presence which, in his faith, bound 'man and bird and
beast' in one mystical body and fellowship; a token of the love
which is the life of all creation, and which is revealed to us in
the blue sky bent over all. ' It is this faith which gives a deeper
meaning to these fairy creations than they bear upon the surface,
and which raises the closing verses of The Ancient Mariner from
the mere irrelevant appendage they have seemed to some critics,
to an expression of the thought that lies at the core of the
And, if this be true, his wellknown retort to
Mrs Barbauld—“Madam, the fault of the poem is that it has too
much moral'—would take a wider significance than has commonly
been supposed. Only, the self-depreciation of the poet must not
be taken more seriously than it deserves.
whole poem.


## p. 133 (#155) ############################################

VI]
His Theory of Criticism
133
6
In treating of Coleridge as literary critic, there is no alternative
but to speak either very briefly or at considerable length. The
latter is here impossible. All that can be done, therefore, is to
indicate the main avenues which his criticism opened out.
The only written monument of his critical work is that con-
tained in Biographia Literaria (1815—17), and in a short series of
articles contributed to Farley's Bristol Journal a year or two
earlier (1814)? . All else has to be gleaned from the very imperfect
reports of his lectures, recorded by Collier, Crabb Robinson and
others. These lectures, of which there were, in all, some dozen
courses, were delivered, partly in London partly at Bristol, between
the years 1808 and 1819. Their avowed subjects, apart from a
course on the history of philosophy (1818—19), were, mainly, the
drama in general, or Shakespeare and Milton. But Coleridge was
never the man to be bound down by a syllabus ; and his audience
had, on occasion, to bear, as best they could, a defence of school-
flogging, an attack on the Lancastrian system of education' and
other such irrelevancies, when they had come to hear a discourse
on Romeo and Juliet. Yet, in spite of these glaring faults, the
lectures were not seldom worthy both of their subject and of their
author. And, with the written pieces, they form a body of work
such as makes an epoch in the history of English-it would hardly
be too much to say, of European--criticism.
Coleridge concerns himself not only with the practice of
criticism, but, also—perhaps, by preference—with its theory. On
both sides, he offers the sharpest contrast with the critics of the
century, and, not least, of the generation, preceding. The Wartons
and Hurd, no doubt, stand apart from the men of their day. In
sentiment, they rebel against the canons of the Augustans; and,
so far, they are at one with Coleridge. But they were content to
defend their instinctive judgments on purely literary grounds, and
made no attempt to justify them on more general principles.
Indeed, they seem never to have suspected that their revolt against
the established taste in poetry carried with it a revolt against
the established system in philosophy. Coleridge, on the other
hand, was philosopher just as much as poet. He lived in the full
ide of a philosophical, no less than a poetic, revival. He was him-
self among the leading figures in both. He had, therefore, on both
sides, a far richer store of material to draw from than had been open
1 They are reprinted in the appendix to Cottle's Early Recollections. To the works
mentioned above should be added a pregnant section of a Preliminary Treatise on
Method, prefixed to Encyclopædia Metropolitana. It was written in 1817 and published
in 1818.


## p. 134 (#156) ############################################

134
Coleridge
[CH.
to the earlier rebels. And it was the first instinct of his nature to
weave, or force, every side of his experience into a consistent whole.
At the first step, he rules out the assumption, which, from
Horace onwards, had wrought such havoc in criticism, that the
object of poetry is to instruct; or, as a less extreme form of the
heresy had asserted, to make men morally better. That this may
be an effect of poetry-of much that is noblest in poetry-he is
not in the least concerned to deny. That, however, is no more
than an incidental result. And the true end, or function, of poetry
is to give immediate pleasure: pleasure, he explains in a somewhat
disconcerting addition, “through the medium of beauty? '
This may not carry us very far. But, at least, it serves to warn
us off from the wrong road, and to set our feet at the beginning of
the right one. More than this : by further additions and modi-
fications, Coleridge so expands his original doctrine as to bring us
considerably further on the path. In the first place, the assertion
that the pleasure which imaginative art aims at giving is wrought
'through the medium of beauty,' however much it may check the
logical flow of the argument, at least serves to enforce the truth,
already laid down by Aristotle, that imaginative pleasure differs
in kind from all other forms of pleasure : nay, that one form of
imaginative pleasure differs in kind from all other forms of
imaginative pleasure: that given by poetry, for instance, from
that given by sculpture or painting ; that given by the drama
from that given by lyric or by epic. In the second place, his own
analysis of that which constitutes “beauty' is so illuminating, his
own exposition of the conditions necessary to poetic pleasure is so
subtle, as to bring us a great deal further on the road than, at the
first moment, we may have been aware. The former throws a
flood of light upon the points in which the various arts differ
from each other, as well as upon those they have in common.
The latter-enforced, as it is, by a criticism of Shakespeare's early
poetic work, and reinforced by an equally delicate criticism of
the charm attaching to the consummate presentment of common
form’ in poetry, particularly by the Italian poets of the later
renascence-is one of the most satisfying things ever written
in this kind. In applying the principles which he had already
laid down in theory, the author succeeds both in defining them
more closely and in extending them more widely; in the very
statement of his theory, he contrives to offer a model of the
method which critics should aim at following in practice.
1 Farley's B. J. art. 1.


## p. 135 (#157) ############################################

vi] As Critic and Philosopher 135
Of the rest of his work in practical criticism, no account can
be offered. It must suffice to mention his criticism of Words-
worth in Biographia, and that of Shakespeare, as dramatist, in
various courses of his lectures. The former, in itself, is a fine
and discriminating piece of work. But it is more than doubtful
whether Coleridge was the man to have undertaken it. He was
aware that the slightly astringent touch, which he felt justice
demanded, would give offence to his brother poet. And, con-
sidering the relation between the two men-a relation once of
the warmest friendship, now of strained forbearance—it would
have been more gracious to keep silence. Indeed, so far as the
criticism deals with Wordsworth’s theory of 'poetic diction, it
cannot but strike the reader as carping ; not to mention the
appearance of treachery involved in attacking a theory for which
he himself was commonly held, and, probably, with some justice,
to be, in part, responsible. As critic of Shakespeare's dramatic
genius, his part is less ambiguous, though even this is complicated
by questions of unacknowledged debts to Schlegel. He was the
first English writer to insist that every work of art-in this
instance, every play-is, by its very nature, an organic whole ;
and that, if this is harder to discern in the complicated structure
of Shakespearean and much other modern drama, it is because,
at least in the nobler examples, such plays are not less, but more,
vitally articulated ; not less, but more, spontaneous and organic
Structure, scenic effect, poetry, character-all are shown to spring
from the same common root in the spirit of the poet; each to
enhance the imaginative effect which, instinctively, he had in view.
And he enforces this, not as a mere abstract doctrine—though it
lies at the core of his theory of beauty—but by an exposition of
individual masterpieces which, for subtlety and suggestiveness,
had certainly, if we except Goethe's masterly criticism of Hamlet,
never been approached. It remains true that, having done so
,
much, he might justly have been expected to do even more; and
that nothing but his own nervelessness, at once the cause and
effect of the opium habit, could have prevented him from doing it.
If, in literary criticism, there has sometimes been a disposition
to exaggerate the value of the work actually accomplished by
Coleridge, in philosophy, the tendency has almost always been
to give him less than his due ; certainly, as to what he achieved
in the way of writing ; too often, even as to his intrinsic capacity.
Yet, his importance in the history of English philosophy is not
to be denied. It is neither more nor less than to have stood


## p. 136 (#158) ############################################

136
[ch.
Coleridge
against the current which, for the last century, had swept every-
thing before it; to have assailed the mechanical philosophy
which, from the time of Locke, had firmly entrenched itself in
this country and in France; and, however much he may have
been overborne by the prejudices of the moment, at least to
have paved the way for their ultimate exposure and defeat. Even
at the moment, in the high tide of Bentham's influence, his
labours were by no means in vain. As writer-still more, in his
talk and in his personal influence—he served for a rallying point
to all who felt, if they could not explain to themselves, the
inadequacy of the prevailing system : the one man who was
capable of laying bare its fallacies, the one man who was able
to give a reasoned account of the larger faith after which they
were blindly groping. The evidence of this is to be found in
the lives of such men as Arnold and Maurice ; or, more com-
pactly, in the generous essay of Mill and the brilliant, but not
too generous, chapter devoted to the subject in Carlyle's Life
of Sterling.
In philosophy, as he himself would have been the first to
acknowledge, he was building on the foundations laid by Kant
and, to a less degree, by Fichte and Schelling. At what time
he became acquainted with the writings of Kant, is a disputed
point. He himself seems to place it in 18002; and, though he was
constitutionally inaccurate about all matters of fact, it is hard to
see why this date, the period immediately following his return
from Germany, should not be accepted. The question is hardly
one of supreme importance. For, despite some unlucky borrowings
from Schelling (alas ! unacknowledged), he was in no sense a mere
adapter, still less a mere copyist, from the Germans? He worked,
as all philosophers must work, on hints furnished by his pre-
decessors; and that is all.
His aim was to show the necessity of replacing the mechanical
interpretation of life and nature, which he found in possession
of the field, by one consistently spiritual, indeed religious. And
he carries out this purpose over the whole field of experience :
in metaphysics and philosophy ; in ethics and politics ; not to
mention his application of the same principle to imaginative
creation, as briefly indicated in the preceding section. In
1 Biographia, chap. ix.
2 The passage in Biographia, chap. XI (pp. 124–7), which forms the introduction
to Coleridge's metaphysical system, is an unblushing translation (with a misquotation
from Horace faithfully reproduced) of Schelling's System des transzendentalen Idealismus,
$S 1, 2. The rest of the chapter is largely an adaptation from the same work.


## p. 137 (#159) ############################################

VI]
6
Metaphysics and Psychology 137
metaphysics, his work is probably less satisfactory than in any other
branch of his vast subject. And that, partly because he is here
more ready than elsewhere to follow the hazardous guidance of
Schelling ; partly because the temptation to press speculative
truth into the service of a particular religious creed was more
than he was able wholly to resist. Hence, with all his subtlety,
he does not succeed in driving home the essentially creative
action of the mind in the process of knowledge—and that, after
all, is the main point at issue—at all as clearly as Kant had
done before him. And, by his use of the distinction between
the “reason' and the understanding'-a distinction originally
due to Kant for the purpose of bolstering up opinions origin-
ally derived from a wholly different source, he opens the door to
all kinds of fallacies and perversions. With Kant, the distinction
between the reason and the understanding has a purely restrictive
purpose. Its effect is to deny to the former anything more than
a ‘regulative' or suggestive function in the ordering of knowledge;
and to claim from the latter, which, froin its nature, must always
go hand in hand with a sensible intuition, the sole title to the
discovery of truth. In other words, it is a distinction which leads
a
straight to what have since come to be known as agnostic con-
clusions. To Coleridge, it serves a purpose exactly the reverse.
So far from separating the spheres of the two faculties, he sweeps
away all barriers between them. He allows to the one an ap-
parently unlimited power of re-affirming what the other had found
it necessary to deny; and thus exposes himself to Carlyle's sarcasm
that he had discovered 'the sublime secret of believing by the
reason what the understanding had been obliged to fling out as
incredible. ' It would be grossly unfair to say that this exhausts
the teaching of Coleridge in the region of metaphysics. His
criticism of the mechanical system-and, in particular, of the
theory of association, as elaborated by Hume and Hartley-
would, in itself, suffice to overthrow any such assertion!