again, a third course, of four lectures, on Milton in April 1814, when he scandalised his old friend and brother-minister, Dr Estlin, by describing the Satan of Paradise Lost as a 'sceptical Socinian.' But then and always, whether the room was full or half-empty, he gave satisfaction' to the audience. It was not the matter (which was sometimes hard to follow) but the manner which revealed the native and inextinguishable genius of the orator. Το speak of Shakespeare and Milton was to unlock his soul and to pour out a flood of eloquence as the 'spirit gave him utterance.' Eleven months (October 1813-September 1814) were spent at Bristol. For the greater part of this weary time' he was the guest of his old friend and correspondent, Josiah Wade, who placed him under the care of a Bristol physician, Dr Daniel, and provided him with an attendant. But under whatever conditions of restraint or freedom, his life was grievous. Then, fever, he was 'wrecked in a mist of opium.' Early in the autumn he was back with the Morgans at Ashley, near Box, and in November followed them to Calne. Thenceforward there was a betterment, the result of a strenuous though unsuccessful attempt to break through the opium-habit. Six letters on the Irish question, 'To Mr Justice Fletcher,' were published in the Courier, September-December 1814 (Essays, &c., 1830, vol. iii. pp. 677-733); and in 1815, though he published no books, delivered no lectures, and was silent in the Courier, he wrote and passed for the press the ·Biographia Literaria (1817), revised and rewrote his poems-Sibylline Leaves (1817)—and completed three acts of Zapolya (1817). Over and above these measurable entities he laid the foundation of, or at least wrote fragmentary notes for, a • magnum opus, to be entitled Logosophia-in Six Treatises. Despite these achievements Coleridge was sorely in need of funds, and, as it will, poverty stood between him and his printers and publishers. He must have been in dire straits when, in response to some complaint or revelation of his circumstances, Lord Byron sent him a hundred pounds. It was a fine and generous action, for the donor had no spare cash at his disposal, and was able and willing to help in other ways without putting his hand in his pocket. On the strength of this loan or gift, and armed with the MS. of Christabel, which Byron had already shown to Murray, and with the MS. of Zapolya for the managing committee of Drury Lane, he went up to town at the end of March 1816. When or where he forgathered with Byron, who was on the eve of his lifelong exile, is uncertain; but an arrangement was come to with Murray for the publication of Christabel, and, more important still, Coleridge gained a haven and foothold for himself. On the recommendation of Dr Joseph Adams, the relative of an old Bristol friend, Mr Matthew Coates, he was received on 25th April as patient and boarder by Mr James Gillman, a Highgate surgeon, who was willing to undertake his case and could offer him 'retirement and a garden.' Here, or not far off,' he remained for the rest of his life. In April 1816 Coleridge was but halfway through his forty-fourth year, but with the first genial reception of Gillman his wanderings and his story come to an end. Highgate was 'a termination' and a last retreat. To what extent Gillman helped Coleridge to 'give up laudanum' is disputed and is insusceptible of proof, but he undoubtedly inspired and encouraged him 'to scotch the snake.' Byron (who had stood his friend in 1816), under the impression that his kindness had been abused, reviled him in Don Juan (1819), but his odious personalities were no longer even 'part a truth,' and the calumny fell to the ground. Coleridge's frailties and shortcomings were ever before him, and at the last his plea was 'to be forgiven for fame.' During the eighteen years of life which remained to him he was not only loved but honoured, not only admired but esteemed and revered. The dark column' turned once more, and 'at evening there was light.' Christabel (with Kubla Khan, a Vision, and The Pains of Sleep) was published in June, and the Statesman's Manual (first lay sermon) in November 1816. The Edinburgh Review attacked and vilipended both poetry and prose. If the writer of these reviews was not, as Coleridge supposed, William Hazlitt, he was an accomplished plagiarist of the style and quality of Hazlitt's acknowledged compositions. Early in 1817 a second Lay Sermon, and, later in the year, the long-delayed Biographia Literaria and Sibylline Leaves, made their appearance. In December Zapolya, which to Coleridge's chagrin had been rejected by the committee of Drury Lane Theatre, was published as a 'Christmas Tale.' In January 1818 an Essay on Method, which had been prepared some months before, was printed as an Introduction to the first volume of the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, and late in the spring the reconstituted Friend was published in three volumes. Neither poetry nor prose filled Coleridge's pockets, and both at the beginning and the end of 1818 he was under the 'necessity of appearing as a lecturer.' The first course of fourteen lectures on 'Shakespeare' and 'Poetical Literature' was delivered at Flower-de-Luce Court in Fetter Lane, 27th January-26th March 1818; and two other courses, the first on the History of Philosophy,' the other on 'Shakespeare,' were delivered concurrently at the Crown and Archer Tavern in the Strand, 14th December 1818-29th March 1819. With this double course lecturing came to an end, and for many years, so far as the public was concerned, both voice and pen were silent. Two misfortunes, differing in kind and in degree, befell him in successive years. In 1819 he suffered a considerable loss of money through the bankruptcy of his publisher, Rest Fenner; and, in 1820, his son Hartley was deprived of his Oriel fellowship on the score of intemperance. 'Work without hope' was not 6 beyond Coleridge's power of will, but the business of authorship, always distasteful, became more and more intolerable. He shrank into himself, devoting his energies to the accumulation of materials for his magnum opus, and his leisure to the grounding, strengthening, and integration' of a class of young men, pupils or disciples, who attended his discourses and formed a kind of miniature 'school' of philosophy. His sole publications during this period were a few contributions to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine-for example, 'Letters to Literary Correspondents,' in October 1821, and 'The Historie and Gests of Maxilian' (see Miscellanies, &c., 1885, pp. 261-285) in January 1822. In 1824 he was elected a Royal Associate of the Royal Society of Literature, a distinction which conveyed an annual pension of one hundred guineas, and by way of doing service for this honorarium he read (18th May 1825) at a meeting of the society a paper on 'The Prometheus of Eschylus' (ibid., pp. 55-83). In 1825 he published his Aids to Reflection, a commentary in the form of aphorisms and selected passages from the writings of Archbishop Leighton. The Aids, which may be regarded as an eirenicon between faith and reason, and at one time served as a kind of manual of liberal orthodoxy, brought their compiler applause and recognition, and since his death have been frequently republished. In 1828 he prepared for the press a collected edition of his poems, which was published in three volumes by William Pickering. A second edition, with emendations, was issued in 1829. In June-July 1828 Coleridge accompanied Wordsworth and his daughter Dora on a tour through Belgium and on the Rhine. His 'merry' rhymes on Köln and its 'two and seventy stenches' are a proof that the boisterous high spirits of his youth were not gone for ever. His last work was a pamphlet on The Constitution of Church and State, which deals with the question of Catholic Emancipation, and seems to be rather than is a plea for inaction or reaction. For the last three years of his life Coleridge was with 'few and brief intervals confined to a sick-room;' but he was often to be seen, and he could almost always talk to the satisfaction' if sometimes to the bewilderment of his hearers. Once and again he went into company. Early in August 1832 he was present at the christening of his grandchild Edith, and drove to the church with his wife, who was living with her daughter and son-in-law at Hampstead. In June 1833 he attended a meeting of the British Association at Cambridge, and though he rose from his bed at Trinity College 'not a man but a bruise,' he seems to have taken all literature for his province' in a series of monologues to his friends (see Conversations at Cambridge [by C. V. Le Grice], 1836, pp. 1-36). He suffered much towards the close of his life, but retained almost to the last his intellectual subtlety and his discursive eloquence. He died at The Grove, Highgate, 25th July 1834. Many of Coleridge's best-known works were posthumous. The Table Talk, which was taken down almost verbatim from his lips by his sonin-law and nephew, H. N. Coleridge, was published (2 vols.) in 1835; Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, by T. Allsop (2 vols.), in 1836; Literary Remains (4 vols. 1836-39); Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840); The Idea of Life (1848); Notes, Theological and Political (1853); Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2 vols. 1895); Anima Poetafrom his Unpublished Note-books (1895). The greater part of his Marginalia; a work on Logic (2 vols. MS.); the preliminary chapters of his magnum opus; Notes on the Gospels, &c.; Diaries of Tours; and a multitude of letters, fragmentary papers, notes and memoranda remain unpublished. It is commonly held that Coleridge wrote a few poems, half-a-dozen more or less, of supreme excellence, and that he did no more. It is true that Coleridge at his best is immeasurably greater than at his second best; but, if we except his juvenilia, he wrote little or nothing which may be passed over or rejected as worthless. His peculiar quality as a poet lay in his power of visualising scenes of which neither he nor another had any actual experience. These fancies from afar' did not flash upon him as memories of the past nor as strange and disordered dreams, but they assumed the realities and possibilities of a harmonious though supernatural world. The open vision was rare, and it was seldom that the intuition was clear or adequate. Again, he was a laborious and accomplished metrist, and it was only by repeated experiments and intense mental effort that he could clothe these shapings of his imagination in a becoming and appropriate garb. Hence it was that after he had passed his thirtieth year and his mind became preoccupied with metaphysical speculations and theological ideas, as Charles Lamb put it, he wrote no more Christabels and Ancient Mariners! But whenever he was minded to express his thoughts in verse, he was a poet at last as well as at first. It is enough to mention such poems as Youth and Age; The Garden of Boccaccio; Love, Hope, and Patience in Education, which were written towards the close of his life. If in some half-dozen pieces Coleridge exceeds himself, in at least thirty or more of lesser excellence he displays imaginative and artistic qualitiesof the highest order. The Christmas Carol (1799), Pains of Sleep (1803), and the undated ballad Alice du Clos may be instanced as great poems not reckoned in the first flight. It is, however, only as a lyrical poet that Coleridge belongs to the immortals. He could and did force his extraordinary talent into producing dramatic pieces which have been performed with success and still invite study, but his plots drag and his characters are neither attractive nor rememberable. Remorse, a Tragedy (1812), and Zapolya, a Christmas Tale, which was written in 1815, contain beauties, 'purple patches' suitable for quotation, but as dramas they are lifeless and uninteresting. On the other hand, his one translation, Schiller's Wallenstein, rivals if it does not surpass the original. As a humourist he attempted little, but that little was first-rate. The wit of The Devil's Thoughts was Southey's wit, but the humour is Coleridge's; and as 'good, simple, savage verse,' as Byron labelled his Dedication to Don Juan, Fire, Famine, and Slaughter and The Two Round Spaces neither require nor admit of an apology. Originally mere jeux d'esprit, doggerel verses in a newspaper, they have won their place in literature. Coleridge maintained that he owed his first inspiration as a poet to Bowles's sonnets and the Lewesdon Hill of Mr Crowe.' His first turn for versification was, perhaps, more immediately due to an intimate knowledge of the odes of Gray and Collins, and his first inclination towards sentiment and the poetry of the affections to Bowles and Cowper, and to Macpherson's Ossian. The Romantic School was already a power in Germany, and was touching the younger generation in England through translations or the works of such imitators as Horace Walpole, Mrs Radcliffe, 'Monk' Lewis, and William Taylor previous to the inception or publication of the Lyrical Ballads; and it is certain that before he went to Germany, in September 1798, Coleridge had read Voss's Luise in the original and was familiar with translations of Schiller's Robbers and the Ghostseer. But however responsive he may have been to 'voices in the air, he owed the awakening and the consummation of his genius to the example and companionship of Wordsworth and of Wordsworth's sister Dorothy. We have only to compare his Ode to the Departing Year (December 1796) with the great Stowey poems, beginning with This Limetree Bower my Prison (May 1797), to understand in what degree and in what sense Wordsworth was the master-light of all his seeing'! There is, indeed, little or no resemblance between Coleridge's great poems and Wordsworth's great poems. The magic and the melody of Coleridge's verse are all his own, and the spirit and direction of his poetry are other and different from the spirit and direction of Wordsworth's. As a poet Coleridge taught us little,' and as a poet Wordsworth was essentially a teacher, but it was Wordsworth who helped Coleridge to find himself, and, as Dykes Campbell has finely expressed it, 'put a new song in his mouth.' But art for art's sake did not satisfy Coleridge. The desire of his soul was to teach and to preach, and in order to deliver his message he expended— some would say scattered-his intellectual activities in various directions. He was a journalist, a critic, a lecturer, a philosopher, and a divine. He regarded it as his mission to found a new school, or at any rate to elaborate a new system, of philosophy, and at the same time to propound an eirenicon between faith and reason. It is held by those most competent to judge that as a philosopher he interpreted and carried on the speculations of others-of Kant and Maass, of Fichte and Schelling-but failed to formulate or work out a system of his own. Of the vast preparations which he made for a work to comprehend all knowledge and all philosophy, a portion sufficient to form an introductory volume was dictated to his disciple and amanuensis, Joseph Henry Green, and remains unpublished. His influence on the religious thought and opinion of his own age and of the last sixty years is of a less questionable nature. The Aids to Reflection (1825) and the posthumous Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840) have been largely instrumental in deepening and widening religious thought within. and without the pale of the Churches. Their direct and immediate influence belongs to the past, but the leaven is still at work. Finally, in his critical notes on Shakespeare's plays, originally) delivered as lectures, and in his masterly dissertation on the 'Tenets peculiar to Mr Wordsworth' which concludes the Biographia Literaria, he speaks not as the inspirer of others, but as a potent if not a final authority. A word which he borrowed from the Greek and applied to Shakespeare describes him best. He was myriad minded.' From The Ancient Mariner.' 'The Sun now rose upon the right: Out of the sea came he, Still hid in mist, and on the left And the good south wind still blew behind, And I had done a hellish thing, Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay, Nor dim nor red, like God's own head, Then all averred, I had killed the bird The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, We were the first that ever burst Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea : So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be. O sweeter than the marriage-feast, 'Tis sweeter far to me, To walk together to the kirk With a goodly company!— To walk together to the kirk, And all together pray, While each to his great Father bends, Old men, and babes, and loving friends, He prayeth best, who loveth best The Mariner, whose eye is bright, He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn : 'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awakened the crowing cock! Tu-whit- -Tu-whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew. Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff, which From her kennel beneath the rock Maketh answer to the clock, Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour; Is the night chilly and dark? The lovely lady, Christabel, Whom her father loves so well, What makes her in the wood so late, A furlong from the castle gate? And she in the midnight wood will pray For the weal of her lover that's far away. She stole along, she nothing spoke, The lady sprang up suddenly, It moaned as near, as near can be, But what it is, she cannot tell.- Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree. She folded her arms beneath her cloak, What sees she there? There she sees a damsel bright, That shadowy in the moonlight shone : I guess, 'twas frightful there to see They crossed the moat, and Christabel Took the key that fitted well; A little door she opened straight, All in the middle of the gate; The gate that was ironed within and without, Where an army in battle-array had marched out. The lady sank, belike through pain, And Christabel with might and main And moved, as she were not in pain. So free from danger, free from fear, They crossed the court: right glad they were. And Christabel devoutly cried To the lady by her side, Praise we the Virgin all divine Who hath rescued thee from thy distress! Alas, alas! said Geraldine, I cannot speak for weariness. So free from danger, free from fear, They crossed the court: right glad they were... They passed the hall, that echoes still, Pass as lightly as you will! |