Part 7 (1/2)

Their lack of incident, however, is not entirely as favourable a circ.u.mstance as that uneventfulness of national annals to which I have compared it; for, though ”no news may be good news” in the case of a nation's history, it is by no means as certainly so in the case of a man's biography, and, least of all, when the subject is a man whose inward life of thought and feeling so completely overshadowed his outward life of action throughout his whole career. There is indeed evidence, slight in amount, but conclusive in character-plain and painful evidence enough to show that at least the first four or five years of the period we have mentioned were not altogether years of resignation and calm; that they were embittered by recurring agonies of self-reproach, by

”Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;”

and by the desolating thought that all which had been ”culled in wood- walks wild,” and ”all which patient toil had reared,” were to be

--”but flowers Strewn on the corse, and borne upon the bier, In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!”

Here and there in the correspondence with Thomas Allsop we obtain a glimpse into that vast half-darkened arena in which this captive spirit self-condemned to the lions was struggling its last. To one strange and hitherto unexplained letter I have already referred. It was written from Ramsgate in the autumn of 1822, evidently under circ.u.mstances of deep depression. But there is a letter nearly two years earlier in date addressed to the same correspondent which contains by far the fullest account of Coleridge's then condition of mind, the state of his literary engagements and his literary projects, his completed and uncompleted work. As usual with him it is stress of money matters that prompts him to write, and he prefaces his request for a.s.sistance with the following portentous catalogue of realised or contemplated schemes.

”Contemplated,” indeed, is too modest a word, according to his own account, to be applied to any one item in the formidable list. Of all of them, he has, he tells Allsop, ”already the written materials and contents, requiring only to be put together from the loose papers and commonplace in memorandum books, and needing no other change, whether of omission, addition, or correction, than the mere act of arranging, and the opportunity of seeing the whole collectively, bring with them of course.” Heads I. and II. of the list comprise those criticisms on Shakespeare and the other princ.i.p.al Elizabethan dramatists; on Dante, Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, Calderon; on Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, Rabelais, etc., which formed the staple of the course of lectures delivered in 1818, and which were published after his death in the first two of the four volumes of _Literary Remains_ brought out under the editors.h.i.+p of Mr. H. N. Coleridge. Reserving No. III. for a moment we find No. IV. to consist of ”Letters on the Old and New Testament, and on the Doctrines and Principles held in common by the Fathers and Founders of the Reformation, addressed to a Candidate for Holy Orders, including advice on the plan and subjects of preaching proper to a minister of the Established Church.” The letters never apparently saw the light of publicity, at any rate, in the epistolary form, either during the author's lifetime or after his death; and with regard to II. and III., which did obtain posthumous publication, the following caution should be borne in mind by the reader. ”To the completion,” says Coleridge, ”of these four works I have literally nothing more to do than to transcribe; but, as I before hinted, from so many sc.r.a.ps and Sibylline leaves, including margins of blank pages that unfortunately I must be my own scribe, and, not done by myself, they will be all but lost.” As matters turned out he was not his own scribe, and the difficulty which Mr. Nelson Coleridge experienced in piecing together the fragmentary materials at his disposal is feelingly described by him in his preface to the first edition. He added that the contents of these volumes were drawn from a portion only of the MSS.

entrusted to him, and that the remainder of the collection, which, under favourable circ.u.mstances, he hoped might hereafter see the light, ”was at least of equal value” with what he was then presenting to the reader. This hope was never realised; and it must be remembered, therefore, that the published record of Coleridge's achievements as a critic is, as has already been pointed out, extremely imperfect. [1]

That it is not even more disappointingly so than it is, may well ent.i.tle his nephew and editor to the grat.i.tude of posterity; but where much has been done, there yet remains much to do ere Coleridge's consummate a.n.a.lyses of poetic and dramatic works can be presented to the reader in other than their present shape of a series of detached brilliancies. The pearls are there, but the string is wanting. Whether it will be ever supplied, or whether it is possible now to supply it, one cannot say.

The third of Coleridge's virtually completed works there is much virtue in a ”virtually”-was a ”History of Philosophy considered as a Tendency of the Human Mind to exhibit the Powers of the Human Reason, to discover by its own strength the Origin and Laws of Man and the World, from Pythagoras to Locke and Condillac.” This production, however, considerable as it is, was probably merely ancillary to what he calls ”My GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which more than twenty years of my life have been devoted, and on which my hopes of extensive and permanent utility, of fame in the n.o.blest sense of the word, mainly rest.” To this work he goes on to say:

”All my other writings, unless I except my Poems (and these I can exclude in part only), are introductory and preparative, while its result, if the premises be as I with the most tranquil a.s.surance am convinced they are-incontrovertible, the deductions legitimate, and the conclusions commensurate, and only commensurate with both [must be], to effect a revolution in all that has been called Philosophy and Metaphysics in England and France since the era of commencing predominance of the mechanical system at the Restoration of our Second Charles, and with [in] the present fas.h.i.+onable views not only of religion, morals, and politics, but even of the modern physics and physiology.”

This, it must be allowed, is a sufficiently ”large order,” being Apparently indeed nothing less than an undertaking to demolish the system of Locke and his successors, and to erect German Transcendentalism on the ruins. With anything less than this, however with any less n.o.ble object or less faith in their attainments-- Coleridge could not, he declares, have stood acquitted of folly and abuse of time, talent, and learning, on a labour of three--fourths of his intellectual life. Somewhat more than a volume of this _magnum opus_ had been dictated by him to his ”friend and enlightened pupil, Mr. Green, so as to exist fit for the press;” and more than as much again had been done, but he had been compelled to break off the weekly meetings with his pupil from the necessity of writing on subjects of the pa.s.sing day. Then comes a reference, the last we meet with, to the real ”great work,” as the unphilosophic world has always considered and will always consider it. On this subject he says:

”Of my poetic works I would fain finish the _Christabel_, Alas!

for the proud time when I planned, when I had present to my mind the materials as well as the scheme of the Hymns ent.i.tled Spirit, Sun, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Man; and the Epic Poem on what appears to me the only fit subject remaining for an Epic Poem--Jerusalem besieged and destroyed by t.i.tus.”

And then there follows this most pathetic pa.s.sage, necessary, in spite of its length, to be transcribed entire, both on account of the value of its biographic details--its information on the subject of the useless worldly affairs, etc.--and because of the singularly penetrating light which it throws upon the mental and moral nature of the man:--

”I have only by fits and starts ever prayed--I have not prevailed upon myself to pray to G.o.d in sincerity and entireness for the fort.i.tude that might enable me to resign myself to the abandonment of all my life's best hopes, to say boldly to myself, 'Gifted with powers confessedly above mediocrity, aided by an education of which no less from almost unexampled hards.h.i.+ps and sufferings than from manifold and peculiar advantages I have never yet found a parallel, I have devoted myself to a life of unintermitted reading, thinking, meditating, and observing, I have not only sacrificed all worldly prospects of wealth and advancement, but have in my inmost soul stood aloof from temporary reputation. In consequence of these toils and this self-dedication I possess a calm and clear consciousness that in many and most important departments of truth and beauty I have outstrode my contemporaries, those at least of highest name, that the number of my. printed works bear witness that I have not been idle, and the seldom acknowledged but strictly _proveable_ effects of my labours appropriated to the welfare of my age in the _Morning Post_ before the peace of Amiens, in the _Courier_ afterwards, and in the serious and various subjects of my lectures... (add to which the unlimited freedom of my communications to colloquial life) may surely be allowed as evidence that I have not been useless to my generation. But, from circ.u.mstances, the main portion of my harvest is still on the ground, ripe indeed and only waiting, a few for the sickle, but a large part only for the _sheaving_ and carting and housing-but from all this I must turn away and let them rot as they lie, and be as though they never had been; for I must go and gather black berries and earth-nuts, or pick mushrooms and gild oak-apples for the palate and fancies of chance customers. I must abrogate the name of philosopher and poet, and scribble as fast as I can and with as little thought as I can for _Blackwood's Magazine_, or as I have been employed for the last days in writing MS. sermons for lazy clergymen who stipulate that the composition must be more than respectable.'... This” [_i.e._ to say this to myself] ”I have not yet had courage to do. My soul sickens and my heart sinks, and thus oscillating between both” [forms of activity--the production of permanent and of ephemeral work] ”I do neither--neither as it ought to be done to any profitable end.”

And his proposal for extricating himself from this distressing position is that ”those who think respectfully and hope highly of my power and attainments should guarantee me a yearly sum for three or four years, adequate to my actual support, with such comforts and decencies of appearance as my health and habit have made necessaries, so that my mind may be unanxious as far as the present time is concerned.” Thus provided for he would undertake to devote two-thirds of his time to some one work of those above mentioned that is to say, of the first four--and confine it exclusively to it till finished, while the remaining third of his time he would go on maturing and completing his ”great work,” and ”(for, if but easy in my mind, I have no doubt either of the reawakening power or of the kindling inclination) my _Christabel_ and what else the happier hour may inspire.” Mr.

Green, he goes on to say, had promised to contribute 30 to 40 yearly, another pupil, ”the son of one of my dearest old friends, 50,” and 10 or 20 could, he thought, be relied on from another. The whole amount of the required annuity would be about 200, to be repaid of course should disposal or sale of his works produce, or as far as they should produce, the means. But ”am I ent.i.tled,” he asks uneasily, ”have I a _right_ to do this I Can I do it without moral degradation? And lastly, can it be done without loss of character in the eyes of my acquaintances and of my friends' acquaintances?”

I cannot take upon myself to answer these painful questions. The reply to be given to them must depend upon the judgment which each individual student of this remarkable but unhappy career may pa.s.s upon it as a whole; and, while it would be too much to expect that that judgment should be entirely favourable, one may at least believe that a fair allowance for those inveterate weaknesses of physical const.i.tution which so largely aggravated, if they did not wholly generate, the fatal infirmities of Coleridge's moral nature, must materially mitigate the harshness of its terms.

The story of Coleridge's closing years is soon told. It is mainly a record of days spent in meditation and discourse, in which character it will be treated of more fully in a subsequent chapter. His literary productions during the last fourteen years of his life were few in number, and but one of them of any great importance. In 1821 he had offered himself as an occasional contributor to _Blackwood's Magazine_, but a series of papers promised by him to that periodical were uncompleted, and his only two contributions (in October 1821 and January 1822) are of no particular note. In May 1825 he read a paper on the _Prometheus_ of 'schylus before the Royal Society of Literature; but ”the series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian in connection with the sacerdotal theology and in contrast with the mysteries of ancient Greece,” to which this essay had been announced as preparatory, never made their appearance. In the same year, however, he published one of the best known of his prose works, his _Aids to Reflection_.

Of the success of this latest of Coleridge's more important contributions to literature there can be no doubt. New editions of it seem to have been demanded at regular intervals for some twenty years after its first production, and it appears to have had during the same period a relatively equal reissue in the United States. The Rev. Dr.

James Marsh, an American divine of some ability and reputation, composed a preliminary essay (now prefixed to the fifth English edition), in which he elaborately set forth the peculiar merits of the work, and undertook to initiate the reader in the fittest and most profitable method of making use of it. In these remarks the reverend essayist insists more strongly on the spiritually edifying quality of the _Aids_ than on their literary merits, and, for my own part, I must certainly consider him right in doing so. As a religious manual it is easy to understand how this volume of Coleridge's should have obtained many and earnest readers. What religious manual, which shows traces of spiritual insight, or even merely of pious yearnings after higher and holier than earthly things, has ever failed to win such readers among the weary and heavy-laden of the world? And that Coleridge, a writer of the most penetrating glance into divine mysteries, and writing always from a soul all tremulous, as it were, with religious sensibility, should have obtained such readers in abundance is not surprising. But to a critic and literary biographer I cannot think that his success in this respect has much to say. For my own part, at any rate, I find considerable difficulty in tracing it to any distinctively literary origin. There seems to me to be less charm of thought, less beauty of style, less even of Coleridge's seldom- failing force of effective statement, in the _Aids to Reflection_ than in almost any of his writings. Even the volume of some dozen short chapters on the Const.i.tution of the Church and State, published in 1830, as an ”aid towards a right judgment in the late Catholic Kelief Bill,” appears to me to yield a more characteristic flavour of the author's style, and to exhibit far more of his distinction of literary workmans.h.i.+p than the earlier and more celebrated work.

Among the acquaintances made by Coleridge after his retirement to Mr.

Gillman's was one destined to be of some importance to the history of his philosophical work. It was that of a gentleman whose name has already been mentioned in this chapter, Mr. Joseph Henry Green, afterwards a distinguished surgeon and Fellow of the Royal Society, who in his early years had developed a strong taste for metaphysical speculation, going even so far as to devote one of his hard-earned periods of professional holiday to a visit to Germany for the sake of studying philosophy in that home of abstract thought. To him Coleridge was introduced by his old Roman acquaintance, Ludwig Tieck, on one of the latter's visits to England, and he became, as the extract above quoted from Coleridge's correspondence shows, his enthusiastic disciple and indefatigable fellow-worker. In the pursuit of their common studies and in those weekly reunions of admiring friends which Coleridge, while his health permitted it, was in the habit of holding, we may believe that a considerable portion of these closing years of his life was pa.s.sed under happier conditions than he had been long accustomed to. It is pleasant to read of him among his birds and flowers, and surrounded by the ever-watchful tendance of the affectionate Gillmans, tranquil in mind at any rate, if not at ease from his bodily ailments, and enjoying, as far as enjoyment was possible to him, the peaceful close of a stormy and unsettled day. For the years 1825-30, moreover, his pecuniary circ.u.mstances were improved to the extent of 105 per annum, obtained for him at the instance of the Royal Society of Literature, and held by him till the death of George IV.

Two incidents of his later years are, however, worthy of more special mention--a tour up the Rhine, which he took in 1828, in company with Wordsworth and his daughter; and, some years earlier, a meeting with John Keats. ”A loose, slack, not well dressed youth,” it is recorded in the _Table Talk,_ published after his death by his nephew, ”met Mr.------” (it was Mr. Green, of whom more hereafter) ”and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back and said, 'Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand.' 'There is death in that hand,'

I said to Green when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.”

His own health, however, had been steadily declining in these latter years, and the German tour with the Wordsworths must, I should imagine, have been the last expedition involving any considerable exercise of the physical powers which he was able to take. Within a year or so afterwards his condition seems to have grown sensibly worse. In November 1831 he writes that for eighteen months past his life had been ”one chain of severe sicknesses, brief and imperfect convalescences, and capricious relapses.” Henceforth he was almost entirely confined to the sick-room. His faculties, however, still remained clear and unclouded. The entries in the _Table Talk_ do not materially dimmish in frequency. Their tone of colloquy undergoes no perceptible variation; they continue to be as stimulating and delightful reading as ever. Not till 11th July 1834 do we find any change; but here at last we meet the shadow, deemed longer than it was in reality, of the approaching end. ”I am dying,” said Coleridge, ”but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that, very recently, bygone images and scenes of early life have stolen into my mind like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope--those twin realities of the phantom world! I do not add Love, for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and, so seen, as _one_.... Hooker wished to live to finish his _Ecclesiastical Polity_--so I own I wish life and strength had been spared to me to complete my _Philosophy._ For, as G.o.d hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and design in my heart were to exalt the glory of His name; and, which is the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind.

But _visum aliter Deo,_ and His will be done.”