Transcendentalism in New England: A History. Frothingham Octavius Brooks
of Sterling," as "A sublime man, who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood; escaping from the black materialisms and revolutionary deluges, with God, freedom, immortality still his; a king of men. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky, sublime character, and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma, his Dodona oak grove (Mr. Gillman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon." "To the man himself, Nature had given in high measure the seeds of a noble endowment, and to unfold it was forbidden him. A subtle, lynx-eyed intellect, tremulous, pious sensibility to all good and all beautiful; truly a ray of empyrean light, – but imbedded in such weak laxity of character, in such indolences and esuriences, as made strange work with it. Once more, the tragic story of a high endowment with an insufficient will."
The abatement is painfully just; but while Coleridge lived, this very indolence and moral imbecility added to the interest he excited, and gave a mystic splendor as of a divine inspiration to his mental performances. The distinction between unhealthiness and inspiration has never been clearly marked, and the voluble utterances of the feebly outlined and loosely jointed soul easily passed for oracles. Thus his moral deficiencies aided his influence. His wonderful powers of conversation or rather of effusion in the midst of admiring friends helped the illusion and the fascination. He really seemed inspired while he talked; and as his talk ranged through every domain, the listeners carried away and communicated the impression of a superhuman wisdom.
The impression that Coleridge made on minds of a very different order from Carlyle's, is given in the following lines by Aubrey de Vere:
"No loftier, purer soul than his hath ever
With awe revolved the planetary page
From infancy to age,
Of knowledge, sedulous and proud to give her
The whole of his great heart, for her own sake;
For what she is: not what she does, or what can make.
And mighty voices from afar came to him;
Converse of trumpets held by cloudy forms
And speech of choral storms.
Spirits of night and noontide bent to woo him;
He stood the while lonely and desolate
As Adam when he ruled a world, yet found no mate.
His loftiest thoughts were but as palms uplifted;
Aspiring, yet in supplicating guise —
His sweetest songs were sighs.
Adown Lethean streams his spirit drifted,
Under Elysian shades from poppied bank,
With amaranths massed in dark luxuriance dank.
Coleridge, farewell! That great and grave transition
Which may not king or priest or conqueror spare.
And yet a babe can bear,
Has come to thee. Through life a goodly vision
Was thine; and time it was thy rest to take.
Soft be the sound ordained thy sleep to break;
When thou art waking, wake me, for thy Master's sake."
In May, 1796, – he was then twenty-four years old, – Coleridge wrote to a friend, "I am studying German, and in about six weeks shall be able to read that language with tolerable fluency. Now I have some thoughts of making a proposal to Robinson, the great London bookseller, of translating all the works of Schiller, which would make a portly quarto, on condition that he should pay my journey and my wife's to and from Jena, a cheap German University where Schiller resides, and allow me two guineas each quarto sheet, which would maintain me. If I could realize this scheme, I should there study chemistry and anatomy, and bring over with me all the works of Semler and Michaelis, the German theologians, and of Kant, the great German metaphysician." In September, 1798, in company with Wordsworth and his sister, and at the expense of his munificent friends Josiah and Thomas Wedgewood, he went to Germany and spent fourteen months in hard study. There he attended the lectures of Eichhorn and Blumenbach, made the acquaintance of Tieck, dipped quite deeply into philosophy and general literature, and took by contagion the speculative ideas that filled his imagination with visions of intellectual discovery. Schelling's "Transcendental Idealism," with which Coleridge was afterwards most in sympathy, was not published till 1800. The "Philosophy of Nature" was published in 1797, the year before Coleridge's visit. In 1817, he tells the readers of the "Biographia Literaria" that he had been able to procure only two of Schelling's books – the first volume of his "Philosophical Writings," and the "System of Transcendental Idealism;" these and "a small pamphlet against Fichte, the spirit of which was, to my feelings, painfully incongruous with the principles, and which displayed the love of wisdom rather than the wisdom of love."
The philosophical ideas of Schelling commended themselves at once to Coleridge, who was a born idealist, of audacious genius, speculative, imaginative, original, capable of any such abstract achievement as the German undertook.
"In Schelling's Natur Philosophie and the System des Transcendentalen Idealismus, I first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do. All the main and fundamental ideas were born and matured in my mind before I had ever seen a single page of the German philosopher; and I might indeed affirm with truth, before the more important works of Schelling had been written, or at least made public. Nor is this at all to be wondered at. We had studied in the same school; been disciplined by the same preparatory philosophy, namely, the writings of Kant; we had both equal obligations to the polar logic and dynamic philosophy of Giordano Bruno; and Schelling has lately, and, as of recent acquisition, avowed that same affectionate reverence for the labors of Behmen and other mystics which I had formed at a much earlier period. God forbid that I should be suspected of a wish to enter into a rivalry with Schelling for the honors so unequivocally his right, not only as a great original genius, but as the founder of the Philosophy of Nature, and as the most successful improver of the Dynamic system, which, begun by Bruno, was reintroduced (in a more philosophical form, and freed from all its impurities and visionary accompaniments) by Kant, in whom it was the native and necessary growth of his own system. Kant's followers, however, on whom (for the greater part) their master's cloak had fallen, without, or with a very scanty portion of his spirit, had adopted his dynamic ideas, only as a more refined species of mechanics. With exception of one or two fundamental ideas which cannot be withheld from Fichte, to Schelling we owe the completion and the most important victories of this revolution in philosophy. To me it will be happiness and honor enough, should I succeed in rendering the system itself intelligible to my countrymen, and in the application of it to the most awful of subjects for the most important of purposes. Whether a work is the offspring of a man's own spirit and the product of original thinking, will be discovered by those who are its sole legitimate judges, by better tests than the mere reference to dates."
The question of Coleridge's alleged plagiarism from Schelling does not concern us here. Whether the philosophy he taught was the product of his own thinking, or whether he was merely the medium for communicating the system of Schelling to his countrymen, is of no moment to us. For us it is sufficient to know that the English-speaking people on both shores of the Atlantic received them chiefly through the Englishman. Those who are interested in the other matter will find Coleridge's reputation vindicated in a long and elaborate introduction to the "Biographia Literaria," edition of 1847, by the poet's son.
Coleridge was a pure Transcendentalist, of the Schelling school. The transcendental phrases came over and over in book and conversation, "reason" and "understanding," "intuition," "necessary truths," "consciousness," and the rest that were used to describe the supersensual world and the faculties by which it was made visible. He shall speak for himself. The following passage from the "Biographia Literaria," Chapter XII., will be sufficiently intelligible to those who have read the previous chapters, or enough of them to comprehend their cardinal ideas:
"The