A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895). Saintsbury George
known, been set forth in fullest measure by Mr. Dykes Campbell. It must suffice here to say that, after much wandering, being unable or unwilling to keep house with his own family, he found asylums, first with some kind folk named Morgan, and then in the house of Mr. Gillman at Hampstead, where for years he held forth to rising men of letters, and where he died on the 25th June 1834. His too notorious craving for opium had never been conquered, though it had latterly been kept in some check.
Despite this unfortunate failing and his general inability to carry out any schemes of work on the great scale, Coleridge's literary production was very considerable, and, except the verse, it has never been completely collected or systematically edited. He began verse-writing very early, and early found a vent for it in the Morning Chronicle, then a Radical organ. He wrote The Fall of Robespierre in conjunction with Southey in 1794, and published it. Some prose pamphlets followed, and then Cottle, the Bristol providence of this group of men of letters, offered thirty guineas for a volume of poems, which duly appeared in 1796. Meanwhile Coleridge had started a singular newspaper called The Watchman, which saw ten numbers, appearing every eighth day. The Lyrical Ballads followed in 1798, and meanwhile Coleridge had written the play of Osorio (to appear long afterwards as Remorse), had begun Christabel, and had contributed some of his best poems to the Morning Post. His German visit (see ante) produced among other things the translation of Wallenstein, a translation far above the original. Some poetry and much newspaper work filled the next ten years, with endless schemes; but in 1807 Coleridge began to lecture at the Royal Institution—a course somewhat irregularly delivered, and almost entirely unreported. 1809 saw his second independent periodical venture, The Friend, the subsequent reprint of which as a book is completely rewritten. In 1811–12 he delivered his second course of lectures, this time on his own account. It was followed by two others, and in 1813 Remorse was produced at Drury Lane, had a fair success, and brought the author some money. Christabel, with Kubla Khan, appeared in 1816, and the Biographia Literaria next year; Zapolya and the rewritten Friend the year after, when also Coleridge gave a new course of lectures, and yet another, the last. Aids to Reflection, in 1825, was the latest important work he issued himself, though in 1828 he superintended a collection of his poems. Such of the rest of his work as is in existence in a collected form has been printed or reprinted since.
A more full account of the appearance of Coleridge's work than is desirable or indeed possible in most cases here has been given, because it is important to convey some idea of the astonishingly piecemeal fashion in which it reached the world. To those who have studied the author's life of opium-eating; of constant wandering from place to place; of impecuniousness so utter that, after all the painstaking of the modern biographer, and after full allowance for the ravens who seem always to have been ready to feed him, it is a mystery how he escaped the workhouse; of endless schemes and endless non-performance—it is only a wonder that anything of Coleridge's ever reached the public except in newspaper columns. As it was, while his most ambitiously planned books were never written at all, most of those which did reach the press were years in getting through it; and Southey, on one occasion, after waiting fifteen months for the conclusion of a contribution of Coleridge's to Omniana, had to cancel the sheet in despair. The collection, after many years, by Mr. Ernest Coleridge of his grandfather's letters has by no means completely removed the mystery which hangs over Coleridge's life and character. We see a little more, but we do not see the whole; and we are still unable to understand what strange impediments there were to the junction of the two ends of power and performance. A rigid judge might almost say, that if friends had not been so kind, fate had been kinder, and that instead of helping they hindered, just as a child who is never allowed to tumble will never learn to walk.
The enormous tolerance of friends, however, which alone enabled him to produce anything, was justified by the astonishing genius to which its possessor gave so unfair a chance. As a thinker, although the evidence is too imperfect to justify very dogmatic conclusions, the opinion of the best authorities, from which there is little reason for differing, is that Coleridge was much more stimulating than intrinsically valuable. His Aids to Reflection, his most systematic work, is disappointing; and, with The Friend and the rest, is principally valuable as exhibiting and inculcating an attitude of mind in which the use of logic is not, as in most eighteenth century philosophers, destructive, but is made to consist with a wide license for the employment of imagination and faith. He borrowed a great deal from the Germans, and he at least sometimes forgot that he had borrowed a great deal from our own older writers.
So, too, precise examination of his numerous but fragmentary remains as a literary critic makes it necessary to take a great deal for granted. Here, also, he Germanised much; and it is not certain, even with the aid of his fragments, that he was the equal either of Lamb or of Hazlitt in insight. Perhaps his highest claim is that, in the criticism of philosophy, of religion, and of literature alike he expressed, and was even a little ahead of, the nobler bent and sympathy of his contemporaries. We are still content to assign to Coleridge, perhaps without any very certain title-deeds, the invention of that more catholic way of looking at English literature which can relish the Middle Ages without doing injustice to contemporaries, and can be enthusiastic for the seventeenth century without contemning the eighteenth.[6] To him more than to any single man is also assigned (and perhaps rightly, though some of his remarks on the Church, even after his rally to orthodoxy, are odd) the great ecclesiastical revival of the Oxford movement; and it is certain that he had not a little to do with the abrupt discarding of the whole tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hartley only excepted. Difficult as it may be to give distinct chapter and verse for these assignments from the formless welter of his prose works, no good judge has ever doubted their validity, with the above and other exceptions and guards. It may be very difficult to present Coleridge's assets in prose in a liquid form; but few doubt their value.
It is very different with his poetry. Here, too, the disastrous, the almost ruinous results of his weaknesses appear. When one begins to sift and riddle the not small mass of his verse, it shrinks almost appallingly in bulk. Wallenstein, though better than the original, is after all only a translation. Remorse (either under that name or as Osorio) and Zapolya are not very much better than the contemporary or slightly later work of Talfourd and Milman. The Fall of Robespierre is as absurd and not so amusing as Southey's unassisted Wat Tyler. Of the miscellaneous verse with which, after these huge deductions, we are left, much is verse-impromptu, often learned and often witty, for Coleridge was (in early days at any rate) abundantly provided with both wit and humour, but quite occasional. Much more consists of mere Juvenilia. Even of the productions of his best times (the last lustrum of the eighteenth century and a lucid interval about 1816) much is not very good. Religious Musings, though it has had its admirers, is terribly poor stuff. The Monody on the Death of Chatterton might have been written by fifty people during the century before it. The Destiny of Nations is a feeble rant; but the Ode on the Departing Year, though still unequal, still conventional, strikes a very different note. The Three Graves, though injured by the namby-pambiness which was still thought incumbent in ballads, again shows no vulgar touch. And then, omitting for the moment Kubla Khan, which Coleridge said he wrote in 1797, but of which no mortal ever heard till 1816, we come to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the birth of the new poetry in England. Here the stutters and flashes of Blake became coherent speech and steady blaze; here poetry, which for a century and a half had been curbing her voice to a genteel whisper or raising it only to a forensic declamation, which had at best allowed a few wood-notes to escape here and there as if by mistake, spoke out loud and clear.
If this statement seems exaggerated (and it is certain that at the time of the appearance of the Ancient Mariner not even Wordsworth, not even Southey quite relished it, while there has always been a sect of dissidents against it), two others will perhaps seem more extravagant still. The second is that, with the exception of this poem, of Kubla Khan, of Christabel, and of Love, all of them according to Coleridge written within a few months of each other in 1797–98, he never did anything of the first class in poetry. The third is that these four—though Christabel itself does not exceed some fifteen hundred lines and is decidedly unequal, though the Ancient Mariner is just over six hundred and the other two are quite short—are sufficient