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The Art of Letters, essay(s) by Robert Lynd |
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12. The Wisdom Of Coleridge |
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_ XII. THE WISDOM OF COLERIDGE (1) COLERIDGE AS CRITIC Coleridge was the thirteenth child of a rather queer clergyman. The Rev. John Coleridge was queer enough in having thirteen children: he was queerer still in being the author of a Latin grammar in which he renamed the "ablative" the "quale-quare-quidditive case." Coleridge was thus born not only with an unlucky number, but trailing clouds of definitions. He was in some respects the unluckiest of all Englishmen of literary genius. He leaves on us an impression of failure as no other writer of the same stature does. The impression may not be justified. There are few writers who would not prefer the magnificent failure of a Coleridge to their own little mole-hill of success. Coleridge was a failure in comparison not with ordinary men, but only with the immense shadow of his own genius. His imperfection is the imperfection of a demi-god. Charles Lamb summed up the truth about his genius as well as about his character in that final phrase, "an archangel a little damaged." This was said at a time when the archangel was much more than a little damaged by the habit of laudanum; but even then Lamb wrote: "His face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory." Most of Coleridge's great contemporaries were aware of that glory. Even those who were afterwards to be counted among his revilers, such as Hazlitt and De Quincey, had known what it was to be disciples at the feet of this inspired ruin. They spoke not only of his mind, but even of his physical characteristics--his voice and his hair--as though these belonged to the one man of his time whose food was ambrosia. Even as a boy at Christ's Hospital, according to Lamb, he used to make the "casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, intranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the _speech_ and the _garb_ of the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus ... or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar--while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity-boy!_" It is exceedingly important that, as we read Coleridge, we should constantly remember what an archangel he was in the eyes of his contemporaries. _Christabel_ and _Kubla Kahn_ we could read, no doubt, in perfect enjoyment even if we did not know the author's name. For the rest, there is so much flagging of wing both in his verse and in his prose that, if we did not remind ourselves what flights he was born to take, we might persuade ourselves at times that there was little in his work but the dull flappings and slitherings of a penguin. His genius is intermittent and comes arbitrarily to an end. He is inspired only in fragments and aphorisms. He was all but incapable of writing a complete book or a complete poem at a high level. His irresponsibility as an author is described in that sentence in which he says: "I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion." His literary plans had a ludicrous way of breaking down. It was characteristic of him that, in 1817, when he projected a complete edition of his poems, under the title _Sibylline Leaves_, he omitted to publish Volume I. and published only Volume II. He would announce a lecture on Milton, and then give his audience "a very eloquent and popular discourse on the general character of Shakespeare." His two finest poems he never finished. He wrote not by an act of the will but according to the wind, and when the wind dropped he came to earth. It was as though he could soar but was unable to fly. It is this that differentiates him from other great poets or critics. None of them has left such a record of unfulfilled purposes. It is not that he did not get through an enormous amount of work, but that, like the revellers in Mr. Chesterton's poem, he "went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head," and in the end he did not get to Birmingham. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch gives an amusing account of the way in which _Biographia Literaria_ came to be written. Originally, in 1815, it was conceived as a preface--to be "done in two, or at farthest three days"--to a collection of some "scattered and manuscript poems." Two months later the plan had changed. Coleridge was now busy on a preface to an _Autobiographia Literaria, sketches of my literary Life and Opinions_. This in turn developed into "a full account (_raisonne_) of the controversy concerning Wordsworth's poems and theory," with a "disquisition on the powers of Association ... and on the generic difference between the Fancy and the Imagination." This ran to such a length that he decided not to use it as a preface, but to amplify it into a work in three volumes. He succeeded in writing the first volume, but he found himself unable to fill the second. "Then, as the volume obstinately remained too small, he tossed in _Satyrane_, an epistolary account of his wanderings in Germany, topped up with a critique of a bad play, and gave the whole painfully to the world in July, 1817." It is one of the ironies of literary history that Coleridge, the censor of the incongruous in literature, the vindicator of the formal purpose as opposed to the haphazard inspiration of the greatest of writers, a missionary of the "shaping imagination," should himself have given us in his greatest book of criticism an incongruous, haphazard, and shapeless jumble. It is but another proof of the fact that, while talent cannot safely ignore what is called technique, genius almost can. Coleridge, in spite of his formlessness, remains the wisest man who ever spoke in English about literature. His place is that of an oracle among controversialists. Even so, _Biographia Literaria_ is a disappointing book. It is the porch, but it is not the temple. It may be that, in literary criticism, there can be no temple. Literary criticism is in its nature largely an incitement to enter, a hint of the treasures that are to be found within. Persons who seek rest in literary orthodoxy are always hoping to discover written upon the walls of the porch the ten commandments of good writing. It is extremely easy to invent ten such commandments--it was done in the age of Racine and in the age of Pope--but the wise critic knows that in literature the rules are less important than the "inner light." Hence, criticism at its highest is not a theorist's attempt to impose iron laws on writers: it is an attempt to capture the secret of that "inner light" and of those who possess it and to communicate it to others. It is also an attempt to define the conditions in which the "inner light" has most happily manifested itself, and to judge new writers of promise according to the measure in which they have been true to the spirit, though not necessarily to the technicalities, of the great tradition. Criticism, then, is not the Roman father of good writing: it is the disciple and missionary of good writing. The end of criticism is less law-giving than conversion. It teaches not the legalities, but the love, of literature. _Biographia Literaria_ does this in its most admirable parts by interesting us in Coleridge's own literary beginnings, by emphasizing the strong sweetness of great poets in contrast to the petty animosities of little ones, by pointing out the signs of the miracle of genius in the young Shakespeare, and by disengaging the true genius of Wordsworth from a hundred extravagances of theory and practice. Coleridge's remarks on the irritability of minor poets--"men of undoubted talents, but not of genius," whose tempers are "rendered yet more irritable by their desire to _appear_ men of genius"--should be written up on the study walls of everyone commencing author. His description, too, of his period as "this age of personality, this age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with sort of Egyptian superstition if only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail," conveys a warning to writers that is not of an age but for all time. Coleridge may have exaggerated the "manly hilarity" and "evenness and sweetness of temper" of men of genius. But there is no denying that, the smaller the genius, the greater is the spite of wounded self-love. "Experience informs us," as Coleridge says, "that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate." As for Coleridge's great service to Wordsworth's fame, it was that of a gold-washer. He cleansed it from all that was false in Wordsworth's reaction both in theory and in practice against "poetic diction." Coleridge pointed out that Wordsworth had misunderstood the ultimate objections to eighteenth-century verse. The valid objection to a great deal of eighteenth-century verse was not, he showed, that it was written in language different from that of prose, but that it consisted of "translations of prose thoughts into poetic language." Coleridge put it still more strongly, indeed, when he said that "the language from Pope's translation of Homer to Darwin's _Temple of Nature_ may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be too faithfully characterized as claiming to be poetical for no better reason than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose." Wordsworth, unfortunately, in protesting against the meretricious garb of mean thoughts, wished to deny verse its more splendid clothing altogether. If we accepted his theories we should have to condemn his _Ode_, the greatest of his sonnets, and, as Coleridge put it, "two-thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry." The truth is, Wordsworth created an engine that was in danger of destroying not only Pope but himself. Coleridge destroyed the engine and so helped to save Wordsworth. Coleridge may, in his turn, have gone too far in dividing language into three groups--language peculiar to poetry, language peculiar to prose, and language common to both, though there is much to be said for the division; but his jealousy for the great tradition in language was the jealousy of a sound critic. "Language," he declared, "is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests." He, himself, wrote idly enough at times: he did not shrink from the phrase, "literary man," abominated by Mr. Birrell. But he rises in sentence after sentence into the great manner, as when he declares: No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. How excellently, again, he describes Wordsworth's early aim as being-- to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us. He explains Wordsworth's gift more fully in another passage: It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought, the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed, and, above all, the original gift of spreading the tone, the _atmosphere_, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world, around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew-drops. Coleridge's censures on Wordsworth, on the other hand, such as that on _The Daffodil_, may not all be endorsed by us to-day. But in the mass they have the insight of genius, as when he condemns "the approximation to what might be called _mental_ bombast, as distinguished from verbal." His quotations of great passages, again, are the very flower of good criticism. Mr. George Sampson's editorial selection from _Biographia Literaria_ and his pleasant as well as instructive notes give one a new pleasure in re-reading this classic of critical literature. The "quale-quare-quidditive" chapters have been removed, and Wordsworth's revolutionary prefaces and essays given in their place. In its new form, _Biographia Literaria_ may not be the best book that could be written, but there is good reason for believing that it is the best book that has been written on poetry in the English tongue. (2) COLERIDGE AS A TALKER Coleridge's talk resembles the movements of one of the heavenly bodies. It moves luminously on its way without impediment, without conflict. When Dr. Johnson talks, half our pleasure is due to our sense of conflict. His sentences are knobby sticks. We love him as a good man playing the bully even more than as a wise man talking common sense. He is one of the comic characters in literature. He belongs, in his eloquence, to the same company as Falstaff and Micawber. He was, to some extent, the invention of a Scottish humourist named Boswell. "Burke," we read in Coleridge's _Table Talk_, "said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life." Coleridge's conversation is not to the same extent a coloured expression of personality. He speaks out of the solitude of an oracle rather than struts upon the stage of good company, a master of repartees. At his best, he becomes the mouthpiece of universal wisdom, as when he says: "To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed." He can give us in a sentence the central truth of politics, reconciling what is good in Individualism with what is good in Socialism in a score or so of words: That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy of the man. And he can give common sense as well as wisdom imaginative form, as in the sentence: Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of error, lest you get your brains knocked out. "I am, by the law of my nature, a reasoner," said Coleridge, and he explained that he did not mean by this "an arguer." He was a discoverer of order, of laws, of causes, not a controversialist. He sought after principles, whether in politics or literature. He quarrelled with Gibbon because his _Decline and Fall_ was "little else but a disguised collection of ... splendid anecdotes" instead of a philosophic search for the ultimate causes of the ruin of the Roman Empire. Coleridge himself formulated these causes in sentences that are worth remembering at a time when we are debating whether the world of the future is to be a vast boxing ring of empires or a community of independent nations. He said: The true key to the declension of the Roman Empire--which is not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work--may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the _national_ character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation. One must not claim too much for Coleridge, however. He was a seer with his head among the stars, but he was also a human being with uneven gait, stumbling amid infirmities, prejudices, and unhappinesses. He himself boasted in a delightful sentence: For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance--that, with all my gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head of a mountain in blue air and sunshine. It is to be feared that Coleridge's "gastric and bowel distempers" had more effect on his head than he was aware of. Like other men, he often spoke out of a heart full of grievances. He uttered the bitterness of an unhappily married dyspeptic when he said: "The most happy marriage I can picture or image to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman." It is amusing to reflect that one of the many books which he wished to write was "a book on the duties of women, more especially to their husbands." One feels, again, that in his defence of the egoism of the great reformers, he was apologizing for a vice of his own rather than making an impersonal statement of truth. "How can a tall man help thinking of his size," he asked, "when dwarfs are constantly standing on tiptoe beside him?" The personal note that occasionally breaks in upon the oracular rhythm of the _Table Talk_, however, is a virtue in literature, even if a lapse in philosophy. The crumbs of a great man's autobiography are no less precious than the crumbs of his wisdom. There are moods in which one prefers his egotism to his great thoughts. It is pleasant to hear Coleridge boasting; "The _Ancient Mariner_ cannot be imitated, nor the poem _Love_. _They may be excelled; they are not imitable._" One is amused to know that he succeeded in offending Lamb on one occasion by illustrating "the cases of vast genius in proportion to talent and the predominance of talent in conjunction with genius in the persons of Lamb and himself." It is amusing, too, to find that, while Wordsworth regarded _The Ancient Mariner_ as a dangerous drag on the popularity of _Lyrical Ballads_, Coleridge looked on his poem as the feature that had sold the greatest number of the copies of the book. It is only fair to add that in taking this view he spoke not self-complacently, but humorously:
Of autobiographical confessions there are not so many in _Table Talk_ as one would like. At the same time, there are one or two which throw light on the nature of Coleridge's imagination. We get an idea of one of the chief differences between the poetry of Coleridge and the poetry of Wordsworth when we read the confession: I had the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim one of the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but where I saw them I mostly forget. The nephew who collected Coleridge's talk declared that there was no man whom he would more readily have chosen as a guide in morals, but "I would not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads." The author of _Kubla Khan_ asserted still more strongly on another occasion his indifference to locality:
Some of Coleridge's other memories are of a more trifling and amusing sort. He recalls, for instance, the occasion of his only flogging at school. He had gone to a shoemaker and asked to be taken on as an apprentice. The shoemaker, "being an honest man," had at once told the boy's master: Bowyer asked me why I had made myself such a fool? to which I answered, that I had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that I hated the thought of being a clergyman. "Why so?" said he. "Because, to tell you the truth, sir," said I, "I am an infidel!" For this, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me--wisely, as I think--soundly, as I know. Any whining or sermonizing would have gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I laughed at, and got heartily ashamed of my folly. Among the reminiscences of Coleridge no passage is more famous than that in which he relates how, as he was walking in a lane near Highgate one day, a "loose, slack, not well-dressed youth" was introduced to him: 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 ----, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly. Another famous anecdote relates to the time at which Coleridge, like Wordsworth, carried the fires of the French Revolution about him into the peace of the West Country. Speaking of a fellow-disciple of the liberty of those days, Coleridge afterwards said: John Thelwall had something very good about him. We were once sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks, when I said to him: "Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!" "Nay! Citizen Samuel," replied he, "it is rather a place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason!" Is there any prettier anecdote in literary history? Besides the impersonal wisdom and the personal anecdotes of the _Table Talk_, however, there are a great number of opinions which show us Coleridge not as a seer, but as a "character"--a crusty gentleman, every whit as ready to express an antipathy as a principle. He shared Dr. Johnson's quarrel with the Scots, and said of them: I have generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The Scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the English. He had no love for Jews, or Dissenters, or Catholics, and anticipated Carlyle's hostility to the emancipation of the negroes. He raged against the Reform Bill, Catholic Emancipation, and the education of the poor in schools. He was indignant with Belgium for claiming national independence. One cannot read much of his talk about politics without amazement that so wise a man should have been so frequently a fool. At the same time, he generally remained an original fool. He never degenerated into a mere partisan. He might be deceived by reactionary ideals, but he was not taken in by reactionary leaders. He was no more capable than Shelley of mistaking Castlereagh for a great man, and he did not join in the glorification of Pitt. Like Dr. Johnson, he could be a Tory without feeling that it was necessary at all costs to bully Ireland. Coleridge, indeed, went so far as to wish to cut the last link with Ireland as the only means of saving England. Discussing the Irish question, he said: I am quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by England from the disannexing and independence of Ireland at all comparable with the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to England by the Union. We have never received one particle of advantage from our association with Ireland.... Mr. Pitt has received great credit for effecting the Union; but I believe it will sooner or later be discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon which, he effected it made it the most fatal blow that ever was levelled against the peace and prosperity of England. From it came the Catholic Bill. From the Catholic Bill has come this Reform Bill! And what next? When one thinks of the injury that the subjection of Ireland has done the English name in America, in Russia, in Australia, and elsewhere in quite recent times, one can hardly deny that on this matter Coleridge was a sound prophet. It is the literary rather than the political opinions, however, that will bring every generation of readers afresh to Coleridge's _Table Talk_. No man ever talked better in a few sentences on Shakespeare, Sterne, and the tribe of authors. One may not agree with Coleridge in regarding Jeremy Taylor as one of the four chief glories of English literature, or in thinking Southey's style "next door to faultless." But one listens to his _obiter dicta_ eagerly as the sayings of one of the greatest minds that have interested themselves in the criticism of literature. There are tedious pages in _Table Talk_, but these are, for the most part, concerned with theology. On the whole, the speech of Coleridge was golden. Even the leaden parts are interesting because they are Coleridge's lead. One wishes the theology was balanced, however, by a few more glimpses of his lighter interests, such as we find in the passage: "Never take an iambus for a Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do very well. Edith and Rotha are my favourite names for women." What we want most of all in table talk is to get an author into the confession album. Coleridge's _Table Talk_ would have stood a worse chance of immortality were it not for the fact that he occasionally came down out of the pulpit and babbled. _ |
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