GLORIFYING THE SLIPSHOD LIFE.
MR. IRVING'S pan at the Savage Club on Saturday to the Bohemian glories of the Savage Club strikes us as a little overdone. Even those of us who never entered heartily into those rather maudlin delights of brotherliness
in undress with tankards of ale and chops under the piazza, on which Mr. Irving dilated as having distinguished the early days of the Savage Club, can fairly well appre- ciate the merits and demerits of the life to which he so feelingly referred, from the many literary pictures of it in its least disagreeable aspect which we have read. Has not the last Laureate given us a most delightful, and also a most idealised, picture of the Bohemian state of mind in "Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue " ? And has not a still more striking, and very much less attractive, picture of the same sort of slipshod youth just been given to us in the early letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge ? We all know the kind of glory which hangs about the period of youth given up to either vain "libations to the Muse," or the rosy-coloured reveries that follow them, which Tennyson has so admirably painted for us :—
"I pledge her, and she comes and dips Her laurel in the wine,
And lays it thrice upon my lips, These favoured lips of mine ; Until the charm have power to make New life-blood warm the bosom, And barren commonplaces break In full and kindly blossom.
I pledge her silent at the board : Her gradual fingers steal, And touch upon the master-chord Of all I felt and feel.
Old wishes, ghosts of broken plans And phantom hopes assemble, And that child's heart within the man's Begins to move and tremble."
There you see the ideal side of the slipshod period of youth, on which Mr. Irving dilated with so much unction, recalling, as he did, the time which Tennyson recalls still more vividly:— "And hence this halo lives about
The waiter's hands that reach To each his perfect pint of stout, His proper chop to each."
Mr. Irving forgot to picture what Tennyson did not forget to picture, that darker side of the same slipshod period, when he
scoffed at himself for discovering afresh, as every one has discovered afresh for himself, that " it is but yonder empty glass that makes me maudlin moral."
But as we have already said, a very much darker picture of the slipshod period of life is given in the letters which depict the youth of a great poet who managed to extend this period to the very end of what might well have been a glorious life, could it but have been rescued (as it never was) from the disastrous effects of this slipshod period. Coleridge's great genius remains a fragment and a ruin just because he never emerged from the confusion of those " old wishes, ghosts of broken plans and phantom hopes " which other men glorify in memory, but happily leave behind them, while he made them the very substance of his vague and wasted days. Let anybody read his grandson's volumes of Coleridge's selected letters, and he will no longer glorify the slipshod period when indolent reverie predominates over disciplined work, and spasms of weak, self-indulgent remorse take the place of firm self-control. Slipshodness was Coleridge's ruin. He ran away from home, and probably laid the foundations of his ill-health by his inability to confess that he had been wrong, as a child. He ran away from College, and enlisted as a cavalry soldier, a career for which he had no sort of aptitude, when he was a youth. He had scarcely been rescued from this
fatal escapade when he lapsed into Utopian dreams of a millennium which he never even tried to realise, except by living on the friend who first shared them with him, when College life grew burdensome to him. He was always throwing off easy and worthless sets of complimentary verses to young ladies whom he half-loved, though he had the genius to have accomplished great things had he had but the industry to make any resolute attempt at continuous study. It is more than possible that but for the habit of taking opium, which he so early acquired, he might never even have com- posed the few great poems by which he will always be remembered, though that habit unfortunately undermined the genius of which it possibly gave us the rarest and highest fruits. If ever there were a fatal instance of the indulgence in Bohemian fits of superficial but glorified emotion, it was that of the great man whom Lamb thought to be "an arch- angel a little damaged," and Carlyle a ne'er-do-weel very much overpraised. No intellect capable of such lofty glimpses ever was so much down at heel. And its slipshodness was all due to that over-indulgence in limp emotions of the moment, which the Bohemians delight to exalt as the most glorious episodes in youthful life. Even Coleridge's fits of remorse were all wasted in an almost maudlin over-expression of them which seems to have blown off the steam so completely, that there was none left to use up in resolute reform. We call this great man's mind slipshod because it seemed to be of its essence that it should be as easy to slip the shoe off as to slip it on. He is always as anxious to be able to rid himself of any mood of mind, as to express it ; and he rids himself of it by over-ex- pressing it. His letters to his brother, after he had enlisted in the cavalry to save himself from the scrapes he had got into at Cambridge, are the most abject we ever read. Yet they are succeeded within a singularly short space of time by letters to Southey speculating on dreams of inaugurating a period of universal equality which show that his disgust and distrust of himself had taken no real hold of him at all, and that he was as eager to explain away all the evil of life as the conse- quence of perverse circumstances, as if he had never inveighed against himself and his weakness at all. Nothing is more curious than to read his conceited compliments to some young lady one day ; his invective against his own utter corruption the next ; and his dreams of setting the whole world straight by new arrangements the third. A more singular illustration of the slipshodness of youth, prolonged alas into old age, was never given than in these letters, which pass from one phase of emotion, to another quite different, if not opposite phase, without betraying any trace of the gulf between them. Coleridge never recognised his own fluidity of character. He inveighed against himself with a sort of eestacy of disgust at one moment, and uttered the most lofty aspirations the next, in a mood of almost transcendental rapture. He is always in that flaccid state which Tennyson has so well expressed, in delineating the Bohemianism of his earlier life. In one of Cole- ridge's letters during the cavalry episode, he says :—" I rode a horse as young and undisciplined as myself. After tumult and agitation of any kind, the mind and all its affections seem to doze for a while, and we sit shivering with chilly feverishness wrapt up in the ragged and threadbare cloak of mere animal enjoyment." That might be taken as the motto of his whole shiftless career. He began early that undisciplined career by slipping off even the academical restraints which were the most useful, and might have been the most effectual, for him. Then he returned and " dozed for a while " in the University, without turning his studies to any advantage. Then he embarked in various friendships from which he slipped away at least as often as he returned to them. His mind was full of gentle and tender dispositions ; but he never had enough of will to be to others the friend that those others were to him. Even as a man of literature, no one could trust him. He was as much accustomed to slip out of his engage- ments as to slip into them. He did not even know what he himself had done, as distinguished from what he had only intended to do. He was slipshod in work, slipshod as a husband and father, slipshod as a friend, shipshod as a poet—and with all his great genius left a name "to point a moral and adorn a tale." The Bohemianism of youth has often taken a more repellent but never a more flagrantly dis- appointing form. Coleridge was never worse than weak, but be was so weak that he may be regarded as having deprived the Bohemianism of youth of the last ray of romance which lingered about it. It is the waywardness and what is called the freedom of the period of uncontrolled youth which has gained for Bohemianism a sort of spurious splendour. But Coleridge's Bohemianism was carried to a point incompatible with anything like brilliancy, even though in him it was joined with a genius of the highest order. If Mr. Irving had had experience of that slipshodness in exc,elsis which Cole- ridge's early letters give us, he would hardly have looked
back to the Bohemianism of the Savage Club with patience, to say nothing of satisfaction. Of all characters, the slip. shod character is the least admirable, and Bohemianism is nothing but the cultus of a slipshod life.
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