COLERIDGE'S INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE.

IF we are to trust Mr. Traill,—whose little book on Coleridge we have reviewed in another column,—Coleridge left us only the delight of his few great poems and of his fine poetical criticism, while the influence which he exercised as a thinker is almost nil. He hints, indeed, that while he genuinely impressed "a few mystics of the type of Maurice," he exer- cised no permanent influence on English thought. Cardinal Newman thinks differently. He holds that Coleridge had paved the way philosophically for a new and deeper appre- hension of theology ; and we confess that we attach far more value to the judgment of Cardinal Newman in such a matter than we do to the judgment of Mr. Traill. Indeed, there can, we think, hardly be any question that Coleridge led the way in that reaction against the philosophy of Locke which made even Carlyle's vague Transcendentalism itself possible, though it did not, and could not, make such Tran- scendentalism a real power in the actual life of England. Coleridge was quite right in thinking that his philosophy was useful chiefly as a rationale of man's nature in perfect harmony with the Christian revelation,—a description which certainly would not apply to the philosophy of Condillac, or Locke, or Hume, or Herbert Spencer. Coleridge, if he exerted any really great and permanent influence over English thought, exerted it in this direction, by effecting a reconciliation between the theology of the New Testament and the philosophy of the nineteenth century.

But did he really do this ? Did the various metaphysical disquisitions, so curiously wedged into the "Biographia Liter- aria," or those volumes of Mr. Green's which professed to be the fruits of Coleridge's teaching, succeed in refuting the philosophy of the Materialist school, or of that purely Evolutionist school which maintains that the mind of man bears no witness in itself to the antecedent existence of a consciousness infinitely larger and grander than ours, but is only the slowly ripening fruit of an ex- perience first gathered in the lower regions of blind sensation? We lay no great stress on the drift of Coleridge's more abstract disquisitions, and no stress at all on the legacy of his faithful pupil's labours. It was not by his metaphysical dissertations, subtle and instructive as these often are, and certainly not by the testimony of his favourite disciple, that Coleridge has exerted the great influence he has on English thought. We should say that it is chiefly, if not wholly, by his scattered criticisms of the secrets of spiritual and poetical truth; by his exposition of the magic of the greatest writers, sacred or profane; by his criticisms of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Wordsworth; by his striking comments on history and polities; and by the flashes of wisdom in his " Table-Talk " that he has done so much to subvert the theory that there is no room in man for true communion with the Divine, and to implant the belief that man's nature is not intelligible at all, except on the assumption of an organic relation between his mind and a spring of infinite wisdom, an assumption altogether beyond the range of sense-evolution. We admit freely that the way in which Coleridge produced this conviction in the beat minds of his age was

call'd so lend, that all the hollow deep Of Hell resounded.'

The dramatic imagination does not throw back, but brings close; it stamps all nature with one, and that its own, meaning, as in Lear throughout."

Well, who can accept that account of the secret of imagination, as of a power which in a flash gives a true wholeness to any part of human life, and yet believe that flash to visit the poet as a mere overflow of the material forces of Nature, though its result is to bring about a new illumination of the secrets of the universe, alight then and there arising for the first time? Does not Coleridge's account of the imagination imply necessarily that this mastery of a living whole springs from a true insight into the integrity of the universe, an insight which nothing but light from the true creative power could give ;—that poetic in-

spiration is really traceable to living relations with much more vital and, therefore, much higher spiritual knowledge than our own ? Would not evolution front beneath necessarily forbid the notion

of these sudden springs into a far higher mastery of the facts of life than any which our toilsome advances, our slowly accu- mulated experience, our unassisted gropings, could possibly account for ? The whole of Coleridge's analysis of the secret of poetic power, virtually assumes that the genius of man is an overflow from the genius of the true creative spirit, and that genius could not spring to the heights it does, and that, too, without the least clue to its own mode of operation, were there not at its source a far stronger grasp of the secrets of creation than any which the highest human genius can reach.

Again, take such a comment as this—also to be found in the "Table Talk," which may be said to be essence of Coleridge, while all his other works are mere tinctures of Coleridge,—on the unique feature of Jewish history :—

"The people of all other nations, but the Jewish, seem to look backwards and also to exist for the present; but in the Jewish scheme everything is prospective and preparatory ; nothing, however trifling, is done for itself alone, but all is typical of something yet to come.'

This, again, is a criticism as pithy as it is obviously true. And what does it not argue as to the informing spirit of the leaders of the Jewish people ? The most sceptical of critics will not deny that, however little credit they may give to prophecy in detail, the prophetic attitude was of the very genius of the Jewish people; nor that this prophetic attitude did at least point to an event, many centuries distant, which actually revolutionised human history, however little they maybe inclined to admit that this event was anticipated in minute detail. Now, what is the ex- planation of this unique forward glance of the only people whose history really claims to be ordained of Go& unless it be found in the assumption that there was a spiritual power higher than the prophets, and which commanded the future, presented to them in but dim glimpses and intimations, in true communion with the prophets ?

Or, take again that passage in the Lay Sermon on the Bible as "The Statesman's Manual," in which Coleridge anticipated one in the highest degree desultory, by the multitude of little glimpses, in fact, which he gave us into the organic relations of human life with the life above us. But then, what way would be more effective than this ? Take, for instance, that discussion of his of the secret of true imaginative power, to which Mr. Trail himself bears such cordial testi- mony in the little book to which we have referred. We will quote a very short passage from the "Table Talk" by way of illustration :—

"You may conceive the difference in kind between the Fancy and the Imagination in this way,—that if the check of the senses and the reason were withdrawn, the first would become delirium, and the last mania. The Fancy brings together images which have no con- nection natural cr moral, but are yoked together by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence ; as in the well.knovrn passage in Hudibras

The sun had long since in the lap Of Thetis taken out hi nap, And like a lobster boyrd, the morn Frem black to red began to turn.'

The Imagination modifies images, and gives unity to variety ; it sees

all things in one, i/ pih limo. There is the epic imagination, the perfection of which is in Milton; and the dramatic, of which Shake- speare is the absolnte master. The first gives unity by throwing back into the distance; as after the magnificent approach of the Messiah to battle, the poet, by one touch from himself—

far off their coming shone

I'—

makes the whole one image. And so at the conclusion of the descrip- tion of the appearance of the entranced angels, in which every sort of image from all the regions of earth and air is introduced to diversify and illustrate,—the reader is brought back to the single image by-

of the chief ideas of Carlyle's French Revolution, and expounded the intimate relation between the passions and the generalisa-

tions, true or false, of the human reason :—

"I have known men, who with significant nods and the pitying contempt of smiles have denied all influence to the corruptions of moral and political philosophy, and with much solemnity have pro- ceeded to solve the riddle of the French Revolution by Anecdotes Yet it would not be difficult, by an unbroken chain of historic facts, to demonstrate that the most important changes in the commercial relations of the world had their origin in the closets or lonely walks of uninterested theorists ;— that the mighty epochs of commerce, that have changed the face of empires ; nay, the most important of those discoveries and improvements in the mechanic arts, which have numerically increased our population beyond what the wisest states- men of Elizabeth's reign deemed possible, and again doubled this population virtually ; the most important, I say, of those iuventions that in their results

—best upho'd

War by her two main nerves, iron and gold— had their origin not in the cabinets of statesmen, or in the practical in- sight of men of business, but in the visions of recInsegenius. To the im- mense majority of men, even in civilised countries, speculative philo- sophy has ever been, and must ever remain, a terra incognita. Yet it is not the less true, that all the epoch-forming revolutions of the Christian world, the revolutions of religion and with them the civil, social, and - domestic habits of the nations concerned, have coincided with the rise and fall of metaphysical systems. So few are the minds that really govern the machine of E ociety, and so incomparably more numerous and more important are the indirect consequences of things than their foreseen and direct effects. It is with nations as with in- dividuals. In tranquil moods and peaceable times we are quite practical. Facts only and cool common-sense are then in fashion. But let the winds of passion swell, and straitway men begin to geueralise ; to connect by remotest analogies; to express the most universal positions of reason in the most glowing figures of fancy ; in short, to feel particular truths and mere facts, as poor, cold, narrow, and incommensurate with their feelings. With his wonted fidelity to nature, our own great poet has placed the greater number of his profoundest maxims and general truths, both political and moral, not in the mouths of men at ease, but of men under the influ- ence of passion, when the mighty thoughts overmaster and become the tyrants of the mind that has brought them forth. In his Lear,

Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, principles of deepest insight and widest interest fly off like sparks from the glowing iron under the loud

forge-hammer. It seems a p tradox only to the unthinking, and it is a fact that none, but the unread in history, will deny, that in periods of popular tumult and innovation the more abstract a notion is, the more readily has it been found to combine, the closer has appeared its affinity, with the feelings of a people and with all their imme- diate impulses to action. At the commencement of the French Revolution, in the remotest villages every tongue was employed in echoing and enforcing the almost geometrical abstractions of the physiocratio politicians and economists. Tho public roads were crowded with armed enthusiasts disputing on the inalienable sovereignty of the people, the impreecriptible laws of the pare reason, and the universal constitution, which, as rising out of the nature and rights of man as man, all natiens alike were under the obligation of adopting. Turn over the fugitive writings, that are still extant, of the age of Luther ; peruse the pamphlets and loose sheets that came out in flights during the reign of Charles I. and the Republic ; and you will find in these one continued comment on the aphorism of Lord Baccn (a man assuredly sufficiently acquainted with the extent of secret and personal influence), that the knowledge of the speculative principles of men in general between the age of twenty and thirty is the one great source of political prophecy. And Sir Philip Sidney regarded the adoption of one set of principles in the Netherlands, as a proof of the divine agency and the fountain of all the events and successes of that Revolution."

This teaching that there is the closest possible alliance between the social passions and the generalising reason of man, points to just the same inference as that forced upon us by the other passages we have quoted, namely, that power over men can only be gained by those who, whether truly or falsely, speak with the authority of that "categorical imperative" which professes to apply to all. It is a true or a false creed which sets men on fire. It is a creed they seek. It is a creed which moves nations ; and without a creed men remain inert and passive. What does this imply, except that the heart implicitly believes in a guidance far in advance of the absolute teaching of experience,—looks, in fact, to spiritual sources for an authority which it is quite certain that the slow accumulations of our petty lives has not provided for us ? These illustrations of Coleridge's power of impressing on us that by the constitution of our minds we are compelled to expect, and forced to receive, light from above, might be multiplied almost indefinitely. And, therefore, we hold that Mr. Trail is utterly wrong in the slighting estimate which he has formed of Coleridge as a source of wide- spreading intellectual convictions.