BOOKS.

MR. TRAILL'S COLERIDGE.*

Mr. TRAILL had in Sterne a subject better suited to his style- and habits of thought than he has got in Coleridge. This little book on the great visionary poet, the single-eyed critic, and the imaginative thinker who changed away his moral force for ease- from pain and a plenitude of dreams, is alively and interesting, but not a satisfactory one, though it is the outcome of a good deal of work and of no trivial ability. It is, of course, no easy matter to paint a telling portrait of Coleridge, though with Hazlitt's delineation of him as he was in 1798, and Carlyle's as he was at the close of his life, say in 1830, more, we think, might have been done than Mr. Traill has accomplished. He gives us, indeed, the greater part of Carlyle's sketch, though he omits Hazlitt's much more favourable and much earlier sketch; but what we miss throughout this pleasant little volume is the recurrence of those touches of personal criticism- which are needed to make one feel that the writer had before his own mind a distinct vision of Coleridge in the various phases of the htory which he recounts._ Considering the unique character of the subject, and the dramatic turn for which Mr. Traill has gained a reputation, we find this little book not, indeed, intrinsically flavourless,— that were hard, indeed, when a very clever man is writing on a subject which must interest even the dullest,—but far less fascinating than we had hoped. Coleridge, partly through his magnificent genius, partly through his disastrous weakness, is one of the most impressive figures in English literature. Carlyle- has painted him ruthlessly from the hard Scotchman's point of view. To paint him with all the fire of mingled sympathy and indignation, with all the sense of pain and pity which his slavery to opium justifies, and with all the triumph at the occasional, flashing-up of that great genius, which a true biographer should have felt, would have been a memorable labour of love.- Mr. Traill has not so far succeeded. A good deal of the story is somewhat drily told, and the impress of personality on not a few of these pages is faint. It is impossible to feet that any passion of sympathy has animated Mr. Trail. There is some delight in Coleridge's marvellous genius as a critic, warm admiration of his poetry, strong disapproval of his weakness, and sincere commiseration for his haplessness, but no pervading feeling of the deep tragedy of that strangely infantine, strangely flaccid, and yet strangely sublime nature. After Coleridge's death, Wordsworth, with a true poetic instinct,. thus commemorated him :— "The rapt one of the godlike forehead,

The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth."

But Mr. Traill has not caught this impression of Coleridge as "a heaven-eyed creature," as a being whose insight pene- trated far beyond that of even his most gifted fellows, but in whose nature there was, nevertheless, from the very first, something helpless, feeble, pitiable. There is not even any adequate picture of his physical appearance, though Hazlitt's admirable description of Coleridge in the Liberal, as he was when Hazlitt first knew him, in 1798, is referred to by Mr. Train, and is, of course, familiar to him. Even that famous note of practical vacillation which Hazlitt observed when Coleridge was twenty-six, and which Carlyle- re-observed when he was near sixty, namely, that even in his walks he never knew which side of the path to choose, but was always changing his mind shoat it, is not adequately insisted on, as Coleridge vacillates between the University and the Army; vacillates, again, between establishing a Pantisocracy and preaching radicalism ; vacillates, further, between the Unitarian ministry and the life of a poet and philosopher ; vacillates repeatedly between the life of a journalist and the life of a recluse; and, last of all, vacillates between the life of a father and husband and that life of a dependent friend on which in the end he has to fall back. There is a want of graphic power somewhere,—not, certainly, in Mr. Triall himself,—but in the aptitude of the subject which he has chosen for Mr. Train's

imagination.

With Mr. Train's estimate of Coleridge's powers as a critic we are altogether satisfied. Nothing better could have been written than what he has said on the Shakespearian criticisms of Coleridge. And with Mr. Train's estimate of Coleridge's

• English Men of Letters. Edited by John Morley. "Coleridge." By H. D. Train. Macmillan and Co.

poetry we have little fault to find. He attributes, we think, a great deal too much merit to the "Religious Musings," when he says that "poetry of the second order has seldom risen to higher heights of power." But what he says of Coleridge's highest efforts is admirably said, and he is very happy in his criticism of the tender and original ode on "Dejection." Yet he does not remark on a much humbler class of poems which, so far as we know, no one but Coleridge has written, and which were most characteristic of him,—the poems, we mean, in which an innocent sense of his own dignity, half humorous and half serious, swells into a sonorous prean of mild rapture. Such are some of the closing lines in "Fears in Solitude" for example, in the address to England :—

"0 divine

And beauteous island, thou haat been my sole And most magnificent temple, in the which I walk with awe and sing my stately songs, Loving the God that made me !'

And such, again, are the delightfully, humorously, and buoy- antly, conceited lines "On revisiting the sea-shore after long absence, under strong medical recommendation not to bathe." 'There is something in the triumph Coleridge expresses in Nature's gracious benignity to him, after he had scorned the advice of the physician, which is most innocently self-important, and innocent self-importance is one of the great notes of Coleridge's personal feeling :— "Dissuading spake the mild physician, Those briny waves for thee are death,' But my soul fulfilled her mission,

And lo ! I breathe untroubled breath.

Fashion's pining sous and daughters, That seek the crowd they seem to fly, Trembling they approach thy waters ; And what cares Nature if they die ?

Me a thousand hopes and pleasures, A thousand recollections bland, Thoughts sublime and stately measures Revisit on the echoing strand."

Probably a swelling consciousness of self-importance was 'never made more gracious than it was made by Coleridge. And yet it is hardly so much a sense of his own genius as a sense of his own fascination for the rest of the world, that buoyed him up. It was like the feeling of a petted child that its happiness and well-being is the concern of everyone, even the concern of Nature herself. Indeed, a great part of the dignity and rhythmic beauty of Coleridge's prose may be traced to this strong feeling that he had of the intrinsic fascination of his own speech. We miss in Mr. Traill's little book any adequate notice of this aspect of Coleridge.

What we regret most, however,—next to the inadequate sense -of personality throughout,—is the very poor criticism on Cole- ridge as thinker. Not only is the criticism of Coleridge's philosophy in general extremely meagre and poor, but the criticism of that striking book, Church and State, and especially of the " Lay-Sermon " devoted to showing that the Bible should be "the Statesman's manual," is worse than meagre,— dense and misleading. Mr. Traill tries to show, for instance, that 'Coleridge even strayed into Dr. Cumming's spurious verifications of Apocalyptic visions, and he asserts this on the strength of a sentence dropped in quite a different sense. What, indeed, could be more unlike Coleridge than to suppose that Isaiah predicted the frost by which Napoleon's flight from Moscow was made so disastrous ? Coleridge certainly had no such notion in his head. He is asserting that Isaiah explains better than we could now explain that delight in sensuous or sensual pleasure, that inordinate self-confidence in experience, that supreme trust in worldly wisdom and astute calculation, which a series of exciting military triumphs produces in a people who have long been oppressed by the rule of selfish and sensual superiors. And he quotes from Isaiah the striking description of precisely that state of mind, and of the ignorant confidence which it produces. The passage runs,—" And thou saidst, I shall be a lady for ever : so that thou didst not lay these things to thy heart, neither didst remember the latter end of it Therefore hear now this, thou that art given to ple,asures, that dwellest carelessly, that sayest in thine heart, I am, and none else beside me ; I shall not sit as a widow, neither shall I know the loss of children : but these two things shall come to thee in a moment in one day, the loss of children, and 'widowhood: they shall come upon thee in their perfection for the multitude of thy sorceries, and for the great abundance of thine enchantments. For thou hast trusted

in thy wickedness : thou hast said, None seeth me. Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee ; and thou

hast said in thine heart, I am, and none else besides me. There- fore shall evil come upon thee; thou shalt not know from whence

it riseth : and mischief shall fall upon thee; thou shalt not be able to put it off: and desolation shall come upon thee suddenly, which thou shalt not know. Stand now with thine enchantments, and with the multitude of thy sorceries, wherein thou hast laboured from thy youth ; if so be thou shalt be able to profit, if so be thou mayest prevail. Thou art wearied in the multitude of thy counsels. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee." To this passage, only half quoted by Mr. Traill—the most relevant portion of it being omitted—Coleridge adds a note :—

"The reader will scarcely fail to find in this verse a remembrancer of the sudden setting-in of the frost, a fortnight before the usual time (in a country, too, where the commencement of its two seasons is in general scarcely less regular than that of the wet and dry seasons between the tropics) which caused, and the desolation which accompanied, the flight from Moscow. The Russians baffled the physical forces of the imperial Jacobin, because they were inac- cessible to his imaginary forces. The faith in St. Nicholas kept off at safe distance the more pernicious superstition of the destinies of Napoleon the Great. The English in the Peninsula overcame the real, because they set at defiance, and had heard only to despise, the imaginary powers of the irresistible Emperor. Thank Heaven ! the heart of the country was sound at the core."

And this Mr. Traill actually interprets as meaning that Coleridge saw in Isaiah a prediction of the early Russian frost.

Of course, Coleridge, in his vague phrase "remembrances," ex- pressed nothing of the kind. What he did mean, was that this supreme faith of the French in their star and their scientific calculations was just like the supreme faith of the Chaldeans in their star and their monthly prognosticators, and was just as useless ; since even the superstitious confidence of the Russians in their St. Nicholas was stronger, being in some sense a moral and patriotic superstition, than the supreme confidence of the French in their destiny and their men of science. Coleridge was as little capable of Dr. Cumming's guess-work answers to the conundrums he found in Scripture, as Mr. Traill himself. The whole of the criticism on Coleridge as a thinker is unworthy of Mr. Traill.

In two cases we think Mr. Traill must be wrong in matters of fact. Apparently he accepts De Quincey's very depreciatory account of Coleridge's reading and intonation. All we can say is that Hazlitt,—no poor judge,—speaks with the utmost enthusiasm of Coleridge's voice, and of the "sonorous and musical " reading of Coleridge, especially of the chaunt in his recitation, "which acts as a spell on the hearer and disarms the

judgment." The bad reading of the lectures which De Quincey heard must have been due to the excesses of opium-eating, for it was in the worst opium-eating period that they were delivered; moreover, the whole description tallies with this explanation. Next, on what ground does Mr. Traill speak of the faith in which

Coleridge died, that i'srssE (S. T. C.) means "he stood," and not "he placed," for on this blunder he grounds a charge against

Coleridge's scholarship ? We hold that Coleridge knew perfectly well that in classical Greek ;us-sin could not mean "he stood." At least, this is what he says in his doggerel lines on his own character :—

" Thus, his own whim, his only bribe, Our bard pursued his old A. B. C.; Contented if he could subscribe In fullest sense his name tavners; Cris Panic Greek, for he bath stood') Whate'er the men, the cause was good. And, therefore, with a right good-will, Poor fool he fights their battles still."

Surely when Coleridge said that i's-rssE was "Punic Greek" for "he hath stood," he did not mean it was good Greek for "he hath stood," or for "he stood" either. With this evidence of his clear consciousness of the mistranslation, his favourite pun on his own initials was clearly no proof of want of scholarship.