BOOKS.

THESE very remarkable letters of Coleridge,—the first volume is much the more remarkable ; in the second, his digressiveness and long-windedness oftener seem to drown his critical genius and his humour than they did in his earlier life, though these faults were always lying in wait for him,—will revive and settle permanently that conception of him which a great though vague tradition formed, and Carlyle's powerful but splenetic study of him in his Life of Sterling did more than it ought to have done to destroy. Whatever may be ascribable to the habit of taking opium, which appears to have begun so early (probably, even, as is pointed out in one of these notes, at the age of eighteen, when he suffered " seas of pain" for which any doctor would then have prescribed laudanum), it seems quite clear that "the rapt one of the godlike forehead," the " heaven-eyed " creature whose eyes fascinated a host of quite different devotees, had from the first a very large element of inertia in his nature, which weighed heavily upon him, and overpowered occasionally all his finer imaginative and critical faculties by its preponderance. Of this he was well aware himself. In writing to Thelwell at the age of twenty-four, after his mar- riage (p. 180, and as the pages of the two volumes are numbered straight on, the page alone will tell in which volume any passage occurs), Coleridge says of himself, "As to me, my face, unless when animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, and great, indeed almost idiotic, good nature. 'Tie a mere carcass of a face, flat, flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpression. Yet I am told that my eyes, eye- brows, and forehead are physiognomically good, but of this the deponent knoweth nothing." And in one of the notes by which his grandson has so greatly added to the value of these letters, the editor quotes from an early transcript of the poem called " Happiness " the lines,-

" And doubly blest if Love supply Lustre to the now heavy eye, And with unwonted spirit grace That fat vacuity of face."

The transcriber adds that the author was at this time seventeen and "remarkable for a plump face," and then at all events the opium-eating could hardly have began. We may surely assume that this "carcass of a face," as he him- self graphically described it, was expressive of his original character, and portrayed the inertia which did so much to spoil nine-tenths of his verse, and to create that longing for some sort of excitement which, no less than the excruciating pains to which he was unfortunately a martyr, drove him into the habits that sometimes stimulated and ultimately ruined his poetic genius. At the age of twenty-four (in November, 1796), he describes a violent attack of neuralgia which drove him nearly frantic, and made him adopt the very injudicious remedy of running about the house naked, "endeavouring by every means to excite sensations in different parts of my body, and so to weaken the enemy by creating division." At that time he took " between sixty and seventy drops of laudanum" to soothe the pain. Indeed, the same remedy had probably been given him at the Bluecoat School, for writing to his brother at the youthful age of nine- teen, he says that "opium never used to have any disagreeable effects on me." It is only fair to remember both the extreme sensitiveness of his nervous organisation and the torture which he often suffered from neuralgia, as well as the heavi- ness of temperament which marked him from the first, and which the opiates no doubt charmed away with dreams that were originally more or less fascinating, when we blame him

for falling into habits which so much increased the sloth to which he was constitutionally liable. In all his early poems— such as the "Religious Musings," and a host of others,—you see chiefly this "carcass" of inertia which expressed itself so effectually on his face, and very little of "the rapt one of the godlike forehead," who made himself famous in "The Ancient Mariner," " Christabel," " The Dark Lady," " Kubla

Khan," and that exquisite poem on Love, "All thoughts, all passions, all delights, whatever stirs this mortal frame," as

• The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols. London: William He nemann.

well as in the very few other great poems and fine translations, by which his name will always be known. It was, no doubt,.

this mass of inertia, which, together with his extremely sensitive and susceptible frame, led to the dreary tragedy of Coleridge's life. The " burden of the flesh," especially when stung by the gadfly of physical agony, drove him into the habit which almost extinguished his free will.

On the other hand, what we see in these letters as clearly as we see the great inertia with which he had to contend, is the exquisite tenderness of his heart,—tenderness rather than depth. He falls in love platonically with both men and women

at the first symptom of geniality and personal liking. It is hard to say to how many different correspondents he did not

express, and express quite truly, the feelings of enthusiastic friendship, which so often occur and so often disappear in his life. Sometimes, as with Lloyd, the early attraction passes into active dislike ; sometimes, as with Lamb, it is varied with periods of alienation ; sometimes, as with Southey and Wordsworth, it is broken in upon by a sharp quarrel ; some- times, as with his lady nurses, it lasts in its original vivacity only while he is dependent upon their care. But it is always genuine while it lasts, though it so often appears to leave no trace behind. There seems no doubt at all that when at Malta in 1805 he was suddenly told of the death of Captain Wordsworth (the poet's sailor brother, who was wrecked and drowned off Portland Bill), he "attempted to stagger out of the room," and fell down in the midst of a large company in convulsive hysterics. This extreme tenderness of nature was at the root of his most delicate poetry. The delicacy and tenderness of the lovely verses with which the poem called " Love " closes, have seldom been equalled by any other English poet. And this tenderness and delicacy of his feelings was no doubt the source of the innocent fascination with which Coleridge inspired so many men and women who made the greatest sacrifices on his behalf. There was something not only pathetic but appealing in it, which rendered it almost impos- sible to treat him with anything but protecting sympathy. Coleridge must have often himself inspired some of the feelir g which he delineates so exquisitely in the Genevieve of his own poem :-

" She wept with pity and delight,

She blushed with love and virgin shame; And like the murmur of a dream I heard her breathe my name.

Her bosom heaved, she stepped aside, As conscious of my look she stepped, Then suddenly with timorous eye, She fled to me and wept."

And yet, though full of this tenderness and delicacy, Coleridge had in him a vein of humour which was sometimes coarse enough,—as, for example, the virulent poem against Sir

James Mackintosh, called " The two Round Spaces on the Tombstone," sufficiently shows. The sharp contrast between Coleridge's tenderness and delicacy and his vein of coarseness is one of the most striking features of his character. For

example, in one of these letters, written of course mostly in joke in 1803 (when Coleridge was thirty-one), he speaks thus of his intention of going to the Canary Islands for the benefit of his health, in a letter to Thomas Wedgwood : —" The climate and country are heavenly, the inhabitants Papishes, all of whom I would burn with fire and faggot, for what didn't they do to us Christians under bloody Queen. Mary P Oh, the devil sulphur-roast them ! I would have no mercy on them unless they drowned all their priests, and then, spite of the itch (which they have in an inveterate degree, rich and poor, gentle and simple, old and young, male and female), would shake hands with them ungloved." That is a specimen of his nonsense, which is often really humorous,.

as this hardly is, but with the same touch of coarseness in it. For instance, in one of his rhodomontade letters to Poole, he calls his three brothers (with whom he had no great sympathy), "relations by gore," and describes his conformity

to their toasts (he was at this time a good deal of a Republican) after the following fashion :—" I drink Church

and King, mere cutaneous scabs of loyalty which only ape the King's evil, but affect not the interior of one's health.

Mendicant sores, it requires some little caution to keep them open, but they heal of their own accord." Or again, in a very graphic and amusing note written at the Treasury of the Maltese Government during his stay at Malta, he thus humorously

describes the hideous noisiness of everything Maltese It

goes through everything, their street-cries, their priests, their advocates, their very pigs yell rather than squeak, or both together rather, as if they were the true descendants of some half-dozen of the swine into which the devils went, rescued by the Royal Humane Society." That last suggestion is a touch of truly humorous caricature, of which, with its natural affinity for coarseness, Coleridge had a considerable share, though the exquisite delicacy of his finer poetry has done a good deal to wipe it out of the memory of his admirers. In the same note he goes on to speak of the horrors of the Maltese caterwauling at night :—" Those who have only heard caterwauling on English roofs can have no idea of a cat- serenade in Malta. In England it has often a close resemblance to the distressful cries of young children, but in Malta it is identical with the wide range of screams uttered by imps while they are dragging each other into hotter and still hotter pools of brimstone and fire. It is the discordof Torture and of Rage and of Hate, and of paroxysms of Revenge, and every note grumbles away into despair." We will take as another instance of the same sort of genius for vividly realising the coarser side of life, his account of the housekeeper with whom he was shut up in the ship tha took him to Malta, and whom he terms "Mrs. Carnosity, a creature with horrible superfluity of envelope, a monopolist and patentee, of flabby flesh, or rather fish. Indeed, she is at once fish, flesh, and fowl, though no chicken. But to see the man eat and this Mrs. Carnosity talk about it,"- " I must have that little potatoe " (baked in grease under the meat) "it looks so smilingly at me." Coleridge's genius for this kind of humorous coarseness, comes out sublimated, and without the coarseness, in the gruesome detail of " The Ancient Mariner," and even in " Christabel" too. Only in these poems, of course, the caricature is all transfigured into a sublime kind of Dantesque horror. It is a side of Coleridge's genius which has not been sufficiently attended to. Indeed, his long-windedness did a good deal to obscure it. As Carlyle said of his more beautiful and serious thoughts, they were "sunny islets " in a sea of indefinite and rather chaotic speculation, and are often lost to sight in the watery element of dilute sentiment in which they floated. The element in genius which Coleridge most needed was concen- tration. His letters, like the greater number of his poems, have far too much in them of aqueous vapour. Whenever he can manage to exclude that, his genius rises to its highest point.