Coleridge Studies
Coleridge : Studies by Several Hands on the Hundredth Anniversary of His Death. Edited by Edmund Blunden and Earl Leslie Griggs. (Constable. 10e. 6d.) CENTENARY volumes are usually depressing affairs. Vamped up laboriously by people with nothing important to say about the subject of celebration—and who write only because they feel that the occasion demands it—they consist for the most part half of platitudes and half of irrelevancies, of things not worth saying and things better said before. Professor Dash from an English University writes to say that Shake's- peare, let us say, was a good poet ; Professor Blank front an American University writes on book-indexing in Shakes- peare's time. Neither can be said to add to our appreciation
of Shakespeare.
The present volume on Coleridge is a happy exception to this gloomy rule. It is unpretentious : indeed, it does not discuss Coleridge's great works at all. But it is dedicated to a genuinely useful task –to filling up gaps. Some of the gaps are biographical : Mr. Edmund Blunden writes on Coleridge's school days ; Mr. Earl Leslie Griggs publishes a letter from Sara Coleridge about her father's death ; Mr. Eagleston has ferreted out a very entertaining anecdote about Coleridge and the Wordsworths during their stay at Alfoxden in 1797. The Rev. G. B. H. Coleridge prints some chapters written by his father on those confusing years in Coleridge's confusing life — 1796 to 1800. Some of the gaps are critical. Mr. Wilkinson contributes a note on Coleridgean bibliography ; Professor Harper calls attention to the beauties of his lesser known poems ; Professor Muirhead and Mr. Beeley devote them- selves to elucidating the chaotic brilliant jungle of Coleridge's ideas on politics and philosophy. The articles are not all equally good. Professor Harper's especially is too elemen- tary. No one is likely to read this book who does not already take an active interest in Coleridge ; and no one who takes an active interest in Coleridge needs to be told that " Frost at Midnight " or the " Ode to Dejection " are worth reading. Further, Professor Harper has a curious belief in the power of bad poetry to prevent bad actions : " 0 pale-eyed form The victim of seduction, doomed to know
Polluted nights and days of blasphemy ; Who in loathed orgies with lewd wassailers Must gaily laugh, while thy remembored home Gnaws like a viper at thy secret heart."
" Who," cries Professor Harper with pious enthusiasm, " with these lines in his memory could seduce a woman or add to the misery of one already debased to prostitution ? " The ;answer, we are afraid, is most people could. Indeed, it would be worth going a long way to meet a man who had been diverted from seducing someone by remembering this passage. . Still, Professor Harper has discovered several pleasing lines of Coleridge that are generally overlooked—he fills his gap. And so do the of her contributors. Every article is an addition to our knowledge of Coleridge ; and an addition worth making.
Indeed any new light on Coleridge is worth having. For
he is such a baffling figure. It is not just that his work differs so greatly in quality, that his valuable achievement is at once so magnificent and so small a proportion of his work. ' This is true of other writers—of Byron for example. But Byron's achievement and his personality are all of a piece. What we know of his writing and of the impression he made on his contemporaries fits in with the impression his letters and story makes on us ourselves. Not so Coleridge. By some of the greatest of his contemporaries—and they were very great indeed—by Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt and de Quincey, he was looked up to as by far the most remarkable man they had ever met, and his finest work justifies their opinion. He wrote three of the best poems in English ; he anticipated every original contribution made to literature by the other romantic poets : at his best he is as profound a critic as any in our literature. Yet when we read his life or his letters, or the records of his conversation, we do not feel impressed, as we should. His busy impractical plans, his torrents of nebulous idealistic talk, his fits of causeless optimism, of abject ineffective remorse, combine to compose a figure touching and curious, but undignified and slightly comic—a pathetic genius at whom we know not whether to laugh or cry, not a great " man at all. All the same, he must have been. Wordsworth and Lamb must be right. Only in the hundred years that have elapsed since Coleridge's death, the key that would have opened the door that reveals his living personality has been lost. And till a biographer arises with genius enough to forge it afresh, from the scattered reminiscences left us,
Coleridge must remain a mystery. DAvrn CECIL.
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