A BOOK OF THE MOMENT

COLERIDGE

[COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE New York Times.] " The rapt-one of the God-like forehead, The Heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth."

(WortnswonTn).

Cole ridge : Poetry and Prose. Edited by H. W. Garrod. (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press. 3s. 6d. net.) Cole ridge : Poetry and Prose. Edited by H. W. Garrod. (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press. 3s. 6d. net.)

IF a poet is best judged by the reactions of his verse and

his genius upon the minds of his fellows and contemporaries of the lyre and the pen, no man comes better from the test than Coleridge. His verse was small in quantity, wayward and even dim in meaning, endowed with little of consistent purpose or design, and often superficially overlaid with many non-conductors of sympathy. Yet from the very beginning of his poetic life Coleridge held the attention of the thinking world. Others had to toil in obscurity to create a public for themselves—to teach men their new language and their new thoughts. Coleridge never cast his spells unregarded. Though he did everything possible to distract and weary the public mind by his spasmodic and elusive publications, by his kaleido- scopic changes of vier and feeling, and by his pedantic pre- tences that his elfin spirit and magical versifying were based upon the dreary metaphysic of Kant, Hegel and Schelling, the reading public strove their hardest to follow their poetic will-o'-the-wisp. They were always demanding from his contemporaries their passports from Parnassus. Coleridge seemed born with the entree to men's minds and hearts.

Though his poetry is obscure no one ever called it un- intelligible or asked for a key or a dictionary. Long before they were printed his verses were passed from hand to hand by admiring strangers. Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, all appear to have read Christabel before it was published and to have had their minds deeply affected. No one ever saw Coleridge without wanting to describe him body and soul. Strangest of all, men seemed bent upon doing what they have done for very few poets. They made him allowances or sent him gifts of money, or took him into their houses, or paid the expenses of his wanderings, without his ever asking for these accommodations. They seemed to fear that the magic flame which enthralled them might go out, and so felt compelled to feed it in spite of the difficulty which surrounded the task. Coleridge, though he had no false pride as to taking money, was so elusive and so visionary that it was not easy to relieve his necessities. He did not tout for help. You had to catch him—to put your salt of gold upon his tail—as he flitted across your path.

The fact that Coleridge was throughout his life the poet, the prophet, and the sage of the Elect is wonderfully well brought out in Coleridge: Poetry and Prose, edited for the Clarendon Press by Mr. Garrod. Though he does not in his introduction tell us what he is doing, and perhaps hardly realizes it himself, he is holding up a magician's mirror in which we see Coleridge reflected. That mirror is made out of the great minds of Coleridge's own age. We see him presented from many points of view, and by many critics kind and unkind, friendly and unfriendly ; but not one of them dares to dismiss him as uninteresting or unimportant. They all catch fire at the sight and the thought of him and give us of their very best when they strive to put down in words " the extreme characteristic impression " that Coleridge made upon them.

Take Hazlitt, the man whose definition of the object of the artist in words I have just given. Hazlitt is at his strongest when he is dealing with Coleridge, and he dealt with him at every epoch of the poet's life. When Coleridge is the theme all the worst qualities in the critic's writing disappear. The magician has known how to call up the Genius of the man

who portrays him. Take the passage on Coleridge from the Lectures on the English Poets :-- " I may say of him here, that he is the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius. He is the only person from whom I ever learnt anything. There is only one thing he could learn from me in return, but that he has not. He was the first poet I ever knew. His genius at that time had angelic wings, and fed on manna. He talked on for over ; and you wished him

to talk on for ever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort ; but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him from off his" feet. His voice rolled on the ear like the pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music of thought. His mind was clothed with wings ; and, raised on them, he lifted philosophy to heaven. In his descriptions, you saw the progress of human happiness and liberty in bright and never- ending succession, like the steps of Jacob's ladder, with airy shapes ascending and descending, and with the voice of God at the top of the ladder. And shall I, who heard him then, listen to him now ? Not I ! . . . That spell is broke ; that time is gone for ever ; that voice is heard no more ; but still the recollection comes rushing by with thoughts of long-past years, and rings in my ears with never-dying sound."

But it was no good to say that the spell was " broke " and that the voice was heard no more. Only five years after Hazlitt is in full cry again and gives us a wonderfully vivid if diffuse picture of Coleridge in 1798 preaching in his father's

chapel. Two years after—that is, in 1825—in The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt drew yet another picture of Coleridge. Could there be a more perfect calling up of the image of a man's

mind than the following ?-

" Our author's mind is (as he himself might express it) tangential. There is no subject on which he has not touched, none on which he has rested. With an understanding, fertile, subtle, expansive, ' quick, forgetive, apprehensive,' beyond all living precedent, few traces of it will perhaps remain. He lends himself to all impressions alike ; he gives up his mind and liberty of thought to none. He is a general lover of art and science, and wedded to no one in particular. He pursues knowledge as a mistress, with outstretched hands and winged speed ; but as he is about to embrace her, his Daphne turns—alas I not to a laurel ! Hardly a speculation has been left on record from the earliest time, but it is loosely folded up in Mr. Coleridge's memory, like a rich but somewhat tattered piece of tapestry : we might add (with more seeming than real extravagance), that scarce a thought can pass through the mind of man, but its sound has at some time or other passed over his head with rustling pinions."

Even when Hazlitt tries to be most critical we see him under the spell of the enchanter. Take, for example, the admirable phrase, " In his abstract reasoning, he misses his way by strewing it with flowers." And then the reflection, " All that he has done of moment, he had done twenty years ago : since then, he may be said to have lived on the sound of his own voice."

Jeffrey, the harsh old Edinburgh reviewer, who by every rule and instinct ought to have hated Coleridge, gives an account of his first interview which shows that he was abso- lutely bowled over by the poet: " I believe coffee was offered me—and I came away in an hour or two." One sees Jeffrey seven years later struggling to disengage himself from the enchantment, but it is with very great difficulty.

De Quincey was an ex animo eulogist of Coleridge, but in the special way in which he writes of him there is another proof of Coleridge's power of impressing the human mind. His genius galvanized even De Quincey, and for once made his style stiffen and appear to have a real backbone. De Quincey describes for us how he found Coleridge " domesticated " at Bridgewater with an amiable family who were the descendants of Chubb the philosopher. But Coleridge did more than secure the affection and esteem of the Chubbs. In their affectionate sentiments we are told that " the whole town of Bridgewater seemed to share." " When the heat of the day had declined, I walked out with him ; and rarely, perhaps never, have I seen a person so much interrupted in one hour's space as Coleridge, on this occasion, by the courteous atten- tions of young and old."

Lamb's reflection on the death of Coleridge is, of course, eulogistic ; but, like the rest of his contemporaries, he cannot keep off a description of the man's person as well as his mind. No one could, apparently, look at Coleridge and his forehead, or hear his musical voice, without a curious perturbation of the spirit. " He had a tone in oral delivery which seemed to convey sense to those who were otherwise imperfect recipients." " In him was disproved that old maxim that we should allow every one his share of talk. He would talk from morn to dewy eve, nor cease till far midnight, yet who would ever interrupt him ? "

But greater and more important as a proof of the effect of Coleridge upon his contemporaries is the description of him contained in Carlyle's Life of Sterling. Taking it altogether, and with all its faults and crudities—there are a good many of

these—I can hardly doubt that this pen picture is as great as anything of its kind in English literature. Though Carlyle was a grudging praiser of his contemporaries, and though in 1851, when the Character was written, Coleridge had become included in the blind spot in literature, the vision of him still stirred the acrid depths of Carlyle's soul. Could there be a fairer representation of that strange and unstable equilibrium of mind which Coleridge acquired at the end of his life ?

" A sublime man • who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual Manhood ; escaping from the black materialisms and revolutionary deluges, with ' God, Freedom, Immortality' still his : a king of men. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer ; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character ; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma ; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon."

The inevitable flout and jeer at the end of the passage is maintained in the later part of the Character, and with great effect. Indeed, it is impossible to read the Carlyle picture not only without gusto, but without feeling that these flouts and jeers add very much to the vitality of the portrait. Those who have never read it should not fail to read it in Mr. Garrod's book, and those who have read it should refresh their memory. If they do, I think they will agree with me in the warmth of -my eulogy. If we accept Carlyle's way of writing, what could !be more magnificent than the peroration of the Character ? 'After speaking of the toil of the Titans of Literature and how they must endure " detestability to flesh and blood, of the tasks laid on them," he goes on to point out how heavy and how tragic are the penalties which must fall upon the Titan if he neglects his appointed task.

" For the old Eternal Powers do live forever ; nor do their laws know any change, however we in our poor wigs and church- tippets may attempt to read their laws. To steal into Heaven— by the modern method of sticking ostrich-like your head into fallacies on Earth, equally as by the ancient and by all conceivable methods—is forever forbidden. High-treason is the name of that attempt ; and it continues to be punished as such. Strange

enough : here once more was a kind of Heaven- z Ixion ; and to him, as to the old one, the just gods were very stern ! Tho ever-revolving, never-advancing Wheel (of a kind) was his, through life ; and from his Cloud-Juno did not he too procreate strange Centaurs, spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory Hybrids, and ecclesiastical Chimeras—which now roam the earth in a very lamentable manner ! "

I wish I had space to quote from the account of Emerson's Visit to Coleridge contained in the English Traits. I will only extract one sentence. Coleridge there, criticizing a religious pamphlet by one of the Independents, gave unconsciously a most -wonderful judgment of himself. " The man was a chaos of truths, but lacked the knowledge that God was a god of order."

I cannot end this notice without a word of warm personal thanks to Mr. Garrod. The reproduction of the portrait of Coleridge by Moses Houghton the younger, now in Christ's Hospital, is a worthy adjunct to the quotations from Coleridge's contemporaries. He evidently inspired and vitalized the portrait painter, just as he inspired and vitalized his brother poets. J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.