BOOKS.

OLERID GE.*

THE charm of a particular individuality, expressing itself through certain characteristic gestures without effort or reserve, is what attracts us most in the letters of Gray,

Madame de Sevigne, and Cowper. The letters of Coleridge belong to a different order, being not so much the expression of a personality as the expression of ideas, a method of teach- ing, rather than of communication, monologues which scarcely reveal at all the characters of those to whom they were addressed. Letter writing, like conversation, is one of the social arts, to excel in which we need an urbane tolerance, a sympathy with diverse intelligences, and an absence of pre- conceived and inflexible opinions which are all Aualities alien

to the mental egotism of Coleridge. His letters have the same greyness and lack of literary excitement which Pater found to be characteristic of his prose works ; they differ from them only because they are a better medium for the brilliant

digressions and flashes of intuitive clairvoyance in which his genius is shown at its highest power. In general, it is by his complete detachment from the affairs of ordinary life, by an almost incessant application to thought, and to thought in its most abstract form, that Coleridge fails to hold and maintain our interest. Pater says of him that his literary life was "a

disinterested struggle against the relative spirit "; but it is not because he combated this spirit, which has been

the chief inspiration of our later development, that Coleridge seems to have failed ; it is not with us any question of opposing science to metaphysics, but we feel that the struggle was not disinterested, that it was directed not so much against an influence from outside as against the relative spirit working in him- self, that he denied his own true genins:and deliberately forced himself to work in a medium which was not expressive of it. It is as a poet, and as a critic of literature, that he compels our admiration; and yet what he achieved in these two fields seems to have been achieved spontaneously and by the way, to be the fruits of his extraordinarily sensuous nature, quick in its apprehension of all the subtleties of colour, of rhythm, and of temperament, less sensitive to form, and lacking that fine balance and sanity which alone can give to the creations of the mind an organic and not merely a nebulous unity.

Mr. A. Turnbull, who has edited the Biographia Epistolaris in a manner which deserves all praise, has inserted a chapter

on " The Permanent," from which we may quote the following passage :—

"The poet in Coleridge was extinguished by a very different thing than opium. Coleridge's poetic faculty was suspended by the loss of hope and also by the growth of his intellect, by the development of his reasoning and philosophic powers, and by the multiplication of the interests which appealed to him, and the many problems which presented themselves for his solution. . . . It is the man of profound genius, who in his own time is feeling on all sides into the future, who is least likely to give forth 'finished productions.' . . . Coleridge is such a man of genius : nearly all his works are fragmentary, unfinished, suggestive rather than 'complete,' just because they verge upon that trans- cendentalism which he' was the first to make audible to English ears in his day. . . . Coleridge's inability arose from his multi- plicity of motive, his visionary faculty of seeing in the light of a new principle a host of problems rise up on all sides, all claiming recognition and solution. That is the disease of my mind—it is comprehensive in its conceptions, and wastes itself in the con- templationaof the many things which it might do.' " This explanation does not altogether satisfy us, for while we agree that it is impossible to account for his comparative

failure by attributing it simply to an habitual use of opium, we think that the evil is deeper than Mr. Turnbull admits It was more of an intellectual and moral evil, or, to put it in another way, his slavery to drngs was not so much the cause as one of the symptoms of his mental disease. The problem is a psychological one. We find in him traces of somnambulism, not only as exemplified in " Kubla Khan," but in various passages in his prose works, and of hypercesthesia, an over-

' Coleridge's Biographia Bpistolaria. Edited by A. Turnbull. Two Vol& London ; O. Bell and Sons. [3s. 6d. net each.] sensitiveness to physical sensations such as colour, light, and sound. Yet it was to this exquisitely sensitive, if somewhat unhealthy, apprehension that the great part of his poetic genius belonged. The very confusion between the sleeping and waking sense lends its magical quality, its ltrainoui and visionary effect to such a passage as that describing the water-snakes :—

" They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes."

And when we consider further the lack of connected progress, even. in " The Ancient Mariner," the spontaneous succession

of images, following one upon another without apparent relation and yet with apparent appropriateness, we have before us precisely the same incoherence which is usual in dreams. It is this magical power of evocation which is the chief characteristic of his genius in poetry, and it is a similar quality—a kind of divination in his criticism, more especially in his lectures on Shakespeare— which is the chief characteristic of his genius in prose. He spealts, in a letter to Thomas Allsop, of "the peculiar sentiment awakened or inspired at first sight" as an article of his philosophic creed; and in another letter, to some unknown correspondent, he says " From my very childhood I have been accustomed to abstract and, as it were, unrealize whatever of more than common interest my eyes dwelt on, and then by a sort of transfusion and transmission of my consciousness to identify myself with the object." Well, it is precisely by such hints as these, and by his reference to the " involuntary " nature of composition, that we are led to consider his genius, both in his poetry and in his literary criticism, with all its vivid insight into psychological causes, as being purelY imagi- native and, using the word in a particular sense, clairvoyant. We are led, almost insensibly, to attribute the greater part of Coleridge'a genius to an involuntary and spontaneous action of the Mind, and to differentiate between this and his later, more definite purpose.

The later purpose was almost entirely philosophical; and the conscious effort of Coleridge was to achieve fame as a teacher of men, an exponent of the permanent and invariable principles which govern the human understanding. The chief idea underlying the philosophy of Coleridge is the doctrine of the Irrational, the notion " that not everything in the world is resolvable into Logic and Thought, bit( that mighty resisting remainders are extant, which perhaps even "constitute the most important thing in the world." It is not really relevant to bring against this doctrine the :charge that it implies .4. use of reason in order to surpass reason, because it is perfectly legitimate to.nse the reasoning faculty_ to sift and clarify. our experienee„ Whether that experi- enee be physical or spiritual. The difficultiea arise through the extremely tenuous and fluid nature Of the spiritual experience itself, which implies in the snbject, as its principal condition, either the entire suspension of the reason or its merging in the whole apprehension of man ;_ and when the yeason emerges again from its momentary eclipse, it is no longer in the presence of the experience, biit only of the traces which the experience has lett behind it We do not pretend to discuss within the limit's of this article the value of Coleridge's philosophical theories ; we are less interested by thought than by the man thinking, but we must point out that the mystical eleinent—common, in a greater or lesser aggie, to all absolute systems—ie one of Coleridge's most striking characteristics. The idea of the absolute, the per- -Menent, he sought to place beyond the solvent of criticism, ..to lift them out, of tie sphere in. which the reason works. Pater Says : "We see him trying ' to apprehend the absolute,' to stereotype forms of faith and philosophy, to attain, as he *says, fixed principles' in politics, morale; and religion; to fix one mode of life as the esssence of life, refusing to see :the parte as parts only; and all the time his own pathetic history plea& for a more elastic philosophy than his, and Cries out against every fOrinula less living and flexible than life itself." Yes, this is true, and finely said; but is it not, at the same time, precisely a nature such as Coleridge's, weak, shifting, singularly acute intellectually, and yet incapable of Any continuity of effort, which would desire to rest itself upon '" the absolute," upon something fixed and permanent amid the eternal flux P " Pray to God," he says in one of his letters, "" that He may grant me a living and not merely a reasoning

faith." To us it seems that the whole tragedy of Coleridge's life is in those few words : the conflict between the two sides of a dual nature, the attempt to reconcile truth in the mystic with truth in the scientific sense, the curious confusion of two mutually exclusive spheres.

Such a mind, with all its delicate scrupulousness, its indeci- sion, and its candour, has a singular charm for us at the present time ; and, though we may hesitate to follow it into that colourless, formless, intangible world of the ideal, we cannot but reverence the tragedy of its frustrate hope and broken promise. The volumes edited by Mr. A. Turnbull help to reveal this mind to us, not in its formal, but in its spon- taneous expression, with the quick play of intelligence upon ideas and the brilliant flashes of illumination. Mr. Turnbull's method is sound, and his work has been done with care and discrimination; but we think that the book should have been more carefully annotated; a duty in which our editors are seldom sufficiently alert.