BOOKS.
THE LETTERS OF COLERIDGE.* [CONCLUDING NOTICE.] THE chief interest, we think, of these letters is less the light which they throw on Coleridge as a poet, a humourist, or even as a thinker, than the light which they throw on him as a friend. No man, we suppose, ever had the power first of fascinating others, and then of leaning upon them with an innocent and childlike helplessness, which Coleridge possessed. The generous brothers Wedgwood gave him (in 1798, when Coleridge was twenty-six) a pension of £150 a year, of which one brother (Thomas Wedgwood) paid him his half through- out life, while the other (and the one whom Coleridge con- fessed that he loved best, and this even after his share of the pension was withdrawn) withdrew it some fifteen years later (in 1813), on account of Coleridge's opium-eating habit. Coleridge leaned, too, for a long time on his friend Poole, to whom he was evidently warmly attached in his earlier life. Further, he leaned upon his brother-in-law, Southey,—indeed, left his wife and children almost wholly to his care. He leaned for a considerable period on the Morgans, who nursed him with the utmost affection. He leaned heavily on Mr. Stuart, of the Morning Post and Morning Courier, for many years ; and for the last sixteen years of his life he was entirely dependent on the Gillmans with whom he lived at Highgate. No man ever succeeded in attaching kinder and more generous friends. And no man ever returned kindness with more heartfelt gratitude, so far as mere feeling was concerned. But Coleridge felt his own helplessness so profoundly that be hardly even made the attempt to serve or help others as they served and helped him. He was exactly like a child in following implicitly the urgent suggestion of his own needs and wants. While Poole could help him he clung with the most eager solicitude to Poole. When Poole got into diffi- culties, he seems to have found it quite easy to transfer himself to the North, though he had previously spoken of leaving Poole as almost an impossibility to him. He built the most magnificent castles in the air of what he and Southey would do together at Keswick ; but when Southey actually came to Keswick, Coleridge left him within a month or two never again to live there. Yet he had a very tender and gentle nature. No one can doubt that he sincerely felt the deep affection he poured out on his various friends at various times. Still he had hardly a friend of the smallest independence (unless it was the Wedgwoods) with whom he did not manage to quarrel more than once, and so seriously as to poison great portions of his life. He quarrelled grievously with Southey, with Lamb, with Wordsworth, and more than once with each of them. He quarrelled once, at least, with Poole. He quarrelled with Charles Lloyd, whom perhaps he never really loved, though Lloyd undoubtedly had loved him. He talked at one time of having "a perfect Lloyd-and- Lambophobia." He quarrelled with his wife. Except with those who were entirely under his influence, like the Morgans, or under whose influence he at length placed himself, like the Gillmans, he hardly managed to get on. Even with those who, like the Wordsworths, were the objects of his deepest reverence, he found it impossible to bear the sense of the pity and reserve with which at length they treated him. In his earlier life there was an innocent kind of Pecksniffianism about him which must have been very trying. He lectures Southey, when he (Coleridge) was only twenty-three, in this fashion :—" If there be in nature a situation perilous to honesty, it is this, when a man has not heart to be, but lusts to seem, virtuous." Again, he forgives Lamb in a fashion that must have stung Lamb more than any resentment. " When I wrote to you that my sonnet to Simplicity was not composed with reference to Southey, you answered me (I believe these are the words) It was a lie too gross for the grossest ignorance to believe,' and I was not angry with you, because the assertion which the grossest ignorance would believe a lie, the Omniscient knew to be the truth." Mr. Pecksniff's character had not then been created, but it is impossible not to think of Mr. Pecksniff's remark, " He beat me with a stick which I have every reason to believe bad knobs on it, but I am not angry." Nevertheless Coleridge's
• The Lettere of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols. London: William Heinemann. was a perfectly innocent Pecksniffianism. It was not hypocrisy, but more or less the expression of true feeling. It would have been better for him if he had been angry. But he was so conscious of the extent of his own weakness, and indeed of his self-deceptions, that even when he knew himself to be wronged he could not be certain that he was not, in some sense, more culpable than he seemed to be ; and this indeed is what he really said to Lamb in the letter of forgiveness we have already noted. He was, latterly, at all events, per- fectly conscious of the flabbiness of his own nature,—and hardly doubted that some of the displeasure be excited in others, bitterly as it pained him, was more or less deserved. His own affectionateness was as genuine as possible. When- he fell down in a swoon at hearing of the death by wreck of Wordsworth's sailor-brother, he showed the deep sensibility of his own nature truly enough. But be had not strength and will enough to make the sacrifices for others which they made for him, and so on the whole, though he had a thoroughly affectionate heart, he was not a friend on whom it was possible to rely.
Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the great Dublin mathema- tician and astronomer, said of Coleridge in a remarkable letter to Mr. Aubrey De Vere (p. 759 note). " Coleridge is rather to be considered as a Faculty than as a Mind; and I did so consider him. I seemed rather to listen to an oracular voice, to be cir- cumfused in a Divine 4/.6cp4, than—as in the presence of Wordsworth—to hold commune with an exalted man." This was, we suppose, Sir William Hamilton's mode of expressing, the strange absence of will in Coleridge, and the singular affluence of thoughts which seemed to be almost independent of himself. When he really spoke from his own centre,. he was a poet, a humourist, sometimes almost a coarse humourist, and even a whimsical and hare-brained kind of improvisatore. Such sayings as the remark that " Dregs from the bottom, half-way up, and froth from the top, half-way down, make up Whitbread's Entire ; " and such lines as- he wrote on his successful sea-bathing, after the doctor had warned him that it might be his death, came from the very depth of his exulting sense of personal importance— a sense of personal importance not in the least inconsistent with his profound humility, which was genuine enough and indeed just enough. But in later life there was a sort of maturity of reflective wisdom in him which seemed to be quite independent of his own personal failures to act upon the teaching of that wisdom. He showed the kind of mind which might have dictated a new Ecclesiasticus. In such books as The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, Aids to- Reflection, The Statesman's Manual, and especially The Lay Sermons and The Biographic(' Literaria, you seem to read the outpouring, as Sir William Hamilton put it, less of a mind than of a faculty. There is no more curious contrast in any single life than is presented between the drift of such books as these and that of the earlier dogmatisms and violent fallacies of his youth.
Alike in the earlier letters and the later works, Coleridge almost always speaks in monologue. His necessitarianism, his. automatism, his pantheism, is given in monologue in youth.. His belief in the freedom of the will, his Trinitarianism, his supernaturalism, is given in monologue in his old age. Sir William Rowan Hamilton was quite right. It is a premature and unripe " faculty " writing to his friends that we find in. the letters from Cambridge and Netherstowey. It is a riper and more discerning, though less vivid, "faculty" that we find in his letters from Highgate. And though Coleridge never writes without some preliminary matter that is more or less personal to the correspondent addressed, it is very rarely that he does not pass into monologue before he gets into anything like full, swing, just as in the Table Talk which his son-in-law edited, all the sayings, even the liveliest, seem to be passages in a reverie,. sometimes a reflective, sometimes a humorous, reverie. His epistolary style is usually full of kindly feeling to the people addressed, but it is too self-conscious to be the best kind of letter. Compare his style with Lamb's, for instance,. and one cannot doubt that Lamb's mind was much fuller of those to whom he was writing, Coleridge's of him- who was addressing them. We can find no more charac- teristic letter than that to Mrs. Morgan (one of the most devoted of his nurses), written in 1808 from the office of Mr. Stuart in the Strand, where Coleridge was supposed to, be living for the benefit of Mr. Stuart's paper, the Courier.
The letter is a kind of monody on his love for the family to whom he was writing; but it is much fuller of the disin- terested character of that love than it is of the disinterested character of the tenderness with which he had been treated,
though that, too, is evidently present to his mind:— "DEB AND HONOURED MARY,—Having had you continually, I may almost say, present to me in my dreams, and always appear- ing as a compassionate comforter therein, appearing in shape as your own dear self, most innocent and full of love, I feel a strong impulse to address a letter to you by name, though it equally respects all my three friends. If it had been told me on that evening when dear Morgan was asleep in the parlour, and you and beloved Caroletta asleep at opposite corners of the sopha in the drawing•room, of which I occupied the centre in a state of blessed half-unconsciousness as a drowsy guardian of your slumbers; if it had been then told me that in less than a fortnight the time should come when I should not wish to be with you, or wish you to be with me, I should have out with one of Caroletta's harmless "condemn its' (commonly pronounced damn it '), 'that's no truth!' And yet since on Friday evening, my lecture having made an impression far beyond its worth or my expectation, I have been in such a state of wretchedness, confined to my bed, in such almost continued pain that I have been content to see no one but the unlovable old woman, as feeling that I should only receive a momently succession of pangs from the presence of those who, giving no pleasure, would make my wretchedness appear almost unnatural, even as if the fire should cease to be warm. Who would not rather shiver on an ice mount than freeze before the fire which had used to spread comfort through his fibres and thoughts of social joy through his imagination P Yet even this, yet even from this feeling that your society would be an agony, oh I know, I feel how I love you, my dear sisters and friends I write in great pain, but yet I deem, whatever become of me, that it will hereafter be a soothing thought to you that in sickness or in health, in hope or in despondency, I have thought of you with love and esteem and gratitude. My dear Mary ! dear Charlotte ! May Heaven bless you! With such a wife and such a sister, my friend is already blest ! May Heaven give him health and elastic spirits to enjoy these and all other blessings ! Once more bless you, bless you. Ah ! who is there to bless S. T. COLERIDGE P "
How characteristic is that half-self-condemning, half-self-pity- ing conclusion, "Ali! who is there to bless S. T. Coleridge?" Then there comes a long postscript with reference to some admiring ladies of whom he had been advised, which ends thus :—" Of the lady and her poetical daughter I had never before heard even the name. Oh, these are shadows ! and all my literary admirers and flatterers, as well as despisers and calumniators, pass over my heart as the images of clouds over dull sea. So far from being retained, they are scarcely made visible there. Bat I love you, dear ladies ! substantially, and pray do write at least a line in Morgan's letter, if neither will write me a whole one, to com- fort me by the assurance that you remember me with esteem and some affection. Most affectionately have you and Char-
lotte treated me, and most gratefully do I remember it. Good-night, good-night ? To be read after the other." That is a very good specimen of Coleridge's letters, affectionate, egotistic, self-pitying, a little lumbering, not a little elaborate,
with a sort of pious pride in his own humility, as though he were thinking aloud : ' See what a castaway I am, and yet how patiently and gratefully I take the alms which these benevolent hearts fling to me.' Carlyle's contempt was really the contempt of a strong egotist for a weaker egotist, and yet had in it a little of the irritable consciousness that the weaker egotist had a far wider range of meditative wisdom than any which the stronger egotist could command. Coleridge's " faculty " was far more comprehensive than Carlyle's, but Carlyle's faculty was all aglow, all aflame with imaginative intensity, while Coleridge was as a rule meandering, tentative, and discontinuous. He says, in his Table Talk, "Charles Lamb wrote an essay on a man who lived in past time ; I thought of adding another to it on one who did not live in time at all, past, present, or future, but beside or collaterally." Just so; and as one consequence (among many) of so living, Coleridge only thought of writing the essay and never wrote it, nor indeed a great many other essays, which might have pieced together for ns that rich and suggestive, but sadly incoherent, life.
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