Life at Highgate-Renewed activity-Publications and re-publications – The Biographia Literaria – The lectures of 1818-Coleridge as a Shakespearian critic.

[1816-1818.]

The results of the step which Coleridge had just taken became speedily visible in more ways than one, and the public were among the first to derive benefit from it. For not only was he stimulated to greater activity of production, but his now more methodical way of life gave him time and inclination for that work of arrangement and preparation for the press which, distasteful to most writers, was no doubt especially irksome to him, and thus insured the publication of many pieces which otherwise might never have seen the light. The appearance of Christabel was, as we have said, received with signal marks of popular favour, three editions being called for and exhausted in the same year. In 1816 there appeared also The Statesman's Manual; or the Bible the best guide to Political Skill and Foresight: a Lay Sermon addressed to the higher classes of Society, with an Appendix containing Comments and Essays connected with the Study of the Inspired Writings; in 1817, another Lay Sermon addressed to the higher and middle classes on the existing distresses and discontents; and in the same year followed the most important publication of this period, the Biographia Literaria.

In 1817, too, it was that Coleridge at last made his long-meditated collection and classification of his already published poems, and that for the first time something approaching to a complete edition of the poet's works was given to the world. The Sibylline Leaves, as this reissue was called, had been intended to be preceded by another volume of verse, and "accordingly on the printer's signatures of every sheet we find Vol. II, appearing." Too characteristically, however, the scheme was abandoned, and Volume II. emerged from the press without any Volume I. to accompany it. The drama of Zapolya followed in the same year, and proved more successful with the public than with the critic of Drury Lane. The "general reader" assigned no "ludicrous objections to its metaphysics;" on the contrary, he took them on trust, as his generous manner is, and Zapolya, published thus as a Christmas tale, became so immediately popular that two thousand copies were sold in six weeks. In the year 1818 followed the three-volume selection of essays from the Friend, a reissue to which reference has already been made. With the exception of Christabel, however, all the publications of these three years unfortunately proceeded from the house of Gale and Fenner, a firm which shortly afterwards became bankrupt; and Coleridge thus lost all or nearly all of the profits of their sale.

The most important of the new works of this period was, as has been said, the Biographia Literaria, or, to give it its other title, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions. Its interest, however, is wholly critical and illustrative; as a narrative it would be found extremely disappointing and probably irritating by the average reader. With the exception of one or two incidental disclosures, but little biographical information is to be derived from it which is not equally accessible from sources independent of the author; and the almost complete want of sequence and arrangement renders it a very inconvenient work of reference even for these few biographical details. Its main value is to be found in the contents of seven chapters, from the fourteenth to the twentieth; but it is not going too far to say that, in respect of these, it is literally priceless. No such analysis of the principles of poetry – no such exact discrimination of what was sound in the modern "return-to-nature" movement from what was false – has ever been accomplished by any other critic, or with such admirable completeness by this consummate critic at any other time. Undoubtedly it is not of the light order of reading; none, or very little, of Coleridge's prose is. The whole of chapter xv., for instance, in which the specific elements of "poetic power" are "distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition by accidental motives," requires a close and sustained effort of the attention, but those who bestow it will find it amply re-paid. I know of no dissertation conceived and carried out in terms of the abstract which in the result so triumphantly justifies itself upon application to concrete cases, As regards the question of poetic expression, and the laws by which its true form is determined, Coleridge's analysis is, it seems to me, final. I cannot, at least, after the most careful reflection upon it, conceive it as being other than the absolutely last word on the subject. Reasoning and illustration are alike so convincing that the reader, like the contentious student who listened unwillingly to his professor's demonstration of the first proposition of Euclid, is compelled to confess that "he has nothing to reply." To the judicious admirer of Wordsworth, to every one who, while recognising Wordsworth's inestimable services to English literature as the leader of the naturalist reaction in poetry, has yet been vaguely conscious of the defect in his poetic theory, and very keenly conscious of the vices of his poetic practice, – to all such persons it must be a profound relief and satisfaction to be guided as unerringly as Coleridge guides them to the "parting of the ways" of truth and falsity in Wordsworth's doctrines, and to be enabled to perceive that nothing which has offended him in that poet's thought and diction has any real connection with whatever in the poet's principles has commanded his assent. There is no one who has ever felt uneasy under the blasphemies of the enemy but must entertain deep gratitude for so complete a discharge as Coleridge has procured him from the task of defending such lines as

"And I have travelled far as Hull to see What clothes he might have left or other property."

Defend them indeed the ordinary reader probably would not, preferring even the abandonment of his theory to a task so humiliating. But the theory has so much of truth and value in it that the critic who has redeemed it from the discredit of Wordsworth's misapplications of it is entitled to the thanks of every friend of simplicity, who is at the same time an enemy of bathos. There is no longer any reason to treat the deadly commonplaces, amid which we toil through so many pages of the Excursion, as having any true theoretic affinity with its but too occasional majestic interludes. The smooth square-cut blocks of prose which insult the natural beauty of poetic rock and boulder even in such a scene of naked moorland grandeur as that of Resolution and Independence are seen and shown to be the mere intruders which we have all felt them to be. To the Wordsworthian, anxious for a full justification of the faith that is in him, the whole body of Coleridge's criticism on his friend's poetry in the Biographia Literaria may be confidently recommended. The refutation of what is untenable in Wordsworth's theory, the censure pronounced upon certain characteristics of his practice, are made all the more impressive by the tone of cordial admiration which distinguishes every personal reference to the poet himself, and by the unfailing discrimination with which the critic singles out the peculiar beauties of his poetry. No finer selection of finely characteristic Wordsworthian passages could perhaps have been made than those which Coleridge has quoted in illustration of his criticisms in the eighteenth and two following chapters of the Biographia Literaria. For the rest, however, unless indeed one excepts the four chapters on the Hartleian system and its relation to the German school of philosophy, the book is rather one to be dipped into for the peculiar pleasure which an hour in Coleridge's company must always give to any active intelligence, than to be systematically studied with a view to perfecting one's conception of Coleridge's philosophical and critical genius considered in its totality.

As to the two lay sermons, the less ambitious of them is decidedly the more successful. The advice to "the higher and middle classes" on the existing distresses and discontents contains at least an ingredient of the practical; its distinctively religious appeals are varied by sound political and economical arguments; and the enumeration and exposure of the various artifices by which most orators are accustomed to delude their hearers is as masterly as only Coleridge could have made it. Who but he, for instance, could have thrown a piece of subtle observation into a form in which reason and fancy unite so happily to impress it on the mind as in the following passage: "The mere appeal to the auditors, whether the arguments are not such that none but an idiot or an hireling could resist, is an effective substitute for any argument at all. For mobs have no memories. They are in nearly the same state as that of an individual when he makes what is termed a bull. The passions, like a fused metal, fill up the wide interstices of thought and supply the defective links; and thus incompatible assertions are harmonised by the sensation, without the sense of connection." The other lay sermon, however, the Statesman's Manual, is less appropriately conceived. Its originating proposition, that the Bible is "the best guide to political skill and foresight," is undoubtedly open to dispute, but might nevertheless be capable of plausible defence upon À priori grounds. Coleridge, however, is not content with this method of procedure; as, indeed, with so avowedly practical an object in view he scarcely could be, for a "manual" is essentially a work intended for the constant consultation of the artificer in the actual performance of his work, and ought at least to contain illustrations of the application of its general principles to particular cases. It is in undertaking to supply these that the essential mysticism of Coleridge's counsels comes to light. For instance: "I am deceived if you will not be compelled to admit that the prophet Isaiah revealed the true philosophy of the French Revolution more than two thousand years before it became a sad irrevocable truth of history. 'And thou saidst, I shall be a lady for ever, so that thou didst not lay these things to thy heart neither didst remember the latter end of it.... Therefore shall evil come upon thee; thou shalt not know from whence it riseth, etc.'" And to this ast-quoted sentence Coleridge actually appends the following note: "The reader will scarcely fail to find in this verse a remembrancer of the sudden setting in of the frost before the usual time (in a country, too, where the commencement of its two seasons is in general scarcely less regular than that of the wet and dry seasons between the tropics) which caused, and the desolation which accompanied, the flight from Moscow." One can make no other comment upon this than that if it really be wisdom which statesmen would do well to lay to heart, the late Dr. Cumming must have been the most profound instructor in statesmanship that the world has ever seen. A prime minister of real life, however, could scarcely be seriously recommended to shape his policy upon a due consideration of the possible allegoric meaning of a passage in Isaiah, to say nothing of the obvious objection that this kind of appeal to Sortes BiblicÆ is dangerously liable to be turned against those who recommend it. On the whole, one must say of this lay sermon that it justifies the apprehension expressed by the author in its concluding pages. It does rather "resemble the overflow of an earnest mind than an orderly and premeditated," in the sense, at any rate, of a well-considered "composition."

In the month of January 1818 Coleridge once more commenced the delivery of a course of lectures in London. The scope of this series-fourteen in number was, as will be seen from the subjoined syllabus, an immensely comprehensive one. The subject of the first was "the manners, morals, literature, philosophy, religion, and state of society in general in European Christendom, from the eighth to the fifteenth century;" and of the second "the tales and metrical romances common for the most part to England, Germany, and the north of France; and English songs and ballads continued to the reign of Charles I." In the third the lecturer proposed to deal with the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser, of Petrarch, and of Ariosto, Pulci, and Boiardo. The fourth, fifth, and sixth were to be devoted to the dramatic works of Shakespeare, and to comprise the substance of Coleridge's former courses on the same subject, "enlarged and varied by subsequent study and reflection." In the seventh he was to treat of the other principal dramatists of the Elizabethan period, Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher; in the eighth of the life and all the works of Cervantes; in the ninth of Rabelais, Swift, and Sterne, with a dissertation "on the nature and constituents of genuine humour, and on the distinctions of humorous from the witty, the fanciful, the droll, the odd, etc." Donne, Dante, and Milton formed the subject of the tenth; the Arabian Nights Entertainment, and the romantic use of the supernatural in poetry, that of the eleventh. The twelfth was to be on "tales of witches and apparitions, etc.," as distinguished from magic and magicians of Asiatic origin; and the thirteenth, – "on colour, sound, and form in nature, as connected with Poesy – the word 'Poesy' being used as the generic or class term including poetry, music, painting, statuary, and ideal architecture as its species, the reciprocal relations of poetry and philosophy to each other, and of both to religion and the moral sense.'" In the fourteenth and final lecture Coleridge proposed to discuss "the corruptions of the English language since the reign of Queen Anne, in our style of writing prose," and to formulate "a few easy rules for the attainment of a manly, unaffected, and pure language in our genuine mother tongue, whether for the purposes of writing, oratory, or conversation."

These lectures, says Mr. Gillman, were from Coleridge's own account more profitable than any he had before given, though delivered in an unfavourable situation; a lecture-room in Flower de Luce Court, which, however, being near the Temple, secured to him the benefit – if benefit it were – of a considerable number of law students among his auditors. It was the first time that his devoted guardian had ever heard him in public, and he reports the significant fact that though Coleridge lectured from notes, which he had carefully made, "it was obvious that his audience were more delighted when, putting his notes aside, he spoke extempore...." He was brilliant, fluent, and rapid; his words seemed to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy some delightful poem. If he sometimes paused, it was not for the want of words, but that he was seeking their most appropriate or most logical arrangement.

An incident related with extreme, though in a great measure unconscious, drollery by Mr. Gillman in connection with a lecture delivered at this period is to my mind of more assistance than many of the accounts of his "lay sermons" in private circles, in enabling us to comprehend one element of Coleridge's marvellous powers of discourse. Early one morning at Mr. Gillman's he received two letters-one to inform him that he was expected that same evening to deliver a lecture, at the rooms of the London Philosophical Society, to an audience of some four or five hundred persons; the other containing a list of the previous lecturers and the lectures delivered by them during the course of the season. At seven o'clock in the evening Coleridge and Mr. Gillman went up to town to make some inquiries respecting this unexpected application; but, on arriving at the house of the gentleman who had written the letter, they were informed that he was not at home, but would return at eight o'clock – the hour fixed for the commencement of the lecture. They then proceeded to the Society's rooms, where in due time the audience assembled; and the committee having at last entered and taken their places on the seats reserved for them, "Mr. President arose from the centre of the group, and, putting on a 'president's hat,' which so disfigured him that we could scarcely refrain from laughter, addressed the company in these words: This evening Mr. Coleridge will deliver a lecture on 'the Growth of the Individual Mind.'" Coleridge at first "seemed startled," as well he might, and turning round to Mr. Gillman whispered: "A pretty stiff subject they have chosen for me." However, he instantly mounted his standing-place and began without hesitation, previously requesting his friend to observe the effect of his lecture on the audience. It was agreed that, should he appear to fail, Gillman was to "clasp his ancle; but that he was to continue for an hour if the countenances of his auditors indicated satisfaction." Coleridge then began his address in these words: "The lecture I am about to give this evening is purely extempore. Should you find a nominative case looking out for a verb, or a fatherless verb for a nominative case, you must excuse it. It is purely extempore, though I have read and thought much on the subject." At this the company smiled, which seemed to inspire the lecturer with confidence. He plunged at once into his lecture – and most brilliant, eloquent, and logically consecutive it was. The time moved on so swiftly that Mr. Gillman found, on looking at his watch, that an hour and a half had passed away, and, therefore, he continues "waiting only a desirable moment – to use his own playful words – I prepared myself to punctuate his oration. As previously agreed, I pressed his ancle, and thus gave him the hint he had requested; when, bowing graciously, and with a benevolent and smiling countenance, he presently descended. The lecture was quite new to me, and I believe quite new to himself so far as the arrangement of his words was concerned. The floating thoughts were beautifully arranged, and delivered on the spur of the moment. What accident gave rise to the singular request, that he should deliver this lecture impromptu, I never learnt; nor did it signify, as it afforded a happy opportunity to many of witnessing in part the extent of his reading and the extraordinary strength of his powers."

It is tantalising to think that no record of this remarkable performance remains; but, indeed, the same may to some extent be said, and in various degrees, of nearly all the lectures which Coleridge ever delivered. With the exception of seven out of the fifteen of 1811, which were published in 1856 by Mr. Payne Collier from shorthand notes taken at the time, Coleridge's lectures scarcely exist for us otherwise than in the form of rough preparatory notes. A few longer pieces, such as the admirable observations in the second volume of the Literary Remains, on poetry, on the Greek drama, and on the progress of the dramatic art in England, are, with the exception above noticed, almost the only general disquisitions on these subjects which appear to have reached us in a complete state. Of the remaining contents of the volume, including the detailed criticisms now textual, now analytic – of the various plays of Shakespeare, a considerable portion is frankly fragmentary, pretending, indeed, to no other character than that of mere marginalia. This, however, does not destroy – I had almost said it does not even impair – their value. It does but render them all the more typical productions of a writer, whose greatest services to mankind in almost every department of human thought and knowledge with which he concerned himself were much the most often performed in the least methodical way. In reading through these incomparable notes on Shakespeare we soon cease to lament, or even to remember, their unconnected form and often somewhat desultory appearance; if, indeed, we do not see reason to congratulate ourselves that the annotator, unfettered by the restraints which the composition of a systematic treatise would have imposed upon him, is free to range with us at will over many a flower-strewn field, for which otherwise he could not perhaps have afforded to quit the main road of his subject. And this liberty is the more welcome, because Coleridge, primus inter pares as a critic of any order of literature, is in the domain of Shakespearian commentary absolute king. The principles of analysis which he was charged with having borrowed without acknowledgment from Schlegel, with whose Shakespearian theories he was at the time entirely unacquainted, were in fact of his own excogitation. He owed nothing in this matter to any individual German, nor had he anything in common with German Shakespearianism except its profoundly philosophising spirit, which, moreover, was in his case directed and restrained by other qualities, too often wanting in critics of that industrious race; for he possessed a sense of the ridiculous, a feeling for the poetic, a tact, a taste, and a judgment, which would have saved many a worthy but heavy-handed Teutonic professor, who should have been lucky enough to own these gifts, from exposing himself and his science to the satire of the light-minded. Very rarely, indeed, do we find Coleridge indulging plus 'quo his passion for psychological analysis. Deeply as his criticism penetrates, it is yet loyally recognitive of the opacity of milestones. Far as he sees into his subject, we never find him fancying that he sees beyond the point at which the faculty of human vision is exhausted. His conception of the more complex of Shakespeare's personages, his theory of their characters, his reading of their motives, is often subtle, but always sane; his interpretation of the master's own dealings with them, and of the language which he puts into their mouths, is often highly imaginative, but it is rarely fanciful. Take, as an illustration of the first-mentioned merit, the following acute but eminently sensible estimate of the character of Polonius: –

"He is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it was natural for Hamlet – a young man of fire and genius, detesting formality and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation – should express himself satirically, yet this must not be taken exactly as the poet's conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character had arisen from long habits of business; but take his advice to Laertes, and Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he was meant to be represented as a statesman somewhat past his faculties – his recollections of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge of human nature, while what immediately takes place before him and escapes from him is indicative of weakness."

Or this comment on the somewhat faint individualisation of the figure of Lear:

"In Lear old age is itself a character-natural imperfections being increased by life-long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any addition of individualisation would have been unnecessary and painful; for the relation of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of frightful ingratitude, alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes the open and ample playroom of nature's passions."

Or lastly, in illustration of my second point, let us take this note on the remark of the knight that "since my young lady's going into France the fool hath much pined away ": –

"The fool is no comic buffoon – to make the groundlings laugh – no forced condescension of Shakspeare's genius to the taste of his audience. Accordingly the poet prepares us for the introduction, which he never does with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into living connection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful a creation as Caliban, – his wild babblings and inspired idiocy articulate and gauge the horrors of the scene."

The subject is a tempting one to linger over, did not imperative Exigencies of space compel me to pass on from it. There is much – very much – more critical matter in the Literary Remains of which it is hard to forbear quotation; and I may mention in particular the profoundly suggestive remarks on the nature of the humorous, with their accompanying analysis of the genius and artistic method of Sterne. But it is, as has been said, in Shakespearian criticism that Coleridge's unique mastery of all the tools of the critic is most conspicuous, and it is in the brilliant, if unmethodised, pages which I have been discussing that we may most readily find consolation for the too early silencing of his muse. For these consummate criticisms are essentially and above all the criticisms of a poet They are such as could not have been achieved by any man not originally endowed with that divine gift which was fated in this instance to expend itself within so few years. Nothing, indeed, could more strikingly illustrate the commanding advantage possessed by a poet interpreting a poet than is to be found in Coleridge's occasional sarcastic comments on the banalitÈs of our national poet's most prosaic commentator, Warburton – the "thought-swarming, but idealess Warburton," as he once felicitously styles him. The one man seems to read his author's text under the clear, diffused, unwavering radiance emitted from his own poetic imagination; while the criticism of the other resembles a perpetual scratching of damp matches, which ash a momentary light into one corner of the dark assage, and then go out.