Halleck's New English Literature · Chapter 72Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1722-1834
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[Illustration: SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. From a pencil sketch by C.R. Leslie.]
Life.—The troubled career of Coleridge is in striking contrast to the peaceful life of Wordsworth. Coleridge, the thirteenth child of a clergyman, was born in 1772 at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire. Early in his life, the future poet became a confirmed dreamer, refusing to participate in the play common to boys of his age. Before he was five years old, he had read the Arabian Nights. Only a few years later, the boy's appetite for books became so voracious that he devoured an average of two volumes a day.
One evening, when he was about nine years old, he had a violent quarrel with his brother and ran away, sleeping out of doors all night. A cold October rain fell; but he was not found until morning, when he was carried home more dead than alive. "I was certainly injured;" he says of this adventure, "for I was weakly and subject to ague for many years after." Facts like these help to explain why physical pain finally led him to use opium.
After his father's death, young Coleridge became, at the age of ten, a pupil in Christ's Hospital, London, where he remained eight years. During the first half of his stay here, his health was still further injured by continuing as he was in earlier childhood, "a playless daydreamer," and by a habit of almost constant reading. He says that the food "was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to supply them." He writes:—
"Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a continual low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read, read, read—fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a mountain of plumcake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs—hunger and fancy!"
A few months after leaving Christ's Hospital, Coleridge went to Cambridge, but he did not remain to graduate. From this time he seldom completed anything that he undertook. It was characteristic of him, stimulated by the spirit of the French Revolution, to dream of founding with Southey a Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna. In this ideal village across the sea, the dreamers were to work only two hours a day and were to have all goods in common. The demand for poetry was at this time sufficiently great for a bookseller to offer Coleridge, although he was as yet comparatively unknown, thirty guineas for a volume of poems and a guinea and a half for each hundred lines after finishing that volume. With such wealth in view, Coleridge married a Miss Fricker of Bristol, because no single people could join the new ideal commonwealth. Southey married her sister; but the young enthusiasts were forced to abandon their project because they did not have sufficient money to procure passage across the ocean.
The tendency to dream, however, never forsook Coleridge. One of his favorite poems begins with this line:—
"My eyes make pictures when they are shut."[16]
He recognized his disinclination to remain long at work on prearranged lines, when he said, "I think that my soul must have preëxisted in the body of a chamois chaser."
In 1797-1798 Coleridge lived with his young wife at Nether-Stowey in Somerset. Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to a house in the neighborhood in order to be near Coleridge. The two young men and Dorothy Wordsworth seemed to be exactly fitted to stimulate one another. Together they roamed over the Quantock Hills, gazed upon the sea, and planned The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is one of the few things that Coleridge ever finished. In little more than a year he wrote nearly all the the poetry that has made him famous.
Had he, like Keats, died when he was twenty-five, the world would probably be wondering what heights of poetic fame Coleridge might have reached; but he became addicted to the use of opium and passed a wretched existence of thirty-six years longer, partly in the Lake District, but chiefly in a suburb of London, without adding to his poetic fame. During his later years he did hack work for papers, gave occasional lectures, wrote critical and philosophical prose, and became a talker almost as noted as Dr. Johnson. It is only just to Coleridge to recognize the fact that even if he had never written a line of poetry, his prose would entitle him to be ranked among England's greatest critics.
[Illustration: COLERIDGE'S COTTAGE AT NETHER-STOWEY.]
Coleridge's wide reading, continued from boyhood, made his contemporaries feel that he had the best intellectual equipment of any man in England since Francis Bacon's time. Once Coleridge, having forgotten the subject of his lecture, was startled by the announcement that he would speak on a difficult topic, entirely different from the one he had in mind; but he was equal to the emergency and delivered an unusually good address.
Young men used to flock to him in his old age to draw on his copious stores of knowledge and especially to hear him talk about German philosophy. Carlyle visited him for this purpose and speaks of the "glorious, balmy, sunny islets, islets of the blest and the intelligible," which occasionally emerged from the mist of German metaphysics. He spent the last eighteen years of his life in Highgate with his kind friend, Dr. Gillman, who succeeded in regulating and decreasing the amount of opium which Coleridge took. He died there in 1834 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Westminster Abbey does not have the honor of the grave of a single one of the great poets of this romantic age.
Poetry.—The Ancient Mariner (1798) is Coleridge's poetical masterpiece. It is also one of the world's masterpieces. The supernatural sphere into which it introduces the reader is a remarkable creation, with its curse, its polar spirit, the phantom ship, the seraph band, and the magic breeze. The mechanism of the poem is a triumph of romantic genius. The meter, the rhythm, and the music have well-nigh magical effect. Almost every stanza shows not only exquisite harmony, but also the easy mastery of genius in dealing with those weird scenes which romanticists love.
The moral interest of the poem is not inferior to its other charms. The Mariner killed the innocent Albatross, and we listen to the same kind of lesson as Wordsworth teaches in his Hart-Leap Well:—
"The spirit who bideth by himself In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shat him with his bow.'"
The noble conclusion of the poem has for more than a hundred years continued to influence human conduct:—
"He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all."
His next greatest poem is the unfinished Christabel (1816). A lovely maiden falls under the enchantments of a mysterious Lady Geraldine; but the fragment closes while this malevolent influence continues. We miss the interest of a finished story, which draws so many readers to The Ancient Mariner, although Christabel is thickly sown with gems. Lines like these are filled with the airiness of nature:—
"There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky."
In all literature there has been no finer passage written on the wounds caused by broken friendship than the lines in Christabel relating to the estrangement of Roland and Sir Leoline. After reading this poem and Kubla Khan, an unfinished dream fragment of fifty-four lines, we feel that the closing lines of Kubla Khan are peculiarly applicable to Coleridge:—
"For he on honey dew hath fed And drunk the milk of Paradise."
Swinburne says of Christabel and Kubla Khan: "When it has been said that such melodies were never heard, such dreams never dreamed, such speech never spoken, the chief things remain unsaid, unspeakable. There is a charm upon these poems which can only be felt in silent submission and wonder."
General Characteristics of his Poetry.—Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge is not the poet of the earth and the common things of life. He is the poet of air, of the regions beyond the earth, and of dreams. By no poet has the supernatural been invested with more charm.
He has rare feeling for the beautiful, whether in the world of morals; of nature, or of the harmonies of sound. The motherless Christabel in her time of danger dreams a beautiful truth of this divinely governed world:—
"But this she knows, in joys and woes, That saints will aid if men will call: For the blue sky bends over all."
His references to nature are less remarkable for description or photographic details than for suggestiveness and diffused charm, such as we find in these lines:—
"…the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon, A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune."
Wordsworth wrote few poems simpler than The Ancient Mariner. A stanza like this seems almost as simple as breathing:—
"The moving moon went up the sky, And nowhere did abide; Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside."
Prose.—Coleridge's prose, which is almost all critical or philosophical, left its influence on the thought of the nineteenth century. When he was a young man, he went to Germany and studied philosophy with a continued vigor unusual for him. He became an idealist and used the idealistic teachings of the German metaphysicians to combat the utilitarian and sense-bound philosophy of Bentham, Malthus, and Mill. We pass by Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825), the weightiest of his metaphysical productions, to consider those works which possess a more vital interest for the student of literature.
[Illustration: COLERIDGE AS A YOUNG MAN. From a sketch made in Germany.]
His Lectures on Shakespeare, delivered in 1811, contained epoch-making Shakespearean criticism. We are told that every drawing-room in London discussed them. His greatest work on criticism is entitled Biographia Literaria (2 Vols., 1817). There are parts of it which no careful student of the development of modern criticism can afford to leave unread. The central point of this work is the exposition of his theory of the romantic school of poetry. He thus gives his own aim and that of Wordsworth in the composition of the volume of poems, known as Lyrical Ballads:—
"…it was agreed that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us."[17]
Coleridge does not hold Wordsworth's belief that the language of common speech and of poetry should be identical. He shows that Wordsworth does better than follow his own theories. Yet, when he considers both the excellencies and the defects of Wordsworth's verse, Coleridge's verdict of praise is substantially that of the twentieth century. This is an unusual triumph for a contemporary critic, sitting in judgment on an author of an entirely new school and rendering a decision in opposition to that of the majority, who, he says, "have made it a business to attack and ridicule Mr. Wordsworth… His fame belongs to another age and can neither be accelerated nor retarded."[18]