S. L. Bensusan

“ If the valley of the Otter was not able to impress the early years of the poet, it is hardly surprising that neither Somersetshire nor Westmorland should succeed where Devonshire failed. The failure adds to the clear proof that Coleridge was at heart a philosopher, a student of life, faith, reason, and the immortality of the soul, but withal a man who was seldom or never on intimate terms with his immediate surroundings. ”

“ An early legacy, a small patrimony that arrived late, but not too late, appointment to one or two posts hardly to be regarded as anything other than sinecures, a government pension in his closing years, a splendid constitution, a fortunate marriage, colossal strength of purpose: all these gifts smoothed the rugged road of the greater man; to Coleridge the fates were adverse. He had at best a great but ill-balanced mind, to which philosophy made the first appeal. A shrewd practical man with half his attainments could have turned them to better advantage. ”

“ History has turned a far more careful eye to the blemishes in a strange character than to the virtues that must have been present by their side. The worst foes of Coleridge have never denied the extraordinary influence he spread around him, or doubted that it was for good. They bear witness to the intense theoretical devotion to unattainable ideals, the respect for virtue, even in hours of backsliding, the belief in his own ability ultimately to overcome the faults that beset him and to rebuild the shattered fabric of personal honour. ”

“ There is a passage in Lucretius, in which the poet speaks of the wealthy senator, no longer able to endure the turmoil of the capital, galloping away as hard as his chariot can carry him to his country villa, only to find that change cannot cure his unrest, and to come thundering back to Rome. It is of himself that he is tired, and from himself there is no escape. So it has been with men of uneven mind for all time, so it was with Coleridge, so it will ever be with those to whom the secret of rational living is "a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed." ”

“ The years so briefly summarised here show Coleridge at his best as a poet and at his worst as a man, sometimes kindled by the fire of genius, sometimes so degraded that he is dangerously near the ranks of the begging-letter writer. He is only saved from the contempt of his critics because he was at least sincere in his belief that the lack of pence alone stood between him and the mental tranquillity that would enable him to enrich the world with a masterpiece. ”

“ As time wore on, the realities of life divorced the poet's muse, now quite a minor quantity, from its union with classicism, to the great advantage of his work, and though he cannot be said to have fulfilled the promise of his best years, he wrote much that his admirers will not willingly let die. One would perhaps hesitate to call it poetry—the work he wrote between his twenty-third and twenty-seventh years was poetry in the fullest sense of the term—it is rather philosophy expressed in set forms with a measure of charm that can never be absent long from any utterance of Coleridge. ”

“ Although the warmth of attachment between Wordsworth and Coleridge had undoubtedly suffered since the days when the former wrote his ill-advised letter to Basil Montague, nearly twenty years before, the admiration of the one poet for the other was quite unfeigned. Wordsworth's delight in a great intellect had never faltered; he could always distinguish between a man's gifts and weaknesses, admiring the one while he condemned or regretted the other. ”

“ The newest thought could carry him away, he cared not whither. Like many another brilliant man, Coleridge needed direction and discipline long after the time when the convention of the world seeks to enforce either. We cannot see whence the force was to come, but we must realise how greatly it was needed. Coleridge was too clever for the ranks to which he was accredited; his gifts were of the uneasy kind that can find no rest. Some men of similar temperament can settle down after a brief struggle; they bridle themselves, hide their light, bow to the world above them, and prosper. ”

“ We would hesitate to-day to condemn him with the severity and fluency shown by his contemporaries—by Thomas de Quincey and William Hazlitt, for example. Perhaps the first thought to which a study of his life and work gives birth is the nearest to the truth, the thought that he was singularly unfitted to cope with life as he found it, that he was essentially a man of thought rather than of action. He was never strong enough to bear the thousand ills that writing man is heir to. ”

“ It is unfortunate, perhaps, that his most popular work as a poet has kept him from receiving due recognition first as a critic and then as a philosopher, and that his work as a philosopher has been clouded by his unfortunate inability to rule his own life on philosophic lines. ”

“ Among the great writers whose activity is associated with the closing years of the eighteenth and the opening of the nineteenth centuries, are several who claim more respect than popularity. If they were poets, their works find a place in a thousand libraries, but the dust gathers upon covers long unopened, and only the stray enthusiast removes it. Southey, Cowper, and Coleridge, for example, are authors of well-nigh universal acceptance, but who, outside the ranks of professed students of poetry, could claim an intimate acquaintance with their work? ”

“ His table-talk was fuller than most men's laboured essays, his lectures, even if delivered extempore, could charm an audience of scholars, and his published work, whether in prose or verse, is an enduring monument, not likely to be hard worn by the attentions of the multitude. Had his lines been cast in more pleasant places, had he married a woman strong enough to direct and guide him, had he been spared his pains and the unfortunate remedy by which he sought to lull them, there seems to be no height to which he might not have risen, no goal to which he might not have attained. ”

“ No man stands so much alone as he who, having no home-life to which he can turn for comfort, is unable to find any abiding happiness in contemplation of the life the seasons show. To make matters worse, we can see Coleridge was profoundly conscious that such a healing power existed. Surely nobody who was in Wordsworth's company, or even in Robert Southey's, could have failed to realise this. ”

“ Whatever the cause, the result was eminently satisfactory; the last years saw the poet baffled and beaten by the world, but for once strong in failure, full of a conviction that there lay beyond the grave that which should atone for unsuccess. There is more dignity and less querulousness in the years that followed publication of Aids to Reflection than in almost any of those that had passed since Coleridge left Cambridge; and for this spell of comparative tranquillity his latter-day admirers must needs be grateful. ”

“ Look upon one side of his life and accomplishment and you are lost in wonder and admiration, look upon the other and there is food for little but pity and regret. Modern teaching has revealed the narrowness of the boundary between genius and insanity, and, in the light of this knowledge, we see that Coleridge was neither wholly a genius nor wholly sane, though he approached either condition very nearly at different periods of his troubled life. ”

“ Soon the "penniless and friendless" man was to find another supporter, Thomas de Quincey, who, after meeting the poet and spending one evening in his company, supplied him anonymously, through Cottle the publisher, with a loan of three hundred pounds, without any conditions, in order that his financial troubles might be ended.
Here we have another proof of the extraordinary personal magnetism of Coleridge. However badly he might behave, his friends forgave him and continued to love him, strangers helped to smooth the rough road over which his follies drew him—all in vain. ”

“ The "Songs of the Pixies," the Sonnet to the River Otter, the lines "To a Beautiful Spring in a Village," [Pg 65] and "On an Autumnal Evening" exhibit the mood of a young man to whom Nature is beginning to reveal some of the secrets of her immortal charm, but there are none of the distinctive thoughts that a Keats or a Wordsworth would have given us under the stress of similar emotion, so we may presume that neither half-remembered Ottery St. Mary, nor Christ's Hospital, nor even Jesus College, Cambridge, had served to string the poet's lyre. ”

“ The charge against Coleridge is one that should not have been made, even though it may be sustained to the complete satisfaction of those who like to belittle great minds.
"I regard truth as a Divine ventriloquist, and care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words be audible and intelligible." In this passage Coleridge summed up an attitude that will satisfy all who can take a sane and dispassionate view of his life, and weigh its accomplishments and vicissitudes. Certain thoughts are the children of every era, and will reach more than one thinker at a time ”

“ In the same way, for the sake of justice, let us admit that the man who was always ready to undertake work that he could never be prevailed upon to begin, who was erratic, intemperate, and wholly unreliable, must have been a sore trouble to any woman who could not appreciate his gifts, and could discern nothing in the future save an increasing family and a diminishing income. ”

“ Whether as poet, critic, or metaphysician, Coleridge was a progressive thinker, and broke away slowly but deliberately from the fetters of form that cripple his earliest utterances; nor were the flights of his thought less remarkable than his experiments in method.
Whatever his acts, his intentions were of the highest. He sought to do good, and he placed at the service of his countrymen the best that he had to offer. One can only speculate upon the extent of the loss that his chronic ill-health inflicted upon his own and [Pg 90] succeeding generations. ”

“ Other men, with a tithe of his talent and the full capacity for living a well-ordered life, could earn a comfortable competence, acquire honour and command respect, while Coleridge, who was in so many respects their master, drifted across the wide waters of life, a ship without a rudder. We need not criticise, we can better pity a man who, greatly gifted, could not raise his head among his contemporaries. Had some stern disciplinarian stood behind him at Cambridge he might have achieved distinction ”

“ That farming demands a strenuous apprenticeship and sound judgment, if it is not to fail altogether to yield any harvest save debt, that appreciation of country life does not carry knowledge with it, these are truths which the majority of men of letters decline to admit.
A second edition of his poems, with additions by Charles Lloyd as well as Lamb, produced twenty guineas from Cottle, and the poet settled to learn the rudiments of agriculture from Thomas Poole, and to train Charles Lloyd in the way he should go. ”