still in his hands, though they trembled on the prize. Next let us, reading of quarrels and misunderstandings between him and his friends, note how, as time effaces the petty circumstance of each, so the essential goodness of the man shines through, more and more clearly; how, in almost any given quarrel, as the years go on, we see that after all Coleridge was in the right. He knew his weakness: but at least it taught him to be tender towards the weaknesses of his fellows, and no man had a better reason to ask of his sufferings But wherefore, wherefore fall on me? And whom I love, I love indeed. As this affectionate disposition made him all but unintelligible to the Southeys and Hazlitts of his time, and lay somewhat outside the range of self-centred Wordsworth, whose fault in friendship was that of the Dutch in matters of commerce1, so the very brilliance of his intellect too often isolated him within the circle of its own light. But on this Shelley has said the last word: You will see Coleridge-he who sits obscure Which, with its own internal lightning blind, A hooded eagle among blinking owls. 1 'But this, my dear sir, is a mistake to which affectionate natures are too liable, though I do not remember to have ever seen it noticed-the mistaking those who are desirous and well pleased to be loved by you, for those who love you.'-Coleridge to Allsop, December 2, 1818. (The reference is to Wordsworth.) In justice and in decency we should strive to imagine Coleridge as he impressed those who loved him and listened to him in his great days of promise; not the Coleridge of later Highgate days, the spent giant with whose portrait Carlyle made brutal play to his own ineffaceable discredit; nor even the Coleridge of 1816, the 'archangel a little damaged' as Lamb, using a friend's privilege, might be allowed to describe him in a letter to Wordsworth, a friend of almost equal standing; not these, but the Coleridge of whom the remembrance was the abiding thought in Lamb's mind and on his lips during the brief while he survived him-Coleridge is dead.' 'His great and dear spirit haunts me....Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see again. I seem to love the house he died at more passionately than when he lived.... What was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel.' If we must dwell at all on the later Coleridge, let it be in the spirit of his own most beautiful epitaph: Stop, Christian passer-by!-Stop, child of God, He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same! None the less, in a world ever loath to admit that omelets involve the breaking of eggs, men will go on surmising what might have been, what full treasures of poetry Coleridge might have left, had he never drunk opium, had he eschewed metaphysics, had he married Dorothy Wordsworth, had he taken a deal of advice his friends gave him in good intent to rescue the Coleridge which God made (with their approval) and the creature marred. "He lived until 1834,' wrote the late Dr Garnett. 'If every year of his life had yielded such a harvest as 1797, he would have produced a greater amount of high poetry than all his contemporaries put together.' Yes, indeed! and Kubla Khan has this in common with a cow's tail-that it only lacks length to reach the moon. And yet, vain though these speculations are, we do wrong to laugh at them, for their protest goes deeper than their reasoning; and while fate tramples on things of beauty the indignant human heart will utter it. Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus, when a poet-and such a poet-is broken in his prime? On the other hand, the question sometimes raisedwhether, in the Quantock time, when the pair learnt to be poets, Coleridge owed more to Wordsworth, or Wordsworth to Coleridge-is, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, puzzling, but not beyond all conjecture: and we raise it again because we think it usually receives the wrong answer. It is usually argued that Coleridge received more than he gave, because he was the more impressionable. We might oppose this with the argument that Coleridge probably gave more than he received, as his presence and talk were the more inspiring. But let us look at a date or two. In June, 1797, Coleridge wrote This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison, and it contains such lines as these: and Yet still the solitary humble-bee Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know No sound is dissonant which tells of Life. Frost at Midnight is dated February, 1798, and it contains the passage beginning Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee.... The exquisite Nightingale belongs to the summer of 1798, and it contains the images of the 'night-wandering man,' of the nightingale That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates With fast thick warble his delicious notes... of the other birds awake in the bushes with Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full... and that most lovely picture of the infant hushing his woe as he gazes up at the moon through the orchard boughs: While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears, Did glitter in the yellow moonbeam! Well!— It is a father's tale. But if that Heaven Should give me life, his childhood shall grow up Now the first thing to be noted of these lines, these images, -or once only, in a couple of lines of The Thorn. When Coleridge wrote these things, Wordsworth was writing We are Seven, Goody Blake, Simon Lee, and the rest. It was only after, though soon after, Coleridge had written them that Wordsworth is seen capable of such lines as The still sad music of humanity... or of The stars of midnight shall be dear This note Coleridge might teach to Wordsworth, as Wordsworth might improve on it and make it his own. But that other note the lyrical note of The Ancient Mariner—was incommunicable. He bequeathed it to none, and before him no poet had approached it; hardly even Shakespeare, on the harp of Ariel. |