by Will Durant
From Kant Coleridge proceeded to Fichte’s exaltation of the self as the only reality directly known, through Hegel’s contrast and union of nature and the self, to Schelling’s subordination of nature to mind as two sides of one reality, in which, however, nature acts unconsciously, while mind may act consciously and reaches its highest expression in the conscious creations of the genius. Coleridge borrowed freely from Schelling, and often neglected to mention his sources;85 but he confessed his general debts, and added: “To me it will be happiness and honor enough, should I succeed in rendering the system itself [of Schelling] intelligible to my countrymen.”86
The last eleven chapters of the Biographia offered a philosophical discussion of literature as a product of imagination. He distinguished between fancy and imagination: fancy is fantasy, as in imagining a mermaid; Imagination (capitalized by Coleridge) is the conscious unification of parts in a new whole, as in the plot of a novel, the organization of a book, the production of a work of art, or the molding of the sciences into a system of philosophy. This conception became a tool for the understanding and criticism of any poem, book, painting, symphony, statue, building: how far does the product have, or lack, structure—the weaving of relevant parts into a consistent and significant whole? In those pages Coleridge offered a philosophical basis for the Romantic movement in literature and art.
He completed his complex Biographia with an acute criticism of Wordsworth’s philosophy and practice of poetry. Is it true that the highest philosophy of life can be found in the ways and thoughts of the simplest men? Is the language of such men the best medium of poetry? Is there no basic difference between poetry and prose? On all these points the poet become critic differed courteously but pointedly and effectively. Then he concluded with a healing homage to the Grasmere sage as the greatest poet since Milton.87
XII. WORDSWORTH: CLIMAX, 1804–14
After some minor wanderings, the Wordsworth ménage moved (1808) from Dove Cottage to a larger house at nearby Allan Bank. There the poet blossomed out as a landscape gardener, surrounding the house with plants and flowers that frolicked in the Grasmere rains. In 1813 the family moved finally to a modest estate at Rydal Mount in Ambleside, a mile south of Grasmere. They were now prosperous, with several servants and some titled friends. In this year Lord Lonsdale arranged Wordsworth’s appointment as distributor of stamps for Westmorland County; this post, retained till 1842, brought the poet an additional two hundred pounds per year. Freed from economic worry, he spent more time in his garden, making it the paradise of rhododendra and other flowering plants which it still is. From his window on the second floor he had an inspiring view of Rydal Water (i.e., Lake) two miles away.
Meanwhile (1805) he completed The Prelude, begun in 1798; “every day,” Dorothy noted, he “brings us in a large treat” of it from his morning walk.88 She and Sara Hutchinson were kept busy taking dictation; Wordsworth had learned to think in blank verse. He subtitled the leisurely epic “The Growth of a Poet’s Mind”; it was intended as a mental autobiography, and as a prelude to The Excursion, which would expound in detail the philosophy reached in that growth. He gave the record an added intimacy by repeatedly addressing his memories to Coleridge. He apologized for the surface egotism of the poem; it was, he confessed, “a thing unprecedented that a man should talk so much about himself.”89 Perhaps for that reason he kept it unpublished during his life.
It is quite tolerable if taken in small doses. Most pleasant are the scenes of his childhood (Books I and II), his solitary woodland rambles, when it seemed to him that in the chatter of the animals, the rustling of the trees, even in the resonance of rocks and hills, he heard the voice of a hidden and multiform god. So, as he sat
Alone upon some jutting eminence,
At the first gleam of dawnlight…
Oft in these moments such a holy calm
Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes
Were utterly forgotten; and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself, a dream,
A prospect in the mind….
I, at this time,
Saw blessings spread around me like a sea…
with bliss ineffable
I felt the sentiment of Being spread
O’er all that moves and all that seemeth still,
O’er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought
And human knowledge, to the human eye
Invisible, yet liveth to the heart;
O’er all that leaps and runs, and shouts and sings,
Or beats the gladsome air; o’er all that glides
Beneath the wave, yea, in the wave itself,
And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not
If high the transport, great the joy I felt,
Communing in this sort through earth and Heaven
With every form of creation, as it looked
Towards the Uncreated…
(There may be a flaw or retrogression here; the last line suggests a division of reality between creation and its creator; we had supposed that in Wordsworth’s pantheistic vision God and nature, as in Spinoza, were one.)
At Cambridge (III) he sometimes joined in student frolics or forays, but he was disturbed by the reckless and undisciplined superficiality of undergraduate life; he took more pleasure in the English classics, or in boating on the Cam. In vacation time (IV) he returned to his early haunts, ate at the family table, nestled in his accustomed bed—
That lowly bed whence I had heard the wind
Roar, and the rain beat hard; where I so oft
Had lain awake on summer nights to watch
The moon in splendor couched among the leaves
Of a tall ash that near our cottage stood;
Had watched her with fixed eyes, while to and fro
In the dark summit of the waving tree
She rocked with every impulse of the breeze.
At Cockermouth he could walk with his old dog, who let him compose verses aloud and did not therefore think him “crazed in brain.”
Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me,… that I should be…
A dedicated spirit,
living for poetry.
Pleasant, too, was that stolen jaunt across the Channel (VI), to feel the happy madness of France in revolution, the exaltation of the Alps, and then, returning, to see the “monstrous ant-hill” called London, with old Burke intoning in Parliament the virtues of tradition, and “with high disdain Exploding upstart Theory”; to watch the crowds frolicking at Vauxhall or worshiping at St. Paul’s; to see or hear the moving multitudes, the varied races, faces, garbs, and speech, the clatter of traffic, the smiles of prostitutes, the vendors’ cries, the flower women’s appeals, the street singer’s hopeful serenade, the artist chalking pictures on the flagstones, “the antic pair of monkeys on a camel’s back”—all this the poet felt as keenly as the woods, but he liked them not, and fled (VIII) to calmer scenes where love of allembracing nature could teach him to understand and forgive.
Then again to France (IX), where old despotism and ancient misery seemed to have justified and ennobled revolt, and even a Briton could join in its wild ecstasy (XI).
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth
The beauty wore of promise…
What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of?
From that high rapture France descended to crime, and Wordsworth to prose:
But now, become oppressors in their turn,
Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defence
For one of conquest, losing sight of all
Which they had struggled for…
Slowly, hesitantly, the poet drew his Prelude to a close (XIV), calling upon his friend to return (from Malta) and join in the effort to win mankind back from war and revolution to love of nature and mankind. He was discontent with his poem,90 knowing that ther
e were spacious deserts around the oases. He had confessedly seen little difference between prose and poetry, and he too often mingled them in the steady, dulling march of his blank verse. He had made “emotion remembered in tranquillity” the essence of poetry, but an emotion tranquilized through fourteen cantos becomes an irresistible lullaby. Generally, the character of an epic is a great or noble action told; and thought is too private to be epical. Even so, The Prelude leaves the resolute reader with a sense of healthy acceptance surviving reality. Wordsworth, sometimes as childish as a nursery rhyme, cleanses us with the freshness of woods and fields, and bids us, like the imperturbable hills, bear the storm silently, and endure.
Before leaving for Germany in 1798 Wordsworth had begun The Recluse, on the theory that only a man who had known life and had then withdrawn from it could judge it fairly. Coleridge urged him to develop this into a full and final statement of his philosophy. More specifically Coleridge suggested: “I wish you would write a poem in blank verse, addressed to those who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes for the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness.”91 They agreed that the summit of literature would be a happy marriage of philosophy and poetry.
On second thought Wordsworth felt that he was not ready to meet this challenge. He had made considerable progress with The Prelude, which proposed to be a history of his mental development; how could he, before completing this, write an exposition of his views? He put The Recluse aside, and pursued The Prelude to its apparent end. Then he found his energy and confidence waning, and the passage of the once exuberant Coleridge out of his life had removed the living inspiration that once had spurred him on. In this condition of depleted vigor and prosperous ease he wrote The Excursion.
It begins well, with a description—apparently taken from the abandoned Recluse—of the ruined cottage where lives the “Wanderer.” This replica of Wordsworth leads the excursionist to the Solitary, who tells how he lost his religious faith, became sated with civilization, and retired to the peace of the mountains. The Wanderer offers religion as the only cure for despair; knowledge is good, but it increases our power rather than our happiness. Then he leads on to the Pastor, who submits that the simple faith and family unity of his peasant flock are wiser than the attempt of the philosopher to replace the wisdom of the ages with the webs of intellectual argument. The Wanderer deplores the artificial life of the city, and the evils of the Industrial Revolution; he advocates universal education, and prophesies its “glorious effects.” The Pastor, however, having the last word, entones a paean to a personal God.
The Excursion, being a Portion of the Recluse, a Poem, was published in 1814 at two guineas a copy. (Its supposed preface, The Prelude, was not printed till 1850.) Wordsworth asked his neighbors, the Clarksons, to help its sale among their Quaker friends, “who are wealthy and fond of instructive books”; he gave a copy to the novelist Charles Lloyd on the understanding that it should not be lent to anyone who could afford to buy it; and he refused to lend it to a rich widow, who considered two guineas as rather high a price for “part of a work.”92 Eight months after publication only three hundred copies had been sold.
The reviews were mixed. Lord Jeffrey, in the November, 1814, issue of the Edinburgh Review, condemned the poem with an ominous beginning: “This will never do.” Hazlitt, after praising “delightful passages, both of natural description and of inspired reflection,” found the poem as a whole “long and labored,” repeating “the same conclusions till they become flat and insipid.”93 And Coleridge, who had called for a masterpiece, saw in The Excursion “prolixity, repetition, and an eddying, instead of progression, of thought.”94 But in his later Table Talk Coleridge praised Books I and II (“The Deserted Cottage”) as “one of the most beautiful poems in the language.”95 Shelley disliked The Excursion as marking Wordsworth’s surrender of a naturalistic pantheism to a more orthodox conception of God; but Keats found many inspirations in the poem, and ranked Wordsworth, all in all, above Byron.96 Time has agreed with Keats.
XIII. THE SAGE OF HIGHGATE: 1816–34
In April, 1816, Coleridge, nearing physical and mental collapse at the age of forty-three, was received as a patient by Dr. James Gillman, of Highgate, London. Coleridge was then consuming a pint of laudanum per day. Southey, about this time, described him as “half as big as the house”; his frame loose and bent; his face pale, round, and flabby; his breath short; his hands so shaky that he could hardly bring a glass to his lips.97 He had some loyal friends, like Lamb, De Quincey, and Crabb Robinson, but he rarely saw his wife or children, lived mostly on pensions or gifts, and was losing his last hold on life. Perhaps the young physician had heard that Byron and Walter Scott had ranked this broken man as England’s greatest man of letters;98 in any case he saw that Coleridge could be saved only by constant and professional surveillance and care. With the consent of his wife, Dr. Gillman took Coleridge into his home, fed him, treated him, comforted and cured him, and kept him till death.
The recovery of Coleridge’s mind was astonishing. The doctor so marveled at the extent of his patient’s knowledge, the wealth of his ideas, and the brilliance of his conversation that he opened his doors to a growing circle of old and young men to whom the “damaged archangel” talked at random, seldom with full clarity or logical order, but with unfailing wit, zest, and effect. Fragments of these conversations, preserved as Table Talk, still strike a spark: “Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist.”
“Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not we are beasts; the first and wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts.”99
He was not content to be among the first and wisest of beasts. As he neared death he sought comfort in religion, and, as if to make sure of his bargain, embraced it in its most orthodox available form, the Church of England, as the pillar of English stability and morality; and hopefully he wished it everlasting life: Esto perpetua! His essay On the Constitution of the Church and the State (1830) presented them as two mutually necessary forms of national unity, each protecting and helping the other.100 He (and Wordsworth) opposed the political emancipation of British Catholics, on the ground that the growth of “popery” would endanger the state by developing a conflict of loyalties between patriotism and religion.
He took full advantage of the conservatism natural to old age. In 1818 he had supported Robert Owen and Sir Robert Peel in their campaigns for restrictions on child labor, but in 1831 he opposed the Reform Bill that was to break the hold of the Tories upon Parliament. He advised against the abolition of West Indian slavery.101 He who, more than most philosophers, had studied and supported science, rejected the idea of evolution, preferring “the history I find in my Bible.”102 In the end his capacious and far-reaching intellect yielded to ailments of body and will, and he fell into a timid fear of every innovation in politics or belief.
He lacked the steady patience to achieve constructive unity in his work. In the Biographia Literaria (1817), he had announced his intention to write an opus magnum—the Logosophia —that would be the sum, summit, and reconciliation of science, philosophy, and religion; but all that flesh and soul would let him contribute to that enterprise was a medley of fragments labored, chaotic, and obscure. To such a pass had come the mind that De Quincey had described as “the most capacious,… subtlest, and most comprehensive… that has yet existed among men.”103
In July, 1834, Coleridge began his adieus to life. “I am dying, but without expectation of a speedy release…. Hooker wished to live to finish his Ecclesiastical Polity,—so I own I wish life and strength had been spared me to complete my Philosophy. For, as God hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and design in my heart were to exalt the glory of his name; and, which is the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind. But visum aliter Deo [God saw otherwise], and his will be done.”104 Coleridge died on July 25, 1834, aged sixty
-two. Wordsworth was shaken by the passing of “the most wonderful man he had ever known”; and Lamb, best friend of all, said, “His great and dear spirit haunts me.”105
XIV. ON THE FRINGE
Charles Lamb (1775–1834) was one of several keen spirits whose principal publications place them after 1815, but who in our period entered intimately into the lives of the Lake Poets. Lamb was the closest of Coleridge’s London friends. They had known each other as schoolboys at Christ’s Hospital. There Lamb’s incurable stammering kept him from scholastic honors. He left school at fourteen to support himself; at seventeen he became an accountant in the East India House; and he remained there until he was retired on a pension at the age of fifty.
There was a strain of insanity in his heritage; he himself spent six weeks in an asylum (1795–96); and in 1796 his sister Mary Ann (1764–1847), in an insane mania, killed their mother. For several periods Mary had been confined, but for the most part Lamb, renouncing marriage, had her live with him till his death. She recovered sufficiently to collaborate with him in writing Tales from Shakespeare (1807). His own unique product was the Essays of Elia (1820–25), whose genial style, modesty, and art revealed one of the most lovable characters in that not too gracious age.
In June, 1797, still shaken by the tragedy of the previous year, he accepted an invitation from Coleridge to visit him at Nether Stowey. As a stammerer he hardly dared talk when he found himself before two poets—Wordsworth and Coleridge—in rival volubility. Five years later he and his sister visited the Coleridge family in Greta Hall. “He received us with all the hospitality in the world.”106 Though he himself remained a skeptic to the end, Lamb never allowed Coleridge’s theological diversions to interfere with an affection and an admiration that withstood every discouragement.
