The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated Edition). Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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rolled by him, not indeed unheeded, but observed with sympathy and with regret, when not founded on those permanent principles which were to benefit and give good government to man.
Coleridge, it is well known, was no adept in matters of business, and so little skilled in ephemeral literature as not to be able to profit by any weekly publication. The first edition of The Friend was published weekly, on paper with the government stamp, and that reached, as before related, its twenty-seventh number.
Such a work was not suited to his genius: in fact, no periodical which required rapid writing on slight amusing subjects, with punctuality in publication, which demanded steadiness of health, and the absence of those sedative causes arising, in part, from his benevolent heart and sensitive nature, ever would have suited him. To write like a novelist — to charm ennui — is that which is required of a modern author who expects pecuniary recompense. Although he needed such recompense, the character of his genius unfitted him for the attainment of it; and had he continued the work, the expenditure would have ended in still greater pecuniary loss. One of his last political essays is that taken from the Morning Post, of March 19, 1800, on the character of Pitt. These Essays were soon forgotten, though this, at the time, was much read and admired as part of the history of the man and his political feelings. It was the effect which Buonaparte believed to have been produced by these on the public mind that tempted him to try to incarcerate Coleridge. Some time after, Otto, the French ambassador at our Court, was ready with a bribe, in the hope to obtain from Coleridge a complimentary essay to his sovereign. The offer of the bribe would have deterred him from writing any more on the subject. Had he been willing to sell himself — to write a flattering character of the great hero — to raise that hero in the estimation of Europe, he would have been amply recompensed.
In his ‘Biographia Literaria,’ he says,
“But I do derive a gratification from the knowledge, that my essays have contributed to introduce the practice of placing the questions and events of the day in a moral point of view, in giving dignity to particular measures by tracing their policy or impolicy to permanent principles, and an interest to principles by the application of them to individual measures. In Mr. Burke’s writings, indeed, the germs of almost all political truths may be found. But I dare assume to myself the merit of having first explicitly defined and analysed the nature of Jacobinism; and that in distinguishing the jacobin from the republican, the democrat and the mere demagogue, I both rescued the word from remaining a mere term of abuse, and put on their guard many honest minds, who even in their heat of zeal against jacobinism, admitted or supported principles from which the worst part of that system may be legitimately deduced.”
With this view the following Essays and Observations have been republished here, — as illustrative of his early opinions to be compared with those of his more advanced life, — to shew the injustice of his political opponents, who never seemed to have troubled themselves about principle, — and the necessary growth of intellectual power giving deeper insight, with the additional value of experience and its consequences.
PITT.
From the Morning Post, March 19, 1800.
“Plutarch, in his comparative biography of Rome and Greece, has generally chosen for each pair of lives the two contemporaries who most nearly resembled each other. His work would perhaps have been more interesting, if he had adopted the contrary arrangement, and selected those rather who had attained to the possession of similar influence, or similar fame, by means, actions, and talents the most dissimilar. For power is the sole object of philosophical attention in man, as in inanimate nature; and in the one equally as in the other, we understand it more intimately, the more diverse the circumstances are with which we have observed it coexist. In our days, the two persons who appear to have influenced the interests and actions of men the most deeply, and the most diffusively, are beyond doubt the Chief Consul of France and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and in these two are prerented to us similar situations, with the greatest dissimilitude of characters.
William Pitt was the younger son of Lord Chatham; a fact of no ordinary importance in the solution of his character, of no mean significance in the heraldry of morals and intellect. His father’s rank, fame, political connections, and parental ambition, were his mould; he was cast, rather than grew.
A palpable election, a conscious predestination controlled the free agency, and transfigured the individuality of his mind; and that, which he ‘might have been’, was compered into that, which he ‘was to be’. From his early childhood it was his father’s custom to make him stand up on a chair, and declaim before a large company; by which exercise, practised so frequently, and continued for so many years, he acquired a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words, which must of necessity have diverted his attention from present objects, obscured his impressions, and deadened his genuine feelings. Not the ‘thing’ on which he was speaking, but the praises to be gained, were present to his intuition; hence he associated all the operations of his faculties with words, and his pleasures with the surprise excited by them.
But an inconceivably large portion of human knowledge and human power is involved in the science and management of ‘words’; and an education of words, though it destroys genius, will often create, and always foster, talent. The young Pitt was conspicuous far beyond his fellows, both at school and at college. He was always full grown: he had neither the promise nor the awkwardness of a growing intellect. Vanity, early satiated, formed and elevated itself into a love of power; and in losing this colloquial vanity, he lost one of the prime links that connect the individual with the species, too early for the affections, though not too early for the understanding. At college he was a severe student; his mind was founded and elemented in words and generalities, and these two formed all the superstructure. That revelry and that debauchery, which are so often fatal to the powers of intellect, would probably have been serviceable to him; they would have given him a closer communion with realities, they would have induced a greater presentness to present objects. But Mr. Pitt’s conduct was correct, unimpressibly correct. His after-discipline in the special pleader’s office, and at the bar, carried on the scheme of his education with unbroken uniformity. His first political connections were with the reformers; but those who accuse him of sympathising or coalescing with their intemperate or visionary plans, misunderstand his character, and are ignorant of the historical facts.
Imaginary situations in an imaginary state of things rise up in minds that possess a power and facility in combining images. Mr. Pitt’s ambition was conversant with old situations in the old state of things, which furnish nothing to the imagination, though much to the wishes. In his endeavours to realise his father’s plan of reform, he was probably as sincere as a being, who had derived so little knowledge from actual impressions, could be. But his sincerity had no living root of affection; while it was propped up by his love of praise and immediate power, so long it stood erect and no longer. He became a member of the Parliament, supported the popular opinions, and in a few years, by the influence of the popular party, was placed in the high and awful rank in which he now is. The fortunes of his country, we had almost said the fates of the world, were placed in his wardship — we sink in prostration before the inscrutable dispensations of Providence, when we reflect in whose wardship the fates of the world were placed!
The influencer of his country and of his species was a young man, the creature of another’s predetermination, sheltered and weather-fended from all the elements of experience; a young man, whose feet had never wandered; whose very eye had never turned to the right or to the left; whose whole track had been as curveless as the motion of a fascinated reptile! It was a young man, whose heart was solitary, because he had existed always amid objects of futurity, and whose imagination too was unpopulous, because those objects of hope to which his habitual wishes had transferred, and as it were ‘projected’, his existence, were all familiar and long-established objects! A plant sown and reared in a hothouse, for whom the very air, that surrounded him, had been regulated by the thermometer of previous purpose; to whom the light of nature had penetrated only through glasses and covers; who had had the sun without the breeze; whom no storm had shaken; on whom no rain had pattered; on whom the dews of Heaven had not fallen! A being who had had no feelings connected with man or nature, no spontaneous impulses, no unbiassed and desultory studies, no genuine science, nothing