THE COMPLETE PLAYS OF S. T. COLERIDGE. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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time to my nineteenth year, when I quitted school for Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of poetry and love.”
It has been observed, that about this sixteenth year, he first developed genius, and that during this early period of his life, his mind was incessantly toiling in the pursuit of knowledge. His love of reading seemed to have increased in proportion to his acquirements, which were equally great: his representing himself as an infidel was better perhaps understood by his master, who believed it to be only puerile vanity; and therefore Coleridge considered the flogging he received on this occasion, a just and appropriate punishment; and it was so, for as a boy he had not thought deep enough on an equally important point, viz., what is Fidelity, and how easily, he particularly might mistake the genuineness of sincere ‘fidelity’ for mere outward forms, and the simple observance of customs. Perhaps I might have been disposed to pass over this era with a slighter notice, which he in his simplicity of character thought it right to record. He was always honest in every thing concerning himself, and never spared self-accusation, often, when not understood, to his own injury. He never from his boyhood to his latest life, received kindness without grateful feelings, and, when he believed it coupled with love, without the deepest sense of its value; and if the person possessed sensibility and taste, he repaid it tenfold. This was the experience of nearly twenty years intimate knowledge of his character.
His description of his first love was that of a young poet, recording the first era of the passion, the fleeting dream of his youth — but not that love which he afterwards records in the Geneviève when he says,
”All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of love,
And feed his sacred flame.”
First love, so seldom the mature love of future days, is a flower of premature growth and developement, on which fancy exercises itself in castle-building, and is in unison with that age when youth flings his limbs about in the air, as an exercise to rid himself of the superfluous volition, the accumulation of which gives him a sensation of uneasiness; and these simple and unreserved accounts of Coleridge’s infidelity, and also of his first love-fit, should be put down merely as mental exercises. The lines above quoted, belong, I have said, to the maturer mind; they are thoughts which, unlike the sportive dace on the surface of some calm lake, may rather be compared to the inhabitants of the deep waters beneath.
“How often will the loving heart and imaginative spirit of a young man mistake the projected creature of his own moral yearning, seen in the reflecting surface of the first not repulsive or vulgar female who treats him affectionately, for the realization of his idea. Reversing the order of the Genesis, he believes the female the original, and the outward reality and impressment of the self-constructed ‘image’, of the ideal! He most sincerely supposes himself in love — even in cases where the mistake might have been suspected by one curious fact — that his strongest emotions on love, were when absent from the imagined object. But the time comes, or may come, when the same feeling exists equally in presence and absence, in health and in sickness; when he verily ‘is’ in love. And now he ‘knows’ himself to be so, by the ‘so’ being — he can even prove it to his own mind by his certainty, his ‘intuition’ of the essential difference, as actually as it is uncommunicable, between it and its previous subjective counterfeits, and anticipations. Even so it is with friends. — O it is melancholy to think how the very forms and geniality of my affections, my belief of obligation, consequent gratitude and anxious sense of duty were wasted on the shadows of friendship. With few exceptions, I can almost say, that till I came to H —— , I never ‘found’ what FRIENDS were — and doubtless, in more than one instance, I sacrificed substances who loved me, for semblances who were well pleased that I should love ‘them’, but who never loved nor inwardly respected ought but themselves. The distinction between ‘the’ friends and ‘the’ love is, that the latter we discover by itself to ‘be’, alone itself — for it is in its nature unique and exclusive. (See Improvvisatore in the ‘Amulet’ of 1826 or 7).
“But of the former we discover the genuineness by comparison and experience — the reason is obvious — in the instances in which the person imagined himself to ‘be in love’ with another (I use this phrase ‘be in love with’ for the want of any other; for, in fact, from the absence in our language of any appropriate exponent of the thing meant), it is a delusion in toto. But, in the other instance, the one half (i.e. the person’s own feelings and sense of duty with acts accordant) remains the same (ex. gr. S.T.C. could not feel more deeply, nor from abatement of nervous life by age and sickness so ‘ardently’) he could not feel, think, and act with a ‘more’ entire devotion, to I.G. or to H.G. than he did to W.W. and to R.S., yet the latter were and remain most honourable to his judgment. Their characters, as moral and intellectual beings, give a dignity to his devotion; and the imperishable consciousness of his devout and almost enthusiastic attachment to them, still sanctifies their names, and makes the men holy and revered to him.”
Had Coleridge in early or even in later life paid an insincere, because undeserved, deference to outward show, and to the surface opinions counterfeiting depth, so attractive to the superficial observer — added to which, had he possessed a portion of that self-regarding policy which frequently aids success — he might have been idolized where he was neglected, and rewarded, if I might so profane this word, with high worldly honours in other quarters. But it was otherwise; and could a crown of gold have been offered him for the crown of glory of which he was in earnest search, he would have refused the exchange. The difference between time and eternity had already taken root, and he felt the mighty import of these words too strongly to have lost sight of their practical use; all that his health and powers would allow him to acquire he did acquire, and freely gave all he had for the benefit of others.
He says, “From the exuberance of my animal spirits, when I had burst forth from my misery and moping and the indiscretions resulting from those spirits — ex. gr. swimming over the New River in my clothes, and remaining in them; — full half the time from seventeen to eighteen was passed in the sick-ward of Christ’s Hospital, afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever.” From these indiscretions and their consequences may be dated all his bodily sufferings in future life: in short, rheumatism sadly afflicting him, while the remedies only slightly alleviated his sufferings, without hope of a permanent cure; though confined to his bed, his mind, ever active, still allowed him time to continue the exercise of his intellectual powers, and afforded him leisure for contemplation. Medical men are too often called upon to witness the effects of acute rheumatism in the young subject: in some, the attack is on the heart, and its consequences are immediate; in others, it leaves behind bodily sufferings, which may indeed be palliated, but terminate only in a lingering dissolution.
I have often heard Coleridge express regret that he had not cultivated mathematics, which he believed would have been of important use in life, particularly had he arrived so far as to have mastered the higher calculus; but he was, by an oversight of the mathematical master, stopped on the threshold. When he was commencing Euclid, among some of its first axioms came this:—”A line is length without breadth.” “How can that be?” said the scholar, (Coleridge); “A line must have some breadth, be it ever so thin.” This roused the master’s indignation at the impertinence of the scholar, which was instantly answered by a box on the ear, and the words, hastily uttered, “Go along, you silly fellow;” and here ended his first tuition, or lecture. His second efforts afterwards were not more successful; so that he was destined to remain ignorant of these exercises of the logic of the understanding.[A] Indeed his logical powers were so stupendous, from boyhood, as never to require such drilling. Bowyer, his classical master, was too skilful in the management of youth, and too much interested in the success of his scholars to overlook what was best fitted for them. He exercised their logical powers in acquiring and comparing the different classics. On him, as a teacher, Coleridge loved to dwell; and, with his grateful feelings, ever ready to acknowledge the sense of his obligations to him, particularly those relating to his mental improvement, he has, in his Biog. Lit. vol. i. p. 7, expressed himself in these words:
“He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated