with all his faults as a truly great thinker, who raised the mind of the time and gave it new and wide impulses. This judgment we feel sure will yet verify itself. If English literature ever regains the higher tone of our earlier national life – the tone of Hooker and Milton and Jeremy Taylor – Coleridge will be again acknowledged, in Julius Hare's words, as “a true sovereign of English thought.” He will take rank in the same line of spiritual genius. He has the same elevation of feeling, the same profound grasp of moral and spiritual ideas, the same wide range of vision. He has, in short, the same love of wisdom, the same insight, the same largeness – never despising nature or art, or literature, for the sake of religion, still less ever despising religion for the sake of culture. In reading over Coleridge's prose works again, returning to them after a long past familiarity, I am particularly struck by their massive and large intellectuality, akin to our older Elizabethan literature. There is everywhere the play of great power – of imagination as well as reason – of spiritual perception as well as logical subtlety.
To speak of Coleridge in this manner as a great spiritual power, an eminently healthy writer in the higher regions of thought, may seem absurd to some who think mainly of his life, and of the fatal failure which characterised it. It is the shadow of this failure of manliness in his conduct, as in that of his life-long friend, Charles Lamb, which no doubt prompted the great genius who carried manliness, if little sweetness, from his Annandale home, to paint both the one and the other in such darkened colors. We have not a word to say on behalf of the failings of either. They were deplorable and unworthy; but it is the fact, notwithstanding, that the mind of both retained a serenity and a certain touch of respectfulness which are lacking in their great Scottish contemporary. They were both finer-edged than Carlyle. They inherited a more delicate and polite personal culture; and delicacy can never be far distant from true manliness. Neither of them could have written of the treasures of old religion as Carlyle did in his Life of Sterling. Whether they accepted for themselves those treasures or not, they would have spared the tender faith of others and respected an ancient ideal. And this is the higher attitude. Nothing which has ever deeply interested humanity or profoundly moved it, is treated with contempt by a good and wise man. It may call for and deserve rejection, but never insult. Unhappily this attitude of mind, reserved, as well as critical, reverent as well as bold, has been conspicuously absent in some of the most powerful and best known writers of our era.
There is a striking contrast between the career of Coleridge and that of his friend Wordsworth. Fellows in the opening of their poetic course, they soon diverged widely. With a true instinct, Wordsworth devoted himself, in quietness and seclusion, to the cultivation of his poetic faculty. He left aside the world of politics and of religious thought, strongly moved as he had been by the interests of both. It may be said that Wordsworth continued a religious thinker as well as poet all his life. And to some extent this is true. The “Wanderer” is a preacher and not only a singer. He goes to the heart of religion, and lays again its foundations in the natural instincts of man. But while Wordsworth's poetry was instinct with a new life of religious feeling, and may be said to have given a new radiancy to its central principles,2 it did not initiate any movement in Christian thought. In religious opinion Wordsworth soon fell back upon, if he ever consciously departed from, the old line of Anglican traditions. The vague Pantheism of the Excursion implies rather a lack of distinctive dogma than any fresh insight into religious problems or capacity of co-ordinating them in a new manner. And so soon as definite religious conceptions came to the poet, the Church in her customary theology became a satisfactory refuge. The Ecclesiastical Sonnets mark this definite stage in his spiritual development. Wordsworth did for the religious thought of his time something more and better perhaps than giving it any definite impulse. While leaving it in the old channels, he gave it a richer and deeper volume. He showed with what vital affinity religion cleaves to humanity, in all its true and simple phases, when uncontaminated by conceit or frivolity. Nature and man alike were to him essentially religious, or only conceivable as the outcome of a Spirit of life, “the Soul of all the worlds.”3 Wordsworth, in short, remained as he began, a poet of a deeply religious spirit. But he did not enter the domain of theological speculation or attempt to give any new direction to it.
In all this Coleridge is his counterpart. He may be said to have abandoned poetry just when Wordsworth in his retirement at Grasmere (1799) was consecrating his life to it. Whether it be true, according to De Quincey, that Coleridge's poetical power was killed by the habit of opium-eating, it is certainly true that the harp of Quantock4 was never again struck save for a brief moment. The poet Coleridge passed into the lecturer and the poetical and literary critic, and then, during the final period of his life, from 1816 to 1834, into the philosopher and theologian. It is to this latter period of his life in the main that his higher prose writings belong, and especially the well-known Aids to Reflection which – disparaged as it is by Mr. Traill – may be said to contain, as his disciples have always held to contain, all the finer substance of his spiritual thought. It is true that it is defective as a literary composition. We are even disposed to allow that it has “less charm of thought, less beauty of style,” and in some respects even less “power of effective statement,”5 than is common with Coleridge; but withal it is his highest work. These very defects only serve to bring out the more its strong points, when we consider the wonderful hold the book has taken of many minds, and how it has been the subject of elaborate commentary.6 It is a book, we may at the same time say, which none but a thinker on divine things will ever like. All such thinkers have prized it greatly. To many such it has given a new force of religious insight; for its time, beyond all doubt, it created a real epoch in Christian thought. It had life in it; and the living seed, scattered and desultory as it was, brought forth fruit in many minds.
What, then, were its main contributions to religious thought, and in what respects generally is Coleridge to be reckoned a spiritual power?
(1.) First, and chiefly, in the Aids to Reflection, Coleridge may be said to have transformed and renewed the current ideas of his time about religion. He was, we know, a man of many ambitions never realised; but of all his ambitions, the most persistent was that of laying anew the foundations of spiritual philosophy. This was “the great work” to which he frequently alluded as having given “the preparation of more than twenty years of his life.”7 Like other great tasks projected by him, it was very imperfectly accomplished; and there will always be those in consequence who fail to understand his influence as a leader of thought. We are certainly not bound to take Coleridge at his own value, nor to attach the same importance as he did to some of his speculations. No one, indeed, knew better than Coleridge himself that there was nothing new in his Platonic Realism. It was merely a restoration of the old religious metaphysic which had preceded “the mechanical systems,” that became dominant in the reign of Charles the Second. He himself constantly claims to do nothing more than re-assert the principles of Hooker, of Henry More, of John Smith, and Leighton, all of whom he speaks of as “Platonizing divines!” But the religious teaching of Coleridge came upon his generation as a new breath, not merely or mainly because he revived these ancient principles, but because he vitalised anew their application to Christianity, so as to transform it from a mere creed, or collection of articles, into a living mode of thought, embracing all human activity. Coleridge was no mere metaphysician. He was a great interpreter of spiritual facts – a student of spiritual life, quickened by a peculiarly vivid and painful experience; and he saw in Christianity, rightly conceived, at once the true explanation of the facts of our spiritual being and the true remedy for their disorder. He brought human nature, not merely on one side, but all sides, once more near to Christianity, so as to find in it not merely a means of salvation in any limited evangelical sense, but the highest Truth and Health – a perfect philosophy. His main power lies in this subjective direction, just as here it was that his age was most needing stimulus and guidance.
The Evangelical School, with all its merits, had conceived of Christianity rather as something superadded the highest life of humanity than as the
Admiration, Hope, and Love.
Admiration, Hope, and Love.
Not only the
It is strange, however, to find Mr. Traill commending Coleridge's very last volume (1830)
By Dr. James Marsh, an American divine, whose preliminary essay is prefaced to the fifth English edition, and by Mr. Green in his
