No More Learning

" After his quarrel in that year he has "an agony of weeping. "
"After fifteen years of such religious, almost superstitious idolatry and
self-sacrifice! " he laments. Now it was during his first, daily
companionship with the Wordsworths that he wrote almost all his greatest
work. "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel" were both written in a kind of
rivalry with Wordsworth; and the "Ode on Dejection" was written after four
months' absence from him, in the first glow and encouragement of a return
to that one inspiring comradeship. Wordsworth was the only poet among his
friends whom he wholly admired, and Wordsworth was more exclusively a poet,
more wholly absorbed in thinking poetry and thinking about poetry, and in a
thoroughly practical way, than almost any poet who has ever lived. It was
not only for his solace in life that Coleridge required sympathy; he needed
the galvanizing of continual intercourse with a poet, and with one to whom
poetry was the only thing of importance. Coleridge, when he was by himself,
was never sure of this; there was his _magnum opus_, the revelation of
all philosophy; and he sometimes has doubts of the worth of his own poetry.
Had Coleridge been able to live uninterruptedly in the company of the
Wordsworths, even with the unsympathetic wife at home, the opium in the
cupboard, and the _magnum opus_ on the desk, I am convinced that we
should have had for our reading to-day all those poems which went down with
him into silence.

What Coleridge lacked was what theologians call a "saving belief" in
Christianity, or else a strenuous intellectual immorality. He imagined
himself to believe in Christianity, but his belief never realized itself in
effective action, either in the mind or in conduct, while it frequently
clogged his energies by weak scruples and restrictions which were but so
many internal irritations. He calls upon the religion which he has never
firmly apprehended to support him under some misfortune of his own making;
it does not support him, but he finds excuses for his weakness in what seem
to him its promises of help. Coleridge was not strong enough to be a
Christian, and he was not strong enough to rely on the impulses of his own
nature, and to turn his failings into a very actual kind of success. When
Blake said, "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise,"
he expressed a profound truth which Nietzsche and others have done little
more than amplify. There is nothing so hopeless as inert or inactive
virtue: it is a form of life grown putrid, and it turns into poisonous,
decaying matter in the soul.
If Coleridge had been more callous towards
what he felt to be his duties, if he had not merely neglected them, as he
did, but justified himself for neglecting them, on any ground of
intellectual or physical necessity, or if he had merely let them slide
without thought or regret, he would have been more complete, more
effectual, as a man, and he might have achieved more finished work as an
artist.

To Coleridge there was as much difficulty in belief as in action, for
belief is itself an action of the mind. He was always anxious to believe
anything that would carry him beyond the limits of time and space, but it
was not often that he could give more than a speculative assent to even the
most improbable of creeds. Always seeking fixity, his mind was too fluid
for any anchor to hold in it. He drifted from speculation to speculation,
often seeming to forget his aim by the way, in almost the collector's
delight over the curiosities he had found in passing. On one page of his
letters he writes earnestly to the atheist Thelwall in defence of
Christianity; on another page we find him saying, "My Spinosism (if
Spinosism it be, and i' faith 'tis very like it)"; and then comes the
solemn assurance: "I am a Berkleyan. " Southey, in his rough,
uncomprehending way, writes: "Hartley was ousted by Berkeley, Berkeley by
Spinoza, and Spinoza by Plato; when last I saw him Jacob Behmen had some
chance of coming in. The truth is that he plays with systems"; so it seemed
to Southey, who could see no better. To Coleridge all systems were of
importance, because in every system there was its own measure of truth. He
was always setting his mind to think about itself, and felt that he worked
both hard and well if he had gained a clearer glimpse into that dark
cavern. "Yet I have not been altogether idle," he writes in December, 180O,
"having in my own conceit gained great light into several parts of the
human mind which have hitherto remained either wholly unexplained or most
falsely explained. " In March, 1801, he declares that he has "completely
extricated the notions of time and space. " "This," he says, "I have
_done_; but I trust that I am about to do more--namely, that I shall
be able to evolve all the five senses, and to state their growth and the
causes of their difference, and in this evolvement to solve the process of
life and consciousness. " He hopes that before his thirtieth year he will
"thoroughly understand the whole of Nature's works. " "My opinion is this,"
he says, defining one part at least of his way of approach to truth, "that
deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and that all
truth is a species of revelation. " On the other hand, he assures us,
speaking of that _magnum opus_ which weighed upon him and supported
him to the end of his life, "the very object throughout from the first page
to the last [is] to reconcile the dictates of common sense with the
conclusions of scientific reasoning.