LITTELL'S LIVING AGE. NO. 1128.-13 JANUARY, 1866. From the North British Review. FIRST PART. -- saw Physical Science attain its highest triumph in the Newtonian discoveries; History studied after a certain manner by votaries more numerous than ever before; and the new science of Political Economy MORE than enough has perhaps been said created. But while these fields were in disparagement of the eighteenth century. thronged with busy inquirers, and though It is not therefore to speak more evil of that Natural Theology was much argued and much-abused time, but merely to note an discussed, yet from the spiritual side of all obvious fact, if we say that its main ten- questions, from the deep things of the soul, dency was towards the outward and the from men's living relations to the eternal finite. Just freed from the last ties of world, educated thought seemed to turn feudalism, escaped too from long religious instinctively away. The guilds of the conflicts which had resulted in war and learned, as by tacit consent, either eschewed revolution, the feelings of the British people these subjects altogether, or, if they were took a new direction: the nation's energies constrained to enter on them, they had laid were wholly turned to the pacific working down for themselves certain conventional out of its material and industrial resources. limits, beyond which they did not venture. Let us leave those deep, interminable ques- On the other side of these lay mystery, entions, which lead only to confusion, and let thusiasm, fanaticism spectres abhorred of us stick to plain, obvious facts, which can- the wise and prudent. How entirely the not mislead, and which yield such comfort- mechanical philosophy had saturated the able results. This was the genius and tem- age, may be seen from the fact that Wesley, per of the generation that followed the the leader of the great spiritual counterglorious Revolution. Nor was there want-, movement of last century, the preacher of ing a man to give definite shape and expression to this tendency of the national mind. Locke, a shrewd and practical man, who knew the world, furnished his countrymen with a way of thinking singularly in keeping with their then temper; a philosophy which, discarding abstruse ideas, fashioned thought mainly out of the senses; an ethics founded on the selfish instincts of pleasure and pain; and a political theory which, instead of the theocratic dreams of the Puritans, or the divine right of the High-Churchmen, or the historic traditions of feudalism, grounded government on the more prosaic but not less unreal phantasy these are the prevailing characteristics. of an original contract. This whole philos- Doubtless the higher truth was not even ophy, however inconsistent with what is then left without its witnesses, Butler and noblest in British history, was so congenial Berkeley in speculation, Burns and Cowper a growth of the British soil, that no other in poetry, Burke in political philosophy, has ever struck so deep a root, or spread so these were either the criers in the wilderwide and enduring an influence. But this ness against the idols of their times, or the process, introduced by Locke for the pur- prophets of the new truth that was being pose of moderating the pretensions of hu- born. Men's thoughts cannot deal earnestman thought, came to be gloried in by his ly with many things at once; and each age followers as its highest achievement. The has its own work assigned it; and the work half century after Locke was no doubt full of the eighteenth century was mainly one of mental activity in certain directions. It of the utilitarian understanding, one of ac divine realities to a generation fast bound in sense, yet in the opening of his sermon on faith indorses the sensational theory, and declares that to man in his natural condition sense is the only inlet of knowledge. The same spirit which pervaded the philosophy and theology of that era is apparent not less in its poetry and literature. Limitation of range, with a certain perfectness of form, contentment with the surface-view of things, absence of high imagination, repression of the deeper feelings, man looked at mainly on his conventional side, careful descriptions of manners, but no open vision, THIRD SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXII. 1446. tive but narrow intelligence, divorced from | fore our readers some account of the friend imagination, from deep feeling, from rever- of Wordsworth, whom his name naturally ence, from spiritual insight. And when recalls, a man not less original nor remarkthis one-sided work was done, the result able than he Samuel Taylor Coleridge. was isolation, individualism, self-will; the And yet, though the two were friends, and universal in thought lost sight of, the uni- shared together many mental sympathies, versal in ethics denied; everywhere, in between the lives and characters of the speculation as in practice, the private will philosophic poet and the poetic philosopher dominant, the Universal Will forgotten. there was more of contrast than of likeness. To exult over the ignorant past, to glory in The one, robust and whole in body as in the wonderful present, to have got rid of mind, resolute in will, and single in purpose, all prejudices, to have no strong beliefs ex- knowing little of books and of other men's cept in material progress, to be tolerant of thoughts, and caring less for them, set himall things but fanaticism, this was its highest self, with his own unaided resources, to boast. And though this self-complacent work out the great original vein of poetry wisdom received some rude shocks in the that was within him, and stopped not, nor crash of revolution with which its peculiar turned aside, till he had fulfilled his task, era closed, and though the soul and spirit had enriched English literature with a new that are in man, long unheeded, then once poetry of the deepest and purest ore, and more awoke and made themselves heard, thereby made the world for ever his debtor. that one-sided and soulless intelligence, if The other, master of an ampler and more weakened, was not destroyed. It was car- varied, though not richer field, of quicker ried over into this century in the brisk but sympathies, less self-sustained, but touching barren criticism of the early Edinburgh Re- life and thought at more numerous points, view. And at this very moment there are eager to know all that other men had symptoms enough on every side that the thought and known, and working as well same spirit, after having received a tempo- on a basis of wide erudition as on his own rary repulse, is again more than usually internal resources, but with a body that did alive. him grievous wrong, and frustrated, not obeyed, his better aspirations, and a will faltering and irresolute to follow out the behests of his surpassing intellect, he but drove in a shaft here and there into the vast mine of thought that was in him, and died leaving samples rather of what he might have done, than a full and rounded achievement, — yet samples so rich, sổ varied, so suggestive, that to thousands they have been the quickeners of new intellectual life, and that to this day they stand unequalled by anything his country has since produced. In one point, however, the friends are alike. They both turned aside from professional aims, devoted themselves to pure thought, set themselves to counterwork the mechanical and utilitarian bias of their time, and became the great spiritualizers of the thought of their countrymen, the fountain-heads from which has flowed most of what is high and unworldly and elevating in the thinking and speculation of the succeeding age. The same manner of thought which we have attempted to describe as it existed in our own country, dominated in others during the same period. So well is it known in Germany that they have a name for it, which we want. They call it by a term which means the Illumination or Enlightenment, and they have marked the notes by which it is known. Some who are deep in German lore tell us that Europe has produced but one power really counteractive of this Illumination, or tyranny of the mere understanding, and that is, the philosophy of Kant and Hegel. And they affect no small scorn for any attempt at reaction, which has originated elsewhere. Nevertheless, at the turn of the century, there did arise nearer home men who felt the defect in the thought of the preceding age, and did much to supply it; who strove to base philosophy on principles of universal reason; and who, into thought and sentiment dwarfed and starved by the effects of Enlightenment, poured the inspiration of soul and spirit. The men who mainly did this in England were Wordsworth and Coleridge. These are the native champions of spiritual truth against the mechanical philosophy of the Illumination. Of the former of the two we took occasion to speak not long since in this Review. In something of the same way we propose to place now be It is indeed strange, that of Coleridge's philosophy, once so much talked of, and really so important in its influence, no comprehensive account has been ever attempted. The only attempt in this direction that we know of, is that made six years after Coleridge's death, and now more than twenty years ago, by one who has since become the chief expounder of that philosophy which Coleridge laboured all his life to refute. In his well-known essay, Mr. Mill, while fully acknowledging that no other Englishman, save only his own teacher Bentham, had left so deep an impress on his age, yet turns aside from making a full survey of Coleridge's whole range of thought, precluded, as he confesses, by his own radical opposition to Coleridge's fundamental principles. After setting forth clearly the antagonistic schools of thought which, since the dawn of philosophy, have divided opinion as to the origin of knowledge, and after declaring his own firm adhesion to the sensational school, and his consequent inability to sympathize with Coleridge's metaphysical views, he passes from this part of the subject, and devotes the rest of his essay mainly to the consideration of Coleridge as a political philosopher. This, however, is but one, and that by no means the chief department of thought, to which Coleridge devoted himself. Had Mr. Mill felt disposed to give to the other and more important of Coleridge's speculations, his views on metaphysics, on morals, and on religion, as well as to his criticisms and his poetry, the same masterly treatment which he has given to his politics, any further attempt in that direction might have been spared. But it is characteristic of Mr. Mill, that, though gifted with a power which no other writer of his school possesses, of entering into lines of thought, and of apparently sympathizing with modes of feeling, most alien to his own, he still, after the widest sweep of appreciation, returns at last to the ground from which he started, and there entrenches himself within his original tenets as firmly as it he had never caught a glimpse of other and higher truths, with which his own principles are inconsistent. touches our common nature more closely than any gifts of genius. The vicarage of Ottery St. Mary's, Devonshire, was the birthplace and early home of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As in Wordsworth, we said that his whole character was in keeping with his native Cumber land- the robust northern yeoman, only touched with genius- so the character of Coleridge, as far as it had any local hue, seems more native to South England. Is it fanciful to imagine that there was something in that character which accords well with the soft mild air, and the dreamy loveliness that rests on the blue coombes and sea-coves of South Devon? He was born on the 21st of October, 1772, the youngest child of ten by his father's second marriage with Anne Bowdon, said to have been a woman of strong practical sense, thrifty, industrious, very ambitious for her sons, but herself without any "tincture of letters." Plainly not from her, but wholly from his father, did Samuel Taylor take his temperament. The Rev. John Coleridge, sometime head-master of the Free Grammar School, afterwards vicar of the parish of Ottery St. Mary's, is described as, for his age, a great scholar, studious, immersed in books, altogether unknowing and regardless of the world and its ways, simple in nature and primitive in manners, heedless of passing events, and usually known as "the absent man." In a Latin grammar which he wrote for his pupils, he changed the case which Julius Cæsar named, from the ablative to the Quale-quare-quidditive, just as his son might have done had he ever taken to writing grammars. He wrote dissertations on portions of the Old Testament, showing the same sort of discursiveBefore we enter on the intellectual re- ness which his son afterwards did on a sult of Coleridge's labours, and inquire larger scale. In his sermons, he used to what new elements he has added to British quote the very words of the Hebrew Scripthought, it may be well to pause for a mo- tures, till the country people used to exment, and review briefly the well-known claim admiringly, "How fine he was! He circumstances of his life. This will not gave us the very words the Spirit spoke only add a human interest to the more ab- in." Of his absent fits and his other eccenstract thoughts which follow, but may per- tricities many stories were long preserved haps help to make them better understood. in his own neighbourhood, which Coleridge And if, in contrast with the life of Words- used to tell to his friends at Highgate, till worth, and with its own splendid promise, the tears ran down his face at the rememthe life of Coleridge is disappointing even brance. Among other well-known stories, to sadness, it has not the less for that a mournful interest; while the union of transcendent genius with infirmity of will and irregular impulses, the failure and the penitential regret, lend to his story a humanizing, even a tragic, pathos, which it is told that once when he had to go from home for several days, his wife packed his portmanteau with a shirt for each day, charging him strictly to be sure and use them. On his return, his wife, cn opening the portmanteau, was surprised to find no |
