5 November: Boreham on Samuel Coleridge

A Rugged Bard
It was on November 5, 1797, at the Valley of Rocks, near Linton, that Dorothy Wordsworth suggested to Coleridge the idea that afterwards took shape as "The Ancient Mariner." Stopford Brooke used to say that all that Coleridge did well could be bound up in twenty pages; "but," he charitably added, "those twenty pages should be bound in pure gold." Most of us would be more generous. It would take the twenty pages to reproduce "The Ancient Mariner."

But Coleridge is worth remembering if only as one of the sublimest oddities that ever strode the stage of English letters. De Quincey thought that, for sheer intellect, the ages could produce nothing to rival him. "He is," Hazlitt declares, "the only person I ever knew who answered to my idea of a man of genius." Wordsworth used to say that he had known many men who could do wonderful things; but only one really wonderful man, and that man was Coleridge.

A thing of fits and starts, of wayward moods and gorgeous fancies, there were times when he sang like an archangel, and times when he jabbered like an idiot. Charles Lamb liked to dilate on both aspects of the poet's grotesque personality. Lamb seldom joined his boon companions without having some new tale to tell of Coleridge that would set the entire company in a roar.

Yet, though he laughed at him, he loved him; and the gentle Elia's soft eyes often moistened as he bore affectionate and grateful witness to the downright goodness of his friend.

Master Of The Art Of Talking
Coleridge was great as a poet; he was greater as a philosopher; but he was at his golden best as a conversationalist. Since the world began, nobody ever talked as Coleridge talked. Like Johnson, one of his few serious rivals, he spouted hurricanes of nonsense at times; yet those brilliant critics who surrounded his chair declare that, at its highest level, Coleridge's conversation has never been equalled. When Coleridge began to talk, Hazlitt affirms, you hoped that he would talk for ever.

It speaks volumes for his versatility that Madame de Stael, who was intimate with the most brilliant wits in Europe, thought it the height of human felicity to sit at the fireside of Coleridge, drinking in his torrent of reason and his flow of soul. She would hang upon his lips for hours at a stretch. She regarded it as sorrow's crown of sorrow that such a wealth of wit and wisdom should be embalmed in no permanent form.

It is true that a couple of volumes of Coleridge's "Table Talk" have been preserved; but, in these uninviting tomes, the scintillation and the sparkle have evaporated. The atomic observations of Dr. Johnson, set down as Boswell does it, are like flowers encased in ice, or bees in amber; the conversation of Coleridge, as recorded in his "Table Talk" is like a bunch of roses kept between cardboard; the life, the beauty, and the fragrance have faded and fled. We exult over the appetising morsels that Boswell spreads before us; the "Table Talk" merely compels a yawn.

If only somebody had done for Coleridge what Boswell did for Johnson, the author of "The Ancient Mariner" would have figured like a colossus on our literary horizon.

Unmoved By The Beauty About Him
The most remarkable thing about this remarkable man was his extraordinary incapacity to receive adequate impressions from his environment. Tourists who today visit the idyllic lake land scenery by which the home of Coleridge is surrounded, invariably remark that, set amidst panoramas of such bewitching loveliness, anybody could be a poet. They are startled when informed that, with his arrival at Keswick, Coleridge's career as a minstrel abruptly ended. After making his home there, he wrote nothing worthy of remembrance.

The fact is that, strange as it may seem, Nature, even in her most captivating mood, made no appeal to him. She left him cold. He spent some of the most impressionable years of his life in the Valley of the Otter. It is one of the most charming and picturesque landscapes to be found among the beautiful dales of Devonshire; yet, save for a single sonnet, there is no reflection of its incomparable grace in anything that he wrote.

He gazed upon the most enchanting vistas with the eyes of Peter Bell; a primrose by the river's brim, a yellow primrose was to him and it was nothing more. He reminds us, not of a bird that builds its nest with materials that it has industriously collected, but of a silkworm that, shutting itself up in the darkness, weaves its dazzling web from some mysterious store within the compass of its own being.

The wonder is that a man of his temper and of his habits, should have given us so much that is worth cherishing. He wrote, as was inevitable, reams of rubbish. But when the rubbish has been sorted out, there remains that priceless residue that Stopford Brooke would bind in covers of pure gold. He deserves our gratitude as an amazing personality that it is a joy to contemplate, as an acute philosopher, as a brilliant conversationalist, and as a poet who at times attained to real super excellence.

Moreover, he was an illustrious member of that select circle, the brotherhood of the Lake Poets, that stands unrivalled among all literary groups and coteries; and, gathering his friends from so choice and exalted a company, he grappled them to himself with hoops of steel. Which, in itself, is eloquent of much.

F W Boreham

Image: Samuel Taylor Coleridge