Poems of Coleridge | Page 2

of grief," and the
terrible and fettering power of luxuriating over his own sorrows, and
tracing them to first principles, outside himself or in the depths of his
subconsciousness, gave him the courage to support that long,
everpresent
divorce.
Both for his good and evil, he had never been able to endure emotion
without either diluting or intensifying it with thought, and with always
self-conscious thought. He uses identically the same words in writing
his last, deeply moved letter to Mary Evans, and in relating the matter
to Southey. He cannot get away from words; coming as near to
sincerity as he can, words are always between him and his emotion.
Hence his over-emphasis, his rhetoric of humility. In 1794 he writes to
his brother George: "Mine eyes gush out with tears, my heart is sick
and languid with the weight of unmerited kindness." Nine days later he
writes to his brother James: "My conduct towards you, and towards my
other brothers, has displayed a strange combination of madness,
ingratitude, and dishonesty. But you forgive me. May my Maker
forgive me! May the time arrive when I shall have forgiven myself!"

Here we see both what he calls his "gangrened sensibility" and a
complete abandonment to the feelings of the moment. It is always a
selfconscious abandonment, during which he watches himself with
approval, and seems to be saying: "Now that is truly 'feeling'!" He can
never concentrate himself on any emotion; he swims about in floods of
his own tears. With so little sense of reality in anything, he has no sense
of the reality of direct emotion, but is preoccupied, from the moment of
the first shock, in exploring it for its universal principle, and then
nourishes it almost in triumph at what he has discovered. This is not
insincerity; it is the metaphysical, analytical, and parenthetic mind in
action. "I have endeavoured to feel what I ought to feel," he once
significantly writes.
Coleridge had many friends, to some of whom, as to Lamb, his
friendship was the most priceless thing in life; but the friendship which
meant most to him, not only as a man, but as a poet, was the friendship
with Wordsworth and with Dorothy Wordsworth. "There is a sense of
the word Love," he wrote to Wordsworth in 1812, "in which I never felt
it but to you and one of your household." 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,"