234 Mr. Leslie Stephen [March 9, 



transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary and vehiculatory 

 gear for setting out ; " but rambled into the universe at large, treated 

 you " as a mere passive bucket, to be pumped into " (fancy a Carlyle for 

 a passive bucket !), and finally left you " swimming and fluttering in the 

 mistiest wide unintelligible deluge of things, for the most part in a 

 rather profitless uncomfortable manner." Yet, at times, we are told, 

 " balmy sunny islets, islets of the blest and intelligible," would rise out 

 of the haze ; and upon these islets the enthusiastic Sterling and others 

 would try to cast anchor. Had they reached the solid foundation of 

 creation, or had they, like Milton's pilot of the small night-foundered 

 skiff, mistaken some metaphysical Kraken for the permanent frame- 

 work of things ? 



That question may be answered dogmatically by any one who 

 pleases. Immovable limits of time and caj)acity forbid me from 

 attempting to answer it now. My excuse for venturing to say some- 

 thing of Coleridge — certainly one of the most fascinating and most 

 perplexing figures in our literary history — is simply this : I have been 

 forced to investigate with some care the details of his career ; and I 

 ought to be able not only to answer the question but to provide a little 

 " vehiculatory gear " towards answering it. Coleridge's philosophy 

 must of course be judged by considerations extraneous to his personal 

 history. Yet I think, as a professional biographer is in duty bound 

 to think, that philosophy is, more often than philosophers admit, the 

 outcome of personal exiDcrience ; and Coleridge's singular history may 

 throw some light uj)on his teaching. Here we meet the hagiologist 

 and the iconoclast, the twin plagues of the humble biogi'apher. 

 The hagiologist burns incense before his idol till it is difficult to 

 distinguish any fixed outline through the clouds of gorgeously- 

 tinted vapour. Coleridge thought himself to have certain failings. 

 His relations fully agreed wdth him. His worshippers regard these 

 meek confessions as mere illustrations of the good man's humility, 

 and even manage to endow the poet and philosopher with all the 

 homely virtues of the respectable and the solvent. To put forward 

 such claims is to challenge the iconoclast. He, a person endowed 

 by nature with a fine stock of virtuous indignation, has very little 

 trouble in j^icturing the poet-philosopher as a shambling, unreliable, 

 indolent voluptuary, to whom an action became impossible so soon as 

 it presented itself as a duty, and who, even as a man of genius, must 

 be condemned as unfaithful to his high calling. And so we raise the 

 usual edifying discussion as to the privileges of genius. Do they 

 include superiority to the Ten Commandments ? Can you expect a 

 poet to confine himself to one wife ? May a man neglect his children 

 because he has written the ' Ancient Mariner ' and ' Christabel ' ? — 

 points of casuistry, of which, with your leave, I will postpone the 

 consideration to a future occasion. 



For my purpose, it is enough to ascertain the facts. I have not 

 to decide whether Coleridge should receive excommunication or 

 canonisation ; whether he deserved to go straight to heaven or to 



