1888.] on S. T. Coleridge. 235 



pass a period — and, if so, how long a period — in purgatory. It is 

 difficult to settle such questions satisfactorily. I desiderate an accu- 

 rate diagnosis, not a judicial sentence. Coleridge sinned and repented. 

 I take note of sin and of repentance as indications of cliaracter. I do 

 not pretend to say whether in the eye of Heaven the repentance would 

 be an adequate set-off for the sin. But I premise one apology for 

 anything that may sound iconoclastic, and which I think is worth 

 the consideration of the amiable persons who undertake to rehabili- 

 tate soiled reputations. A man's weakness can rarely be overlooked 

 without underestimating his strength. If Coleridge's intellect were, 

 as De Quincey said in his magniloquent way, " the greatest and most 

 spacious, the subtlest and most comprehensive, that has yet existed 

 among men " (what a philosopher one must be to pronounce such a 

 judgment ! ), why were the results so small ? Because the ethereal 

 soul was chained to a fleshly carcase. To deny this is to force us to 

 assume that what he did was all that he could do. You must either 

 exaggerate his actual achievements beyond all possible limits, or save 

 your belief in his potential achievements, by admitting that his intel- 

 lect never had fair play. 



Let us consider the antecedents of the prophet of Highgate Hill. 

 Was there ever a young man fuller of intellectual promise or of per- 

 sonal charm thtin the youth of twenty-five, who, in 1797, rambled 

 through the Quantocks discussing and composing poetry with Words- 

 worth ? Circumstances apparently urrfavourable had only served to 

 stimulate his intellectual growth. Separated from his family in 

 infancy, to become one of the victims of our public school system — 

 ill-fed, ill-nursed, and ill-taught at Christ's Hospital ; urged upon 

 the treadmill of a sound classical education by a rigid schoolmaster, 

 he had assimilated with singular aptitude whatever intellectual food 

 had drifted within his reach. He had caught glimpses of high meta- 

 physical secrets ; he had peered into the mysteries of medical 

 practice ; he had bolted a miscellaneous library whole ; he had been 

 infected with poetical enthusiasm by the study of that minute day- 

 star, W. L. Bowles ; and he had completed his training by falling 

 desperately in love with the inevitable sister of a schoolfellow. It 

 is a comfort to reflect that the best regulated systems of education 

 break down somewhere. Coleridge, it would have seemed, ran every 

 risk of being driven sheep-like along the dull highroad of Latin 

 grammar. Nature had prompted him to leap the fences, to expatiate 

 in the wide fields of intellectual and imaginative pasture, and to 

 derive a keener zest for his nourishment from the knowledge that the 

 indulgence was illegitimate. Cambridge, the mother of j^oets, received 

 him with the kindness she has so often shown to her children. We 

 — I speak as a Cambridge man — we flogged (or nearly flogged) 

 Milton into republicanism ; we disgusted Dryden into an anomalous 

 and monstrous preference for Oxford; we bored Gray till, half stifled 

 with academic dulness, he sought more cheerful surroundings in a 

 country churchyard ; we left Byron to the congenial society of bis 



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