1888. J on S. T. Coleridge. 243 



Germany which he had already used in the ' Friend,' and apparently 

 kept as a last resource to stop the mouths of printers. 



Now it is remarkable that even at this time, when his demorali- 

 sation had gone furthest, he could still pour out many pages of 

 criticism, quite irrelevant to the professed purpose of the book, and 

 yet such as was beyond and above the range of any living contempo- 

 rary. Coleridge at his worst lost the power of finishing and concen- 

 trating — of which he had never had very much — but not the power of 

 discursive reflection. He must be comj^ared not to a tree which has 

 lost its vital fibre, but to a vine deprived of its props, which, though 

 most of its fruit is crushed and wasted, can yet produce grapes with 

 the full bloom of what might have been a superlative vintage. But 

 there is one fact of the ' Biographia' for which the apology of illusion 

 is more requisite even than for his misstatements of fact. Coleridge 

 has often been accused of plagiarism. I do not believe that he stole 

 his Shakespeare criticism from Schlegel, and, partly at least, for the 

 reason which would induce me to acquit a supposed thief of having 

 stolen a pair of breeches from a wild Highlandman. But it is un- 

 deniable that Coleridge was guilty of a serious theft of metaphysical 

 wares. The only excuse suggested is that the theft was too certain 

 of exposure to be perpetrated. But, as it certainly was perpetrated, 

 this can only be an apology for the motive. The simple fact is that 

 part of his scheme was to establish his claims to be a great meta- 

 physician. But it takes much trouble and some thought to put to- 

 gether what looks like a chain of a ^priori demonstration of abstract 

 principles. Coleridge, therefore, persuaded himself that he had 

 really anticipated Schelling's thoughts and might justifiably appro- 

 priate Schelling's words. He threw out a few phrases about " genial 

 coincidence " — perhaps the happiest circumlocution ever devised for 

 what Pistol called " conveying " — and adopted Schelling in the lump. 

 When he had come to an end of Schelling's guidance, he proceeded 

 — with an infantile simplicity which disarms indignation — to write a 

 solemn complimentary letter from himself to himself, pointing out 

 that the public would have had enough of the discussion, and '• Dear 

 C." politely agreed to drop the subject, with proper compliments to 

 his " afiectionate, &c." 



And now I come to the very difficult task of indicating, as briefly 

 as I can, the bearing of these remarks upon Coleridge's multifarious 

 activity. It is not possible to sum up in a few phrases the character- 

 istics of a man who wrote upon metaphysics, theology, morals, 

 politics, and literary criticism ; who made a deep impression in all 

 the departments of thought ; whose utterances are scattered up and 

 down in fragmentary treatises, in complex arguments which generally 

 break ofl^ in the middle, and in miscellaneous jottings upon the 

 margins of books ; whose opinions have been difierently interpreted 

 by different disciples, and have in great part to be inferred from his 

 comments upon other wTiters, and can only be intelligible when we 

 have settled what those ^vl•iters meant, and what he took them to 



