Milo? Would a man, in speaking of Bacon, begin by setting forth his love of money, and all the evils it led him into? Would a generous and right-minded man do so at any time? Would a man, whose heart was not cankered by vanity, or some other reckless passion, do it before the sound of his knell had died away? Verily, at such a time, it well behoves the person, who calls himself the foremost of Coleridge's admirers,' to step forward in the face of the world, and play the part of the advocatus diaboli. For, unless he had done 60, no one would: Coleridge's enemies, if he had any, could not: they were awed into silence. ་ I have been speaking on the supposition that the charges of plagiarism and insincerity brought by the Opium-eater against Coleridge are strictly, accurately true that Coleridge is guilty to the full amount and tale of the offences imputed to him. Even in this case, it indicates a singular 'obliquity of feeling' thus to drag them forth and thrust them forward. But are they true! Doubtless, seeing that he who thrusts them forward can only do it out of a painful and rankling love of truth and justice; seeing that the voice which comes forth from his opium-eating mask proclaims him to be the foremost of Coleridge's admirers.' Reader, be not deluded and put to sleep by a name : look into the charges; sift them. Among them the accuser himself acknowledges that there is only one of any moment, the others having been lugged in to swell the counts of the indictment, through a somewhat over-anxious feara fear which would have been deemed malicious in any one but the foremost of his admirers-lest any tittle that could tell against Coleridge should be forgotten. One case, however, there is, he assures us, ' of real and palpable plagiarism:' so, lest 'some cursed reviewer eight hundred or a thousand years hence' should make the discovery,' he determines to prevent him by forestalling him, and states it in full, as in admirership bound. The dissertation in the Biographia Literaria 'on the reciprocal relations of the esse and the cogitare' is asserted to be a translation from an essay in the volume of Schelling's Philosophische Schriften. True: the Opium-eater is indeed mistaken in the name of the book; but that is of little moment, except as an additional mark of audacious carelessness in impeaching a great man's honour. The dissertation, as it stands in the Biographia Literaria, vol. i. pp. 254-261, is a literal translation from the introduction to Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism: and though the assertion that there is no attempt in a single instance to appropriate the paper, by developing the arguments, or by diversifying the illustrations,' is not quite borne out by the fact, Coleridge's additions are few and slight. But the Opium-eater further says, that 'Coleridge's essay is prefaced by a few words, in which, aware of his coincidence with Schelling, he declares his willingness to acknowledge himself indebted to so great a man, in any case where the truth would allow him to do so; but in this particular case, insisting on the impossibility that he could have borrowed arguments which he had first seen some years after he had thought out the whole hypothesis proprio marte.' That Coleridge never can have been guilty of such a piece of scandalous dishonesty, is clear even on the face of the charge: he never could apply the word hypothesis to that which has nothing hypothetical in it. The Opium-eater also is much too precise in his use of words to have done so, if he had known or considered what he was talking about. But he did not; and owing to this slovenly rashness of assertion, he has brought forward a heavy acccusation, which is utterly false and groundless, the distorted offspring of a benighted memory under the incubus of what shall we say? an ardent admiration. Not a single word does Coleridge say about the originality of his essay, one way or other. It is not prefaced by any remark. No mention is made of Schelling within a hundred pages of it, further than a quotation from him, in page 247, and a reference to him, in page 250. In an earlier part of the work, however, where Coleridge is giving an account of his philosophical education, there does occur a passage (pp. 149-153) about his obligations to Schelling, and his coincidences with him. This no doubt is the passage which the Opium-eater had in his head; but strangely indeed has he metamorphosed it. For Coleridge's vindication, it is necessary to quote it somewhat at length. It would be a mere act of justice to myself, were I to warn my readers, that an identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase, will not be at all times a certain proof that the passage has been borrowed from Schelling, or that the conceptions were originally learnt from him. Many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind, before I had ever seen a page of the German philosopher. God forbid that I should be suspected of a wish to enter into a rivalry with Schelling for the honours so unequivocally his right, not only as a great and original genius, but as the founder of the Philosophy of Nature, and as the most successful improver of the Dynamic system! To Schelling we owe the completion, and the most important victories, of this revolution in philosophy. To me it will be happiness and honour enough, should I succeed in rendering the system itself intelligible to my countrymen, and in the application of it to the most awful of subjects for the most important of purposes. Whether a work is the offspring of a man's own spirit, and the product of original thinking, will be discovered by those who are its sole legitimate judges, by better tests than the mere reference to dates. For readers in general, let whatever shall be found in this or any future work of mine, that resembles, or coincides with, the doctrines of my German predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly attributed to him: provided that the absence of distinct references to his books, which I could not at all times make with truth, as designating citations or thoughts actually derived from him, and which, I trust, would, after this general acknowledgment, be superfluous, be not charged on me as an ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism.” Yet the charge, which he thus earnestly deprecates, has been brought against him, and that too by a person entitling himself the foremost of his admirers.' Heaven preserve all honest men from such forward admirers ! The boy who rendered nil admirari, not to be admired, must have had something of prophecy in him, when he pronounced this to be an indispensable recipe for happiness. Coleridge, we see, was so far from denying or shuffling about his debts to Schelling, that he makes over every passage to him on which the stamp of his mind could be discovered. Of a truth too, if he had been disposed to purloin, he never would have stolen half a dozen pages from the head and front of that very work of Schelling's which was the likeliest to fall into his reader's hands, and the first sentence of which one could not read without detecting the plagiarism. Would any man think of pilfering a column from the porch of St. Paul's? The high praise which Coleridge bestows on Schelling would naturally excite a wish in such of his readers as felt an interest in his philosophy to know more of the great German. The first books of his they would take up would be his Naturphilosophie and his Transcendental Idealism : these are the works which Coleridge himself mentions; and the latter, from its subject, would attract them the most. For the maturer exposition of Schelling's philosophy in the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik is hardly to be met with in England, having never been published except in that journal, and being still no more than a fragment. Indeed Coleridge himself does not seem to have known it; and Germany has for thirty years been looking in vain expectation for the doctrine of the greatest of her philosophers. But even with the fullest conviction that Coleridge cannot have been guilty of intentional plagiarism, the reader will probably deem it strange that he should have transferred half a dozen pages of Schelling into his volume without any reference to their source. And strange it undoubtedly is. The only way I see of accounting for it is from his practice of keeping note-books, or journals of his thoughts, filled with observations and brief dissertations on such matters as happened to strike him, with a sprinkling now and then of extracts and abstracts from the books he was reading. If the name of the author from whom he took an extract was left out, he might easily, years after, forget whose property it was, especially when he had made it in some measure his own, by transfusing it into his own English. That this may happen I know from my own experience, having myself been lately puzzled by a passage which I had translated from Kant some years ago, and which cost me a good deal of search before I ascertained that it was not my own. Yet my memory in such minutiæ is tolerably accurate, while Coleridge's was notoriously irretentive. That this solution is the true one may, I think, be collected from the references to Schelling, in pp. 247 and 250. In both these places we find a couple of pages translated, with some slight changes and additions, from the latter part of Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre. In neither place are we told that we are reading a translation. Yet that the author cannot be conscious of any intentional plagiarism is clear, from his mentioning Schelling's name, and, in the latter place, even that of this particular work. Here again I would conjecture that the passages must have been transcribed from some old note-book; only in these instances Schelling's name was marked down at the end of the first extract and at the beginning of the second; and so the end of the first extract is ascribed to him, and he is cited at the beginning of the second. There is also another passage about the mystics, in pp. 140, 141, acknowledged to be translated from a recent continental writer, which comes from Schelling's pamphlet against Fichte. In this case, Coleridge knew that he was setting forth what he had borrowed from another: for he had not been long acquainted with this work of Schelling's, as may be gathered from his way of speaking of it in p. 153, and from his saying, in p. 150, that Schelling has lately avowed his affectionate reverence for Behmen.' Schelling's pamphlet had appeared eleven years before but perhaps it did not find its way to England till the peace; and Coleridge, having read it but recently, inferred that it was a recent publication. These passages form well-nigh the sum of Coleridge's loans from Schelling; and with regard to these, on the grounds here stated, though I do not presume to rank myself among the foremost of his admirers, I readily acquit him of all suspicion of " ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism." Of the other alleged instances of plagiarism I will not speak. The Opiumeater himself admits that, as such, they "amount to nothing;" and that the only thing reprehensible about them was Coleridge's "seeking to decline the very slight acknowledgments required." So that the pith of these charges lies not in the plagiarism, but in the denial of it; and of this we have no record except the Opium-eater's statement, to which, after such an exposure of its worthlessness in a grave accusation, few will attach much weight in lesser ones. Even when there is no conceivable motive to mislead his memory, his carelessness is perpetually letting it go astray. Thus he says, in p. 688, that Coleridge had been "personally acquainted, or connected as a pupil, with Eichhorn and Michaelis." Now this is incorrect with regard to both. Michaelis died in 1791, and Coleridge did not go to Göttingen till 1799. Nor was he Eichhorn's pupil: his own account in the Biographia is, that "Eichhorn's lectures on the New Testament were repeated to him from notes by a student from Ratzeburg." The latter difference indeed is so small, it would be captious to mention it, except as shewing the habitual inaccuracy of a writer who draws the matter of his tale from the recollection of conversations held a quarter of a century ago. How can such a person lay claim to credit in cases where a slight turn or shade of expression, a word or two more or less, may change the whole character of the story? Again, in p. 589, where he blurts out about German literature with the dashing ignorance he has often shewn on that subject, he says that its revival in the last century took place "upon the impulse of what cattle!-Bodmer on the one hand, and Gottsched on the other!" Ay! much as Sampson's revival took place upon the impulse of the Philistines, who called him to make them sport: much as Luther arose on the impulse of the Dominican sellers of indulgences. With the same truth might it be said, that the modern literature of England arose upon the impulse of Johnson and the Della Cruscans. Every body who knows anything about the matter, knows that the modern literature of Germany sprang up in opposition both to Bodmer and to Gottsched-that its fathers are Lessing, Klopfstock, and Winckelmann, and that Goethe and Kant are the master-minds who have poured their spirit into its limbs, and have guided and shaped its course. "England," he adds, "for nineteen, and France for the twentieth, of all her capital works, has given the too servile law." What a " too servile law can be, might puzzle all the jurists from Lycurgus down to Savigny; but, waving this, to which of the two classes do Goethe and John Paul belong? As to the letters written during Coleridge's tour in Germany, of which the Opium-eater just after expresses his belief that they have never been printed, except in the first edition of the Friend, he may find them in the second volume of the Biographia Literaria. But to return a second very offensive passage about Coleridge is the coarse caricature of him, when he was living at the Courier Office; which, however, tickles the writer's fancy so that he cannot refrain from recurring to it in p. 685. Of the same cast is the account of the lectures which Coleridge delivered at the Royal Institution in 1808; in which this foremost of his admirers would fain persuade us that he exhibited no spark of his unquenchable genius; that there was "no heart, no soul, no strength of feeling, no power of originality; in which too even the pieces of poetry read by him are said to have produced little effect, with the exception of two or three from Ritson's Metrical Romances, chosen and marked out for him by the Opium-eater himself. What grand things we have been doing! cries the Clown, when Harlequin has been turning a hovel into a palace. Alexander's groom too was, no doubt, fully convinced that the victory of Arbela was mainly owing to him who had bridled Bucephalus, forgetting how that noble horse, though he bent his knees to the king, and seemed to feel whom he was carrying on his back, would let none but Alexander mount him. Is this an indecorous tone in speaking of a man whom I willingly acknowledge to be, perhaps, the most learned metaphysician, the closest logician, and one of the subtlest thinkers and most powerful writers in England? It would be so, but that, as all evil, from running counter to the laws of nature, by an inevitable doom, works its own destruction, so is this more rapidly the case with vanity, which is mostly baffled at the very moment of its outbreak. He who sets a trap to catch praise, is quite sure to catch blame and ridicule, and for the time forfeits the respect, which otherwise we might have been glad to pay him. With regard to the general effect of Coleridge's lectures in 1808, I happen, within the last few days, to have seen a lady of singularly delicate and cultivated taste, who attended the whole course, and who has assured me that, though it is true several interruptions occurred in consequence of Coleridge's ill health, her recollection of the lectures which he did deliver is entirely at variance with the description of them in Tait's Magazine. Nay, she cannot even call to mind the marvellous impression produced by the extracts from Ritson's Romances. But, even allowing that the Opium-eater's account were correct, how comes it that almost the only parts of Coleridge's life on which he dwells and enlarges are his failures, his weakness, his errors? Has he nothing to tell us about the Friend, beyond a tedious detail of the blunders which Coleridge made in publishing it at Penrith instead of at Kendal? Yet many and choice were the spirits to whom the Friend was as the dawning of a new life. Would he pass by Paradise Lost, content with giving us the invaluable piece of information, that Milton was so ill-trained in the school of Mammon, such a dolt in the arts of huckstering and higgling, that he could not get more than five pounds for a poem containing 10,565 lines? He" called upon Coleridge daily" in the Strand, and yet has nothing to record of the "subtlest and most comprehensive intellect that has yet existed among men," except that he "pitied his forlorn condition," and that Coleridge used to scream out," Mrs. Brain bridge! I say, Mrs. Brainbridge!" He "saw Coleridge daily" for several months at Allan Bank; and again can find nothing worth telling of him, except that, when he borrowed a book, he used to write the owner's name in it. But I forget: he does tell us something more; he tells us that, in writing in the owner's name, he had a trick of dubbing him esquire. There is a story in one of Zelter's letters to Goethe, of two of Frederic's guards, one of whom said to the other, as the king went by," Look what a bad hat the king has on!” "Stupid dog!" cried the other, "look what a head he has!" These speeches are typical of the two classes of mankind; but I should never have expected to see the Opium-eater in the more numerous one. In truth however, though here and there one meets with a fine passage, a great part of the three articles is so trashy, that one can hardly understand how such an able writer could fall so far below himself, so far below the greatness of his subject. The fact is, that it has hung all the while like a weight over his head, like the weight over the head of Tantalus, τὸν ἀιεὶ μενοινῶν κεφαλᾶς βαλεῖν εὐφροσύνας aaral. It is remarkable, that Euripides represents this weight as the ball of the sun, swinging from heaven by its golden chains: thus, by a fine allegory, that which in itself is the source of light, and warmth, and joy, becomes an intolerable oppression to him who cannot look up to it with a free and open heart. Nor is the crime by which Tantalus incurred his punishment without its symbolical meaning. The popular tradition was, that he had served up his son at a banquet which he gave to the gods. He would, no doubt, have served up himself, in the prodigality of his ostentation, had he known how to do so without committing suicide: but the device of writing confessions had not been invented in those barbarous days; nor had it been discovered as yet that the seat of the gods is the one-shilling gallery. Euripides, however, whom we know to be a favorite poet with the Opium-eater, here again hit out a new explanation, no less to our purpose than the former. According to him, the sin of Tantalus was, that, having been admitted into the society of the gods, ἀκόλαστον εἶχε γλῶσσαν, αἰσχίστην νόσον, and went about blabbing what he had heard there. The last of the three articles, headed with the name of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that in the November number, is filled in great part with an account of Bishop Watson, whom I feel no calling to rescue from the Opium-eater's tender mercies. If he must be a man of prey, let him seek his prey among the children of earth. In the latter part, however, he returns to Coleridge; and, speaking in a very extravagant tone of the decay of his faculties, tries to account in this way for his having spent the last twenty-four years in the neighbourhood of London. The explanation is subtle, only too subtle. That Coleridge's poetical powers even were not "burnt out," is proved by the exquisite beauty of many of the short poems written in his latter years; though it is true that poetry then became to him little more than an occasional amusement. "You yourself," says Charles Lamb to him in his affectionate dedication," write no Christabels nor Ancient Mariners now." But the powers which he withdrew from poetry he threw into philosophy. That now became the great business of his life in all its highest forms: Philosophy in itself—the tracing the earth-piercing roots and the heaven-piercing branches of the tree of life; philosophy in its application to politics, and in its connexion with religion; the forwarding the great atonement of philosophy with religion, this was the task to which he devoted himself: and it was surely enough to afford ample employment, even for such a mighty intellect as Coleridge's. This was the habitation of his soul and here he continued to the last, “Springing from crystal step to crystal step |