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Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. II.

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. II.







COLERIDGE AND OPIUM-EATING.


What is the deadest of things earthly? It is, says the world, ever
forward and rash--'a door-nail!' But the world is wrong. There is a
thing deader than a door-nail, viz., Gillman's Coleridge, Vol. I. Dead,
more dead, most dead, is Gillman's Coleridge, Vol. I.; and this upon
more arguments than one. The book has clearly not completed its
elementary act of respiration; the _systole_ of Vol. I. is
absolutely useless and lost without the _diastole_ of that Vol.
II., which is never to exist. That is one argument, and perhaps this
second argument is stronger. Gillman's Coleridge, Vol. I., deals
rashly, unjustly, and almost maliciously, with some of our own
particular friends; and yet, until late in this summer, _Anno
Domini_ 1844, we--that is, neither ourselves nor our friends--ever
heard of its existence. Now a sloth, even without the benefit of Mr.
Waterton's evidence to his character, will travel faster than that. But
malice, which travels fastest of all things, must be dead and cold at
starting, when it can thus have lingered in the rear for six years; and
therefore, though the world was so far right, that people _do_
say, 'Dead as a door-nail,' yet, henceforward, the weakest of these
people will see the propriety of saying--'Dead as Gillman's Coleridge.'

The reader of experience, on sliding over the surface of this opening
paragraph, begins to think there's mischief singing in the upper air.
'No, reader, not at all. We never were cooler in our days. And this we
protest, that, were it not for the excellence of the subject,
_Coleridge and Opium-Eating_, Mr. Gillman would have been dismissed
by us unnoticed. Indeed, we not only forgive Mr. Gillman, but we
have a kindness for him; and on this account, that he was good, he
was generous, he was most forbearing, through twenty years, to poor
Coleridge, when thrown upon his hospitality. An excellent thing
_that_, Mr. Gillman, till, noticing the theme suggested by this
unhappy Vol. I., we are forced at times to notice its author, Nor is
this to be regretted. We remember a line of Horace never yet properly
translated, viz:--

'Nec scutica dignum horribili sectere flagello.'

The true translation of which, as we assure the unlearned reader, is--
'Nor must you pursue with the horrid knout of Christopher that man who
merits only a switching.' Very true. We protest against all attempts to
invoke the exterminating knout; for _that_ sends a man to the
hospital for two months; but you see that the same judicious poet, who
dissuades an appeal to the knout, indirectly recommends the switch,
which, indeed, is rather pleasant than otherwise, amiably playful in
some of its little caprices, and in its worst, suggesting only a
pennyworth of diachylon.

We begin by professing, with hearty sincerity, our fervent admiration
of the extraordinary man who furnishes the theme for Mr. Gillman's
_coup-d'essai_ in biography. He was, in a literary sense, our
brother--for he also was amongst the contributors to _Blackwood_--
and will, we presume, take his station in that Blackwood gallery of
portraits, which, in a century hence, will possess more interest for
intellectual Europe than any merely martial series of portraits, or any
gallery of statesmen assembled in congress, except as regards one or
two leaders; for defunct major-generals, and secondary diplomatists,
when their date is past, awake no more emotion than last year's
advertisements, or obsolete directories; whereas those who, in a stormy
age, have swept the harps of passion, of genial wit, or of the
wrestling and gladiatorial reason, become more interesting to men when
they can no longer be seen as bodily agents, than even in the middle
chorus of that intellectual music over which, living, they presided.

Of this great camp Coleridge was a leader, and fought amongst the
_primipili_; yet, comparatively, he is still unknown. Heavy,
indeed, are the arrears still due to philosophic curiosity on the real
merits, and on the separate merits, of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Coleridge as a poet--Coleridge as a philosopher! How extensive are
those questions, if those were all! and upon neither question have we
yet any investigation--such as, by compass of views, by research, or
even by earnestness of sympathy with the subject, can, or ought to
satisfy, a philosophic demand. Blind is that man who can persuade
himself that the interest in Coleridge, taken as a total object, is
becoming an obsolete interest. We are of opinion that even Milton, now
viewed from a distance of two centuries, is still inadequately judged
or appreciated in his character of poet, of patriot and partisan, or,
finally, in his character of accomplished scholar. But, if so, how much
less can it be pretended that satisfaction has been rendered to the
claims of Coleridge? for, upon Milton, libraries have been written.
There has been time for the malice of men, for the jealousy of men, for
the enthusiasm, the scepticism, the adoring admiration of men, to
expand themselves! There has been room for a Bentley, for an Addison,
for a Johnson, for a wicked Lauder, for an avenging Douglas, for an
idolizing Chateaubriand; and yet, after all, little enough has been
done towards any comprehensive estimate of the mighty being concerned.
Piles of materials have been gathered to the ground; but, for the
monument which should have risen from these materials, neither the
first stone has been laid, nor has a qualified architect yet presented
his credentials. On the other hand, upon Coleridge little,
comparatively, has yet been written, whilst the separate characters on
which the judgment is awaited, are more by one than those which Milton
sustained. Coleridge, also, is a poet; Coleridge, also, was mixed up
with the fervent politics of his age--an age how memorably reflecting
the revolutionary agitations of Milton's age. Coleridge, also, was an
extensive and brilliant scholar. Whatever might be the separate
proportions of the two men in each particular department of the three
here noticed, think as the reader will upon that point, sure we are
that either subject is ample enough to make a strain upon the amplest
faculties. How alarming, therefore, for any _honest_ critic, who
should undertake this later subject of Coleridge, to recollect that,
after pursuing him through a zodiac of splendors corresponding to those
of Milton in kind, however different in degree--after weighing him as a
poet, as a philosophic politician, as a scholar, he will have to wheel
after him into another orbit, into the unfathomable _nimbus_ of
transcendental metaphysics. Weigh him the critic must in the golden
balance of philosophy the most abstruse--a balance which even itself
requires weighing previously, or he will have done nothing that can be
received for an estimate of the composite Coleridge. This astonishing
man, be it again remembered, besides being an exquisite poet, a
profound political speculator, a philosophic student of literature
through all its chambers and recesses, was also a circumnavigator on
the most pathless waters of scholasticism and metaphysics. He had
sounded, without guiding charts, the secret deeps of Proclus and
Plotinus; he had laid down buoys on the twilight, or moonlight, ocean
of Jacob Boehmen; [Footnote: 'JACOB BOEHMEN.' We ourselves had the
honor of presenting to Mr. Coleridge, Law's English version of Jacob--a
set of huge quartos. Some months afterwards we saw this work lying
open, and one volume at least overflowing, in parts, with the
commentaries and the _corollaries_ of Coleridge. Whither has this
work, and so many others swathed about with Coleridge's MS. notes,
vanished from the world?] he had cruised over the broad Atlantic of
Kant and Schelling, of Fichte and Oken. Where is the man who shall be
equal to these things? We at least make no such adventurous effort; or,
if ever we should presume to do so, not at present. Here we design only
to make a coasting voyage of survey round the headlands and most
conspicuous seamarks of our subject, as they are brought forward by Mr.
Gillman, or collaterally suggested by our own reflections; and
especially we wish to say a word or two on Coleridge as an opium-eater.

Naturally the first point to which we direct our attention, is the
history and personal relations of Coleridge. Living with Mr. Gillman
for nineteen years as a domesticated friend, Coleridge ought to have
been known intimately. And it is reasonable to expect, from so much
intercourse, some additions to our slender knowledge of Coleridge's
adventures, (if we may use so coarse a word,) and of the secret springs
at work in those early struggles of Coleridge at Cambridge, London,
Bristol, which have been rudely told to the world, and repeatedly told,
as showy romances, but never rationally explained.

The anecdotes, however, which Mr. Gillman has added to the personal
history of Coleridge, are as little advantageous to the effect of his
own book as they are to the interest of the memorable character which
he seeks to illustrate. Always they are told without grace, and
generally are suspicious in their details. Mr. Gillman we believe to be
too upright a man for countenancing any untruth. He has been deceived.
For example, will any man believe this? A certain 'excellent
equestrian' falling in with Coleridge on horseback, thus accosted him--
'Pray, Sir, did you meet a tailor along the road?' '_A tailor_!'
answered Coleridge; '_I did meet a person answering such a description,
who told me he had dropped his goose; that if I rode a little further
I should find it; and I guess he must have meant you._' In Joe Miller
this story would read, perhaps, sufferably. Joe has a privilege; and
we do not look too narrowly into the mouth of a Joe-Millerism. But
Mr. Gillman, writing the life of a philosopher, and no jest-book, is
under a different law of decorum. That retort, however, which silences
the jester, it may seem, must be a good one. And we are desired to
believe that, in this case, the baffled assailant rode off in a spirit
of benign candor, saying aloud to himself, like the excellent
philosopher that he evidently was, 'Caught a Tartar!'

But another story of a sporting baronet, who was besides a Member of
Parliament, is much worse, and altogether degrading to Coleridge. This
gentleman, by way of showing off before a party of ladies, is
represented as insulting Coleridge by putting questions to him on the
qualities of his horse, so as to draw the animal's miserable defects
into public notice, and then closing his display by demanding what he
would take for the horse 'including the rider.' The supposed reply of
Coleridge might seem good to those who understand nothing of true
dignity; for, as an _impromptu_, it was smart and even caustic.
The baronet, it seems, was reputed to have been bought by the minister;
and the reader will at once divine that the retort took advantage of
that current belief, so as to throw back the sarcasm, by proclaiming
that neither horse nor rider had a price placarded in the market at
which any man could become their purchaser. But this was not the temper
in which Coleridge either did reply, or could have replied. Coleridge
showed, in the _spirit_ of his manner, a profound sensibility to
the nature of a gentleman; and he felt too justly what it became a
self-respecting person to say, ever to have aped the sort of flashy
fencing which might seem fine to a theatrical blood.

Another story is self-refuted: 'A hired partisan' had come to one of
Coleridge's political lectures with the express purpose of bringing the
lecturer into trouble; and most preposterously he laid himself open to
his own snare by refusing to pay for admission. Spies must be poor
artists who proceed thus. Upon which Coleridge remarked--'That, before
the gentleman kicked up a dust, surely he would down with the dust.' So
far the story will not do. But what follows is possible enough. The
_same_ 'hired' gentleman, by way of giving unity to the tale, is
described as having hissed. Upon this a cry arose of 'Turn him out!'
But Coleridge interfered to protect him; he insisted on the man's right
to hiss if he thought fit; it was legal to hiss; it was natural to
hiss; 'for what is to be expected, gentlemen, when the cool waters of
reason come in contact with red-hot aristocracy, but a hiss?' _Euge!_

Amongst all the anecdotes, however of this splendid man, often trivial,
often incoherent, often unauthenticated, there is one which strikes us
as both true and interesting; and we are grateful to Mr. Gillman for
preserving it. We find it introduced, and partially authenticated, by
the following sentence from Coleridge himself:--'From eight to fourteen
I was a playless day-dreamer, a _helluo librorum_; my appetite for
which was indulged by a singular incident. A stranger, who was struck
by my conversation, made me free of a circulating library in King's
Street, Cheapside.' The more circumstantial explanation of Mr. Gillman
is this: `The incident indeed was singular. Going down the Strand, in
one of his day-dreams, fancying himself swimming across the Hellespont,
thrusting his hands before him as in the act of swimming, his hand came
in contact with a gentleman's pocket. The gentleman seized his hand,
turning round, and looking at him with some anger--"What! so young, and
yet so wicked?" at the same time accused him of an attempt to pick his
pocket. The frightened boy sobbed out his denial of the intention, and
explained to him how he thought himself Leander swimming across the
Hellespont. The gentleman was so struck and delighted with the novelty
of the thing, and with the simplicity and intelligence of the boy, that
he subscribed, as before stated, to the library; in consequence of
which Coleridge was further enabled to indulge his love of reading.'

We fear that this slovenly narrative is the very perfection of bad
story-telling. But the story itself is striking, and, by the very
oddness of the incidents, not likely to have been invented. The effect,
from the position of the two parties--on the one side, a simple child
from Devonshire, dreaming in the Strand that he was swimming over from
Sestos to Abydos, and, on the other, the experienced man, dreaming only
of this world, its knaves and its thieves, but still kind and generous
--is beautiful and picturesque. _Oh! si sic omnia!_

But the most interesting to us of the _personalities_ connected
with Coleridge are his feuds and his personal dislikes.
Incomprehensible to us is the war of extermination which Coleridge made
upon the political economists. Did Sir James Steuart, in speaking of
vine-dressers, (not _as_ vine-dressers, but generally as
cultivators,) tell his readers, that, if such a man simply replaced his
own consumption, having no surplus whatever or increment for the public
capital, he could not be considered a useful citizen? Not the beast in
the Revelation is held up by Coleridge as more hateful to the spirit of
truth than the Jacobite baronet. And yet we know of an author--viz.,
one S. T. Coleridge--who repeated that same doctrine without finding
any evil in it. Look at the first part of the _Wallenstein_, where
Count Isolani having said, 'Pooh! we are _all_ his subjects,'
_i. e._, soldiers, (though unproductive laborers,) not less than
productive peasants, the emperor's envoy replies--'Yet with a
difference, general;' and the difference implies Sir James's scale, his
vine-dresser being the equatorial case between the two extremes of the
envoy. Malthus again, in his population-book, contends for a mathematic
difference between animal and vegetable life, in respect to the law of
increase, as though the first increased by geometrical ratios, the last
by arithmetical! No proposition more worthy of laughter; since both,
when permitted to expand, increase by geometrical ratios, and the
latter by much higher ratios. Whereas, Malthus persuaded himself of his
crotchet simply by refusing the requisite condition in the vegetable
case, and granting it in the other. If you take a few grains of wheat,
and are required to plant all successive generations of their produce
in the same flower-pot for ever, of course you neutralize its expansion
by your own act of arbitrary limitation. [Footnote: Malthus would have
rejoined by saying--that the flowerpot limitation was the actual
limitation of nature in our present circumstances. In America it is
otherwise, he would say, but England is the very flowerpot you suppose;
she is a flowerpot which cannot be multiplied, and cannot even be
enlarged. Very well, so be it (which we say in order to waive
irrelevant disputes). But then the true inference will be--not that
vegetable increase proceeds under a different law from that which
governs animal increase, but that, through an accident of position, the
experiment cannot be tried in England. Surely the levers of Archimedes,
with submission to Sir Edward B. Lytton, were not the less levers
because he wanted the _locum standi_. It is proper, by the way,
that we should inform the reader of this generation where to look for
Coleridge's skirmishings with Malthus. They are to be found chiefly in
the late Mr. William Hazlitt's work on that subject: a work which
Coleridge so far claimed as to assert that it had been substantially
made up from his own conversation.] But so you would do, if you tried
the case of _animal_ increase by still exterminating all but one
replacing couple of parents. This is not to try, but merely a pretence
of trying, one order of powers against another. That was folly. But
Coleridge combated this idea in a manner so obscure, that nobody
understood it. And leaving these speculative conundrums, in coming to
the great practical interests afloat in the Poor Laws, Coleridge did so
little real work, that he left, as a _res integra_, to Dr. Alison,
the capital argument that legal and _adequate_ provision for the
poor, whether impotent poor or poor accidentally out of work, does not
extend pauperism--no, but is the one great resource for putting it
down. Dr. Alison's overwhelming and _experimental_ manifestations
of that truth have prostrated Malthus and his generation for ever. This
comes of not attending to the Latin maxim--'_Hoc_ age'--mind the
object before you. Dr. Alison, a wise man, '_hoc_ egit:' Coleridge
'_aliud_ egit.' And we see the result. In a case which suited him,
by interesting his peculiar feeling, Coleridge could command

'Attention full ten times as much as there needs.'

But search documents, value evidence, or thresh out bushels of
statistical tables, Coleridge could not, any more than he could ride
with Elliot's dragoons.

Another instance of Coleridge's inaptitude for such studies as
political economy is found in his fancy, by no means 'rich and rare,'
but meagre and trite, that taxes can never injure public prosperity by
mere excess of quantity; if they injure, we are to conclude that it
must be by their quality and mode of operation, or by their false
appropriation, (as, for instance, if they are sent out of the country
and spent abroad.) Because, says Coleridge, if the taxes are exhaled
from the country as vapors, back they come in drenching showers. Twenty
pounds ascend in a Scotch mist to the Chancellor of the Exchequer from
Leeds; but does it evaporate? Not at all: By return of post down comes
an order for twenty pounds' worth of Leeds cloth, on account of
Government, seeing that the poor men of the ----th regiment want new
gaiters. True; but of this return twenty pounds, not more than four
will be profit, _i.e._, surplus accruing to the public capital;
whereas, of the original twenty pounds, every shilling was surplus. The
same unsound fancy has been many times brought forward; often in
England, often in France. But it is curious, that its first appearance
upon any stage was precisely two centuries ago, when as yet political
economy slept with the pre-Adamites, viz., in the Long Parliament. In a
quarto volume of the debates during 1644-45, printed as an independent
work, will be found the same identical doctrine, supported very
sonorously by the same little love of an illustration from the see-saw
of mist and rain.

Political economy was not Coleridge's forte. In politics he was
happier. In mere personal politics, he (like every man when reviewed
from a station distant by forty years) will often appear to have erred;
nay, he will be detected and nailed in error. But this is the necessity
of us all. Keen are the refutations of time. And absolute results to
posterity are the fatal touchstone of opinions in the past. It is
undeniable, besides, that Coleridge had strong personal antipathies,
for instance, to Messrs. Pitt and Dundas. Yet _why_, we never
could understand. We once heard him tell a story upon Windermere, to
the late Mr. Curwen, then M. P. for Workington, which was meant,
apparently, to account for this feeling. The story amounted to this;
that, when a freshman at Cambridge, Mr. Pitt had wantonly amused
himself at a dinner party in Trinity, in smashing with filberts
(discharged in showers like grape-shot) a most costly dessert set of
cut glass, from which Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued a principle of
destructiveness in his _cerebellum_. Now, if this dessert set
belonged to some poor suffering Trinitarian, and not to himself, we are
of opinion that he was faulty, and ought, upon his own great subsequent
maxim, to have been coerced into 'indemnity for the past, and security
for the future.' But, besides that this glassy _mythus_ belongs to
an æra fifteen years earlier than Coleridge's so as to justify a shadow
of scepticism, we really cannot find, in such an _escapade_ under
the boiling blood of youth, any sufficient justification of that
withering malignity towards the name of Pitt, which runs through
Coleridge's famous _Fire, Famine, and Slaughter_. As this little
viperous _jeu-d'esprit_ (published anonymously) subsequently
became the subject of a celebrated after-dinner discussion in London,
at which Coleridge (_comme de raison_) was the chief speaker, the
reader of this generation may wish to know the question at issue; and
in order to judge of _that_, he must know the outline of this
devil's squib. The writer brings upon the scene three pleasant young
ladies, viz., Miss Fire, Miss Famine, and Miss Slaughter. 'What are you
up to? What's the row?'--we may suppose to be the introductory question
of the poet. And the answer of the ladies makes us aware that they are
fresh from larking in Ireland, and in France. A glorious spree they
had; lots of fun; and laughter _a discretion_. At all times
_gratus puellæ risus ab angulo_; so that we listen to their little
gossip with interest. They had been setting men, it seems, by the ears;
and the drollest little atrocities they do certainly report. Not but we
have seen better in the Nenagh paper, so far as Ireland is concerned.
But the pet little joke was in La Vendee. Miss Famine, who is the girl
for our money, raises the question--whether any of them can tell the
name of the leader and prompter to these high jinks of hell--if so, let
her whisper it.

'Whisper it, sister, so and so,
In a dark hint--distinct and low.'

Upon which the playful Miss Slaughter replies:--

'Letters _four_ do form his name.
* * * * *
He came by stealth and unlock'd my den;
And I have drunk the blood since then
Of thrice three hundred thousand men.'

Good: but the sting of the hornet lies in the conclusion. If this
quadriliteral man had done so much for _them_, (though really, we
think, 6s. 8d. might have settled his claim,) what, says Fire, setting
her arms a-kimbo, would they do for _him_? Slaughter replies,
rather crustily, that, as far as a good kicking would go--or (says
Famine) a little matter of tearing to pieces by the mob--they would be
glad to take tickets at his benefit. 'How, you bitches!' says Fire, 'is
that all?

'I alone am faithful; I
_Cling to him everlastingly_.'

The sentiment is diabolical. And the question argued at the London
dinner-table was--Could the writer have been other than a devil? The
dinner was at the late excellent Mr. Sotheby's, known advantageously in
those days as the translator of Wieland's _Oberon_. Several of the
great guns amongst the literary body were present; in particular, Sir
Walter Scott; and he, we believe, with his usual good-nature, took the
apologetic side of the dispute. In fact, he was in the secret. Nobody
else, barring the author, knew at first whose good name was at stake.
The scene must have been high. The company kicked about the poor
diabolic writer's head as if it had been a tennis-ball. Coleridge, the
yet unknown criminal, absolutely perspired and fumed in pleading for
the defendant; the company demurred; the orator grew urgent; wits began
to _smoke_ the case, as active verbs; the advocate to _smoke_, as a
neuter verb; the 'fun grew fast and furious;' until at length
_delinquent arose_, burning tears in his eyes, and confessed to an
audience, (now bursting with stifled laughter, but whom he supposed to
be bursting with fiery indignation,) 'Lo! I am he that wrote it.'

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