Chapter XXVIII: The New Academe

[The letters to Allsop gradually lessen in number as we draw away from the year 1822. This is not necessarily because there was less communication between the two friends, but more probably because their meetings were more frequent. The Gillmans, on account of the large circle of friends who assembled round their guest, had to set aside an afternoon once a week as a special "at home" day for the convenience of visitors (_Life of Alaric Watts_, i, 244-45). This was the origin of the _Table Talk_, edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge, which begins on 29th December 1822, and continues, with breaks, to the year 1834. Various accounts have been given of these celebrated Thursdays, the most notable of which is that of J. Noon Talfourd in the concluding chapter of his _Final Memorials of Charles Lamb_. The scraps of _Table Talk_, published by Henry Nelson Coleridge, though reckoned of great value, are, after all, very isolated; and to any one who has studied Coleridge's prose works and can comprehend the "grand planetary wheelings" of his logic they appear insufficient to warrant the accounts of the eulogists of Coleridge's conversational ability. Doubtless they have the same relationship to Coleridge's conversation as the shattered fragments of the great icebergs which come floating down the Gulf Stream and wreck themselves on the coasts of Iceland have to the icebergs of which they are the disunited parts.

Many men who afterwards attained to eminence in their several departments gathered at the Grove to hear Coleridge discourse. Charles and Mary Lamb, Basil Montagu and his wife, J. Hookham Frere, Henry Crabb Robinson, John Sterling, Henry Nelson Coleridge, Allsop, and Joseph Henry Green, may be regarded as the planets who revolved around the central sun. The planets, too, occasionally brought their satellites. Joseph Henry Green made Coleridge's acquaintance in 1817. Deeply interested in philosophy, he imbibed Coleridge's principles, and afterwards wrote a book on the Logos, published in 1865 as _Spiritual Philosophy_. Edward Irving also sat at the feet of Coleridge; he brought Carlyle to Highgate in 1824, who wrote his impressions of Coleridge to his brother the same year, and twenty years later depicted Coleridge in colours which will remain beside those of Hazlitt, De Quincey, Noon Talfourd, Henry Nelson Coleridge, and Clement Carlyon and T. Colley Grattan, one of the fine gallery of contemporary literary portraits of Coleridge. Dr. Chalmers came in 1827 and caught occasional glimpses of meaning, (_Memoir_ by Hanna, ii, 126-27): and Emerson called in 1833, without, however, any vital feeling of spiritual inter-relationship springing up between them, (_English Traits_).

During 1824 Coleridge was much engaged with Religious subjects; and then composed those Letters afterwards published as _Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_.

Our next letter refers to the _Aids to Reflection_ which Coleridge was now having published. The germs of the volume may be found in the long Theological Letter to Cottle of 1807, in which Coleridge extols Leighton as the best of the old divines, and in a letter to John Murray of 18th January 1822 (_Letters_, 717) in which he projected a selection of _Beauties from Leighton_. Its theory of Atonement also lies in germ in the play of _Osorio_, 1797, (_Remorse_ of 1813). The _Aids to Reflection_ not only became the most popular of Coleridge's works; it helped to forward interest in his other writings.]

The _Aids to Reflection_ first appeared in 1825. The original title was _Aids to Reflection in the formation of a manly character on the several grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion; illustrated by select passages from our elder divines, especially from Archbishop Leighton_. In an advertisement to the first edition, the Author mentions that the work was proposed and begun as a mere selection from the writings of Leighton, with a few notes and a biographical preface by the selector, but underwent a revolution of plan and object. "It would, indeed," he adds, "be more correct to say, that the present volume owed its accidental origin to the intention of compiling one of a different description than to speak of it as the same work." "Still, however, the selections from Leighton, which will be found in the fundamental and moral sections of this work, and which I could retain consistently with its present form and matter, will, both from the intrinsic excellence and from the characteristic beauty of the passages, suffice to answer two prominent purposes of the original plan; that of placing in a clear light the principle which pervades all Leighton's writings--his sublime view, I mean, of Religion and Morality as the means of reforming the human soul in the Divine Image (_Idea_); and that of exciting an interest in the works, and an affectionate reverence for the name and memory of this severely tried and truly primitive Churchman."

Neither Hume nor Clarendon, I believe, mentions the persecution of Archbishop Leighton's father by the Prelatical party of his day; and yet it was one of their worst acts, and that which most excited wrath and indignation against the Primate--so faithful is their portrait of those times! Never can I read Mr. Wordsworth's sublime sonnet to Laud, especially the lines,

Prejudged by foes determined not to spare,
An old weak man for vengeance laid aside,

without thinking of another "old weak man for vengeance laid aside"--of Laud in the day of his power pulling off his hat and thanking God for the inhuman sentence that had been passed upon the already wasted victim[135]--of the miserable den to which the mangled man was committed for life after that sentence had been executed in all its multiplication and precision of barbarity--then calling to mind the words of our Saviour, _They that take the sword shall perish with the sword_, and _Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy_. It was not _mercy_ alone that was violated by these acts--but law and justice; and if he who instigated and rejoiced in them received neither justice nor mercy in his turn, is he worthy of the sacred name of _Martyr_? May we not say that the _vengeance_ which fell upon this persecutor was the Lord's vengeance, even if it came to pass by evil instruments, and fell upon a head already bowed down, and in some respects a noble one? Can the _glory and honour_ of meeting death with firmness,--nay even with "sublime" piety, cast its beams backward and bathe in one pure luminous flood a life darkened with such deep shadows, as those that chequer the sunshine of Laud's career?--the parts really brightened with the light of heaven? Plainness, sincerity, integrity, learning, munificence to a cause[136]--can virtues like these outweigh or neutralize such faults of head, heart, and temper, as lie to the charge of this Bishop in the church of Christ? As well might we set the cold bright morning dews, that rest on the stony crown of Vesuvius, against the burning lava that bursts from its crater, and expect them to quench the fire or reduce it to a moderate heat. _Some_ abatement must be made from the guilt of his violences from consideration of the _times_; but to subtract the whole on that account, or even to make light of it, is surely too much to make moral good and evil dependent on circumstance. What? Have Arundel, Bonner, Gardiner little or nothing to answer for? Was there ever yet a persecutor that persecuted from mere _speculative_ inhumanity? Even through Clarendon's account we may discern, I think, that Laud's private passions, in part at least, engaged him in the cause of Intolerance. He had been exasperated, before he attained power, by Puritan molestations and oppositions,--he became the persecutor of Puritans after he attained it; as schoolboys that have been tormented while they were in a low form, torment in their turn when they get into a high one,--not their tormentors but unfortunates who represent them to their imagination. An eminently good and wise man is above his _times_, if not in all, yet in many things; but Laud was the very impersonation of his times--the impersonated spirit of his age and his party. (Compare his over ceremonious consecration of St. Catherine's Church, gloated over by Hume, with Archdeacon Hare's remarks on his neglect of his diocese, in _The Mission of the Comforter_.) They who are of that party still, who would still swathe religion by way of supporting it, and dizen by way of dressing it, and gaze with fond regretful admiration upon the giant forms of Spiritual Despotism and Exaggerated Externalism, as they loom shadowy and magnificent through the vapoury vista of ages, to them no wonder that he is a giant too. And there are others, far above that or any other _party_, who in their love and zeal for the Church, abstract the how and the why of Laud's public warfare, and see him abstractedly as the Champion of the Church of England. "God knows my heart," says Mr. Coleridge, (in a marginal note on Mr. Southey's article on the _History of Dissenters_, in the _Quarterly Review_ of October 1813,) "how bitterly I abhor _all_ intolerance, how deeply I pity the actors when there is reason to suppose them deluded; but is it not clear that this theatrical scene of Laud's death, who was the victim of almost national indignation, is not to be compared with 'bloody sentences' in the coolness of secure power? As well might you palliate the horrible atrocities of the Inquisition, every one of which might be justified on the same grounds that Southey has here defended Laud, by detailing the vengeance taken on some of the Inquisitors." I do not see that _here_ my honoured Uncle _defends_ the Primate: he says, "We are not the apologists of Laud; in some things he was erroneous, in some imprudent, in others culpable. Evil, which upon the great scale is ever made conducive to good, produces evil to those by whom it comes." And how wise and beautiful is this sentiment a little further on! "It especially behoves the historian to inculcate charity, and take part with the oppressed, whoever may have been the oppressors."

As some excuse for my Father's expression, "theatrical scene," I allege that sentence of Laud's; "Never did man put off mortality with a better courage, nor look upon his bloody and malicious enemies with more Christian charity." My Father adds: "I know well how imprudent and unworldly these my opinions are. The Dissenters will give me no thanks, because I prefer and extol the _present_ Church of England, and the partizans of the Church will calumniate me, because I condemn particular members, and regret particular æras, of the _former_ Church of England. Would that Southey had written the _whole_ of his review in the spirit of this beautiful page." (Page 102.) In that very interesting collection of meditative Sonnets by the late Sir Aubrey de Vere is one upon Laud, against which I ventured to write, "If _anything_ done in the name of principle must needs be righteous, then the tortures and long languishing of Leighton are no impeachment of Laud's righteousness." There was a second edition of the _Aids_ in 1831, a fifth in 1843.

The little work _On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the Idea of each_, first appeared in 1830, and went into a second edition in the same year. It is now joined with the _Lay Sermons_ in one volume. To the _Church and State_ are appended _Notes on Taylor's History of Enthusiasm_, and _A Dialogue between Demosius and Mystes_.

[LETTER 214. TO ALLSOP

March 20th, 1825.

My dearest Friend,

I should have answered your last but for three causes: first, that I had proofs to correct and a passage of great nicety to add, neither of which could be deferred without injustice to the Publishers, and the breach of a definite promise on my part; second, that I was almost incapacitated from thinking of and doing anything as it ought to be done by poor Mrs. G.'s restless and interrogating anxieties, which in the first instance put the whole working Hive of my Thoughts in a whirl and a bur; and then, when I see her care-worn countenance, and reflect on the state of her health (and it is difficult to say which of the two, ill-health or habitual anxiety, is more cause and more effect), a sharp fit of the Heart-ache follows.

But enough of this Subject. I ought to be ashamed of myself for troubling you with it; you have enough frets and frictions of your own. And so I proceed to the third cause, which is that (how far imputable to the mood of mind I was in, I cannot say) I did not understand your letter.

Is there any definite service, or any chance of any definite service, great or small, that I can do or promote, or expedite, by coming to town? If there be, let me have a line or a monosyllable _Yes_, and mention the time. I would have set off and taken the chance without asking the question, but that I have so many irons in the fire at this present moment,--1, my Preface; 2, my Essay; 3, a Work prepared for the press by my Hebrew Friend,[137] in which I am greatly interested, morally and _crumenically_, though not like the Modern Descendants of Heber, one of a _crumenimulga Natio_, _i.e._ a purse-milking set; and 4, Revisal, etc., for a friend only less near than yourself.

Mr. Chance, I take it for granted, has written to you. My opinion is, that he will be a valuable man, not only generally, but _especially_ to that which alone concerns _me_--_your_ comfort and happiness. He is a self-satisfied man, but of the very kindest and best sort. Prosperous in all his concerns, and with peace in his own conscience and family, I regard such vainness but as the overflow of humanity. I do not like him the better _for_ it; but I should not like him the better _without_ it. Meantime he is active, shrewd, a thorough man of business; _sanguine_ I should think, both by constitution and habitual success: and, under any sudden emergency, I think that Mr. Chance, not so deeply interested, and yet (such is his nature) with equal liveliness in feeling, would be a comfort to you.

I shall miss the post if I do more than add, that whatever really serves _you_, will (and on his death-pillow quite as much as in his present garret) delight

Your sincere and affectionate friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.[138]

T. Allsop, Esq.