The Life and Times of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Complete Autobiographical Works. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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      PREFACE

       Table of Contents

      Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which the poet's nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, published in 1835, was a popular book from the first, and has won the approval of two generations of readers. Unlike the Biographia Literaria, or the original and revised versions of The Friend, which never had their day at all, or the Aids to Reflection, which passed through many editions, but now seems to have delivered its message, the Table Talk is still well known and widely read, and that not only by students of literature. The task which the editor set himself was a difficult one, but it lay within the powers of an attentive listener, possessed of a good memory and those rarer gifts of a refined and scholarly taste, a sound and luminous common sense. He does not attempt to reproduce Coleridge's conversation or monologue or impassioned harangue, but he preserves and notes down the detached fragments of knowledge and wisdom which fell from time to time from the master's lips. Here are "the balmy sunny islets of the blest and the intelligible," an unvexed and harbourous archipelago. Very sparingly, if at all, have those pithy "sentences" and weighty paragraphs been trimmed or pruned by the pious solicitude of the memorialist, but it must be borne in mind that the unities are more or less consciously observed, alike in the matter of the discourse and the artistic presentation to the reader. There is, in short, not merely a "mechanic" but an "organic regularity" in the composition of the work as a whole. A "myriad-minded" sage, who has seen men and cities, who has read widely and shaped his thoughts in a peculiar mould, is pouring out his stores of knowledge, the garnered fruit of a life of study and meditation, for the benefit of an apt learner, a discreet and appreciative disciple. A day comes when the marvellous lips are constrained to an endless silence, and it becomes the duty and privilege of the beloved and honoured pupil to "snatch from forgetfulness" and to hand down to posterity the great tradition of his master's eloquence. A labour of love so useful and so fascinating was accomplished by the gifted editor of the Table Talk, and it was accomplished once for all. The compilation of a new Table Talk, if it were possible, would be a mistake and an impertinence.

      The present collection of hitherto unpublished aphorisms, reflections, confessions and soliloquies, which for want of a better name I have entitled Anima Poetæ, does not in any way challenge comparison with the Table Talk. It is, indeed, essentially different, not only in the sources from which it has been compiled but in constitution and in aim.

      "Since I left you," writes Coleridge in a letter to Wordsworth of May 12, 1812, "my pocket-books have been my sole confidants." Doubtless, in earlier and happier days, he had been eager not merely to record but to communicate to the few who would listen or might understand the ceaseless and curious workings of his ever-shaping imagination, but from youth to age note-books and pocket-books were his silent confidants, his "never-failing friends" by night and day.

      More than fifty of these remarkable documents are extant. The earliest of the series, which dates from 1795 and which is known as the "Gutch Memorandum Book," was purchased in 1868 by the trustees of the British Museum, and is now exhibited in the King's Library. It consists, for the most part, of fragments of prose and verse thrown off at the moment, and stored up for future use in poem or lecture or sermon. A few of these fragments were printed in the Literary Remains (4 vols. 1836-39), and others are to be found (pp. 103, 5, 6, 9 et passim) in Herr Brandl's Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School. The poetical fragments are printed in extenso in Coleridge's Poetical Works (Macmillan, 1893), pp. 453-58. A few specimens of the prose fragments have been included in the first chapter of this work. One of the latest note-books, an unfinished folio, contains the Autobiographic Note of 1832, portions of which were printed in Gillman's Life of Coleridge, pp. 9-33, and a mass of unpublished matter, consisting mainly of religious exercises and biblical criticism.

      Of the intervening collection of pocket-books, note-books, copy-books, of all shapes, sizes and bindings, a detailed description would be tedious and out of place. Their contents may be roughly divided into diaries of tours in Germany, the Lake District, Scotland, Sicily and Italy; notes for projected and accomplished works, rough drafts of poems, schemes of metre and metrical experiments; notes for lectures on Shakspere and other dramatists; quotations from books of travel, from Greek, Latin, German and Italian classics, with and without critical comments; innumerable fragments of metaphysical and theological speculation; and commingled with this unassorted medley of facts and thoughts and fancies, an occasional and intermitted record of personal feeling, of love and friendship, of disappointment and regret, of penitence and resolve, of faith and hope in the Unseen.

      Hitherto, but little use has been made of this life-long accumulation of literary material. A few specimens, "Curiosities of Literature" they might have been called, were contributed by Coleridge himself to Southey's Omniana of 1812, and a further selection of some fifty fragments, gleaned from note-books 21-1/2 and 22, and from a third unnumbered MS. book now in my possession, were printed by H. N. Coleridge in the first volume of the Literary Remains under the heading Omniana 1809-1816. The Omniana of 1812 were, in many instances, re-written by Coleridge before they were included in Southey's volumes, and in the later issue, here and there, the editor has given shape and articulation to an unfinished or half-formed sentence. The earlier and later Omniana, together with the fragments which were published by Allsop in his Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, in 1836, were included by the late Thomas Ashe in his reprint of the Table Talk, Bell & Co., 1884.

      Some fourteen or fifteen notes of singular interest and beauty, which belong to the years 1804, 1812, 1826, 1829, etc., were printed by James Gillman in his unfinished "Life of Coleridge," and it is evident that he contemplated a more extended use of the note-books in the construction of his second volume, or, possibly, the publication of a supplementary volume of notes or Omniana. Transcripts which were made for this purpose are extant, and have been placed at my disposal by the kindness of Mrs. Henry Watson, who inherited them from her grandmother, Mrs. Gillman.

      I may add that a few quotations from diaries of tours in the Lake Country and on the Continent are to be found in the foot-notes appended to the two volumes of Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge which were issued in the spring of the present year.

      To publish the note-books in extenso would be impracticable, if even after the lapse of sixty years since the death of the writer it were permissible. They are private memoranda-books, and rightly and properly have been regarded as a sacred trust by their several custodians. But it is none the less certain that in disburthening himself of the ideas and imaginations which pressed upon his consciousness, in committing them to writing and carefully preserving them through all his wanderings, Coleridge had no mind that they should perish utterly. The invisible pageantry of thought and passion which for ever floated into his spiritual ken, the perpetual hope, the half-belief that the veil of the senses would be rent in twain, and that he and not another would be the first to lay bare the mysteries of being, and to solve the problem of the ages—of these was the breath of his soul. It was his fate to wrestle from night to morn with the Angel of the Vision, and of that unequal combat he has left, by way of warning or encouragement, a broken but an inspired and inspiring record. "Hints and first thoughts" he bade us regard the contents of his memorandum-books—"cogitabilia rather than cogitata a me, not fixed opinions," and yet acts of obedience to the apostolic command of "Try all things: hold fast that which is good"—say, rather, acts of obedience to the compulsion of his own genius to "take a pen and write in a book all the words of the vision."

      The aim of the present work, however imperfectly accomplished, has been to present in a compendious shape a collection of unpublished aphorisms and sentences, and at the same time to enable the reader to form some estimate of those strange self-communings to which Coleridge devoted so much of his intellectual energies, СКАЧАТЬ