Poems of Coleridge | Page 5

world was
always a sufficiently unreal thing to him, facts more than remote
enough, consequences unrelated to their causes; he lived in a mist, and
opium thickened the mist to a dense yellow fog. Opium might have
helped to make Southey a poet; it left Coleridge the prisoner of a
cobweb-net of dreams. What he wanted was some astringent force in
things, to tighten, not to loosen, the always expanding and
uncontrollable limits of his mind. Opium did but confirm what the
natural habits of his constitution had bred in him: an overwhelming
indolence, out of which the energies that still arose intermittently were
no longer flames, but the escaping ghosts of flame, mere black smoke.
At twenty-four, in a disinterested description of himself for the benefit
of a friend whom he had not yet met, he declares, "the walk of the
whole man indicates indolence capable of energies." It was that walk
which Carlyle afterwards described, unable to keep to either side of the
gardenpath. "The moral obligation is to me so very strong a stimulant,"
Coleridge writes to Crabb Robinson, "that in nine cases out of ten it
acts as a narcotic. The blow that should rouse, stuns me." He plays
another variation on the ingenious theme in a letter to his brother:
"Anxieties that stimulate others infuse an additional narcotic into my
mind.... Like some poor labourer, whose night's sleep has but
imperfectly refreshed his overwearied frame, I have sate in drowsy
uneasiness, and doing nothing have thought what a deal I have to do."

His ideal, which he expressed in 1797 in a letter to Thelwall, and, in
1813, almost word for word, in a poem called" The Night-Scene," was,
"like the Indian Vishnu, to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in
the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a million years for a few
minutes just to know that I was going to sleep a million years more."
Observe the effect of the desire for the absolute, reinforced by
constitutional indolence, and only waiting for the illuminating excuse
of opium.
From these languors, and from their consequences, Coleridge found
relief in conversation, for which he was always ready, while he was far
from always ready for the more precise mental exertion of writing. "Oh,
how I wish to be talking, not writing," he cries in a letter to Southey in
1803, "for my mind is so full, that my thoughts stifle and jam each
other." And, in 1816, in his first letter to Gillman, he writes, more
significantly, "The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that
haunts my mind; but when I am alone, the horrors that I have suffered
from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm
me." It was along one avenue of this continual escape from himself that
Coleridge found himself driven (anywhere, away from action) towards
what grew to be the main waste of his life. Hartley Coleridge, in the
preface to "Table-Talk," has told us eloquently how, "throughout a
long-drawn summer's day, would this man talk to you in low, equable,
but clear and musical tones, concerning things human and divine"; we
know that Carlyle found him "unprofitable, even tedious," and wished
"to worship him, and toss him in a blanket"; and we have the vivid
reporting of Keats, who tells us that, on his one meeting with Coleridge,
"I walked with him, at his alderman-after-dinner pace, for near two
miles, I suppose. In those two miles he broached a thousand things. Let
me see if I can give you a list--nightingales--poetry--on poetical
sensation--metaphysics--different genera and species of dreams--
nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single and
double touch--a dream related--first and second consciousness--the
difference explained between will and volition--so say metaphysicians
from a want of smoking the second consciousness--monsters--the
Kraken--mermaids--Southey believes in them--Southey's belief too
much diluted--a ghost story--Goodmorning --I heard his voice as he

came towards me--I heard it as he moved away--I had heard it all the
interval--if it may be called so." It may be that we have had no more
wonderful talker, and, no doubt, the talk had its reverential listeners, its
disciples; but to cultivate or permit disciples is itself a kind of waste, a
kind of weakness; it requires a very fixed and energetic indolence to
become, as Coleridge became, a vocal utterance, talking for talking's
sake.
But beside talking, there was lecturing, with Coleridge a scarcely
different form of talk; and it is to this consequence of a readiness to
speak and a reluctance to write that we owe much of his finest criticism,
in the imperfectly recorded "Lectures on Shakespeare." Coleridge as a
critic is not easily to be summed up. What may first surprise us, when
we begin to look into his critical opinions, is the uncertainty