Coleridge's Letters
The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Selected and with an Introduction by Kathleen Raine. (Grey Walls Press. 12s. 6d.)
IN 1895 E. H. Coleridgeedited many of his celebrated grandfather's 'letters in two stately volumes. More recently Professor E. L. Griggs published two volumes snore. The remnant, which is considerable, will no doubt mostly appear when Professor -Griggs achieves his proposed ultimate collection—but Coleridge will inevitably turn up after that in uncollected letters of great length and each with some flashes of his originality. In these circumstances, and while so much is out of print or not yet in it, a selection of this poet's letters is " not a bad thing to have about a house."
I was almost going to say that any selection of two or three hundred pages would do, but Miss Raine has made a really good one. it contains the principal materials for a general acquaintance with Coleridge's personality, genius and performance ; and, in spite of what has been said in dispraise of him by those particularly with tidy minds and serious faces, Coleridge ought not to be missed by any enthusiast for human life. Arriving at his dwelling within the pages of Miss Raipe's book, we do not run the risk which attended actual visits to his last home in the Grove, Highgate. We need not encounter him-on one of his theological mornings—though we may if we please. But we are in S. T. C.'s room ; he is out at the moment, patting rather ungrateful children on the head, and he has left on his desk a letter to John Flaxman. A few words catch our eye : " I am preparing an essay on the Connection of Statuary and Sculpture with Religion." This enterprising letter is one of the selected items, even if the essay is not among Coleridge's ascertained works. Another letter is on Blake and some of his poems, and there is nothing vague about it. Who else at that date could have been so precise on Blake ?
We see, or hear, Coleridge in these letters in his variety, from mystic to mischief, from apologist to man of action ; a man of an inex- haustible curiosity, and capable of comprehending whatever idea came his way. Thus his letters are apt to transform themselves into something like the magnificent essays which he did not write, with a freedom of language and illustration which he might have modified for the Spectator. In October, 1825, Coleridge goes on a holiday to Ramsgate, by steamer, and promptly and affectionately reports his safe arrival alongside Ramsgate Pier at 4.30 p.m. to his Highgate housemate James Gillman. But the long letter is simply a witty and beautiful discourse on the " flat'ning thought that the more we have seen, the less we have to say."
No letter-writer in the English language excels Coleridge in life and force of expression, however he may appear comparatively in other points which make published correspondence interesting and popular. He seems to forget his particular correspondent often enough, which is a defect, but he makes up for that in a way by the gusto of his own concerns. An unknown correspondent in 1820 receives a postal script from him, as it might be, to Mr. Nobody, in which Coleridge describes his unique position among the English
poets. He does this poetically, sketching that " yet stranger and wider Allegory than of yore " which he would bring forth one day " if ever 1 should feel once again the genial warmth and stir of the poetic impulse." Alas, the impulse stayed away, but the substitute itself is wonderful, and such passages show the letter-writer now edited by a modern poet as greater in power even though lesser in strict correspondence than the others in this series.
EDMUND BLUNDEN.
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