Sterling,who assiduously attended him,with profound reverence,and was often with him by himself,for a good many months,gives a record of their first colloquy.[8]Their colloquies were numerous,and he had taken note of many;but they are all gone to the fire,except this first,which Mr.Hare has printed,--unluckily without date.It contains a number of ingenious,true and half-true observations,and is of course a faithful epitome of the things said;but it gives small idea of Coleridge's way of talking;--this one feature is perhaps the most recognizable,"Our interview lasted for three hours,during which he talked two hours and three quarters."Nothing could be more copious than his talk;and furthermore it was always,virtually or literally,of the nature of a monologue;suffering no interruption,however reverent;hastily putting aside all foreign additions,annotations,or most ingenuous desires for elucidation,as well-meant superfluities which would never do.Besides,it was talk not flowing any-whither like a river,but spreading every-whither in inextricable currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea;terribly deficient in definite goal or aim,nay often in logical intelligibility;_what_you were to believe or do,on any earthly or heavenly thing,obstinately refusing to appear from it.So that,most times,you felt logically lost;swamped near to drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables,spreading out boundless as if to submerge the world.
To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into,whether you consent or not,can in the long-run be exhilarating to no creature;how eloquent soever the flood of utterance that is descending.But if it be withal a confused unintelligible flood of utterance,threatening to submerge all known landmarks of thought,and drown the world and you!--I have heard Coleridge talk,with eager musical energy,two stricken hours,his face radiant and moist,and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers,--certain of whom,I for one,still kept eagerly listening in hope;the most had long before given up,and formed (if the room were large enough)secondary humming groups of their own.He began anywhere:you put some question to him,made some suggestive observation:instead of answering this,or decidedly setting out towards answer of it,he would accumulate formidable apparatus,logical swim-bladders,transcendental life-preservers and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear,for setting out;perhaps did at last get under way,--but was swiftly solicited,turned aside by the glance of some radiant new game on this hand or that,into new courses;and ever into new;and before long into all the Universe,where it was uncertain what game you would catch,or whether any.
His talk,alas,was distinguished,like himself,by irresolution:it disliked to he troubled with conditions,abstinences,definite fulfilments;--loved to wander at its own sweet will,and make its auditor and his claims and humble wishes a mere passive bucket for itself!He had knowledge about many things and topics,much curious reading;but generally all topics led him,after a pass or two,into the high seas of theosophic philosophy,the hazy infinitude of Kantean transcendentalism,with its "sum-m-mjects "and "om-m-mjects."Sad enough;for with such indolent impatience of the claims and ignorances of others,he had not the least talent for explaining this or anything unknown to them;and you swam and fluttered in the mistiest wide unintelligible deluge of things,for most part in a rather profitless uncomfortable manner.
Glorious islets,too,I have seen rise out of the haze;but they were few,and soon swallowed in the general element again.Balmy sunny islets,islets of the blest and the intelligible:--on which occasions those secondary humming groups would all cease humming,and hang breathless upon the eloquent words;till once your islet got wrapt in the mist again,and they could recommence humming.Eloquent artistically expressive words you always had;piercing radiances of a most subtle insight came at intervals;tones of noble pious sympathy,recognizable as pious though strangely colored,were never wanting long:but in general you could not call this aimless,cloud-capt,cloud-based,lawlessly meandering human discourse of reason by the name of "excellent talk,"but only of "surprising;"and were reminded bitterly of Hazlitt's account of it:"Excellent talker,very,--if you let him start from no premises and come to no conclusion."Coleridge was not without what talkers call wit,and there were touches of prickly sarca** in him,contemptuous enough of the world and its idols and popular dignitaries;he had traits even of poetic humor:but in general he seemed deficient in laughter;or indeed in sympathy for concrete human things either on the sunny or on the stormy side.One right peal of concrete laughter at some convicted flesh-and-blood absurdity,one burst of noble indignation at some injustice or depravity,rubbing elbows with us on this solid Earth,how strange would it have been in that Kantean haze-world,and how infinitely cheering amid its vacant air-castles and dim-melting ghosts and shadows!None such ever came.His life had been an abstract thinking and dreaming,idealistic,passed amid the ghosts of defunct bodies and of unborn ones.The moaning singsong of that theosophico-metaphysical monotony left on you,at last,a very dreary feeling.