the making of the Coleridge we love and admire. Reading the detailed
story of his life, we may note that, in the brief and simple relations
with Mary Evans, Coleridge acted as though he had no definite control
over his own impulses. Some of the correspondence has been preserved,
and it is hard to escape the impression that while the poet was quite
serious in his protestations, he exaggerated with true poetic licence
the depth and permanency of his regard.
In January 1791, the Almoners of Christ's Hospital appointed Coleridge
to an Exhibition at Jesus College, Cambridge, with the idea that the
school's promising pupil would pass from the University to the Church.
He left Newgate Street in the September following, and entered the
University a month later, intervening weeks being spent, in all
probability, in Devonshire.
We find him now at the parting of the ways, the wholesome bonds of
discipline relaxing, a measure of liberty before him of a kind to which
he had been a stranger hitherto, and one is inclined to think that he
was absolutely unfitted to stand alone or to be his own master, even
within the limits imposed upon the Cambridge undergraduate. His
brilliant intellect was not associated with sound common sense, the
conventions and restriction of normal life were things he would not
trouble about, his mind, daring and speculative, was never at rest, he
stood desperately in need of some steadying influence of a kind that
never came to him. The newest thought could carry him away, he cared not
whither. Like many another brilliant man, Coleridge needed direction and
discipline long after the time when the convention of the world seeks to
enforce either. We cannot see whence the force was to come, but we must
realise how greatly it was needed. Coleridge was too clever for the
ranks to which he was accredited; his gifts were of the uneasy kind that
can find no rest. Some men of similar temperament can settle down after
a brief struggle; they bridle themselves, hide their light, bow to the
world above them, and prosper. To Coleridge such a method of living
would have seemed immoral, far more immoral than his own shifting,
haphazard and unhappy career. He was always the slave of his own moral
ideas, his weaknesses were a tribute to the sick and ailing body; to his
judgment, his moral consciousness, he acted with most rigorous honesty,
even to his own detriment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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