Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

to have him released. Coleridge returned to Cambridge and shortly thereafter planned to establish a weekly journal. He traveled around England looking for subscribers for this publication. He recounts that he arrived in Bristol, spoke with a gentleman, that this gentleman asked him if he had read the newspaper, and he answered that he did not believe that one of his duties as a Christian was to read the newspaper, which caused no small amount of hilarity, because everyone knew that the purpose of his trip to Bristol was to engage subscribers for his publication.Coleridge, after having been invited to join a conversation, took the strange precaution of filling half his pipe bowl with salt and the other half with tobacco. In spite of this, he became ill, as he was not in the habit of smoking. Here we have one of those inexplicable episodes in Coleridge’s life: his carrying out of absurd acts.
    The journal was finally published. It was called
The Watchman
, something like “
El sereno
” or “
El vigilante
,” and actually consisted of a series of sermons, more than news; then it was closed a year later. Coleridge also collaborated withSouthey on the writing of a play,
The Fall ofRobespierre,
and another about Joan of Arc, who speaks about the Leviathan, for example, and magnetism, subjects that surely never figured in the conversations of the saint. 5 Otherwise, it can be asserted that he did nothing but converse. He wrote a few poems we will look at later, called “The AncientMariner” . . . another is called“Christabel,” and another, “Kubla Khan,” the name of that Chinese emperor who was Marco Polo’s patron. 6
    Coleridge’s conversations were very unusual.De Quincey, who was a disciple and admirer, said that each time Coleridge talked, it was as if he were tracing a circle in the air. In other words, he went further and further away from the subject he had started with, then returned to it, but very slowly. Coleridge’s conversation could last for two or three hours. At the end, it was discovered that he had traced a circle, returning to the point of departure. But usually his interlocutors would not have lasted that long and would have left. So they carried away the impression of a series of inexplicable digressions.
    Coleridge’s friends thought that a good outlet for his genius would be for him to give lectures. In fact, his lectures were advertised and many people subscribed to the series. For the most part, when the date arrived, Coleridge would not appear, and when he did appear, he would speak about anything other than the subject that had been announced. And then there were times he spoke about everything, even the subject of the lecture. But those occasions were rare.
    Coleridge married fairly young. The story is that he visited a house where there were three sisters. He was in love with the second one, but he thought that if the second got married before the first—that is, according to what he told DeQuincey—this could wound the sexual pride of the first. And so, out of a sense of delicacy, he married the first, even though he was not in love with her. It is no big surprise to learn that the marriage failed. Coleridge had nothing to do with his wife and children and went to live with his friends. Coleridge’s friends felt honored by his visits, honored. At first it was assumed that the visits would last a week, then they lasted a month, and in some cases years. And Coleridge accepted this hospitality, not with ingratitude, but with a kind of absentmindedness, because he was the most absentminded of men.
    Coleridge traveled to Germany, and he realized he had never seen the sea, in spite of having described it in his poem “The AncientMariner” in an admirable, unforgettable way. But he was not so impressed by it. The sea of his imagination was vaster than the real one. Then, another of Coleridge’s characteristics was to announce ambitious works—a history of philosophy, a history of English literature, a history of German literature. And he wrote to his friends—they knew he was lying, and he knew that they knew—that this or the other work was well under way, even when he hadn’t written a single line. Among the works he did complete is a translation ofSchiller’s
Wallenstein
trilogy, which, according to some critics, among them Germans, is better than the original.
    One of the themes that has most worried critics is that of Coleridge’s plagiaries. In his
Biographia