Coleridge on the Mania of Celebrating Personalities

Samuel Taylor Coleridge · Down to Earth Series · 12 pages

A twelve-page compilation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on biography and personal gossip, opened by an abstract and train of thoughts with page references.

The argument is against a particular literary habit rather than against biography itself. Voluminous biographical trivialities are said to render the real character almost invisible, like the counterfeit frankincense that smoke-blacks the favourite idol of a Catholic church. The comparison Coleridge draws for the practice is exact: to scribble trifles on the glass of an inn window is the mark of an idler, but to engrave them on the marble monument sacred to the memory of the departed great is something worse than idleness. He then explains why such stories are not harmless. Insignificant anecdotes derive no real respectability from the eminence of their subject, and so tend to have their insipidity seasoned by the same bad passions that accompany gossip generally — the misapprehensions of weak men meeting the misinterpretations of malignant men, which he says has often formed the groundwork of the most grievous calumnies. The duty of the honest biographer is stated fairly, to portray the prominent imperfections as well as the excellencies of his subject; but that duty is not accepted as an excuse for heaping together particulars which prove nothing of any man that could not be taken for granted of all men. The closing passages treat the appetite itself as a symptom more alarming than it is troublesome as a disease, and object to the pollution of the mind, by vulgar scandal and personal anxiety, of the very sanctuary to which one should flee for refuge from them.

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