The Painful Wonder Rosemary Ashton, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. ISBN: 0 631 18746 4 (hardback) Price: £25

This is a clear, splendid biography, whose 407 pages of detailed labour Coleridge has long deserved—perhaps even a little more. But if this biography sometimes minimises the complexities of the Coleridgean philosophy only now emerging in all its untidy splendour, it does manage to do what no other has yet achieved: to paint the picture, warts and all, without either apologies or accusations. Ashton has written an admirable, unsqueemish biography that everyone will be glad to read; Coleridgeans will be relieved to read it. The task could hardly have been easy. The irresolution, dishonesty and over-dependence that mark all aspects of Coleridge's life might be managed on their own; but united with the generosity and perspicuity for which he is fabled, those ignoble traits demand an elaborate psychological explanation that cannot but be moral, too. Why should a man with such an ebullient intellect, always churning even in the most dire circumstances, a man of such acute self-consciousness and possessed of such insight into human nature, have lived so unwisely, so unhappily? The question baffled Coleridge's upright nephew, John Taylor, who observed with palpable chagrin: "Nothing can be finer than the principles he lays down in morals and religion; the wonder, the painful wonder is that a man who can think and feel as he does ... should have acted and still act as he has done and does" (quoted on p. 349). But it was the opium addiction and unusual domestic arrangements that troubled John Taylor and a whole generation of Victorian readers—moral deficiencies which biographers could not but condemn in language equal to the offence, among them J. D. Campbell (1894) and later E. K. Chambers (1938). There was of course an alternative, less hostile approach that emphasised the achievement regardless of the circumstances—exemplified by F. J. A. Hort in one of the finest single essays on Coleridge ever published (in Cambridge Essays, 1856)—though few followed it. Today's generation of readers, unruffled by such an untidy life, nevertheless still take offence—not at the drugs and separation, but at the procrastination of so many projected works, the incompleteness of major projects, the white lies in the Biographia, the "strain of dishonesty" as Ashton gently calls it (p. 307). This, though, is a lover's complaint, not a public prosecutor's. Painting the good and the bad (and the ugly) in such an even-handed, confident manner, Ashton writes a very satisfying, clearly post-Fruman biography. For philosophical perspicuity it does not always match W. J. Bate's much shorter intellectual life (1968), but then even Bate's magisterial treatment of Coleridge's mind occasionally slips into a reverence that would better be avoided or qualified, especially considering Fruman's hostile, but unavoidable, biography of sins (1972). Many of the charges against Coleridge (plagiarism, incoherence) have been settled by the new edition of the works as well as in arguments offered by critics like John Beer and Thomas McFarland, largely in the context of intellectual history. Here we have the response in the context of biography. The wonder is, Ashton excuses nothing and still Coleridge comes off well. Nowhere is this more evident than in the admirable portrait of the young radical Coleridge courting persecution recklessly (though briefly) and the respectful depiction of the older sage of Highgate grown conservative and Anglican (almost). This is clearly the work of an historian who prefers facts to polemics. The same drive delivered, in addition to biographies of George Eliot (1983) and G. H. Lewes (1991), several indispensable works on the German presence in British culture including Little Germany (1986), The German Idea (1980) and a valuable Cambridge thesis (1975), well …