Eloquence or Bullshit?

The distinction between eloquence and bullshit is a fine one. Even windbags can prove themselves charming, at least on occasion. Samuel Johnson was nearly always eloquent and seldom a bullshitter. In Coleridge, Johnson’s only peer among the great English conversationalists, the proportion of bullshit to eloquence is reversed. I would believe nearly anything Johnson said and would question nearly everything Coleridge said. Yet who would shun the company of either man?

Bullshit is not synonymous with lying, and it’s not always deplorable. I have this on good authority. Harry Frankfurt, the retired Princeton philosopher, last year published On Bullshit. Here’s what he says:

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

This perfectly describes Coleridge. Like the laudanum he prodigiously consumed, Coleridge’s conversation intoxicated and consoled him. Read his Biographia Literaria, or Table Talk, two hefty volumes of Coleridge speaking compellingly on any subject, “his eyes not on the facts at all,” as recorded by friends and relations. In the Table Talk entry for July 1, 1833, Henry Nelson Coleridge, the poet’s nephew, reports him saying:

“Johnson’s fame now rests principally upon Boswell. It is impossible not to be amused by such a book. But his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced; for no one, I suppose, will set Johnson before [Edmund] Burke – and Burke was a great and universal talker…. The fact was, Burke, like all men of Genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous – hence he is not reported; for he seldom said the sharp short things that Johnson almost always did, which produced a more decided effect at the moment and which are much more easy to carry off…. Burke said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking that in writing – and even greater in Boswell than in real life.”

What Coleridge says of Burke’s conversation, of course – “discursive and continuous” – is a precise description of Coleridge’s own mode of discourse. And in his indirect paring away at Johnson’s reputation, by way of Burke, we can hear the small-spirited hectoring of an insecure man. Between them, Johnson and Coleridge, in addition to their other accomplishments, written and oral, set the highest standard for Shakespeare criticism. Both were giants.

In the second volume of his biography of the poet, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, Richard Holmes musters ample evidence of Coleridge’s volubility. On July 10, 1834, Henry Coleridge, in his final Table Talk entry, reports his uncle saying:

“I am dying, but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently by-gone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice islands of Youth and Hope – those twin realities of this phantom world! I do not add Love – for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and so seen as one? I say realities; for reality is a thing of degrees, from the Iliad to a dream…”

This, if an accurate transcription, is poignant eloquence, not bullshit. Fifteen days later, Coleridge, age 61, died. Here’s Holmes’ eloquent description:

“At 6:30 a.m. on 25 July 1835 he slipped into the dark. He was talking almost up to the end. As he closed those extraordinary eyes, he told [an old friend, Henry] Green that his mind was clear and `quite unclouded.’ Then he added with growing interest, `I could be witty…”