Visit to Germany--Life at Göttingen,--Return--Explores the Lake
Country--London--The _Morning Post_--Coleridge as a
journalist--Retirement to Keswick.
[1799-1800.]
The departure of the two poets for the Continent was delayed only till
they had seen their joint volume through the press. The _Lyrical
Ballads_ appeared in the autumn of 1798, and on 16th September of that
year Coleridge left Yarmouth for Hamburg with Wordsworth and his
sister. [1] The purpose of his two companions' tour is not known to
have been other than the pleasure, or mixed pleasure and instruction,
usually derivable from foreign travel; that of Coleridge was strictly,
even sternly, educational. Immediately on his arrival in Germany he
parted from the Wordsworths, who went on to Gozlar, [2] and took up his
abode at the house of the pastor at Ratzeburg, with whom he spent five
months in assiduous study of the language. In January he removed to
Göttingen. Of his life here during the next few months we possess an
interesting record in the _Early Years and Late Reflections_ of Dr.
Carrlyon, a book published many years after the events which it
relates, but which is quite obviously a true reflection of impressions
yet fresh in the mind of its writer when its materials were first
collected. Its principal value, in fact, is that it gives us Coleridge
from the standpoint of the average young educated Englishman of the
day, sufficiently intelligent, indeed, to be sensible of his
fellow-student's transcendent abilities, but as little awed by them out
of youth's healthy irreverence of criticism as the ordinary English
undergraduate ever has been by the intellectual supremacy of any
"greatest man of his day" who might chance to have been his
contemporary at Oxford or Cambridge. In Dr. Carrlyon's reminiscences
and in the quoted letters of a certain young Parry, another of the
English student colony at Göttingen, we get a piquant picture of the
poet-philosopher of seven-and-twenty, with his yet buoyant belief in
his future, his still unquenched interest in the world of things, and
his never-to-be-quenched interest in the world of thought, his even
then inexhaustible flow of disquisition, his generous admiration for
the gifts of others, and his _naïve_ complacency--including, it would
seem, a touch of the vanity of personal appearance--in his own. "He
frequently," writes Dr. Carrlyon, "recited his own poetry, and not
unfrequently led us further into the labyrinth of his metaphysical
elucidations, either of particular passages or of the original
conception of any of his productions, than we were able to follow him.
At the conclusion, for instance, of the first stanza of _Christabel_,
he would perhaps comment at full length upon such a line as
'Tu--whit!--Tu--whoo!' that we might not fall into the mistake of
supposing originality to be its sole merit." The example is not very
happily chosen, for Coleridge could hardly have claimed "originality"
for an onomatopoeia which occurs in one of Shakspeare's best known
lyrics; but it serves well enough to illustrate the fact that he "very
seldom went right to the end of any piece of poetry; to pause and
analyse was his delight." His disappointment with regard to his tragedy
of _Osorio_ was, we also learn, still fresh. He seldom, we are told,
"recited any of the beautiful passages with which it abounds without a
visible interruption of the perfect composure of his mind." He
mentioned with great emotion Sheridan's inexcusable treatment of him
with respect to it. At the same time, adds his friend, "he is a severe
critic of his own productions, and declares" (this no doubt with
reference to his then, and indeed his constant estimate of _Christabel_
as his masterpiece) "that his best poems have perhaps not appeared in
print."
Young Parry's account of his fellow-student is also fresh and pleasing.
"It is very delightful," he tells a correspondent, "to hear him
sometimes discourse on religious topics for an hour together. His
fervour is particularly agreeable when compared with the chilling
speculations of German philosophers," whom Coleridge, he adds,
"successively forced to abandon all their strongholds." He is "much
liked, notwithstanding many peculiarities. He is very liberal towards
all doctrines and opinions, and cannot be put out of temper. These
circumstances give him the advantage of his opponents, who are always
bigoted and often irascible. Coleridge is an enthusiast on many
subjects, and must therefore appear to many to possess faults, and no
doubt he has faults, but he has a good heart and a large mass of
information with," as his fellow-student condescendingly admits,
"superior talents. The great fault which his friends may lament is the
variety of subjects which he adopts, and the abstruse nature of his
ordinary speculations, _extra homines podtas_. They can easily,"
concludes the writer, rising here to the full stateliness of youth's
epistolary style, "they can easily excuse his devoted attachment to his
country, and his reasoning as to the means of producing the greatest
human happiness, but they do not universally approve the mysticism of
his metaphysics and the remoteness of his topics from human
comprehension."
In the month of May 1799 Coleridge set out with a party of his
fellow-students on a walking tour through the Harz Mountains, an
excursion productive of much oral philosophising on his part, and of
the composition of the _Lines on ascending the Brocken_, not one of the
happiest efforts of his muse. As to the philosophising, "he never,"
says one of his companions on this trip, "appeared to tire of mental
exercise; talk seemed to him a perennial pastime, and his endeavours to
inform and amuse us ended only with the cravings of hunger or the
fatigue of a long march, from which neither his conversational powers
nor his stoicism could protect himself or us." It speaks highly for the
matter of Coleridge's allocutions that such incessant outpourings
during a mountaineering tramp appear to have left no lasting impression
of boredom behind them. The holiday seems to have been thoroughly
enjoyed by the whole party, and Coleridge, at any rate, had certainly
earned it. For once, and it is almost to be feared for the last time in
his life, he had resisted his besetting tendency to dispersiveness, and
constrained his intelligence to apply itself to one thing at a time. He
had come to Germany to acquire the language, and to learn what of
German theology and metaphysics he might find worth the study, and his
five months' steady pursuit of the former object had been followed by
another four months of resolute prosecution of the latter. He attended
the lectures of Professor Blumenbach, and obtained through a
fellow-student notes from those of Eichhorn. He suffered no
interruption in his studies, unless we are to except a short visit from
Wordsworth and his sister, who had spent most of their stay abroad in
residence at Gozlar; and he appears, in short, to have made in every
way the best use of his time. On 24th June 1799 he gave his
leave-taking supper at Göttingen, replying to the toast of his health
in fluent German but with an execrable accent; and the next day
presumably he started on his homeward journey.
His movements for the next few months are incorrectly stated in most of
the brief memoirs prefixed to the various editions of the poet's works,
--their writers having, it is to be imagined, accepted without
examination a misplaced date of Mr. Gillman's. It is not the fact that
Coleridge "returned to England after an absence of fourteen months, and
arrived in London the 27th of November." His absence could not have
lasted longer than a year, for we know from the evidence of Miss
Wordsworth's diary that he was exploring the Lake country (very likely
for the first time) in company with her brother and herself in the
month of September 1799. The probability is that he arrived in England
early in July, and immediately thereupon did the most natural and
proper thing to be done under the circumstances--namely, returned to
his wife and children at Nether Stowey, and remained there for the next
two months, after which he set off with the Wordsworths, then still at
Alfoxden, to visit the district to which the latter had either already
resolved upon, or were then contemplating, the transfer of their abode.
The 27th of November is no doubt the correct date of his arrival in
London, though not "from abroad." And his first six weeks in the
metropolis were spent in a very characteristic fashion--in the
preparation, namely, of a work which he pronounced with perfect
accuracy to be destined to fall dead from the press. He shut himself up
in a lodging in Buckingham Street, Strand, and by the end of the
above-mentioned period he had completed his admirable translation of
_Wallenstein_, in itself a perfect, and indeed his most perfect
dramatic poem. The manuscript of this English version of Schiller's
drama was purchased by Messrs. Longman under the condition that the
translation and the original should appear at the same time. Very few
copies were sold, and the publishers, indifferent to Coleridge's advice
to retain the unsold copies until the book should become fashionable,
disposed of them as waste paper. Sixteen years afterwards, on the
publication of _Christabel_, they were eagerly sought for, and the few
remaining copies doubled their price. It was while engaged upon this
work that he formed that connection with political jouralism which
lasted, though with intermissions, throughout most of the remainder of
his life. His early poetical pieces had, as we have seen, made their
first appearance in the _Morning Post_, but hitherto that newspaper had
received no prose contribution from his pen. His engagement with its
proprietor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, to whom he had been introduced during a
visit to London in 1797, was to contribute an occasional copy of verses
for a stipulated annual sum; and some dozen or so of his poems (notably
among them the ode to _France_ and the two strange pieces _Fire Famine
and Slaughter_ and _The Devil's Thoughts_) had entered the world in
this way during the years 1798 and 1799.
Misled by the error above corrected, the writers of some of the brief
memoirs of Coleridge's life represent him as having sent verse
contributions to the _Morning Post_ from Germany in 1799; but as the
earliest of these only appeared in August of that year there is no
reason to suppose that any of them were written before his return to
England. The longest of the serious pieces is the well-known _Ode to
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire_, which cannot be regarded as one of
the happiest of Coleridge's productions. Its motive is certainly a
little slight, and its sentiment more than a little overstrained. The
noble enthusiasm of the noble lady who, "though nursed in pomp and
pleasure," could yet condescend to "hail the platform wild where once
the Austrian fell beneath the shaft of Tell," hardly strikes a reader
of the present day as remarkable enough to be worth "gushing" over; and
when the poet goes on to suggest as the explanation of Georgiana's
having "learned that heroic measure" that the Whig great lady had
suckled her own children, we certainly seem to have taken the fatal
step beyond the sublime! It is to be presumed that Tory great ladies
invariably employed the services of a wet-nurse, and hence failed to
win the same tribute from the angel of the earth, who, usually, while
he guides
"His chariot-planet round the goal of day,
All trembling gazes on the eye of God,"
but who on this occasion "a moment turned his awful face away" to gaze
approvingly on the high-born mother who had so conscientiously
performed her maternal duties.
Very different is the tone of this poem from that of the two best known
of Coleridge's lighter contributions to the _Morning Post_. The most
successful of these, however, from the journalistic point of view, is
in a literary sense the less remarkable. One is indeed a little
astonished to find that a public, accustomed to such admirable
political satire as the _Anti-Jacobin_, should have been so much taken
as it seems to have been by the rough versification and somewhat clumsy
sarcasm of the _Devil's Thoughts_. The poem created something like a
_furore_, and sold a large reissue of the number of the _Morning Post_
in which it appeared. Nevertheless it is from the metrical point of
view doggerel, as indeed the author admits, three of its most
smoothly-flowing stanzas being from the hand of Southey, while there is
nothing in its boisterous political drollery to put its composition
beyond the reach of any man of strong partisan feelings and a turn for
street-humour. _Fire Famine and Slaughter_, on the other hand, is
literary in every sense of the word, requiring indeed, and very
urgently, to insist on its character as literature, in order to justify
itself against the charge of inhuman malignity. Despite the fact that
"letters four do form his name," it is of course an idealised
statesman, and not the real flesh and blood Mr. Pitt, whom the sister
furies, Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, extol as their patron in these
terrible lines. The poem must be treated as what lawyers call an "A. B.
case." Coleridge must be supposed to be lashing certain alphabetical
symbols arranged in a certain order. This idealising process is
perfectly easy and familiar to everybody with the literary sense. The
deduction for "poetic license" is just as readily, though it does not,
of course, require to be as frequently, made with respect to the
hyperbole of denunciation as with respect to that of praise. Nor need
we doubt that this deduction had in fact been made by all intelligent
readers long before that agitating dinner at Mr. Sotheby's, which
Coleridge describes with such anxious gravity in his apologetic preface
to the republication of the lines. On the whole one may pretty safely
accept De Quincey's view of the true character of this incident as
related by him in his own inimitable fashion, namely, that it was in
the nature of an elaborate hoax, played off at the poet's expense. [3]
The malice of the piece is, as De Quincey puts it, quite obviously a
"malice of the understanding and fancy," and not of the heart. There is
significance in the mere fact that the poem was deliberately published
by Coleridge two years after its composition, when the vehemence of his
political animosities had much abated. Written in 1796, it did not
appear in the _Morning Post_ till January 1798.
He was now, however, about to draw closer his connection with the
newspaper press. Soon after his return from Germany he was solicited to
"undertake the literary and political department in the _Morning
Post_," and acceded to the proposal "on condition that the paper should
thenceforward be conducted on certain fixed and announced principles,
and that he should be neither obliged nor requested to deviate from
them in favour of any party or any event." Accordingly, from December
1799 until about midsummer of 1800, Coleridge became a regular
contributor of political articles to this journal, sometimes to the
number of two or three in one week. At the end of the period of six
months he quitted London, and his contributions became necessarily less
frequent, but they were continued (though with two apparent breaks of
many months in duration) [4] until the close of the year 1802. It would
seem, however, that nothing but Coleridge's own disinclination
prevented this connection from taking a form in which it would have
profoundly modified his whole future career. In a letter to Mr. Poole,
dated March 1800, he informs his friend that if he "had the least love
of money" he could "make sure of £2000 a year, for that Stuart had
offered him half shares in his two papers, the _Morning Post_ and the
_Courier_, if he would devote himself to them in conjunction with their
proprietor. But I told him," he continues, "that I would not give up
the country and the lazy reading of old folios for two thousand times
two thousand pounds,--in short, that beyond £350 a year I considered
money as a real evil." Startlingly liberal as this offer will appear to
the journalist, it seems really to have been made. For, writing long
afterwards to Mr. Nelson Coleridge, Mr. Stuart says: "Could Coleridge
and I place ourselves thirty years back, and he be so far a man of
business as to write three or four hours a day, there is nothing I
would not pay for his assistance. I would take him into partnership,
and I would enable him to make a large fortune." Nor is there any
reason to think that the bargain would have been a bad one for the
proprietor from the strictly commercial point of view. Coleridge in
later years may no doubt have overrated the effect of his own
contributions on the circulation of the _Morning Post_, but it must
have been beyond question considerable, and would in all likelihood
have become far greater if he could have been induced to devote himself
more closely to the work of journalism. For the fact is--and it is a
fact for which the current conception of Coleridge's intellectual
character does not altogether prepare one--that he was a workman of the
very first order of excellence in this curious craft. The faculties
which go to the attainment of such excellence are not perhaps among the
highest distinctions of the human mind, but, such as they are, they are
specific and well marked; they are by no means the necessary
accompaniments even of the most conspicuous literary power, and they
are likely rather to suffer than to profit by association with great
subtlety of intellect or wide philosophic grasp. It is not to the
advantage of the journalist, as such, that he should see too many
things at a time, or too far into any one thing, and even the gifts of
an active imagination and an abundant vocabulary are each of them
likely to prove a snare. To be wholly successful, the journalist--at
least the English journalist--must not be too eloquent, or too witty,
or too humorous, or too ingenious, or too profound. Yet the English
reader likes, or thinks he likes, eloquence; he has a keen sense of
humour, and a fair appreciation of wit; and he would be much hurt if he
were told that ingenuity and profundity were in themselves distasteful
to him. How, then, to give him enough of these qualities to please and
not enough to offend him--as much eloquence as will stir his emotions,
but not enough to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry home
the argument, but not enough to make him doubt its sincerity; as much
humour as will escape the charge of levity, as much ingenuity as can be
displayed without incurring suspicion, and as much profundity as may
impress without bewildering? This is a problem which is fortunately
simplified for most journalists by the fact of their possessing these
qualities in no more than, if in so much as, the minimum required. But
Coleridge, it must be remembered, possessed most of them in
embarrassing superfluity. Not all of them indeed, for, though he could
be witty and at times humorous, his temptations to excess in these
respects were doubtless not considerable. But as for his eloquence, he
was from his youth upwards _Isoo torrentior_, his dialectical ingenuity
was unequalled, and in disquisition of the speculative order no man was
so apt as he to penetrate more deeply into his subject than most of his
readers would care to follow him. _À priori_, therefore, one would
have expected that Coleridge's instincts would have led him to
rhetorise too much in his diction, to refine too much in his arguments,
and to philosophise too much in his reflections, to have hit the
popular taste as a journalist, and that at the age of eight-and-twenty
he would have been unable to subject these tendencies either to the
artistic repression of the maturer writer or to the tactical restraints
of the trained advocate. This eminently natural assumption, however, is
entirely rebutted by the facts. Nothing is more remarkable in
Coleridge's contributions to the _Morning Post_ than their thoroughly
workmanlike character from the journalistic point of view, their
avoidance of "viewiness," their strict adherence to the one or two
simple points which he is endeavouring at any particular juncture in
politics to enforce upon his readers, and the steadiness with which he
keeps his own and his readers' attention fixed on the special political
necessities of the hour. His articles, in short, belong to that
valuable class to which, while it gives pleasure to the cultivated
reader, the most commonplace and Philistine man of business cannot
refuse the to him supreme praise of being eminently "practical." They
hit the nail on the head in nearly every case, and they take the
plainest and most direct route to their point, dealing in rhetoric and
metaphor only so far as the strictly "business" ends of the argument
appear to require. Nothing, for instance, could have been better done,
better reasoned and written, more skilfully adapted throughout to the
English taste, than Coleridge's criticism (3lst Dec. 1799) on the new
constitution established by Bonaparte and Sieyes on the foundation of
the Consulate, with its eighty senators, the "creatures of a renegade
priest, himself the creature of a foreign mercenary, its hundred
tribunes who are to talk and do nothing, and its three hundred
legislators whom the constitution orders to be silent." What a
ludicrous Purgatory, adds he, "for three hundred Frenchmen!" Very
vigorous, moreover, is he on the ministerial rejection of the French
proposals of peace in 1800, arguing against the continuance of the war
on the very sound anti-Jacobin ground that if it were unsuccessful it
would inflame French ambition anew, and, if successful, repeat the
experience of the results of rendering France desperate, and simply
reanimate Jacobinism.
Effective enough too, for the controversial needs of the moment, was
the argument that if France were known, as Ministers pretended, to be
insincere in soliciting peace, "Ministers would certainly treat with
her, since they would again secure the support of the British people in
the war, and expose the ambition of the enemy;" and that, therefore,
the probability was that the British Government knew France to be
sincere, and shrank from negotiation lest it should expose their own
desire to prosecute the war. [5] Most happy, again, is his criticism of
Lord Grenville's note, with its references to the unprovoked aggression
of France (in the matter of the opening of the Scheldt, etc.) as the
sole cause and origin of the war. "If this were indeed true, in what
ignorance must not Mr. Pitt and Mr. Windham have kept the poor Duke of
Portland, who declared in the House of Lords that the cause of the war
was the maintenance of the Christian religion?"
To add literary excellence of the higher order to the peculiar
qualities which give force to the newspaper article is for a
journalist, of course, a "counsel of perfection;" but it remains to be
remarked that Coleridge did make this addition in a most conspicuous
manner. Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's three volumes of her father's _Essays on
his own Times_ deserve to live as literature apart altogether from
their merits as journalism. Indeed among the articles in the _Morning
Post_ between 1799 and 1802 may be found some of the finest specimens
of Coleridge's maturer prose style. The character of Pitt, which
appeared on 19th March 1800, is as remarkable for its literary merits
as it is for the almost humorous political perversity which would not
allow the Minister any single merit except that which he owed to the
sedulous rhetorical training received by him from his father, viz. "a
premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words." [6] The
letters to Fox, again, though a little artificialised perhaps by
reminiscences of Junius, are full of weight and dignity. But by far the
most piquant illustration of Coleridge's peculiar power is to be found
in the comparison between his own version of Pitt's speech of 17th
February 1800, on the continuance of the war, with the report of it
which appeared in the _Times_ of that date. With the exception of a few
unwarranted elaborations of the arguments here and there, the two
speeches are in substance identical; but the effect of the contrast
between the minister's cold state-paper periods and the life and glow
of the poet-journalist's style is almost comic. Mr. Gillman records
that Canning, calling on business at the editor's, inquired, as others
had done, who was the reporter of the speech for the _Morning Post_,
and, on being told, remarked drily that the report "did more credit to
his head than to his memory."
On the whole one can well understand Mr. Stuart's anxiety to secure
Coleridge's permanent collaboration with him in the business of
journalism; and it would be possible to maintain, with less of paradox
than may at first sight appear, that it would have been better not only
for Coleridge himself but for the world at large if the editor's
efforts had been successful. It would indeed have been bowing the neck
to the yoke; but there are some natures upon which constraint of that
sort exercises not a depressing but a steadying influence. What, after
all, would the loss in hours devoted to a comparatively inferior class
of literary labour have amounted to when compared with the gain in
much-needed habits of method and regularity, and--more valuable than
all to an intellect like Coleridge's,--in the constant reminder that
human life is finite and the materials of human speculation infinite,
and that even a world-embracing mind must apportion its labour to its
day? There is, however, the great question of health to be
considered--_the_ question, as every one knows, of Coleridge's whole
career and life. If health was destined to give way, in any event--if
its collapse, in fact, was simply the cause of all the lamentable
external results which followed it, while itself due only to
predetermined internal conditions over which the sufferer had no
control--then to be sure _cadit qu'stio_. At London or at the Lakes,
among newspaper files or old folios, Coleridge's life would in that
case have run the same sad course; and his rejection of Mr. Stuart's
offer becomes a matter of no particular interest to disappointed
posterity. But be that as it may, the "old folios" won the day. In the
summer of 1800 Coleridge quitted London, and having wound up his
affairs at his then place of residence, removed with his wife and
children to a new and beautiful home in that English Lake country with
which his name was destined, like those of Southey and Wordsworth, to
be enduringly associated.
FOOTNOTES
1. De Quincey's error, in supposing that Coleridge's visit to Germany
to "complete his education" was made at an earlier date than this
journey with the Wordsworths, is a somewhat singular mistake for one so
well acquainted with the facts of Coleridge's life. Had we not his own
statement that this of 1798 was the first occasion of his quitting his
native country, it so happens that we can account in England for nearly
every month of his time from his leaving Cambridge until this date.
2. It has only within a comparatively recent period been ascertained
that the visit of the Wordsworths to Germany was itself another result
of Thomas Wedgwood's generous appreciation of literary merit. It
appears, on the incontrovertible testimony of the Wedgwoods' accounts
with their agents at Hamburg, that the expenses of all three travellers
were defrayed by their friend at home. The credits opened for them
amounted, during the course of their stay abroad, to some £260.--Miss
Meteyard's _A Group of Englishmen_, p. 99.
3. After quoting the two concluding lines of the poem, "Fire's" rebuke
of her inconstant sisters, in the words
"I alone am faithful, I
Cling to him everlastingly,"
De Quincey proceeds: "The sentiment is diabolical; and the question
argued at the London dinner-table (Mr. Sotheby's) was 'Could the writer
have been other than a devil?'... Several of the great guns among the
literary body were present--in particular Sir Walter Scott, and he, we
believe, with his usual good nature, took the apologetic side of the
dispute; in fact, he was in the secret. Nobody else, barring the
author, knew at first whose good name was at stake. The scene must have
been high. The company kicked about the poor diabolic writer's head as
though it had been a tennis-ball. Coleridge, the yet unknown criminal,
absolutely perspired and fumed in pleading for the defendant; the
company demurred; the orator grew urgent; wits began to smoke the case
as an active verb, the advocate to smoke as a neuter verb; the 'fun
grew fast and furious,' until at length the delinquent arose, burning
tears in his eyes, and confessed to an audience now bursting with
stifled laughter (but whom he supposed to be bursting with fiery
indignation), 'Lo, I am he that wrote it.'"
4. _Sic_ in _Essays on his own Times_ by S. T. C., the collection of
her father's articles made by Mrs. Nelson (Sara) Coleridge; but without
attributing strange error to Coleridge's own estimate (in the
_Biographia Literaria_) of the amount of his journalistic work, it is
impossible to believe that this collection, forming as it does but two
small volumes, and a portion of a third, is anything like complete.
5. Alas, that the facts should be so merciless to the most excellent
arguments! Coleridge could not foresee that Napoleon would, years
afterwards, admit in his own Memoirs the insincerity of his overtures.
"I had need of war; a treaty of peace...would have withered every
imagination." And when Mr. Pitt's answer arrived, "it filled me with a
secret satisfaction."
6. The following passage, too, is curious as showing how polemics, like
history, repeat themselves. "As his reasonings were, so is his
eloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on words,
finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent that the whole bears the
semblance of argument and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but,
when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said; no one
philosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. Not a
sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed the favourite
phrase of the day--a thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation."
With the alteration of one word--the proper name--this passage might
have been taken straight from some political diatribe of to-day.