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COLERIDGE
BY S. L. BENSUSAN
[Illustration]
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
67 LONG ACRE, W. C., AND EDINBURGH
NEW YORK: DODGE PUBLISHING CO.
[Illustration: Samuel Coleridge]
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTION 7
I. EARLY YEARS 13
II. IN SEARCH OF THE IDEAL 25
III. IN THE LAKE COUNTRY AND AT MALTA 33
IV. TROUBLED YEARS 41
V. COLERIDGE AS AN OBSERVER OF NATURE 61
VI. COLERIDGE AS POET AND CRITIC 75
INDEX 93
COLERIDGE
INTRODUCTION
Among the great writers whose activity is associated with the closing
years of the eighteenth and the opening of the nineteenth centuries, are
several who claim more respect than popularity. If they were poets,
their works find a place in a thousand libraries, but the dust gathers
upon covers long unopened, and only the stray enthusiast removes it.
Southey, Cowper, and Coleridge, for example, are authors of well-nigh
universal acceptance, but who, outside the ranks of professed students
of poetry, could claim an intimate acquaintance with their work? In _An
Anthology of Longer Poems_ published at Oxford two years ago and
prepared by two Professors of English Literature, Southey, for all his
great gifts, is not represented at all, and William Cowper is
responsible for nothing more than the familiar lines to his mother's
picture.
Dryden and Alexander Pope, Goldsmith, Gray, Crabbe, and Thomson are
little more than names to the most of the generation that has just
entered upon its inheritance. Perhaps, if the truth be told, the
present-day reading public cannot keep pace with its ever-growing task,
and satisfies its conscience by paying to the worthy dead the sacrifice
of a small expenditure. In the old time it was hard to gather a modest
library, to-day the difficulty lies in selection. The best efforts of a
thousand years clamour for a place on our shelves, the material for
reading has been multiplied, the capacity for reading remains where it
was, if indeed the wonderful growth of claims upon our attention, the
quickening of the pace of life, has not reduced our leisure time at the
expense of books. Little wonder, then, that in the struggle for a
sustained reputation many sound writers fail to hold their own. It is
only when we choose one of the poets just named for a course of steady
reading and turn to his pages with some knowledge of the life and times
which gave them birth, that the dead man becomes a living force, and we
find how far his claim to recognition lies outside the scope of a mere
convention. Even then the inequalities of thought and style will be
painfully apparent. We shall read much that would not have been
preserved had the poet written in an age when self-criticism was as
strong a force as it is to-day, but there will be no waste of labour if
the full extent of his gifts as well as his limitations can be grasped.
It is not safe to accept the "selected works" of any man of mark; a
selection can never be quite fair to an author.
Of all the men whose work was completed between the middle of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there are few, if any, whose life is
of more interest to the psychologist, the student of transcendentalism,
and the lover of fine thought, than that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the
subject of this brief study. He was compact of remarkable strength and
fatal weakness, of rare attainments and incomplete achievement, of
courage and cowardice, of energy and laziness, of reason and unreason,
of airy wit and solid wisdom. Look upon one side of his life and
accomplishment and you are lost in wonder and admiration, look upon the
other and there is food for little but pity and regret. Modern teaching
has revealed the narrowness of the boundary between genius and insanity,
and, in the light of this knowledge, we see that Coleridge was neither
wholly a genius nor wholly sane, though he approached either condition
very nearly at different periods of his troubled life. We would hesitate
to-day to condemn him with the severity and fluency shown by his
contemporaries--by Thomas de Quincey and William Hazlitt, for example.
Perhaps the first thought to which a study of his life and work gives
birth is the nearest to the truth, the thought that he was singularly
unfitted to cope with life as he found it, that he was essentially a man
of thought rather than of action. He was never strong enough to bear the
thousand ills that writing man is heir to. He lacked courage, method,
order; one might add that he lacked diligence, but for the knowledge
that no man can move in advance of his inspiration if he would be just
to himself. Even though his pen was idle his brain was ever active; his
failure lay in lack of will-power to do full justice to its activity.
Wordsworth, his contemporary and friend, had far better fortune; life
offered his notable virtues every assistance. An early legacy, a small
patrimony that arrived late, but not too late, appointment to one or two
posts hardly to be regarded as anything other than sinecures, a
government pension in his closing years, a splendid constitution, a
fortunate marriage, colossal strength of purpose: all these gifts
smoothed the rugged road of the greater man; to Coleridge the fates were
adverse. He had at best a great but ill-balanced mind, to which
philosophy made the first appeal. A shrewd practical man with half his
attainments could have turned them to better advantage. His health was
never really robust, and he suffered from the fatal sickness of
self-pity. He accepted the charity of friends and asked for more; though
he seems to have had few personal extravagances, the income that kept
his friends, William, Mary, and Dorothy Wordsworth, free from financial
strain, would not have been enough for his support. None of his
biographers has discovered what he did with his money on the rare
occasions when it was plentiful; there is ample reason to believe that
he would have been equally puzzled to make out a balance-sheet. But,
while his private life was beset by all manner of difficulties, while
his private letters reveal too frequently an utter absence of personal
dignity, his public utterances and the "table-talk" recorded by his
nephew stand on a very high plane. Every class of cultivated man and
woman was content to be silent when Coleridge was speaking; there was
seemingly but one matter that the keen clear brain could neither grapple
with nor control, and this was the conduct of his own life. Where he
himself was not concerned, his wisdom and insight were remarkable, his
natural gifts, splendidly cultivated in youth, had been reinforced by
prolonged study as a man. His table-talk was fuller than most men's
laboured essays, his lectures, even if delivered extempore, could charm
an audience of scholars, and his published work, whether in prose or
verse, is an enduring monument, not likely to be hard worn by the
attentions of the multitude. Had his lines been cast in more pleasant
places, had he married a woman strong enough to direct and guide him,
had he been spared his pains and the unfortunate remedy by which he
sought to lull them, there seems to be no height to which he might not
have risen, no goal to which he might not have attained. We may not
judge him save in all charity and kindness, for we know that his faults
brought their own punishment in full measure and, apart from this, the
lines he wrote a few years before he died seem to arrest the fault
finder.
"Frail creatures are we all! To be the best,
Is but the fewest faults to have.--
Look Thou then to thyself, and leave the rest
To God, thy conscience, and the grave."
Few of his contemporaries spoke or wrote harshly of Coleridge. Lamb
and Wordsworth loved him, despite occasional and regrettable
misunderstandings. He collaborated with Wordsworth in the _Lyrical
Ballads_ and with Southey in _The Fall of Robespierre_, a three-act
drama of which the last-named poet wrote the second act. There were few
who were not happy in his brief fortunes or without sympathy in the
long-drawn period of his trouble and pain, while all who came within the
charmed circle of his personality delighted in his company and sought it
eagerly. Judged by ordinary standards, his life-work would provide a
monument for any man whose attainments fall short of absolute genius,
and perhaps they have been most severe who realise how nothing more than
order and self-control kept Coleridge from the very highest rank. They
are jealous for his gifts, they feel that he hid his light under a
bushel. For the most of us it will suffice that the poet's utterances
are melodious, inspiring, and finely wrought, that he himself was a
greatly suffering man who fought desperately and at last successfully
against his own worst failings. Even as he arrests our imagination he
claims our sympathy, which we give the more gladly because he would have
welcomed it. Not only did he ask for merciful judgment while he was
alive, but appealed for it when life should have passed. Few who have
read even a tithe of what he wrote will grudge a little tribute to his
memory, while those who study Coleridge become his debtors, and realise
that he played no insignificant part in moulding some aspects of
nineteenth-century thought and faith.
CHAPTER I
EARLY YEARS
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest of the nine sons of the Rev.
John Coleridge, Vicar of Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire and
Chaplain-Priest as well as Master of King's School, a Free Grammar
School founded by King Henry VIII, who suppressed and replaced a
long-standing monastic institution in the town. The Rev. John Coleridge,
who was twice married, was the father of three daughters by his first
wife and ten children by the second. He was the son of a trader in
woollen goods who suffered serious financial losses when John was a boy,
and the lad owed his Cambridge education to the generosity of a friend
of the family. He married young, and kept a school at Southampton until
his first wife died and he had married again. Then he obtained the
living and mastership at Ottery St. Mary. Of his nine sons the youngest
was destined to be the most distinguished, but James, who was born
twelve years before Samuel Taylor, became the father of one Judge of the
High Court, the grandfather of Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, and
great-grandfather of the present Judge. The Vicar was a man of letters,
who published several long-forgotten books by subscription, and was
noted, to quote his youngest son's description, for "learning,
good-heartedness, absentness of mind, and excessive ignorance of the
world." It would not be hard to find all these qualities reproduced in
the poet himself; they are of the kind that need a country school-house
or vicarage for their home if they are not to be the cause of grave
trouble to their possessor. From the very early days Sam, as his family
called the future poet and philosopher, was a strange, precocious and
unhappy child. Perhaps our modern ideas are shocked at the thought that
he was sent to school at the age of three years. Should the
twentieth-century theories be correct, such a brain as his would have
been far healthier if the stage of happy ignorance had been extended
until he was at least twice as old. Spoiled by his parents, the share of
attentions he received from them provoked, naturally enough, the
jealousy and resentment of his brothers and sisters, while his strange
ways made him the unhappy butt of his school-fellows. Small wonder if,
when he described his early childhood in the latter days, he had but a
sorry tale to tell. Compared with his friends Charles Lamb and William
Wordsworth, Coleridge was an unhappy boy.
Nervous, self-conscious, and irritable, he took no pleasure in outdoor
games, and at the earliest possible age was busy with books. With their
aid he lived in a world of his own, a world peopled with the heroes and
heroines who dwell between book covers. By the time he was six years of
age he had read the _Arabian Nights' Entertainments_, and though it was
certainly an abridged version in a single volume, there is no doubt
that it must have provided a powerful and unhealthy stimulant to an
imagination already far too active. Happily his father found that these
books were dangerous to his youngest born, and destroyed them.
The boy entered the grammar school, where he speedily passed all the
other lads of his age. For the next three years the life at Ottery St.
Mary continued in the seemingly peaceful fashion that was in reality so
harmful. The little lad was disliked by his school-fellows and flattered
and petted by his elders. His father took him seriously enough to pave
the way, by a series of discourses, for the service of the Church. His
mother's friends delighted in exhibitions of his precocity. His temper,
sometimes sullen and perverse, showed itself disastrously on one
occasion, when he ran away from home to avoid some punishment, doubtless
well earned, and slept all night by the banks of the river that gives
its name to his home. He woke so exhausted that his rescuer was obliged
to carry him home. To this escapade he attributed the fits of ague to
which he was subject for many following years.
It is worth remarking in this place that for all the boy's undoubted
precocity, the beauty of the scenes in which the first decade of his
life was set seem to have left little or no impression. Had Coleridge
been a lover of the country for its own sake, he must have been at least
as deeply impressed by the all-pervading charm of Ottery St. Mary as his
friend Wordsworth was by Hawkshead. For Ottery has beauty and history in
plenty with which to reward the visitor or resident; its romance
travels far away into the first twilight of legendry. In later years, of
which the historical record is safe, the Manor of Ottery was granted by
King Edward the Confessor to the Cathedral Church of Rouen. The poet
might have seen as a child the royal arms of England and France on the
stone scutcheons above the church altar, with the armorial bearings of
several distinguished Devon families to bear them company. In the reign
of Edward III, the head of one of these families, John de Grandisson,
Bishop of Exeter, bought the manor and advowson of Ottery and
established there the college of Monks. This was dissolved by Henry
VIII, who made the college over to a corporation of four governors, and
established the "King's New Grammar School," a building whose irregular
roof is still a feature of the landscape. Here the Rev. John Coleridge
was master and his son pupil. At Hayes Farm, close by, Sir Walter
Raleigh was born; the family pew is to be seen in the parish church of
East Budleigh.
When Coleridge was a young man, the house of Raleigh in Ottery St. Mary
was still standing; it was burnt down in the year of Trafalgar. He does
not mention it, he does not even tell us of the wonderful orchards in
the valley of the Otter, perhaps the most outstanding feature of the
country in which his earliest years were passed. They say that these
orchards are the more remarkable because mistletoe will not grow round
the trees, the Druids having laid all Devonshire under a ban! The Valley
of the Otter is a district no country lover could forget. The river,
swift, though narrow, runs sparkling over many-coloured soil--Coleridge
recalls this single feature in his Sonnet on the Otter. It separates the
chalk flint and red marls of Ottery East Hill from the heather-clad
black earth of West Hill, and makes a clean division between the plant
growths on one side of its banks and those on the other. The high peaks
of Dartmoor can be seen from either hill. In the valleys, while summer
lasts, the red Devon kine stand amid luxuriant grasses which rise to
their dewlaps. We are told that the transceptal towers of St. Mary's
Church at Ottery inspired Bishop Quivil when he planned Exeter
Cathedral. St. Mary's dominates the little town and adds to the
perennial air of peace and seclusion that breathes over it. Coleridge
might have made Ottery St. Mary immortal, but he did little more than
write his well-remembered sonnet and a short ode inspired by the
"Pixies' Parlour," a cave in the red sandstone cliffs below the town.
The curious may still find "S.T.C. 1789" carved on the soft stones. If
the valley of the Otter was not able to impress the early years of the
poet, it is hardly surprising that neither Somersetshire nor Westmorland
should succeed where Devonshire failed. The failure adds to the clear
proof that Coleridge was at heart a philosopher, a student of life,
faith, reason, and the immortality of the soul, but withal a man who was
seldom or never on intimate terms with his immediate surroundings.
The Rev. John Coleridge passed away, beloved by his pupils and
parishioners, when his son Samuel Taylor was but nine years old, and
within a year the efforts of friends had resulted in obtaining for the
lad a presentation to Christ's Hospital.
His period in the junior school in Hertfordshire was brief, and
apparently quite uneventful. Before he was ten years old "the poor
friendless boy" of Elia's famous essay was "in the great city pent, mid
cloisters dim," and his apprenticeship to learning in the famous
foundation that has now been removed from Newgate Street to the
beautiful Sussex country near Horsham lasted for nine years, in the
first seven of which he seems to have seen nothing of his Devonshire
home.
One would hesitate to say, despite the hardships of boarding-school life
a century or more ago, that the poet would have been better off anywhere
else. He recognised in later years the advantages of his training.
Firmly, even brutally disciplined, his master in the upper school was
Boyer, of whose severity Lamb and others have written unsparingly.
Coleridge was thoroughly well grounded; he mastered the elementary rules
of poetic expression, his eccentricities were repressed, his departures
from law, order, and rule firmly punished. For one whose mind was
ill-governed, in whom the newest idea found an immediate and devoted
adherent, strong rule was the first essential of development. He passed
through many phases; cobbling, medicine, and metaphysics attracted him
in turn, and Boyer gladly provided an effective antidote for the virus
of each. Lamb bears generous witness to his companion's budding talent,
and we know that he made and kept friends, that there was something
about his personality that was eminently attractive and led people to
pardon in him what they would have condemned in others. A foolish
escapade on the New River resulted in nearly a year's illness, and left
him very weak, indeed throughout life he was never robust, but the
troubles that affected his body did nothing to stunt his intellectual
growth. The poet in him awoke, perhaps called to life by Mary Evans,
eldest sister of a school-fellow whom he had befriended and who
gratefully introduced him to his family. Mary Evans undoubtedly inspired
much of his earliest, and comparatively feeble, verse. The sonnets of
Bowles, who then had a following and a reputation, were another force in
the making of the Coleridge we love and admire. Reading the detailed
story of his life, we may note that, in the brief and simple relations
with Mary Evans, Coleridge acted as though he had no definite control
over his own impulses. Some of the correspondence has been preserved,
and it is hard to escape the impression that while the poet was quite
serious in his protestations, he exaggerated with true poetic licence
the depth and permanency of his regard.
In January 1791, the Almoners of Christ's Hospital appointed Coleridge
to an Exhibition at Jesus College, Cambridge, with the idea that the
school's promising pupil would pass from the University to the Church.
He left Newgate Street in the September following, and entered the
University a month later, intervening weeks being spent, in all
probability, in Devonshire.
We find him now at the parting of the ways, the wholesome bonds of
discipline relaxing, a measure of liberty before him of a kind to which
he had been a stranger hitherto, and one is inclined to think that he
was absolutely unfitted to stand alone or to be his own master, even
within the limits imposed upon the Cambridge undergraduate. His
brilliant intellect was not associated with sound common sense, the
conventions and restriction of normal life were things he would not
trouble about, his mind, daring and speculative, was never at rest, he
stood desperately in need of some steadying influence of a kind that
never came to him. The newest thought could carry him away, he cared not
whither. Like many another brilliant man, Coleridge needed direction and
discipline long after the time when the convention of the world seeks to
enforce either. We cannot see whence the force was to come, but we must
realise how greatly it was needed. Coleridge was too clever for the
ranks to which he was accredited; his gifts were of the uneasy kind that
can find no rest. Some men of similar temperament can settle down after
a brief struggle; they bridle themselves, hide their light, bow to the
world above them, and prosper. To Coleridge such a method of living
would have seemed immoral, far more immoral than his own shifting,
haphazard and unhappy career. He was always the slave of his own moral
ideas, his weaknesses were a tribute to the sick and ailing body; to his
judgment, his moral consciousness, he acted with most rigorous honesty,
even to his own detriment.
When Coleridge went to Jesus College, the month was October; he became a
pensioner in November, and matriculated in the following month. From
1792 he would have been in receipt of £40 per annum from his old school,
and between 1792-4 he held one of the Rustat scholarships belonging to
Jesus College and given only to sons of clergymen. In the year last
named he became a Foundation scholar. For the first twelve months, while
the recollection of Christ's Hospital discipline was perhaps still keen
within him, and his friend Middleton was at Pembroke College, he worked
diligently and gained his first award, the Browne Gold Medal. He
competed for the Craven Scholarship, which fell to Samuel Butler,
afterwards Bishop of Lichfield. By the following year Middleton had left
the University and Coleridge was beginning to lose his head and find his
powers. He associated himself with the most progressive and radical
spirits in his College, and the authorities looked askance at him. But
he paid little heed to such a trifle as the dissatisfaction of tutors.
The centre of a large and admiring circle that clamoured to hear his
political opinions, his latest poem, or his favourite recitation, he
seemed to realise that he could hold an audience and lead opinion. Debts
began to accumulate; he was indeed destined for the greater part of his
life to owe more than he could pay. His suit with Mary Evans was not
prospering; he tried to set himself right financially by speculating in
a lottery, and, when that failed him, left Cambridge, the first of the
long series of sudden departures from accustomed haunts that was to be a
prominent feature in his career. A fortnight later he had become Silas
Tomkyn Comberbach of the King's Light Dragoons. The new and popular
recruit, who repaid his companions for doing his share of the common
drudgery by writing their love-letters for them, soon found that under
the most favourable conditions soldiering was not to his taste. He could
not sit a horse, he could not even groom one, and it was not very long
before his identity was revealed to an officer through the medium of
some lines in Latin written in chalk on a wall. His elder brother,
Captain James Coleridge, procured his discharge in the following April,
when the Master and Fellows of Jesus readmitted him, much to the
surprise of his friends. That the authorities were ready and willing to
give him every chance is sufficient proof that his capacities and his
personality alike pleaded powerfully in his defence.
A few months later he was on a visit to Oxford, where he met Robert
Southey, his future brother-in-law, and they talked of Pantisocracy. In
his _Christian Life_, Peter Bayne speaks of the days "when Coleridge and
Southey were building, of cloud and moonbeam, their notable fabric of
Pantisocracy, the government of all by all." The idea was just suited to
the hare-brained poets. Twelve men, each armed with £125, were to leave
England in the company of twelve women, for one of the back settlements
of America, there to establish a Utopia of their own. A few hours' work
a day from each would suffice, they thought, for the needs of all.
Political and religious opinions were to be free, and the question of
the validity of the marriage contract was left open. Needless perhaps to
add that neither the industrious Southey nor his erratic friend had
£125, but the former hoped to raise the amount from the sale of _Joan of
Arc_ and other of his early work, while Coleridge proposed to publish by
subscription a volume of _Imitations from the Modern Latin Poets_. Like
so many of the volumes he intended to write, this one was never written,
though he had all the scholarship necessary to bring a venture of the
kind to a successful issue. Southey and Coleridge met a little later in
Bristol and went into Somersetshire, where they were joined by Burnett
and Thomas Poole. Of these two men the latter was to play an important
part in the life-story of Coleridge.
A little later the young poet had recovered sufficiently from his
overmastering attachment to Mary Evans to become engaged to Sarah
Fricker, Southey's sister-in-law. He collaborated with the future
laureate in a rapidly written dramatic poem, _The Fall of Robespierre_,
which he dedicated to Mr. Martin of Jesus College, without any reference
to Southey's considerable part in it. The enthusiasm for Pantisocracy
was short-lived; in a few months its originators had dropped the scheme,
though it was to be revived later. Coleridge went back to Cambridge, and
left suddenly in the December of 1794 without taking his degree. The
reasons for this step have never been revealed; some think that he left
on account of debt, others think the cause must have been some further
breach of discipline. His career at Jesus had been brief and
unsatisfactory, and he was soon dropped by the College authorities and
the Committee of Christ's Hospital. Whatever their private views of his
ability, they could no longer remain indifferent to his irregular life,
his inability to settle down and work, the dangerous results of too much
tolerance in an institution that must control its scholars or cease to
exist. On the other hand, Coleridge could not respond to order and
discipline. He was not like other men; of him it might be truly said in
the words of the Patriarch, "unstable as water, thou shalt not excel."
The period of wandering trouble and unrest had begun; it was to continue
until, the greater part of his life and life's-work accomplished, he
found a hospitable asylum at Highgate. It cannot be supposed that
Cambridge was in any degree responsible for what happened within the
walls of Jesus College or in the world beyond. The erratic disposition
was with Coleridge as a little boy. Christ's Hospital subdued but did
not eradicate it, Jesus College gave it an atmosphere of limited freedom
in which to blossom and bud until the college boundaries were no longer
wide enough to contain such an errant spirit.