IN SEARCH OF THE IDEAL
When Coleridge left the University he had entered his twenty-third year;
he had rather more than forty before him, but, as the two preceding
years had been, so were the most of those that followed. Trouble,
largely if not altogether of his own making, anxiety, comparative
poverty, ill-health, these were the shadows that darkened his days. For
him life was a problem with which he could not grapple; although he had
a giant's strength he did not know how to use it. He was master of a
rare and exquisite gift, but it did not avail him. Other men, with a
tithe of his talent and the full capacity for living a well-ordered
life, could earn a comfortable competence, acquire honour and command
respect, while Coleridge, who was in so many respects their master,
drifted across the wide waters of life, a ship without a rudder. We need
not criticise, we can better pity a man who, greatly gifted, could not
raise his head among his contemporaries. Had some stern disciplinarian
stood behind him at Cambridge he might have achieved distinction; had he
married a strong resolute woman she might have taught him regular
industry and self-respect. But in all the important actions of his life
the mood of the moment was the deciding factor, so that, despite the
number of his friends, there was none to help. Coleridge was almost a
genius, and quite a law to himself. Such happiness as came to him was
found chiefly in intercourse with kindred spirits, in grappling with
metaphysical problems, in refuting the current errors of philosophy, and
above all in the kindness and generosity of friends. Woe to the man who
accepts help from others! Once he has done this he stands for ever on a
lower plane, his life is no longer his own, he can no longer say, "I am
the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul." It was the
misfortune of Coleridge to receive assistance in those critical hours
when a man must stand alone, though it be but in a garret with no more
food and clothing than will serve for the necessities of life. There are
few brilliant exceptions to the sweeping rule that forbids
self-respecting men to receive doles. Horace and Virgil are notable
among them, but the rule stands, even while we remember that both
Martial and Juvenal declared that the protection of prince or patron
offers the only chance to poetry. With Coleridge there was less excuse
than the poet may claim, for he could always command a living wage in
journalism. The trouble with him was not to get money for his work, but
to give work in return for other people's money.
From Cambridge the poet drifted to London, journalism, and the
delightful company of Charles Lamb. He wrote sonnets for the _Morning
Chronicle_, and took his glass and pipe with Elia in long-forgotten
taverns until Southey hunted him up and carried him back to Bristol and
Sarah Fricker, to Pantisocracy and lecturing and the company of Burnett,
with whom both Coleridge and Southey lived in College Street. In 1796
Cottle, the Bristol publisher, paid Coleridge thirty guineas for poems,
including the "Monody on the Death of Chatterton" and "Religious
Musings." Southey lost faith in Pantisocracy and went to live with his
mother. Coleridge lost faith in Southey, the friends quarrelled, and for
some time were not on speaking or writing terms. Cottle, who had a sure
eye for promising work, offered to buy all the verse Coleridge could
write at the price of one and a half guineas per hundred lines, and on
the strength of this, Coleridge married Sarah Fricker in October 1795,
and settled in a little cottage at Clevedon near Bristol, in company
with Burnett and another of Sarah's sisters. The men shared in the
labour of the house, but it was too far from town to serve for purposes
of work in days when the circulating library was still unknown, and,
early in their married life, Mr. and Mrs. Coleridge moved to Redcliffe
Hill. There Coleridge decided to start a paper called _The Watchman_, to
be published on every eighth day, and he has left on record an account
of his northern pilgrimage in search of subscribers. He found enough to
justify publication; the paper lived to reach its tenth number, when it
departed from life, leaving its editor-proprietor stranded, though his
_Poems on Various Subjects_, with additions by Charles Lamb, Robert
Southey, and Mr. Favell, had been published in March by Cottle, and had
been favourably received. Thomas Poole, as good a friend as ever poet
had, came to the rescue with forty pounds, and Coleridge spent a happy
fortnight at Nether Stowey; with him, as soon as a trouble was over it
could be forgotten. But something had to be done; negotiations for the
post of co-editor of the _Morning Chronicle_ were opened, and fell
through. Following this came another plan, to educate the children of a
wealthy Derbyshire lady, who changed her mind at the eleventh hour,
giving the poet £95, and his wife a welcome gift of baby linen instead.
In the meantime the prodigal son had visited Ottery St. Mary and been
reconciled to his family. Proposals to establish a school in Derby came
to nothing, and there is matter for regret here, for the poet would have
made an admirable schoolmaster. In September his responsibilities were
increased by the arrival of David Hartley Coleridge, born while the poet
was on a visit to the Lloyds. Charles Lloyd, an epilept, was anxious to
live with him, and Coleridge wished to rent a house near Nether Stowey
that he might be near his friend Poole. After much search a cottage was
found.
By this time, the poet had begun to suffer from severe neuralgia, and
had started to dose himself with laudanum for its cure. With his usual
optimism in hours of change, the future was clear to him. "My farm will
be a garden of an acre and a half," he writes to "Citizen" Thelwall, "in
which I intend to raise vegetables and corn for my wife, and feed a
couple of grunting and snouted cousins from the refuse. My evenings I
shall devote to literature, and by reviews in the _Monthly Magazine_ and
other shilling scavengering, shall probably gain £40 a year--which
economy and self-denial, gold beaters, shall hammer till it covers my
annual expenses." Well might Lamb write--"What does your worship know
about farming?" More than a hundred years have passed since Coleridge
took the little cottage of which the garden met Poole's, but successive
generations of literary men and poets have shared his strange belief
that anybody can go on the land and make it yield its fruits in due
season. That farming demands a strenuous apprenticeship and sound
judgment, if it is not to fail altogether to yield any harvest save
debt, that appreciation of country life does not carry knowledge with
it, these are truths which the majority of men of letters decline to
admit.
A second edition of his poems, with additions by Charles Lloyd as well
as Lamb, produced twenty guineas from Cottle, and the poet settled to
learn the rudiments of agriculture from Thomas Poole, and to train
Charles Lloyd in the way he should go. Then he went on a visit to the
Wordsworths, who were first at Racedown and later at Alfoxden House. An
offer from Sheridan to consider a play for Drury Lane led to the writing
of _Osorio_. Charles Lamb came to Nether Stowey, and so too did William
and Dorothy Wordsworth and "Citizen" John Thelwall, with whom Coleridge
kept up such a lively correspondence. This visit brought about the
Wordsworths' departure from Alfoxden House, for the "Citizen," rather an
undesirable person at best, was a political suspect, and a nervous
government sent a spy down to Nether Stowey to find what company he
kept. But in spite of "those gold beaters, economy and self-denial," the
poet's poor exchequer was by no means equal to the demands made upon it
by his unsettled mode of living. He received a fresh subscription from
friends, urged to contribute by Thomas Poole, and declared that this
would be the last subsidy he would be free to accept. Doubtless he
thought so; at no period of his life had Coleridge the slightest idea of
the value of money, the expense of living, or the probable fate of his
own best intentions. One traces in him a faint likeness to Wilkins
Micawber. With the later months of 1797, he visited Bowles, whose
sonnets had appealed so greatly to him, and learned that Sheridan had
rejected _Osorio_. Relations with Charles Lloyd no longer remained as
they had been, and it may be that his contribution to the family
exchequer at Nether Stowey was not maintained. But for all the troubles
and trials of the year it is a notable one in the annals of British
poetry, for on November 13 Coleridge set out with William and Dorothy
Wordsworth on a walking tour of which the expense was to be defrayed by
a joint composition. Wordsworth for once was not equal to the task, and
Coleridge began the poem by which he is best known, "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner." His own description of it as "inimitable" does not
seem extravagant. Begun in the course of the memorable walk, it was
finished in the following March, though there were further alterations
as subsequent editions of collected poems appeared. The beginning of
"Christabel" belongs apparently to 1797.
The opening of 1798 brought some good fortune in its train. Coleridge
had been about to accept a call to the Unitarian Chapel at Shrewsbury,
and had already given a taste of his quality in the pulpit, when Josiah
and Thomas Wedgwood, sons of the famous potter, sought to keep him from
burying his gifts. They understood that the need of cash rather than
the claims of faith were responsible for his new departure. A present
for his immediate needs the poet returned, and then came a remarkable
letter from Josiah Wedgwood offering in his own and his brother's name
to pay Coleridge £150 a year, the amount of his promised stipend from
the Chapel, if he would turn from the work of the preacher and devote
himself to poetry and philosophy. No further conditions were attached to
this munificent offer, which was to last for life and to be independent
of everything but the wreck of the brothers' fortunes. Coleridge was
staying with William Hazlitt, at the house of the latter's father near
Shrewsbury, when the letter from Josiah Wedgwood was received, and the
essayist has set down the story in one of his papers. The poet accepted
the offer, a very fortunate one, considering the ever-changing nature of
his faith, and Unitarianism found some other advocate. About the same
time came an invitation from the _Morning Post_, which would have
brought in another fifty pounds a year, so that, had Coleridge been able
to take the fullest advantage of his opportunities, financial anxieties
might have come to an end. Doubtless his good fortune inspired him to
some fine efforts in 1798, but he was nervous and hyper-sensitive, his
quarrel with Charles Lloyd had affected his spirits, he retired to a
Devonshire farm-house to indulge in seclusion and opium and write the
fragmentary "Kubla Khan." Through Charles Lloyd came a misunderstanding,
happily brief, with Charles Lamb. Other happenings in 1798 were the
birth of a second son, the short-lived Berkeley Coleridge; the
publication, anonymously, of _Lyrical Ballads with a few other Poems_,
joint effort of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and the trip with William and
Mary Wordsworth and a friend from Stowey (John Chester by name) to
Germany, a journey described in part by Coleridge in _Satyrane's
Letters_.
Coleridge left the Wordsworths after a brief stay, and went to Ratzburg
with Chester, while the brother and sister went to Goslar. From
Ratzburg, Coleridge went to Göttingen, where he matriculated and
collected material for a _Life of Lessing_. He seems to have worked hard
in Germany, where his taste for abstruse metaphysical speculation was
greatly strengthened.
Before he left Göttingen for London, he had learned the sad news of the
death of his youngest child, and with the return to the metropolis, we
come to another chapter in the poet's life. It will be seen that the
generosity of the brothers Wedgwood had stimulated him to an increased
effort, though at the moment when he might have pulled himself together
and was honestly trying to do so, the opium habit began to hold him. The
current of his life could not run smoothly; he at least was "born to
trouble, as the sparks fly upward." The best that can be said is that
the visit to Germany, and the brief period of honest study, did much to
develop the poet's mind, opening to it unknown fields of German thought,
and filling him with dreams of great works that were to unite German and
British philosophers. Needless to say that, though mountains were
expected to arise, little more than a molehill was forthcoming.