COLERIDGE AS AN OBSERVER OF NATURE
The author of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which the
observation of natural phenomena is extraordinary, was never the child
of his environment in the same degree as his friends William Wordsworth
and Charles Lamb, though a great part of his life was passed in the
surroundings they knew best. Wordsworth is the true offspring of the
Lake Country; he carried to Racedown Lodge and Alfoxton House rich
memories of the sterner north, and his genius matured at Dove Cottage.
Lamb was a Londoner all the days of his life; the nearer to the
metropolis, the higher were his spirits, the more brilliant his pen.
Take London from Lamb and the Lakeside from Wordsworth and it is
difficult to say what would remain. Coleridge, on the other hand, must
have expressed himself anywhere, nor does it seem likely that the
quality of his utterances would have suffered from their place of birth.
While he was young and vigorous he found it hard to stay for any length
of time in one district, but wherever he went he seems to have felt at
home. Such complaints as Wordsworth could utter at Goslar, or Lamb at
Enfield, find no place that I can trace in the poems, essays, or
correspondence of Coleridge. He took no overwhelming delight in
populous cities or in the open spaces of the country. If he sojourned at
Keswick, it was to be near Wordsworth, and the only noticeable influence
his work owes to the Lake Country is to be found in "Christabel." If he
came to London it was to be within touch of work that was immediately
remunerative. The one remaining force that could decide the question of
a district's quality was proximity to a good library. His imagination,
when the spirit moved him, annihilated distance and ignored immediate
surroundings, his muse in its rare working hours knew no fetters of time
or place. Friends were more necessary to him than either to Wordsworth
or to Lamb, for these had a beloved sister for constant companion, and
while Lamb, the most hospitable of men, could console himself for the
absence of his friends with the aid of his folios, and a generous
measure of beer, Wordsworth had the additional gift of loving wife and
children. Then again Lamb worked for a great part of his life in the
office of the East India Company, while Wordsworth was supremely
conscious of the call of duty, and was anxious to read the lesson of the
simple life to a generation given over to the unavailing pursuit of
happiness. Of the three, only Coleridge was condemned to live in a
condition of perennial anxiety for the future, an anxiety not a little
due to his lack of capacity for steady work, the curse of a vagrant
disposition, and a fatal surrender to self-indulgence of a peculiarly
dangerous kind. The moods in which Coleridge could turn for relief to
Nature and scenes of natural beauty were rare, and consequently the
utterances thus directly inspired are few and far between. He had but a
passing regard for flowers and birds, no marked preference for mountain,
river, or plain, no very ready response to changing seasons. In a
collected edition of his poetical works, the student will find less than
thirty poems that seem to be suggested by Nature.
He knew the north, the west, and the south of England, but there is
nothing in his work to indicate that one was more to him than the other.
His genius was subjective rather than objective, and though he was a
great poet he was a still greater scholar and philosopher, with more of
the fruits of deep reading in his capacious brain than Wordsworth and
Lamb (each a scholar) could boast between them. To the full extent that
his infirmities and overmastering vice permitted, he was a man of the
world, at home in any company, able to discourse _de omnibus rebus et
quibusdam aliis_, and so overflowing with ideas that he could carry on a
monologue in the company of the most brilliant conversationalists and
leave them well content for once to be silent. It will be seen, then,
that in the case of Samuel Taylor Coleridge the question of residence,
although of admitted interest, is of relatively small importance, since
each might have been altered without affecting the volume, trend, or
quality of his output.
Ottery St. Mary has already been described at sufficient length for the
purposes of this brief essay. For all the beauty that belongs of right
to Devonshire it left no lasting impression upon his mind, and though
he quitted the home of his family at a tender age, we might have looked
for some definite utterances, because the early years of a poet are
frequently associated with very lasting impressions. Wordsworth
remembered his schooldays and Dame Tyson's cottage even in old age.
Christ's Hospital--by the way, does not de Quincey tell us that it
should be called Christ Hospital?--was the scene of Coleridge's earliest
poetic effort, and a sonnet to the autumnal moon is dated 1788, at a
time when, it is generally understood, he had not returned to his
mother's house. There is no direct inspiration from Nature here. He
compares the appearance of the moon coming from a cloud to Hope, now
brightening the eye, now hidden behind "dragon-winged Despair," and
finally shining like a meteor over the "sorrow-clouded breast of Care."
The lines are fluent but superficial. It may be that owing to long
residence in Newgate Street with the terror of Boyer's discipline upon
him the young "Grecian" had little chance to respond to such glimpses of
Nature as his brief holiday rambles afforded. A year later, in some
verses called "Life" he makes a passing reference to Otter's "scanty
stream," and in 1790 writes some weak verses condemning the bad
Devonshire roads. His "Absence," a farewell ode on quitting school for
Cambridge, and "The Raven," belonging to the same year, show no
influence of Nature, but in 1793, in the brave year when he was
twenty-one, there are verses that show at last an awakening
appreciation. The "Songs of the Pixies," the Sonnet to the River Otter,
the lines "To a Beautiful Spring in a Village," and "On an Autumnal
Evening" exhibit the mood of a young man to whom Nature is beginning to
reveal some of the secrets of her immortal charm, but there are none of
the distinctive thoughts that a Keats or a Wordsworth would have given
us under the stress of similar emotion, so we may presume that neither
half-remembered Ottery St. Mary, nor Christ's Hospital, nor even Jesus
College, Cambridge, had served to string the poet's lyre. Out of the
superabundant gift of expression and the long course of varied reading,
certain emotions had proceeded, but they are never the emotions of a
poet of Nature. The early verses that Coleridge contributed to the
_Morning Post_ include adaptations from the classics. The "Lines to a
Nightingale" (1795) are inspired by Sarah Fricker, and she too comes
into the far better compositions of the same year, "Lines composed while
climbing the left ascent of Brackley Coomb, Somersetshire," written when
Coleridge was dallying with Pantisocracy in company with Burnett and
Southey. The maythorn, yew, and elm are the only trees he notices, and
cuckoo the only bird. The "Æolian Harp," written in the same year, is
inspired too by Sarah Fricker, and it must be remembered that Coleridge
was then twenty-three, when the best and worst men are guilty of writing
verse in which the inspiration felt is quite out of proportion to the
thought expressed. Perhaps "Reflection on having left a Place of
Retirement" strikes the pastoral and rural note most clearly. The "place
of retirement" was the little cottage at Clevedon he found after
marriage. The lines seem to be a record of the honeymoon. They are
happy and speak of a certain resolution that had yet to be undermined:
"Ah! quiet dell! dear cot, and mount sublime!
I was constrained to quit you. Was it right
While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled,
That I should dream away the entrusted hours
On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart
With feelings all too delicate for use?
I therefore go, and join head, heart, and hand
Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight
Of science, freedom, and the truth in Christ."
The lines, of which the above are a part, are important in so far as
they show that even on his honeymoon and in the most delightful country
Coleridge was not yet on intimate terms with natural objects. He writes
of rose and myrtle and jasmine and "the bare bleak mountain speckled
thin with sheep." He knew neither the small nor the great on terms of
intimacy, and here again we have further proof that there is nothing
local about his genius, and that his homes and haunts did little more
than influence his health upon occasions; they never stirred his pen or
turned him to seek nature knowledge. Doubtless, had he been left to
spend his boyhood by the Otter's banks, he would have gathered some
small lore of tree, and bird, and plant, but London, though it did much
for him, left him quite ill-equipped. The Clevedon cottage where he
spent his honeymoon is still to be seen by the tourist and lover of the
poet, who may well pause to wonder how Wordsworth would have sung such a
peaceful and yet stimulating spot. In the February of 1796 come lines
"On observing a blossom on the first of February," and this will make
the most modest botanist smile, for by the first of February the winter
jasmine, the Christmas rose, and the winter aconite, to name but three
flowers at random, have been blossoming for some time, and so, too, has
many a pleasant weed. Later in the same year the first primrose of the
season tempted him to some charming lines, of which four may be quoted:
"But, tender blossom, why so pale,
Dost hear stern winter in the gale?
And didst thou tempt the ungentle sky
To catch one vernal glance and die?"
This is very pretty and naïve, but quite childish, and the lines are
prefaced by a quotation from Ovid. In June 1797, at Nether Stowey,
Coleridge wrote the exquisite poem, "This Lime Tree Bower my Prison." It
was addressed to Charles Lamb, and on a copy of this poem, thirty-seven
years later, he wrote his last words, "Charles and Mary Lamb, dear to my
heart, yea, as it were, my heart." Here for once the spirit of Nature
descends for a moment upon him. He sees his surroundings with what Sir
Joshua would have called "a dilated eye." There are lines in it with
which memory loves to dwell; they bring Coleridge nearer to some of us
than many of the poems upon which his reputation stands secure:
"....In this bower,
This little lime tree bower, have I not marked
Much that has soothed me? Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage, and I watched
Some broad and sunny leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut tree
Was richly tinged, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight, and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble bee
Sings in the bean flower!"
The recurrence of the word "and" in four consecutive lines is perhaps
the most noticeable blemish here.
It is at Nether Stowey when Coleridge was five-and-twenty years old that
we find the first utterance which seems to treat Nature as the theme and
not merely as a subsidiary aid to the expression of certain thoughts.
"Frost at Midnight," belonging to 1798, has some fine lines addressed to
little Hartley:
"Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun thaw, whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon."
This is full of promise, and so too is the "Conversation Poem" called
"The Nightingale," written in April of that year, in which Coleridge
shows the true instinct by rejecting the suggestion that the bird's
notes are sad:
"....'Tis the merry Nightingale
That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates
With fast thick warble his delicious notes
As he were fearful that an April night
Would be too short for him to utter forth
His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul
Of all its music."
If the presence of Lamb inspired the "Lime Tree Bower" music, it is
undoubtedly to the happy association at Alfoxden with the Wordsworths
that we owe the "Nightingale" song, though the image of his child,
presumably little Berkeley, the short-lived second-born, runs sparkling
through the closing lines.
Some years pass now before Coleridge responds again to Nature, this time
in his magnificent "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni." This
is as stately an invocation as ever the poet penned, and to the same
year belongs the well-known "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath."
After this date one will look in vain to Coleridge for a direct response
to Nature or for any prolonged utterance founded upon the beauty of
earth, sea, or sky. The year 1802, in which this side of the poet's work
seems to fail, is the date of the "Ode to Dejection," a twelvemonth
before the visit to Scotland and two years before the visit to Malta and
Italy. Is it unreasonable, then, to suggest that the Nature love and
study that the poems of Coleridge reveal are associated only with the
early years of courtship and marriage, and the first long association
with the Wordsworths in and around Nether Stowey and Alfoxden? We know
that by the time "Kubla Khan" was written (1798) Coleridge was already
beginning to surrender himself to opium, and a very few years of close
devotion to this drug would have served to deprive him, not only of the
spring joy of life, but of response to Nature. He was not a Nature lover
at heart, and consequently there was little to be rooted out. Courtship
and the birth of children kindled some light that the drug was to quench
effectually, and after 1802, Coleridge turned but seldom to Nature even
for pictorial imagery. His mind wandered farther and farther into fields
of abstruse and difficult speculation, the poet in him mingled with the
scholar, and in the later years his essays were, from the standpoint of
fine thought, expressed in terse, vigorous English that lacked neither
wit nor humour upon occasion, far more important than his poetry. Lamb's
essays breathe the spirit of a poet; much of Coleridge's later work,
whether dramatic or lyrical, is in the first place the effort of an
accomplished man of letters and philosopher. This brings me back to the
first statement of the chapter; Coleridge was not influenced by
residence, but by the circumstances of his life, by his failure to earn
sufficient money, a failure due in its turn to his besetting weakness.
We cannot name any place of the poet's uneasy sojourn and say the
district exercised an abiding influence upon his poetry.
Here we have material for a very painful reflection. We know how largely
some of the saddest lives in literature have been soothed or brightened
by close communion with what we call common things, because they are
within reach of all. Had Coleridge been able to take comfort in them,
had he possessed, with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, the "inward eye
that is the bliss of solitude," his life would have been immeasurably
happier, long periods of keen distress would have been spared him. No
man stands so much alone as he who, having no home-life to which he can
turn for comfort, is unable to find any abiding happiness in
contemplation of the life the seasons show. To make matters worse, we
can see Coleridge was profoundly conscious that such a healing power
existed. Surely nobody who was in Wordsworth's company, or even in
Robert Southey's, could have failed to realise this. Coleridge and
Southey lived together, and Southey, though he walked book in hand,
tells us of the sights that delighted him on his rambles, and how on
winter mornings he would take his little ones to the hill-tops "for the
sake of getting the first sunshine on the mountains." But Coleridge
could not grasp this gift, so keenly appreciated by the two future Poets
Laureate, any more than he could grasp the opportunities extended to him
on every side by men who realised at once the extent of his troubles and
his gifts. To him the sources of most human consolations "were barr'd
and bann'd, forbidden fare." If only for this, his harshest critic who
can see his life in true perspective must respond to the appeal of the
epitaph the poet wrote for himself when he saw the end of a weary
pilgrimage in sight. Never did man so richly blessed with friends and
well-wishers travel along a more lonely road, and when we consider the
conditions under which the most of his work was written, the
comparatively few hours in which he was the master of his own soul, we
are left with a feeling of surprise at the quantity and quality of his
accomplishment. Coleridge will receive from most kindly human judges the
mercy and forgiveness for which he pleads, but at the same time the fame
remains, nor can the praise be withheld.
But by reason of his close association with Wordsworth, and his
considerable sojourn by the Lakes and in Somersetshire, Coleridge is
often considered in his relations to Nature, and a few selected poems
from which free quotation has been made here, are brought forward to
suggest that he too was in his turn a Nature poet. It has been shown
that such an opinion is hard to justify; it would be more fair to say
that as far as the introduction of the imagery of nature is concerned,
Coleridge bears the same relation to Wordsworth that Horace bears to
Virgil. Horace used nature to illustrate his philosophy, to clothe or
adorn his imagery dealing with matters outside the countryside;
Coleridge did the same, but not so well, for he lacked the Horatian
humour. The second epode of Horace explodes for all time in its closing
lines the theory that Horace has the country man's love for the country.
It suggests that the Augustan age had its cry of "back to the land," and
that the cry was insincere. Horace turned it to good account, though
doubtless the little estate among the Sabine hills near Roccagiavone and
the Licenza valley that he owed to the kindness of Mæcenas was a source
of infinite delight to him. But the pleasure came from the opportunity
it afforded of quiet and uninterrupted work when Rome was too hot to be
pleasant and all the interesting people had left the city. One can
imagine that Coleridge would have looked with much the same regard upon
a country-house that cost him nothing and gave complete assurance of
privacy. With Virgil, as with Wordsworth, the case was different. The
Mantuan loved the country as Wordsworth loved it, and, for his time,
with a much more studied appreciation. Virgil and Wordsworth hold the
ear and stimulate the mind when they write of rural life and scenery.
Horace and Coleridge, for all their exquisite facility, fail to utter
the litany to which the heart of the country lover responds. The
comparison between the Mantuan peasant and the son of a slave on the one
hand, and two eighteenth-century poets who had their education rounded
off by the University on the other, may seem at first a little strained,
but if it were possible to pursue it here we might find many points
that, _mutatis mutandis_, connect Coleridge with Horace and Wordsworth
with Virgil in the relation of the poets to the country and the country
life. Moreover, each of the latter-day poets was indebted to patrons, as
were their great prototypes, if such a word be permissible. There is
something in the Bucolics and Georgics which connects Virgil with the
best period of Wordsworth, if we will remember that the men saw life in
a different age, under different skies, and in the light of different
faiths. Even those who will not admit as much will acknowledge that
Virgil and Wordsworth ring true to the country man, while neither
Horace nor Coleridge, though they call the country to their aid for an
illustration, or a moral or philosophical lesson, could have written:
"O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint Agricolas!"
But it is time to turn from a general survey of Coleridge's work to a
more detailed consideration of certain examples.