CLEVEDON—LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS: COLERIDGE
CLEVEDON is now entered by the modern suburban developments of Walton
Park. Suburbs and light railways, and all the things they mean, do not
come into the minds of those who have merely read of Clevedon and have
not been there. Clevedon to these untravelled folk means Coleridge and
Tennyson and Hallam, a certain “quiet cot,” a stately Court and a lone
church on a hilltop, overlooking the Severn Sea. These are essentials;
the rest is incidental. But when you come at last to Clevedon, you
discover, with a pained surprise to which you have no sort of a right,
that the position is altogether reversed: these literary landmarks and
associations are the incidentals, and the essentials—well, _what_ are
they? It would puzzle even an old-established resident of Clevedon to
say. Nothing matters very much at Clevedon—except that half the houses
are to let; and _that_ is a matter of moment only to the owners of them
and to the tradesfolk. How do people make shift to pass the time here?
They don’t care for literature: they don’t stroll the sands, for there
are none; and they don’t walk, for it is a neighbourhood of atrocious
hills, except on the way to the railway-station, the dust-destructor,
and the gas-works.
What is it, then, they do? I will tell you. They sit upon the rocks,
waiting for the next mealtime and refusing (rightly) to support the
miserable creatures who, calling themselves “pierrots,” infest the
front. In the exiguous public gardens old ladies of both sexes knit
impossible and useless articles or pretend to read the newspapers, and
wonder why they ever came to the place.
The paradoxical tragedy of Clevedon is that there is at once too little
and too much of it: too little sea-front, and a great deal too much of
the town in these later times built beside it; but the place must indeed
have been delightful in 1795, at the time when Samuel Taylor Coleridge
brought his bride here from Bristol, where they had been married, in the
church of St. Mary Redcliffe. He was twenty-three, and a visionary
immersed in German metaphysics and the Kantean philosophy; and had but
recently been bought out of the 15th Light Dragoons, in which in a
moment of despair and starvation, he had enlisted. Four months of
military duties untempered with glory, but strongly savoured with
riding-lessons and stable-fatigue, did not make him a more practical
man; and he remained in all the sixty-two years that made up his span of
life, although the most gifted of all the clever Coleridge family, an
amiable dreamer.
The dreams in which he and Southey and other friends were at this time
immersed were concerned with a fantastic kind of Socialism they were
pleased to style a “Pantisocracy,” in which ideal state all property was
to be held in common, and all spare time was to be occupied with
literature; a truly terrible prospect! This ideal community was to be
established in North America, on the Susquehanna river, there to live a
life of plain living and high thinking, punctuated with washing up the
domestic dishes, weeding the potato-patch, and propagating a new
generation of prigs. But money was needed for the starting of this
pretty and pedantic scheme, and because “Pantisocracy” (Heavens! what a
name!) did not appeal, and was never likely to appeal, to any one who
was master of any honest coin of the realm, it remained a vision. It
failed for want of money; and, human nature being what it is, it would
still have failed disastrously had funds been provided.
So our Pantisocrats remained in England; “Myrtle Cottage,” Clevedon,
remaining for a little while the address of the Coleridges, until they
removed to Nether Stowey. We may fairly suppose that here this wayward
genius, a brilliant talker, a poet of gorgeous ideas and noble language,
but a man constitutionally infirm of purpose, and made yet more
inconstant by deep reading of mystical German philosophy that led to
mental blind alleys, lived the happiest time of his life. We obtain an
early first glimpse of him—the second day after arrival—in his letter to
Cottle, the amiable and helpful bookseller of Bristol, who greatly
befriended Coleridge and Southey when they needed friendship most:
To his “dear Cottle” he wrote, October 6th, 1795: “Pray send me a
riddle, slice, a candle-box, two ventilators, two glasses for the
washstand, one tin dust-pan, one small tin tea-kettle, one pair of
candlesticks, one carpet-brush, one flour dredge, three tin
extinguishers, two mats, a pair of slippers, a cheese toaster, two large
tin spoons, a Bible, a keg of porter, coffee, raisins, currants, catsup,
nutmegs, allspice, cinnamon, rice, ginger, and mace.”
[Illustration: COLERIDGE’S COTTAGE, CLEVEDON.]
The imagination readily pictures the essentially unpractical Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, certainly not well versed in domestic economy, taking
down this list of household small gear from his “pensive Sara”;
prepared, with the receipt of them, to open his campaign for existence
against an indifferent world.
He sang the praises of that early home in no uncertain manner:
Low was our pretty cot; our tallest rose
Peeped at the chamber window. We could hear
At silent noon, and eve, and early morn,
The sea’s faint murmur. In the open air
Our myrtle blossomed; and across the porch
Thick jasmins twined: the little landscape round
Was green and woody, and refreshed the eye.
It was a spot which you might aptly call
The Valley of Seclusion!
You might indeed so call it now, if inclined to poetry, but you would be
wholly wrong. The painful fact must be recorded that “Myrtle Cottage”
stands beside the road, directly on the busiest route between the
railway-station and the sea-front (such as the sea-front is), and that
flys, “charleybanks,” wagonettes, motor-cars, and all conceivable
traffic come this way. Indeed, this cottage and its trim fellow are now
almost the only vestiges in the road left of the Clevedon that Coleridge
knew. What little remained of the rocky bluff at the back is now being
actively blasted and quarried away by the local authority, in its
attempt—highly successful, too—at matching the place with the London
district of Notting Hill. Property owners have already filled Clevedon
with stuccoed semi-“Italian” villas on the Ladbroke Grove model, that
became discredited a generation ago; the kind of property that has
dismal semi-underground dungeons called “breakfast-rooms” (by way of a
penitential beginning of the day), and long flights of stone steps to
the front door, alleged to be ornamental, and certainly excessively
tiring. This is a kind of property that never, or rarely, lets nowadays;
and Clevedon has many empty villas.
The white-paled, red-tiled trim cottages—Coleridge’s and another—are
among the pleasantest sights of Clevedon, by reason of their
unconventional, homely style, and the fine trees that surround and
overhang them. Tiles, you will observe, have replaced the thatch of the
poet’s description; but the jessamine still twines over the porch. Five
pounds a year, the landlord paying the taxes; that was the rent of this
then idyllic spot.
It should here be added that doubts have recently been expressed as to
the genuine nature of the tradition that makes “Myrtle Cottage” the
temporary home of Coleridge. And not only have these doubts been
expressed, but very strongly worded statements have been made, to the
effect that the real Coleridge Cottage was in the valley at East
Clevedon, adjoining Walton-in-Gordano. But the matter is controversial,
and at any rate the legend—if, indeed, it be but a legend—that has
attached to the cottage popularly known as Coleridge’s, has had so long
a start that it will be difficult, if not impossible, ever to demolish
it.
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