childhood, Hartley preserved into manhood and age all of boyhood which
he had ever possessed—its beaming imagination and its wayward will. He
had none of the natural roughness of that age. He never played—partly
from weakness, for he was very small, but more from awkwardness. His
uncle Southey used to say he had two left hands, and might have added
that they were both useless. He could no more have achieved football, or
mastered cricket, or kept in with the hounds, than he could have followed
Charles’s Wain or played pitch and toss with Jupiter’s satellites. Nor
was he very excellent at school-work. He showed, indeed, no deficiency.
The Coleridge family have inherited from the old scholar of Ottery St.
Mary a certain classical facility which could not desert the son of
Samuel Taylor. But his real strength was in his own mind. All children
have a world of their own, as distinct from that of the grown people who
gravitate around them as the dreams of girlhood from our prosaic life; as
the ideas of the kitten that plays with the falling leaves, from those of
her carnivorous mother that catches mice and is sedulous in her domestic
duties. But generally about this interior existence, children are dumb.
You have warlike ideas, but you cannot say to a sinewy relative, ‘My
dear aunt, I wonder when the big bush in the garden will begin to walk
about; I’m sure it’s a crusader, and I was cutting it all the day with
my steel sword. But what do you think, aunt, for I’m puzzled about its
legs, because you see, aunt, it has only _one_ stalk; and besides, aunt,
the leaves.’ You cannot remark this in secular life; but you hack at the
infelicitous bush till you do not altogether reject the idea that your
small garden is Palestine, and yourself the most adventurous of knights.
Hartley had this, of course, like any other dreamy child, but in his
case it was accompanied with the faculty of speech, and an extraordinary
facility in continuous story-telling. In the very earliest childhood he
had conceived a complete outline of a country like England, whereof he
was king himself, and in which there were many wars, and rumours of wars,
and foreign relations and statesmen, and rebels and soldiers. ‘My people,
Derwent,’ he used to begin, ‘are giving me much pain; they want to go
to war.’ This faculty, as was natural, showed itself before he went to
school, but he carried on the habit of fanciful narration even into that
bleak and ungenial region. ‘It was not,’ says his brother, ‘by a series
of tales, but by one continuous tale, regularly evolved, and possessing a
real unity, that he enchained the attention of his auditors, night after
night, as we lay in bed, for a space of years, and not unfrequently for
hours together.’... ‘There was certainly,’ he adds, ‘a great variety of
persons sharply characterised, who appeared on the stage in combination
and not in succession.’ Connected, in Hartley, with this premature
development of the imagination, there was a singular deficiency in what
may be called the _sense_ of reality. It is alleged that he hardly
knew that Ejuxrea, which is the name of his kingdom, was not as solid
a _terra firma_ as Keswick or Ambleside. The deficiency showed itself
on other topics. His father used to tell a story of his metaphysical
questioning. When he was about five years old, he was asked, doubtless
by the paternal metaphysician, some question as to why he was called
Hartley. ‘Which Hartley?’ replied the boy. ‘Why, is there more than one
Hartley?’ ‘Yes, there is a deal of Hartleys; there is Picture Hartley
(Hazlitt had painted a picture of him), and Shadow Hartley, and there’s
Echo Hartley, and there’s Catchmefast Hartley,’ seizing his own arm very
eagerly, and as if reflecting on the ‘summject and ommject,’ which is to
say, being in hopeless confusion. We do not hear whether he was puzzled
and perplexed by such difficulties in later life; and the essays which
we are reviewing, though they contain much keen remark on the detail of
human character, are destitute of the Germanic profundities; they do not
discuss how existence is possible, nor enumerate the pure particulars of
the soul itself. But considering the idle dreaminess of his youth and
manhood, we doubt if Hartley ever got over his preliminary doubts—ever
properly grasped the idea of fact and reality. This is not nonsense. If
you attend acutely, you may observe that in few things do people differ
more than in their perfect and imperfect realisation of this earth.
To the Duke of Wellington a coat was a coat; ‘there was no mistake;’
no reason to disbelieve it; and he carried to his grave a perfect and
indubitable persuasion that he really did (what was his best exploit),
without fluctuation, _shave_ on the morning of the battle of Waterloo.
You could not have made him doubt it. But to many people who will never
be Field Marshals, there is on such points, not rational doubt, but
instinctive questioning. ‘Who the devil,’ said Lord Byron, ‘could _make_
such a world? No one, I believe.’ ‘Cast your thoughts,’ says a very
different writer, ‘back on the time when our ancient buildings were
first reared. Consider the churches all around us; how many generations
have passed since stone was put upon stone, till the whole edifice was
finished! The first movers and instruments of its erection, the minds
that planned it, and the limbs that wrought at it, the pious hands
that contributed to it, and the holy lips that consecrated it, have
long, long ago been taken away, yet we benefit by their good deed. Does
it not seem strange that men should be able, not merely by acting on
others, not by a continued influence carried on through many minds in
succession, but by a single direct act, to come into contact with us,
and, as if with their own hand, to benefit us who live centuries later?’
Or again, speaking of the lower animals: ‘Can anything be more marvellous
or startling, than that we should have a race of beings about us, whom
we do but see, and as little know their state, or can describe their
interests or their destiny, as we can tell of the inhabitants of the
sun and moon? It is indeed a very overpowering thought, that we hold
intercourse with creatures who are as much strangers to us, as mysterious
as if they were the fabulous, unearthly beings, more powerful than man,
and yet his slaves, which Eastern superstitions have invented.... Cast
your thoughts abroad on the whole number of them, large and small, in
vast forests, or in the water, or in the air, and then say whether the
presence of such countless multitudes, so various in their natures, so
strange and wild in their shapes, is not’ as incredible as anything can
be. We go into a street, and see it thronged with men, and we say, Is
it _true_, _are_ there these men? We look on a creeping river, till we
say, _Is_ there this river? We enter the law courts: we watch the patient
Chancellor: we hear the droning wigs:—surely this is not real,—this is
a dream,—nobody would do _that_,—it is a delusion. We are really, as
the sceptics insinuate, but ‘sensations and impressions,’ in groups or
alone, that float up and down; or, as the poet teaches, phantoms and
images, whose idle stir but mocks the calm reality of the ‘pictures on
the wall.’ All this will be called dreamy; but it is exactly because it
_is_ dreamy that we notice it. Hartley Coleridge was a dreamer: he began
with Ejuxrea, and throughout his years, he but slumbered and slept. Life
was to him a floating haze, a disputable mirage: you must not treat him
like a believer in stocks and stones—you might as well say he was a man
of business.
Hartley’s school education is not worth recounting; but beside and along
with it there was another education, on every side of him, singularly
calculated to bring out the peculiar aptitudes of an imaginative mind,
yet exactly, on that very account, very little likely to bring it down
to fact and reality, to mix it with miry clay, or define its dreams by
a daily reference to the common and necessary earth. He was bred up in
the house of Mr. Southey, where, more than anywhere else in all England,
it was held that literature and poetry are the aim and object of every
true man, and that grocery and other affairs lie beneath at an wholly
immeasurable distance, to be attended to by the inferior animals. In
Hartley’s case the seed fell on fitting soil. In youth, and even in
childhood, he was a not unintelligent listener to the unspeakable talk of
the Lake poets.
‘It was so,’ writes his brother, ‘rather than by a regular course of
study, that he was educated; by desultory reading, by the living voice
of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, Lloyd, Wilson, and De Quincey;
and again, by homely familiarity with townsfolk and countryfolk of every
degree; lastly, by daily recurring hours of solitude—by lonely wanderings
with the murmur of the Brathay in his ear.’
Thus he lived till the time came that he should go to Oxford, and
naturally enough, it seems, he went up with much hope and strong
excitement; for, quiet and calm as seem those ancient dormitories, to
him, as to many, the going among them seemed the first entrance into
the real world—the end of torpidity—the beginning of life. He had often
stood by the white Rydal Water, and thought it was coming, and now it
was come in fact. At first his Oxford life was prosperous enough. An
old gentleman, who believes that he too was once an undergraduate,
well remembers how Hartley’s eloquence was admired at wine parties and
breakfast parties. ‘Leaning his head on one shoulder, turning up his
dark bright eyes, and swinging backwards and forwards in his chair, he
would hold forth by the hour, for no one wished to interrupt him, on
whatever subject might have been started—either of literature, politics,
or religion—with an originality of thought, a force of illustration,
which,’ the narrator doubts, ‘if any man then living, except his father,
could have surpassed.’ The singular gift of continuous conversation—for
singular it is, if in any degree agreeable—seems to have come to him by
nature, and it was through life the one quality which he relied on for
attraction in society. Its being agreeable is to be accounted for mainly
by its singularity; if one knew any respectable number of declaimers—if
any proportion of one’s acquaintance should receive the gift of the
English language, and ‘improve each shining hour’ with liquid eloquence,
how we should regret their present dumb and torpid condition! If we
are to be dull—which our readers will admit to be an appointment of
providence—surely we will be dull in silence. Do not sermons exist, and
are they not a warning to mankind?
In fact, the habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of
mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in
other people’s minds. S. T. Coleridge, it is well known, talked to
everybody, and to everybody alike; like a Christian divine, he did not
regard persons. ‘That is a fine opera, Mr. Coleridge,’ said a young
lady, some fifty years back. ‘Yes, ma’am; and I remember Kant somewhere
makes a very similar remark for, as _we_ know, the idea of philosophical
infinity—.’ Now, this sort of talk will answer with two sorts of
people—with comfortable, stolid, solid people, who don’t understand it at
all—who don’t feel that they ought to understand it—who feel that they
ought not—that _they_ are to sell treacle and appreciate figs—but that
there _is_ this transcendental superlunary sphere, which is known to
others—which is now revealed in the spiritual speaker, the unmitigated
oracle, the evidently celestial sound. That the dreamy orator himself
has no more notion what is passing in their minds than they have what
is running through his, is of no consequence at all. If he did know
it, he would be silent; he would be jarred to feel how utterly he was
misunderstood; it would break the flow of his everlasting words. Much
better that he should run on in a never-pausing stream, and that the
wondering rustics should admire for ever. The basis of the entertainment
is that neither should comprehend the other.—But in a degree yet higher
is the society of an omniscient orator agreeable to a second sort of
people,—generally young men, and particularly—as in Hartley’s case—clever
undergraduates. All young men like what is theatrical, and by a fine
dispensation all clever young men like notions. They want to hear about
opinions, to know about opinions. The ever-flowing rhetorician gratifies
both propensions. He is a notional _spectacle_. Like the sophist of old,
he _is_ something and says something. The vagabond speculator in all
ages will take hold on those who wish to reason, and want premises—who
wish to argue, and want theses—who desire demonstrations, and have but
presumptions. And so it was acceptable enough that Hartley should make
the low tones of his musical voice glide sweetly and spontaneously
through the cloisters of Merton, debating the old questions, the ‘fate,
free-will, foreknowledge,’—the points that Ockham and Scotus propounded
in these same enclosures—the common riddles, the everlasting enigmas of
mankind. It attracts the scorn of middle-aged men (who depart πρὸς τὰ
ἱερά, and fancy they are wise), but it is a pleasant thing, that impact
of hot thought upon hot thought, of young thought upon young thought, of
new thought upon new thought. It comes to the fortunate once, but to no
one a second time thereafter for ever.
Nor was Hartley undistinguished in the regular studies of the University.
A regular, exact, accurate scholar he never was; but even in his early
youth he perhaps knew much more and understood much more of ancient
literature than seven score of schoolmasters and classmen. He had,
probably, in his mind a picture of the ancient world, or of some of it,
while the dry _literati_ only know the combinations and permutations of
the Greek alphabet. There is a pleasant picture of him at this epoch,
recorded by an eye-witness. ‘My attention,’ he narrates, ‘was at first
aroused by seeing from a window a figure flitting about amongst the
trees and shrubs of the garden with quick and agitated motion. This was
Hartley, who, in the ardour of preparing for his college examination, did
not even take his meals with the family, but snatched a hasty morsel in
his own apartment, and only sought the free air when the fading daylight
prevented him from seeing his books. Having found who he was that so
mysteriously flitted about the garden, I was determined to lose no time
in making his acquaintance, and through the instrumentality of Mrs.
Coleridge I paid Hartley a visit in what he called his den. This was a
room afterwards converted by Mr. Southey’—as what chink was not?—‘into
a supplementary library, but then appropriated as a study to Hartley,
and presenting a most picturesque and student-like disorder of scattered
pamphlets and folios.’ This is not a picture of the business-like
reading man—one wonders what fraction of his time he did read—but
it was probably the happiest period of his life. There was no coarse
prosaic action there. Much musing, little studying,—fair scholarship, an
atmosphere of the classics, curious fancies, much perusing of pamphlets,
light thoughts on heavy folios—these make the meditative poet, but not
the technical and patient-headed scholar; yet, after all, he was happy,
and obtained a second class.
A more suitable exercise, as it would have seemed at first sight, was
supplied by that curious portion of Oxford routine, the Annual Prize
Poem. This, he himself tells us, was, in his academic years, the real and
single object of his ambition. His reason is, for an autobiographical
reason, decidedly simple. ‘A great poet,’ he says, ‘I should not have
imagined myself, for I knew well enough that the verses were no great
things.’ But he entertained at that period of life—he was twenty-one—a
favourable opinion of young ladies; and he seems to have ascertained,
possibly from actual trial, that verses were not in themselves a very
emphatic attraction. Singular as it may sound, the ladies selected were
not only insensible to what is, after all, a metaphysical line, the
distinction between good poetry and bad, but were almost indifferent to
poetry itself. Yet the experiment was not quite conclusive. Verses might
fail in common life, and yet succeed in the Sheldonian theatre. It is
plain that they would be _read out_; it occurred to him, as he naïvely
relates, that if he should appear ‘as a prizeman,’ ‘as an intelligible
reciter of poetry,’ he would be an object of ‘some curiosity to the fair
promenaders in Christchurch Meadow;’ that the young ladies ‘with whom he
was on bowing and speaking terms might have felt a satisfaction in being
known to know me, which they had never experienced before.’ ‘I should,’
he adds, ‘have deemed myself a prodigious lion, and it was a character I
was weak enough to covet more than that of poet, scholar, or philosopher.’
In fact, he did not get the prize. The worthy East Indian, who imagined
that, in leaving a bequest for a prize to poetry, he should be as sure
of possessing poetry for his money as of eggs, if he had chosen eggs,
or of butter, if he had chosen butter, did not estimate rightly the
nature of poetry, or the nature of the human mind. The mechanical parts
of rhythm and metre are all that a writer can be certain of producing,
or that a purchaser can be sure of obtaining; and these an industrious
person will find in any collection of the Newdegate poems, together with
a fine assortment of similes and sentiments, respectively invented and
enjoined by Shem and Japhet for and to the use of after generations. And
there is a peculiar reason why a great poet (besides his being, as a
man of genius, rather more likely than another, to find a difficulty in
the preliminary technicalities of art) should not obtain an academical
prize, to be given for excellent verses to people of about twenty-one.
It is a bad season. ‘The imagination,’ said a great poet of the very
age, ‘of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is
healthy, but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a
ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition
thick-sighted.’[25] And particularly in a real poet, where the disturbing
influences of passion and fancy are most likely to be in excess, will
this unhealthy tinge be most likely to be excessive and conspicuous.
Nothing in the style of Endymion would have a chance of a prize; there
are no complete conceptions, no continuance of adequate words. What
is worse, there are no defined thoughts, or aged illustrations. The
characteristic of the whole is beauty and novelty, but it is beauty which
is not formed, and novelty which is strange and wavering. Some of these
defects are observable in the copy of verses on the ‘Horses of Lysippus,’
which Hartley Coleridge contributed to the list of unsuccessful attempts.
It does not contain so much originality as we might have expected; on
such a topic we anticipated more nonsense; a little, we are glad to say,
there is, and also that there is an utter want of those even raps, which
are the music of prize poems,—which were the right rhythm for Pope’s
elaborate sense, but are quite unfit for dreamy classics or contemplative
enthusiasm. If Hartley, like Pope, had been the son of a shopkeeper,
he would not have received the paternal encouragement, but rather a
reprimand,—‘Boy, boy, these be bad rhymes;’ and so, too, believed a
grizzled and cold examiner.
A much worse failure was at hand. He had been elected to a Fellowship,
in what was at that time the only open foundation in Oxford, Oriel
College: an event which shows more exact scholarship in Hartley, or
more toleration in the academical authorities for the grammatical
delinquencies of a superior man, than we should have been inclined, _a
priori_, to attribute to either of them. But it soon became clear that
Hartley was not exactly suited to that place. Decorum is the essence,
pomposity the advantage, of tutors. These Hartley had not. Beside the
serious defects which we shall mention immediately, he was essentially
an absent and musing, and therefore at times a highly indecorous man;
and though not defective in certain kinds of vanity, there was no tinge
in his manner of scholastic dignity. A schoolmaster should have an
atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being
himself. But an excessive sense of the ludicrous disabled Hartley
altogether from the acquisition of this valuable habit; perhaps he never
really attempted to obtain it. He accordingly never became popular as a
tutor, nor was he ever described as ‘exercising an influence over young
persons.’ Moreover, however excellently suited Hartley’s eloquence might
be to the society of undergraduates, it was out of place at the Fellows’
table. This is said to be a dull place. The excitement of early thought
has passed away; the excitements of active manhood are unknown. A certain
torpidity seems natural there. We find too that, probably for something
to say, he was in those years rather fond of exaggerated denunciation
of the powers that be. This is not the habit most grateful to the heads
of houses. ‘Sir,’ said a great authority, ‘do you deny that Lord Derby
ought to be Prime Minister? you might as well say, that I ought not to
be Warden of So and So.’ These habits rendered poor Hartley no favourite
with the leading people of his college, and no great prospective
shrewdness was required to predict that he would fare but ill, if any
sufficient occasion should be found for removing from the place, a person
so excitable and so little likely to be of use in inculcating ‘safe’
opinions among the surrounding youth.
Unhappily, the visible morals of Hartley offered an easy occasion. It
is not quite easy to gather from the narrative of his brother the exact
nature or full extent of his moral delinquencies; but enough is shown
to warrant, according to the rules, the unfavourable judgment of the
collegiate authorities. He describes, probably truly, the commencement
of his errors—‘I verily believe that I should have gone crazy, silly,
mad with vanity, had I obtained the prize for my “Horses of Lysippus.”
It was the only occasion in my life wherein I was keenly disappointed,
for it was the only one upon which I felt any confident hope. I had made
myself very sure of it; and the intelligence that not I but Macdonald was
the lucky man, absolutely stupefied me; yet I contrived for a time to
lose all sense of my misfortunes in exultation for Burton’s success.... I
sang, I danced, I whistled, I ran from room to room, announcing the great
tidings, and trying to persuade myself that I cared nothing at all for my
own case. But it would not do. It was bare sands with me the next day.
It was not the mere loss of the prize, but the feeling or phantasy of
an adverse destiny.... I foresaw that all my aims and hopes would prove
frustrate and abortive; and from that time I date my downward declension,
my impotence of will, and my melancholy recklessness. It was the first
time I sought relief in wine, which, as usual in such cases, produced
not so much intoxication as downright madness.’ Cast in an uncongenial
society, requiring to live in an atmosphere of respect and affection—and
surrounded by gravity and distrust—misconstrued and half tempted to
maintain the misconstruction; with the waywardness of childhood without
the innocency of its impulses; with the passions of manhood without the
repressive vigour of a man’s will,—he lived as a woman lives that is lost
and forsaken, who sins ever and hates herself for sinning, but who sins,
perhaps, more on that very account; because she requires some relief
from the keenness of her own reproach; because, in her morbid fancy, the
idea is ever before her; because her petty will is unable to cope with
the daily craving and the horrid thought—that she may not lose her own
identity—that she may not give in to the rigid, the distrustful, and the
calm.