the weakness was hereditary. We do not as yet know, it seems most likely
that we shall never know, the precise character of his father. But with
all the discrepancy concerning the details, enough for our purpose is
certain of the outline. We know that he lived many and long years a prey
to weaknesses and vice of this very description; and though it be false
and mischievous to speak of hereditary vice, it is most true and wise
to observe the mysterious fact of hereditary temptation. Doubtless it
is strange that the nobler emotions and the inferior impulses, their
peculiar direction or their proportionate strength, the power of a fixed
idea—that the inner energy of the very will, which seems to issue from
the inmost core of our complex nature, and to typify, if anything does,
the pure essence of the immortal soul—that these and such as these should
be transmitted by material descent, as though they were an accident of
the body, the turn of an eyebrow or the feebleness of a joint,—if this
were not obvious, it would be as amazing, perhaps more amazing, than
any fact which we know; it looks not only like predestinated, but even
heritable election. But, explicable or inexplicable—to be wondered at
or not wondered at—the fact is clear; tendencies and temptations are
transmitted even to the fourth generation both for good and for evil,
both in those who serve God and in those who serve Him not. Indeed, the
weakness before us seems essentially connected—perhaps we may say on a
final examination essentially identical—with the dreaminess of mind, the
inapprehensiveness of reality which we remarked upon before. Wordsworth
used to say, that ‘at a particular stage of his mental progress he used
to be frequently so wrapt into an unreal transcendental world of ideas,
that the external world seemed no longer to exist in relation to him,
and he had to convince himself of its existence by _clasping a tree_ or
something that happened to be near him.’ But suppose a mind which did not
feel acutely the sense of reality which others feel, in hard contact with
the tangible universe; which was blind to the distinction between the
palpable and the impalpable, or rather lived in the latter in preference
to, and nearly to the exclusion of, the former. What is to fix such a
mind, what is to strengthen it, to give it a fulcrum? To exert itself,
the will, like the arm, requires to have an obvious and a definite
resistance, to know where it is, why it is, whence it comes, and whither
it goes. ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made of,’ says Prospero. So,
too, the difficulty of Shakespeare’s greatest dreamer, Hamlet, is that
he cannot quite believe that his duty is to be done where it lies, and
immediately. Partly from the natural effect of a vision of a spirit which
is not, but more from native constitution and instinctive bent, he is for
ever speculating on the reality of existence, the truth of the world.
‘How,’ discusses Kant, ‘is Nature in general possible?’ and so asked
Hamlet too. With this feeling on his mind, persuasion is useless and
argument in vain. Examples gross as earth exhort him, but they produce no
effect; but he thinks and thinks the more.
‘Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,—
A thought which quarter’d hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward,—I do not know
Why yet I live to say, “This thing’s to do,”
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do ’t.’
Hartley himself well observes that on such a character the likelihood
of action is inversely as the force of the motive and the time for
deliberation. The stronger the reason, the more certain the scepticism?
_Can_ anything be so certain? Does not the excess of the evidence alleged
make it clear that there is something behind, something on the other
side? Search then diligently lest anything be overlooked. Reflection
‘puzzles the will,’ Necessity ‘benumbs like a torpedo:’ and so
‘The native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.’
Why should we say any more? We do but ‘chant snatches of old tunes.’
But in estimating men like the Coleridges—the son even more than the
father—we must take into account this peculiar difficulty—this dreamy
unbelief—this daily scepticism—this haunting unreality—and imagine that
some may not be quite responsible either for what they do, or for what
they do not—because they are bewildered, and deluded, and perplexed, and
want the faculty as much to comprehend their difficulty as to subdue it.
The Oxford life of Hartley is all his life. The failure of his prospects
there, in his brother’s words, ‘deprived him of the residue of his
years.’ The biography afterwards goes to and fro—one attempt after
another failing, some beginning in much hope, but even the sooner for
that reason issuing in utter despair. His literary powers came early to
full perfection. For some time after his expulsion from Oriel he was
resident in London, and the poems written there are equal, perhaps are
superior, to any which he afterwards produced. This sonnet may serve as a
specimen:—
‘In the great city we are met again
Where many souls there are, that breathe and die
Scarce knowing more of nature’s potency
Than what they learn from heat or cold or rain,
The sad vicissitude of weary pain:—
For busy man is lord of ear and eye,
And what hath Nature, but the vast, void sky,
And the throng’d river toiling to the main?
Oh! say not so, for she shall have her part
In every smile, in every tear that falls,
And she shall hide her in the secret heart
Where love persuades and sterner duty calls;
But worse it were than death or sorrow’s smart,
To live without a friend within these walls.’
He soon, however, went down to the lakes, and there, except during one or
two short intervals, he lived and died. This exception was a residence
at Leeds, during which he brought out, besides a volume containing his
best poems, the book which stands at the head of our article—the Lives of
Northern Worthies. We selected the book, we confess, with the view mainly
of bringing a remarkable character before the notice of our readers—but
in itself the work is an excellent one, and of a rare kind.
Books are for various purposes—tracts to teach, almanacs to sell, poetry
to make pastry, but this is the rarest sort of book, a book to _read_.
As Dr. Johnson said, ‘Sir, a good book is one you can hold in your hand,
and take to the fire.’ Now there are extremely few books which can, with
any propriety, be so treated. When a great author, as Grote or Gibbon,
has devoted a whole life of horrid industry to the composition of a large
history, one feels one ought not to touch it with a mere hand—it is not
respectful. The idea of slavery hovers over the ‘Decline and Fall.’ Fancy
a stiffly dressed gentleman, in a stiff chair, slowly writing that stiff
compilation in a stiff hand: it is enough to stiffen you for life. Or is
poetry readable? Of course it is rememberable; when you have it in the
mind, it clings; if by heart, it haunts. Imagery comes from it; songs
which lull the ear, heroines that waste the time. But this Biographia is
actually read; a man is glad to take it up, and slow to lay it down; it
is a book which is truly valuable, for it is truly pleasing; and which
a man who has once had it in his library would miss from his shelves,
not only in the common way, by a physical vacuum, but by a mental
deprivation. This strange quality it owes to a peculiarity of style. Many
people give many theories of literary composition, and Dr. Blair, whom we
will read, is sometimes said to have exhausted the subject; but, unless
he has proved the contrary, we believe that the knack in style is to
write like a human being. Some think they must be wise, some elaborate,
some concise; Tacitus wrote like a pair of stays; some startle as Thomas
Carlyle, or a comet, inscribing with his tail. But legibility is given
to those who neglect these notions, and are willing to be themselves, to
write their own thoughts in their own words, in the simplest words, in
the words wherein they were thought; and such, and so great, was in this
book the magnanimity of Hartley.
As has been said, from his youth onwards, Hartley’s outward life was
a simple blank. Much writing, and much musing, some intercourse with
Wordsworth, some talking to undergraduate readers or lake ladies, great
loneliness, and much intercourse with the farmers of Cumberland—these
pleasures, simple enough, most of them, were his life. The extreme
pleasure of the peasantry in his conversation, is particularly remarked.
‘Aye, but Mr. Coleridge talks fine,’ observed one. ‘I would go through
fire and water for Mr. C.,’ interjected another. His father, with real
wisdom, had provided (in part, at least) for his necessary wants in the
following manner:—
‘This is a codicil to my last will and testament.
‘S. T. COLERIDGE.
‘Most desirous to secure, as far as in me lies, for my dear
son Hartley, the tranquillity essential to any continued and
successful exertion of his literary talents, and which, from
the like characters of our minds in this respect, I know to
be especially requisite for his happiness, and persuaded that
he will recognise in this provision that anxious affection
by which it is dictated, I affix this codicil to my last
will and testament.... And I hereby request them (the said
trustees) to hold the sum accruing to Hartley Coleridge from
the equal division of my total bequest between him, his brother
Derwent, and his sister Sara, after his mother’s decease,
to dispose of the interests or proceeds of the same portion
to or for the use of my dear son Hartley Coleridge, at such
time or times, in such manner, or under such conditions, as
they, the trustees above named, know to be my wish, and shall
deem conducive to the attainment of my object in adding the
codicil, namely, the anxious wish to ensure for my son the
continued means of a home, in which I comprise board, lodging,
and raiment. Providing that nothing in this codicil shall be
so interpreted as to interfere with my son H. C.’s freedom of
choice respecting his place of residence, or with his power of
disposing of his portion by will after his decease according as
his own judgments and affections may decide.’
An excellent provision, which would not, however, by the English law,
have disabled the ‘said Hartley’ from depriving himself of ‘the continued
means of a home’ by alienating the principal of the bequest; since the
jurisprudence of this country has no legal definition of ‘prodigality,’
and does not consider any person incompetent to manage his pecuniary
affairs unless he be quite and certainly insane. Yet there undoubtedly
are persons, and poor Hartley was one of them, who though in general
perfectly sane, and even with superior powers of thought or fancy, are as
completely unable as the most helpless lunatic to manage any pecuniary
transactions, and to whom it would be a great gain to have perpetual
guardians and compulsory trustees. But such people are rare, and few
principles are so English as the maxim _de minimis non curat lex_.
He lived in this way for thirty years or nearly so, but there is nothing
to tell of all that time. He died January 6, 1849, and was buried in
Grasmere churchyard—the quietest place in England, ‘by the yews,’ as
Arnold says, ‘that Wordsworth planted, the Rotha with its big silent
pools passing by.’ It was a shining January day when Hartley was borne to
the grave. ‘Keep the ground for us,’ said Mr. Wordsworth to the sexton;
‘we are old, and it cannot be long.’
We have described Hartley’s life at length for a peculiar reason. It is
necessary to comprehend his character, to appreciate his works; and there
is no way of delineating character but by a selection of characteristic
sayings and actions. All poets, as is commonly observed, are delineated
in their poems, but in very different modes. Each minute event in the
melancholy life of Shelley is frequently alluded to in his writings. The
tender and reverential character of Virgil is everywhere conspicuous in
his pages. It is clear that Chaucer was shrewd. We seem to have talked
with Shakespeare, though we have forgotten the facts of his life; but
it is not by minute allusion, or a tacit influence, or a genial and
delightful sympathy, that a writer like Hartley Coleridge leaves the
impress of himself, but in a more direct manner, which it will take a few
words to describe.
Poetry begins in Impersonality. Homer is a voice—a fine voice, a fine
eye, and a brain that drew with light; and this is all we know. The
natural subjects of the first art are the scenes and events in which the
first men naturally take an interest. They don’t care—who does?—for a
kind old man; but they want to hear of the exploits of their ancestors—of
the heroes of their childhood—of them that their fathers saw—of the
founders of their own land—of wars, and rumours of wars—of great
victories boldly won—of heavy defeats firmly borne—of desperate disasters
unsparingly retrieved. So in all countries—Siegfried, or Charlemagne, or
Arthur,—they are but attempts at an Achilles: the subject is the same—the
κλέα ἀνδρῶν and the death that comes to all. But then the mist of battles
passes away, and the sound of the daily conflict no longer hurtles in
the air, and a generation arises skilled with the skill of peace, and
refined with the refinement of civilisation, yet still remembering the
old world, still appreciating the old life, still wondering at the old
men, and ready to receive, at the hand of the poet, a new telling of
the old tale—a new idealisation of the legendary tradition. This is the
age of dramatic art, when men wonder at the big characters of old, as
schoolboys at the words of Æschylus, and try to find in their own breasts
the roots of those monstrous, but artistically developed impersonations.
With civilisation too comes another change: men wish not only to tell
what they have seen, but also to express what they are conscious of.
Barbarians feel only hunger, and that is not lyrical; but as time runs
on, arise gentler emotions and finer moods and more delicate desires
which need expression, and require from the artist’s fancy the lightest
touches and the most soothing and insinuating words. Lyrical poetry, too,
as we know, is of various kinds. Some, as the war song, approach to the
epic, depict events and stimulate to triumph; others are love songs to
pour out wisdom, others sober to describe champagne; some passive and
still, and expressive of the higher melancholy, as Gray’s ‘Elegy in a
Country Churchyard.’ But with whatever differences of species and class,
the essence of lyrical poetry remains in all identical; it is designed
to express, and when successful does express, some one mood, some single
sentiment, some isolated longing in human nature. It deals not with man
as a whole, but with man piecemeal, with man in a scenic aspect, with man
in a peculiar light. Hence lyrical poets must not be judged literally
from their lyrics: they are discourses; they require to be reduced into
the scale of ordinary life, to be stripped of the enraptured element,
to be clogged with gravitating prose. Again, moreover, and in course
of time, the advance of ages and the progress of civilisation appear
to produce a new species of poetry which is distinct from the lyrical,
though it grows out of it, and contrasted with the epic, though in a
single respect it exactly resembles it. This kind may be called the
_self-delineative_, for in it the poet deals not with a particular
desire, sentiment, or inclination in his own mind, not with a special
phase of his own character, not with his love of war, his love of ladies,
his melancholy, but with his mind viewed as a whole, with the entire
essence of his own character. The first requisite of this poetry is
truth. It is in Plato’s phrase the soul ‘itself by itself’ aspiring to
view and take account of the particular notes and marks that distinguish
it from all other souls. The sense of reality is necessary to excellence;
the poet being himself, speaks like one who has authority; he knows and
must not deceive. This species of poetry, of course, adjoins on the
lyrical, out of which it historically arises. Such a poem as the ‘Elegy’
is, as it were, on the borders of the two; for while it expresses but
a single emotion, meditative, melancholy, you seem to feel that this
sentiment is not only then and for a moment the uppermost, but (as with
Gray it was) the habitual mood, the pervading emotion of his whole life.
Moreover, in one especial peculiarity, this sort of poetry is analogous
to the narrative or epic. Nothing certainly can, in a general aspect,
be more distantly removed one from another, the one dealing in external
objects and stirring events, the other with the stillness and repose of
the poet’s mind; but still in a single characteristic the two coincide.
They describe character as the painters say _in mass_. The defect of the
drama is, that it can delineate only motion. If a thoughtful person will
compare the character of Achilles, as we find it in Homer, with the more
surpassing creations of dramatic invention, say with Lear or Othello,
he will perhaps feel that character in repose, character on the lonely
beach, character in marble, character in itself, is more clearly and
perfectly seen in the epic narrative, than in the conversational drama.
It of course requires immense skill to make mere talk exhibit a man as
he is ἑτάρων ἄφαρ. Now this quality of epic poetry the self-delineative
precisely shares with it. It describes a character—the poet’s—alone by
itself. And therefore, when the great master in both kinds did not
hesitate to turn aside from his ‘high argument’ to say—
‘More safe I sing with mortal voice unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,’
pedants may prose as they please about the ‘impropriety’ of
‘interspersing’ species of composition which are by nature remote; but
Milton felt more profoundly that in its treatment of character the
egotistical poetry is allied to the epic; that he was putting together
elements which would harmoniously combine; that he was but exerting the
same faculties in either case—being guided thereto by a sure instinct,
the desire of genius to handle and combine every one of the subjects on
which it is genius.
Now it is in this self-delineative species of poetry that, in our
judgment, Hartley Coleridge has attained to nearly, if not quite the
highest excellence; it pervades his writings everywhere. But a few
sonnets may be quoted to exemplify it:—
‘We parted on the mountains, as two streams
From one clear spring pursue their several ways;
And thy fleet course hath been through many a maze
In foreign lands, where silvery Padus gleams
To that delicious sky, whose glowing beams
Brightened the tresses that old poets praise,
Where Petrarch’s patient love and artful lays,
And Ariosto’s song of many themes,
Moved the soft air.—But I, a lazy brook,
As close pent up within my native dell,
Have crept along from nook to shady nook,
Where flow’rets blow and whispering Naiads dwell.
Yet now we meet that parted were so wide,
For rough and smooth to travel side by side.
‘Once I was young, and fancy was my all,
My love, my joy, my grief, my hope, my fear,
And ever ready as an infant’s tear,
Whate’er in Fancy’s kingdom might befall,
Some quaint device had Fancy still at call,
With seemly verse to greet the coming cheer;
Such grief to soothe, such airy hope to rear,
To sing the birth-song, or the funeral
Of such light love, it was a pleasant task;
But ill accord the quirks of wayward glee
That wears affliction for a wanton mask,
With woes that bear not Fancy’s livery;
With Hope that scorns of Fate its fate to ask,
But is itself its own sure destiny.
‘Too true it is my time of power was spent
In idly watering weeds of casual growth
That wasted energy to desperate sloth
Declined, and fond self-seeking discontent;
That the huge debt for all that nature lent
I sought to cancel,—and was nothing loth,
To deem myself an outlaw, severed both
From duty and from hope,—yea, blindly sent
Without an errand where I would to stray:—
Too true it is, that knowing now my state,
I weakly mourn the sin I ought to hate,
Nor love the law I yet would fain obey:
But true it is, above all law and fate
Is Faith, abiding the appointed day.
‘Long time a child, and still a child when years
Had painted manhood on my cheek, was I:
For yet I lived like one not born to die,
A thriftless prodigal of smiles and tears;
No hope I needed, and I knew no fears.
But sleep, though sweet, is only sleep, and waking,
I waked to sleep no more, at once o’ertaking
The vanguard of my age, with all arrears
Of duty on my back. Nor child, nor man,
Nor youth, nor sage, I find my head is grey,
For I have lost the race I never ran;
A rathe December blights my lagging May;
And still I am a child, tho’ I be old,
Time is my debtor for my years untold.’
Indeed, the whole series of sonnets with which the earliest and best
work of Hartley began is (with a casual episode on others), mainly and
essentially a series on himself. Perhaps there is something in the
structure of the sonnet rather adapted to this species of composition.
It is too short for narrative, too artificial for the intense passions,
too complex for the simple, too elaborate for the domestic; but in an
impatient world where there is not a premium on self-describing, who so
would speak of himself must be wise and brief, artful and composed—and in
these respects he will be aided by the concise dignity of the tranquil
sonnet.
It is remarkable that in this, too, Hartley Coleridge resembled his
father. Turn over the early poems of S. T. Coleridge, the minor poems
(we exclude the ‘Mariner’ and ‘Christabel,’ which are his epics), but
the small shreds which Bristol worshipped and Cottle paid for, and you
will be disheartened by utter dulness. Taken on a decent average, and
perhaps excluding a verse here and there, it really seems to us that they
are inferior to the daily works of the undeserving and multiplied poets.
If any reader will peruse any six of the several works intituled ‘Poems
by a Young Gentleman,’ we believe he will find the refined anonymity
less insipid than the small productions of Samuel Taylor. There will be
less puff and less ostentation. The reputation of the latter was caused
not by their merit but by their time. Fifty years ago people believed
in metre, and it is plain that Coleridge (Southey may be added, for
that matter) believed in it also; the people in Bristol said that these
two were wonderful men, because they had written wonderfully small
verses;—and such is human vanity, that both for a time accepted the
creed. In Coleridge, who had large speculative sense, the hallucination
was not permanent—there are many traces that he rated his Juvenilia at
their value; but poor Southey, who lived with domestic women, actually
died in the delusion that his early works were perfect, except that he
tried to ‘amend’ the energy out of Joan of Arc, which was the only good
thing in it. His wife did not doubt that he had produced stupendous
works. Why, then, should he? But experience has now shown that a certain
metrical facility, and a pleasure in the metrical expression of certain
sentiments, are in youth extremely common. Many years ago, Mr. Moore is
reported to have remarked to Sir Walter Scott, that hardly a magazine
was then published, which did not contain verses that would have made a
sensation when they were young men. ‘Confound it, Tom,’ was the reply,
‘what luck it was _we_ were born before all these fellows.’ And though
neither Moore nor Scott are to be confounded with the nameless and
industrious versifiers of the present day, yet it must be allowed that
they owed to their time and their position—to the small quantity of
rhyme in the market of the moment, and the extravagant appreciation of
their early productions—much of that popular encouragement which induced
them to labour upon more excellent compositions and to train themselves
to write what they will be remembered by. But, dismissing these
considerations, and returning to the minor poems of S. T. Coleridge,
although we fearlessly assert that it is impossible for any sane man to
set any value on—say the Religious Musings—an absurd attempt to versify
an abstract theory, or the essay on the Pixies, who had more fun in
them than the reader of it could suspect—it still is indisputable that
scattered here and there through these poems, there are lines about
himself (lines, as he said in later life, ‘in which the subjective object
views itself subjectivo-objectively,’) which rank high in that form of
art. Of this kind are the Tombless Epitaph, for example, or the lines,—
‘To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assigned
Energic Reason and a shaping mind,
The daring ken of truth; the Patriot’s part,
And Pity’s sigh, that breathes the gentle heart;
Sloth-jaundiced all! and from my graspless hand
Drop friendship’s priceless pearls, like hour-glass sand.
I weep, yet stoop not! the faint anguish flows,
A dreamy pang in morning’s fev’rish doze;’
and so on. In fact, it would appear that the tendency to, and the faculty
for self-delineation are very closely connected with the dreaminess
of disposition and impotence of character which we spoke of just now.
Persons very subject to these can grasp no external object, comprehend
no external being; they can do no external thing, and therefore they are
left to themselves. Their own character is the only one which they can
view as a whole, or depict as a reality; of every other they may have
glimpses, and acute glimpses, like the vivid truthfulness of particular
dreams; but no settled appreciation, no connected development, no regular
sequence whereby they may be exhibited on paper or conceived in the
imagination. If other qualities are supposed to be identical, those will
be most egotistical who only know themselves; the people who talk most of
themselves will be those who talk best.