should have the praise of surpassing his father; but nevertheless it
would be absurd, on a general view, to compare the two men. Samuel
Taylor was so much bigger; what there was in his son was equally good,
perhaps, but then there was not much of it; outwardly and inwardly he was
essentially little. In poetry, for example, the father has produced two
longish poems, which have worked themselves right down to the extreme
depths of the popular memory, and stay there very firmly, in part from
their strangeness, but in part from their power. Of Hartley, nothing
of this kind is to be found—he could not write connectedly; he wanted
steadiness of purpose, or efficiency of will, to write so voluntarily;
and his genius did not, involuntarily, and out of its unseen workings,
present him with continuous creations; on the contrary, his mind teemed
with little fancies, and a new one came before the first had attained any
enormous magnitude. As his brother observed, he wanted ‘back thought.’
‘On what plan, Mr. Coleridge, are you arranging your books?’ inquired
a lady. ‘Plan, madam? I have no plan: at first I had a principle; but
then I had another, and now I do not know.’ The same contrast between
the ‘shaping mind’ of the father, and the gentle and minute genius of
the son, is said to have been very plain in their conversation. That of
Samuel was continuous, diffused, comprehensive.
‘Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless motion,
Nothing before and nothing behind, but the sky and the ocean.’
‘Great talker, certainly,’ said Hazlitt, ‘_if_ you will let him start
from no _data_, and come to no conclusion.’ The talk of Hartley, on the
contrary, though continuous in time, was detached in meaning; stating
hints and observations on particular subjects; glancing lightly from side
to side, but throwing no intense light on any, and exhausting none. It
flowed gently over small doubts and pleasant difficulties, rippling for a
minute sometimes into bombast, but lightly recovering and falling quietly
in ‘melody back.’
By way, it is likely, of compensation to Hartley for this great
deficiency in what his father imagined to be his own _forte_,—the power
of conceiving a whole,—Hartley possessed, in a considerable degree,
a species of sensibility to which the former was nearly a stranger.
‘The mind of S. T. Coleridge,’ says one who had every means of knowing
and observing, ‘was not in the least under the influence of external
objects.’ Except in the writings written during daily and confidential
intimacy with Wordsworth (an exception that may be obviously accounted
for), no trace can perhaps be found of any new image or metaphor from
natural scenery. There is some story too of his going for the first time
to York, and by the Minster, and never looking up at it. But Hartley’s
poems exhibit a great sensibility to a certain aspect of exterior nature,
and great fanciful power of presenting that aspect in the most charming
and attractive forms. It is likely that the London boyhood of the elder
Coleridge was,—added to a strong abstractedness which was born with
him,—a powerful cause in bringing about the curious mental fact, that
a great poet, so susceptible to every other species of refining and
delightful feeling, should have been utterly destitute of any perception
of beauty in landscape or nature. We must not forget that S. T. Coleridge
was a blue-coat boy,—what do any of them know about fields? And
similarly, we require in Hartley’s case, before we can quite estimate his
appreciation of nature, to consider his position, his circumstances, and
especially his time.
Now it came to pass in those days that William Wordsworth went up into
the hills. It has been attempted in recent years to establish that the
object of his life was to teach Anglicanism. A whole life of him has been
written by an official gentleman, with the apparent view of establishing
that the great poet was a believer in rood-lofts, an idolator of piscinæ.
But this is not capable of rational demonstration. Wordsworth, like
Coleridge, began life as a heretic, and as the shrewd Pope unfallaciously
said, ‘once a heretic, always a heretic.’ Sound men are sound from the
first; safe men are safe from the beginning, and Wordsworth began wrong.
His real reason for going to live in the mountains was certainly in part
sacred, but it was not in the least Tractarian:—
‘For he with many feelings, many thoughts,
Made up a meditative joy, and found
Religious meanings in the forms of nature.’
His whole soul was absorbed in the one idea, the one feeling, the one
thought, of the sacredness of hills.
‘Early had he learned
To reverence the volume that displays
The mystery, the life which cannot die;
But in the mountains did he _feel_ his faith.
All things responsive to the writing, there
Breathed immortality, revolving life,
And greatness still revolving; infinite;
There littleness was not.
...
—In the after-day
Of boyhood, many an hour in caves forlorn,
And ’mid the hollow depths of naked crags,
He sate, and e’en in their fixed lineaments
Or from the power of a peculiar eye,
Or by creative feeling overborne,
Or by predominance of thought oppressed,
E’en in their fixed and steady lineaments
He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind,
Expression ever varying!
...
A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’
The defect of this religion is, that it is too abstract for the
practical, and too bare for the musing. The worship of sensuous
beauty—the southern religion—is of all sentiments the one most deficient
in his writings. His poetry hardly even gives the charm, the entire
charm, of the scenery in which he lived. The lighter parts are little
noticed: the rugged parts protrude. The bare waste, the folding hill,
the rough lake, Helvellyn with a brooding mist, Ulswater in a grey day:
these are his subjects. He took a personal interest in the corners of
the universe. There is a print of Rembrandt said to represent a piece of
the Campagna, a mere waste, with a stump and a man, and under is written
‘Tacet et loquitur;’ and thousands will pass the old print-shop where
it hangs, and yet have a taste for paintings, and colours, and oils:
but some fanciful students, some lonely stragglers, some long-haired
enthusiasts, by chance will come, one by one, and look, and look, and
be hardly able to take their eyes from the fascination, so massive is
the shade, so still the conception, so firm the execution. Thus is it
with Wordsworth and his poetry. _Tacet et loquitur._ Fashion apart, the
million won’t read it. Why should they?—they could not understand it.
Don’t put them out,—let them buy, and sell, and die;—but idle students,
and enthusiastic wanderers, and solitary thinkers, will read, and read,
and read, while their lives and their occupations hold. In truth,
his works are the Scriptures of the intellectual life; for that same
searching, and finding, and penetrating power which the real Scripture
exercises on those engaged, as are the mass of men, in practical
occupations and domestic ties, do his works exercise on the meditative,
the solitary, and the young.
‘His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.’
And he had more than others,
‘That blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened: that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.’
And therefore he has had a whole host of sacred imitators. Mr. Keble,
for example, has translated him for women. He has himself told us that
he owed to Wordsworth the tendency _ad sanctiora_, which is the mark of
his own writings; and in fact he has but adapted the tone and habit of
reverence, which his master applied to common objects and the course of
the seasons, to sacred objects and the course of the ecclesiastical
year,—diffusing a mist of sentiment and devotion altogether delicious
to a gentle and timid devotee. Hartley Coleridge is another translator.
He has applied to the sensuous beauties and seductive parts of external
nature the same _cultus_ which Wordsworth applied to the bare and the
abstract. It is—
‘That fair beauty which no eye can see,
Of that sweet music which no ear can measure.’
It is, as it were, female beauty in wood and water; it is Rydal Water on
a shining day; it is the gloss of the world with the knowledge that it is
gloss: the sense of beauty, as in some women, with the feeling that yet
it is hardly theirs:—
‘The vale of Tempe had in vain been fair,
Green Ida never deemed the nurse of Jove,
Each fabled stream, beneath its covert grove,
Had idly murmured to the idle air;
The shaggy wolf had kept his horrid lair
In Delphi’s cell and old Trophonius’ cave,
And the wild wailing of the Ionian wave
Had never blended with the sweet despair
Of Sappho’s death-song,—if the sight inspired
Saw only what the visual organs show;
If heaven-born phantasy no more required
Than what within the sphere of sense may grow.
The beauty to perceive of earthly things,
The mounting soul must heavenward prune her wings.
And he knew it himself: he has sketched the essence of his works:—
‘Whither is gone the wisdom and the power,
That ancient sages scattered with the notes
Of thought-suggesting lyres? The music floats
In the void air; e’en at this breathing hour,
In every cell and every blooming bower,
The sweetness of old lays is hovering still;
But the strong soul, the self-constraining will,
The rugged root that bare the winsome flower,
Is weak and withered. Were we like the Fays
That sweetly nestle in the fox-glove bells,
Or lurk and murmur in the rose-lipped shells,
Which Neptune to the earth for quit-rent pays;
Then might our pretty modern Philomels
Sustain our spirits with their roundelays.’
We had more to say of Hartley: we were to show that his Prometheus was
defective; that its style had no Greek severity, no defined outline; that
he was a critic as well as a poet, though in a small detached way, and
what is odd enough, that he could criticise in rhyme. We were to make
plain how his heart was in the right place, how his love affairs were
hopeless, how he was misled by his friends; but our time is done and
our space is full, and these topics must ‘go without day’ of returning.
We may end as we began. There are some that are bold and strong and
incessant and energetic and hard, and to these is the world’s glory;
and some are timid and meek and impotent and cowardly and rejected and
obscure. ‘One man esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth
every day alike.’ And so of Hartley, whom few regarded; he had a
resource, the stillness of thought, the gentleness of musing, the peace
of nature.
‘To his side the fallow deer
Came and rested without fear;
The eagle, lord of land and sea,
Stooped down to pay him fealty;
And both the undying fish that swim,
In Bowscale-tarn did wait on him;
The pair were servants of his eye,
In their immortality;
And glancing, gleaming, dark or bright,
Moved to and fro for his delight.
He knew the rocks which Angels haunt
Upon the mountains visitant.
He hath kenned them taking wing,
And into caves where Fairies sing
He hath entered; and been told
By voices how men lived of old.
Among the heavens his eye can see
The face of thing that is to be,
And if that men report him right
His tongue could whisper words of might.
—Now another day is come,
Fitter hope and nobler doom,
He hath thrown aside his crook,
And hath buried deep his book.’
‘And now the streams may sing for others’ pleasure,
The hills sleep on in their eternity.’
He is gone from among them.
_PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY._[26]
(1856.)
After the long biography of Moore, it is half a comfort to think of a
poet as to whom our information is but scanty. The few intimates of
Shelley seem inclined to go to their graves without telling in accurate
detail the curious circumstances of his life. We are left to be content
with vain ‘prefaces’ and the circumstantial details of a remarkable
blunderer. We know something, however;—we know enough to check our
inferences from his writings; in some moods it is pleasant not to have
them disturbed by long volumes of memoirs and anecdotes.
One peculiarity of Shelley’s writing makes it natural that at times
we should not care to have, that at times we should wish for, a full
biography. No writer has left so clear an image of himself in his
writings; when we remember them as a whole, we seem to want no more.
No writer, on the other hand, has left so many little allusions which
we should be glad to have explained, which the patient patriarch would
not perhaps have endured that anyone should comprehend while he did
not. The reason is, that Shelley has combined the use of the two great
modes by which writers leave with their readers the image of themselves.
There is the art of self-delineation. Some authors try in imagination
to get outside themselves—to contemplate their character as a fact, and
to describe it and the movement of their own actions as external forms
and images. Scarcely any one has done this as often as Shelley. There
is hardly one of his longer works which does not contain a finished
picture of himself in some point or under some circumstances. Again, some
writers, almost or quite unconsciously, by a special instinct of style,
give an idea of themselves. This is not peculiar to literary men; it is
quite as remarkable among men of action. There are people in the world
who cannot write the commonest letter on the commonest affair of business
without giving a just idea of themselves. The Duke of Wellington is an
example which at once occurs of this. You may read a despatch of his
about bullocks and horseshoe-nails; and yet you will feel an interest—a
great interest, because somehow among the words seems to lurk the mind of
a great general. Shelley has this peculiarity also. Every line of his has
a personal impress, an unconscious inimitable manner. And the two modes
in which he gives an idea of himself concur. In every delineation we see
the same simple intense being. As mythology found a Naiad in the course
of every limpid stream, so through each eager line our fancy sees the
same panting image of sculptured purity.
Shelley is probably the most remarkable instance of the pure impulsive
character,—to comprehend which requires a little detail. Some men are
born under the law: their whole life is a continued struggle between
the lower principles of their nature and the higher. These are what are
called men of principle; each of their best actions is a distinct choice
between conflicting motives. One propension would bear them here; another
there; a third would hold them still: into the midst the living will
goes forth in its power, and selects whichever it holds to be best. The
habitual supremacy of conscience in such men gives them an idea that
they only exert their will when they do right; when they do wrong they
seem to ‘let their nature go;’ they say that ‘they are hurried away:’
but, in fact, there is commonly an act of will in both cases;—only it is
weaker when they act ill, because in passably good men, if the better
principles are reasonably strong, they conquer; it is only when very
faint that they are vanquished. Yet the case is evidently not always so;
sometimes the wrong principle is of itself and of set purpose definitely
chosen: the better one is consciously put down. The very existence of
divided natures is a conflict. This is no new description of human
nature. For eighteen hundred years Christendom has been amazed at the
description in St. Paul of the law of his members warring against the
law of his mind. Expressions most unlike in language, but not dissimilar
in meaning, are to be found in some of the most familiar passages of
Aristotle.
In extreme contrast to this is the nature which has no struggle. It
is possible to conceive a character in which but one impulse is ever
felt—in which the whole being, as with a single breeze, is carried in
a single direction. The only exercise of the will in such a being is
in aiding and carrying out the dictates of the single propensity. And
this is something. There are many of our powers and faculties only in
a subordinate degree under the control of the emotions; the intellect
itself in many moments requires to be bent to defined attention by
compulsion of the will; no mere intensity of desire will thrust it on
its tasks. But of what in most men is the characteristic action of the
will—namely, self-control—such natures are hardly in want. An ultimate
case could be imagined in which they would not need it at all. They
have no lower desires to pull down, for they have no higher ones which
come into collision with them; the very words ‘lower’ and ‘higher,’
involving the contemporaneous action and collision of two impulses, are
inapplicable to them; there is no strife; all their soul impels them in
a single line. This may be a quality of the highest character: indeed in
the highest character it will certainly be found; no one will question
that the whole nature of the holiest being tends to what is holy without
let, struggle, or strife—it would be impiety to doubt it. Yet this
same quality may certainly be found in a lower—a much lower—mind than
the highest. A level may be of any elevation; the absence of intestine
commotion may arise from a sluggish dulness to eager aspirations; the
one impulse which is felt may be any impulse whatever. If the idea were
completely exemplified, one would instinctively say, that a being with
so single a mind could hardly belong to human nature. Temptation is the
mark of our life; we can hardly divest ourselves of the idea that it is
indivisible from our character. As it was said of solitude, so it may be
said of the sole dominion of a single impulse, ‘Whoso is devoted to it
would seem to be either a beast or a god.’
Completely realised on earth this idea will never be; but approximations
may be found, and one of the closest of those approximations is Shelley.
We fancy his mind placed in the light of thought, with pure subtle
fancies playing to and fro. On a sudden an impulse arises; it is alone,
and has nothing to contend with; it cramps the intellect, pushes aside
the fancies, constrains the nature; it bolts forward into action.
Such a character is an extreme puzzle to external observers. From the
occasionality of its impulses it will often seem silly; from their
singularity, strange; from their intensity, fanatical. It is absurdest
in the more trifling matters. There is a legend of Shelley, during an
early visit to London, flying along the street, catching sight of a new
microscope, buying it in a moment; pawning it the instant afterwards
to relieve some one in the same street in distress. The trait may be
exaggerated, but it is characteristic. It shows the sudden irruption of
his impulses, their abrupt force and curious purity.
The predominant impulse in Shelley from a very early age was ‘a passion
for reforming mankind.’ Mr. Newman has told us in his Letters from the
East how much he and his half-missionary associates were annoyed at being
called ‘young people trying to convert the world.’ In a strange land,
ignorant of the language, beside a recognised religion, in the midst
of an immemorial society, the aim, though in a sense theirs, seemed
ridiculous when ascribed to them. Shelley would not have felt this at
all. No society, however organised, would have been too strong for him
to attack. He would not have paused. The impulse was upon him. He would
have been ready to preach that mankind were to be ‘free, equal, pure,
and wise,’—in favour of ‘justice, and truth, and time, and the world’s
natural sphere,’—in the Ottoman Empire, or to the Czar, or to George III.
Such truths were independent of time and place and circumstance; some
time or other, something, or somebody (his faith was a little vague),
would most certainly intervene to establish them. It was this placid
undoubting confidence which irritated the positive and sceptical mind of
Hazlitt. ‘The author of the “Prometheus Unbound,”’ he tells us, ‘has a
fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic
flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is
sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced. As is often observable in the
case of religious enthusiasts, there is a slenderness of constitutional
stamina, which renders the flesh no match for the spirit. His bending,
flexible form appears to take no strong hold of things, does not grapple
with the world about him, but slides from it like a river—
‘And in its liquid texture mortal wound
Receives no more than can the fluid air.’
The shock of accident, the weight of authority, make no impression on
his opinions, which retire like a feather, or rise from the encounter
unhurt, through their own buoyancy. He is clogged by no dull system of
realities, no earth-bound feelings, no rooted prejudices, by nothing that
belongs to the mighty trunk and hard husk of nature and habit; but is
drawn up by irresistible levity to the regions of mere speculation and
fancy, to the sphere of air and fire, where his delighted spirit floats
in ‘seas of pearl and clouds of amber.’ There is no _caput mortuum_ of
worn-out threadbare experience to serve as ballast to his mind; it is
all volatile, intellectual salt-of-tartar, that refuses to combine its
evanescent, inflammable essence with anything solid or anything lasting.
Bubbles are to him the only realities:—touch them, and they vanish.
Curiosity is the only proper category of his mind; and though a man in
knowledge, he is a child in feeling.’ And so on with vituperation. No two
characters could, indeed, be found more opposite than the open, eager,
buoyant poet, and the dark, threatening, unbelieving critic.
It is difficult to say how far such a tendency under some circumstances
might not have carried Shelley into positions most alien to an essential
benevolence. It is most dangerous to be possessed with an idea. Dr.
Arnold used to say that he had studied the life of Robespierre with the
greatest personal benefit. No personal purity is a protection against
insatiable zeal; it almost acts in the opposite direction. The less a man
is conscious of inferior motives, the more likely is he to fancy that he
is doing God service. There is no difficulty in imagining Shelley cast by
the accident of fortune into the Paris of the Revolution; hurried on by
its ideas, undoubting in its hopes, wild with its excitement, going forth
in the name of freedom conquering and to conquer;—and who can think that
he would have been scrupulous how he attained such an end? It was in him
to have walked towards it over seas of blood. One could almost identify
him with St. Just, the ‘fair-haired republican.’