Coleridge is one of our great men who require many footnotes, for
there are characteristics of his which need all the extenuation they
can get. How comes it, for instance, that he could write, and not only
write but publish, in the same decade, and sometimes in the same year,
poetry which is of our very best, and some which for frozen inanity it
would be hard to equal anywhere? How could a thinker of his power of
brain cover leagues of letter-paper with windy nonsense and mawkish
insincerity? And finally, of what quality was the talk of one whose
social life was entirely monologue? To the first of these questions
Wordsworth perhaps helps with an analogy, but not very far; for it is
certain that Wordsworth's opinion of the importance of his own
verses was inflexible, whereas Coleridge, having another medium of
expression, was by no means so insistent upon publishing. Upon the
second, it may be observed that when a philosopher is at the same time
a poet, and therefore his own rhapsodist, it is probable that he will
charm the understanding of many, but certain that he will bewitch
his own. The certainty is clinched when the rhapsodist is without the
humorous sense. It was the possession of that which enabled Charles
Lamb, who loved him, to see him "Archangel, a little damaged," and
even in one dreadful moment of his life to reprove him for a too
oleaginous sympathy. Lamb, in fact, was always able to view his friend
with clear eyes. In a letter to Manning, enclosing "all Coleridge's
letters" to himself, he says that in them Manning will find "a good
deal of amusement, to see genuine talent struggling against a pompous
display of it." No criticism could be sounder. But Coleridge never
wavered from the belief that he was in no phase of his being an
ordinary man. If his thoughts were not ordinary thoughts, his
imaginings not ordinary imaginings, then his stomach-aches were not
ordinary stomach-aches, but strokes of calamity so grievous as to
demand from him copious commentary and appeals for more sympathy than
is ordinarily given to ordinary men. And, strange to say, he received
it. There was that in the "noticeable man with large grey eyes" which
drew the love of his friends and the regard of acquaintance. His talk
had the quality of his Ancient Mariner's; one could not choose
but hear. The accounts which we have of that, however, are mainly
sympathetic; it is not so certain how it affected hearers who were not
predisposed.
Lately a book has been published, or rather republished, which
illustrates Coleridge's relations with a world outside his own. _A
House of Letters_ (Jarrolds--N.D.), containing a selection of the
memoirs and correspondence of Miss Mary Matilda Betham, includes a
good many letters from Coleridge, and some few from Charles Lamb which
have not so far been recorded elsewhere. Miss Betham, who was born
in 1776, was a miniature painter by profession, and so far as can be
judged by reproductions a good one. She was a poetess, too, and the
compiler of a Biographical Dictionary of Celebrated Women. In 1797 she
published a volume of _Elegies_, which in 1802 was sent to Coleridge
by his friend Lady Boughton, and of which a short piece, "On a Cloud,"
transported him. He addressed immediately a blank-verse exhortation
"To Matilda Betham, from a Stranger," dated it Keswick, September 9th,
1802, signed it "S.T.C.," and sent it off.
Matilda! I have heard a sweet tune play'd
On a sweet instrument--thy Poesie,
it began; and went on to hope--
That our own Britain, our dear mother Isle,
May boast one Maid, a poetess indeed,
Great as th' impassioned Lesbian, in sweet song,
And O! of holier mind, and happier fate.
That was what he called twining her vernal wreath around the brows of
patriot Hope. He concluded with some cautionary lines whose epithets
are irresistibly comic:
Be bold, meek Woman! but be wisely bold!
Fly, ostrich-like, firm land beneath thy feet.