What nobler meed, Matilda! canst thou win
Than tears of gladness in a Boughton's eyes,
And exultation even in strangers' hearts?
It is a wonderful thing indeed that, having composed _The Ancient
Mariner_ (1797), _Love_ (1799), _Christabel_ (1797-1800), and _Kubla
Khan_ (1798), he should slip back into this eighteenth-century
flatulence--but Coleridge could do such things and not turn a hair.
Nevertheless, to a young poetess, a bad poem is still a poem, and
means a reader. An acquaintance invited in such terms will thrive, and
that of Miss Betham and the Stranger ripened into a friendship. She
went to stay at Greta Hall, painted portraits of Mrs. Coleridge
and Sara, and of some of the Southeys too. Through them she became
acquainted with the Lambs, and if never one of their inner circle,
was a familiar correspondent, and had relations with George Dyer, the
Morgans, the Thelwalls, Montagues, Holcrofts and others. Altogether
Lady Boughton's bow at a venture brought down a goodly quarry for Miss
Betham, but many waters were to flow under the restless philosopher
before he could swim into her ken again.
It was in 1808, in fact, when he was living in London (at the
_Courier_ office, 348, Strand), and in the midst of his second course
of lectures, that the intercourse was renewed--or rather it is there
that _A House of Letters_ enables us to pick it up. We find him then
writing in this kind of strain to Matilda:--
"What joy would it not be to you, or to me, Miss Betham, to
meet a Milton in a future state, and with that reverence
due to a superior, pour forth our deep thanks for the noble
feelings he had aroused in us, for the impossibility of many
mean and vulgar feelings and objects which his writings had
secured us!"
The Americans call that sort of thing poppycock, which seems a useful
phrase. No doubt there was more of it, though it is precisely there,
without subscription or signature, that the Editor of _A House of
Letters_ thinks fit to conclude. He has much to learn of the duties of
editorship, among other things, as we shall have to note before long,
reasonable care in recording and printing his originals. Upon that
letter, at any rate, _post_ if not _propter_, Miss Betham proposed to
the philosopher that he should sit to her, and that, with some demur,
he promised to do. An appointment was made to that end, and punctually
broken. Then came this letter of excuse, which should have been
worth many a miniature, being indeed a full-length portrait done by a
master-hand:--
"Dear Miss Betham,--Not my will, but accident and necessity
made me a truant from my promise. I was to have left Merton,
in Surrey, at half-past eight on Tuesday morning with a Mr.
Hall, who would have driven me in his chaise to town by ten;
but having walked an unusual distance on the Monday, and
talked and exerted myself in spirits that have been long
unknown to me, on my return to my friend's house, being
thirsty, I drank at least a quart of lemonade; the consequence
was that all Tuesday morning, till indeed two o'clock in the
afternoon, I was in exceeding pain, and incapable of quitting
my room, or dismissing the hot flannels applied to my
body...."
This was no ordinary philosopher; but the chapter is not yet full.
He left Merton, he says, at five, walked stoutly on, was detained an
hour and a half on Clapham Common, "in an act of mere humanity," and
finally reached Vauxhall.
"At Vauxhall I took a boat for Somerset House: two mere
children were my Charons; however, though against tide, we
sailed safely to the landing-place, when, as I was getting
out, one of the little ones (God Bless him!) moved the boat.
On turning halfway round to reprove him, he moved it again,
and I fell back on the landing-place. By my exertions I should
have saved myself but for a large stone which
I struck against just under my crown and unfortunately in the
very same place which had been contused at Melton (_sic_) when
I fell backward after learning suddenly and most abruptly of
Captain Wordsworth's fate in the _Abergavenny_, a most dear
friend of mine. Since that time any great agitation has
occasioned a feeling of, as it were, a _shuttle_ moving from
that part of the back of my head horizontally to my forehead,
with some pain but more confusion."
The unction of that blessing called down upon his persecutor is
truly Coleridgian. "Melton" is the Editor's rendering of Malta, where
Coleridge was when he heard of John Wordsworth's drowning in 1805. He
had then kept his bed for a fortnight, or so he told Mrs. Coleridge.
Apparently no meeting took place, as yet another letter, dated 7th
May, relates how instead of going to New Cavendish Street, where Miss
Betham lived, he went to Old Cavendish Street, where she did not. "I
knocked at every door in Old Cavendish Street, not unrecompensed for
the present pain by the remembrances of the different characters
of voice and countenance with which my question was answered in
all gradations, from gentle and hospitable kindness to downright
brutality." Further promises and assurances are given, and in July, as
we learn from a letter of Southey's, the good Matilda was still high
in hopes that her sitter would eventually sit. Her hopes could not
have come from Southey, who had none. "You would have found him the
most wonderful man living in conversation, but the most impracticable
one for a painter, and had you begun the picture it is ten thousand
to one that you must have finished it from memory." He was right. When
his lectures were over, in June, Coleridge went to Bury St. Edmunds,
and by the 9th September he was in Cumberland. "Coleridge has arrived
at last, about half as big as the house," Southey writes to his
brother on that day. There he cogitated and there began _The Friend_,
and there the separation from his wife was finally made.
After the separation, very characteristically, he was less separated
from Mrs. Coleridge than he had been for many years. In 1810 he was
still in the Lakes, in the summer of which year his wife gives news of
him to the poetess. "Coleridge has been with me for some time past,
in good health, spirits and humour, but the _Friend_ for some
unaccountable reason, or for no reason at all, is utterly silent.
This, you will easily believe, is matter of perpetual grief to me, but
I am obliged to be silent on the subject, although ever uppermost in
my thoughts, but I am obliged to bear about a cheerful countenance,
knowing as I do by sad experience that to expostulate, or even to
hazard one anxious look, would soon drive him hence." Then comes a
sidelight on the Wordsworths. "Coleridge sends you his best thanks for
the elegant little book; I shall not, however, let it be carried
over to Grasmere, for _there_ it would soon be _soiled_, for the
Wordsworths are woeful destroyers of good books, as our poor library
will witness."
But all this was too good to last, and as everybody knows, it did not.
In October Coleridge left the Lakes with the Montagues, and almost
immediately after that the rupture with the Wordsworths occurred,
which involved also the family at Keswick. Southey's letter to Miss
Betham giving her an account of the affair has been published by
Mr. Dykes Campbell, and is misplaced in _A House of Letters_. The
unfortunate philosopher set up his rest with the Morgans, friends of
the Lambs, at Hammersmith; and there he was in February, 1811, when
Miss Betham conceived her project of getting him as a lion at the
party of her friend Lady Jerningham.
Lady Jerningham, blue mother of a bluer daughter (Lady Bedingfield)
and sister-in-law of the "Charming Man" of Walpole's and the Misses
Berry's acquaintance, was a friend of Miss Betham's of old standing.
Several letters of hers are in _A House of Letters_, but many more
of her daughter's. Whether it was her ladyship's or Miss Betham's
proposal there's no telling now; but Miss Betham, at any rate, did
not feel equal to the job, and called in Charles and Mary Lamb to help
her. Mary, in the first instance, sounded the philosopher, and with
success. I quote from Mr. Lucas's edition of the Lamb letters, as
the editor of Miss Betham's misreads and misprints his original.
"Coleridge," she writes, "has given me a very cheerful promise that he
will wait on Lady Jerningham any day you will be pleased to appoint.
He offered to write to you, but I found it was to be done _to-morrow_,
and as I am pretty well acquainted with his to-morrows, I thought good
to let you know his determination to-day. He is in town to-day, but
as he is often going to Hammersmith for a night or two, you had better
perhaps send the invitation through me, and I will manage it for
you as well as I can. You had better let him have four or five days'
previous notice, and you had better send the invitation as soon as
you can; for he seems tolerably well just now. I mention all these
betters, because I wish to do the best I can for you, perceiving, as I
do, it is a thing you have set your heart on."
Charles was next brought in. Mr. Lucas gives his letter (I. 429) to
John Morgan, which says, "There--don't read any further, because the
letter is not intended for you, but for Coleridge, who might perhaps
not have opened it directed to him _suo nomine_. It is to invite C.,
to Lady Jerningham's on Sunday."
Finally, Coleridge went to the party, and apparently in company,
though it is not clear in whose company. This is what Lady Jerningham
thought about it:--
"My dear Miss Betham,--I have been pleased with your friends,
tho' (which is not singular) they sometimes fly higher than my
imagination can follow. I think the author ought to mix
more, I will not say with Fools, but with People of Common
Comprehension. His own intellect would be as bright, and
what emanated from it more clear. This is perhaps a very
impertinent Remark for me to venture at making, but your
indulgence invited sincerity."
That letter, I think, whose capitals are particularly graphic, throws
the whole party up in a dry light. One can see the rhapsodist talking
interminably, involving himself ever deeplier in a web of his own
spinning; the great lady gazing in wonder. It is one of the very few
impartial witnesses we have to his conversational feats. Nearly all
the evidence is tainted either by predisposition in his favour or the
reverse. Hazlitt, a mainly hostile witness, says that he talked well
on every subject; Godwin on none. One suspects antithesis there. He
reports Holcroft as saying that "he thought Mr. C. a very clever man,
with a great command of language, but that he feared he did not always
affix very precise ideas to the words he used!" Then we have
Byron, who wrote for effect, and whose aim was scorn. "Coleridge is
lecturing. 'Many an old fool,' said Hannibal to some such lecturer,
'but such as this, never.'" Tom Moore, who met Coleridge at
Monkhouse's famous poets' dinner-party, goes no further than to allow
that "Coleridge told some tolerable things:" but what Tom wanted was
anecdote. Directly Coleridge began upon theory Moore was bored. He
shuts him down with a "This is absurd." Rogers was present at that
party, but we don't know what he thought about it. He admits that
Coleridge was a marvellous talker, however. "One morning when Hookham
Frere also breakfasted with me, Coleridge talked for three hours
without intermission about poetry, and so admirably that I wish every
word he uttered had been written down." But it was not always so
well. He says elsewhere that he and Wordsworth once called upon him.
Coleridge "talked uninterruptedly for about two hours, during which
Wordsworth listened with profound attention, every now and then
nodding his head. On quitting the lodging, I said to Wordsworth,
'Well, for my own part, I could not make head or tail of Coleridge's
oration; pray, did you understand it?' 'Not one syllable of it,' was
Wordsworth's reply."
Keats' account is capital. He met the Sage between Highgate and
Hampstead, he says, and "walked with him, at his alderman-after-dinner
pace, for near two miles, I suppose. In those two miles he broached
a thousand things. Let me see if I can give you
a list--nightingales--poetry--on poetical
sensation--metaphysics--different genera and species of
dreams--nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single
and double touch--a dream related--first and second consciousness--the
difference explained between will and volition--so say
_metaphysicians_ from a _want of smoking the second
consciousness_--monsters--the Kraken--mermaids--Southey believes
in them--Southey's belief too much diluted--a ghost story--Good
morning--I heard his voice as he came towards me--I heard it as he
moved away--I had heard it all the interval--if it may be called so."
Charles Lamb's is even better. On his way to the city he met
Coleridge, and "in spite of my assuring him that time was precious, he
drew me within the door of an unoccupied garden by the roadside, and
there, sheltered from observation by a hedge of evergreens, he took me
by the button of my coat, and closing his eyes, commenced an eloquent
discourse, waving his right hand gently, as the musical words flowed
in an unbroken stream from his lips. I listened entranced; but the
striking of a church-clock recalled me to a sense of duty." Charles
cut himself free with a pen-knife, he says, and went off to his
office. "Five hours afterwards, in passing the garden on my way home,
I heard Coleridge's voice, and on looking in, there he was, with
closed eyes--the button in his fingers--his right hand gracefully
waving." A good story, at least. This was no company for Lady
Jerningham, who demanded clarity, and probably had a good deal to do.
Lastly, we have Coleridge's own confession to Miss Betham that
"Bacchus ever sleek and young," as at this time Lamb called him,
"pouring down," he went on to say, "goblet after goblet," must
have outdone his usual outdoings. Here is the best he can say for
himself:--
"True history will be my sufficient apology. After my return
from Lady J.'s on Monday night, or rather morning, I awoke
from my short sleep unusually indisposed, and was at last
forced to call up the good daughter of the house at an early
hour to get me hot water and procure me medicine. I could not
leave my bed till past six Monday evening, when I crawled
out in order to see Charles Lamb, and to afford him such
poor comfort as my society might perhaps do in the present
dejection of his spirits and loneliness."
There is much more to the same effect; and surely it is not often that
a philosopher, or even a poet, will treat his post-prandial dumps (to
call them so) as a stroke of adverse fortune. Coleridge takes it as
an act of God. "This, my dear Miss Betham, waiving all connexion of
sentences, is the history of my breach of engagement, of its cause,
and of the occasion of that cause." There is much of Mr. Micawber
here.
And here, so far as _A House of Letters_ can help us, Coleridge's
correspondence with Matilda Betham ends. It may well have been the end
indeed. From that date onwards the wreck of the thinker and poet slid
swiftly down the slope appointed, until he came up, after many bumps,
in the hospitable Highgate backwater where he was to end his days.
It was a wonderful London which within the same twenty years could
harbour three men, like Blake, Coleridge and Shelley, in whom the
incondite spirit which we call genius dwelt so near the surface
of conscious being, and had such freedom to range. With Blake and
Shelley, however, once over the threshold, it was untrammelled--and
with Blake at least entirely innocuous to society, except to one
drunken soldier who richly deserved what he got. But with Coleridge,
throughout his career, one sees it struggling like a fly glued in
treacle, pausing often to cleanse its wings. The fly, you adjudge,
walked into the treacle. But Coleridge always thought that it was the
treacle which had walked over him.