poet himself, yet devoted to letters, and staunch friend in their utmost
need to an afterwards famous band of young men, tells us how Robert
Lovell, an inexperienced and sanguine Quaker, was carried away by a
Socialistic colonization scheme to be tested on the banks of the
Susquehannah--the community to be called a Pantisocracy--from which
injustice, wrath, anger, clamour, and evil-speaking, were to be
excluded, thereby setting an example of human perfectability. Four young
men, Lovell said, had joined the movement, who were to embark at Bristol
for the American colonies--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Cambridge with
whom the idea was supposed to have originated, Robert Southey and George
Burnett from Oxford, and himself. In due time he introduced his
friends--Southey, 'tall, dignified, possessing great suavity of manners,
an eye piercing, with a countenance full of genius, kindliness, and
intelligence'; Burnett, son of a Somersetshire farmer, who soon vanished
from sight--never, indeed, comes fairly into it; and Coleridge, with 'an
eye, a brow, and a forehead indicative of commanding genius.' The last
soon applied on behalf of the fraternity for a loan, not to pay for the
emigrants' sea passage, but their lodgings bill! The good man lent £5,
and afterwards advanced Coleridge £30, taking the value back in MSS. as
he could secure them. Meanwhile, Coleridge lectured to small audiences
on somewhat abstruse subjects for a Bristol population, and managed to
fall in love with a sister of his friend Lovell's wife, a third of these
Miss Frickers becoming engaged to and marrying Southey, though he had
not the remotest prospect of supporting a family. Lecturing and
literature had not paid, Pantisocracy had perished in the bud, and
Coleridge had not in any other direction shown the least capacity for
dealing with every-day affairs. His antecedents both proved, and had
intensified, his want of sagacity.
Born in 1772, into the large family of a learned Devonshire clergyman,
who was also Head Master of a Grammar School--'a gentle and kindly
eccentric'--he lost his father when only nine years of age, and was
sent to the Blue Coat School (Christ's Hospital) in London. Here Charles
Lamb was his schoolfellow. He grew, ere he left it, to be a tall lad of
striking presence, with long black hair. At nineteen he was sent to
Cambridge University. From Cambridge--owing, it is now generally
believed, to some disappointment in a love affair, though others will
have it that it was owing to debts recklessly contracted--he went up to
London with little money in his pocket, and enlisted as a private in a
regiment of light cavalry, under the assumed name of Silas Titus
Comberback. In this regiment he remained only four months, proving 'an
execrable rider, a negligent groom of his horse, and generally a slack
and slovenly trooper.' Here a Latin quotation scribbled on a whitewashed
wall discovered him, and led to his discharge, a visit to Oxford and an
introduction to Lovell and Southey, then students, made him a more
decided Pantisocratist, then a Bristolian, a protégé of Cottle and
Charles Lloyd, and a benedict. In 1795 he was married at St. Mary de
Redcliffe Church, and the thriftless pair set up housekeeping forthwith
in a rose-covered cottage at Clevedon, then a village on the shores of
the Severn Sea, though now a fashionable watering-place. Little
furniture, no cash, no income beyond a promise of a guinea and a half
for every hundred lines of copy, whether in rhyme or blank verse,
offered a poor matrimonial prospect. Two days after the wedding,
however, Cottle sent him 'with the aid of the grocer, and the shoemaker,
and the brewer, and the tin-man, and the glass-man, and the brazier,'
all he required--and more. In this retreat Coleridge did some necessary
bread-winning with his pen, but still more planning and projecting of
great world-astonishing magazines. Combined with his fancy for
projecting big schemes was an unconquerable habit of procrastination.
'His strongest intentions were but feebly supported after his first
paroxysm of resolve.' Such a man was unlikely to launch a serial on the
world successfully. He issued circulars of a paper to be called _The
Watchman_, travelled through the Midlands into Lancashire and Yorkshire
to obtain subscribers, and issued a few numbers, and then it collapsed.
In his travels he made the acquaintance of Lloyd, afterwards of
Ambleside, who found him in books, and made a home for him at Nether
Stowey. Wordsworth was then at Alfoxden, a close adjoining village. It
was during a walk taken by the two poets over the Quantock Hills that
their joint volume 'Lyrical Ballads,' was conceived, and that the
'Ancient Mariner' was partly written. 'Christabel' is another product of
this period of Coleridge's life, and what has been aptly called the
dream-poem of 'Kubla-Khan.' It was also now that he avowed himself a
Unitarian, and commenced to preach in the chapels of that sect.
Travelling to Shropshire in this ministry he captivated young William
Hazlitt by his extraordinary discourses in public and in private, who
records how it seemed to him poetry and philosophy were met together in
the preacher, truth and genius had embraced under the eye and sanction
of religion. At this time, he adds, Coleridge's personal appearance was
of one above the middle height, inclining to be corpulent, with hair
still raven-black, forehead broad and high, light as if built of ivory,
projecting brows, with rolling, bright eyes beneath them, and a mouth
'gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent.' His preaching, too, brought him
into contact with the generous De Quincey, and with the two Wedgwoods,
the eminent Staffordshire potters, who defrayed the expenses of himself
and William and Dorothy Wordsworth to Germany, and granted Coleridge a
pension to enable him to devote his life to literature. On their return,
Coleridge went to London on the staff of the _Morning Post_, in the
columns of which he did first-class work.
In 1800 he removed his family to Keswick. He came to that town in many
respects a changed man. The torrents of revolutionary talk he indulged
in during his undergraduate days had lapsed into ultra-Toryism under the
reaction from the disappointed hopes excited by the upheaval in France,
but chiefly from his connection with the London Tory organ, although, as
his German biographer somewhat grimly remarks, 'a trace of his
partiality for the community of goods lingered in his blood; he never
ceased to live upon his friends'! The Church of England doctrines he was
intended to imbibe at school and college had given way before
Unitarianism and the mysticism and pantheism of the Continent. Goethe,
Kant, and Lessing had become his masters. He came, too, in broken
health. At Keswick dwelt a good man in Greta Hall, or rather in the
smaller of the two houses now known by that name. Mr. Jackson, who
started as a common carrier, was a well-to-do man, and had accumulated a
library. He charged Coleridge half the proper rent for the other
cottage, and gave him access to his books. There seemed no reason why
our poet-philosopher should not have been happier here than ever before.
But the end of his poetical career was at hand. 'Opium,' says De
Quincey, himself a victim to the drug, 'killed Coleridge as a poet.' He
began taking the deadly poison to allay the pains of gout, to which he
was a martyr. His 'Ode to Dejection' is undoubtedly his dirge over the
grave of his muse. In his hours of awakening he gave himself afresh to
philosophy to compel mental activity. He found the study an alleviation,
but by no means a cure. An artist friend took him a voyage up the
Mediterranean. On returning to his care-worn wife he found himself
without sufficient means for the support of a growing family, though Sir
George Beaumont, of Coleorton, and the ever-faithful Cottle and Sir
Humphry Davy, helped him and interested themselves on his behalf, to
enable him to earn something by lecturing in London. Returning again to
the Lake Country, he started another weekly paper, which he called _The
Friend_. It failed to capture the public, and ceased at the
twenty-seventh number. He had magazine and review work, and published
something. The opium habit still increased till these Kendal Black Drops
(he probably so calls them because he first procured them as a quack
medicine from this town) were at last taken in doses amounting to two
quarts of laudanum in a week. Yet he was visited by the Lambs, the
Wordsworths, Hazlitt, Professor Wilson, and many another who admired and
loved him for his genius and his unique personality. In four years' time
his brother-in-law, Robert Southey, and his family joined him at Greta
Hall. On the other hand, the Wedgwood annual allowance was withdrawn, on
the ground that his side of the agreement was not being fulfilled. More
and more he drifted about from place to place, leaving his wife and
children to the care of their relatives. One while he stayed with the
Wordsworths at Grasmere, and another with a benevolent friend at Calne
(he was three years there), till his generous host's means being much
reduced he was compelled to withdraw his hospitality. Here he had been
partly weaned from opium, but on going up to London in search of a
livelihood he fell back under its complete tyranny. In a kind of
desperation he carried his case to a Dr. Gillman, of Highgate. This
gentleman, an able physician and a man of standing and culture, was
happily married, and needed no 'paying guest,' but as Professor Brandle
puts it, 'the spell of his talk, and the repute of his name, vanquished
the Gillmans at once, and from that time he became the inmate and friend
of the family, and remained so till his end.' Here in this beautiful
home--beautiful in its then countrified surroundings, beautiful in its
moral atmosphere--he was once again happy, and for no fewer than sixteen
years. No opium was permitted within the walls. His wife and children,
and friendly visitors like Irving, Hallam, Maurice, Hare, and T. H.
Green, were welcomed. He became an undoubted Christian, and a powerful
advocate of a form of orthodoxy commoner now than it was then--an
attractive Anglican theology impregnated with the German type of
platonic philosophy. His utter simplicity of character was never lost,
and, unfortunately, his endeavours after pecuniary recovery were
thwarted by a scoundrelly publisher cheating him of large sums he had
fairly earned by hard work and genius. It was at this time he issued
'Aids to Reflection,' 'Lay Sermons,' and other memorable books.
Towards the end of his days he suffered much, notably from an affection
of the heart, which 'bent his figure, furrowed his face, and hindered
his work.' Finding death within sight, he settled what outward affairs
he had to settle, ordered mourning rings for his friends, composed an
epitaph for his tombstone, and in a marvellous calm, not begotten of
narcotics, but of a living faith, he passed away into the fulness of
light, in the year of our Lord 1834, and the sixty-second of his age.
What is the true estimate of his character? His was empathically a
self-marred life. With a steady, reliable temperament and will he might
have achieved one of the very highest positions among England's greatest
men. 'Frailty,' cries a modern essayist, 'thy name is Genius.' His
conversational powers were unequalled, and attracted eminent people from
afar to hear him pour forth his brilliant scientific knowledge,
philosophic speculations, and wealth of illustration. It is true that
Charles Lamb adjudged him too great a monopolist of the situation.
'Lamb,' was the response, 'did you ever hear me preach?' 'I never heard
you do anything else,' retorted Lamb. His talks were really spontaneous
orations which electrified his hearers. That ineffectual outward life of
his, so full of latent possibilities, has not, happily, been
altogether thrown away. Both the pre-opium-drinking days and the
post-opium-drinking were long enough for him to influence the thoughts
and teaching of his own and future ages, and he still leavens the
literature of the pulpit and the desk. His poetry yet delights young and
old. It is comforting to know that one whom the 'Circean Chalice' had
driven to wish for annihilation, and created in him a desire to place
himself in a madhouse, could write from his death-bed to a 'dear
god-son' that on the brink of the grave he had proved Christ to be an
Almighty Redeemer, who had reconciled God, and given him, under all
pains and infirmities, 'the peace that passeth understanding.'
His literary output I will neither expound nor criticise, tempting as it
is to do both. His poems are on the shelves of every well-selected
library, however small. His more solid works are not for the general
public. They are too profound, and go far too deeply into the secret
springs of life and thought, too far afield into the Divine and human
undercurrents of motive and action; are too theological, too
speculative, to lay hold of any but those who themselves are, in their
spheres, and to some extent, at least, guides and moulders of other
men's emotions and duties. They are essentially books for the patiently
reflective, who learn that they may teach. If spiritual things are only
spiritually discerned, so also are philosophical theories, methods, and
categories appreciated only by those who have a natural leaning towards
them, and some degree of training. Nine-tenths of my readers will be
'practical' men and women, to whom his revelations will seem guess-work
and his intuitions dreams. But if any want a delicate and subtle
analysis of Coleridge's mind, and whatsoever was in it, they may read
the late Walter Pater's 'Appreciation' of him.
TO BE READ AT HIS GRAVESIDE
'I have no particular choice of a churchyard, but I would repose, if
possible, where there were no proud monuments, no new-fangled
obelisks or mausoleums, heathen in everything but taste, and not
Christian in that. Nothing that betokened aristocracy, unless it
were the venerable memorial of some old family long extinct. If the
village school adjoined the churchyard, so much the better. But all
this must be as He will. I am greatly pleased with the fancy of
Anaxagoras, whose sole request of the people of Lampsacus was, that
the children might have a holiday on the anniversary of his death.
But I would have the holiday on the day of my funeral. I would
connect the happiness of childhood with the peace of the dead, not
with the struggles of the dying.'--_Written on a book-margin by
Hartley Coleridge._
[Illustration:
_Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._
NAB COTTAGE, RYDAL.
The Home of De Quincey's Father-in-law (see p. 8), and
afterwards of Hartley Coleridge.]
VIII
A LIFE TO PITY
HARTLEY COLERIDGE
'Hartley Coleridge has come much nearer us, and probably you might
see as much of him as you liked. Of genius he has not a little, and
talent enough for fifty.'--WORDSWORTH.
'Dined at Mrs. Fletcher's. H. Coleridge behaved very well. He read
some verses on Dr. Arnold which I could not comprehend, he read them
so unpleasantly; and he sang a comic song that kept me very grave.
He left us quite early.'--CRABBE ROBINSON'S _Diary_.
Poor 'Lile Hartley'--_little_ Hartley, as the neighbours called him--is
one of the most pathetic figures in English literature. Undersized in
body, of promising intellect from childhood, of child-like simplicity in
character, devoid of self-control, and overmastered by the alcoholic
habit, as his father was by the opium habit, he is at once pitiable,
excusable, and lovable. As you ride from Ambleside to Grasmere you pass
a low cottage on your right, just beneath Nab Scarr, where the young
farmer and his wife lived who cared so unselfishly for him and for his
comfort and welfare. It is locally known as 'Coleridge's Cottage.' Here
he lived in later manhood, followed and brought home tenderly, when he
had wandered away, by his kind-hearted caretakers, and writing prose
essays and sweet sonnets in hours of freedom from his besetment.
By birth Hartley Coleridge belongs to the West Country, having come into
the world while his parents lived on Redcliffe Hill, Bristol, shortly
after their return from their little flower-covered, poverty-stricken
Clevedon Cottage. The National Dictionary of Biography is in error in
giving Rose Cottage as his birthplace. It was beyond all doubt Bristol,
and he was born during the autumn of 1796. 'A pretty and engaging
child,' his brother Derwent says he was. There must have been something
attractive about the babe, for it is given to few to be apostrophized by
two poets at so early an age, especially by two such as his own father
and his father's friend, William Wordsworth. Great things were
anticipated for him in the future by both the seers. He was taken to
London for a visit when three years old, and, after being mystified by
the street lamps, he suddenly exclaimed: 'Oh! now I know what the stars
are: they are lamps that have been good upon earth, and have gone up
into heaven!' At six years of age he was removed with the family to
Keswick. Here for a season the two households of Coleridge and Southey
dwelt at Greta Hall, an occurrence which seems in many ways to have
remarkably influenced his career. Those who came in contact with him at
this place speak of him as pouring forth, with flashing eyes, strange
speculations far beyond his years, and weaving wild inventions. His
dreamy boyhood was varied by another stay in London and a visit to
Bristol, in both which places further mundane knowledge was acquired,
only to be forthwith transmuted into the visions which filled his mental
life. His very play related to the history of a kind of Utopia, its
populations, its geography, its constitution, its wars, its politics.
'Ejuxria' was the name he gave his island kingdom, and he prolonged the
existence of it for himself and his playmates beyond the length of the
famous thousand and one nights of the Eastern story-teller. Everything
he saw, everything he read, became forthwith 'Ejuxrian.' This habit of
introversion and lack of practicality changed its forms as he grew
older, but never left him. When at length he went to a boarding-school
at Ambleside--or, rather, was placed in a clergyman's house near it with
a few other boys for private tuition--his power of improvization was
encouraged by his companions demanding long-drawn-out romances from him,
while his morbid tendencies and consciousness of his small stature
induced the habit of lonely wanderings and musing.
Desultory reading and frequent intercourse with his father's
friends--Southey, Wordsworth, Professor Wilson, De Quincey, and Charles
Lloyd--formed the chief part of his early education. He seems to have
been as a schoolboy truthful, dutiful, and thoughtful, but with great
infirmity of will and subject to paroxysms of passion and heartbroken
repentance. From school to Oxford University was a natural and proper
advance. Unfortunately, his rare conversational qualities made him much
sought after for students' wine parties. The result of this was that,
although he passed his exams creditably, and won an Oriel Fellowship,
he was judged to have forfeited this Fellowship by his intemperance.
The authorities were inexorable. No expostulation or influence could
save him. It is probable some freedom of speech offensive to the
narrow-minded dons of his day had something to do with their hardness.
Sympathy and kindly common-sense might have recovered him just then from
his snare. As it was, he tried for literary employment in London with
little success, though his tarriance there resulted in a further
development of his alcoholic tendency. Thence he drifted back to
Ambleside, where he tried school-keeping, but in vain. He had no
disciplinary power, and one by one his pupils were removed, till the
school collapsed. From there he went to the Grasmere Cottage, already
spoken of, facing the lovely little lake of Rydal, a blue island-dotted
gem framed in with lofty green mountains. Everybody loved the lonely,
affectionate man--a keen observer of Nature, an inspired writer of
poetry--and everybody grieved when the end came one winter's day of
1849, and his remains were buried in Grasmere Churchyard. There a little
group of us stood but a while ago, reverently uncovered, beneath the
yews that overshadow his grave and the graves of the Wordsworth family.
That he knew his weakness and lamented it, and at seasons valiantly
struggled to overcome it, is certain, and one cannot help wondering
whether he would not have triumphed ultimately had he lived in a
teetotal age, when he could have been surrounded by abstaining
companions, who would have sheltered him and kept him out of perpetually
recurrent temptations. Some of his more personal verses are sadly
suggestive both of his struggle and his need:
'A woeful thing it is to find
No trust secure in weak mankind,
But tenfold woe betide the elf
Who knows not how to trust himself.'
And again he writes:
'Oh woeful impotence of weak resolve,
Recorded rashly to the writer's shame,
Days pass away, and Time's large orbs revolve,
And every day behold me still the same,
Till oft-neglected purpose loses aim,
And hope becomes a flat, unheeded lie,
And conscience, weary with the work of blame,
In seeming slumber droops her wistful eye,
As if she would resign her unregarded ministry.'
Passing lightly over his 'Northern Worthies,' some dozen or so of
biographic sketches, good and capable 'pot-boilers'--yet 'pot-boilers'
essentially--one comes to his essays, written for _Blackwood_ and other
magazines and papers, and his marginalia written in his books and
published after his death. We cannot but be struck with the immense
variety of subjects dealt with in his essays. Many of them are signed by
a pseudonym, such as 'Thersites' if on 'Heathen Mythology'--or 'Tom
Thumb the Great' if 'Brief Observations upon Brevity'--or 'Ignoramus' if
a series on the 'Fine Arts'--and very few were issued in his own name.
Some are full of quaint humour, such as 'Thoughts on Horsemanship, by a
Pedestrian,' 'A Nursery Lecture delivered by an Old Bachelor.' Others
have a fine literary flavour, as, for example, 'Shakespeare, a Tory and
a Gentleman,' or 'On the Character of Hamlet.' It is, however, as a
sonnetteer he will be longest remembered, and as a writer of
miscellaneous verses. When rowing round Grasmere Lake the other day we
recalled his lines, beginning:
'Within the compass of a little vale
There lies a lake unknown in fairy tale,
Which not a poet knew in ancient days,
When all the world believed in ghosts and fays;
Yet on that lake I have beheld a boat
That seemed a fairy pinnace all afloat,
On some blest mission to a distant isle
To do meet worship in some ruined pile,
Where long of yore the Fairies used to meet
And haply hallow with their last retreat.'
Sometimes, too, when religious controversies grow warm around the good
old revelation those verses of his come to remembrance, called 'The Word
of God':
'In holy books we read how God hath spoken
To holy men in many different ways;
But hath the present work'd no sign or token?
Is God quite silent in these latter days?
'And hath our Heavenly Sire departed quite,
And left His poor babes in this world alone,
And only left for blind belief--not sight--
Some quaint old riddles in a tongue unknown?'
Hartley Coleridge's longer and more ambitious pieces do not commend
themselves to the public as do his shorter ones. His _forte_ was in--
'Singing of the little rills
That trickle down the yellow hills
To drive the Fairies' water-mills;'
of children whom he doted upon,--of 'the merry lark that bids a blithe
good-morrow,'--of 'summer rain'--of 'rose, and violet, and pansy, each
with its tale of love'--of poor Mary Magdalene. From his own soul, as
from Mary's, it may be the Lord has 'wiped off the soiling of despair.'
May we find it has been so when we ourselves reach the great hereafter.
KESWICK IN WINTER