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English Men of Letters: Coleridge

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Title: English Men of Letters: Coleridge

Author: H. D. Traill


        
Release date: November 1, 2004 [eBook #6916]
                Most recently updated: October 15, 2014

Language: English

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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS

COLERIDGE

BY

H. D. TRAILL




PREFATORY NOTE.


In a tolerably well-known passage in one of his essays De Quincey
enumerates the multiform attainments and powers of Coleridge, and the
corresponding varieties of demand made by them on any one who should
aspire to become this many-sided man's biographer. The description is
slightly touched with the humorous hyperbole characteristic of its
author; but it is in substance just, and I cannot but wish that it were
possible, within the limits of a preface, to set out the whole of it in
excuse for the many inevitable shortcomings of this volume. Having thus
made an "exhibit" of it, there would only remain to add that the
difficulties with which De Quincey confronts an intending biographer of
Coleridge must necessarily be multiplied many-fold by the conditions
under which this work is here attempted. No complete biography of
Coleridge, at least on any important scale of dimensions, is in
existence; no critical appreciation of his work _as a whole_, and as
correlated with the circumstances and affected by the changes of his
life, has, so far as I am aware, been attempted. To perform either of
these two tasks adequately, or even with any approach to adequacy, a
writer should at least have the elbow-room of a portly volume. To
attempt the two together, therefore, and to attempt them within the
limits prescribed to the manuals of this series, is an enterprise which
I think should claim, from all at least who are not offended by its
audacity, an almost unbounded indulgence.

The supply of material for a _Life_ of Coleridge is fairly plentiful,
though it is not very easily come by. For the most part it needs to be
hunted up or fished up--those accustomed to the work will appreciate
the difference between the two processes--from a considerable variety
of contemporary documents. Completed biography of the poet-philosopher
there is none, as has been said, in existence; and the one volume of
the unfinished _Life_ left us by Mr. Gillman--a name never to be
mentioned with disrespect, however difficult it may sometimes be to
avoid doing so, by any one who honours the name and genius of
Coleridge--covers, and that in but a loose and rambling fashion, no
more than a few years. Mr. Cottle's _Recollections of Southey,
Wordsworth, and Coleridge_ contains some valuable information on
certain points of importance, as also does the _Letters, Conversations,
etc., of S. T. C._ by Mr. Allsop. Miss Meteyard's _Group of Eminent
Englishmen_ throws much light on the relations between Coleridge and
his early patrons the Wedgwoods. Everything, whether critical or
biographical, that De Quincey wrote on Coleridgian matters requires,
with whatever discount, to be carefully studied. _The Life of
Wordsworth,_ by the Bishop of St. Andrews; _The Correspondence of
Southey;_ the Rev. Derwent Coleridge's brief account of his father's
life and writings; and the prefatory memoir prefixed to the 1880
edition of Coleridge's _Poetical and Dramatic Works_, have all had to
be consulted. But, after all, there remain several tantalising gaps in
Coleridge's life which refuse to be bridged over; and one cannot but
think that there must be enough unpublished matter in the possession of
his relatives and the representatives of his friends and correspondents
to enable some at least, though doubtless not all, of these missing
links to be supplied. Perhaps upon a fitting occasion and for an
adequate purpose these materials would be forthcoming.




CONTENTS.



_POETICAL PERIOD._

CHAPTER I.
[1772-1794.]
Birth, parentage, and early years--Christ's Hospital--Jesus College,
Cambridge.

CHAPTER II.
[1794-1797.]
The Bristol Lectures--Marriage--Life at Clevedon--The
_Watchman_--Retirement to Stowey--Introduction to Wordsworth.

CHAPTER III.
[1797-1799.]
Coleridge and Wordsworth--Publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_--The
_Ancient Mariner_--The first part of _Christabel_--Decline of
Coleridge's poetic impulse--Final review of his poetry.


_CRITICAL PERIOD._

CHAPTER IV.
[1799-1800.]
Visit to Germany--Life at Gottingen--Return--Explores the Lake
country--London--The _Morning Post_--Coleridge as a
journalist--Retirement to Keswick.

CHAPTER V.
[1800-1804.]
Life at Keswick--Second part of _Christabel_--Failing health--Resort
to opium--The _Ode to Dejection_--Increasing restlessness--Visit to
Malta.

CHAPTER VI.
[1806-1809.]
Stay at Malta--Its injurious effects--Return to England--Meeting with
De Quincey--Residence in London--First series of lectures.

CHAPTER VII.
[1809-1810.]
Return to the Lakes--From Keswick to Grasmere--With Wordsworth at
Allan Bank--The _Friend_--Quits the Lake country for ever.

CHAPTER VIII.
[1810-1816.]
London again--Second recourse to journalism--The _Courier_ articles--The
Shakespeare lectures--Production of _Remorse_--At Bristol again as
lecturer--Residence at Calne--Increasing ill health and
embarrassments--Retirement to Mr. Gillman's.


_METAPHYSICAL AND THEOLOGICAL PERIOD._

CHAPTER IX.
[1816-1818.]
Life at Highgate--Renewed activity--Publications and republications--The
_Biographia Literaria_--The lectures of 1818--Coleridge as a Shakespearian
critic.

CHAPTER X.
[1818-1834.]
Closing years--Temporary renewal of money troubles--The _Aids to
Refection_--Growing weakness-Visit to Germany with the Wordsworths--Last
illness and death.

CHAPTER XI.
Coleridge's metaphysics and theology--_The Spiritual Philosophy_ of
Mr. Green.

CHAPTER XII.
Coleridge's position in his later years--His discourse--His influence
on contemporary thought--Final review of his intellectual work.

INDEX.




COLERIDGE.





CHAPTER I.

Birth, parentage, and early years--Christ's Hospital--Jesus College,
Cambridge.

[1772-1794.]


On the 21st of October 1772 there was added to that roll of famous
Englishmen of whom Devonshire boasts the parentage a new and not its
least illustrious name. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE was the son of the Rev.
John Coleridge, vicar of Ottery St. Mary in that county, and head
master of Henry VIII.'s Free Grammar School in the same town. He was
the youngest child of a large family. To the vicar, who had been twice
married, his first wife had borne three children, and his second ten.
Of these latter, however, one son died in infancy; four others,
together with the only daughter of the family, passed away before
Samuel had attained his majority; and thus only three of his brothers,
James, Edward, and George Coleridge, outlived the eighteenth century.
The first of these three survivors became the father of Henry Nelson
Coleridge--who married his cousin Sara, the poet's accomplished
daughter, and edited his uncle's posthumous works--and of the late Mr.
Justice Coleridge, himself the father of the present Lord Chief-Justice
of England. Edward, the second of the three, went, like his eldest
brother William, to Pembroke College, Oxford, and like him took orders;
and George, also educated at the same college and for the same
profession, succeeded eventually to his father's benefice and school.
The vicar himself appears from all accounts to have been a man of more
mark than most rural incumbents, and probably than a good many
schoolmasters of his day. He was a Hebrew scholar of some eminence, and
the compiler of a Latin grammar, in which, among other innovations
designed to simplify the study of the language for "boys just
initiated," he proposed to substitute for the name of "ablative" that
of "quale-quare-quidditive case." The mixture of amiable simplicity and
not unamiable pedantry to which this stroke of nomenclature testifies
was further illustrated in his practice of diversifying his sermons to
his village flock with Hebrew quotations, which he always commended to
their attention as "the immediate language of the Holy Ghost"--a
practice which exposed his successor, himself a learned man, to the
complaint of his rustic parishioners, that for all his erudition no
"immediate language of the Holy Ghost" was ever to be heard from _him_.
On the whole the Rev. John Coleridge appears to have been a gentle and
kindly eccentric, whose combination of qualities may have well entitled
him to be compared, as his famous son was wont in after-life to compare
him, to Parson Adams.

Of the poet's mother we know little; but it is to be gathered from such
information as has come to us through Mr. Gillman from Coleridge
himself that, though reputed to have been a "woman of strong mind," she
exercised less influence on the formation of her son's mind and
character than has frequently been the case with the not remarkable
mothers of remarkable men. "She was," says Mr. Gillman, "an uneducated
woman, industriously attentive to her household duties, and devoted to
the care of her husband and family. Possessing none even of the most
common accomplishments of her day, she had neither love nor sympathy
for the display of them in others. She disliked, as she would say, your
'harpsichord ladies,' and strongly tried to impress upon her sons their
little value" (that is, of the accomplishments) "in their choice of
wives." And the final judgment upon her is that she was "a very good
woman, though, like Martha, over careful in many things; very ambitious
for the advancement of her sons in life, but wanting, perhaps, that
flow of heart which her husband possessed so largely." Of Coleridge's
boyhood and school-days we are fortunate in being able to construct an
unusually clear and complete idea. Both from his own autobiographic
notes, from the traditionary testimony of his family, and from the no
less valuable evidence of his most distinguished schoolfellow, we know
that his youthful character and habits assign him very conspicuously to
that perhaps somewhat small class of eminent men whose boyhood has
given distinct indications of great things to come. Coleridge is as
pronounced a specimen of this class as Scott is of its opposite. Scott
has shown the world how commonplace a boyhood may precede a maturity of
extraordinary powers. In Coleridge's case a boy of truly extraordinary
qualities was father to one of the most remarkable of men. As the
youngest of ten children (or of thirteen, reckoning the vicar's family
of three by his first wife), Coleridge attributes the early bent of his
disposition to causes the potency of which one may be permitted to
think that he has somewhat exaggerated. It is not quite easy to believe
that it was only through "certain jealousies of old Molly," his brother
Frank's "dotingly fond nurse," and the infusions of these jealousies
into his brother's mind, that he was drawn "from life in motion to life
in thought and sensation." The physical impulses of boyhood, where they
exist in vigour, are not so easily discouraged, and it is probable that
they were naturally weaker and the meditative tendency stronger than
Coleridge in after-life imagined. But to continue: "I never played," he
proceeds, "except by myself, and then only acting over what I had been
reading or fancying, or half one, half the other" (a practice common
enough, it may be remarked, among boys of by no means morbidly
imaginative habit), "cutting down weeds and nettles with a stick, as
one of the seven champions of Christendom. Alas! I had all the
simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the
child's habits. I never thought as a child--never had the language of a
child." So it fared with him during the period of his home instruction,
the first eight years of his life; and his father having, as scholar
and schoolmaster, no doubt noted the strange precocity of his youngest
son, appears to have devoted especial attention to his training. "In my
ninth year," he continues, "my most dear, most revered father died
suddenly. O that I might so pass away, if, like him, I were an
Israelite without guile. The image of my father, my revered, kind,
learned, simple-hearted father, is a religion to me."

Before he had attained his tenth year a presentation to Christ's
Hospital was obtained for him by that eminent judge Mr. Justice Buller,
a former pupil of his father's; and he was entered at the school on the
18th July 1782. His early bent towards poetry, though it displayed
itself in youthful verse of unusual merit, is a less uncommon and
arresting characteristic than his precocious speculative activity. Many
a raw boy "lisps in numbers, for the numbers come;" but few discourse
Alexandrian metaphysics at the same age, for the very good reason that
the metaphysics as a rule do not "come." And even among those youth
whom curiosity, or more often vanity, induces to dabble in such
studies, one would find few indeed over whom they have cast such an
irresistible spell as to estrange them for a while from poetry
altogether. That this was the experience of Coleridge we have his own
words to show. His son and biographer, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, has
a little antedated the poet's stages of development in stating that
when his father was sent to Christ's Hospital in his eleventh year he
was "already a poet, and yet more characteristically a metaphysician."
A poet, yes, and a precocious scholar perhaps to boot, but a
metaphysician, no; for the "delightful sketch of him by his friend and
schoolfellow Charles Lamb" was pretty evidently taken not at "this
period" of his life but some years later. Coleridge's own account of
the matter in the _Biographia Literaria_ is clear. [1] "At a very
premature age, even before my fifteenth year," he says, "I had
bewildered myself in metaphysics and in theological controversy.
Nothing else pleased me. History and particular facts lost all interest
in my mind. Poetry (though for a schoolboy of that age I was above par
in English versification, and had already produced two or three
compositions which I may venture to say were somewhat above mediocrity,
and which had gained me more credit than the sound good sense of my old
master was at all pleased with),--poetry itself, yea, novels and
romance, became insipid to me." He goes on to describe how highly
delighted he was if, during his friendless wanderings on leave-days,
"any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black," would enter
with him into a conversation, which he soon found the means of
directing to his favourite subject of "providence, foreknowledge, will,
and fate; fixed fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute." Undoubtedly it
is to this period that one should refer Lamb's well-known description
of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard."

"How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still,
entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between
the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold in
thy deep and sweet intonations the mysteries of Iamblichus or Plotinus
(for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic
draughts), or reciting Homer in the Greek, or Pindar, while the walls
of the old Grey Friars re-echoed with the accents of the _inspired
charity-boy_."

It is interesting to note such a point as that of the "deep and sweet
intonations" of the youthful voice--its most notable and impressive
characteristic in after-life. Another schoolfellow describes the young
philosopher as "tall and striking in person, with long black hair," and
as commanding "much deference" among his schoolfellows. Such was
Coleridge between his fifteenth and seventeenth year, and such
continued to be the state of his mind and the direction of his studies
until he was won back again from what he calls "a preposterous pursuit,
injurious to his natural powers and to the progress of his education,"
by--it is difficult, even after the most painstaking study of its
explanations, to record the phenomenon without astonishment--a perusal
of the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles. Deferring, however, for the
present any research into the occult operation of this converting
agency, it will be enough to note Coleridge's own assurance of its
perfect efficacy. He was completely cured for the time of his
metaphysical malady, and "well were it for me perhaps," he exclaims,
"had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had continued
to pluck the flowers and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface
instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic
depths." And he goes on to add, in a passage full of the peculiar
melancholy beauty of his prose, and full too of instruction for the
biographer, "But if, in after-time, I have sought a refuge from bodily
pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised
the strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening the
feelings of the heart, there was a long and blessed interval, during
which my natural faculties were allowed to expand and my original
tendencies to develop themselves--my fancy, and the love of nature, and
the sense of beauty in forms and sounds." This "long and blessed
interval" endured, as we shall see, for some eleven or twelve years.

His own account of his seduction from the paths of poetry by the wiles
of philosophy is that physiology acted as the go-between. His brother
Luke had come up to London to walk the hospitals, and young Samuel's
insatiable intellectual curiosity immediately inspired him with a
desire to share his brother's pursuit. "Every Saturday I could make or
obtain leave, to the London Hospital trudged I. O! the bliss if I was
permitted to hold the plaisters or attend the dressings.... I became
wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon; English, Latin, yea, Greek books
of medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's _Latin Medical Dictionary_
I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it was a wild dream, which, gradually
blending with, gradually gave way to, a rage for metaphysics occasioned
by the essays on Liberty and Necessity in Cato's _Letters_, and more by
theology." [2] At the appointed hour, however, Bowles the emancipator
came, as has been said, to his relief, and having opportunely fallen in
love with the eldest daughter of a widow lady of whose son he had been
the patron and protector at school, we may easily imagine that his
liberation from the spell of metaphysics was complete. "From this
time," he says, "to my nineteenth year, when I quitted school for
Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of poetry and love."

Of Coleridge's university days we know less; but the account of his
schoolfellow, Charles Le Grice, accords, so far as it goes, with what
would have been anticipated from the poet's school life. Although "very
studious," and not unambitious of academical honours--within a few
months of his entering at Jesus he won the Browne Gold Medal for a
Greek Ode on the Slave Trade [3]--his reading, his friend admits, was
"desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake
of exercise, but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in
conversation, and for the sake of this his room was a constant
rendezvous of conversation-loving friends. I will not call them
loungers, for they did not call to kill time but to enjoy it." From the
same record we gather that Coleridge's interest in current politics was
already keen, and that he was an eager reader, not only of Burke's
famous contributions thereto, but even a devourer of all the pamphlets
which swarmed during that agitated period from the press. The desultory
student, however, did not altogether intermit his academical studies.
In 1793 he competed for another Greek verse prize, this time
unsuccessfully. He afterwards described his ode _On Astronomy_ as "the
finest Greek poem I ever wrote;" [4] but, whatever may have been its
merits from the point of view of scholarship, the English translation
of it, made eight years after by Southey (in which form alone it now
exists), seems hardly to establish its title to the peculiar merit
claimed by its author for his earlier effort. The long vacation of this
year, spent by him in Devonshire, is also interesting as having given
birth to one of the most characteristic of the _Juvenile Poems,_ the
_Songs of the Pixies_, and the closing months of 1793 were marked by
the most singular episode in the poet's earlier career.

It is now perhaps impossible to ascertain whether the cause of this
strange adventure of Coleridge's was, "chagrin at his disappointment in
a love affair" or "a fit of dejection and despondency caused by some
debts not amounting to a hundred pounds;" but, actuated by some impulse
or other of restless disquietude, Coleridge suddenly quitted Cambridge
and came up, very slenderly provided with money, to London, where,
after a few days' sojourn, he was compelled by pressure of actual need
to enlist, under the name of Silas Titus Comberback (S. T. C.), [5] as
a private in the 15th Light Dragoons. It may seem strange to say so,
but it strikes one as quite conceivable that the world might have been
a gainer if fate had kept Coleridge a little longer in the ranks than
the four months of his actual service. As it was, however, his military
experiences, unlike those of Gibbon, were of no subsequent advantage to
him. He was, as he tells us, an execrable rider, a negligent groom of
his horse, and, generally, a slack and slovenly trooper; but before
drill and discipline had had time to make a smart soldier of him, he
chanced to attract the attention of his captain by having written a
Latin quotation on the white wall of the stables at Reading. This
officer, who it seems was either able to translate the ejaculation,
"Eheu! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem," [7] or, at any
rate, to recognise the language it was written in, interested himself
forthwith on behalf of his scholarly recruit. [6] Coleridge's discharge
was obtained at Hounslow on April 10, 1794, and he returned to
Cambridge.

The year was destined to be eventful for him in more ways than one. In
June he went to Oxford to pay a visit to an old schoolfellow, where an
accidental introduction to Robert Southey, then an undergraduate of
Balliol, laid the foundation of a friendship destined largely to
influence their future lives. In the course of the following August he
came to Bristol, where he was met by Southey, and by him introduced to
Robert Lovell, through whom and Southey he made the acquaintance of two
persons of considerable, if not exactly equal, importance to any young
author--his first publisher and his future wife. Robert Lovell already
knew Mr. Joseph Cottle, brother of Amos Cottle (Byron's "O! Amos
Cottle! Phoebus! what a name"), and himself a poet of some pretensions;
and he had married Mary Fricker, one of whose sisters, Edith, was
already engaged to Southey; while another, Sara, was afterwards to
become Mrs. Coleridge.

As the marriage turned out on the whole an unhappy one, the present may
be a convenient moment for considering how far its future character was
determined by previously existing and unalterable conditions, and how
far it may be regarded as the result of subsequent events. De Quincey,
whose acute and in many respects most valuable monograph on the poet
touches its point of least trustworthiness in matters of this kind,
declares roundly, and on the alleged authority of Coleridge himself,
that the very primary and essential prerequisite of happiness was
wanting to the union. Coleridge, he says, assured him that his marriage
was "not his own deliberate act, but was in a manner forced upon his
sense of honour by the scrupulous Southey, who insisted that he had
gone too far in his attentions to Miss Fricker for any honourable
retreat." On the other hand, he adds, "a neutral spectator of the
parties protested to me that if ever in his life he had seen a man
under deep fascination, and what he would have called desperately in
love, Coleridge, in relation to Miss F., was that man." One need not, I
think, feel much hesitation in preferring this "neutral spectator's"
statement to that of the discontented husband, made several years after
the mutual estrangement of the couple, and with no great propriety
perhaps, to a new acquaintance. There is abundant evidence in his own
poems alone that at the time of, and for at least two or three years
subsequently to, his marriage Coleridge's feeling towards his wife was
one of profound and indeed of ardent attachment. It is of course quite
possible that the passion of so variable, impulsive, and irresolute a
temperament as his may have had its hot and cold fits, and that during
one of the latter phases Southey may have imagined that his friend
needed some such remonstrance as that referred to. But this is not
nearly enough to support the assertion that Coleridge's marriage was
"in a manner forced upon his sense of honour," and was not his own
deliberate act. It was as deliberate as any of his other acts during
the years 1794 and 1795,--that is to say, it was as wholly inspired by
the enthusiasm of the moment, and as utterly ungoverned by anything in
the nature of calculation on the possibilities of the future. He fell
in love with Sara Fricker as he fell in love with the French Revolution
and with the scheme of "Pantisocracy," and it is indeed extremely
probable that the emotions of the lover and the socialist may have
subtly acted and reacted upon each other. The Pantisocratic scheme was
essentially based at its outset upon a union of kindred souls, for it
was clearly necessary of course that each male member of the little
community to be founded on the banks of the Susquehanna should take
with him a wife. Southey and Lovell had theirs in the persons of two
sisters; they were his friends and fellow-workers in the scheme; and
they had a sympathetic sister-in-law disengaged. Fate therefore seemed
to designate her for Coleridge and with the personal attraction which
she no doubt exerted over him there may well have mingled a dash of
that mysterious passion for symmetry which prompts a man to "complete
the set." After all, too, it must be remembered that, though Mrs.
Coleridge did not permanently retain her hold upon her husband's
affections, she got considerably the better of those who shared them
with her. Coleridge found out the objections to Pantisocracy in a very
short space of time, and a decided coolness had sprung up between him
and Madame la Revolution before another two years had passed.

The whole history indeed of this latter _liaison_ is most remarkable,
and no one, it seems to me, can hope to form an adequate conception of
Coleridge's essential instability of character without bestowing
somewhat closer attention upon this passage in his intellectual
development than it usually receives. It is not uncommon to see the
cases of Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge lumped together
indiscriminately, as interequivalent illustrations of the way in which
the young and generous minds of that era were first fascinated and then
repelled by the French Revolution. As a matter of fact, however, the
last of the three cases differed in certain very important respects
from the two former. Coleridge not only took the "frenzy-fever" in a
more violent form than either Wordsworth or Southey, and uttered wilder
things in his delirium than they, but the paroxysm was much shorter,
the _immediate_ reaction more violent in its effects and brought about
by slighter causes in his case than in theirs. This will appear more
clearly when we come to contrast the poems of 1794 and 1795 with those
of 1797. For the present it must suffice to say that while the history
of Coleridge's relations to the French Revolution is intellectually
more interesting than that of Wordsworth's and Southey's, it plainly
indicates, even in that early period of the three lives, a mind far
more at the mercy of essentially transitory sentiment than belonged to
either of the others, and far less disposed than theirs to review the
aspirations of the moment by the steady light of the practical judgment.

This, however, is anticipating matters. We are still in the summer of
1794, and we left Coleridge at Bristol with Southey, Lovell, and the
Miss Frickers. To this year belongs that remarkable experiment in
playwriting at high pressure, _The Fall of Robespierre_. It originated,
we learn from Southey, in "a sportive conversation at poor Lovell's,"
when each of the three friends agreed to produce one act of a tragedy,
on the subject indicated in the above title, by the following evening.
Coleridge was to write the first, Southey the second, and Lovell the
third. Southey and Lovell appeared the next day with their acts
complete, Coleridge, characteristically, with only a part of his.
Lovell's, however, was found not to be in keeping with the other two,
so Southey supplied the third as well as the second, by which time
Coleridge had completed the first. The tragedy was afterwards published
entire, and is usually included in complete editions of Coleridge's
poetical works. It is an extremely immature production, abounding in
such coquettings (if nothing more serious) with bathos as

                                      "Now,
  Aloof thou standest from the tottering pillar,
  And like a frighted child behind its mother,
  Hidest thy pale face in the skirts of Mercy."

and

  "Liberty, condensed awhile, is bursting
  To scatter the arch-chemist in the explosion."

Coleridge also contributed to Southey's _Joan of Arc_ certain lines of
which, many years afterwards, he wrote in this humorously exaggerated
but by no means wholly unjust tone of censure:--"I was really
astonished (1) at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; (2) at
the transmogrification of the fanatic Virago into a modern novel-pawing
proselyte of the Age of Reason--a Tom Paine in petticoats; (3) at the
utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb-down
of the pauses, and at the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in the
single lines."

In September Coleridge returned to Cambridge, to keep what turned out
to be his last term at Jesus. We may fairly suppose that he had already
made up his mind to bid adieu to the Alma Mater whose bosom he was
about to quit for that of a more venerable and, as he then believed, a
gentler mother on the banks of the Susquehanna; but it is not
impossible that in any case his departure might have been expedited by
the remonstrances of college authority. Dr. Pearce, Master of Jesus,
and afterwards Dean of Ely, did all he could, records a friend of a
somewhat later date, "to keep him within bounds; but his repeated
efforts to reclaim him were to no purpose, and upon one occasion, after
a long discussion on the visionary and ruinous tendency of his later
schemes, Coleridge cut short the argument by bluntly assuring him, his
friend and master, that he mistook the matter altogether. He was
neither Jacobin, [8] he said, nor Democrat, but a Pantisocrat." And,
leaving the good doctor to digest this new and strange epithet,
Coleridge bade farewell to his college and his university, and went
forth into that world with which he was to wage so painful and variable
a struggle.


FOOTNOTES

1. He tells us in the _Biographia Literaria_ that he had translated the
eight hymns of Synesius from the Greek into English anacreontics
"before his fifteenth year." It is reasonable to suppose, therefore,
that he had more scholarship in 1782 than most boys of ten years.

2. Footnote: Gillman, pp. 22, 23.

3. Of this Coleridge afterwards remarked with justice that its "ideas
were better than the language or metre in which they were conveyed."
Porson, with little magnanimity, as De Quincey complains, was severe
upon its Greek, but its main conception--an appeal to Death to come, a
welcome deliverer to the slaves, and to bear them to shores where "they
may tell their beloved ones what horrors they, being men, had endured
from men"--is moving and effective. De Quincey, however, was
undoubtedly right in his opinion that Coleridge's Greek scholarship was
not of the exact order. No exact scholar could, for instance, have died
in the faith (as Coleridge did) that εστησε (S. T. C.) means "he
stood," and not "he placed."

4. Adding "that which gained the prize was contemptible"--an expression
of opinion hardly in accordance with Le Grice's statement
("Recollections" in _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1836) that "no one was
more convinced of the propriety of the decision than Coleridge
himself." Mr. Le Grice, however, bears valuable testimony to
Coleridge's disappointment, though I think he exaggerates its influence
in determining his career.

5. It is characteristic of the punctilious inaccuracy of Mr. Cottle
(_Recollections_, ii. 54) that he should insist that the assumed name
was "Cumberbatch, not Comberback," though Coleridge has himself fixed
the real name by the jest, "My habits were so little equestrian, that
my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion." This circumstance, though
trifling, does not predispose us to accept unquestioningly Mr. Cottle's
highly particularised account of Coleridge's experience with his
regiment.

6. Miss Mitford, in her _Recollections of a Literary Life_,
interestingly records the active share taken by her father in procuring
the learned trooper's discharge.

7. "In omni adversitate fortunæ, infelicissimum genus est infortunii
fuisse felicem."--_Boethius_.

8. Carrlyon's _Early Years and late Reflections_, vol. i. p. 27.




CHAPTER II.

The Bristol Lectures--Marriage--Life at Clevedon--The
_Watchman_--Retirement to Stowey--Introduction to Wordsworth.

[1794-1797.]


The reflections of the worthy Master of Jesus upon the strange reply of
the wayward young undergraduate would have been involved in even
greater perplexity if he could have looked forward a few months into
the future. For after a winter spent in London, and enlivened by those
_noctes conoque Deûm_ at the "Cat and Salutation," which Lamb has so
charmingly recorded, Coleridge returned with Southey to Bristol at the
beginning of 1795, and there proceeded to deliver a series of lectures
which, whatever their other merits, would certainly not have assisted
Dr. Pearce to grasp the distinction between a Pantisocrat and a
Jacobin. As a scholar and a man of literary taste he might possibly
have admired the rhetorical force of the following outburst, but,
considering that the "HE" here gibbeted in capitals was no less a
personage than the "heaven-born minister" himself, a plain man might
well have wondered what additional force the vocabulary of Jacobinism
could have infused into the language of Pantisocracy. After summing up
the crimes of the Reign of Terror the lecturer asks: "Who, my brethren,
was the cause of this guilt if not HE who supplied the occasion and the
motive? Heaven hath bestowed on _that man_ a portion of its ubiquity,
and given him an actual presence in the sacraments of hell, wherever
administered, in all the bread of bitterness, in all the cups of
blood." And in general, indeed, the _Conciones ad Populum_, as
Coleridge named these lectures on their subsequent publication, were
rather calculated to bewilder any of the youthful lecturer's
well-wishers who might be anxious for some means of discriminating his
attitude from that of the Hardys, the Horne Tookes, and the Thelwalls
of the day. A little warmth of language might no doubt be allowed to a
young friend of liberty in discussing legislation which, in the
retrospect, has staggered even so staunch a Tory as Sir Archibald
Alison; but Coleridge's denunciation of the Pitt and Grenville Acts, in
the lecture entitled _The Plot Discovered_, is occasionally startling,
even for that day of fierce passions, in the fierceness of its
language. It is interesting, however, to note the ever-active play of
thought and reasoning amid the very storm and stress of political
passion. Coleridge is never for long together a mere declaimer on
popular rights and ministerial tyranny, and even this indignant address
contains a passage of extremely just and thoughtful analysis of the
constituent elements of despotism. Throughout the spring and summer of
1795 Coleridge continued his lectures at Bristol, his head still
simmering--though less violently, it may be suspected, every
month--with Pantisocracy, and certainly with all his kindred political
and religious enthusiasms unabated.

A study of these crude but vigorous addresses reveals to us, as does
the earlier of the early poems, a mind struggling with its half-formed
and ever-changing conceptions of the world, and, as is usual at such
peculiar phases of an intellectual development, affirming its temporary
beliefs with a fervour and vehemence directly proportioned to the
recency of their birth. Commenting on the _Conciones ad Populum_ many
years afterwards, and invoking them as witnesses to his political
consistency as an author, Coleridge remarked that with the exception of
"two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity
and Unitarianism," he saw little or nothing in these outbursts of his
youthful zeal to retract, and, with the exception of "some
flame-coloured epithets" applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others,
"or rather to personifications"--for such, he says, they really were to
him--as little to regret.

We now, however, arrive at an event, important in the life of every
man, and which influenced that of Coleridge to an extent not the less
certainly extraordinary because difficult, if not impossible, to define
with exactitude. On the 4th of October 1795 Coleridge was married at
St. Mary Redcliffe Church, Bristol, to Sarah (or as he preferred to
spell it Sara) Fricker, and withdrew for a time from the eager
intellectual life of a political lecturer to the contemplative quiet
appropriate to the honeymoon of a poet, spent in a sequestered cottage
amid beautiful scenery, and within sound of the sea. No wonder that
among such surroundings, and with such belongings, the honeymoon should
have extended from one month to three, and indeed that Coleridge should
have waited till his youthful yearnings for a life of action, and
perhaps (though that would have lent itself less gracefully to his poem
of farewell to his Clevedon cottage) his increasing sense of the
necessity of supplementing the ambrosia of love with the bread and
cheese of mortals, compelled him to re-enter the world. No wonder he
should have delayed to do so, for it is as easy to perceive in his
poems that these were days of unclouded happiness as it is melancholy
to reflect by how few others like them his life was destined to be
brightened. The _Æolian Harp_ has no more than the moderate merits,
with its full share of the characteristic faults, of his earlier
productions; but one cannot help "reading into it" the poet's
after-life of disappointment and disillusion--estrangement from the
"beloved woman" in whose affection he was then reposing; decay and
disappearance of those "flitting phantasies" with which he was then so
joyously trifling, and the bitterly ironical scholia which fate was
preparing for such lines as

  "And tranquil muse upon tranquillity."

One cannot in fact refrain from mentally comparing the _'olian Harp_ of
1795 with the _Dejection_ of 1803, and no one who has thoroughly felt
the spirit of both poems can make that comparison without emotion. The
former piece is not, as has been said, in a literary sense remarkable.
With the exception of the one point of metrical style, to be touched on
presently, it has almost no note of poetic distinction save such as
belongs of right to any simple record of a mood which itself forms the
highest poetry of the average man's life; and one well knows whence
came the criticism of that MS. note inscribed by S. T. C. in a copy of
the second edition of his early poems, "This I think the most perfect
poem I ever wrote. Bad may be the best perhaps." One feels that the
annotator might just as well have written, "How perfect was the
happiness which this poem recalls!" for this is really all that
Coleridge's eulogium, with its touching bias from the hand of memory,
amounts to.

It has become time, however, to speak more generally of Coleridge's
early poems. The peaceful winter months of 1795-96 were in all
likelihood spent in arranging and revising the products of those poetic
impulses which had more or less actively stirred within him from his
seventeenth year upwards; and in April 1797 there appeared at Bristol a
volume of some fifty pieces entitled _Poems on Various Subjects, by S.
T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College Cambridge_. It was published by his
friend Cottle, who, in a mixture of the generous with the speculative
instinct, had given him thirty guineas for the copyright. Its contents
are of a miscellaneous kind, consisting partly of rhymed irregular
odes, partly of a collection of _Sonnets on Eminent Characters_, and
partly (and principally) of a blank verse poem of several hundred
lines, then, and indeed for years afterwards, regarded by many of the
poet's admirers as his masterpiece--the _Religious Musings_. [1]

To the second edition of these poems, which was published in the
following year, Coleridge, at all times a candid critic (to the limited
extent to which it is possible even for the finest judges to be so) of
his own works, prefixed a preface, wherein he remarks that his poems
have been "rightly charged with a profusion of double epithets and a
general turgidness," and adds that he has "pruned the double epithets
with no sparing hand," and used his best efforts to tame the swell and
glitter both of thought and diction. "The latter fault, however, had,"
he continues, "so insinuated itself into my _Religious Musings_ with
such intricacy of union that sometimes I have omitted to disentangle
the weed from fear of snapping the flower." This is plain-spoken
criticism, but I do not think that any reader who is competent to
pronounce judgment on the point will be inclined to deprecate its
severity. Nay, in order to get done with fault-finding as soon as
possible, it must perhaps be added that the admitted turgidness of the
poems is often something more than a mere defect of style, and that the
verse is turgid because the feeling which it expresses is exaggerated.
The "youthful bard unknown to fame" who, in the _Songs of the Pixies_,
is made to "heave the gentle misery of a sigh," is only doing a natural
thing described in ludicrously and unnaturally stilted terms; but the
young admirer of the _Robbers_, who informs Schiller that if he were to
meet him in the evening wandering in his loftier mood "beneath some
vast old tempest-swinging wood," he would "gaze upon him awhile in mute
awe" and then "weep aloud in a wild ecstasy," endangers the reader's
gravity not so much by extravagance of diction as by over-effusiveness
of sentiment. The former of these two offences differs from the latter
by the difference between "fustian" and "gush." And there is, in fact,
more frequent exception to be taken to the character of the thought in
these poems than to that of the style. The remarkable gift of
eloquence, which seems to have belonged to Coleridge from boyhood,
tended naturally to aggravate that very common fault of young poets
whose faculty of expression has outstripped the growth of their
intellectual and emotional experiences--the fault of wordiness. Page
after page of the poems of 1796 is filled with what one cannot, on the
most favourable terms, rank higher than rhetorical commonplace; stanza
after stanza falls pleasantly upon the ear without suggesting any image
sufficiently striking to arrest the eye of the imagination, or
awakening any thought sufficiently novel to lay hold upon the mind. The
_Æolian Harp_ has been already referred to as a pleasing poem, and
reading it, as we must, in constant recollection of the circumstances
in which it was written, it unquestionably is so. But in none of the
descriptions either of external objects or of internal feeling which
are to be found in this and its companion piece, the _Reflections on
having left a Place of Retirement_, is there anything which can fairly
be said to elevate them above the level of graceful verse. It is only
in the region of the fantastic and supernatural that Coleridge's
imagination, as he was destined to show by a far more splendid example
two years afterwards, seems to acquire true poetic distinction. It is
in the _Songs of the Pixies_ that the young man "heaves the gentle
misery of a sigh," and the sympathetic interest of the reader of today
is chilled by the too frequent intrusion of certain abstract ladies,
each preceded by her capital letter and attended by her
"adjective-in-waiting;" but, after all deductions for the
conventionalisms of "white-robed Purity," "meek-eyed Pity," "graceful
Ease," etc., one cannot but feel that the _Songs of the Pixies_ was the
offspring not of a mere abundant and picturesque vocabulary but of a
true poetic fancy. It is worth far more as an earnest of future
achievement than the very unequal _Monody on the Death of Chatterton_
(for which indeed we ought to make special allowance, as having been
commenced in the author's eighteenth year), and certainly than anything
which could be quoted from the _Effusions_, as Coleridge, unwilling to
challenge comparison with the divine Bowles, had chosen to describe his
sonnets. It must be honestly said indeed that these are, a very few
excepted, among the least satisfactory productions of any period of his
poetic career. The Coleridgian sonnet is not only imperfect in form and
in marked contrast in the frequent bathos of its close to the steady
swell and climax of Wordsworth, but, in by far the majority of
instances in this volume, it is wanting in internal weight. The "single
pebble" of thought which a sonnet should enclose is not only not neatly
wrapped up in its envelope of words, but it is very often not heavy
enough to carry itself and its covering to the mark. When it is so, its
weight, as in the sonnet to Pitt, is too frequently only another word
for an ephemeral violence of political feeling which, whether displayed
on one side or the other, cannot be expected to reproduce its effect in
the minds of comparatively passionless posterity. Extravagances, too,
abound, as when in _Kosciusko_ Freedom is made to look as if, in a fit
of "wilfulness and sick despair," she had drained a mystic urn
containing all the tears that had ever found "fit channel on a
Patriot's furrowed cheek." The main difficulty of the metre, too--that
of avoiding forced rhymes--is rarely surmounted. Even in the three fine
lines in the _Burke_---

  "Thee stormy Pity and the cherished lure
  Of Pomp and proud precipitance of soul,
  Wildered with meteor fires"--

we cannot help feeling that "lure" is extremely harsh, while the
weakness of the two concluding lines of the sonnet supplies a typical
example of the disappointment which these "effusions" so often prepare
for their readers.

Enough, however, has been said of the faults of these early poems; it
remains to consider their merits, foremost among which, as might be
expected, is the wealth and splendour of their diction in these
passages, in which such display is all that is needed for the literary
ends of the moment. Over all that wide region of literature, in which
force and fervour of utterance, depth and sincerity of feeling avail,
without the nameless magic of poetry in the higher sense of the word,
to achieve the objects of the writer and to satisfy the mind of the
reader, Coleridge ranges with a free and sure footstep. It is no
disparagement to his _Religious Musings_ to say that it is to this
class of literature that it belongs. Having said this, however, it must
be added that poetry of the second order has seldom risen to higher
heights of power. The faults already admitted disfigure it here and
there. We have "moon blasted Madness when he yells at midnight;" we
read of "eye-starting wretches and rapture-trembling seraphim," and the
really striking image of Ruin, the "old hag, unconquerable, huge,
Creation's eyeless drudge," is marred by making her "nurse" an
"impatient earthquake." But there is that in Coleridge's aspirations
and apostrophes to the Deity which impresses one even more profoundly
than the mere magnificence, remarkable as it is, of their rhetorical
clothing. They are touched with so penetrating a sincerity; they are so
obviously the outpourings of an awe-struck heart. Indeed, there is
nothing more remarkable at this stage of Coleridge's poetic development
than the instant elevation which his verse assumes whenever he passes
to Divine things. At once it seems to take on a Miltonic majesty of
diction and a Miltonic stateliness of rhythm. The tender but low-lying
domestic sentiment of the _Æolian Harp_ is in a moment informed by it
with the dignity which marks that poem's close. Apart too from its
literary merits, the biographical interest of _Religious Musings_ is
very considerable. "Written," as its title declares, but in reality, as
its length would suggest and as Mr. Cottle in fact tells us, only
_completed_, "on the Christmas eve of 1794," it gives expression to the
tumultuous emotions by which Coleridge's mind was agitated at this its
period of highest political excitement. His revolutionary enthusiasm
was now at its hottest, his belief in the infant French Republic at its
fullest, his wrath against the "coalesced kings" at its fiercest, his
contempt for their religious pretence at its bitterest. "Thee to
defend," he cries,

  "Thee to defend, dear Saviour of mankind!
  Thee, Lamb of God! Thee, blameless Prince of Peace!
  From all sides rush the thirsty brood of war--
  Austria, and that foul Woman of the North,
  The lustful murderess of her wedded lord,
  And he, connatural mind! whom (in their songs,
  So bards of elder time had haply feigned)
  Some Fury fondled in her hate to man,
  Bidding her serpent hair in tortuous fold
  Lick his young face, and at his mouth imbreathe
  Horrible sympathy!"

This is vigorous poetic invective; and the effect of such outbursts is
heightened by the rapid subsidence of the passion that inspires them
and the quick advent of a calmer mood. We have hardly turned the page
ere denunciations of Catherine and Frederick William give place to
prayerful invocations of the Supreme Being, which are in their turn the
prelude of a long and beautiful contemplative passage: "In the prim'val
age, a dateless while," etc., on the pastoral origin of human society.
It is as though some sweet and solemn strain of organ music had
succeeded to the blast of war-bugles and the roll of drums. In the _Ode
to the Departing Year_, written in the last days of 1796, with its
"prophecy of curses though I pray fervently for blessings" upon the
poet's native country, the mood is more uniform in its gloom; and it
lacks something, therefore, of those peculiar qualities which make the
_Religious Musings_ one perhaps of the most pleasing of all Coleridge's
earlier productions. But it shares with the poems shortly to be noticed
what may be called the autobiographic charm. The fresh natural emotion
of a young and brilliant mind is eternally interesting, and Coleridge's
youthful Muse, with a frankness of self-disclosure which is not the
less winning because at times it provokes a smile, confides to us even
the history of her most temporary moods. It is, for instance, at once
amusing and captivating to read in the latest edition of the poems, as
a footnote to the lines--

  "Not yet enslaved, not wholly vile,
  O Albion! O my mother isle!"

the words--

  "O doomed to fall, enslaved and vile--1796."

Yes; in 1796 and till the end of 1797 the poet's native country _was_
in his opinion all these dreadful things, but, directly the mood
changes, the verse alters, and to the advantage, one cannot but think,
of the beautiful and often-quoted close of the passage--

"And Ocean mid his uproar wild
   Speaks safety to his island child.
    Hence for many a fearless age
    Has social Quiet loved thy shore,
   Nor ever proud invader's rage,
   Or sacked thy towers or stained thy fields with gore."

And whether we view him in his earlier or his later mood there is a
certain strange dignity of utterance, a singular confidence in his own
poetic mission, which forbids us to smile at this prophet of
four-and-twenty who could thus conclude his menacing vaticinations:--

  "Away, my soul, away!
   I, unpartaking of the evil thing,
    With daily prayer and daily toil
    Soliciting for food my scanty soil,
   Have wailed my country with a loud lament.
   Now I recentre my immortal mind
    In the deep Sabbath of meek self-content,
   Cleansed from the vaporous passions which bedim
   God's image, sister of the Seraphim."

If ever the consciousness of great powers and the assurance of a great
future inspired a youth with perfect and on the whole well-warranted
fearlessness of ridicule it has surely done so here.

Poetry alone, however, formed no sufficient outlet for Coleridge's
still fresh political enthusiasm--an enthusiasm which now became too
importunate to let him rest in his quiet Clevedon cottage. Was it
right, he cries in his lines of leave-taking to his home, that he
should dream away the entrusted hours "while his unnumbered brethren
toiled and bled"? The propaganda of Liberty was to be pushed forward;
the principles of Unitarianism, to which Coleridge had become a convert
at Cambridge, were to be preached. Is it too prosaic to add that what
poor Henri Murger calls the "chasse aux piecè de cent sous" was in all
probability demanding peremptorily to be resumed?

Anyhow it so fell out that in the spring of the year 1796 Coleridge
took his first singular plunge into the unquiet waters of journalism,
instigated thereto by "sundry philanthropists and anti-polemists,"
whose names he does not record, but among whom we may conjecturally
place Mr. Thomas Poole of Stowey, with whom he had formed what was
destined to be one of the longest and closest friendships of his life.
Which of the two parties--the advisers or the advised--was responsible
for the general plan of this periodical and for the arrangements for
its publication is unknown; but one of these last-mentioned details is
enough to indicate that there could have been no "business head" among
them. Considering that the motto of the _Watchman_ declared the object
of its issue to be that "all might know the truth, and that the truth
might make them free," it is to be presumed that the promoters of the
scheme were not unwilling to secure as many subscribers as possible for
their sheet of "thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed, price
only fourpence." In order, however, to exempt it from the stamp-tax,
and with the much less practical object of making it "contribute as
little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom," it
was to be published on every eighth day, so that the week-day of its
appearance would of course vary with each successive week--an
arrangement as ingeniously calculated to irritate and alienate its
public as any perhaps that the wit of man could have devised. So,
however, it was to be, and accordingly with "a naming prospectus,
'Knowledge is Power,' to cry the state of the political atmosphere,"
Coleridge set off on a tour to the north, from Bristol to Sheffield,
for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching Unitarian sermons by
the way in most of the great towns, "as an hireless volunteer in a blue
coat and white waistcoat that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might
be seen on me." How he sped upon his mission is related by him with
infinite humour in the _Biographia Literaria_. He opened the campaign
at Birmingham upon a Calvinist tallow-chandler, who, after listening to
half an hour's harangue, extending from "the captivity of the nations"
to "the near approach of the millennium," and winding up with a
quotation describing the latter "glorious state" out of the _Religious
Musings_, inquired what might be the cost of the new publication.
Deeply sensible of "the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos" of the answer,
Coleridge replied, "Only fourpence, each number to be published every
eighth day," upon which the tallow-chandler observed doubtfully that
that came to "a deal of money at the end of the year." What determined
him, however, to withhold his patronage was not the price of the
article but its quantity, and not the deficiency of that quantity but
its excess. Thirty-two pages, he pointed out, was more than he ever
read all the year round, and though "as great a one as any man in
Brummagem for liberty and truth, and them sort of things, he begged to
be excused." Had it been possible to arrange for supplying him with
sixteen pages of the paper for twopence, a bargain might no doubt have
been struck; but he evidently had a business-like repugnance to
anything in the nature of "over-trading." Equally unsuccessful was a
second application made at Manchester to a "stately and opulent
wholesale dealer in cottons," who thrust the prospectus into his pocket
and turned his back upon the projector, muttering that he was "overrun
with these articles." This, however, was Coleridge's last attempt at
canvassing. His friends at Birmingham persuaded him to leave that work
to others, their advice being no doubt prompted, in part at least, by
the ludicrous experience of his qualifications as a canvasser which the
following incident furnished them. The same tradesman who had
introduced him to the patriotic tallow-chandler entertained him at
dinner, and, after the meal, invited his guest to smoke a pipe with him
and "two or three other _illuminati_ of the same rank." The invitation
was at first declined on the plea of an engagement to spend the evening
with a minister and his friends, and also because, writes Coleridge, "I
had never smoked except once or twice in my lifetime, and then it was
herb-tobacco mixed with Oronooko." His host, however, assured him that
the tobacco was equally mild, and "seeing, too, that it was of a yellow
colour," he took half a pipe of it, "filling the lower half of the
bowl," for some unexplained reason, "with salt." He was soon, however,
compelled to resign it "in consequence of a giddiness and distressful
feeling" in his eyes, which, as he had drunk but a single glass of ale,
he knew must have been the effect of the tobacco. Deeming himself
recovered after a short interval, he sallied forth to fulfil the
evening's engagement; but the symptoms returned with the walk and the
fresh air, and he had scarcely entered the minister's drawing-room and
opened a packet of letters awaiting him there than he "sank back on the
sofa in a sort of swoon rather than sleep." Fortunately he had had time
to inform his new host of the confused state of his feelings and of its
occasion; for "here and thus I lay," he continues, "my face like a wall
that is whitewashing, deathly pale, and with the cold drops of
perspiration running down it from my forehead; while one after another
there dropped in the different gentlemen who had been invited to meet
and spend the evening with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty.
As the poison of tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke
from insensibility and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by
the candles, which had been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving
my embarrassment one of the gentlemen began the conversation with:
'Have you seen a paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?' 'Sir,' I replied,
rubbing my eyes, 'I am far from convinced that a Christian is permitted
to read either newspapers or any other works of merely political and
temporary interest.'" The incongruity of this remark, with the purpose
for which the speaker was known to have visited Birmingham, and to
assist him in which the company had assembled, produced, as was
natural, "an involuntary and general burst of laughter," and the party
spent, we are told, a most delightful evening. Both then and
afterwards, however, they all joined in dissuading the young projector
from proceeding with his scheme, assuring him "in the most friendly and
yet most flattering expressions" that the employment was neither fit
for him nor he for the employment. They insisted that at any rate "he
should make no more applications in person, but carry on the canvass by
proxy," a stipulation which we may well believe to have been prompted
as much by policy as by good nature. The same hospitable reception, the
same dissuasion, and, that failing, the same kind exertions on his
behalf, he met with at Manchester, Derby, Nottingham, and every other
place he visited; and the result of his tour was that he returned with
nearly a thousand names on the subscription list of the _Watchman_,
together with "something more than a half conviction that prudence
dictated the abandonment of the scheme." Nothing but this, however, was
needed to induce him to persevere with it. To know that a given course
of conduct was the dictate of prudence was a sort of presumptive proof
to him at this period of life that the contrary was the dictate of
duty. In due time, or rather out of due time,--for the publication of
the first number was delayed beyond the day announced for it,--the
_Watchman_ appeared. Its career was brief--briefer, indeed, than it
need have been. A naturally short life was suicidally shortened. In the
second number, records Coleridge, with delightful _naïveté_, "an
essay against fast-days, with a most censurable application of a text
from Isaiah [2] for its motto, lost me near five hundred subscribers at
one blow." In the two following numbers he made enemies of all his
Jacobin and democratic patrons by playing Balaam to the legislation of
the Government, and pronouncing something almost like a blessing on the
"gagging bills"--measures he declared which, "whatever the motive of
their introduction, would produce an effect to be desired by all true
friends of freedom, as far as they should contribute to deter men from
openly declaiming on subjects the principles of which they had never
bottomed, and from pleading to the poor and ignorant instead of
pleading for them." At the same time the editor of the _Watchman_
avowed his conviction that national education and a concurring spread
of the Gospel were the indispensable conditions of any true political
amelioration. We can hardly wonder on the whole that by the time the
seventh number was published its predecessors were being "exposed in
sundry old iron shops at a penny a piece."

And yet, like everything which came from Coleridge's hand, this
immature and unpractical production has an interest of its own. Amid
the curious mixture of actuality and abstract disquisition of which
each number of the _Watchman_ is made up, we are arrested again and
again by some striking metaphor or some weighty sentence which tells us
that the writer is no mere wordy wielder of a facile pen. The paper on
the slave trade in the seventh number is a vigorous and, in places, a
heart-stirring appeal to the humane emotions. There are passages in it
which foreshadow Coleridge's more mature literary manner--the manner of
the great pulpit orators of the seventeenth century--in a very
interesting way. [3] But what was the use of No. IV containing an
effective article like this when No. III. had opened with an
"Historical Sketch of the Manners and Religion of the Ancient Germans,
introductory to a sketch of the Manners, Religion, and Politics of
present Germany"? This to a public who wanted to read about Napoleon
and Mr. Pitt! No. III. in all probability "choked off" a good
proportion of the commonplace readers who might have been well content
to have put up with the humanitarian rhetoric of No. IV., if only for
its connection with so unquestionable an actuality as West Indian
sugar. It was, anyhow, owing to successive alienations of this kind
that on 13th May 1796 the editor of the _Watchman_ was compelled to bid
farewell to his few remaining readers in the tenth number of his
periodical, for the "short and satisfactory" reason that "the work does
not pay its expenses." "Part of my readers," continues Coleridge,
"relinquished it because it did not contain sufficient original
composition, and a still larger part because it contained too much;"
and he then proceeds with that half-humorous simplicity of his to
explain what excellent reasons there were why the first of these
classes should transfer their patronage to Flower's _Cambridge
Intelligencer_, and the second theirs to the _New Monthly Magazine_.

It is not, however, for the biographer or the world to regret the short
career of the _Watchman_, since its decease left Coleridge's mind in
undivided allegiance to the poetic impulse at what was destined to be
the period of its greatest power. In the meantime one result of the
episode had been to make a not unimportant addition to his friendships.
Mention has already been made of his somewhat earlier acquaintance with
Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, a man of high intelligence and mark
in his time; and it was in the course of his northern peregrinations in
search of subscribers that he met with Charles Lloyd. This young man,
the son of an eminent Birmingham banker, was so struck with Coleridge's
genius and eloquence as to conceive an "ardent desire to domesticate
himself permanently with a man whose conversation was to him as a
revelation from heaven;" and shortly after the decease of the
_Watchman_ he obtained his parents' consent to the arrangement.

Early, therefore, in the year 1797 Coleridge, accompanied by Charles
Lloyd, removed to Nether Stowey in Somersetshire, where he occupied a
cottage placed at his disposal by Mr. Poole. His first employment in
his new abode appears to have been the preparation of the second
edition of his poems. In the new issue nineteen pieces of the former
publication were discarded and twelve new ones added, the most
important of which was the _Ode to the Departing Year_, which had first
appeared in the _Cambridge Intelligencer_, and had been immediately
afterwards republished in a separate form as a thin quarto pamphlet,
together with some lines of no special merit "addressed to a young man
of fortune" (probably Charles Lloyd), "who abandoned himself to an
indolent and causeless melancholy." To the new edition were added the
preface already quoted from, and a prose introduction to the sonnets.
The volume also contained some poems by Charles Lloyd and an enlarged
collection of sonnets and other pieces by Charles Lamb, the latter of
whom about the time of its publication paid his first visit to the
friend with whom, ever since leaving Christ's Hospital, he had kept up
a constant and, to the student of literature, a most interesting
correspondence. [4] In June 1797 Charles and Mary Lamb arrived at the
Stowey cottage to find their host disabled by an accident which
prevented him from walking during their whole stay. It was during their
absence on a walking expedition that he composed the pleasing lines--

  "The lime-tree bower my prison,"

in which he thrice applies to his friend that epithet which gave such
humorous annoyance to the "gentle-hearted Charles." [5]

But a greater than Lamb, if one may so speak without offence to the
votaries of that rare humorist and exquisite critic, had already made
his appearance on the scene. Some time before this visit of Lamb's to
Stowey Coleridge had made the acquaintance of the remarkable man who
was destined to influence his literary career in many ways importantly,
and in one way decisively. It was in the month of June 1797, and at the
village of Racedown in Dorsetshire, that he first met William
Wordsworth.


FOOTNOTES

1. The volume contained also three sonnets by Charles Lamb, one of
which was destined to have a somewhat curious history.

2. "Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp."--Is. xvi. 11.

3. Take for instance this sentence: "Our own sorrows, like the Princes
of Hell in Milton's Pandemonium, sit enthroned 'bulky and vast;' while
the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are
crowded in an innumerable multitude into some dark corner of the
heart." Both in character of imagery and in form of structure we have
here the germ of such passages as this which one might confidently defy
the most accomplished literary "taster" to distinguish from Jeremy
Taylor: "Or like two rapid streams that at their first meeting within
narrow and rocky banks mutually strive to repel each other, and
intermix reluctantly and in tumult, but soon finding a wider channel
and more yielding shores, blend and dilate and flow on in one current
and with one voice."--_Biog. Lit._ p. 155.

4. Perhaps a "correspondence" of which only one side exists may be
hardly thought to deserve that name. Lamb's letters to Coleridge are
full of valuable criticism on their respective poetical efforts.
Unfortunately in, it is somewhat strangely said, "a fit of dejection"
he destroyed all Coleridge's letters to him.

5. Lamb's Correspondence with Coleridge, Letter XXXVII.




CHAPTER III.

Coleridge and Wordsworth--Publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_--The
_Ancient Mariner_--The first part of _Christabel_--Decline of
Coleridge's poetic impulse--Final review of his poetry.

[1797-1799.]


The years 1797 and 1798 are generally and justly regarded as the
blossoming-time of Coleridge's poetic genius. It would be scarcely an
exaggeration to say that they were even more than this, and that within
the brief period covered by them is included not only the development
of the poet's powers to their full maturity but the untimely beginnings
of their decline. For to pass from the poems written by Coleridge
within these two years to those of later origin is like passing from
among the green wealth of summer foliage into the well-nigh naked woods
of later autumn. During 1797 and 1798 the _Ancient Mariner_, the first
part of _Christabel_, the fine ode to France, the _Fears in Solitude_,
the beautiful lines entitled _Frost at Midnight_, the _Nightingale_,
the _Circassian Love-Chant_, the piece known as _Love_ from the poem of
the _Dark Ladie_, and that strange fragment _Kubla Khan_, were all of
them written and nearly all of them published; while between the last
composed of these and that swan-song of his dying Muse, the
_Dejection_, of 1802, there is but one piece to be added to the list of
his greater works. This therefore, the second part of _Christabel_
(1800), may almost be described by the picturesque image in the first
part of the same poem as

  "The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
   Hanging so light and hanging so high,
   On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky."

The first to fail him of his sources of inspiration was his
revolutionary enthusiasm; and the ode to France--the _Recantation_, as
it was styled on its first appearance in the _Morning Post_--is the
record of a reaction which, as has been said, was as much speedier in
Coleridge's case than in that of the other ardent young minds which had
come under the spell of the Revolution as his enthusiasm had been more
passionate than theirs. In the winter of 1797-98 the Directory had
plunged France into an unnatural conflict with her sister Republic of
Switzerland, and Coleridge, who could pardon and had pardoned her
fierce animosity against a country which he considered not so much his
own as Pitt's, was unable to forgive her this. In the _Recantation_ he
casts her off for ever; he perceives at last that true liberty is not
to be obtained through political, but only through spiritual
emancipation; that--

  "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain,
   Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game
   They burst their manacles, and wear the name
   Of Freedom graven on a heavier chain";

and arrives in a noble peroration at the somewhat unsatisfactory
conclusion, that the spirit of liberty, "the guide of homeless winds
and playmate of the waves," is to be found only among the elements, and
not in the institutions of man. And in the same quaintly ingenuous
spirit which half touches and half amuses us in his earlier poems he
lets us perceive a few weeks later, in his _Fears in Solitude_, that
sympathy with a foreign nation threatened by the invader may gradually
develop into an almost filial regard for one's own similarly situated
land. He has been deemed, he says, an enemy of his country.

  "But, O dear Britain! O my mother Isle,"

once, it may be remembered, "doomed to fall enslaved and vile," but
now--

  "Needs must them prove a name most dear and holy,
   To me a son, a brother, and a friend,
   A husband and a father! who revere
   All bonds of natural love, and find them all
   Within the limits of thy rocky shores."

After all, it has occurred to him, England is not only the England of
Pitt and Grenville, and in that capacity the fitting prey of the
insulted French Republic: she is also the England of Sara Coleridge,
and little Hartley, and of Mr. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey. And so,
to be sure, she was in 1796 when her downfall was predicted, and in the
spirit rather of the Old Testament than of the New. But there is
something very engaging in the candour with which the young poet
hastens to apprise us of this his first awakening to the fact.

_France_ may be regarded as the last ode, and _Fears in Solitude_ as
the last blank-verse poem of any importance, that owe their origin to
Coleridge's early political sentiments. Henceforth, and for the too
brief period of his poetic activity, he was to derive his inspiration
from other sources. The most fruitful and important of these was
unquestionably his intercourse with Wordsworth, from whom, although
there was doubtless a reciprocation of influence between them, his much
more receptive nature took a far deeper impression than it made. [1] At
the time of their meeting he had already for some three years been
acquainted with Wordsworth's works as a poet, and it speaks highly for
his discrimination that he was able to discern the great powers of his
future friend, even in work so immature in many respects as the
_Descriptive Sketches_. It was during the last year of his residence at
Cambridge that he first met with these poems, of which he says in the
_Biographia Literaria_ that "seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an
original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently
announced;" and the effect produced by this volume was steadily
enhanced by further acquaintance both with the poet and his works.
Nothing, indeed, is so honourably noticeable and even touching in
Coleridge's relation to his friend as the tone of reverence with which,
even in the days of his highest self-confidence and even almost haughty
belief in the greatness of his own poetic mission, he was accustomed to
speak of Wordsworth. A witness, to be more fully cited hereafter, and
whose testimony is especially valuable as that of one who was by no
means blind to Coleridge's early foible of self-complacency, has
testified to this unbounded admiration of his brother-poet. "When,"
records this gentleman, "we have sometimes spoken complimentarily to
Coleridge of himself he has said that he was nothing in comparison with
Wordsworth." And two years before this, at a time when they had not yet
tested each other's power in literary collaboration, he had written to
Cottle to inform him of his introduction to the author of "near twelve
hundred lines of blank verse, superior, I dare aver, to anything in our
language which in any way resembles it," and had declared with evident
sincerity that he felt "a little man" by Wordsworth's side.

His own impression upon his new friend was more distinctively personal
in its origin. It was by Coleridge's total individuality, by the sum of
his vast and varied intellectual powers, rather than by the specific
poetic element contained in them, that Wordsworth, like the rest of the
world indeed, was in the main attracted; but it is clear enough that
this attraction was from the first most powerful. On that point we have
not only the weighty testimony of Dorothy Wordsworth, as conveyed in
her often-quoted description [2] of her brother's new acquaintance, but
the still more conclusive evidence of her brother's own acts. He gave
the best possible proof of the fascination which had been exercised
over him by quitting Racedown with his sister for Alfoxden near Nether
Stowey within a few weeks of his first introduction to Coleridge, a
change of abode for which, as Miss Wordsworth has expressly recorded,
"our principal inducement was Coleridge's society."

By a curious coincidence the two poets were at this time simultaneously
sickening for what may perhaps be appropriately called the "poetic
measles." They were each engaged in the composition of a five-act
tragedy, and read scenes to each other, and to each other's admiration,
from their respective dramas. Neither play was fortunate in its
immediate destiny. Wordsworth's tragedy, the _Borderers_, was greatly
commended by London critics and decisively rejected by the management
of Covent Garden. As for Coleridge, the negligent Sheridan did not even
condescend to acknowledge the receipt of his manuscript; his play was
passed from hand to hand among the Drury Lane Committee; but not till
many years afterwards did _Osorio_ find its way under another name to
the footlights.

For the next twelvemonth the intercourse between the two poets was
close and constant, and most fruitful in results of high moment to
English literature. It was in their daily rambles among the Quantock
Hills that they excogitated that twofold theory of the essence and
functions of poetry which was to receive such notable illustration in
their joint volume of verse, the _Lyrical Ballads_; it was during a
walk over the Quantock Hills that by far the most famous poem of that
series, the _Ancient Mariner_, was conceived and in part composed. The
publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ in the spring of the year 1798
was, indeed, an event of double significance for English poetry. It
marked an epoch in the creative life of Coleridge, and a no less
important one in the critical life of Wordsworth. In the _Biographia
Literaria_ the origination of the plan of the work is thus described:--

"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our
conversation turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,
the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful
adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest
of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination. The sudden
charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset
diffused over a known and familiar landscape appeared to represent the
practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The
thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a
series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one the
incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and
the interest aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the
affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally
accompany such situations, supposing them real.... For the second
class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters
and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its
vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after
them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea
originated the plan of the _Lyrical Ballads_, in which it was agreed
that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters
supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our
inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to
procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of
disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. Mr.
Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his
object, to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to
excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's
attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the
loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible
treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and
selfish solicitude, we have eyes which see not, ears that hear not, and
hearts which neither feel nor understand."

We may measure the extent to which the poetic teaching and practice of
Wordsworth have influenced subsequent taste and criticism by noting how
completely the latter of these two functions of poetry has overshadowed
the former. To lend the charm of imagination to the real will appear to
many people to be not one function of poetry merely but its very
essence. To them it is poetry, and the only thing worthy of the name;
while the correlative function of lending the force of reality to the
imaginary will appear at best but a superior kind of metrical
romancing, or clever telling of fairy tales. Nor of course can there,
from the point of view of the highest conception of the poet's office,
be any comparison between the two. In so far as we regard poetry as
contributing not merely to the pleasure of the mind but to its health
and strength--in so far as we regard it in its capacity not only to
delight but to sustain, console, and tranquillise the human
spirit--there is, of course, as much difference between the idealistic
and the realistic forms of poetry as there is between a narcotic potion
and a healing drug. The one, at best, can only enable a man to forget
his burdens; the other fortifies him to endure them. It is perhaps no
more than was naturally to be expected of our brooding and melancholy
age, that poetry (when it is not a mere voluptuous record of the
subjective impressions of sense) should have become almost limited in
its very meaning to the exposition of the imaginative or spiritual
aspect of the world of realities; but so it is now, and so in
Coleridge's time it clearly was _not_. Coleridge, in the passage above
quoted, shows no signs of regarding one of the two functions which he
attributes to poetry as any more accidental or occasional than the
other; and the fact that the realistic portion of the _Lyrical Ballads_
so far exceeded in amount its supernatural element, he attributes not
to any inherent supremacy in the claims of the former to attention but
simply to the greater industry which Wordsworth had displayed in his
special department of the volume. For his own part, he says, "I wrote
the _Ancient Mariner_, and was preparing, among other poems, the _Dark
Ladie_ and the _Christabel_, in which I should have more nearly
realised my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr.
Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the
number of the poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of
forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous
matter." There was certainly a considerable disparity between the
amount of their respective contributions to the volume, which, in fact,
contained nineteen pieces by Wordsworth and only four by Coleridge.
Practically, indeed, we may reduce this four to one; for, of the three
others, the two scenes from _Osorio_ are without special distinction,
and the _Nightingale_, though a graceful poem, and containing an
admirably-studied description of the bird's note, is too slight and
short to claim any importance in the series. But the one long poem
which Coleridge contributed to the collection is alone sufficient to
associate it for ever with his name. _Unum sed leonem._ To any one who
should have taunted him with the comparative infertility of his Muse he
might well have returned the haughty answer of the lioness in the
fable, when he could point in justification of it to the _Rime of the
Ancient Marinere_.

There is, I may assume, no need at the present day to discuss the true
place in English literature of this unique product of the human
imagination. One is bound, however, to attempt to correlate and adjust
it to the rest of the poet's work, and this, it must be admitted, is a
most difficult piece of business. Never was there a poem so irritating
to a critic of the "pigeon-holing" variety. It simply defies him; and
yet the instinct which he obeys is so excusable, because in fact so
universal, that one feels guilty of something like disloyalty to the
very principles of order in smiling at his disappointment. Complete and
symmetrical classification is so fascinating an amusement; it would
simplify so many subjects of study, if men and things would only
consent to rank themselves under different categories, and remain
there; it would, in particular, be so inexpressibly convenient to be
able to lay your hand upon your poet whenever you wanted him by merely
turning to a shelf labelled "Realistic" or "Imaginative" (nay, perhaps,
to the still greater saving of labour--Objective or Subjective), that
we cannot be surprised at the strength of the aforesaid instinct in
many a critical mind. Nor should it be hard to realise its revolt
against those single exceptions which bring its generalisations to
nought. When the pigeon-hole will admit every "document" but one, the
case is hard indeed; and it is not too much to say that the _Ancient
Mariner_ is the one document which the pigeon-hole in this instance
declines to admit. If Coleridge had only refrained from writing this
remarkable poem, or if, having done so, he had written more poems like
it, the critic might have ticketed him with a quiet mind, and gone on
his way complacent. As it is, however, the poet has contrived in virtue
of this performance not only to defeat classification but to defy it.
For the weird ballad abounds in those very qualities in which
Coleridge's poetry with all its merits is most conspicuously deficient,
while on the other hand it is wholly free from the faults with which he
is most frequently and justly chargeable. One would not have said in
the first place that the author of _Religious Musings_, still less of
the _Monody on the Death of Chatterton_, was by any means the man to
have compassed triumphantly at the very first attempt the terseness,
vigour, and _naïveté_ of the true ballad-manner. To attain this,
Coleridge, the student of his early verse must feel, would have rather
more to retrench and much more to restrain than might be the case with
many other youthful poets. The exuberance of immaturity, the want of
measure, the "not knowing where to stop," are certainly even more
conspicuous in the poems of 1796 than they are in most productions of
the same stage of poetic development; and these qualities, it is
needless to say, require very stern chastening from him who would
succeed in the style which Coleridge attempted for the first time in
the _Ancient Mariner_.

The circumstances of this immortal ballad's birth have been related
with such fulness of detail by Wordsworth, and Coleridge's own
references to them are so completely reconcilable with that account,
that it must have required all De Quincey's consummate ingenuity as a
mischief-maker to detect any discrepancy between the two.

In the autumn of 1797, records Wordsworth in the MS. notes which he
left behind him, "Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and myself started from
Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon with a view to visit Linton and
the Valley of Stones near to it; and as our united funds were very
small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem to
be sent to the _New Monthly Magazine_. Accordingly we set off, and
proceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet; and in the course
of this walk was planned the poem of the _Ancient Mariner_, founded on
a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruikshank. Much the
greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention, but certain
parts I suggested; for example, some crime was to be committed which
should bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted
to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime
and his own wanderings. I had been reading in Shelvocke's _Voyages_, a
day or two before, that while doubling Cape Horn they frequently saw
albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, some
extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. 'Suppose,' said I, 'you
represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South
Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to
avenge the crime.' The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and
adopted accordingly. I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the
dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the
scheme of the poem. The gloss with which it was subsequently
accompanied was not thought of by either of us at the time, at least
not a hint of it was given to me, and I have no doubt it was a
gratuitous afterthought. We began the composition together on that to
me memorable evening. I furnished two or three lines at the beginning
of the poem, in particular--

  "'And listened like a three years' child:
    The Mariner had his will.'

"These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with
unnecessary scrupulosity recorded,[3] slipped out of his mind, as they
well might. As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly (I speak of the
same evening) our respective manners proved so widely different that it
would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate
from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog.... The
_Ancient Mariner_ grew and grew till it became too important for our
first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; and
we began to think of a volume which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge
has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects." Except
that the volume ultimately determined on was to consist only "partly"
and not "chiefly" of poems on supernatural subjects (in the result, as
has been seen, it consisted "chiefly" of poems upon natural subjects),
there is nothing in this account which cannot be easily reconciled with
the probable facts upon which De Quincey bases his hinted charge
against Coleridge in his _Lake Poets_. It was not Coleridge who had
been reading Shelvocke's _Voyages_, but Wordsworth, and it is quite
conceivable, therefore, that the source from which his friend had
derived the idea of the killing of the albatross may (if indeed he was
informed of it at the time) have escaped his memory twelve years
afterwards, when the conversation with De Quincey took place. Hence, in
"disowning his obligations to Shelvocke," he may not by any means have
intended to suggest that the albatross incident was his own thought.
Moreover, De Quincey himself supplies another explanation of the
matter, which we know, from the above-quoted notes of Wordsworth's, to
be founded upon fact. "It is possible," he adds, "from something which
Coleridge said on another occasion, that before meeting a fable in
which to embody his ideas he had meditated a poem on delirium,
confounding its own dream-scenery with external things, and connected
with the imagery of high latitudes." Nothing, in fact, would be more
natural than that Coleridge, whose idea of the haunted seafarer was
primarily suggested by his friend's dream, and had no doubt been
greatly elaborated in his own imagination before being communicated to
Wordsworth at all, should have been unable, after a considerable lapse
of time, to distinguish between incidents of his own imagining and
those suggested to him by others. And, in any case, the "unnecessary
scrupulosity," rightly attributed to him by Wordsworth with respect to
this very poem, is quite incompatible with any intentional denial of
obligations.

Such, then, was the singular and even prosaic origin of the _Ancient
Mariner_--a poem written to defray the expenses of a tour; surely the
most sublime of "pot-boilers" to be found in all literature. It is
difficult, from amid the astonishing combination of the elements of
power, to select that which is the most admirable; but, considering
both the character of the story and of its particular vehicle, perhaps
the greatest achievement of the poem is the simple realistic force of
its narrative. To achieve this was of course Coleridge's main object:
he had undertaken to "transfer from our inward nature a human interest
and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of
imaginations that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which
constitutes poetic faith." But it is easier to undertake this than to
perform it, and much easier to perform it in prose than in verse--with
the assistance of the everyday and the commonplace than without it.
Balzac's _Peau de Chagrin_ is no doubt a great feat of the
realistic-supernatural; but no one can help feeling how much the author
is aided by his "broker's clerk" style of description, and by the
familiar Parisian scenes among which he makes his hero move. It is
easier to compass verisimilitude in the Palais-Royal than on the South
Pacific, to say nothing of the thousand assisting touches, out of place
in rhyme and metre, which can be thrown into a prose narrative. The
_Ancient Mariner_, however, in spite of all these drawbacks, is as real
to the reader as is the hero of the _Peau de Chagrin_; we are as
convinced of the curse upon one of the doomed wretches as upon the
other; and the strange phantasmagoric haze which is thrown around the
ship and the lonely voyager leaves their outlines as clear as if we saw
them through the sunshine of the streets of Paris. Coleridge triumphs
over his difficulties by sheer vividness of imagery and terse vigour of
descriptive phrase--two qualities for which his previous poems did not
prove him to possess by any means so complete a mastery. For among all
the beauties of his earlier landscapes we can hardly reckon that of
intense and convincing truth. He seems seldom before to have written,
as Wordsworth nearly always seems to write, "with his eye on the
object;" and certainly he never before displayed any remarkable power
of completing his word-picture with a few touches. In the _Ancient
Mariner_ his eye seems never to wander from his object, and again and
again the scene starts out upon the canvas in two or three strokes of
the brush. The skeleton ship, with the dicing demons on its deck; the
setting sun peering "through its ribs, as if through a dungeon-grate;"
the water-snakes under the moonbeams, with the "elfish light" falling
off them "in hoary flakes" when they reared; the dead crew, who work
the ship and "raise their limbs like lifeless tools"--everything seems
to have been actually _seen_, and we believe it all as the story of a
truthful eye-witness. The details of the voyage, too, are all
chronicled with such order and regularity, there is such a diary-like
air about the whole thing, that we accept it almost as if it were a
series of extracts from the ship's "log." Then again the execution--a
great thing to be said of so long a poem--is marvellously equal
throughout; the story never drags or flags for a moment, its felicities
of diction are perpetual, and it is scarcely marred by a single weak
line. What could have been better said of the instantaneous descent of
the tropical night than

  "The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
   At one stride comes the dark;"

what more weirdly imagined of the "cracks and growls" of the rending
iceberg than that they sounded "like noises in a swound"? And how
beautifully steals in the passage that follows upon the cessation of
the spirit's song--

  "It ceased; yet still the sails made on
   A pleasant noise till noon,
   A noise like to a hidden brook
   In the leafy month of June,
   That to the sleeping woods all night
   Singeth a quiet tune."

Then, as the ballad draws to its close, after the ship has drifted over
the harbour-bar--

  "And I with sobs did pray--
   O let me be awake, my God;
   Or let me sleep alway,"

with what consummate art are we left to imagine the physical traces
which the mariner's long agony had left behind it by a method far more
terrible than any direct description--the effect, namely, which the
sight of him produces upon others--

  "I moved my lips--the Pilot shrieked
   And fell down in a fit;
   The holy Hermit raised his eyes,
   And prayed where he did sit.

  "I took the oars: the Pilot's boy,
   _Who now doth crazy go_,
   Laughed loud and long, and all the while
   His eyes went to and fro.
   'Ha! ha!' quoth he, 'full plain I see,
   The Devil knows how to row.'"

Perfect consistency of plan, in short, and complete equality of
execution, brevity, self-restraint, and an unerring sense of artistic
propriety--these are the chief notes of the _Ancient Mariner_, as they
are _not_, in my humble judgment, the chief notes of any poem of
Coleridge's before or since. And hence it is that this masterpiece of
ballad minstrelsy is, as has been said, so confounding to the
"pigeon-holing" mind.

The next most famous poem of this or indeed of any period of
Coleridge's life is the fragment of _Christabel_, which, however, in
spite of the poet's own opinion on that point, it is difficult to
regard as "a more effective realisation" of the "natural-supernatural"
idea. Beautiful as it is, it possesses none of that human interest with
which, according to this idea, the narrator of the poetic story must
undertake to invest it. Nor can the unfinished condition in which it
was left be fairly held to account for this, for the characters
themselves--the lady Christabel, the witch Geraldine, and even the
baron Sir Leoline himself--are somewhat shadowy creations, with too
little hold upon life and reality, and too much resemblance to the
flitting figures of a dream. Powerful in their way as are the lines
descriptive of the spell thrown over Christabel by her uncanny
guest--lines at the recitation of which Shelley is said to have
fainted--we cannot say that they strike a reader with such a sense of
horror as should be excited by the contemplation of a real
flesh-and-blood maiden subdued by "the shrunken serpent eyes" of a
sorceress, and constrained "passively to imitate" their "look of dull
and treacherous hate." Judging it, however, by any other standard than
that of the poet's own erecting, one must certainly admit the claim of
_Christabel_ to rank very high as a work of pure creative art. It is so
thoroughly suffused and permeated with the glow of mystical romance,
the whole atmosphere of the poem is so exquisitely appropriate to the
subject, and so marvellously preserved throughout, that our lack of
belief in the reality of the scenes presented to us detracts but little
from the pleasure afforded by the artistic excellence of its
presentment. It abounds, too, in isolated pictures of surpassing
vividness and grace--word-pictures which live in the "memory of the
eye" with all the wholeness and tenacity of an actual painting.
Geraldine appearing to Christabel beneath the oak, and the two women
stepping lightly across the hall "that echoes still, pass as lightly as
you will," are pictures of this kind; and nowhere out of Keats's _Eve
of St. Agnes_ is there any "interior" to match that of Christabel's
chamber, done as it is in little more than half a dozen lines. These
beauties, it is true, are fragmentary, like the poem itself, but there
is no reason to believe that the poem itself would have gained anything
in its entirety--that is to say, as a poetic narrative--by completion.
Its main idea--that the purity of a pure maiden is a charm more
powerful for the protection of those dear to her than the spells of the
evil one for their destruction--had been already sufficiently
indicated, and the mode in which Coleridge, it seems, intended to have
worked would hardly have added anything to its effect. [4] And although
he clung till very late in life to the belief that he _could_ have
finished it in after days with no change of poetic manner--"If easy in
my mind," he says in a letter to be quoted hereafter, "I have no doubt
either of the reawakening power or of the kindling inclination"--there
are few students of his later poems who will share his confidence.
Charles Lamb strongly recommended him to leave it unfinished, and
Hartley Coleridge, in every respect as competent a judge on that point
as could well be found, always declared his conviction that his father
could not, at least _qualis ab incepto_, have finished the poem.

The much-admired little piece first published in the _Lyrical Ballads_
under the title of _Love_, and probably best known by its (original)
first and most pregnant stanza, [5] possesses a twofold interest for
the student of Coleridge's life and works, as illustrating at once one
of the most marked characteristics of his peculiar temperament, and one
of the most distinctive features of his poetic manner. The lines are
remarkable for a certain strange fascination of melody--a quality for
which Coleridge, who was not unreasonably proud of his musical gift, is
said to have especially prized them; and they are noteworthy also as
perhaps the fullest expression of the almost womanly softness of
Coleridge's nature. To describe their tone as effeminate would be
unfair and untrue, for effeminacy in the work of a male hand would
necessarily imply something of falsity of sentiment, and from this they
are entirely free. But it must certainly be admitted that for a man's
description of his wooing the warmth of feeling which pervades them is
as nearly sexless in character as it is possible to conceive; and,
beautiful as the verses are, one cannot but feel that they only escape
the "namby-pamby" by the breadth of a hair.

As to the wild dream-poem _Kubla Khan_, it is hardly more than a
psychological curiosity, and only that perhaps in respect of the
completeness of its metrical form. For amid its picturesque but vague
imagery there is nothing which might not have presented itself, and the
like of which has not perhaps actually presented itself, to many a
half-awakened brain of far lower imaginative energy during its hours of
full daylight consciousness than that of Coleridge. Nor possibly is it
quite an unknown experience to many of us to have even a fully-written
record, so to speak, of such impressions imprinted instantaneously on
the mind, the conscious composition of whole pages of narrative,
descriptive, or cogitative matter being compressed as it were into a
moment of time. Unfortunately, however, the impression made upon the
ordinary brain is effaced as instantaneously as it is produced; the
abnormal exaltation of the creative and apprehensive power is quite
momentary, being probably indeed confined to the single moment between
sleep and waking; and the mental tablet which a second before was
covered so thickly with the transcripts of ideas and images, all far
more vivid, or imagined to be so, than those of waking life, and all
apprehended with a miraculous simultaneity by the mind, is converted
into a _tabula rasa_ in the twinkling of a half-opened eye. The wonder
in Coleridge's case was that his brain retained the word-impressions
sufficiently long to enable him to commit them, to the extent at least
of some fifty odd lines, to paper, and that, according to his own
belief, this is but a mere fraction of what but for an unlucky
interruption in the work of transcribing he would have been able to
preserve. His own account of this curious incident is as follows:--

"In the summer of 1797 the author, then in ill health, had retired to a
lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of
Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an
anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep
in his chair at the moment that he was reading, the following sentence,
or words of the same substance, in Purchas's _Pilgrimage_:--'Here the
Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden
thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed by a
wall.' The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep,
at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most
vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to
three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which
all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production
of the corresponding expressions, without any sensation or
consciousness of effect. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a
distinct recollection of the whole, and, taking his pen, ink, and
paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here
preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person
on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his
return to his room found, to his no small surprise and mortification,
that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the
general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or
ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the
images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast,
but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter."

This poem, though written in 1797, remained, like _Christabel_, in MS.
till 1816. These were then published in a thin quarto volume, together
with another piece called the _Pains of Sleep_, a composition of many
years' later date than the other two, and of which there will be
occasion to say a word or two hereafter.

At no time, however, not even in this the high-tide of its activity,
was the purely poetic impulse dominant for long together in Coleridge's
mind. He was born with the instincts of the orator, and still more with
those of the teacher, and I doubt whether he ever really regarded
himself as fulfilling the true mission of his life except at those
moments when he was seeking by spoken word to exercise direct influence
over his fellow-men. At the same time, however, such was the
restlessness of his intellect, and such his instability of purpose,
that he could no more remain constant to what he deemed his true
vocation than he could to any other. This was now to be signally
illustrated. Soon after the _Ancient Mariner_ was written, and some
time before the volume which was to contain it appeared, Coleridge
quitted Stowey for Shrewsbury to undertake the duties of a Unitarian
preacher in that town. This was in the month of January 1798, [6] and
it seems pretty certain, though exact dates are not to be ascertained,
that he was back again at Stowey early in the month of February. In the
pages of the _Liberal_ (1822) William Hazlitt has given a most graphic
and picturesque description of Coleridge's appearance and performance
in his Shrewsbury pulpit; and, judging from this, one can well believe,
what indeed was to have been antecedently expected, that had he chosen
to remain faithful to his new employment he might have rivalled the
reputation of the greatest preacher of the time. But his friends the
Wedgwoods, the two sons of the great potter, whose acquaintance he had
made a few years earlier, were apparently much dismayed at the prospect
of his deserting the library for the chapel, and they offered him an
annuity of £150 a year on condition of his retiring from the ministry
and devoting himself entirely to the study of poetry and philosophy.
Coleridge was staying at the house of Hazlitt's father when the letter
containing this liberal offer reached him, "and he seemed," says the
younger Hazlitt, "to make up his mind to close with the proposal in the
act of tying on one of his shoes." Another inducement to so speedy an
acceptance of it is no doubt to be found in the fact of its presenting
to Coleridge an opportunity for the fulfilment of a cherished
desire--that, namely, of "completing his education," as he regarded it,
by studying the German language, and acquiring an acquaintance with the
theology and philosophy of Germany in that country itself. This
prospect he was enabled, through the generosity of the Wedgwoods, to
put into execution towards the end of 1798. But before passing on from
this culminating and, to all intents and purposes, this closing year of
Coleridge's career as a poet it will be proper to attempt something
like a final review of his poetic work. Admirable as much of that work
is, and unique in quality as it is throughout, I must confess that it
leaves on my own mind a stronger impression of the unequal and
imperfect than does that of any poet at all approaching Coleridge in
imaginative vigour and intellectual grasp. It is not a mere inequality
and imperfection of style like that which so seriously detracts from
the pleasure of reading Byron. Nor is it that the thought is often
_impar sibi_--that, like Wordsworth's, it is too apt to descend from
the mountain-tops of poetry to the flats of commonplace, if not into
the bogs of bathos. In both these respects Coleridge may and does
occasionally offend, but his workmanship is, on the whole, as much more
artistic than Byron's as the material of his poetry is of more
uniformly equal value than Wordsworth's. Yet, with almost the sole
exception of the _Ancient Mariner_, his work is in a certain sense more
disappointing than that of either. In spite of his theory as to the
twofold function of poetry we must finally judge that of Coleridge, as
of any other poet, by its relation to the actual. Ancient Mariners and
Christabels--the people, the scenery, and the incidents of an imaginary
world--may be handled by poetry once and again to the wonder and
delight of man; but feats of this kind cannot--or cannot in the Western
world, at any rate--be repeated indefinitely, and the ultimate test of
poetry, at least for the modern European reader, is its treatment of
actualities--its relations to the world of human action, passion,
sensation, thought. And when we try Coleridge's poetry in any one of
these four regions of life, we seem forced to admit that, despite all
its power and beauty, it at no moment succeeds in convincing us, as at
their best moments Wordsworth's and even Byron's continually does, that
the poet has found his true poetic vocation--that he is interpreting
that aspect of life which he can interpret better than he can any
other, and which no other poet, save the one who has vanquished all
poets in their own special fields of achievement, can interpret as well
as he. In no poem of actuality does Coleridge so victoriously show
himself to be the right man at the right work as does Wordsworth in
certain moods of seership and Byron in certain moments of passion. Of
them at such moods and moments we feel assured that they have
discovered where their real strength lies, and have put it forth to the
utmost. But we never feel satisfied that Coleridge has discovered where
_his_ real strength lies, and he strikes us as feeling no more
certainty on the point himself. Strong as is his pinion, his flight
seems to resemble rather that of the eaglet than of the full-grown
eagle even to the last. He continues "mewing his mighty youth" a little
too long. There is a tentativeness of manner which seems to come from a
conscious aptitude for many poetic styles and an incapacity to
determine which should be definitively adopted and cultivated to
perfection. Hence one too often returns from any prolonged ramble
through Coleridge's poetry with an unsatisfied feeling which does not
trouble us on our return from the best literary country of Byron or
Wordsworth. Byron has taken us by rough roads, and Wordsworth led us
through some desperately flat and dreary lowlands to his favourite
"bits;" but we feel that we have seen mountain and valley, wood and
river, glen and waterfall at their best. But Coleridge's poetry leaves
too much of the feeling of a walk through a fine country on a misty
day. We may have had many a peep of beautiful scenery and occasional
glimpses of the sublime; but the medium of vision has been of variable
quality, and somehow we come home with an uneasy suspicion that we have
not seen as much as we might. It is obvious, however, even upon a
cursory consideration of the matter, that this disappointing element in
Coleridge's poetry is a necessary result of the circumstances of its
production; for the period of his productive activity (at least after
attaining manhood) was too short to enable a mind with so many
intellectual distractions to ascertain its true poetic bent, and to
concentrate its energies thereupon. If he seems always to be feeling
his way towards the work which he could do best, it is for the very
good reason that this is what, from 1796 to 1800, he was continually
doing as a matter of fact. The various styles which he attempted--and
for a season, in each case, with such brilliant results--are forms of
poetic expression corresponding, on the face of them, to poetic
impulses of an essentially fleeting nature. The political or
politico-religious odes were the offspring of youthful democratic
enthusiasm; the supernatural poems, so to call them for want of a
better name, had their origin in an almost equally youthful and more
than equally transitory passion for the wild and wondrous. Political
disillusion is fatal to the one impulse, and mere advance in years
extinguishes the other. Visions of Ancient Mariners and Christabels do
not revisit the mature man, and the Toryism of middle life will hardly
inspire odes to anything.

With the extinction of these two forms of creative impulse Coleridge's
poetic activity, from causes to be considered hereafter, came almost
entirely to an end, and into what later forms it might subsequently
have developed remains therefore a matter more or less of conjecture.
Yet I think there is almost a sufficiency of _à priori_ evidence as to
what that form would have been. Had the poet in him survived until
years had "brought the philosophic mind," he would doubtless have done
for the human spirit, in its purely isolated self-communings, what
Wordsworth did for it in its communion with external nature. All that
the poetry of Wordsworth is for the mind which loves to hold converse
with the world of things; this, and more perhaps than this--if more be
possible--would the poetry of Coleridge have been for the mind which
abides by preference in the world of self-originating emotion and
introspective thought. Wordsworth's primary function is to interpret
nature to man: the interpretation of man to himself is with him a
secondary process only-the response, in almost every instance, to
impressions from without. This poet can nobly brace the human heart to
fortitude; but he must first have seen the leech-gatherer on the lonely
moor. The "presence and the spirit interfused" throughout creation is
revealed to us in moving and majestic words; yet the poet requires to
have felt it "in the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the
living air" before he feels it "in the mind of man." But what
Wordsworth grants only to the reader who wanders with him in
imagination by lake and mountain, the Muse of Coleridge, had she lived,
would have bestowed upon the man who has entered into his inner chamber
and shut to the door. This, it seems to me, is the work for which
genius, temperament, and intellectual habit would alike have fitted
him. For while his feeling for internal nature was undoubtedly less
profound, less mystically penetrating than Wordsworth's, his
sensibilities in general were incomparably quicker and more subtle than
those of the friend in whom he so generously recognised a master; and
the reach of his sympathies extends to forms of human emotion, to
subjects of human interest which lay altogether outside the somewhat
narrow range of Wordsworth's.

And, with so magnificent a furniture of those mental and moral
qualities which should belong to "a singer of man to men," it must not
be forgotten that his technical equipment for the work was of the most
splendidly effective kind. If a critic like Mr. Swinburne seems to
speak in exaggerated praise of Coleridge's lyrics, we can well
understand their enchantment for a master of music like himself.
Probably it was the same feeling which made Shelley describe _France_
as "the finest ode in the English language." With all, in fact, who
hold--as it is surely plausible to hold--that the first duty of a
singer is to sing, the poetry of Coleridge will always be more likely
to be classed above than below its merits, great as they are. For, if
we except some occasional lapses in his sonnets--a metrical form in
which, at his best, he is quite "out of the running" with
Wordsworth--his melody never fails him. He is a singer always, as
Wordsworth is not always, and Byron almost never. The _'olian Harp_ to
which he so loved to listen does not more surely respond in music to
the breeze of heaven than does Coleridge's poetic utterance to the wind
of his inspiration. Of the dreamy fascination which Love exercises over
a listening ear I have already spoken; and there is hardly less charm
in the measure and assonances of the _Circassian Love Chant.
Christabel_ again, considered solely from the metrical point of view,
is a veritable _tour de force_--the very model of a metre for romantic
legend: as which, indeed, it was imitated with sufficient grace and
spirit, but seldom with anything approaching to Coleridge's melody, by
Sir Walter Scott.

Endowed therefore with so glorious a gift of song, and only not fully
master of his poetic means because of the very versatility of his
artistic power and the very variety and catholicity of his youthful
sympathies, it is unhappily but too certain that the world has lost
much by that perversity of conspiring accidents which so untimely
silenced Coleridge's muse. And the loss is the more trying to posterity
because he seems, to a not, I think, too curiously considering
criticism, to have once actually struck that very chord which would
have sounded the most movingly beneath his touch,--and to have struck
it at the very moment when the failing hand was about to quit the keys
for ever.

  "Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata neque ultra
   Esse sinunt."

I cannot regard it as merely fantastic to believe that the _Dejection_,
that dirge of infinite pathos over the grave of creative imagination,
might, but for the fatal decree which had by that time gone forth
against Coleridge's health and happiness, have been but the cradle-cry
of a new-born poetic power, in which imagination, not annihilated but
transmigrant, would have splendidly proved its vitality through other
forms of song.


FOOTNOTES

1. Perhaps the deepest impress of the Wordsworthian influence is to be
found in the little poem _Frost at Midnight_, with its affecting
apostrophe to the sleeping infant at his side--infant destined to
develop as wayward a genius and to lead as restless and irresolute a
life as his father. Its closing lines--

  "Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee
   Whether the summer clothe the general earth
   With greenness...
   ... whether the eave-drops fall,
   Heard only in the trances of the blast,
   Or if the secret ministry of frost
   Shall hang them up in silent icicles
   Quietly shining to the quiet moon"--

might have flowed straight from the pen of Wordsworth himself.

2. "You had a great loss in not seeing Coleridge. He is a wonderful
man. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so
benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests
himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very
plain, that is, for about three minutes; he is pale, thin, has a wide
mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish loose-growing
half-curling rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five
minutes you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not
very dark but gray, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the
dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind:
it has more of the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling than I ever
witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows and an overhanging forehead."

3. The lines--

  "And it is long, and lank, and brown,
   As is the ribbed sea-sand."

4. Mr. Gillman (in his _Life_, p. 301) gives the following somewhat
bald outline of what were to form the two concluding cantos, no doubt
on the authority of Coleridge himself. The second canto ends, it may be
remembered, with the despatch of Bracy the bard to the castle of Sir
Roland:--"Over the mountains the Bard, as directed by Sir Leoline,
hastes with his disciple; but, in consequence of one of those
inundations supposed to be common to the country, the spot only where
the castle once stood is discovered, the edifice itself being washed
away. He determines to return. Geraldine, being acquainted with all
that is passing, like the weird sisters in _Macbeth_, vanishes.
Reappearing, however, she awaits the return of the Bard, exciting in
the meantime by her wily arts all the anger she could rouse in the
Baron's breast, as well as that jealousy of which he is described to
have been susceptible. The old bard and the youth at length arrive, and
therefore she can no longer personate the character of Geraldine, the
daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, but changes her appearance to that of
the accepted though absent lover of Christabel. Next ensues a courtship
most distressing to Christabel, who feels--she knows not why--great
disgust for her once favoured knight. This coldness is very painful to
the Baron, who has no more conception than herself of the supernatural
transformation. She at last yields to her father's entreaties, and
consents to approach the altar with the hated suitor. The real lover
returning, enters at this moment, and produces the ring which she had
once given him in sign of her betrothment. Thus defeated, the
supernatural being Geraldine disappears. As predicted, the castle-bell
tolls, the mother's voice is heard, and, to the exceeding great joy of
the parties, the rightful marriage takes place, after which follows a
reconciliation and explanation between father and daughter." 5.

  "All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
  Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
  All are but ministers of Love,
    And feed his sacred flame."

6. It may be suggested that this sudden resolution was forced upon
Coleridge by the _res angusta domi_. But I do not think that was the
case. In the winter of 1797 he had obtained an introduction to and
entered into a literary engagement with Mr. Stuart of the _Morning
Post_, and could thus have met, as in fact he afterwards did meet, the
necessities of the hour.




CHAPTER IV.

Visit to Germany--Life at Göttingen,--Return--Explores the Lake
Country--London--The _Morning Post_--Coleridge as a
journalist--Retirement to Keswick.

[1799-1800.]


The departure of the two poets for the Continent was delayed only till
they had seen their joint volume through the press. The _Lyrical
Ballads_ appeared in the autumn of 1798, and on 16th September of that
year Coleridge left Yarmouth for Hamburg with Wordsworth and his
sister. [1] The purpose of his two companions' tour is not known to
have been other than the pleasure, or mixed pleasure and instruction,
usually derivable from foreign travel; that of Coleridge was strictly,
even sternly, educational. Immediately on his arrival in Germany he
parted from the Wordsworths, who went on to Gozlar, [2] and took up his
abode at the house of the pastor at Ratzeburg, with whom he spent five
months in assiduous study of the language. In January he removed to
Göttingen. Of his life here during the next few months we possess an
interesting record in the _Early Years and Late Reflections_ of Dr.
Carrlyon, a book published many years after the events which it
relates, but which is quite obviously a true reflection of impressions
yet fresh in the mind of its writer when its materials were first
collected. Its principal value, in fact, is that it gives us Coleridge
from the standpoint of the average young educated Englishman of the
day, sufficiently intelligent, indeed, to be sensible of his
fellow-student's transcendent abilities, but as little awed by them out
of youth's healthy irreverence of criticism as the ordinary English
undergraduate ever has been by the intellectual supremacy of any
"greatest man of his day" who might chance to have been his
contemporary at Oxford or Cambridge. In Dr. Carrlyon's reminiscences
and in the quoted letters of a certain young Parry, another of the
English student colony at Göttingen, we get a piquant picture of the
poet-philosopher of seven-and-twenty, with his yet buoyant belief in
his future, his still unquenched interest in the world of things, and
his never-to-be-quenched interest in the world of thought, his even
then inexhaustible flow of disquisition, his generous admiration for
the gifts of others, and his _naïve_ complacency--including, it would
seem, a touch of the vanity of personal appearance--in his own. "He
frequently," writes Dr. Carrlyon, "recited his own poetry, and not
unfrequently led us further into the labyrinth of his metaphysical
elucidations, either of particular passages or of the original
conception of any of his productions, than we were able to follow him.
At the conclusion, for instance, of the first stanza of _Christabel_,
he would perhaps comment at full length upon such a line as
'Tu--whit!--Tu--whoo!' that we might not fall into the mistake of
supposing originality to be its sole merit." The example is not very
happily chosen, for Coleridge could hardly have claimed "originality"
for an onomatopoeia which occurs in one of Shakspeare's best known
lyrics; but it serves well enough to illustrate the fact that he "very
seldom went right to the end of any piece of poetry; to pause and
analyse was his delight." His disappointment with regard to his tragedy
of _Osorio_ was, we also learn, still fresh. He seldom, we are told,
"recited any of the beautiful passages with which it abounds without a
visible interruption of the perfect composure of his mind." He
mentioned with great emotion Sheridan's inexcusable treatment of him
with respect to it. At the same time, adds his friend, "he is a severe
critic of his own productions, and declares" (this no doubt with
reference to his then, and indeed his constant estimate of _Christabel_
as his masterpiece) "that his best poems have perhaps not appeared in
print."

Young Parry's account of his fellow-student is also fresh and pleasing.
"It is very delightful," he tells a correspondent, "to hear him
sometimes discourse on religious topics for an hour together. His
fervour is particularly agreeable when compared with the chilling
speculations of German philosophers," whom Coleridge, he adds,
"successively forced to abandon all their strongholds." He is "much
liked, notwithstanding many peculiarities. He is very liberal towards
all doctrines and opinions, and cannot be put out of temper. These
circumstances give him the advantage of his opponents, who are always
bigoted and often irascible. Coleridge is an enthusiast on many
subjects, and must therefore appear to many to possess faults, and no
doubt he has faults, but he has a good heart and a large mass of
information with," as his fellow-student condescendingly admits,
"superior talents. The great fault which his friends may lament is the
variety of subjects which he adopts, and the abstruse nature of his
ordinary speculations, _extra homines podtas_. They can easily,"
concludes the writer, rising here to the full stateliness of youth's
epistolary style, "they can easily excuse his devoted attachment to his
country, and his reasoning as to the means of producing the greatest
human happiness, but they do not universally approve the mysticism of
his metaphysics and the remoteness of his topics from human
comprehension."

In the month of May 1799 Coleridge set out with a party of his
fellow-students on a walking tour through the Harz Mountains, an
excursion productive of much oral philosophising on his part, and of
the composition of the _Lines on ascending the Brocken_, not one of the
happiest efforts of his muse. As to the philosophising, "he never,"
says one of his companions on this trip, "appeared to tire of mental
exercise; talk seemed to him a perennial pastime, and his endeavours to
inform and amuse us ended only with the cravings of hunger or the
fatigue of a long march, from which neither his conversational powers
nor his stoicism could protect himself or us." It speaks highly for the
matter of Coleridge's allocutions that such incessant outpourings
during a mountaineering tramp appear to have left no lasting impression
of boredom behind them. The holiday seems to have been thoroughly
enjoyed by the whole party, and Coleridge, at any rate, had certainly
earned it. For once, and it is almost to be feared for the last time in
his life, he had resisted his besetting tendency to dispersiveness, and
constrained his intelligence to apply itself to one thing at a time. He
had come to Germany to acquire the language, and to learn what of
German theology and metaphysics he might find worth the study, and his
five months' steady pursuit of the former object had been followed by
another four months of resolute prosecution of the latter. He attended
the lectures of Professor Blumenbach, and obtained through a
fellow-student notes from those of Eichhorn. He suffered no
interruption in his studies, unless we are to except a short visit from
Wordsworth and his sister, who had spent most of their stay abroad in
residence at Gozlar; and he appears, in short, to have made in every
way the best use of his time. On 24th June 1799 he gave his
leave-taking supper at Göttingen, replying to the toast of his health
in fluent German but with an execrable accent; and the next day
presumably he started on his homeward journey.

His movements for the next few months are incorrectly stated in most of
the brief memoirs prefixed to the various editions of the poet's works,
--their writers having, it is to be imagined, accepted without
examination a misplaced date of Mr. Gillman's. It is not the fact that
Coleridge "returned to England after an absence of fourteen months, and
arrived in London the 27th of November." His absence could not have
lasted longer than a year, for we know from the evidence of Miss
Wordsworth's diary that he was exploring the Lake country (very likely
for the first time) in company with her brother and herself in the
month of September 1799. The probability is that he arrived in England
early in July, and immediately thereupon did the most natural and
proper thing to be done under the circumstances--namely, returned to
his wife and children at Nether Stowey, and remained there for the next
two months, after which he set off with the Wordsworths, then still at
Alfoxden, to visit the district to which the latter had either already
resolved upon, or were then contemplating, the transfer of their abode.
The 27th of November is no doubt the correct date of his arrival in
London, though not "from abroad." And his first six weeks in the
metropolis were spent in a very characteristic fashion--in the
preparation, namely, of a work which he pronounced with perfect
accuracy to be destined to fall dead from the press. He shut himself up
in a lodging in Buckingham Street, Strand, and by the end of the
above-mentioned period he had completed his admirable translation of
_Wallenstein_, in itself a perfect, and indeed his most perfect
dramatic poem. The manuscript of this English version of Schiller's
drama was purchased by Messrs. Longman under the condition that the
translation and the original should appear at the same time. Very few
copies were sold, and the publishers, indifferent to Coleridge's advice
to retain the unsold copies until the book should become fashionable,
disposed of them as waste paper. Sixteen years afterwards, on the
publication of _Christabel_, they were eagerly sought for, and the few
remaining copies doubled their price. It was while engaged upon this
work that he formed that connection with political jouralism which
lasted, though with intermissions, throughout most of the remainder of
his life. His early poetical pieces had, as we have seen, made their
first appearance in the _Morning Post_, but hitherto that newspaper had
received no prose contribution from his pen. His engagement with its
proprietor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, to whom he had been introduced during a
visit to London in 1797, was to contribute an occasional copy of verses
for a stipulated annual sum; and some dozen or so of his poems (notably
among them the ode to _France_ and the two strange pieces _Fire Famine
and Slaughter_ and _The Devil's Thoughts_) had entered the world in
this way during the years 1798 and 1799.

Misled by the error above corrected, the writers of some of the brief
memoirs of Coleridge's life represent him as having sent verse
contributions to the _Morning Post_ from Germany in 1799; but as the
earliest of these only appeared in August of that year there is no
reason to suppose that any of them were written before his return to
England. The longest of the serious pieces is the well-known _Ode to
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire_, which cannot be regarded as one of
the happiest of Coleridge's productions. Its motive is certainly a
little slight, and its sentiment more than a little overstrained. The
noble enthusiasm of the noble lady who, "though nursed in pomp and
pleasure," could yet condescend to "hail the platform wild where once
the Austrian fell beneath the shaft of Tell," hardly strikes a reader
of the present day as remarkable enough to be worth "gushing" over; and
when the poet goes on to suggest as the explanation of Georgiana's
having "learned that heroic measure" that the Whig great lady had
suckled her own children, we certainly seem to have taken the fatal
step beyond the sublime! It is to be presumed that Tory great ladies
invariably employed the services of a wet-nurse, and hence failed to
win the same tribute from the angel of the earth, who, usually, while
he guides

 "His chariot-planet round the goal of day,
  All trembling gazes on the eye of God,"

but who on this occasion "a moment turned his awful face away" to gaze
approvingly on the high-born mother who had so conscientiously
performed her maternal duties.

Very different is the tone of this poem from that of the two best known
of Coleridge's lighter contributions to the _Morning Post_. The most
successful of these, however, from the journalistic point of view, is
in a literary sense the less remarkable. One is indeed a little
astonished to find that a public, accustomed to such admirable
political satire as the _Anti-Jacobin_, should have been so much taken
as it seems to have been by the rough versification and somewhat clumsy
sarcasm of the _Devil's Thoughts_. The poem created something like a
_furore_, and sold a large reissue of the number of the _Morning Post_
in which it appeared. Nevertheless it is from the metrical point of
view doggerel, as indeed the author admits, three of its most
smoothly-flowing stanzas being from the hand of Southey, while there is
nothing in its boisterous political drollery to put its composition
beyond the reach of any man of strong partisan feelings and a turn for
street-humour. _Fire Famine and Slaughter_, on the other hand, is
literary in every sense of the word, requiring indeed, and very
urgently, to insist on its character as literature, in order to justify
itself against the charge of inhuman malignity. Despite the fact that
"letters four do form his name," it is of course an idealised
statesman, and not the real flesh and blood Mr. Pitt, whom the sister
furies, Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, extol as their patron in these
terrible lines. The poem must be treated as what lawyers call an "A. B.
case." Coleridge must be supposed to be lashing certain alphabetical
symbols arranged in a certain order. This idealising process is
perfectly easy and familiar to everybody with the literary sense. The
deduction for "poetic license" is just as readily, though it does not,
of course, require to be as frequently, made with respect to the
hyperbole of denunciation as with respect to that of praise. Nor need
we doubt that this deduction had in fact been made by all intelligent
readers long before that agitating dinner at Mr. Sotheby's, which
Coleridge describes with such anxious gravity in his apologetic preface
to the republication of the lines. On the whole one may pretty safely
accept De Quincey's view of the true character of this incident as
related by him in his own inimitable fashion, namely, that it was in
the nature of an elaborate hoax, played off at the poet's expense. [3]
The malice of the piece is, as De Quincey puts it, quite obviously a
"malice of the understanding and fancy," and not of the heart. There is
significance in the mere fact that the poem was deliberately published
by Coleridge two years after its composition, when the vehemence of his
political animosities had much abated. Written in 1796, it did not
appear in the _Morning Post_ till January 1798.

He was now, however, about to draw closer his connection with the
newspaper press. Soon after his return from Germany he was solicited to
"undertake the literary and political department in the _Morning
Post_," and acceded to the proposal "on condition that the paper should
thenceforward be conducted on certain fixed and announced principles,
and that he should be neither obliged nor requested to deviate from
them in favour of any party or any event." Accordingly, from December
1799 until about midsummer of 1800, Coleridge became a regular
contributor of political articles to this journal, sometimes to the
number of two or three in one week. At the end of the period of six
months he quitted London, and his contributions became necessarily less
frequent, but they were continued (though with two apparent breaks of
many months in duration) [4] until the close of the year 1802. It would
seem, however, that nothing but Coleridge's own disinclination
prevented this connection from taking a form in which it would have
profoundly modified his whole future career. In a letter to Mr. Poole,
dated March 1800, he informs his friend that if he "had the least love
of money" he could "make sure of £2000 a year, for that Stuart had
offered him half shares in his two papers, the _Morning Post_ and the
_Courier_, if he would devote himself to them in conjunction with their
proprietor. But I told him," he continues, "that I would not give up
the country and the lazy reading of old folios for two thousand times
two thousand pounds,--in short, that beyond £350 a year I considered
money as a real evil." Startlingly liberal as this offer will appear to
the journalist, it seems really to have been made. For, writing long
afterwards to Mr. Nelson Coleridge, Mr. Stuart says: "Could Coleridge
and I place ourselves thirty years back, and he be so far a man of
business as to write three or four hours a day, there is nothing I
would not pay for his assistance. I would take him into partnership,
and I would enable him to make a large fortune." Nor is there any
reason to think that the bargain would have been a bad one for the
proprietor from the strictly commercial point of view. Coleridge in
later years may no doubt have overrated the effect of his own
contributions on the circulation of the _Morning Post_, but it must
have been beyond question considerable, and would in all likelihood
have become far greater if he could have been induced to devote himself
more closely to the work of journalism. For the fact is--and it is a
fact for which the current conception of Coleridge's intellectual
character does not altogether prepare one--that he was a workman of the
very first order of excellence in this curious craft. The faculties
which go to the attainment of such excellence are not perhaps among the
highest distinctions of the human mind, but, such as they are, they are
specific and well marked; they are by no means the necessary
accompaniments even of the most conspicuous literary power, and they
are likely rather to suffer than to profit by association with great
subtlety of intellect or wide philosophic grasp. It is not to the
advantage of the journalist, as such, that he should see too many
things at a time, or too far into any one thing, and even the gifts of
an active imagination and an abundant vocabulary are each of them
likely to prove a snare. To be wholly successful, the journalist--at
least the English journalist--must not be too eloquent, or too witty,
or too humorous, or too ingenious, or too profound. Yet the English
reader likes, or thinks he likes, eloquence; he has a keen sense of
humour, and a fair appreciation of wit; and he would be much hurt if he
were told that ingenuity and profundity were in themselves distasteful
to him. How, then, to give him enough of these qualities to please and
not enough to offend him--as much eloquence as will stir his emotions,
but not enough to arouse his distrust; as much wit as will carry home
the argument, but not enough to make him doubt its sincerity; as much
humour as will escape the charge of levity, as much ingenuity as can be
displayed without incurring suspicion, and as much profundity as may
impress without bewildering? This is a problem which is fortunately
simplified for most journalists by the fact of their possessing these
qualities in no more than, if in so much as, the minimum required. But
Coleridge, it must be remembered, possessed most of them in
embarrassing superfluity. Not all of them indeed, for, though he could
be witty and at times humorous, his temptations to excess in these
respects were doubtless not considerable. But as for his eloquence, he
was from his youth upwards _Isoo torrentior_, his dialectical ingenuity
was unequalled, and in disquisition of the speculative order no man was
so apt as he to penetrate more deeply into his subject than most of his
readers would care to follow him. _À priori_, therefore, one would
have expected that Coleridge's instincts would have led him to
rhetorise too much in his diction, to refine too much in his arguments,
and to philosophise too much in his reflections, to have hit the
popular taste as a journalist, and that at the age of eight-and-twenty
he would have been unable to subject these tendencies either to the
artistic repression of the maturer writer or to the tactical restraints
of the trained advocate. This eminently natural assumption, however, is
entirely rebutted by the facts. Nothing is more remarkable in
Coleridge's contributions to the _Morning Post_ than their thoroughly
workmanlike character from the journalistic point of view, their
avoidance of "viewiness," their strict adherence to the one or two
simple points which he is endeavouring at any particular juncture in
politics to enforce upon his readers, and the steadiness with which he
keeps his own and his readers' attention fixed on the special political
necessities of the hour. His articles, in short, belong to that
valuable class to which, while it gives pleasure to the cultivated
reader, the most commonplace and Philistine man of business cannot
refuse the to him supreme praise of being eminently "practical." They
hit the nail on the head in nearly every case, and they take the
plainest and most direct route to their point, dealing in rhetoric and
metaphor only so far as the strictly "business" ends of the argument
appear to require. Nothing, for instance, could have been better done,
better reasoned and written, more skilfully adapted throughout to the
English taste, than Coleridge's criticism (3lst Dec. 1799) on the new
constitution established by Bonaparte and Sieyes on the foundation of
the Consulate, with its eighty senators, the "creatures of a renegade
priest, himself the creature of a foreign mercenary, its hundred
tribunes who are to talk and do nothing, and its three hundred
legislators whom the constitution orders to be silent." What a
ludicrous Purgatory, adds he, "for three hundred Frenchmen!" Very
vigorous, moreover, is he on the ministerial rejection of the French
proposals of peace in 1800, arguing against the continuance of the war
on the very sound anti-Jacobin ground that if it were unsuccessful it
would inflame French ambition anew, and, if successful, repeat the
experience of the results of rendering France desperate, and simply
reanimate Jacobinism.

Effective enough too, for the controversial needs of the moment, was
the argument that if France were known, as Ministers pretended, to be
insincere in soliciting peace, "Ministers would certainly treat with
her, since they would again secure the support of the British people in
the war, and expose the ambition of the enemy;" and that, therefore,
the probability was that the British Government knew France to be
sincere, and shrank from negotiation lest it should expose their own
desire to prosecute the war. [5] Most happy, again, is his criticism of
Lord Grenville's note, with its references to the unprovoked aggression
of France (in the matter of the opening of the Scheldt, etc.) as the
sole cause and origin of the war. "If this were indeed true, in what
ignorance must not Mr. Pitt and Mr. Windham have kept the poor Duke of
Portland, who declared in the House of Lords that the cause of the war
was the maintenance of the Christian religion?"

To add literary excellence of the higher order to the peculiar
qualities which give force to the newspaper article is for a
journalist, of course, a "counsel of perfection;" but it remains to be
remarked that Coleridge did make this addition in a most conspicuous
manner. Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's three volumes of her father's _Essays on
his own Times_ deserve to live as literature apart altogether from
their merits as journalism. Indeed among the articles in the _Morning
Post_ between 1799 and 1802 may be found some of the finest specimens
of Coleridge's maturer prose style. The character of Pitt, which
appeared on 19th March 1800, is as remarkable for its literary merits
as it is for the almost humorous political perversity which would not
allow the Minister any single merit except that which he owed to the
sedulous rhetorical training received by him from his father, viz. "a
premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words." [6] The
letters to Fox, again, though a little artificialised perhaps by
reminiscences of Junius, are full of weight and dignity. But by far the
most piquant illustration of Coleridge's peculiar power is to be found
in the comparison between his own version of Pitt's speech of 17th
February 1800, on the continuance of the war, with the report of it
which appeared in the _Times_ of that date. With the exception of a few
unwarranted elaborations of the arguments here and there, the two
speeches are in substance identical; but the effect of the contrast
between the minister's cold state-paper periods and the life and glow
of the poet-journalist's style is almost comic. Mr. Gillman records
that Canning, calling on business at the editor's, inquired, as others
had done, who was the reporter of the speech for the _Morning Post_,
and, on being told, remarked drily that the report "did more credit to
his head than to his memory."

On the whole one can well understand Mr. Stuart's anxiety to secure
Coleridge's permanent collaboration with him in the business of
journalism; and it would be possible to maintain, with less of paradox
than may at first sight appear, that it would have been better not only
for Coleridge himself but for the world at large if the editor's
efforts had been successful. It would indeed have been bowing the neck
to the yoke; but there are some natures upon which constraint of that
sort exercises not a depressing but a steadying influence. What, after
all, would the loss in hours devoted to a comparatively inferior class
of literary labour have amounted to when compared with the gain in
much-needed habits of method and regularity, and--more valuable than
all to an intellect like Coleridge's,--in the constant reminder that
human life is finite and the materials of human speculation infinite,
and that even a world-embracing mind must apportion its labour to its
day? There is, however, the great question of health to be
considered--_the_ question, as every one knows, of Coleridge's whole
career and life. If health was destined to give way, in any event--if
its collapse, in fact, was simply the cause of all the lamentable
external results which followed it, while itself due only to
predetermined internal conditions over which the sufferer had no
control--then to be sure _cadit qu'stio_. At London or at the Lakes,
among newspaper files or old folios, Coleridge's life would in that
case have run the same sad course; and his rejection of Mr. Stuart's
offer becomes a matter of no particular interest to disappointed
posterity. But be that as it may, the "old folios" won the day. In the
summer of 1800 Coleridge quitted London, and having wound up his
affairs at his then place of residence, removed with his wife and
children to a new and beautiful home in that English Lake country with
which his name was destined, like those of Southey and Wordsworth, to
be enduringly associated.


FOOTNOTES

1. De Quincey's error, in supposing that Coleridge's visit to Germany
to "complete his education" was made at an earlier date than this
journey with the Wordsworths, is a somewhat singular mistake for one so
well acquainted with the facts of Coleridge's life. Had we not his own
statement that this of 1798 was the first occasion of his quitting his
native country, it so happens that we can account in England for nearly
every month of his time from his leaving Cambridge until this date.


2. It has only within a comparatively recent period been ascertained
that the visit of the Wordsworths to Germany was itself another result
of Thomas Wedgwood's generous appreciation of literary merit. It
appears, on the incontrovertible testimony of the Wedgwoods' accounts
with their agents at Hamburg, that the expenses of all three travellers
were defrayed by their friend at home. The credits opened for them
amounted, during the course of their stay abroad, to some £260.--Miss
Meteyard's _A Group of Englishmen_, p. 99.

3. After quoting the two concluding lines of the poem, "Fire's" rebuke
of her inconstant sisters, in the words

   "I alone am faithful, I
   Cling to him everlastingly,"

De Quincey proceeds: "The sentiment is diabolical; and the question
argued at the London dinner-table (Mr. Sotheby's) was 'Could the writer
have been other than a devil?'... Several of the great guns among the
literary body were present--in particular Sir Walter Scott, and he, we
believe, with his usual good nature, took the apologetic side of the
dispute; in fact, he was in the secret. Nobody else, barring the
author, knew at first whose good name was at stake. The scene must have
been high. The company kicked about the poor diabolic writer's head as
though it had been a tennis-ball. Coleridge, the yet unknown criminal,
absolutely perspired and fumed in pleading for the defendant; the
company demurred; the orator grew urgent; wits began to smoke the case
as an active verb, the advocate to smoke as a neuter verb; the 'fun
grew fast and furious,' until at length the delinquent arose, burning
tears in his eyes, and confessed to an audience now bursting with
stifled laughter (but whom he supposed to be bursting with fiery
indignation), 'Lo, I am he that wrote it.'"

4. _Sic_ in _Essays on his own Times_ by S. T. C., the collection of
her father's articles made by Mrs. Nelson (Sara) Coleridge; but without
attributing strange error to Coleridge's own estimate (in the
_Biographia Literaria_) of the amount of his journalistic work, it is
impossible to believe that this collection, forming as it does but two
small volumes, and a portion of a third, is anything like complete.

5. Alas, that the facts should be so merciless to the most excellent
arguments! Coleridge could not foresee that Napoleon would, years
afterwards, admit in his own Memoirs the insincerity of his overtures.
"I had need of war; a treaty of peace...would have withered every
imagination." And when Mr. Pitt's answer arrived, "it filled me with a
secret satisfaction."

6. The following passage, too, is curious as showing how polemics, like
history, repeat themselves. "As his reasonings were, so is his
eloquence. One character pervades his whole being. Words on words,
finely arranged, and so dexterously consequent that the whole bears the
semblance of argument and still keeps awake a sense of surprise; but,
when all is done, nothing rememberable has been said; no one
philosophical remark, no one image, not even a pointed aphorism. Not a
sentence of Mr. Pitt's has ever been quoted, or formed the favourite
phrase of the day--a thing unexampled in any man of equal reputation."
With the alteration of one word--the proper name--this passage might
have been taken straight from some political diatribe of to-day.




CHAPTER V.

Life at Keswick--Second part of _Christabel_--Failing health--Resort to
opium--The _Ode to Dejection_--Increasing restlessness--Visit to Malta.

[1800-1804.]


We are now approaching the turning-point, moral and physical, of
Coleridge's career. The next few years determined not only his destiny
as a writer but his life as a man. Between his arrival at Keswick in
the summer of 1800 and his departure for Malta in the spring of 1804
that fatal change of constitution, temperament, and habits which
governed the whole of his subsequent history had fully established
itself. Between these two dates he was transformed from the Coleridge
of whom his young fellow-students in Germany have left us so pleasing a
picture into the Coleridge whom distressed kinsmen, alienated friends,
and a disappointed public were to have before them for the remainder of
his days. Here, then, at Keswick, and in these first two or three years
of the century--here or nowhere is the key to the melancholy mystery to
be found.

It is probable that only those who have gone with some minuteness into
the facts of this singular life are aware how great was the change
effected during this very short period of time. When Coleridge left
London for the Lake country he had not completed his
eight-and-twentieth year. Before he was thirty he wrote that _Ode to
Dejection_ in which his spiritual and moral losses are so pathetically
bewailed. His health and spirits, his will and habits, may not have
taken any unalterable bent for the worse until 1804, the year of his
departure for Malta--the date which I have thought it safest to assign
as the definitive close of the earlier and happier period of his life;
but undoubtedly the change had fully manifested itself more than two
years before. And a very great and painful one it assuredly was. We
know from the recorded evidence of Dr. Carrlyon and others that
Coleridge was full of hope and gaiety, full of confidence in himself
and of interest in life during his few months' residence in Germany.
The _annus mirabilis_ of his poetic life was but two years behind him,
and his achievements of 1797-98 seemed to him but a mere earnest of
what he was destined to accomplish. His powers of mental concentration
were undiminished, as his student days at Göttingen sufficiently
proved; his conjugal and family affections, as Dr. Carrlyon notes for
us, were still unimpaired; his own verse gives signs of a home-sickness
and a yearning for his own fireside which were in melancholy contrast
with the restlessness of his later years. Nay, even after his return to
England, and during the six months of his regular work on the _Morning
Post_, the vigour of his political articles entirely negatives the idea
that any relaxation of intellectual energy had as yet set in. Yet
within six months of his leaving London for Keswick there begins a
progressive decline in Coleridge's literary activity in every form. The
second part of _Christabel_, beautiful but inferior to the first, was
composed in the autumn of 1800, and for the next two years, so far as
the higher forms of literature are concerned, "the rest is silence."
The author of the prefatory memoir in the edition of Coleridge's
_Poetical and Dramatic Works_ (1880), enumerates some half-dozen slight
pieces contributed to the _Morning Post_ in 1801, but declares that
Coleridge's poetical contributions to this paper during 1802 were "very
rich and varied, and included the magnificent ode entitled
_Dejection_." Only the latter clause of this statement is entitled, I
think, to command our assent. Varied though the list may be, it is
hardly to be described as "rich." It covers only about seven weeks in
the autumn of 1802, and, with the exception of the _Lovers' Resolution_
and the "magnificent ode" referred to, the pieces are of the shortest
and slightest kind. Nor is it accurate to say that the "political
articles of the same period were also numerous and important." On the
contrary, it would appear from an examination of Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's
collection that her father's contributions to the _Post_ between his
departure from London and the autumn of 1802 were few and intermittent,
and in August 1803 the proprietorship of that journal passed out of Mr.
Stuart's hands. It is, in short, I think, impossible to doubt that very
shortly after his migration to the Lake country he practically ceased
not only to write poetry but to produce any mentionable quantity of
_complete_ work in the prose form. His mind, no doubt, was incessantly
active throughout the whole of the deplorable period upon which we are
now entering; but it seems pretty certain that its activity was not
poetic nor even critical, but purely philosophical, and that the
products of that activity went exclusively to _marginalia_ and the
pages of note-books.

Yet unfortunately we have almost no evidence, personal or other, from
which we can with any certainty construct the psychological--if one
should not rather say the physiological, or better still, perhaps, the
pathological--history of this cardinal epoch in Coleridge's life. Miss
Wordsworth's diary is nearly silent about him for the next few years;
he was living indeed some dozen miles from her brother at Grasmere, and
they could not therefore have been in daily intercourse. Southey did
not come to the Lakes till 1803, and the records of his correspondence
only begin therefore from that date. Mr. Cottle's _Reminiscences_ are
here a blank; Charles Lamb's correspondence yields little; and though
De Quincey has plenty to say about this period in his characteristic
fashion, it must have been based upon pure gossip, as he cites no
authorities, and did not himself make Coleridge's acquaintance till six
years afterwards. This, however, is at least certain, that his gloomy
accounts of his own health begin from a period at which his
satisfaction with his new abode was still as fresh as ever. The house
which he had taken, now historic as the residence of two famous
Englishmen, enjoyed a truly beautiful situation and the command of a
most noble view. It stood in the vale of Derwentwater, on the bank of
the river Greta, and about a mile from the lake. When Coleridge first
entered it, it was uncompleted, and an arrangement was made by which,
after completion, it was to be divided between the tenant and the
landlord, a Mr. Jackson. As it turned out, however, the then completed
portion was shared by them in common, the other portion, and eventually
the whole, being afterwards occupied by Southey. In April 1801, some
eight or nine months after his taking possession of Greta Hall,
Coleridge thus describes it to its future occupant:--

"Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of which is one field
and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery garden.
Behind the house is an orchard and a small wood on a steep slope, at
the foot of which is the river Greta, which winds round and catches the
evening's light in the front of the house. In front we have a giant
camp--an encamped army of tent-like mountains which, by an inverted
arch, gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely vale and
the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left Derwentwater
and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrowdale.
Behind is the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two chasms and a
tent-like ridge in the larger. A fairer scene you have not seen in all
your wanderings."

There is here no note of discontent with the writer's surroundings; and
yet, adds Mr. Cuthbert Southey in his _Life and Correspondence_ of his
father, the remainder of this letter was filled by Coleridge with "a
most gloomy account of his health." Southey writes him in reply that he
is convinced that his friend's "complaint is gouty, that good living is
necessary and a good climate." In July of the same year he received a
visit from Southey at Greta Hall, and one from Charles and Mary Lamb in
the following summer, and it is probable that during such intervals of
pleasurable excitement his health and spirits might temporarily rally.
But henceforward and until his departure for Malta we gather nothing
from any source as to Coleridge's _normal_ condition of body and mind
which is not unfavourable, and it is quite certain that he had long
before 1804 enslaved himself to that fatal drug which was to remain his
tyrant for the rest of his days.

When, then, and how did this slavery begin? What was the precise date
of Coleridge's first experiences of opium, and what the original cause
of his taking it? Within what time did its use become habitual? To what
extent was the decline of his health the effect of the evil habit, and
to what, if any, extent its cause? And how far, if at all, can the
deterioration of his character and powers be attributed to a decay of
physical constitution, brought about by influences beyond the
sufferer's own control?

Could every one of these questions be completely answered, we should be
in a position to solve the very obscure and painful problem before us;
but though some of them can be answered with more or less approach to
completeness, there is only one of them which can be finally disposed
of. It is certain, and it is no doubt matter for melancholy
satisfaction to have ascertained it, that Coleridge first had recourse
to opium as an anodyne. It was Nature's revolt from pain, and not her
appetite for pleasure, which drove him to the drug; and though De
Quincey, with his almost comical malice, remarks that, though Coleridge
began in the desire to obtain relief "there is no proof that he did not
end in voluptuousness," there is on the other hand no proof whatever
that he did so end--_until the habit was formed_. It is quite
consistent with probability, and only accords with Coleridge's own
express affirmations, to believe that it was the medicinal efficacy of
opium, and this quality of it alone, which induced him to resort to it
again and again until his senses contracted that well-known and
insatiable craving for the peculiar excitement, "voluptuous" only to
the initiated, which opium-intoxication creates. But let Coleridge
speak on this point for himself. Writing in April 1826 he says:--

"I wrote a few stanzas three-and-twenty years ago, soon after my eyes
had been opened to the true nature of the habit into which I had been
ignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium, in the sudden
removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended with swellings in
my knees and palpitation of the heart and pains all over me, by which I
had been bed-ridden for nearly six months. Unhappily among my
neighbours' and landlord's books were a large number of medical reviews
and magazines. I had always a fondness (a common case, but most
mischievous turn with reading men who are at all dyspeptic) for
dabbling in medical writings; and in one of these reviews I met a case
which I fancied very like my own, in which a cure had been effected by
the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour I procured it: it worked
miracles--the swellings disappeared, the pains vanished. I was all
alive, and all around me being as ignorant as myself, nothing could
exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing else, prescribed the
newly-discovered panacea for all complaints, and carried a little about
with me not to lose any opportunity of administering 'instant relief
and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentle or
simple. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and
bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and how
I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to which I
was drawing, just when the current was beyond my strength to stem. The
state of my mind is truly portrayed in the following effusion, for God
knows! that from that time I was the victim of pain and terror, nor had
I at any time taken the flattering poison as a stimulus or for any
craving after pleasurable sensation."

The "effusion" in question has parted company with the autobiographical
note, and the author of the prefatory memoir above quoted conjectures
it to have been a little poem entitled the _Visionary Hope_; but I am
myself of opinion, after a careful study of both pieces, that it is
more probably the _Pains of Sleep_, which moreover is known to have
been written in 1803. But whichever it be, its date is fixed in that
year by the statement in the autobiographical note of 1826 that the
stanzas referred to in it were written "twenty-three years ago." Thus,
then, we have the two facts established, that the opium-taking habit
had its origin in a bodily ailment, and that at some time in 1803 that
habit had become confirmed. The disastrous experiment in amateur
therapeutics, which was the means of implanting it, could not have
taken place, according to the autobiographical note, until at least six
months after Coleridge's arrival at Keswick, and perhaps not for some
months later yet. At any rate, it seems tolerably certain that it was
not till the spring of 1801, when the climate of the Lake country first
began to tell unfavourably on his health, that the "Kendal Black Drop"
was taken. Possibly it may have been about the time (April 1801) when
he wrote the letter to Southey which has been quoted above, and which,
it will be remembered, contained "so gloomy an account of his health."
How painfully ailing he was at this time we know from a variety of
sources, from some of which we also gather that he must have been a
sufferer in more or less serious forms from his boyhood upwards. Mr.
Gillman, for instance, who speaks on this point with the twofold
authority of confidant and medical expert, records a statement of
Coleridge's to the effect that, as a result of such schoolboy
imprudences as "swimming over the New River in my clothes and remaining
in them, full half the time from seventeen to eighteen was passed by me
in the sick ward of Christ's Hospital, afflicted with jaundice and
rheumatic fever." From these indiscretions and their consequences "may
be dated," Mr. Gillman thinks, "all his bodily sufferings in future
life." That he was a martyr to periodical attacks of rheumatism for
some years before his migration to Keswick is a conclusion resting upon
something more than conjecture. The _Ode to the Departing Year_ (1796)
was written, as he has himself told us, under a severe attack of
rheumatism in the head. In 1797 he describes himself in ill health, and
as forced to retire on that account to the "lonely farmhouse between
Porlock and London on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire,"
where _Kubla Khan_ was written. [1]

Thus much is, moreover, certain, that whatever were Coleridge's health
and habits during the first two years of his residence at Keswick, his
career as a poet--that is to say, as a poet of the first order--was
closed some months before that period had expired. The ode entitled
_Dejection_, to which reference has so often been made, was written on
the 4th of April 1802, and the evidential importance which attaches, in
connection with the point under inquiry, to this singularly pathetic
utterance has been almost universally recognised. Coleridge has himself
cited its most significant passage in the _Biographia Literaria_ as
supplying the best description of his mental state at the time when it
was written. De Quincey quotes it with appropriate comments in his
_Coleridge and Opium-Eating_. Its testimony is reverently invoked by
the poet's son in the introductory essay prefixed by him to his edition
of his father's works. The earlier stanzas are, however, so necessary
to the comprehension of Coleridge's mood at this time that a somewhat
long extract must be made. In the opening stanza he expresses a longing
that the storm which certain atmospheric signs of a delusively calm
evening appear to promise might break forth, so that

  "Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed,
   And sent my soul abroad,
  Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,
  Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live."

And thus, with ever-deepening sadness, the poem proceeds:

  "A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
   A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
   Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
    In word, or sigh, or tear--
  O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,
  To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,
   All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
  Have I been gazing on the western sky,
   And its peculiar tint of yellow green:
  And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye!
  And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
  That give away their motion to the stars;
  Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
  Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
   Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew
   In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
   I see them all so excellently fair,
   I see, not feel how beautiful they are!

    "My genial spirits fail,
    And what can these avail
   To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
    It were a vain endeavour,
    Though I should gaze for ever
   On that green light that lingers in the west:
   I may not hope from outward forms to win
   The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

   "O Lady! we receive but what we give,
   And in our life alone does nature live:
   Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
    And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
   Than that inanimate cold world allowed
   To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
    Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth,
   A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
    Enveloping the earth--
   And from the soul itself must there be sent
    A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
   Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

   "O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me
   What this strong music in the soul may be!
   What, and wherein it doth exist,
   This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
   This beautiful and beauty-making power.
    Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given,
   Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,
   Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower,
   Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
   Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower
    A new Earth and new Heaven,
   Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud--
   Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud--
    We in ourselves rejoice!
  And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
   All melodies the echoes of that voice,
  All colours a suffusion from that light."

And then follows the much quoted, profoundly touching, deeply
significant stanza to which we have referred:--

  "There was a time when, though my path was rough,
   This joy within me dallied with distress,
  And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
   Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
  For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
  And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
  But now afflictions how me down to earth:
  Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth,
    But O! each visitation
  Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
   My shaping spirit of Imagination.
   For not to think of what I needs must feel,
   But to be still and patient, all I can;
  And haply by abstruse research to steal
   From my own nature all the natural Man--
   This was my sole resource, my only plan:
  Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
  And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul."

Sadder lines than these were never perhaps written by any poet in
description of his own feelings. And what gives them their peculiar
sadness--as also, of course, their special biographical value--is that
they are not, like Shelley's similarly entitled stanzas, the mere
expression of a passing mood. They are the record of a life change, a
veritable threnody over a spiritual death. For there can be no
doubt--his whole subsequent history goes to show it--that Coleridge's
"shaping spirit of Imagination" was in fact dead when these lines were
written. To a man of stronger moral fibre a renascence of the poetical
instinct in other forms might, as I have suggested above, been
possible; but the poet of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_ was
dead. The metaphysician had taken his place, and was striving, in
abstruse research, to live in forgetfulness of the loss. Little more,
that is to say, than a twelvemonth after the composition of the second
part of _Christabel_ the impulse which gave birth to it had passed away
for ever. Opium-taking had doubtless begun by this time--may
conceivably indeed have begun nearly a year before--and the mere _mood_
of the poem, the temporary phase of feeling which directed his mind
inwards into deeper reflections on its permanent state, is no doubt
strongly suggestive, in its excessive depression, of the terrible
reaction which is known to follow upon opium-excitement. But, I
confess, it seems to me improbable that even the habitual use of the
stimulant for so comparatively short a time as twelve months could have
produced so profound a change in Coleridge's intellectual nature. I
cannot but think that De Quincey overstates the case in declaring that
"opium killed Coleridge as a poet," though it may well be that, after
the collapse of health, which appears to me to have been the real
_causa causans_ in the matter, had killed the poet as we know him,
opium prevented his resurrection in another and it may be but little
inferior form. On the whole, in fact, the most probable account of this
all-important era in Coleridge's life appears to me to be this: that in
the course of 1801, as he was approaching his thirtieth year, a
distinct change for the worse--precipitated possibly, as Mr. Gillman
thinks, by the climate of his new place of abode--took place in his
constitution; that his rheumatic habit of body, and the dyspeptic
trouble by which it was accompanied became confirmed; and that the
severe attacks of the acute form of the malady which he underwent
produced such a permanent lowering of his vitality and animal spirits
as, _first_, to extinguish the creative impulse, and _then_ to drive
him to the physical anodyne of opium and to the mental stimulant of
metaphysics.

From the summer of 1801, at any rate, his _malaise_, both of mind and
body, appears to have grown apace. Repeated letters from Southey allow
us to see how deeply concerned he was at this time about his friend's
condition. Plans of foreign travel are discussed between them, and
Southey endeavours in vain to spur his suffering and depressed
correspondent to "the assertion of his supremacy" in some new literary
work. But, with the exception of his occasional contributions to the
press, whatever he committed to paper during these years exists only,
if at all, in a fragmentary form. And his restlessness, continually on
the increase, appears by the end of 1802 to have become ungovernable.
In November of that year he eagerly accepted an offer from Thomas
Wedgwood to become his companion on a tour, and he spent this and the
greater part of the following month in South Wales with some temporary
advantage, it would seem, to his health and spirits. "Coleridge,"
writes Mr. Wedgwood to a friend, "is all kindness to me, and in
prodigious favour here. He is quite easy, cheerful, and takes great
pains to make himself pleasant. He is willing, indeed desirous, to
accompany me to any part of the globe." "Coll and I," he writes on
another occasion, the abbreviation of name having been suggested to him
by Coleridge himself, "harmonise amazingly," and adds that his
companion "takes long rambles, and writes a great deal." But the fact
that such changes of air and scene produced no permanent effect upon
the invalid after his return to his own home appears to show that now,
at any rate, his fatal habit had obtained a firm hold upon him. And his
"writing a great deal resulted" only in the filling of many note-books,
and perhaps the sketching out of many of those vast schemes of literary
labour of which he was destined to leave so remarkable a collection at
his death. One such we find him forwarding to Southey in the August of
1803--the plan of a Bibliotheca Britannica, or "History of British
Literature, bibliographical, biographical, and critical," in eight
volumes. The first volume was to contain a "complete history of all
Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books that are not translations, but the native
growth of Britain;" to accomplish which, writes Coleridge, "I will with
great pleasure join you in learning Welsh and Erse." The second volume
was to contain the history of English poetry and poets, including "all
prose truly poetical." The third volume "English prose, considered as
to style, as to eloquence, as to general impressiveness; a history of
styles and manners, their causes, their birthplace and parentage, their
analysis." The fourth volume would take up "the history of metaphysics,
theology, medicine, alchemy; common, canon, and Roman law from Alfred
to Henry VII." The fifth would "carry on metaphysics and ethics to the
present day in the first half, and comprise in the second half the
theology of all the reformers." In the sixth and seventh volumes were
to be included "all the articles you (Southey) can get on all the
separate arts and sciences that have been treated of in books since the
Reformation; and by this time," concludes the enthusiastic projector,
"the book, if it answered at all, would have gained so high a
reputation that you need not fear having whom you liked to write the
different articles--medicine, surgery, chemistry, etc.; navigation,
travellers' voyages, etc., etc." There is certainly a melancholy humour
in the formulation of so portentous a scheme by a man who was at this
moment wandering aimlessly among the lakes and mountains, unable to
settle down to any definite piece of literary work, or even to throw
off a fatal habit, which could not fail, if persevered in, to destroy
all power of steady application in the future. That neither the comic
nor the pathetic element in the situation was lost upon Southey is
evident from his half-sad, half-satirical, wholly winning reply. "Your
plan," he writes, "is too good, too gigantic, quite beyond my powers.
If you had my tolerable state of health and that love of steady and
productive employment which is now grown into a necessary habit with
me, if you were to execute and would execute it, it would be beyond all
doubt the most valuable work of any age or any country; but I cannot
fill up such an outline. No man can better feel where he fails than I
do, and to rely upon you for whole quartos! Dear Coleridge, the smile
that comes with that thought is a very melancholy one; and if Edith saw
me now she would think my eyes were weak again, when in truth the
humour that covers them springs from another cause." A few weeks after
this interchange of correspondence Coleridge was once again to prove
how far he was from possessing Southey's "tolerable state of health."
Throughout the whole of this year he had been more restless than ever.
In January 1803 we find him staying with Southey at Bristol, "suffering
terribly from the climate, and talking of going abroad." A week later
he is at Stowey, planning schemes, not destined to be realised, of
foreign travel with Wedgwood. Returning again to Keswick, he started,
after a few months' quiescence, on 15th August, in company with
Wordsworth and his sister, for a tour in Scotland, but after a
fortnight he found himself too ill to proceed. The autumn rains set in,
and "poor Coleridge," writes Miss Wordsworth, "being very unwell,
determined to send his clothes to Edinburgh, and make the best of his
way thither, being afraid to face much wet weather in an open
carriage." It is possible, however, that his return to Keswick may have
been hastened by the circumstance that Southey, who had paid a brief
visit to the Lake country two years before, was expected in a few days
at the house which was destined to be his abode for the longest portion
of his life. He arrived at Greta Hall on 7th September 1803, and from
time to time during the next six months his correspondence gives us
occasional glimpses of Coleridge's melancholy state. At the end of
December, his health growing steadily worse, he conceived the project
of a voyage to Madeira, and quitted Keswick with the intention, after
paying a short visit to the Wordsworths, of betaking himself to London
to make preparations. His stay at Grasmere, however, was longer than he
had counted on. "He was detained for a month by a severe attack of
illness, induced, if his description is to be relied on, by the use of
narcotics. [2] Unsuspicious of the cause, Mrs. and Miss Wordsworth
nursed him with the tenderest affection, while the poet himself,
usually a parsimonious man, forced upon him, to use Coleridge's own
words, a hundred pounds in the event of his going to Madeira, and his
friend Stuart offered to befriend him." From Grasmere he went to
Liverpool, where he spent a pleasant week with his old Unitarian
friend, Dr. Crompton, and arrived in London at the close of 1803. Here,
however, his plans were changed. Malta was substituted for Madeira, in
response to an invitation from his friend Mr., afterwards Sir John,
Stoddart, then resident as judge in the Mediterranean island. By 12th
March, as we gather from the Southey correspondence, the change of
arrangements had been made. Two days afterwards he receives a letter of
valediction from his "old friend and brother" at Greta Hall, and on 2d
April 1804, he sailed from England in the _Speedwell_, dropping anchor
sixteen days later in Valetta harbour.


FOOTNOTES

1. Were it not for Coleridge's express statement that he first took
opium at Keswick, one would be inclined to attribute the gorgeous but
formless imagery of that poem to the effects of the stimulant. It is
certainly very like a metrical version of one of the pleasant variety
of opium-dreams described in De Quincey's poetic prose.

2. See Miss Meteyard (_A Group of Englishmen_, p. 223). Her evidence,
however, on any point otherwise doubtful in Coleridge's history should
be received with caution, as her estimate of the poet certainly errs
somewhat on the side of excessive harshness.




CHAPTER VI

Stay at Malta--Its injurious effects--Return to England--Meeting with
De Quincey--Residence in London--First series of lectures.

[1806-1809.]


Never was human being destined so sadly and signally to illustrate the
_coelum non animum_ aphorism as the unhappy passenger on the
_Speedwell_. Southey shall describe his condition when he left England;
and his own pathetic lines to William Wordsworth will picture him to us
on his return. "You are in great measure right about Coleridge," writes
the former to his friend Rickman, "he is worse in body than you seem to
believe; but the main cause lies in his own management of himself, or
rather want of management. His mind is in a perpetual St. Vitus's
dance--eternal activity without action. At times he feels mortified
that he should have done so little, but this feeling never produces any
exertion. 'I will begin to-morrow,' he says, and thus he has been all
his lifelong letting to-day slip. He has had no heavy calamities in
life, and so contrives to be miserable about trifles. Poor fellow,
there is no one thing which gives me so much pain as the witnessing
such a waste of unequalled powers." Then, after recalling the case of a
highly promising schoolfellow, who had made shipwreck of his life, and
whom "a few individuals only remember with a sort of horror and
affection, which just serves to make them melancholy whenever they
think of him or mention his name," he adds: "This will not be the case
with Coleridge; the _disjecta membra_ will be found if he does not die
early: but having so much to do, so many errors to weed out of the
world which he is capable of eradicating, if he does die without doing
his work, it would half break my heart, for no human being has had more
talents allotted." Such being his closest friend's account of him, and
knowing, as we now do (what Southey perhaps had no suspicion of at the
time), the chief if not the sole or original cause of his morally
nerveless condition, it is impossible not to feel that he did the worst
possible thing for himself in taking this journey to Malta. In quitting
England he cut himself off from those last possibilities of
self-conquest which the society and counsels of his friends might
otherwise have afforded him, and the consequences were, it is to be
feared, disastrous. After De Quincey's incredibly cool assertion that
it was "notorious that Coleridge began the use of opium, not as a
relief from any bodily pain or nervous irritations, since his
constitution was strong and excellent(!), but as a source of luxurious
sensations," we must receive anything which he has to say on this
particular point with the utmost caution; but there is only too much
plausibility in his statement that, Coleridge being necessarily thrown,
while at Malta, "a good deal upon his own resources in the narrow
society of a garrison, he there confirmed and cherished ... his habit
of taking opium in large quantities." Contrary to his expectations,
moreover, the Maltese climate failed to benefit him. At first, indeed,
he did experience some feeling of relief, but afterwards, according to
Mr. Gillman, he spoke of his rheumatic limbs as "lifeless tools," and
of the "violent pains in his bowels, which neither opium, ether, nor
peppermint combined could relieve."

Occupation, however, was not wanting to him, if occupation could have
availed in the then advanced stage of his case. He early made the
acquaintance of the governor of the island, Sir Alexander Ball, who,
having just lost his secretary by death, requested Coleridge to
undertake that official's duties until his successor should be
appointed. By this arrangement the governor and the public service in
all likelihood profited more than the provisional secretary; for
Coleridge's literary abilities proved very serviceable in the
department of diplomatic correspondence. The dignities of the office,
Mr. Gillman tells us, no doubt on Coleridge's own authority, "he never
attempted to support; he was greatly annoyed at what he thought its
unnecessary parade, and he petitioned Sir Alexander Ball to be relieved
from it." The purely mechanical duties of the post, too, appear to have
troubled him. He complains, in one of the journals which he kept during
this period, of having been "for months past incessantly employed in
official tasks, subscribing, examining, administering oaths, auditing,
etc." On the whole it would seem that the burden of his secretarial
employment, though doubtless it would have been found light enough by
any one accustomed to public business, was rather a weariness to the
flesh than a distraction to the mind; while in the meantime a new
symptom of disorder--a difficulty of breathing, to which he was always
afterwards subject--began to manifest itself in his case. Probably he
was glad enough--relieved, in more than one sense of the word--when, in
the autumn of 1805, the new secretary arrived at Malta to take his
place.

On 27th September Coleridge quitted the island on his homeward journey
_vié_ Italy, stopping for a short time at Syracuse on his way. At
Naples, which he reached on the 15th of December, he made a longer
stay, and in Rome his sojourn lasted some months. Unfortunately, for a
reason which will presently appear, there remains no written record of
his impressions of the Eternal City; and though Mr. Gillman assures us
that the gap is "partly filled by his own verbal account, repeated at
various times to the writer of this memoir," the public of to-day is
only indebted to "the writer of this memoir" for the not very startling
information that Coleridge, "while in Rome, was actively employed in
visiting the great works of art, statues, pictures, buildings, palaces,
etc. etc., observations on which he minuted down for publication." It
is somewhat more interesting to learn that he made the acquaintance of
many literary and artistic notabilities at that time congregated there,
including Tieck, the German poet and novelist, and the American painter
Alston, to whose skill we owe what is reputed to be the best of his
many not easily reconcilable portraits. The loss of his Roman memoranda
was indirectly brought about by a singular incident, his account of
which has met with some undeserved ridicule at the hands of Tory
criticism. When about to quit Rome for England _vié_ Switzerland and
Germany he took the precaution of inquiring of Baron von Humboldt,
brother of the traveller, and then Prussian Minister at the Court of
Rome, whether the proposed route was safe, and was by him informed that
he would do well to keep out of the reach of Bonaparte, who was
meditating the seizure of his person. According to Coleridge, indeed,
an order for his arrest had actually been transmitted to Rome, and he
was only saved from its execution by the connivance of the "good old
Pope," Pius VII., who sent him a passport and counselled his immediate
flight. Hastening to Leghorn, he discovered an American vessel ready to
sail for England, on board of which he embarked. On the voyage she was
chased by a French vessel, which so alarmed the captain that he
compelled Coleridge to throw his papers, including these precious MSS.,
overboard. The wrath of the First Consul against him was supposed to
have been excited by his contributions to the _Morning Post_, an
hypothesis which De Quincey reasonably finds by no means so ridiculous
as it appeared to a certain writer in _Blackwood_, who treated it as
the "very consummation of moonstruck vanity," and compared it to "John
Dennis's frenzy in retreating from the sea-coast under the belief that
Louis XIV. had commissioned commissaries to land on the English shore
and make a dash at his person." It must be remembered, however, that
Mr. Fox, to whose statement on such a point Napoleon would be likely to
attach especial weight, had declared in the House of Commons that the
rupture of the Peace of Amiens had been brought about by certain essays
in the _Morning Post_, and there is certainly no reason to believe that
a tyrant whose animosity against literary or quasi-literary assailants
ranged from Madame de Staël down to the bookseller Palm would have
regarded a man of Coleridge's reputation in letters as beneath the
stoop of his vengeance.

After an absence of two years and a half Coleridge arrived in England
in August 1806. That his then condition of mind and body was a
profoundly miserable one, and that he himself was acutely conscious of
it, will be seen later on in certain extracts from his correspondence;
but his own _Lines to William Wordsworth_--lines "composed on the night
after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual
mind"--contain an even more tragic expression of his state. It was
Wordsworth's pensive retrospect of their earlier years together which
awoke the bitterest pangs of self-reproach in his soul, and wrung from
it the cry which follows:--

  "Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn
   The pulses of my being beat anew:
   And even as life returns upon the drowned,
   Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains--
   Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe
   Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;
   And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope;
   And hope that scarce would know itself from fear;
   Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
   And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;
   And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild,
   And all which patient toil had reared, and all,
   Commune with thee had opened out--but flowers
   Strewn on my corse, and borne upon my bier,
   In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"

A dismal and despairing strain indeed, but the situation unhappily was
not less desperate. We are, in fact, entering upon that period of
Coleridge's life--a period, roughly speaking, of about ten years--which
no admirer of his genius, no lover of English letters, no one, it might
even be said, who wishes to think well of human nature, can ever
contemplate without pain. His history from the day of his landing in
England in August 1806 till the day when he entered Mr. Gillman's house
in 1816 is one long and miserable story of self-indulgence and
self-reproach, of lost opportunities, of neglected duties, of
unfinished undertakings. His movements and his occupation for the first
year after his return are not now traceable with exactitude, but his
time was apparently spent partly in London and partly at Grasmere and
Keswick. When in London, Mr. Stuart, who had now become proprietor of
the _Courier_, allowed him to occupy rooms at the office of that
newspaper to save him expense; and Coleridge, though his regular
connection with the _Courier_ did not begin till some years afterwards,
may possibly have repaid the accommodation by occasional contributions
or by assistance to its editor in some other form. It seems certain, at
any rate, that if he was earning no income in this way he was earning
none at all. His friend and patron, Mr. Thomas Wedgwood, had died while
he was in Malta; but the full pension of £150 per annum bestowed upon
him by the two brothers jointly continued to be paid to him by Josiah,
the senior. Coleridge, however, had landed in England in ignorance of
his patron's death. He had wholly neglected to keep up any
correspondence with the Wedgwoods during his stay in Malta, and though
"dreadfully affected" by it, as Mr. Poole records, he seems to have
allowed nearly a year to elapse before communicating with the surviving
brother. The letter which he then wrote deserves quotation, not only as
testimony to his physical and pecuniary condition on his arrival in
England, but as affording a distressing picture of the morbid state of
his emotions and the enfeebled condition of his will. "As to the
reasons for my silence, they are," he incoherently begins, "impossible,
and the numbers of the _causes_ of it, with the almost weekly
expectation for the last eight months of receiving my books,
manuscripts, etc. from Malta, has been itself a cause of increasing the
procrastination which constant ill health, despondency, domestic
distractions, and embarrassment from accidents, equally unconnected
with my will or conduct" [every cause mentioned, it will be seen, but
the true one], "had already seated deep in my very muscles, as it were.
I do not mean to accuse myself of idleness--I have enough of
self-crimination without adding imaginary articles--but in all things
that affect my moral feelings I have sunk under such a strange
cowardice of pain that I have not unfrequently kept letters from
persons dear to me for weeks together unopened. After a most miserable
passage from Leghorn of fifty-five days, during which my life was twice
given over, I found myself again in my native country, ill, penniless,
and worse than homeless. I had been near a month in the country before
I ventured or could summon courage enough to ask a question concerning
you and yours, and yet God Almighty knows that every hour the thought
had been gnawing at my heart. I then for the first time heard of that
event which sounded like my own knell, without its natural hope or
sense of rest. Such shall I be (is the thought that haunts me), but O!
not such; O! with what a different retrospect! But I owe it to justice
to say, Such good I truly can do myself, etc., etc." The rest of this
painfully inarticulate letter is filled with further complaints of ill
health, with further protestations of irresponsibility for the neglect
of duties, and with promises, never to be fulfilled, of composing or
assisting others to compose a memoir of Thomas Wedgwood, who, in
addition to his general repute as a man of culture, had made a special
mark by his speculations in psychology.

The singular expression, "worse than homeless," and the reference to
domestic distractions, appear to indicate that some estrangement had
already set in between Coleridge and his wife. De Quincey's testimony
to its existence at the time (a month or so later) when he made
Coleridge's acquaintance may, subject to the usual deductions, be
accepted as trustworthy; and, of course, for aught we know, it may then
have been already of some years' standing. That the provocation to it
on the husband's part may be so far antedated is at least a reasonable
conjecture. There may be nothing--in all likelihood there is
nothing--worth attention in De Quincey's gossip about the young lady,
"intellectually very much superior to Mrs. Coleridge, who became a
neighbour and daily companion of Coleridge's walks" at Keswick. But if
there be no foundation for his remarks on "the mischiefs of a situation
which exposed Mrs. Coleridge to an invidious comparison with a more
intellectual person," there is undoubtedly plenty of point in the
immediately following observation that "it was most unfortunate for
Coleridge himself to be continually compared with one so ideally
correct and regular in his habits as Mr. Southey." The passion of
female jealousy assuredly did not need to be called into play to
account for the alienation of Mrs. Coleridge from her husband. Mrs.
Carlyle has left on record her pathetic lament over the fate of a woman
who marries a man of genius; but a man of genius of the coldly selfish
and exacting type of the Chelsea philosopher would probably be a less
severe burden to a woman of housewifely instincts than the weak,
unmethodical, irresolute, shiftless being that Coleridge had by this
time become. After the arrival of the Southeys, Mrs. Coleridge would
indeed have been more than hu

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