English Men of Letters: Coleridge
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H. D. Traill >> English Men of Letters: Coleridge
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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.
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