Coleridge Part 1

Coleridge.

by Samuel Levy Bensusan.

INTRODUCTION

Among the great writers whose activity is a.s.sociated with the closing years of the eighteenth and the opening of the nineteenth centuries, are several who claim more respect than popularity. If they were poets, their works find a place in a thousand libraries, but the dust gathers upon covers long unopened, and only the stray enthusiast removes it.

Southey, Cowper, and Coleridge, for example, are authors of well-nigh universal acceptance, but who, outside the ranks of professed students of poetry, could claim an intimate acquaintance with their work? In _An Anthology of Longer Poems_ published at Oxford two years ago and prepared by two Professors of English Literature, Southey, for all his great gifts, is not represented at all, and William Cowper is responsible for nothing more than the familiar lines to his mother's picture.

Dryden and Alexander Pope, Goldsmith, Gray, Crabbe, and Thomson are little more than names to the most of the generation that has just entered upon its inheritance. Perhaps, if the truth be told, the present-day reading public cannot keep pace with its ever-growing task, and satisfies its conscience by paying to the worthy dead the sacrifice of a small expenditure. In the old time it was hard to gather a modest library, to-day the difficulty lies in selection. The best efforts of a thousand years clamour for a place on our shelves, the material for reading has been multiplied, the capacity for reading remains where it was, if indeed the wonderful growth of claims upon our attention, the quickening of the pace of life, has not reduced our leisure time at the expense of books. Little wonder, then, that in the struggle for a sustained reputation many sound writers fail to hold their own. It is only when we choose one of the poets just named for a course of steady reading and turn to his pages with some knowledge of the life and times which gave them birth, that the dead man becomes a living force, and we find how far his claim to recognition lies outside the scope of a mere convention. Even then the inequalities of thought and style will be painfully apparent. We shall read much that would not have been preserved had the poet written in an age when self-criticism was as strong a force as it is to-day, but there will be no waste of labour if the full extent of his gifts as well as his limitations can be grasped.

It is not safe to accept the "selected works" of any man of mark; a selection can never be quite fair to an author.

Of all the men whose work was completed between the middle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there are few, if any, whose life is of more interest to the psychologist, the student of transcendentalism, and the lover of fine thought, than that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the subject of this brief study. He was compact of remarkable strength and fatal weakness, of rare attainments and incomplete achievement, of courage and cowardice, of energy and laziness, of reason and unreason, of airy wit and solid wisdom. Look upon one side of his life and accomplishment and you are lost in wonder and admiration, look upon the other and there is food for little but pity and regret. Modern teaching has revealed the narrowness of the boundary between genius and insanity, and, in the light of this knowledge, we see that Coleridge was neither wholly a genius nor wholly sane, though he approached either condition very nearly at different periods of his troubled life. We would hesitate to-day to condemn him with the severity and fluency shown by his contemporaries--by Thomas de Quincey and William Hazlitt, for example.

Perhaps the first thought to which a study of his life and work gives birth is the nearest to the truth, the thought that he was singularly unfitted to cope with life as he found it, that he was essentially a man of thought rather than of action. He was never strong enough to bear the thousand ills that writing man is heir to. He lacked courage, method, order; one might add that he lacked diligence, but for the knowledge that no man can move in advance of his inspiration if he would be just to himself. Even though his pen was idle his brain was ever active; his failure lay in lack of will-power to do full justice to its activity.

Wordsworth, his contemporary and friend, had far better fortune; life offered his notable virtues every a.s.sistance. An early legacy, a small patrimony that arrived late, but not too late, appointment to one or two posts hardly to be regarded as anything other than sinecures, a government pension in his closing years, a splendid const.i.tution, a fortunate marriage, colossal strength of purpose: all these gifts smoothed the rugged road of the greater man; to Coleridge the fates were adverse. He had at best a great but ill-balanced mind, to which philosophy made the first appeal. A shrewd practical man with half his attainments could have turned them to better advantage. His health was never really robust, and he suffered from the fatal sickness of self-pity. He accepted the charity of friends and asked for more; though he seems to have had few personal extravagances, the income that kept his friends, William, Mary, and Dorothy Wordsworth, free from financial strain, would not have been enough for his support. None of his biographers has discovered what he did with his money on the rare occasions when it was plentiful; there is ample reason to believe that he would have been equally puzzled to make out a balance-sheet. But, while his private life was beset by all manner of difficulties, while his private letters reveal too frequently an utter absence of personal dignity, his public utterances and the "table-talk" recorded by his nephew stand on a very high plane. Every cla.s.s of cultivated man and woman was content to be silent when Coleridge was speaking; there was seemingly but one matter that the keen clear brain could neither grapple with nor control, and this was the conduct of his own life. Where he himself was not concerned, his wisdom and insight were remarkable, his natural gifts, splendidly cultivated in youth, had been reinforced by prolonged study as a man. His table-talk was fuller than most men's laboured essays, his lectures, even if delivered extempore, could charm an audience of scholars, and his published work, whether in prose or verse, is an enduring monument, not likely to be hard worn by the attentions of the mult.i.tude. Had his lines been cast in more pleasant places, had he married a woman strong enough to direct and guide him, had he been spared his pains and the unfortunate remedy by which he sought to lull them, there seems to be no height to which he might not have risen, no goal to which he might not have attained. We may not judge him save in all charity and kindness, for we know that his faults brought their own punishment in full measure and, apart from this, the lines he wrote a few years before he died seem to arrest the fault finder.

"Frail creatures are we all! To be the best, Is but the fewest faults to have.-- Look Thou then to thyself, and leave the rest To G.o.d, thy conscience, and the grave."

Few of his contemporaries spoke or wrote harshly of Coleridge. Lamb and Wordsworth loved him, despite occasional and regrettable misunderstandings. He collaborated with Wordsworth in the _Lyrical Ballads_ and with Southey in _The Fall of Robespierre_, a three-act drama of which the last-named poet wrote the second act. There were few who were not happy in his brief fortunes or without sympathy in the long-drawn period of his trouble and pain, while all who came within the charmed circle of his personality delighted in his company and sought it eagerly. Judged by ordinary standards, his life-work would provide a monument for any man whose attainments fall short of absolute genius, and perhaps they have been most severe who realise how nothing more than order and self-control kept Coleridge from the very highest rank. They are jealous for his gifts, they feel that he hid his light under a bushel. For the most of us it will suffice that the poet's utterances are melodious, inspiring, and finely wrought, that he himself was a greatly suffering man who fought desperately and at last successfully against his own worst failings. Even as he arrests our imagination he claims our sympathy, which we give the more gladly because he would have welcomed it. Not only did he ask for merciful judgment while he was alive, but appealed for it when life should have pa.s.sed. Few who have read even a t.i.the of what he wrote will grudge a little tribute to his memory, while those who study Coleridge become his debtors, and realise that he played no insignificant part in moulding some aspects of nineteenth-century thought and faith.

CHAPTER I

EARLY YEARS

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest of the nine sons of the Rev.

John Coleridge, Vicar of Ottery St. Mary in Devons.h.i.+re and Chaplain-Priest as well as Master of King's School, a Free Grammar School founded by King Henry VIII, who suppressed and replaced a long-standing monastic inst.i.tution in the town. The Rev. John Coleridge, who was twice married, was the father of three daughters by his first wife and ten children by the second. He was the son of a trader in woollen goods who suffered serious financial losses when John was a boy, and the lad owed his Cambridge education to the generosity of a friend of the family. He married young, and kept a school at Southampton until his first wife died and he had married again. Then he obtained the living and masters.h.i.+p at Ottery St. Mary. Of his nine sons the youngest was destined to be the most distinguished, but James, who was born twelve years before Samuel Taylor, became the father of one Judge of the High Court, the grandfather of Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, and great-grandfather of the present Judge. The Vicar was a man of letters, who published several long-forgotten books by subscription, and was noted, to quote his youngest son's description, for "learning, good-heartedness, absentness of mind, and excessive ignorance of the world." It would not be hard to find all these qualities reproduced in the poet himself; they are of the kind that need a country school-house or vicarage for their home if they are not to be the cause of grave trouble to their possessor. From the very early days Sam, as his family called the future poet and philosopher, was a strange, precocious and unhappy child. Perhaps our modern ideas are shocked at the thought that he was sent to school at the age of three years. Should the twentieth-century theories be correct, such a brain as his would have been far healthier if the stage of happy ignorance had been extended until he was at least twice as old. Spoiled by his parents, the share of attentions he received from them provoked, naturally enough, the jealousy and resentment of his brothers and sisters, while his strange ways made him the unhappy b.u.t.t of his school-fellows. Small wonder if, when he described his early childhood in the latter days, he had but a sorry tale to tell. Compared with his friends Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth, Coleridge was an unhappy boy.

Nervous, self-conscious, and irritable, he took no pleasure in outdoor games, and at the earliest possible age was busy with books. With their aid he lived in a world of his own, a world peopled with the heroes and heroines who dwell between book covers. By the time he was six years of age he had read the _Arabian Nights' Entertainments_, and though it was certainly an abridged version in a single volume, there is no doubt that it must have provided a powerful and unhealthy stimulant to an imagination already far too active. Happily his father found that these books were dangerous to his youngest born, and destroyed them.

The boy entered the grammar school, where he speedily pa.s.sed all the other lads of his age. For the next three years the life at Ottery St.

Mary continued in the seemingly peaceful fas.h.i.+on that was in reality so harmful. The little lad was disliked by his school-fellows and flattered and petted by his elders. His father took him seriously enough to pave the way, by a series of discourses, for the service of the Church. His mother's friends delighted in exhibitions of his precocity. His temper, sometimes sullen and perverse, showed itself disastrously on one occasion, when he ran away from home to avoid some punishment, doubtless well earned, and slept all night by the banks of the river that gives its name to his home. He woke so exhausted that his rescuer was obliged to carry him home. To this escapade he attributed the fits of ague to which he was subject for many following years.

It is worth remarking in this place that for all the boy's undoubted precocity, the beauty of the scenes in which the first decade of his life was set seem to have left little or no impression. Had Coleridge been a lover of the country for its own sake, he must have been at least as deeply impressed by the all-pervading charm of Ottery St. Mary as his friend Wordsworth was by Hawkshead. For Ottery has beauty and history in plenty with which to reward the visitor or resident; its romance travels far away into the first twilight of legendry. In later years, of which the historical record is safe, the Manor of Ottery was granted by King Edward the Confessor to the Cathedral Church of Rouen. The poet might have seen as a child the royal arms of England and France on the stone scutcheons above the church altar, with the armorial bearings of several distinguished Devon families to bear them company. In the reign of Edward III, the head of one of these families, John de Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter, bought the manor and advowson of Ottery and established there the college of Monks. This was dissolved by Henry VIII, who made the college over to a corporation of four governors, and established the "King's New Grammar School," a building whose irregular roof is still a feature of the landscape. Here the Rev. John Coleridge was master and his son pupil. At Hayes Farm, close by, Sir Walter Raleigh was born; the family pew is to be seen in the parish church of East Budleigh.

When Coleridge was a young man, the house of Raleigh in Ottery St. Mary was still standing; it was burnt down in the year of Trafalgar. He does not mention it, he does not even tell us of the wonderful orchards in the valley of the Otter, perhaps the most outstanding feature of the country in which his earliest years were pa.s.sed. They say that these orchards are the more remarkable because mistletoe will not grow round the trees, the Druids having laid all Devons.h.i.+re under a ban! The Valley of the Otter is a district no country lover could forget. The river, swift, though narrow, runs sparkling over many-coloured soil--Coleridge recalls this single feature in his Sonnet on the Otter. It separates the chalk flint and red marls of Ottery East Hill from the heather-clad black earth of West Hill, and makes a clean division between the plant growths on one side of its banks and those on the other. The high peaks of Dartmoor can be seen from either hill. In the valleys, while summer lasts, the red Devon kine stand amid luxuriant gra.s.ses which rise to their dewlaps. We are told that the transceptal towers of St. Mary's Church at Ottery inspired Bishop Quivil when he planned Exeter Cathedral. St. Mary's dominates the little town and adds to the perennial air of peace and seclusion that breathes over it. Coleridge might have made Ottery St. Mary immortal, but he did little more than write his well-remembered sonnet and a short ode inspired by the "Pixies' Parlour," a cave in the red sandstone cliffs below the town.

The curious may still find "S.T.C. 1789" carved on the soft stones. If the valley of the Otter was not able to impress the early years of the poet, it is hardly surprising that neither Somersets.h.i.+re nor Westmorland should succeed where Devons.h.i.+re failed. The failure adds to the clear proof that Coleridge was at heart a philosopher, a student of life, faith, reason, and the immortality of the soul, but withal a man who was seldom or never on intimate terms with his immediate surroundings.

The Rev. John Coleridge pa.s.sed away, beloved by his pupils and paris.h.i.+oners, when his son Samuel Taylor was but nine years old, and within a year the efforts of friends had resulted in obtaining for the lad a presentation to Christ's Hospital.

His period in the junior school in Hertfords.h.i.+re was brief, and apparently quite uneventful. Before he was ten years old "the poor friendless boy" of Elia's famous essay was "in the great city pent, mid cloisters dim," and his apprentices.h.i.+p to learning in the famous foundation that has now been removed from Newgate Street to the beautiful Suss.e.x country near Horsham lasted for nine years, in the first seven of which he seems to have seen nothing of his Devons.h.i.+re home.

One would hesitate to say, despite the hards.h.i.+ps of boarding-school life a century or more ago, that the poet would have been better off anywhere else. He recognised in later years the advantages of his training.

Firmly, even brutally disciplined, his master in the upper school was Boyer, of whose severity Lamb and others have written unsparingly.

Coleridge was thoroughly well grounded; he mastered the elementary rules of poetic expression, his eccentricities were repressed, his departures from law, order, and rule firmly punished. For one whose mind was ill-governed, in whom the newest idea found an immediate and devoted adherent, strong rule was the first essential of development. He pa.s.sed through many phases; cobbling, medicine, and metaphysics attracted him in turn, and Boyer gladly provided an effective antidote for the virus of each. Lamb bears generous witness to his companion's budding talent, and we know that he made and kept friends, that there was something about his personality that was eminently attractive and led people to pardon in him what they would have condemned in others. A foolish escapade on the New River resulted in nearly a year's illness, and left him very weak, indeed throughout life he was never robust, but the troubles that affected his body did nothing to stunt his intellectual growth. The poet in him awoke, perhaps called to life by Mary Evans, eldest sister of a school-fellow whom he had befriended and who gratefully introduced him to his family. Mary Evans undoubtedly inspired much of his earliest, and comparatively feeble, verse. The sonnets of Bowles, who then had a following and a reputation, were another force in the making of the Coleridge we love and admire. Reading the detailed story of his life, we may note that, in the brief and simple relations with Mary Evans, Coleridge acted as though he had no definite control over his own impulses. Some of the correspondence has been preserved, and it is hard to escape the impression that while the poet was quite serious in his protestations, he exaggerated with true poetic licence the depth and permanency of his regard.

In January 1791, the Almoners of Christ's Hospital appointed Coleridge to an Exhibition at Jesus College, Cambridge, with the idea that the school's promising pupil would pa.s.s from the University to the Church.

He left Newgate Street in the September following, and entered the University a month later, intervening weeks being spent, in all probability, in Devons.h.i.+re.

We find him now at the parting of the ways, the wholesome bonds of discipline relaxing, a measure of liberty before him of a kind to which he had been a stranger hitherto, and one is inclined to think that he was absolutely unfitted to stand alone or to be his own master, even within the limits imposed upon the Cambridge undergraduate. His brilliant intellect was not a.s.sociated with sound common sense, the conventions and restriction of normal life were things he would not trouble about, his mind, daring and speculative, was never at rest, he stood desperately in need of some steadying influence of a kind that never came to him. The newest thought could carry him away, he cared not whither. Like many another brilliant man, Coleridge needed direction and discipline long after the time when the convention of the world seeks to enforce either. We cannot see whence the force was to come, but we must realise how greatly it was needed. Coleridge was too clever for the ranks to which he was accredited; his gifts were of the uneasy kind that can find no rest. Some men of similar temperament can settle down after a brief struggle; they bridle themselves, hide their light, bow to the world above them, and prosper. To Coleridge such a method of living would have seemed immoral, far more immoral than his own s.h.i.+fting, haphazard and unhappy career. He was always the slave of his own moral ideas, his weaknesses were a tribute to the sick and ailing body; to his judgment, his moral consciousness, he acted with most rigorous honesty, even to his own detriment.

When Coleridge went to Jesus College, the month was October; he became a pensioner in November, and matriculated in the following month. From 1792 he would have been in receipt of 40 per annum from his old school, and between 1792-4 he held one of the Rustat scholars.h.i.+ps belonging to Jesus College and given only to sons of clergymen. In the year last named he became a Foundation scholar. For the first twelve months, while the recollection of Christ's Hospital discipline was perhaps still keen within him, and his friend Middleton was at Pembroke College, he worked diligently and gained his first award, the Browne Gold Medal. He competed for the Craven Scholars.h.i.+p, which fell to Samuel Butler, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield. By the following year Middleton had left the University and Coleridge was beginning to lose his head and find his powers. He a.s.sociated himself with the most progressive and radical spirits in his College, and the authorities looked askance at him. But he paid little heed to such a trifle as the dissatisfaction of tutors.

The centre of a large and admiring circle that clamoured to hear his political opinions, his latest poem, or his favourite recitation, he seemed to realise that he could hold an audience and lead opinion. Debts began to acc.u.mulate; he was indeed destined for the greater part of his life to owe more than he could pay. His suit with Mary Evans was not prospering; he tried to set himself right financially by speculating in a lottery, and, when that failed him, left Cambridge, the first of the long series of sudden departures from accustomed haunts that was to be a prominent feature in his career. A fortnight later he had become Silas Tomkyn Comberbach of the King's Light Dragoons. The new and popular recruit, who repaid his companions for doing his share of the common drudgery by writing their love-letters for them, soon found that under the most favourable conditions soldiering was not to his taste. He could not sit a horse, he could not even groom one, and it was not very long before his ident.i.ty was revealed to an officer through the medium of some lines in Latin written in chalk on a wall. His elder brother, Captain James Coleridge, procured his discharge in the following April, when the Master and Fellows of Jesus readmitted him, much to the surprise of his friends. That the authorities were ready and willing to give him every chance is sufficient proof that his capacities and his personality alike pleaded powerfully in his defence.

A few months later he was on a visit to Oxford, where he met Robert Southey, his future brother-in-law, and they talked of Pantisocracy. In his _Christian Life_, Peter Bayne speaks of the days "when Coleridge and Southey were building, of cloud and moonbeam, their notable fabric of Pantisocracy, the government of all by all." The idea was just suited to the hare-brained poets. Twelve men, each armed with 125, were to leave England in the company of twelve women, for one of the back settlements of America, there to establish a Utopia of their own. A few hours' work a day from each would suffice, they thought, for the needs of all.

Political and religious opinions were to be free, and the question of the validity of the marriage contract was left open. Needless perhaps to add that neither the industrious Southey nor his erratic friend had 125, but the former hoped to raise the amount from the sale of _Joan of Arc_ and other of his early work, while Coleridge proposed to publish by subscription a volume of _Imitations from the Modern Latin Poets_. Like so many of the volumes he intended to write, this one was never written, though he had all the scholars.h.i.+p necessary to bring a venture of the kind to a successful issue. Southey and Coleridge met a little later in Bristol and went into Somersets.h.i.+re, where they were joined by Burnett and Thomas Poole. Of these two men the latter was to play an important part in the life-story of Coleridge.

A little later the young poet had recovered sufficiently from his overmastering attachment to Mary Evans to become engaged to Sarah Fricker, Southey's sister-in-law. He collaborated with the future laureate in a rapidly written dramatic poem, _The Fall of Robespierre_, which he dedicated to Mr. Martin of Jesus College, without any reference to Southey's considerable part in it. The enthusiasm for Pantisocracy was short-lived; in a few months its originators had dropped the scheme, though it was to be revived later. Coleridge went back to Cambridge, and left suddenly in the December of 1794 without taking his degree. The reasons for this step have never been revealed; some think that he left on account of debt, others think the cause must have been some further breach of discipline. His career at Jesus had been brief and unsatisfactory, and he was soon dropped by the College authorities and the Committee of Christ's Hospital. Whatever their private views of his ability, they could no longer remain indifferent to his irregular life, his inability to settle down and work, the dangerous results of too much tolerance in an inst.i.tution that must control its scholars or cease to exist. On the other hand, Coleridge could not respond to order and discipline. He was not like other men; of him it might be truly said in the words of the Patriarch, "unstable as water, thou shalt not excel."

The period of wandering trouble and unrest had begun; it was to continue until, the greater part of his life and life's-work accomplished, he found a hospitable asylum at Highgate. It cannot be supposed that Cambridge was in any degree responsible for what happened within the walls of Jesus College or in the world beyond. The erratic disposition was with Coleridge as a little boy. Christ's Hospital subdued but did not eradicate it, Jesus College gave it an atmosphere of limited freedom in which to blossom and bud until the college boundaries were no longer wide enough to contain such an errant spirit.

CHAPTER II

IN SEARCH OF THE IDEAL

When Coleridge left the University he had entered his twenty-third year; he had rather more than forty before him, but, as the two preceding years had been, so were the most of those that followed. Trouble, largely if not altogether of his own making, anxiety, comparative poverty, ill-health, these were the shadows that darkened his days. For him life was a problem with which he could not grapple; although he had a giant's strength he did not know how to use it. He was master of a rare and exquisite gift, but it did not avail him. Other men, with a t.i.the of his talent and the full capacity for living a well-ordered life, could earn a comfortable competence, acquire honour and command respect, while Coleridge, who was in so many respects their master, drifted across the wide waters of life, a s.h.i.+p without a rudder. We need not criticise, we can better pity a man who, greatly gifted, could not raise his head among his contemporaries. Had some stern disciplinarian stood behind him at Cambridge he might have achieved distinction; had he married a strong resolute woman she might have taught him regular industry and self-respect. But in all the important actions of his life the mood of the moment was the deciding factor, so that, despite the number of his friends, there was none to help. Coleridge was almost a genius, and quite a law to himself. Such happiness as came to him was found chiefly in intercourse with kindred spirits, in grappling with metaphysical problems, in refuting the current errors of philosophy, and above all in the kindness and generosity of friends. Woe to the man who accepts help from others! Once he has done this he stands for ever on a lower plane, his life is no longer his own, he can no longer say, "I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul." It was the misfortune of Coleridge to receive a.s.sistance in those critical hours when a man must stand alone, though it be but in a garret with no more food and clothing than will serve for the necessities of life. There are few brilliant exceptions to the sweeping rule that forbids self-respecting men to receive doles. Horace and Virgil are notable among them, but the rule stands, even while we remember that both Martial and Juvenal declared that the protection of prince or patron offers the only chance to poetry. With Coleridge there was less excuse than the poet may claim, for he could always command a living wage in journalism. The trouble with him was not to get money for his work, but to give work in return for other people's money.

From Cambridge the poet drifted to London, journalism, and the delightful company of Charles Lamb. He wrote sonnets for the _Morning Chronicle_, and took his gla.s.s and pipe with Elia in long-forgotten taverns until Southey hunted him up and carried him back to Bristol and Sarah Fricker, to Pantisocracy and lecturing and the company of Burnett, with whom both Coleridge and Southey lived in College Street. In 1796 Cottle, the Bristol publisher, paid Coleridge thirty guineas for poems, including the "Monody on the Death of Chatterton" and "Religious Musings." Southey lost faith in Pantisocracy and went to live with his mother. Coleridge lost faith in Southey, the friends quarrelled, and for some time were not on speaking or writing terms. Cottle, who had a sure eye for promising work, offered to buy all the verse Coleridge could write at the price of one and a half guineas per hundred lines, and on the strength of this, Coleridge married Sarah Fricker in October 1795, and settled in a little cottage at Clevedon near Bristol, in company with Burnett and another of Sarah's sisters. The men shared in the labour of the house, but it was too far from town to serve for purposes of work in days when the circulating library was still unknown, and, early in their married life, Mr. and Mrs. Coleridge moved to Redcliffe Hill. There Coleridge decided to start a paper called _The Watchman_, to be published on every eighth day, and he has left on record an account of his northern pilgrimage in search of subscribers. He found enough to justify publication; the paper lived to reach its tenth number, when it departed from life, leaving its editor-proprietor stranded, though his _Poems on Various Subjects_, with additions by Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Mr. Favell, had been published in March by Cottle, and had been favourably received. Thomas Poole, as good a friend as ever poet had, came to the rescue with forty pounds, and Coleridge spent a happy fortnight at Nether Stowey; with him, as soon as a trouble was over it could be forgotten. But something had to be done; negotiations for the post of co-editor of the _Morning Chronicle_ were opened, and fell through. Following this came another plan, to educate the children of a wealthy Derbys.h.i.+re lady, who changed her mind at the eleventh hour, giving the poet 95, and his wife a welcome gift of baby linen instead.

In the meantime the prodigal son had visited Ottery St. Mary and been reconciled to his family. Proposals to establish a school in Derby came to nothing, and there is matter for regret here, for the poet would have made an admirable schoolmaster. In September his responsibilities were increased by the arrival of David Hartley Coleridge, born while the poet was on a visit to the Lloyds. Charles Lloyd, an epilept, was anxious to live with him, and Coleridge wished to rent a house near Nether Stowey that he might be near his friend Poole. After much search a cottage was found.

By this time, the poet had begun to suffer from severe neuralgia, and had started to dose himself with laudanum for its cure. With his usual optimism in hours of change, the future was clear to him. "My farm will be a garden of an acre and a half," he writes to "Citizen" Thelwall, "in which I intend to raise vegetables and corn for my wife, and feed a couple of grunting and snouted cousins from the refuse. My evenings I shall devote to literature, and by reviews in the _Monthly Magazine_ and other s.h.i.+lling scavengering, shall probably gain 40 a year--which economy and self-denial, gold beaters, shall hammer till it covers my annual expenses." Well might Lamb write--"What does your wors.h.i.+p know about farming?" More than a hundred years have pa.s.sed since Coleridge took the little cottage of which the garden met Poole's, but successive generations of literary men and poets have shared his strange belief that anybody can go on the land and make it yield its fruits in due season. That farming demands a strenuous apprentices.h.i.+p and sound judgment, if it is not to fail altogether to yield any harvest save debt, that appreciation of country life does not carry knowledge with it, these are truths which the majority of men of letters decline to admit.

A second edition of his poems, with additions by Charles Lloyd as well as Lamb, produced twenty guineas from Cottle, and the poet settled to learn the rudiments of agriculture from Thomas Poole, and to train Charles Lloyd in the way he should go. Then he went on a visit to the Wordsworths, who were first at Racedown and later at Alfoxden House. An offer from Sheridan to consider a play for Drury Lane led to the writing of _Osorio_. Charles Lamb came to Nether Stowey, and so too did William and Dorothy Wordsworth and "Citizen" John Thelwall, with whom Coleridge kept up such a lively correspondence. This visit brought about the Wordsworths' departure from Alfoxden House, for the "Citizen," rather an undesirable person at best, was a political suspect, and a nervous government sent a spy down to Nether Stowey to find what company he kept. But in spite of "those gold beaters, economy and self-denial," the poet's poor exchequer was by no means equal to the demands made upon it by his unsettled mode of living. He received a fresh subscription from friends, urged to contribute by Thomas Poole, and declared that this would be the last subsidy he would be free to accept. Doubtless he thought so; at no period of his life had Coleridge the slightest idea of the value of money, the expense of living, or the probable fate of his own best intentions. One traces in him a faint likeness to Wilkins Micawber. With the later months of 1797, he visited Bowles, whose sonnets had appealed so greatly to him, and learned that Sheridan had rejected _Osorio_. Relations with Charles Lloyd no longer remained as they had been, and it may be that his contribution to the family exchequer at Nether Stowey was not maintained. But for all the troubles and trials of the year it is a notable one in the annals of British poetry, for on November 13 Coleridge set out with William and Dorothy Wordsworth on a walking tour of which the expense was to be defrayed by a joint composition. Wordsworth for once was not equal to the task, and Coleridge began the poem by which he is best known, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." His own description of it as "inimitable" does not seem extravagant. Begun in the course of the memorable walk, it was finished in the following March, though there were further alterations as subsequent editions of collected poems appeared. The beginning of "Christabel" belongs apparently to 1797.

The opening of 1798 brought some good fortune in its train. Coleridge had been about to accept a call to the Unitarian Chapel at Shrewsbury, and had already given a taste of his quality in the pulpit, when Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood, sons of the famous potter, sought to keep him from burying his gifts. They understood that the need of cash rather than the claims of faith were responsible for his new departure. A present for his immediate needs the poet returned, and then came a remarkable letter from Josiah Wedgwood offering in his own and his brother's name to pay Coleridge 150 a year, the amount of his promised stipend from the Chapel, if he would turn from the work of the preacher and devote himself to poetry and philosophy. No further conditions were attached to this munificent offer, which was to last for life and to be independent of everything but the wreck of the brothers' fortunes. Coleridge was staying with William Hazlitt, at the house of the latter's father near Shrewsbury, when the letter from Josiah Wedgwood was received, and the essayist has set down the story in one of his papers. The poet accepted the offer, a very fortunate one, considering the ever-changing nature of his faith, and Unitarianism found some other advocate. About the same time came an invitation from the _Morning Post_, which would have brought in another fifty pounds a year, so that, had Coleridge been able to take the fullest advantage of his opportunities, financial anxieties might have come to an end. Doubtless his good fortune inspired him to some fine efforts in 1798, but he was nervous and hyper-sensitive, his quarrel with Charles Lloyd had affected his spirits, he retired to a Devons.h.i.+re farm-house to indulge in seclusion and opium and write the fragmentary "Kubla Khan." Through Charles Lloyd came a misunderstanding, happily brief, with Charles Lamb. Other happenings in 1798 were the birth of a second son, the short-lived Berkeley Coleridge; the publication, anonymously, of _Lyrical Ballads with a few other Poems_, joint effort of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and the trip with William and Mary Wordsworth and a friend from Stowey (John Chester by name) to Germany, a journey described in part by Coleridge in _Satyrane's Letters_.

Coleridge left the Wordsworths after a brief stay, and went to Ratzburg with Chester, while the brother and sister went to Goslar. From Ratzburg, Coleridge went to Gottingen, where he matriculated and collected material for a _Life of Lessing_. He seems to have worked hard in Germany, where his taste for abstruse metaphysical speculation was greatly strengthened.

Before he left Gottingen for London, he had learned the sad news of the death of his youngest child, and with the return to the metropolis, we come to another chapter in the poet's life. It will be seen that the generosity of the brothers Wedgwood had stimulated him to an increased effort, though at the moment when he might have pulled himself together and was honestly trying to do so, the opium habit began to hold him. The current of his life could not run smoothly; he at least was "born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward." The best that can be said is that the visit to Germany, and the brief period of honest study, did much to develop the poet's mind, opening to it unknown fields of German thought, and filling him with dreams of great works that were to unite German and British philosophers. Needless to say that, though mountains were expected to arise, little more than a molehill was forthcoming.

CHAPTER III

IN THE LAKE COUNTRY AND AT MALTA

A reconciliation between Southey and Coleridge marked the return of the latter to Stowey, where Mr. and Mrs. Southey came on a visit of some weeks. Following this Coleridge took his wife to Ottery St. Mary and joined the family circle for a month. In October he stayed with the Wordsworths at Sockburn-on-Tees, in the house of Mrs. Wordsworth's parents, and was with John and William Wordsworth when they lighted on the old inn that was to become Dove Cottage, the home of William Wordsworth during the period of his most fruitful labours, and in these latter days a centre of pilgrimage. By the end of the year Coleridge was in London again, living at 21 Buckingham Street in the Strand, and writing for the _Morning Post_. The a.s.sociation was a lengthy one, but it was not always pleasant, and it gave rise to controversy during the poet's life and when he was dead. Coleridge said in after years that Stuart had offered him a partners.h.i.+p and that he had declined it on the ground that any income in excess of five pounds a week was an evil.

Coleridge may have said this, and doubtless believed what he said; we have seen that he was quite unable to deal authoritatively with financial matters. It is fair to say that the poet had few if any of the qualities that are demanded for daily journalism, in which a man must be safe and reliable. If he be brilliant, so much the better for those who employ him, but brilliance is not to be compared with punctuality in a newspaper office. Coleridge declared that he "wasted the prime and manhood of his intellect" on the _Morning Post_ and the _Courier_; but latter-day judgment, while acknowledging the high quality of some of his journalistic work, cannot accept the statement, which is yet another example of poetic licence. Modern Fleet Street does not treat erratic contributors as patiently or liberally as Stuart treated Coleridge; the rapid march of events and the stress of compet.i.tion alike forbid.