Coleridge the Talker: A Series of Contemporary Descriptions and Comments 9781501741067

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SARAH FLOWER ADAMS 1805-1848 Sarah Flower Adams was the daughter of Benjamin Flower, who published The Fall of Robespierre, and in 1796 printed Coleridge's “Ode on the Departing Year" in the Cambridge Intelligencer, of which he was editor. She was the wife of William Bridges Adams, the inventor of numerous devices for the early railroad. Among her lit¬ erary works were poems on social and political subjects, many of them for the Anti-Corn Law League, a dramatic poem, Vivia Perpetua, and the famous hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee the original music of which was composed by her talented sister Eliza. Coleridge she saw but once, at Charles Lamb's, at a time that cannot be exactly determined. Her recollections of the meeting appeared in the Monthly Repository soon after the poet's death. Coleridge and Lamb compared: •

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COLERIDGE, with his clear, calm, blue eyes and expansive forehead,—his sweet, child-like, unruffled expression of face,— his painful voice, which, in spite of all the beauties and treasures it was the means of bringing to you, had yet such an expression in its tone of long suffering and patient endurance, as at first to prevent the sensation excited by his extraordinary power of conversation being one of perfect enjoyment. I had heard much of this power, but no description, however vivid, could give an idea of the uninterrupted outpouring of poetry in the spoken prose that streamed from his lips. It was a realization of the fairy tale of the enchanted child; he never opened his mouth but out came a precious gem, a pearl beyond all price, which all around gathered up to hoard in the cabinet of their memories. . . . There was an equal amount of difference in his [Lamb’s] conversation from that of Coleridge, as there was in his person. IOI

Contemporary Descriptions It was not one uninterrupted flow, but a periodical production of sentences, short, telling, full of wit, philosophy, at times slightly caustic, though that is too strong a word for satire which was of the most good-natured kind. There was another essential point of difference. In Coleridge might be detected a certain consciousness of being listened to, and at times an evident getting up of phrases, a habit almost impossible to be avoided in a prac¬ tised conversationalist. In Charles Lamb there was a perfect absence of this; all that he said was choice in its humour, true in its philosophy; but the racy freshness, that was like an atmos¬ phere of country air about it, was better than all; the perfect simplicity, absence of all conceit, child-like enjoyment of his own wit, and the sweetness and benevolence that played about the rugged face, gave to it a charm in no way inferior to the poetical enjoyment derived from the more popular conversation of his friend. Another difference might be observed; that Coleridge’s metaphysics seemed based in the study of his own individual nature more than the nature of others, while Charles Lamb seemed not for a moment to rest on self, but to throw his whole soul into

the nature of circumstances

and

things around

him. . . . Coleridge, on the evening in question, spoke of death with fear; not from the dread of punishment, not from the shrinking from physical pain, but he said he had a horror lest, after the attempt to “shuffle off this mortal coil,” he should yet “be thrown back upon himself.” Charles Lamb kept silence, and looked sceptical; and, after a pause, said suddenly, “One of the things that made me question the particular inspiration they ascribed to Jesus Christ, was his ignorance of the character of Judas Iscariot. Why did not he and his disciples kick him out for a rascal, instead of receiving him as a disciple?” Coleridge smiled very quietly, and then spoke of some person (name forgotten) who had been making a comparison between himself and Wordsworth as to their religious faith. “They said, although I was an atheist, we were upon a par, for that Wordsworth’s Christianity was very like Coleridge’s atheism; and Coleridge’s atheism was very like 102

Sarah Flower Adams Wordsworth’s Christianity.” After some time he moved round the room to read the different engravings that hung upon the walls. One, over the mantel-piece, especially interested his fancy. There were only two figures in the picture, both women. One was of a lofty, commanding stature, with a high intellectual brow, and of an abbess-like deportment. She was standing in grave majesty, with the finger uplifted, in act of monition to a young girl beside her. The face was in profile, and somewhat severe in its expression; but this was relieved by the richness and grace of the draperies in which she was profusely enveloped. The girl was in the earliest and freshest spring of youth, lovely and bright, with a somewhat careless and inconsiderate air, and she seemed but half inclined to heed the sage advice of her elder companion. She held in her hand a rose, with which she was toying, and had she been alive you would have expected momen¬ tarily to see it taken between the taper fingers, and scattered in wilful profusion. Coleridge uttered an expression of admiration, and then, as if talking to himself, apostrophized in some such words as these: “There she stands, with the world all before her: to her it is as a fairy dream, a vision of unmingled joy. To her it is as is that lovely flower, which woos her by its bright hue and fragrant perfume. Poor child! must thou too be reminded of the thorns that lurk beneath? Turn thee to thy monitress! she bids thee clasp not too closely pleasures that lure but to wound thee. Look into her eloquent eyes; listen to her pleading voice; her words are words of wisdom; garner them up in thy heart; and when the evil days come, the days in which thou shalt say ‘I find no pleasure in them,’ remember her as thus she stood, and, with uppointing finger, bade thee think of the delights of heaven— that heaven which is ever ready to receive the returning wan¬ derer to its rest.” 1

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Contemporary Descriptions

FRANCES ALLEN 1781-1875 Frances or Fanny Allen, as she was better known, was a sister-in-law of Josiah Wedgwood. Tom Wedgwood and Coleridge went together into South Wales in the autumn of 1802 and stayed for some time at the country house of John Bartlett Allen, her father. They arrived “a few days after” November 16, and stayed for about a month. At that time Fanny was 21 years old. According to Tom Wedgwood’s biographer, “She . . . was known to the multitudinous WedgwoodAllen-Darwin cousinhood of the next two generations as one of the cleverest and most entertaining of old ladies. Her talk, like her letters, was full of piquancy and point, and in the early bloom of twenty-one she must have been a very attractive creature. ... In her old age, sixty-nine years later, she dictated to her niece, Elizabeth Wedgwood, a few sentences of ‘Recollections of Tom Wedgwood.’ ” 1 Of days with Coleridge and Tom Wedgwood at Crescelly, in the autumn of 1802: ONE DAY at Crescelly Mr. Coleridge was saying something about the Ten Commandments which T. W. thought would shock Mr. Allen, and he tapped him [Coleridge] on the arm and took him out of the room and stopped him. . . . Another day at Crescelly, Coleridge, who was fond of reading MS. poems of Wordsworth’s, asked Fanny whether she liked poetry, and when she said she did, came and sat by her on the sofa, and began to read the Leechgatherer. When he came to the passage, now I believe omitted, about his skin being so old and dry that the leeches wouldn’t stick, it set Fanny a-laughing. That frightened her, and she got into a convulsive fit of laughter that shook Coleridge, who was sitting close to her, looking very angry. He put up his MS., saying he ought to ask her pardon, for per¬ haps to a person who had not genius (Fanny cannot exactly re¬ member the expression) the poem might seem absurd. F. sat in a dreadful fright, everybody looking amazed, Sarah [Tom’s

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Thom,as Allsop sister] looking angry; and she almost expected her father would turn her out of the room, but Uncle Tom came to her rescue. “Well, Coleridge, one must confess that it is not quite a subject for a poem.” Coleridge did not forgive Fanny for some days, putting by his reading aloud if she came in. But afterwards he was very good friends with her, and one day in particular gave her all his history, saying, amongst other things, “and there I had the misfortune to meet with my wife.” 2

THOMAS ALLSOP 1795-188° A London stockbroker of moderate means, Thomas Allsop, by virtue of his social-mindedness and a certain facility of expression, came to assume a significant place in public affairs. His Budget of Two Taxes Only he addressed, in 1848, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer; California and Its Gold Mines he wrote, in 1852-53, on mines which he personally had explored. His friendships with men in high place, as well as his fearless declaration of advanced and even revolutionary principles, combined to endow him with a degree of contemporary power. It was in consequence of his attending the first lecture in Cole¬ ridge's course of 1818 that his friendship with the poet began. Full of enthusiasm, young Allsop at once wrote to the lecturer a letter which Coleridge, promptly replying, termed “manly, simple, and correct." Thereafter the friendship developed rapidly: before the end of the year Coleridge ivas writing those long and revelatory epistles which Allsop published, after the poet's death, in his Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge. Through the ensuing years, Allsop expressed his admiration for Coleridge not only in words (he considered Coleridge “the greatest of moderns"), but also in timely gifts of a practical nature. Allsop, in turn, was the recipient of the poet's confidences. Their intimacy developed to the point that Coleridge was once led to write, “Were you my son by nature, I could not hold you dearer." Allsop was frequently at Highgate, and Coleridge was often a guest, with many another literary or political celebrity, at Allsop's house. Once, leaving Highgate over

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Contemporary Descriptions some disagreement with the Gillmans, the poet took refuge for ten days with the sympathetic and trusted friend who has been called his “favorite disciple.” While one must be grateful to Allsop for having preserved and edited the many letters written to him by Coleridge, one regrets that he failed to record more fully and more systematically the oral discourse of the seer of Highgate. Mindful of the opportunity that had so largely passed him by: BITTERLY do I now regret . . . that a contempt for the char¬ acter and pursuits of Boswell deterred me from making constant memorandums of conversations, which, spread over a period of seventeen years, and, for a part of that time, almost daily, would now to me have been a treasure and a consolation unspeakable, in the dear and delightful recollections which they would have contained. These recollections, which are now so misty, so shadowy, and so unsubstantial, as to present little that is tan¬ gible, little that can be recalled bodily, would not be the less delightful to me as harmonizing with the general character of my mind, if they did not also include regret the most poignant at the opportunities that I suffered to pass unimproved.1 In defense of his fragmentary way of recording Coleridge’s conver¬ sations, he notes their extensiveness and the fact that others took part in them. I have not observed the transitions from one subject to an¬ other; indeed, this was not possible without giving the whole conversation, with the remarks and observations of others—a course quite out of the question, seeing that each conversation would make a small volume; a volume, I may add, of great and most delightful interest throughout.2 Commenting on a letter, April 8, 1820, in which Coleridge indulges in daydreams concerning several never-completed works: If it had been possible for the writer of this letter to have been both oracle and priest (or rather popular expounder), then indeed should we have wanted little (for the present time at least) in the way of aids to knowledge in its highest aim and

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Washington Allston tendency. But powers like his have never yet existed in con¬ junction with familiar and popular elucidation. There was noth¬ ing shapeless and unmeaning in any thing he ever said or wrote. There were no crudities, no easy reading in his productions. To follow the train of his reasoning demanded at first severe and continued attention; and to this how few of the self-called seekers after that knowledge which is truth are equal. To him, details were of little value, except as far as they illustrated, proved, a principle; while to the greater part of those who latterly became his hearers, they constituted the only part of his conversation which was intelligible, or of the least interest. Would that it were possible to recall some of those delightful tales which my friend used to relate in his inimitable manner, as forming part of the collection existing in his mind of the “Weather-bound Traveller.” Myself a proficient when a youth as a raconteur, I was still surprised at the extraordinary ease with which he pro¬ duced story after story, each more incredible, more mystic, and more abounding with materials for future meditation, than the one preceding. Ardently do I hope that the fragments above alluded to have been saved, and that the worthy and excellent friend to whom they are confided will give them to the world as he finds them.3 Having conversed with Coleridge of Steele, whom they both valued above Addison: It was a joy and ever new delight to listen to him on any con¬ genial theme, on one congenial to you as well as to him,.4

WASHINGTON ALLSTON

i779~l843 Washington Allston, the American artist, was for three years a student at the Royal Academy under Benjamin West. Subsequently he so¬ journed in Paris, Switzerland, and Italy, painting and studying paint-

Contemporary Descriptions ings. In Rome, where he went in 1805, he made the acquaintance of Coleridge and Washington Irving. Throughout the War of 1812 Allston, with his fellow Americans S. F. B. Morse and Charles R. Leslie, painted in London, arid once again Allston zvas in Coleridge’s com¬ pany.1 At Salt Hill and Bristol Coleridge nursed his American friend through a serious illness. During his convalescence Allston painted the famous Bristol portrait of Coleridge, now in the National Por¬ trait Gallery. He returned to America in 1818. Incidentally a writer, Allston published a volume of verse, The Sylphs of the Seasons, in 1813, and his poem “America to Great Britain” so pleased Coleridge that he included it in his Sybilline Leaves, noting that it was written by “an American gentleman, a valued and dear friend.” According to Richard H. Dana, Jr., Allstozi “often spoke of Coleridge as having been of the greatest advantage to his mind in every way—in his art, in poetry, and in his opinions and habits of thought generally—and also to his religious character.” 2

Of his debt to Coleridge, and with reference to their talks in Rome: TO NO OTHER man do I owe so much intellectually as to Mr. Coleridge, with whom I became acquainted in Rome, and who has honored me with his friendship for more than five and twenty years. He used to call Rome “the silent city,” but I could never think of it as such while with him, for meet him when and where I would, the fountain of his mind was never dry, but, like the far-reaching aqueducts that once supplied this mistress of the world, its living stream seemed specially to flow for every classic ruin over which we wandered; and when I recall some of our walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, I am almost tempted to dream that I have once listened to Plato in the groves of the Academy.3 Describing his portrait of Coleridge, which Wordsworth said was the only likeness that ever gave him any pleasure: So far as I can judge of my own production the likeness of Coleridge is a true one, but it is Coleridge in repose; and, though not unstirred by the perpetual ground-swell of his ever-working intellect, and shadowing forth something of the deep philos108

Thomas Carlyle opher, it is not Coleridge in his highest mood, the poetic state, when the divine afflatus of the poet possessed him. When in that state, no face that I ever saw was like his; it seemed almost spirit made visible without a shadow of the physical upon it. Could I then have fixed it upon canvas! but it was beyond the reach of my art.4 His memorial tribute, “On Coleridge”: And thou art gone, most loved, most honored friend! No, never more thy gentle voice shall blend With air of earth its pure ideal tones, Binding in one, as with harmonious zones, The heart and intellect. And I no more Shall with thee gaze on that unfathomed deep, The Human Soul,—as when, pushed off the shore, Thy mystic bark would through the darkness sweep, Itself the while so bright! For oft we seemed As on some starless sea,—all dark above, All dark below,—yet, onward as we drove, To plough up light that ever round us streamed. But he who mourns is not as one bereft Of all he loved; thy living truths are left.5

THOMAS CARLYLE 1795-1881 Of all the contemporary descriptions of Coleridge and his talk, Carlyle's is unquestionably the most brilliant and unforgettable. But it is by no means the truest. Except as he knew him through inter¬ mediaries, Carlyle had very slight personal acquaintance with Coleridge. They met in June, 1824, and Carlyle admits in his Remi¬ niscences that he saw Coleridge for the last time in 1825.1 Moreover, during the period of their limited contact, Carlyle zuas a young man under 30, so recently come from the north that he was not yet ad¬ justed to London, while Coleridge was past 50 and exercising the IO9

Contemporary Descriptions prerogatives of an oracle. However open-minded Carlyle may have been when he was introduced by Irving to the poet, he had acquired a stubborn antipathy before he left. Having hopefully anticipated an elucidation of Kant, Carlyle went away from Highgate more con¬ fused than ever. His belief that Coleridge was befogged and rudder¬ less in a sea of German transcendentalism dated from that meeting, and was never shaken. For all their common interest in German literature, in philosophy and theology, Carlyle and Coleridge were personally incompatible. Especially was this true at the time of their acquaintance. Himself vigorous and active of mind and body, Carlyle disliked Coleridge's apparent inertia. “Sunk inextricably in the depths of putrescent indolence” teas the ivay he expressed it.2 Carlyle, the stiff-spined independent, refused to bend to this master, and it irritated him that others should do so. Add to this early-formed bias Carlyle's dislike of most London literary men, his intolerance of other monologists than himself, his belief that Coleridge's theological teachings were a mass of compromise and word-juggling, actually harmful to such followers as Irving and Sterling, and one under¬ stands why Carlyle, after a few trial sketches, so maliciously carica¬ tured the man who, he insisted, was “strange, not at all great.”

An account of their first meeting, in June, 1824, written by Carlyle many years later: ON ONE of the first fine mornings, Mrs. Montagu, along with Irving, took me to see Coleridge at Highgate. My impressions of the man and of the place are conveyed, faithfully enough, in the Life of Sterling; that first interview in particular, of which I had expected very little, was idle and unsatisfactory, and yielded me nothing,—Coleridge, a puffy, anxious, obstructed-looking, fattish old man, hobbled about with us, talking with a kind of solemn emphasis on matters which were of no interest (and even reading pieces in proof of his opinions thereon); I had him to myself once or twice, in narrow parts of the garden-walks; and tried hard to get something about Kant and Co. from him, about “reason” versus “understanding,” and the like; but in vain: nothing came from him that was of use to me, that day, or in fact any day. The sight and sound of a sage who was so venerated

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Thomas Carlyle by those about me, and whom I too would so willingly have venerated, but could not,—this was all. Several times afterward, Montagu, on Coleridge’s “Thursday Evening,” carried Irving and me out, and returned blessing Heaven (I not) for what we had received; Irving and I walked out more than once on morn¬ ings, too; and found the Dodona Oracle humanely ready to act, —but never (to me, nor to Irving either I suspect) explanatory of the question put. Good Irving strove always to think that he was getting priceless wisdom out of this great man; but must have had his misgivings. Except by the Montagu-Irving channel, I at no time communicated with Coleridge: I had never, on my own strength, had much esteem for him; and found slowly, in spite of myself, that I was getting to have less and less.3 Also of this first meeting, from a letter of June 24, 1824, to his brother John: I have seen many curiosities; not the least of them I reckon Coleridge, the Kantian metaphysician and quondam Lake poet. I will tell you all about our interview when we meet. Figure a fat, flabby, incurvated personage, at once short, rotund, and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange brown, timid, yet earnest-looking eyes, a high tapering brow, and a great bush of grey hair; and you have some faint idea of Coleridge. He is a kind good soul, full of religion and affection and poetry and animal magnetism. His cardinal sin is that he wants will. He has no resolution. He shrinks from pain or labour in any of its shapes. His very attitude bespeaks this. He never straightens his knee-joints. He stoops with his fat, ill-shapen shoulders, and in walking he does not tread, but shovel and slide. My father would call it “skluiffing.” He is also always busied to keep, by strong and frequent inhalations, the water of his mouth from overflowing, and his eyes have a look of anxious impotence. He would do with all his heart, but he knows he dares not. The conversation of the man is much as I anticipated—a forest of thoughts, some true, many false, more part dubious, all of them ingenious in some degree, often in a high degree. But there is

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Contemporary Descriptions no method in his talk: he wanders like a man sailing among many currents, whithersoever his lazy mind directs him; and, what is more unpleasant, he preaches, or rather soliloquises. He cannot speak, he can only tal-k (so he names it). Hence I found him unprofitable, even tedious; but we parted very good friends, I promising to go back and see him some evening—a promise which I fully intend to keep. I sent him a copy of “Meister,” about which we had some friendly talk. I reckon him a man of great and useless genius: a strange, not at all a great man.4 From a letter to John, January 22, 1825, i*1 which Carlyle, restless and discontented, expresses his low opinion of London men of letters: Coleridge is a mass of richest spices putrefied into a dunghill. I never hear him tawlk without feeling ready to worship him, and toss him in a blanket.5 From his journal, May 26, 1835, commenting on the newly published Table Talk: Coleridge’s “Table Talk” insignificant yet expressive of Cole¬ ridge: a great possibility that has not realised itself. Never did I see such apparatus got ready for thinking, and so little thought. He mounts scaffolding, pulleys, and tackle, gathers all the tools in the neighbourhood with labour, with noise, demonstration, precept, abuse, and sets—three bricks. I do not honour the man. I pity him (with the opposite of contempt); see in him one glorious up-struggling ray (as it were) which perished, all but ineffectual, in a lax, languid, impotent character. This is my theory of Coleridge—very different from that of his admirers here. Nothing, I find, confuses me more than the admiration, the kind of man admired, I see current here. So measurable these infinite men do seem, so unedifying the doxologies chanted to them. Yet in that also there is something which I really do try to profit by. The man that lives has a real way of living, built on thought of one or the other sort. He is a fact. Consider him. Draw knowledge from him.6

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Thomas Carlyle The famous passage in the Life of Sterling, 1851: Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life’s battle; attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific prov¬ ince of human literature or enlightenment, had been small and sadly intermittent, but he had, especially among young inquir¬ ing men, a higher than literary, a kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold, he alone in England, the key of German and other Transcendentalisms; knew the sublime secret of believing by “the reason’’ what “the understanding’’ had been obliged to fling out as incredible; and could still, after Hume and Voltaire had done their best and worst with him, profess himself an orthodox Christian, and say and print to the Church of England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices at Allhallowtide, Esto perpetua. A sublime man; who, alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood; escaping from the black materialisms, and revolutionary deluges, with “God, Freedom, Immortality’’ still his: a king of men. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gillman’s house at High¬ gate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon. The Gillmans did not encourage much company, or excitation of any sort, round their sage; nevertheless access to him, if a youth did reverently wish it, was not difficult. He would stroll about the pleasant garden with you, sit in the pleasant rooms of the place,—perhaps take you to his own peculiar room, high up, with a rearward view, which was the chief view of all. A really charming outlook, in fine weather. Close at hand, wide sweep 113

Contemporary Descriptions of flowery leafy gardens, their few houses mostly hidden, the very chimney-pots veiled under blossomy umbrage, flowed glori¬ ously down hill; gloriously issuing in wide-tufted undulating plain-country, rich in all charms of field and town. Waving blooming country of the brightest green; dotted all over with handsome villas, handsome groves; crossed by roads and human traffic, here inaudible or heard only as a musical hum: and be¬ hind all swam, under olive-tinted haze, the illimitable limitary ocean of London, with its domes and steeples definite in the sun, big Paul’s and the many memories attached to it hanging high over all. Nowhere, of its kind, could you see a grander prospect on a bright summer day, with the set of the air going southward, —southward and so draping with the city-smoke not you but the city. Here for hours would Coleridge talk, concerning all con¬ ceivable or inconceivable things; and liked nothing better than to have an intelligent, or failing that, even a silent and patient human listener. He distinguished himself to all that ever heard him as at least the most surprising talker extant in this world,— and to some small minority, by no means to all, as the most excellent. The good man, he was now getting old, towards sixty perhaps; and gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings; a life heavy-laden, half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and other bewilderment. Brow and head were round, and of massive weight, but the face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irres¬ olute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping atti¬ tude; in walking, he rather shuffled than decisively stept; and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which side of the garden walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both. A heavy-laden, high-aspiring and surely much-suffering man. His voice, naturally soft and good, 114

Thomas Carlyle had contracted itself into a plaintive snuffle and singsong; he spoke as if preaching,—you would have said, preaching earnestly and also hopelessly the weightiest things. I still recollect his “object” and “subject,” terms of continual recurrence in the Kantean province; and how he sang and snuffled them into “om-m-mject” and “sum-m-mject,” with a kind of solemn shake or quaver, as he rolled along. No talk, in his century or in any other, could be more surprising. Sterling, who assiduously attended him, with profound rever¬ ence, and was often with him by himself, for a good many months, gives a record of their first colloquy.7 Their colloquies were numerous, and he had taken note of many; but they are all gone to the fire, except this first, which Mr. Hare has printed,—un¬ luckily without date. It contains a number of ingenious, true and half-true observations, and is of course a faithful epitome • of the things said; but it gives small idea of Coleridge’s way of talking;—this one feature is perhaps the most recognisable, “Our interview lasted for three hours, during which he talked two hours and three quarters.” Nothing could be more copious than his talk; and furthermore it was always, virtually or literally, of the nature of a monologue; suffering no interruption, how¬ ever reverent; hastily putting aside all foreign additions, anno¬ tations, or most ingenuous desires for elucidation, as well-meant superfluities which would never do. Besides, it was talk not flow¬ ing anywhither like a river, but spreading everywhither in in¬ extricable currents and regurgitations like a lake or sea; terribly deficient in definite goal or aim, nay often in logical intelligi¬ bility; what you were to believe or do, on any earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to appear from it. So that, most times, you felt logically lost; swamped near to drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables, spreading out boundless as if to submerge the world. To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into, whether you consent or not, can in the long-run be exhilarating to no creature; how eloquent soever the flood of utterance that is descending. But if it be withal a confused unintelligible flood of utterance,

J15

Contemporary Descriptions threatening to submerge all known landmarks of thought, and drown the world and you!—I have heard Coleridge talk, with eager musical energy, two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individ¬ ual of his hearers,—certain of whom, I for one, still kept eagerly listening in hope; the most had long before given up, and formed (if the room were large enough) secondary humming groups of their own. He began anywhere: you put some question to him, made some suggestive observation: instead of answering this, or decidedly setting out towards answer of it, he would accu¬ mulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcen¬ dental life-preservers and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear, for setting out; perhaps did at last get under way,—but was swiftly solicited, turned aside by the glance of some radiant new game on this hand or that, into new courses; and ever into new; and before long into all the Universe, where it was uncertain what game you would catch, or whether any. His talk, alas, was distinguished, like himself, by irresolution: it disliked to be troubled with conditions, abstinences, definite fulfilments;—loved to wander at its own sweet will, and make its auditor and his claims and humble wishes a mere passive bucket for itself! He had knowledge about many things and topics, much curious reading; but generally all topics led him, after a pass or two, into the high seas of theosophic philosophy, the hazy infinitude of Kantean transcendentalism, with its “sum-mmjects” and “om-m-mjects.” Sad enough; for with such indolent impatience of the claims and ignorances of others, he had not the least talent for explaining this or anything unknown to them; and you swam and fluttered in the mistiest wide unin¬ telligible deluge of things, for most part in a rather profitless uncomfortable manner. Glorious islets, too, I have seen rise out of the haze; but they were few, and soon swallowed in the general element again. Balmy sunny islets, islets of the blest and intelligible:—on which occasions those secondary humming groups would all cease hum¬ ming, and hang breathless upon the eloquent words; till once 116

Thomas Carlyle your islet got wrapt in the mist again, and they could recom¬ mence humming. Eloquent artistically expressive words you always had; piercing radiances of a most subtle insight came at intervals; tones of noble pious sympathy, recognisable as pious though strangely coloured, were never wanting long: but in gen¬ eral you could not call this aimless, cloudcapt, cloudbased, law¬ lessly meandering human discourse of reason by the name of “excellent talk,” but only of “surprising”; and were reminded bitterly of Hazlitt’s account of it: “Excellent talker, very,—if you let him start from no premises and come to no conclusion.” Coleridge was not without what talkers call wit, and there were touches of prickly sarcasm in him, contemptuous enough of the world and its idols and popular dignitaries; he had traits even of poetic humour: but in general he seemed deficient in laugh¬ ter; or indeed in sympathy for concrete human things either on the sunny or on the stormy side. One right peal of concrete laughter at some convicted flesh-and-blood absurdity, one burst of noble indignation at some injustice or depravity, rubbing elbows with us on this solid Earth, how strange would it have been in that Kantean haze-world, and how infinitely cheering amid its vacant air-castles and dim-melting ghosts and shadows! None such ever came. His life had been an abstract thinking and dreaming, idealistic, passed amid the ghosts of defunct bodies and of unborn ones. The moaning singsong of that theosophicometaphysical monotony left on you, at last, a very dreary feel¬ ing. In close colloquy, flowing within narrower banks, I suppose he was more definite and apprehensible; Sterling in aftertimes did not complain of his unintelligibility, or imputed it only to the abstruse high nature of the topics handled. Let us hope so, let us try to believe so! There is no doubt but Coleridge could speak plain words on things plain: his observations and responses on the trivial matters that occurred were as simple as the com¬ monest man’s, or were even distinguished by superior simplicity as well as pertinency. “Ah, your tea is too cold, Mr. Coleridge!” mourned the good Mrs. Gillman once, in her kind, reverential 117

Contemporary Descriptions

and yet protective manner, handing him a very tolerable though belated cup.—“It’s better than I deserve!” snuffled he, in a low hoarse murmur, partly courteous, chiefly pious, the tone of which still abides with me: “It’s better than I deserve!” But indeed, to the young ardent mind, instinct with pious nobleness, yet driven to the grim deserts of Radicalism for a faith, his speculations had a charm much more than literary, a charm almost religious and prophetic^The constant gist of his discourse was lamentation over the sunk condition of the world; which he recognised to be given-up to Atheism and Materialism, full of mere sordid misbeliefs, mispursuits and misresults. All Science had become mechanical; the science not of men, but of a kind of human beavers. Churches themselves had died away into a godless mechanical condition; and stood there as mere Cases of Articles, mere Forms of Churches; like the dried car¬ casses of once-swift camels, which you find left withering in the thirst of the universal desert,—ghastly portents for the present, beneficent ships of the desert no more. Men’s souls were blinded, hebetated; and sunk under the influence of Atheism and Materi¬ alism, and Hume and Voltaire: the world for the present was as an extinct world, deserted of God, and incapable of welldoing till it changed its heart and spirit. This, expressed I think with less of indignation and with more of long-drawn querulousness, was always recognisable as the ground-tone:—in which truly a pious young heart, driven into Radicalism and the opposition party, could not but recognise a too sorrowful truth; and ask of the Oracle, with all earnestness, What remedy, then?) The remedy, though Coleridge himself professed to see it as in sunbeams, could not, except by processes unspeakably difficult, be described to you at all. On the whole, those dead Churches, this dead English Church especially, must be brought to life I again. Why not? It was not dead; the soul of it, in this parched-up ' body, was tragically asleep only. Atheistic Philosophy was true on its side, and Hume and Voltaire could on their own ground speak irrefragably for themselves against any Church: but lift the Church and them into a higher sphere of argument, they ll8

Thomas Carlyle died into inanition, the Church revivified itself into pristine florid vigour,—became once more a living ship of the desert, and invincibly bore you over stock and stone. But how, but how! By attending to the “reason” of man, said Coleridge, and duly chaining-up the “understanding” of man: the Vernunft (Reason) and Verstand (Understanding) of the Germans, it all turned upon these, if you could well understand them,—which you couldn’t. For the rest, Mr. Coleridge had on the anvil vari¬ ous Books, especially was about to write one grand Book On the Logos, which would help to bridge the chasm for us. So much appeared, however: Churches, though proved false (as you had imagined), were still true (as you were to imagine): here was an Artist who could burn you up an old Church, root and branch; and then as the Alchymists professed to do with organic sub¬ stances in general, distil you an “Astral Spirit” from the ashes, which was the very image of the old burnt article, its airdrawn counterpart,—this you still had, or might get, and draw uses from, if you could. Wait till the Book on the Logos were done; —alas, till your own terrene eyes, blind with conceit and the dust of logic, were purged, subtilised and spiritualised into the sharpness of vision requisite for discerning such an “om-mmject.”—The ingenuous young English head, of those days, stood strangely puzzled by such revelations; uncertain whether it were getting inspired, or getting infatuated into flat imbecility; and strange effulgence, of new day or else of deeper meteoric night, coloured the horizon of the future for it. Let me not be unjust to this memorable man. Surely there was here, in his pious, ever-labouring, subtle mind, a precious truth, or prefigurement of truth; and yet a fatal delusion withal. Prefigurement that, in spite of beaver sciences and temporary spiritual hebetude and cecity, man and his Universe were eter¬ nally divine; and that no past nobleness, or revelation of the divine, could or would ever be lost to him. Most true, surely, and worthy of all acceptance. Good also to do what you can with old Churches and practical Symbols of the Noble: nay quit not the burnt ruins of them while you find there is still gold to be

“9

Contemporary Descriptions dug there. But, on the whole, do not think you can, by logical alchymy, distil astral spirits from them; or if you could, that said astral spirits, or defunct logical phantasms, could serve you in anything. What the light of your mind, which is the direct inspiration of the Almighty, pronounces incredible,—that, in God’s name, leave uncredited; at your peril do not try believing that. No subtlest hocus-pocus of “reason” versus “understand¬ ing” will avail for that feat;—and it is terribly perilous to try it in these provinces! The truth is, I now see, Coleridge’s talk and speculation was the emblem of himself: in it as in him, a ray of heavenly inspira¬ tion struggled, in a tragically ineffectual degree, with the weak¬ ness of flesh and blood. He says once, he “had skirted the howling deserts of Infidelity”; this was evident enough: but he had not had the courage, in defiance of pain and terror, to press resolutely across said deserts to the new firm lands of Faith beyond; he pre¬ ferred to create logical fatamorganas for himself on this hither side, and laboriously solace himself with these. To the man himself Nature had given, in high measure, the seeds of a noble endowment; and to unfold it had been forbid¬ den him. A subtle lynx-eyed intellect, tremulous pious sensi¬ bility to all good and all beautiful; truly a ray of empyrean light; —but imbedded in such weak laxity of character, in such in¬ dolences and esuriences as had made strange work with it. Once more, the tragic story of a high endowment with an insufficient will. An eye to discern the divineness of the Heaven’s splendours and lightnings, the insatiable wish to revel in their godlike ra¬ diances and brilliances; but no heart to front the scathing terrors of them, which is the first condition of your conquering an abid¬ ing place there. The courage necessary for him, above all things, had been denied this man. His life, with such ray of the empy¬ rean in it, was great and terrible to him; and he had not valiantly grappled with it, he had fled from it; sought refuge in vague day¬ dreams, hollow compromises, in opium, in theosophic meta¬ physics. Harsh pain, danger, necessity, slavish harnessed toil, were of all things abhorrent to him. And so the empyrean ele120

Clement Carlyon ment, lying smothered under the terrene, and yet inextinguish¬ able there, made sad writhings. For pain, danger, difficulty, steady slaving toil, and other highly disagreeable behests of destiny, shall in no wise be shirked by any brightest mortal that will approve himself loyal to his mission in this world; nay, pre¬ cisely the higher he is, the deeper will be the disagreeableness, and the detestability to flesh and blood, of the tasks laid on him; and the heavier too, and more tragic, his penalties if he neglect them. For the old Eternal Powers do live forever; nor do their laws know any change, however we in our poor wigs and churchtippets may attempt to read their laws. To steal into Heaven, —by the modern method, of sticking ostrich-like your head into fallacies on Earth, equally as by the ancient and by all conceiv¬ able methods,—is forever forbidden. High-treason is the name of that attempt; and it continues to be punished as such. Strange enough: here once more was a kind of Heaven-scaling Ixion; and to him, as to the old one, the just gods were very stern! The ever-revolving, never-advancing Wheel (of a kind) was his, through life; and from his Cloud-Juno did not he too procreate strange Centaurs, spectral Puseyisms, monstrous illusory Hy¬ brids, and ecclesiastical Chimeras,—which now roam the earth in a very lamentable manner! 8

CLEMENT CARLYON 1777—1864 Except for his local reputation as a physician and his slightly wider attainments in research on typhus fever, Carlyon is principally re¬ membered for his acquaintance with Coleridge. After taking his de¬ gree and receiving a fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he proceeded to Germany to continue his medical studies. Later, his training completed in Edinburgh and London, he settled in his native town of Truro, where in due course he was five times mayor. It was in Germany that Carlyon and the poet met. Coleridge, having arrived

121

Contemporary Descriptions at Gottingen in February, 1799, had been there but a month when Carlyon came to this university city. With him were one or two others. Almost at once Coleridge became the leader of the little group of Englishmen. On their excursion to the Harz Mountains he was the center of every adventure and every conversation. Until spring Coleridge was happy with his young friends, busy listening to lectures at the university a?id painstakingly mastering German. Then came word of little Berkeley's death, and Coleridge, saddened, ivas filled with anxiety for the other loved ones at home. In June he left for England, Carlyon accompanying him as far as Brunswick. As it xcas not until 1836-58 that Carlyon set down the details of his friendship with Coleridge, in Early Years and Late Reflections, one must note that he was writing in long retrospect.

Describing Coleridge at Gottingen: WHEN in company, his vehemence of manner and wonderful flow of words and ideas, drew all eyes towards him, and gave him pre-eminence, despite his costume, which he affected to treat with great indifference. He even boasted of the facility with which he was able to overcome the disadvantage of negligent dress; and I have heard him say, fixing his prominent eyes upon himself (as he was wont to do, whenever there was a mirror in the room), with a singularly coxcomical expression of counte¬ nance, that his dress was sure to be lost sight of the moment he began to talk; an assertion which, whatever may be thought of its modesty, was not without truth.1 On the “pedestrian tour” over the Harz Mountains to the summit of the Brocken, in the spring of 1799, Coleridge wrote very few verses which his companions considered good enough for their journals. But if his muse was dull, the genius of metaphysics was in full activity, and he endeavoured to enlighten the minds of his com¬ panions by a long discussion, among other things, in favour of an opinion which he maintained, in opposition to -, that, throughout nature, pleasurable sensations greatly predominate over painful. He said, that it must be so, for as the tendency of pain is to disorganize, the disorganization of the whole living 122

Clement Carlyon system must ensue if the balance lay on its side. Exquisite pleas¬ ure becomes pain; does exquisite pain, he asked, ever become pleasure? There was another point which he could not settle so entirely to his satisfaction, and that was the nature or essential quality of happiness. He seemed to think that it might be defined “a consciousness of an excess of pleasurable sensations, direct or reflex.” And when we find Johnson, in his Dictionary, telling us, in a quotation from Hooker, that “Happiness is that estate whereby we attain, so far as possibly may be attained, the full possession of that which, simply for itself, is to be desired, and containeth in it after an eminent sort, the contentation of our desires, the highest degree of all our perfection”; he too may at least be considered as leaving this inestimable treasure open to further analysis, and a more precise definition. It would cer¬ tainly have been a high treat to have heard Johnson and Cole■ ridge discuss this point together.2 *

On the same tour, with reference to an altercation in a Hessian vil¬ lage, brought about by Coleridge’s exclaiming, “Why surely these Hessians cannot be Christians!”: To sleep soundly after such an adventure, and in such a place, was scarcely to be expected; but Morpheus had a friend for once in Coleridge, whose protracted psychological tirade upon the inhospitable conduct of the Hessian boors acted at length as a soporific, so that huddling together, Turk and all, as closely as we could, we managed to pass a few hours tolerably well for young bivouackers.3 Likewise on the Brocken tour: Coleridge made the profound, although seemingly trivial, remark that no animal but man appears ever to be struck with wonder. He was fond of amusing himself and his fellow tourists by asking the definition of some particular word, closing the inquiry, after each had exercised his ingenuity, with his own, which we seldom failed, with due submission to him, to consider the best. 123

Contemporary Descriptions When we were ascending the Brocken, and ever and anon stopping to take breath, as well as to survey the magnificent scene, a long discussion took place upon the sublime and beau¬ tiful. We had much of Burke, but more of Coleridge. Of beauty much, but more of sublimity, which was in accordance with the grandeur of surrounding objects. Many were the fruitless attempts made to define sublimity satisfactorily, when Cole¬ ridge, at length, pronounced it to consist in a suspension of the power of comparison.4 He never 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.3 On an excursion to the Hiibichen-Stein, a few days after returning from the Harz: Coleridge was in good spirits, very amusing, and as talkative as ever, throughout this little excursion. He frequently recited his own poetry, and not unfrequently led us rather farther into the labyrinth of his metaphysical elucidations, either of partic¬ ular passages, or of the original conception of any of his pro¬ ductions, than we were able to follow him.6 Shortly before Coleridge left Gottingen: Monday, the 24th of June, having been fixed for his final de¬ parture from Gottingen, I had the pleasure of spending a most entertaining take-leave evening with him at Professor Blumenbach’s. Our party, at supper, consisted, in addition to the pro¬ fessor’s own family, of young Blumenbach’s fellow tourists only; and the conversation, which was chiefly in German, was par¬ ticularly sprightly and amusing on the part of the professor and Coleridge, who even then, after nine months’ residence in Ger¬ many, thought it no undue precaution to carry with him a pocket dictionary, to which he hesitated not to apply, if he happened to be at a loss for a word; but this was seldom the case; and there was something inexpressibly comic in the manner in which he 124

Henry Cary dashed on, with fluent diction, but with the very worst German accent imaginable, through the thick and thin of his subject.7

HENRY CARY 1804-1870 Henry Cary was the author of Memorials of the Great Civil War in England, Testimonies of the Fathers, and numerous translations of the Greek classics. He was less widely known, however, than his father, Henry Francis Cary (1772-1844), the translator of Dante. Francis Cary's edition of the Inferno, in 1805, met with so little success that he found it necessary to publish the translation of Dante's complete works, in 1812, at his own expense. Although this publication, too, was at first unsuccessful, it later came into notice, largely because of the warm praise accorded it by Coleridge in his lectures. A further service of Coleridge to Francis Cary was introducing him to Lamb, thus opening the way for him to become a contributor to the London Magazine, and a member of a stimulating literary circle. The account of Coleridge's meeting with the Carys, father and son, in 1817, ivas related by Henry Cary thirty years later in his Memoir of the Rev. Henry Francis Cary. On the beach at Littlehampton, in 1817: SEVERAL HOURS of each day were spent by Mr. Cary in read¬ ing the Classics with the writer of this memoir, who was then only thirteen years of age. After a morning of toil over Greek and Latin composition, it was our custom to walk on the sands and read Homer aloud, a practice adopted partly for the sake of the sea-breezes, and not a little, I believe, in order that the pupil might learn to read ore rotundo, having to raise his voice above the noise of the sea that was breaking at our feet. For several consecutive days Coleridge crossed us in our walk. The sound of the Greek, and especially the expressive countenance of the tutor, attracted his notice; so one day, as we met, he placed him¬ self directly in my father’s way and thus accosted him: “Sir,

125

Contemporary Descriptions yours is a face I should know: I am Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” His person was not unknown to my father, who had already pointed him out to me as the great genius of our age and country. Our volume of Homer was shut up; but as it was ever Cole¬ ridge’s custom to speak, it could not be called talking or con¬ versing, on the subject that first offered itself, whatever it might be; the deep mysteries of the blind bard engaged our attention during the remainder of a long walk. I was too young at that time to carry away with me any but a very vague impression of his wondrous speech. All that I remember is, that I felt as one from whose eyes the scales were just removed, who could discern and enjoy the light, but had not strength of vision to bear its fulness. Till that day I had regarded Homer as merely a book in which boys were to learn Greek; the description of a single combat had occasionally power to interest me; but from this time, I was ever looking for pictures in the poem, endeavouring to realise them to my mind’s eye, and especially to trace out virtues and vices as personified in the heroes and deities of the Homeric drama. The close of our walk found Coleridge at our family dinner table. Amongst other topics of conversation Dante’s “divine” poem was mentioned: Coleridge had never heard of my father’s translation, but took a copy home with him that night. On the following day when the two friends (for so they may from the first day of their meeting be called) met for the purpose of tak¬ ing their daily stroll, Coleridge was able to recite whole pages of the version of Dante, and, though he had not the original with him, repeated passages of that also, and commented on the translation. Before leaving Littlehampton he expressed his de¬ termination to bring the version of Dante into public notice; and this, more than any other single person, he had the means of doing in his course of lectures delivered in London during the winter months.1

126

Thomas Chalmers

THOMAS CHALMERS 1780-1847 One of the most eloquent pulpit orators of his day, Thomas Chalmers was a distinguished Scottish theologian and philanthropist. For years he strove to raise the level of living of his downtrodden Glasgow parishioners, meanwhile propounding his social ideas in numerous articles and pamphlets. During the latter part of his life he occupied chairs of theology and moral philosophy at the universi¬ ties of St. Andrews and Edinburgh. For a time his assistant in the ministry at Glasgow was Edward Irving, through whom he came to know Carlyle. As an eminent divme and educator, Chalmers on several occasions preached, or lectured in London, and on one of his trips to the metropolis he was taken by his friend Irving to meet , Coleridge at Highgate. An entry in his journal, dated May 10, 1827: IRVING and I went to Bedford-square. Mr. and Mrs. Montagu took us out in their carriage to Highgate, where we spent three hours with the great Coleridge. He lives with Dr. and Mrs. Gillman on the same footing that Cowper did with the Unwins. His conversation, which flowed in a mighty unremitting stream, is most astonishing, but, I must confess, to me still unintelligible. I caught occasional glimpses of what he would be at, but mainly he was very far out of all sight and all sympathy. I hold it, how¬ ever, a great acquisition to have become acquainted with him. You know that Irving sits at his feet, and drinks in the inspiration of every syllable that falls from him. There is a secret, and to me as yet unintelligible communion of spirit between them, on the ground of a certain German mysticism and transcendental lakepoetry which I am not yet up to. Gordon 1 says it is all unintelli¬ gible nonsense, and I am sure a plain Fife man as uncle “Tarnmas,” had he been alive, would have pronounced it the greatest buff he had ever heard in his life.2 127

Contemporary Descriptions PHILARETE CHASLES 1798-1873 Reared in a Paris home that was a center of Republican intrigue, Philarete Chasles had barely ceased to be a schoolboy when he was accused of conspiracy against the government of France and thrown into prison. Since the only evidence against him was a series of refer¬ ences to love of liberty in his manuscripts of youthful prose and verse, he was released after two months, but was strongly advised by his friends to leave the country. He did so at once, and spent the years from 1815 to 1823 in England, where he made it a point to meet many of the foremost thinkers of the time. Although the dates given in his autobiographical fragments are uncertain, and in fact sometimes contradictory, he indicates that he first met Coleridge in 1820 1 and called on him several times. Chasles travelled widely in other countries following his sojourn in England, and used his knowledge of foreign peoples and their literatures for a series of essays and books that were finally reprinted between 1836 and 1864 in a collected edition of thirteen volumes. Such works as Etudes sur

la Litterature et les Moeurs a l’Angleterre au XIXe Siecle, Etudes sur l’Espagne, and Etudes sur l’Allemagne Ancienne et Moderne, to¬ gether with his teaching at the College de France, had an important effect on French literary taste.

A young Frenchman falls under the spell: SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE . . . dwelt near London, in a modest retreat, where his friends would assemble and listen to his eloquence. Deistical philosopher in his youth, and one of the chiefs of the poetical reform, he had become a Christian mystic. He alone in England occupied a place analogous with that of Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel; but the eminently practical spirit of England tendered him more admiration than disciples. We arrived at eight at the small but elegant residence of Coleridge; about thirty persons were already assembled in a small blue room, simply furnished. Coleridge was discoursing.

128

Philarete Chasles Standing in front of the chimney upon which he leaned back, with head erect and arms crossed, his dreamy eyes lost in ab¬ straction, transported by the inspirations of his own genius, he seemed to be addressing, not the auditors, but replying to his own thoughts. His voice was vibratory, rich and full, his features harmonious, his ample brow, shaded by dark brown curls, in which here and there some silver lines intruded, the beautiful contour of his mouth, sweet in expression, also the softness of his expressive eyes, won favour unheard. He recalled to my mind the physiognomy of Fox, with more of calm; that of Mirabeau, with less turbulence; and that of M. Berryer, with a disposition more abstract and dreamy. Like these three remarkable men he was endowed with the first gift for the orator, sympathetic force. Surrounded by a circle who enkindled the enthusiasm which was transmitted in full power in return, he went on with an erudite and masterly analysis of the dramatic poets of Greece. It is only in the personal presence of the great Sorcerer that his ideas upon these sublime dramatists can be imparted; in his own nervous style he described the subtle reasoning and the pathos of Euripides, the harmonious and celestial grace that characterized Sophocles, and the lofty but solemn eloquence of jEschylus. During ten minutes, he commented upon the Prome¬ theus of zEschylus, the ode to Destiny, and the pleading of man against Providence. By degrees, as the orator raised the triple veil which enwraps the allegory, his eye gleams, his animation be¬ comes vehemence, and by his anguish and energy he reproduces before our eyes the victim of destiny, marked for the vengeance of the Gods. We see him pouring out his plaints and laments to the winds which war around his devoted head,—sublime emblem of the ancient and terrible belief in fatality. Soon the mythological type gives place to the destiny of the Christian man, and in the most bold and brilliant style he follows, and elucidates all the metaphysical theories upon the enigma of life. He traces Hartley through the labyrinth of his aerial tissues, weighs the mystic chain of associations, explains the chimeras

129

Contemporary Descriptions of the will, brings all the weight of argument to the metaphysical contest between the spiritualists and materialists, and treads with a heavy foot the enchanted domain of Berkeley. He cited the strong eloquence of Tillotson and Clarke, and reaching Leibnitz, he followed that great philosopher over the bridge of communication which he extended from earth to heaven. Leibnitz led to Spinoza. We heard him with the ardent glow of genius refute the impalpable pantheism of Spinoza, who gave a soul to the universe without individuality, and motion to matter without a mover. In the mazes of these metaphysical speculations, the poetical genius of Coleridge would flow on, or disport in circles like the harmonious and luminous ocean. From the refutation of Spinoza, “who,” says he, “withdraws God from the universe,” he proceeded in beautiful and sublime strains to illustrate the tenets and principles of religion, till, reached to the summit, where he could advance no farther or higher, he bowed himself in humility and reverence to the earth, and mur¬ muring some sweet and mysterious verses from Dante’s Paradise, he closed. I withdrew, filled with the highest and deepest admiration. Never had I seen in human being the union of such glowing eloquence and subtle acumen. Three days after this, by my own request I was introduced to him; and in many conversations, which might rather be called monologues and dithyrambic strains, he condescended to reveal to me the principal points of his great system. He repudiated none of the dogmas of Christianity, for he believed they were conformable with reason, experience, and history. The material mystery of life, or the physical union which produced the phe¬ nomena, he thought was electricity, magnetism, and galvanism, which seemed to him to accord with the spiritual mystery of the soul associated to an intelligence served by organs. He thought all philosophical doctrines were explained through Christianity, which contained them all. He believed in progress developing itself through the phases of humanity; and in traditions of the past, vegetation becoming animal life in its progress, and the 130

Philarete Chasles v

lower animal ascending to the higher. In all his conversations which were not direct instruction, one could not but lament some obscurity and mistiness; but in listening and endeavouring to follow him, I experienced nothing of that weariness and dis¬ gust that the systems of Bentham caused in me, neither that vacuum which the theatrical and pompous Foscolo induced. Vibrating to all emotions, capable of comprehending all systems, possessing rich treasures of memory and a truly independent spirit, with a taste for all philosophical reveries and caprices, and luxuriating in beauty, with the ability to reproduce his brilliant and deep thought with all the fascination of genius, Coleridge appeared to me a sort of mystical Diderot. Unhappily, the feeble¬ ness of his frame, much increased from his fatal indulgence in opium, did not permit him to draw up as a whole his magnificent system of aesthetic Christianity, of which he only bequeathed some vestiges. It would be impossible to enumerate the variety and depth of studies from which he reaped such fruits. He was familiar with the brilliant prose of Jeremy Taylor, the sonnets of Bowles, and the essays of Addison; also the works of Jean Jacques and Rabe¬ lais, Crebillon and Goldsmith, enchanted him. Romance, his¬ tory, poetry, the dramatic art, the fine arts, he essayed them all, and enjoyed all. The erudite and occult sciences claimed his re¬ gard; the metaphysics of Fichte, Kant, Winckelmann, and Hegel counted him among their adepts. Coleridge has neared all shores. When the popular fury crushed the towers of the Bastille, his muse rang the peal of joy; poet, philosopher, artist, critic, man of taste and erudition, he has dispensed but scattered rays of light. The fault is not alone his, but that of his age and country. The practical world around cannot comprehend him. The renown of the utilitarian Bentham augmented each day, whilst that of the mystical Coleridge was contested or decried. But time, the great restorer, has set all right. The fragments of Coleridge, his prose so philosophic and brilliant, his inspired poetry, in fine, his admirable autobiography, in which he shows himself devoid of the egotistical spirit, but psychologically pro-

131

Contemporary Descriptions found, assign him a niche unique among philosophers and poets of the nineteenth century. He was the Novalis of England.2

CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE 1787-1877 Charles Cowden Clarke began the first of many friendships with art¬ ists, musicians, and men of letters when he met Keats in his fa¬ ther's school at Enfield. Later he was an intimate friend of Leigh Hunt, Lamb, and others of the London literary circle. After a boy¬ hood and early manhood in Enfield and Ramsgate, he settled in Lon¬ don, first going into business as a bookseller, and then entering into partnership as a music publisher with the son of Vincent Novello. He married Mary Novello, his partner's sister. After 1834 he steadily built up a reputation as a popular lecturer on Shakespeare and other dramatists and poets, establishing himself, like Dickens later, as a highly successful public reader. Working separately, both Charles and Mary Clarke wrote extensively, particularly on Shakespeare. Jointly, they produced still other zvorks, including the Recollections

of Writers, published in i8y8, which brought together their personal memories of a host of famous men and women. Although Charles and Mary Clarke moved much among Coleridge's London friends, they seem not to have been frequent visitors at Highgate.

When Charles Clarke introduced himself to Coleridge: IT WAS in the summer of 1821 that I first beheld Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was on the East Cliff at Ramsgate. He was con¬ templating the sea under its most attractive aspect: in a dazzling sun, with sailing clouds that drew their purple shadows over its bright green floor, and a merry breeze of sufficient prevalence to emboss each wave with a silvery foam. ... As he had no companion, I desired to pay my respects to one of the most extraordinary—and, indeed in his department of genius, the most extraordinary man of his age. And being possessed of a talisman for securing his consideration, I introduced myself as 132

Charles Cow den Clarke a friend and admirer of Charles Lamb. This pass-word was sufficient, and I found him immediately talking to me in the bland and frank tones of a standing acquaintance. A poor girl had that morning thrown herself from the pier-head in a pang of despair, from having been betrayed by a villain. He alluded to the event, and went on to denounce the morality of the age that will hound from the community the reputed weaker sub¬ ject, and continue to receive him who has wronged her. He agreed with me that that question never will be adjusted but by the women themselves. Justice will continue in abeyance so long as they visit with severity the errors of their own sex and tolerate those of ours. He then diverged to the great mysteries of life and death, and branched away to the sublimer question— the immortality of the soul. Here he spread the sail-broad vans of his wonderful imagination, and soared away with an eagle' flight, and with an eagle-eye too, compassing the effulgence of his great argument, ever and anon stooping within my own sparrow’s range, and then glancing away again, and careering through the trackless fields of ethereal metaphysics. And thus he continued for an hour and a half, never pausing for an instant except to catch his breath (which, in the heat of his teeming mind, he did like a schoolboy repeating by rote his task), and gave utterance to some of the grandest thoughts I ever heard from the mouth of man. His ideas, embodied in words of purest eloquence, flew about my ears like drifts of snow. He was like a cataract filling and rushing over my penny-phial capacity. I could only gasp and bow my head in acknowledgment. He re¬ quired from me nothing more than the simple recognition of his discourse; and so he went on like a steam-engine—i keeping the machine oiled with my looks of pleasure, while he supplied the fuel: and that, upon the same theme too, would have lasted till now. What would I have given for a short-hand report of that speech! And such was the habit of this wonderful man. Like the old peripatetic philosophers, he walked about, prodigally scat¬ tering wisdom, and leaving it to the winds of chance to waft the seeds into a genial soil.

*33

Contemporary Descriptions My first suspicion of his being at Ramsgate had arisen from my mother observing that she had heard an elderly gentleman in the public library, who looked like a Dissenting minister, talking as she never heard man talk. Like his own “Ancient Mariner,” when he had once fixed your eye he held you spell¬ bound, and you were constrained to listen to his tale; you must have been more powerful than he to have broken the charm; and I know no man worthy to do that. He did indeed answer to my conception of a man of genius, for his mind flowed on “like to the Pontick sea,” that “ne’er feels retiring ebb.” It was always ready for action; like the hare, it slept with its eyes open. He would at any given moment range from the subtlest and most abstruse question in metaphysics to the architectural beauty in contrivance of a flower of the held; and the gorgeousness of his imagery would increase and dilate and flash forth such corusca¬ tions of similes and startling theories that one was in a perpetual aurora borealis of fancy. . . . He would not only illustrate a theory or an argument with a sustained and superb figure, but in pursuing the current of his thought he would bubble up with a sparkle of fancy so fleet and brilliant that the attention, though startled and arrested, was not broken. He would throw these into the stream of his argument, as waifs and strays. Notwithstanding his wealth of language and prodigious power in amplification, no one, I think (unless it were Shakespeare or Bacon), possessed with himself equal power of condensation. He would frequently comprise the elements of a noble theorem in two or three words; and, like the genuine offspring of a poet’s brain, it always came forth in a golden halo. I remember once, in discoursing upon the architecture of the Middle Ages, he reduced the Gothic structure into a magnificent abstraction—and in two words. “A Gothic cathedral,” he said, “is like a petrified religion.” . . . Like all men of genius, and with the gift of eloquence, Cole¬ ridge had a power and subtlety in interpretation that would per¬ suade an ordinary listener against the conviction of his senses. It has been said of him that he could persuade a Christian he

134

Charles Cow den Clarke was a Platonist, a Deist that he was a Christian, and an Atheist that he believed in a God. . . . Like the chameleon, he would frequently adopt and reflect the hue of his converser’s prejudices, where neither opinions (religious or political) were positively offensive to him; and thus, from a tranquillity—perhaps I might say, an indolence— of disposition, he would fashion his discourse and frame his arguments, for the time being, to suit the known predilections of his companion. It is therefore idle to represent him as a par¬ tisan at all, unless it be for kindness and freedom of thought; and I know no other party principle worth a button.1 On March 5, 1830, Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke carried to Coleridge a message from Edmund Reade, concerning Reade’s poem “Cain.” More than glad were we of this occasion for a visit to Highgate, where at Mr. Gillman’s house we found Coleridge, bland, amiable, affably inclined to renew the intercourse of some years previous on the cliff at Ramsgate. As he came into the room, large-presenced, ample-countenanced, grand-foreheaded, he seemed to the younger visitor a living and moving imperson¬ ation of some antique godlike being shedding a light around him of poetic effulgence and omnipercipience. He bent kindly eyes upon her, when she was introduced to him as Vincent Novello’s eldest daughter and the wife of her introducer, and spoke a few words of courteous welcome: then, the musician’s name catching his ear and engaging his attention, he immediately launched forth into a noble eulogy of music, speaking of his special admira¬ tion for Beethoven as the most poetical of all musical composers; and from that, went on into a superb dissertation upon an idea he had conceived that the Creation of the Universe must have been achieved during a grand prevailing harmony of spheral music. His elevated tone, as he rolled forth his gorgeous sentences, his lofty look, his sustained flow of language, his sublime utter¬ ance, gave the effect of some magnificent organ-peal to our en-

J35

Contemporary Descriptions tranced ears. It was only when he came to a pause in his subject —or rather, to the close of what he had to say upon it—that he reverted to ordinary matters, learned the motive of our visit and the message with which we were charged, and answered some inquiries about his health. . . .2

HARTLEY COLERIDGE 1796-1849 Coleridge's eldest son, Hartley, gave evidence of unusual endow¬ ments from an early age. He was the “dear babe” of the tender and hopeful passages in “The Nightingale” and “Frost at Midnight” But if he had some of the gifts of his father, including that of talk, he also resembled him in lacking will and definiteness of purpose. Removal from an Oxford fellowship, on grounds of intemperance, probably had much to do with the despondence and irregularity of his later life. Unsuccessful as a schoolmaster, he sporadically engaged in writing, but produced only such biographical studies as Bio-

graphia Borealis and Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire, some crit¬ icisms and essays, and a volume of poems. The intended biography of his father, which he was so well qualified to write, never got beyond a few fragmentary passages.

Writing to his father, March 12, 1824: I HAVE little to wish for, except your presence and conversa¬ tion, of which, the more deeply I reflect on any subject, the more I feel the deprivation.1 From a letter to his brother, Derwent, August 1, 1834: I lived in hopes of seeing our dear departed Parent. ... I might have seen him, might have comforted him, might have been enriched with the fulness of his wisdom; of which, alas, some fragments only, abide in my memory.2 From a letter to Mrs. Coleridge, May 16, 1835, concerning the Table Talk, which he says he has not yet read: 136

Hartley Coleridge I hope Henry has been very, very careful as to what he has recorded. Dear papa often said things which he would not him¬ self have published: and I have heard him utter opinions both in Religion and in Politics not very easy to reconcile with what he has published.3 From another letter to Mrs. Coleridge on the same subject, January 18, 1836:

My Father’s opinions on many points of public import were considerably different during the years wherein I last conversed with him, from those which Henry has recorded. He admitted the necessity of a reform in parliament, and though I could never have imagined that he could have much admired little Johnny Russell’s unprecedented piece of stupidity and blundering, call’d “the Reform Bill,” I thought he would have been thank¬ ful, as I am, for any thing which got rid of the idolized abomina¬ tions of the old system, not as better in itself, but as necessary, transitory, and, at least, making room for something better.4 Writing to H. N. Coleridge, May 8, 1836, to assure him that in the letter quoted above, “nothing could be more remote from my inten¬ tion than to accuse you of misrepresentation or suppression”:

All I said was, that his was a many sided mind, and it had chanced that I had seen it under aspects probably less frequently developed in latter years, and though I well know that he never would have approved of the measures called reforms, and still less of the manner and spirit in which they have been carried, his conversation when I was last in the habit of hearing him authorized me to think that he did perceive the necessity of deep and vital changes, not in servile compliance with the spirit of the age,—(an odious phrase) but to approximate the practice of the constitution to its Ideal and final cause he certainly did hold, or I grievously mistook him, that though the government did work well according to the money getting commercial principles of the economists who assailed it, it did not work well morally, did not perform its duty to God or to the divine in Man, did not

J37

Contemporary Descriptions supply those demands of human nature, which are at once rights and duties. He did express strong indignation against the selfish¬ ness modified and mollified indeed by much kindness and good¬ nature,—but not controlled or balanced by any clear principles. He utterly condemn’d I know, to his latest hour the system which considering men as things, instruments, machines, property, does not in effect make them so. Though he never held that happiness is the legitimate end of human existence, he thought comfort, competence, national free-agency, a kind and paternal treatment of the many, which alone can render a duteous, filial loyalty possible—are the essential conditions of a healthy state either of individuals or classes. I cannot, moreover, help thinking, that though at no time of his life a Jacobin or a revolutionist, he was in his youth at the period to which my earliest recollections of him extend, a great deal more of a republican, and certainly, much more of a philanthropist and cosmopolite, than he appears to have been distinctly aware of in his riper years. I recollect being somewhat startled and terrified at the exulting tone in which he spoke of the French Revolution long after its true character had appeared. He was, as far as his nature allowed him to hate any thing, a king-hater, and a prelate-hater, and spoke of Charles ist and of Laud with a bitterness in which I never did and never can sympathize. He also, but read not this to Mama or Sara, did even when I was last with him at Highgate, speak very harshly of the political subserviency of W— and S—.5 From the uncompleted biographical study of his father, in answer to the charge that S. T. C. was a plagiarist: My Father, of all men whom I ever knew, was the readiest to love any one in whom there was but an appearance of goodness, and no man so egregiously overrated the understanding of those whom he loved. In fact he put his own sense into their nonsense, inspired their very common-place with his own transcendent meaning; if by any chance a stray word struck a new train of thought in his mind, he attributed the fulness of his own ideas to the unconscious speaker. In the kingdom of intellect, he had 138

Hartley Coleridge no notion of meum and tuum; he mistook the sympathy of affection, or it may be of vanity, for a sympathy of intelligence, and would sometimes, in describing a conversation, repeat as the veritable speeches of his company, such bursts of eloquence, such revelations of Truth, as they could no more of [sic] uttered or conceived than they could have talk’d the language of para¬ dise—no more than the Bos loquitur of Livy’s epitomizer could have cultivated the words which the ventriloquist made to pro¬ ceed from its muzzle. And in this he was guilty of no deception, no flattery; he was not even conscious of kind intention; there forgeries always proceeded from some short observation, couched in words which might vent the meaning which he infused from his proper store—he galvanized a dead frog and fancied that it was a living cherub[?]. Never was there a fouller calumny than that which ascribed to Coleridge a repugnance to acknowledge intellectual obligations. Those who have never enjoyed the bounties of his personal converse may find some very amusing illustrations of this propensity to overunderstand (for he rarely misunderstood) the words of others, in his “Table Talk’’ and in his “Remains,’’ in his remarks upon Books. If he found in any author he liked (and he loved his favourite books with a human kindliness as if the sentient souls of their writers had abided in them, and they were capable of perceiving and reciprocating his affection), a phrase that readily adapted itself to a thought, pre¬ existent in his mind, though perhaps not immediately present to his consciousness, he gave away without reservation, not that thought only, but all its progeny in his teeming brain, all its lineal and logical ancestry, and its collateral and associative cousins, and scotch cousins, to the fortunate author.6

139

Contemporary Descriptions

HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE i798-l843 Coleridge’s nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, was also his faithful editor and scribe. Posterity has forgotten his brief legal career; his pamphlet inspired by the rick-burnings of 1830; and his description of an excursion he made with his uncle, the Bishop of Barbados, a pleasant little book entitled. Six Months in the West Indies; but it remembers his able editions of Coleridge’s Literary Remains, Aids to Reflection, and Confessions of an Inquir¬ ing Spirit. His appreciative analysis of Coleridge’s Poetical Works, in the Quarterly Review, has been called “the most important single critique of the poetry of Coleridge written during his lifetime.” 1 But by far his greatest service was the preservation and publication of Coleridge’s Table Talk. From December 29,1822 to July 10, 1834 he was his uncle’s assiduous Boswell. The Table Talk begins on the former date with Coleridge’s animated discourse on Shakespeare, Schiller, Scott, Byron, and the actor Kemble, and closes on the latter date with Coleridge’s deathbed regrets that he will be unable to complete his Philosophy. The value of this writer’s remarks on Cole¬ ridge’s talk, based as they are on long years of close intimacy and purposeful listening, must be apparent.

An afternoon with Coleridge, June 24, 1827: HOW WELL I remember this Midsummer-day! I shall never pass such another. The sun was setting behind Caen Wood, and the calm of the evening was so exceedingly deep that it arrested Mr. Coleridge’s attention. We were alone together in Mr. Gillman’s drawing-room, and Mr. C. left off talking, and fell into an almost trance-like state for ten minutes whilst contemplating the beautiful prospect before us. His eyes swam in tears, his head in¬ clined a little forward, and there was a slight uplifting of the fin¬ gers, which seemed to tell me that he was in prayer. I was awe¬ stricken, and remained absorbed in looking at the man, in forgetfulness of external nature, when he recovered himself, and after a word or two, fell by some secret link of association upon 140

Henry Nelson Coleridge Spenser’s poetry. Upon my telling him that I did not very well recollect the Prothalamion: “Then I must read you a bit of it,” said he; and fetching the book from the next room, he recited the whole of it in his finest and most musical manner. I particularly bear in mind the sensible diversity of tone and rhythm with which he gave:— Sweet Thames! run softly till I end my song, the concluding line of each of the ten strophes of the poem. When I look upon the scanty memorial, which I have alone preserved of this afternoon’s converse, I am tempted to burn these pages in despair. Mr. Coleridge talked a volume of criti¬ cism that day, which, printed verbatim as he spoke it, would have made the reputation of any other person but himself. He was, indeed, particularly brilliant and enchanting; and I left him at night so thoroughly magnetized, that I could not for two or three days afterwards reflect enough to put anything on paper.2 At the British Gallery in Pall Mall, July 24, 1831: Mr. Coleridge was in high spirits, and seemed to kindle in his mind at the contemplation of the splendid pictures before him. He did not examine them all by the catalogue, but anchored himself before some three or four great works, telling me that he saw the rest of the Gallery potentially. I can yet distinctly recall him, half leaning on his old simple stick, and his hat off in one hand, whilst with the fingers of the other he went on, as was his constant wont, figuring in the air a commentary of small diagrams, wherewith, as he fancied, he could translate to the eye those relations of form and space which his words might fail to convey with clearness to the ear. His admiration for Rubens showed itself in a sort of joy and brotherly fondness; he looked as if he would shake hands with his pictures. What the company, which by degrees formed itself round this silver-haired, bright¬ eyed, music-breathing old man, took him for, I cannot guess; there was probably not one there who knew him to be that 141

Contemporary Descriptions Ancient Mariner, who held people with his glittering eye, and constrained them, like three years’ children, to hear his tale. In the midst of his speech, he turned to the right hand, where stood a very lovely young woman, whose attention he had involun¬ tarily arrested; to her, without apparently any consciousness of her being a stranger to him, he addressed many remarks, although I must acknowledge they were couched in a somewhat softer tone, as if he were soliciting her sympathy. He was, verily, a gentle-hearted man at all times; but I never was in company with him in my life, when the entry of a woman, it mattered not who, did not provoke a dim gush of emotion, which passed like an infant’s breath over the mirror of his intellect.3 Coleridge having remarked, July 4, 1833, “Burke was a great and universal talker;—yet now we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in Boswell. The fact is, Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the sharp short things that Johnson almost always did, which produce a more decided effect at the mo¬ ment, and which are so much more easy to carry off”: Burke, I am persuaded, was not so continuous a talker as Coleridge. Madame de Stael told a nephew of the latter, at Coppet, that Mr. C. was a master of monologue, mais qu’il ne savait pas le dialogue. There was a spice of vindictiveness in this, the exact history of which is not worth explaining. And if dia¬ logue must be cut down in its meaning to small talk, I, for one, will admit that Coleridge, amongst his numberless qualifications, possessed it not. But I am sure that he could, when it suited him, converse as well as any one else, and with women he frequently did converse in a very winning and popular style, confining them, however, as well as he could, to the detail of facts or of their spontaneous emotions. In general, it was certainly other¬ wise. “You must not be surprised,’’ he said to me, “at my talking so long to you—I pass so much of my time in pain and solitude, yet everlastingly thinking, that, when you or any other persons call on me, I can hardly help easing my mind, by pouring forth 142

Henry Nelson Coleridge some of the accumulated mass of reflection and feeling, upon an apparently interested recipient.” But the principal reason, no doubt, was the habit of his intellect, which was under a law of discoursing upon all subjects with reference to ideas or ultimate ends. You might interrupt him when you pleased, and he was patient of every sort of conversation except mere personality, which he absolutely hated.4 Written in 1834, shortly before Coleridge’s death: Perhaps our readers may have heard repeated a saying of Mr. Wordsworth, that many men of this age had done wonderful things, as Davy, Scott, Cuvier, Sec.; but that Coleridge was the only wonderful man he ever knew. Something, of course, must be allowed in this as in all other such cases for the antithesis; but we believe the fact really to be, that the greater part of those who have occasionally visited Mr. Coleridge have left him with a feeling akin to the judgment indicated in the above remark. They admire the man more than his works, or they forget the works in the absorbing impression made by the living author. And no wonder. Those who remember him in his more vigorous days can bear witness to the peculiarity and transcendent power of his conversational eloquence. It was unlike anything that could be heard elsewhere; the kind was different, the degree was dif¬ ferent, the manner was different. The boundless range of scientific knowledge, the brilliancy and exquisite nicety of illustration, the deep and ready reasoning, the strangeness and immensity of bookish lore—were not all; the dramatic story, the joke, the pun, the festivity, must be added—and with these the clerical-looking dress, the thick waving silver hair, the youthful-coloured cheek, the indefinable mouth and lips, the quick yet steady and pene¬ trating greenish grey eye, the slow and continuous enunciation, and the everlasting music of his tones,—all went to make up the image and to constitute the living presence of the man. He is now no longer young, and bodily infirmities, we regret to know, have pressed heavily upon him. His natural force is indeed abated; but his eye is not dim, neither is his mind yet enfeebled. . . .

143

Contemporary Descriptions Mr. Coleridge’s conversation, it is true, has not now all the brilliant versatility of his former years; yet we know not whether the contrast between his bodily weakness and his mental power does not leave a deeper and a more solemnly affecting impression, than his most triumphant displays in youth could ever have done. To see the pain-stricken countenance relax, and the contracted frame dilate under the kindling of intellectual fire alone—to watch the infirmities of the flesh shrinking out of sight, or glori¬ fied and transfigured in the brightness of the awakening spirit— is an awful object of contemplation; and in no other person did we ever witness such a distinction,—nay, alienation of mind from body,—such a mastery of the purely intellectual over the purely corporeal, as in the instance of this remarkable man. Even now his conversation is characterized by all the essentials of its former excellence; there is the same individuality, the same unexpected¬ ness, the same universal grasp; nothing is too high, nothing too low for it: it glances from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, with a speed and a splendour, an ease and a power, which almost seem inspired: yet its universality is not of the same kind with the superficial ranging of the clever talkers whose criticism and whose information are called forth by, and spent upon, the par¬ ticular topics in hand. No; in this more, perhaps, than in any¬ thing else is Mr. Coleridge’s discourse distinguished: that it springs from an inner centre, and illustrates by light from the soul. His thoughts are, if we may so say, as the radii of a circle, the centre of which may be in the petals of a rose, and the cir¬ cumference as wide as the boundary of things visible and invisible. In this it was that we always thought another eminent light of our time, recently lost to us, an exact contrast to Mr. Coleridge as to quality and style of conversation. You could not in all London or England hear a more fluent, a more brilliant, a more exquisitely elegant converser than Sir James Mackintosh; nor could you ever find him unprovided. But, somehow or other, it always seemed as if all the sharp and brilliant things he said were poured out of so many vials filled and labelled for the particular occasion; it struck us, to use a figure, as if his mind were an ample and well144

Henry Nelson Coleridge arranged hortus siccus, from which you might have specimens of every kind of plant, but all of them cut and dried for store. You rarely saw nature working at the very moment in him. With Coleridge it was and still is otherwise. He may be slower, more rambling, less pertinent; he may not strike at the instant as so eloquent; but then, what he brings forth is fresh coined; his flowers are newly gathered, they are wet with dew, and, if you please, you may almost see them growing in the rich garden of his mind. The projection is visible; the enchantment is done be¬ fore your eyes. To listen to Mackintosh was to inhale perfume; it pleased, but did not satisfy. The effect of an hour with Coleridge is to set you thinking; his words haunt you for a week afterwards; they are spells, brightenings, revelations. In short, it is, if we may venture to draw so bold a line, the whole difference between talent and genius. A very experienced short-hand writer was employed to take down Mr. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare, but the manu¬ script was almost entirely unintelligible. Yet the lecturer was, as he always is, slow and measured. The writer—we have some notion it was no worse an artist than Mr. Gurney himself—gave this account of the difficulty: that with regard to every other speaker whom he had ever heard, however rapid or involved, he could almost always, by long experience in his art, guess the form of the latter part, or apodosis, of the sentence by the form of the beginning; but that the conclusion of every one of Coleridge’s sentences was a surprise upon him. He was obliged to listen to the last word. Yet this unexpectedness, as we termed it before, is not the effect of quaintness or confusion of construction; so far from it, that we believe foreigners of different nations, especially Germans and Italians, have often borne very remarkable testi¬ mony to the grammatical purity and simplicity of his language, and have declared that they generally understood what he said much better than the sustained conversation of any other Eng¬ lishman whom they had met. It is the uncommonness of the thoughts or the image which prevents your anticipating the end. We owe, perhaps, an apology to our readers for the length of

145

Contemporary Descriptions the preceding remarks; but the fact is, so very much of the intel¬ lectual life and influence of Mr. Coleridge has consisted in the oral communication of his opinions, that no sketch could be reasonably complete without a distinct notice of the peculiar character of his powers in this particular. We believe it has not been the lot of any other literary man in England, since Dr. Johnson, to command the devoted admiration and steady zeal of so many and such widely-differing disciples—some of them having become, and others being likely to become, fresh and independent sources of light and moral action in themselves upon the principles of their common master. One half of these affectionate disciples have learned their lessons of philosophy from the teacher’s mouth. He has been to them as an old oracle of the Academy or Lyceum. The fulness, the inwardness, the ultimate scope of his doctrines has never yet been published in print, and if disclosed, it has been from time to time in the higher moments of conversation, when occasion, and mood, and person begot an exalted crisis. More than once has Mr. Coleridge said, that with pen in hand he felt a thousand checks and difficulties in the expression of his meaning; but that—authorship aside—he never found the smallest hitch or impediment in the fullest utterance of his most subtle fancies by word of mouth. His abstrusest thoughts became rhythmical and clear when chaunted to their own music.5 From the Preface to the second edition of the Table Talk, 1836: It is nearly fifteen years since I was, for the first time, enabled to become a frequent and attentive visitor in Mr. Coleridge’s domestic society. His exhibition of intellectual power in living discourse struck me at once as unique and transcendent; and upon my return home, on the very first evening which I spent with him after my boyhood, I committed to writing, as well as I could, the principal topics of his conversation in his own words. I had no settled design at that time of continuing the work, but simply made the note in something like a spirit of vexation that such a strain of music as I had just heard, should not last for ever. 146

Henry Nelson Coleridge What I did once, I was easily induced by the same feeling to do again: and when, after many years of affectionate communion be¬ tween us, the painful existence of my revered relative on earth was at length finished in peace, my occasional notes of what he had said in my presence had grown to a mass, of which this volume contains only such parts as seem fit for present publication. I know, better than any one can tell me, how inadequately these specimens represent the peculiar splendour and individuality of Mr. Coleridge’s conversation. How should it be otherwise? Who could always follow to the turning-point his long arrow-flights of thought? Who could fix those ejaculations of light, those tones of a prophet, which at times have made me bend before him as before an inspired man? Such acts of spirit as these were too subtle to be fettered down on paper: they live—if they can live anywhere—in the memories alone of those who witnessed them. Yet I would fain hope that these pages will prove that all is not lost;—that something of the wisdom, the learning, and the elo¬ quence of a great man’s social converse has been snatched from forgetfulness, and endowed with a permanent shape for general use. And although, in the judgment of many persons, I may incur a serious responsibility by this publication, I am, upon the whole, willing to abide the result, in confidence that the fame of the loved and lamented speaker will lose nothing hereby, and that the cause of Truth and of Goodness will be every way a gainer. This sprig, though slight and immature, may yet become its place, in the Poet’s wreath of honour, among flowers of graver hue. . . . A cursory inspection will show that this volume lays no claim to be ranked with those of Boswell in point of dramatic interest. Coleridge differed not more from Johnson in every characteristic of intellect, than in the habits and circumstances of his life, dur¬ ing the greatest part of the time in which I was intimately con¬ versant with him. He was naturally very fond of society, and continued to be so to the last; but the almost unceasing ill-health with which he was afflicted, after fifty, confined him for many months in every year to his own room, and, most commonly, to 147

Contemporary Descriptions his bed. He was then rarely seen except by single visitors; and few of them would feel any disposition upon such occasions to inter¬ rupt him, whatever might have been the length or mood of his discourse. And indeed, although I have been present in mixed company, where Mr. Coleridge has been questioned and op¬ posed, and the scene has been amusing for the moment—I own that it was always much more delightful to me to let the river wander at its own sweet will, unruffled by aught but a certain breeze of emotion which the stream itself produced. If the course it took was not the shortest, it was generally the most beautiful; and what you saw by the way was as worthy of note as the ultimate object to which you were journeying. It is possible, indeed, that Coleridge did not, in fact, possess the precise gladiatorial power of Johnson; yet he understood a sword-play of his own; and I have, upon several occasions, seen him exhibit brilliant proofs of its effectiveness upon disputants of considerable pretensions in their particular lines. But he had a genuine dislike of the practice in himself or others, and no slight provocation could move him to any such exertion. He was, indeed, to my observation, more distinguished from other great men of letters by his moral thirst after the Truth—the ideal truth—in his own mind, than by his merely intellectual qualifications. To leave the every-day circle of society, in which the literary and scientific rarely—the rest never—break through the spell of personality;—where Anecdote reigns everlastingly paramount and exclusive, and the mildest attempt to generalize the Babel of facts, and to control temporary and individual phenomena by the application of eternal and overruling principles, is unintelligible to many, and disagreeable to more;—to leave this species of converse—if converse it de¬ serves to be called—and pass an entire day with Coleridge, was a marvellous change indeed. It was a Sabbath past expression deep, and tranquil, and serene. You came to a man who had travelled in many countries, and in critical times; who had seen and felt the world in most of its ranks and in many of its vicissi¬ tudes and weaknesses; one to whom all literature and genial art 148

Henry Nelson Coleridge were absolutely subject, and to whom, with a reasonable allow¬ ance as to technical details, all science was in a most extraor¬ dinary degree familiar. Throughout a long-drawn summer’s day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but clear and musi¬ cal, tones, concerning things human and divine; marshalling all history, harmonizing all experiment, probing the depths of your consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and of terror to the imagination; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mind, that you might, for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very act of conversion. And this he would do, without so much as one allusion to himself, without a word of reflection on others, save when any given act fell naturally in the way of his discourse,—without one anecdote that was not proof and illus¬ tration of a previous position;—gratifying no passion, indulging no caprice, but, with a calm mastery over your soul, leading you onward and onward for ever through a thousand windings, yet with no pause, to some magnificent point in which, as in a focus, all the parti-coloured rays of his discourse should converge in light. In all this he was, in truth, your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that he was other than a fellowstudent and the companion of your way,—so playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate the glance of his pleasant eye! There were, indeed, some whom Coleridge tired, and some whom he sent asleep. It would occasionally so happen, when the abstruser mood was strong upon him, and the visitor was narrow and ungenial. I have seen him at times when you could not in¬ carnate him—when he shook aside your petty questions or doubts, and burst with some impatience through the obstacles of common conversation. Then, escaped from the flesh, he would soar upwards into an atmosphere almost too rare to breathe, but which seemed proper to him, and there he would float at ease. Like enough, what Coleridge then said, his subtlest listener would not understand as a man understands a newspaper; but, upon such a listener, there would steal an influence, and an im-

H9

Contemporary Descriptions pression, and a sympathy; there would be a gradual attempering of his body and spirit, till his total being vibrated with one pulse alone, and thought became merged in contemplation:— And so, his senses gradually wrapt In a half sleep, he’d dream of better worlds, And dreaming hear thee still, O singing lark, That sangest like an angel in the clouds!

But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the general char¬ acter of Mr. Coleridge’s conversation was abstruse or rhapsodical. The contents of the following pages may, I think, be taken as pretty strong presumptive evidence that his ordinary manner was plain and direct enough; and even when, as sometimes hap¬ pened, he seemed to ramble from the road, and to lose himself in a wilderness of digressions, the truth was, that at that very time he was working out his fore-known conclusion through an almost miraculous logic, the difficulty of which consisted pre¬ cisely in the very fact of its minuteness and universality. He took so large a scope, that, if he was interrupted before he got to the end, he appeared to have been talking without an object; al¬ though, perhaps, a few steps more would have brought you to a point, a retrospect from which would show you the pertinence of all he had been saying. I have heard persons complain that they could get no answer to a question from Coleridge. The truth is, he answered, or meant to answer, so fully, that the querist should have no second question to ask. In nine cases out of ten he saw the question was short or misdirected; and knew that a mere yes or no answer could not embrace the truth—that is, the whole truth—and might, very probably, by implication, convey error. Hence that exhaustive cyclical mode of discoursing in which he frequently indulged; unfit, indeed, for a dinner-table, and too long-breathed for the patience of a chance visitor,—but which, to those who knew for what they came, was the object of their profoundest admiration, as it was the source of their most valu¬ able instruction. Mr. Coleridge’s affectionate disciples learned their lessons of philosophy and criticism from his own mouth. 150

Henry Nelson Coleridge He was to them as an old master of the Academy or Lyceum. The more time he took, the better pleased were such visitors; for they came expressly to listen, and had ample proof how truly he had declared, that whatever difficulties he might feel, with pen in hand, in the expression of his meaning, he never found the small¬ est hitch or impediment in the utterance of his most subtle rea¬ sonings by word of mouth. How many a time and oft have I felt his abstrusest thoughts steal rhythmically on my soul, when chanted forth by him! Nay, how often have I fancied I heard rise up in answer to his gentle touch, an interpreting music of my own, as from the passive strings of some wind-smitten lyre! Mr. Coleridge’s conversation at all times required attention, because what he said was so individual and unexpected. But when he was dealing deeply with a question, the demand upon the intellect of the hearer was very great; not so much for any hardness of language, for his diction was always simple and easy; nor for the abstruseness of the thoughts, for they generally ex¬ plained, or appeared to explain, themselves; but pre-eminently on account of the seeming remoteness of his associations, and the exceeding subtlety of his transitional links. Upon this point it is very happily, though, according to my observation, too gen¬ erally, remarked, by one whose powers and opportunities of judging were so eminent,6 that the obliquity of his testimony in other respects is the more unpardonable;—“Coleridge to many people—and often I have heard the complaint—seemed to wan¬ der; and he seemed then to wander the most, when, in fact, his resistance to the wandering instinct was greatest,—viz., when the compass and huge circuit, by which his illustrations moved, travelled farthest into remote regions, before they began to re¬ volve. Long before this coming round commenced, most people had lost him, and naturally enough supposed that he had lost himself. They continued to admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not see their relations to the dominant theme. . . . However, I can assert, upon my long and intimate knowl¬ edge of Coleridge’s mind, that logic the most severe was as in¬ alienable from his modes of thinking, as grammar from his lan-

J5X

Contemporary Descriptions guage.” 7 True: his mind was a logic-vice; let him fasten it on the tiniest flourish of an error, he never slacked his hold, till he had crushed body and tail to dust. He was always ratiocinating in his own mind, and therefore sometimes seemed incoherent to the partial observer. It happened to him as to Pindar, who in modern days has been called a rambling rhapsodist, because the connec¬ tions of his parts, though never arbitrary, are so fine, that the vulgar reader sees them not at all. But they are there nevertheless, and may all be so distinctly shown, that no one can doubt their existence; and a little study will also prove that the points of contact are those which the true genius of lyric verse naturally evolved, and that the entire Pindaric ode, instead of being the loose and lawless outburst which so many have fancied, is, with¬ out any exception, the most artificial and highly-wrought compo¬ sition which Time has spared to us from the wreck of the Greek Muse. So I can well remember occasions, in which, after listening to Mr. Coleridge for several delightful hours, I have gone away with divers splendid masses of reasoning in my head, the separate beauty and coherency of which I deeply felt; but how they had produced, or how they bore upon, each other, I could not then perceive. In such cases I have mused sometimes even for days afterwards upon the words, till at length, spontaneously as it seemed, “the fire would kindle,” and the association, which had escaped my utmost efforts of comprehension before, flash itself all at once upon my mind with the clearness of noon-day light. It may well be imagined that a style of conversation so con¬ tinuous and diffused as that which I have just attempted to de¬ scribe, presented remarkable difficulties to a mere reporter by memory. It is easy to preserve the pithy remark, the brilliant retort, or the pointed anecdote; these stick of themselves, and their retention requires no effort of mind. But where the salient angles are comparatively few, and the object of attention is a long-drawn subtle discoursing, you can never recollect, except by yourself thinking the argument over again. In so doing, the order and the characteristic expressions will for the most part spontaneously arise; and it is scarcely credible with what degree

*52

Sir John Taylor Coleridge of accuracy language may thus be preserved, where practice has given some dexterity, and long familiarity with the speaker has enabled, or almost forced, you to catch the outlines of his manner. Yet with all this, so peculiar were the flow and breadth of Mr. Coleridge’s conversation, that I am very sensible how much those who can best judge will have to complain of my representation of it. The following specimens will, I fear, seem too fragmentary, and therefore deficient in one of the most distinguishing proper¬ ties of that which they are designed to represent; and this is true. Yet the reader will in most instances have little difficulty in understanding the course which the conversation took, although my recollections of it are thrown into separate paragraphs for the sake of superior precision. As I never attempted to give dia¬ logue—indeed, there was seldom much dialogue to give—the great point with me was to condense what I could remember on each particular topic into intelligible wholes with as little injury to the living manner and diction as was possible. With this ex¬ planation, I must leave it to those who still have the tones of “that old man eloquent” ringing in their ears, to say how far I have succeeded in this delicate enterprise of stamping his winged words with perpetuity.8

SIR JOHN TAYLOR COLERIDGE 1790-1876 Sir John Taylor Coleridge, better known as Mr. Justice Coleridge, was the poet's nephew. As a man of letters, he contributed to the Quarterly Review, of which he was for a few months editor, and wrote a Life of Keble. His chief distinction, however, was as a bar¬ rister and judge. A long career on the King's Bench led to his appoint¬ ment as a Privy Councillor. With a reputation for fair-mindedness, he was often selected as an arbitrator and was appointed to several important legal and educational commissions. Literary and legal talents might be said to have combined in his widely used edition of

!53

Contemporary Descriptions Blackstone’s Commentaries. He must still have been a student at Oxford, very likely off on a holiday, when Coleridge discoursed ivith him at Richmond in 1811. This was during the period when Cole¬ ridge was domesticated with the Morgans at Hammersmith, and con¬ tributing to the Courier.

John Taylor Coleridge writes to his brother James in 1811, after meeting S. T. C. at the home of John May, an affluent wine merchant, in Richmond: HE SPENT two days at Richmond, and so delightful and aston¬ ishing a man I have never met with. Every subject he was master of, and discussed in the most splendid eloquence, without ever pausing for a word. Whether poetry, religion, language, politics, or metaphysics were on the “tapis,” he was equally at home and equally clear. It was curious to see the ladies loitering most at¬ tentively, and being really uncommonly entertained with a long discussion of two hours on the deepest metaphysics. . . . He made a conquest of all the men and women at Richmond, gave us analyses of long works which are to come out, recited songs and odes of his own, told stories of his youth and travels, never sparing himself at all, and altogether made the most power¬ ful impression on my mind of any man I ever saw. Yet I saw and heard some things which I did not quite like.1 A more detailed account of the talk at Richmond, April 20, 1811: We got on politics, and he [S. T. C.] related some curious facts of the Prince and Perceval. Then, adverting to the present state of affairs in Portugal, he said that he rejoiced, not so much in the mere favourable turn, as in the end that must now be put to the base reign of opinion respecting the superiority and invincible skill of the French generals. Brave as Sir John Moore was, he thought him deficient in that greater and more essential manli¬ ness of soul, which should have made him not hold his enemy in such fearful respect, and which should have taught him to care less for the opinion of the world at home. We then got, I know not how, to German topics. He said that

154

Sir John Taylor Coleridge the language of their literature was entirely factitious, and had been formed by Luther from the two dialects. High and Low German; that he had made it, grammatically, most correct, more so, perhaps, than any other language; it was equal to the Greek, except in harmony and sweetness. And yet the Germans them¬ selves thought it sweet;—Klopstock had repeated to him an ode of his own to prove it, and really had deceived himself, by the force of association, into a belief that the harsh sounds, convey¬ ing, indeed, or being significant of, sweet images or thoughts, were themselves sweet. Mr. C. was asked what he thought of Klopstock. He answered, that his fame was rapidly declining in Germany; that an Englishman might form a correct notion of him by uniting the moral epigram of Young, the bombast of Hervey, and the minute description of Richardson. As to sub¬ limity, he had, with all Germans, one rule for producing it; it was, to take something very great, and make it very small in com¬ parison with that which you wish to elevate. Thus, for example, Klopstock says,—“As the gardener goes forth, and scatters from his basket seed into the garden; so does the Creator scatter worlds with his right hand.” Here worlds, a large object, are made small in the hands of the Creator; consequently, the Creator is very great. In short, the Germans were not a poetical nation in the very highest sense. Wieland was their best poet: his subject was bad, and his thoughts often impure; but his language was rich and harmonious, and his fancy luxuriant. Sotheby’s translation had not at all caught the manner of the original. But the Ger¬ mans were good metaphysicians and critics: they criticised on principles previously laid down; thus, though they might be wrong, they were in no danger of being self-contradictory, which was too often the case with English critics. Young, he said, was not a poet to be read through at once. His love of point and wit had often put an end to his pathos and sublimity; but there were parts in him which must be immortal. He (Mr. C.) loved to read a page of Young, and walk out to think of him. Returning to the Germans, he said that the state of their re155

Contemporary Descriptions ligion, when he was in Germany, was really shocking. He had never met one clergyman a Christian; and he found professors in the universities lecturing against the most material points in the Gospel. He instanced, I think, Paulus, whose lectures he had attended. The object was to resolve the miracles into natural operations; and such a disposition evinced was the best road to preferment. He severely censured Mr. Taylor’s book, in which the principles of Paulus were explained and insisted on with much gratuitous indelicacy. He then entered into the question of Socinianism, and noticed, as I recollect, the passage in the Old Testament; “The people bowed their faces, and worshipped God and the king.” He said, that all worship implied the pres¬ ence of the object worshipped: the people worshipped, bowing to the sensuous presence of the one, and the conceived omni¬ presence of the other. He talked of his having constantly to de¬ fend the Church against the Socinian Bishop of Llandaff, Wat¬ son. The subject then varied to Roman Catholicism, and he gave us an account of a controversy he had had with a very sensible priest in Sicily, on the worship of saints. He had driven the priest from one post to another, tiU the latter took up the ground, that though the saints were not omnipresent, yet God, who was so, imparted to them the prayers offered up, and then they used their interference with Him to grant them. “That is, father, (said C. in reply)—excuse my seeming levity, for I mean no impiety— that is; I have a deaf and dumb wife, who yet understands me, and I her, by signs. You have a favour to ask of me, and want my wife’s interference; so you communicate your request to me, who impart it to her, and she, by signs back again, begs me to grant it.’’ The good priest laughed, and said, “Populus vult decipi, et decipiatur!”

We then got upon the Oxford controversy, and he was de¬ cidedly of opinion that there could be no doubt of Copleston’s complete victory. He thought the Review had chosen its points of attack ill, as there must doubtless be in every institution so old much to reprehend and carp at. On the other hand, he thought that Copleston had not been so severe or hard upon 156

Sir John Taylor Coleridge them as he might have been; but he admired the critical part of his work, which he thought very highly valuable, independently of the controversy. He wished some portion of mathematics was more essential to a degree at Oxford, as he thought a gentleman’s education incomplete without it, and had himself found the necessity of getting up a little, when he could ill spare the time. He every day more and more lamented his neglect of them when at Cambridge. Then glancing off to Aristotle, he gave a very high character of him. He said that Bacon objected to Aristotle the grossness of his examples, and Davy now did precisely the same to Bacon: both were wrong; for each of those philosophers wished to con¬ fine the attention of the mind in their works to the form of rea¬ soning only, by which other truths might be established or elicited, and therefore the most trite and commonplace examples were in fact the best. He said that during a long confinement in his room, he had taken up the Schoolmen, and was astonished at the immense learning and acute knowledge displayed by them; that there was scarcely anything which modern philosophers had proudly brought forward as their own, which might not be found clearly and systematically laid down by them in some or other of their writings. Locke had sneered at the Schoolmen unfairly, and had raised a foolish laugh against them by citations from their Quid libet questions, which were discussed on the eves of holydays, and in which the greatest latitude was allowed, being considered mere exercises of ingenuity. We had ridiculed their quiddities, and why? Had we not borrowed their quantity and their quality, and why then reject their quiddity, when every schoolboy in logic must know, that of everything may be asked, Quantum est? Quale estf and Quid est? the last bringing you to the most material of all points, its individual being. He after¬ wards stated, that in a History of Speculative Philosophy which he was endeavouring to prepare for publication, he had proved, and to the satisfaction of Sir James Mackintosh, that there was nothing in Locke which his best admirers most admired, that might not be found more clearly and better laid down in Des-

Contemporary Descriptions cartes, or the old Schoolmen; not that he was himself an implicit disciple of Descartes, though he thought that Descartes had been much misinterpreted. When we got on the subject of poetry and Southey, he gave us a critique of the Curse of Kehama, the fault of which he thought consisted in the association of a plot and a machinery so very wild with feelings so sober and tender: but he gave the poem high commendation, admired the art displayed in the employ¬ ment of the Hindu monstrosities, and begged us to observe the noble feeling excited of the superiority of virtue over vice; that Kehama went on, from the beginning to the end of the poem, in¬ creasing in power, whilst Kailyal gradually lost her hopes and her protectors; and yet by the time we got to the end, we had arrived at an utter contempt and even carelessness of the power of evil, as exemplified in the almighty Rajah, and felt a complete confidence in the safety of the unprotected virtue of the maiden. This he thought the very great merit of the poem. When we walked home with him to the inn, he got on the subject of the English Essay for the year at Oxford, and thought some consideration of the corruption of language should be introduced into it. It originated, he thought, in a desire to ab¬ breviate all expression as much as possible; and no doubt, if in one word, without violating idiom, I can express what others have done in more, and yet be as fully and easily understood, I have manifestly made an improvement; but if, on the other hand, it becomes harder, and takes more time to comprehend a thought or image put in one word by Apuleius than when ex¬ pressed in a whole sentence by Cicero, the saving is merely of pen and ink, and the alteration is evidently a corruption. The next morning: Before breakfast we went into Mr. May’s delightful bookroom, where he was again silent in admiration of the prospect. After breakfast, we walked to church. He seemed full of calm piety, and said he always felt the most delightful sensations in a Sunday church-yard,—that it struck him as if God had given to 158

Sir John Taylor Coleridge man fifty-two springs in every year. After the service, he was vehement against the sermon, as common-place, and invidious in its tone towards the poor. Then he gave many texts from the lessons and gospel of the day, as affording fit subjects for dis¬ courses. He ridiculed the absurdity of refusing to believe every¬ thing that you could not understand; and mentioned a rebuke of Dr. Parr’s to a man of the name of Frith, and that of another clergyman to a young man, who said he would believe nothing which he could not understand:—“Then, young man, your creed will be the shortest of any man’s I know.” As we walked up Mr. Cambridge’s meadows towards Twicken¬ ham, he criticised Johnson and Gray as poets, and did not seem to allow them high merit. The excellence of verse, he said, was to be untranslatable into any other words without detriment to the beauty of the passage;—the position of a single word could not be altered in Milton without injury. Gray’s personifications, he said, were mere printer’s devils’ personifications—persons with a capital letter, abstract qualities with a small one. He thought Collins had more genius than Gray, who was a singular instance of a man of taste, poetic feeling, and fancy, without imagination. He contrasted Dryden’s opening of the 10th satire of Juvenal with Johnson’s:— Let observation, with extensive view, Survey mankind from Ganges to Peru;— which was as much as to say,— Let observation with extensive observation observe mankind. After dinner he told us a humorous story of his enthusiastic fondness for Quakerism, when he was at Cambridge, and his at¬ tending one of their meetings, which had entirely cured him. When the little children came in, he was in raptures with them, and descanted upon the delightful mode of treating them now, in comparison with what he had experienced in childhood. He lamented the haughtiness with which Englishmen treated all foreigners abroad, and the facility with which our government 159

Contemporary Descriptions had always given up any people which had allied itself to us, at the end of a war; and he particularly remarked upon our aban¬ donment of Minorca. These two things, he said, made us uni¬ versally disliked on the Continent; though, as a people, most highly respected. He thought a war with America inevitable; and expressed his opinion, that the United States were un¬ fortunate in the prematureness of their separation from this country, before they had in themselves the materials of moral society—before they had a gentry and a learned class,—the former looking backwards, and giving the sense of stability—the latter looking forwards, and regulating the feelings of the people. Afterwards in the drawing-room, he sat down by Professor Rigaud, with whom he entered into a discussion of Kant’s System of Metaphysics. The little knots of the company were speedily silent: Mr. C.’s voice grew louder; and abstruse as the subject was, yet his language was so ready, so energetic, and so eloquent, and his illustrations so very neat and apposite, that the ladies even paid him the most solicitous and respectful attention. They were really entertained with Kant’s Metaphysics! At last I took one of them, a very sweet singer, to the pianoforte; and, when there was a pause, she began an Italian air. She was anxious to please him, and he was enraptured. His frame quivered with emotion, and there was a titter of uncommon delight on his countenance. When it was over, he praised the singer warmly, and prayed she might finish those strains in heaven! This is nearly all, except some anecdotes, which I recollect of our meeting with this most interesting, most wonderful man. Some of his topics and arguments I have enumerated; but the connection and the words are lost. And nothing that I can say can give any notion of his eloquence and manner,—of the hold which he soon got on his audience—of the variety of his stores of information—or, finally, of the artlessness of his habits, or the modesty and temper with which he listened to, and answered arguments, contradictory to his own.1

160

Sara Coleridge

SARA COLERIDGE 1802-1852 Of Sara Coleridge, the poet's only daughter, it has been said that “her father looked down into her eyes, and left in them the light of his own." And this must indeed be true if, as is also reported, she was at home “in the region of psychology and abstract thought” For all her learning, she was generally acknowledged a woman of beauty and charm, celebrated, along with Dora Wordsworth and Edith Southey, as one of the three maidens in Wordsworth's poem, “The Triad.” Besides publishing several translations, she ivrote a fairy tale, Phantasmion. On the death of her husband, Henry Nelson Coleridge, she continued his task of editing her father's writings.

In a letter to Mrs. Plummer, 1835: AS TO my contributions to the “Table Talk,” I am ashamed to say that they really amount to a mere nothing. Two or three short memorables I remember recording; and I often wonder now how I could have been so negligent a listener. But there were several causes for this. In the first place, my father generally dis¬ coursed on such a very extensive scale that it would have been an arduous task for me to attempt recording what I had heard. Henry could sometimes bring him down to narrower topics, but when alone with me he was almost always on the star-paved road, taking in the whole heavens in his circuit.1 Writing to Mrs. Henry M. Jones, July, 1835: The Printing Machine and other critical publications find fault with the editor of “Table Talk” for not having done what they themselves admit no reporter on earth could do. They all allow that it was impossible to represent on paper the ample sweeping current of my father’s discourse. They add, however, that the work has preserved much valuable matter, which would otherwise have perished; that it serves in some measure to con¬ firm and elucidate my father’s written works, and ought always to 161

Contemporary Descriptions be printed as a companion to the “Friend,” etc. This was all that Henry expected to do; he dreamed not of placing Coleridge the talker before his readers, but merely hoped to preserve some part of his talk.2 In a letter to Miss Morris, November 16, 1849, after having met Macaulay, in whom she detected some likeness to Coleridge: His talk, too, though different as to sentiment and matter, was like a little, in manner, in its labyrinthine multiplicity and multitudinousness; and the tones, so flexile and sinuous, as it were, reminded me of the departed eloquence.3

SARA FRICKER (MRS. S. T.) COLERIDGE 1770-1845 Sara Fricker, daughter of a Bristol manufacturer and sister of the Edith Fricker who married Southey, “would have made an excel¬ lent ivife to many persons.” But, as Dorothy Wordsworth continues, Coleridge was “as little fitted for her as she for him.” 1 In Coleridge's own words, taken from one of the many passages in his letters de¬ voted to an analysis of the disharmony between his wife and himself, “Never, I suppose, did the stern match-maker bring together two minds so utterly contrariant in their primary and organical constitu¬ tion.” 2 The married life of the Coleridges, that began October 4, 1795, was one of incompatibility, of efforts at adjustment, and of ever longer periods of separation. If the wife was fretful and un¬ sympathetic, the husband, in continual ill health, was both irre¬ sponsible as a provider and irritable under the yoke of domestic duties. At best the ill-suited pair were, as Coleridge phrased it, “peace¬ able housemates.” 3 We must regret Mrs. Coleridge's failure to leave us a full record of the talk in this discordant but extremely interest¬ ing household.

Writing to Tom Poole from Greta Hall, August 3, 1810: ALL Southey’s friends who have been here this Summer have thought his [Coleridge’s] presence a great addition to the society 162

John Payne Collier here; and have all been uniformly great admirers of his conver¬ sation.4 On the christening of Coleridge’s granddaughter, Edith, August, 1832, at Hampstead: The grandfather came from Highgate to be present and to pass the rest of the day here! . . . His power of continuous talking seems unabated, for he talked incessantly for full 5 hours to the great entertainment of Mrs. May and a few other friends who were present, and did not leave us till 10, when he was accom¬ panied home by the Revd. James Gillman (son of his friends), who performed the ceremony, and when Henry called to see him yesterday he appeared no worse for the exertion he had made. Coleridge talked a good deal of you [Tom Poole], as he always does when he speaks of [his] early days. . . .5

JOHN PAYNE COLLIER 1789-1883 John Payne Collier was a law and parliamentary reporter for the, Times and subsequently for the Morning Chronicle; the literary adviser of the Duke of Devonshire; an active member of the Cam¬ den, Percy, and Shakespeare Societies; the author of a History of English Dramatic Poetry; and the editor of the works of Spenser and of Shakespeare, to mention but a few of the activities of his long life. He is unfortunately remembered, however, for the bitter and per¬ sistent controversy over annotations which he claimed to have dis¬ covered in his copy of a second folio Shakespeare, but which were proved to be forgeries. Doubt likewise existed for many years regard¬ ing the accuracy and even authenticity of his long-lost shorthand notes of Coleridge’s 1811-12 lectures on Shakespeare and Milton. In an anonymous pamphlet, Literary Cookery, the question became so pointed that Collier instituted a libel suit against the publisher. The lecture reports are noiu generally accepted as genuine. When, as a young man, Collier attended Coleridge’s lectures at the London Philosophical Society in the winter of 1811-12, he was enthusiastic 163

Contemporary Descriptions about Shakespeare and a warm admirer of Coleridge, of whom he had already “seen something and heard more” He was also present at the lectures of 1818 and, he says, often in Coleridge's company. Admitting the defects of his record of Coleridge's lectures, he ex¬ plains: “1 was not unfrequently so engrossed, and absorbed by the almost inspired look and manner of the speaker, that I was, for a time, incapable of performing the mechanical duty of writing” 1

From Collier’s diary, October 13, 1811: TWO OR THREE months ago I was in Coleridge’s company for the first time: I have seen him on various occasions since, to my great delight and surprise. I was delighted with his gentle man¬ ners and unaffected good humour, and especially with his kind¬ ness and considerateness for young people: I was surprised by the variety and extent of his knowledge, displayed and enlivened by so much natural eloquence. All he says is without effort, but not unfrequently with a sort of musical hum, and a catching of his breath at the end, and sometimes in the middle, of a sentence, enough to make a slight pause, but not so much as to interrupt the flow of his language. He never disdains to talk on the most famil¬ iar topics, if they seem pleasing to others. In a conversation at my father’s, a little while since, he gave the following character of Falstaff, which I wrote down very soon after it was delivered. Falstaff was no coward, but pretended to be one merely for the sake of trying experiments on the credulity of mankind: he was a liar with the same object, and not because he loved false¬ hood for itself. He was a man of such pre-eminent abilities, as to give him a profound contempt for all those by whom he was usually surrounded, and to lead to a determination on his part, in spite of their fancied superiority, to make them his tools and dupes. He knew, however low he descended, that his own talents would raise him, and extricate him from any difficulty. While he was thought to be the greatest rogue, thief, and liar, he still had that about him which could render him not only respectable, but absolutely necessary to his companions. It was in characters 164

John Payne Collier of complete moral depravity, but of first-rate wit and talents, that Shakespeare delighted; and Coleridge instanced Richard the Third, Falstaff, and Iago. As Coleridge is a man of genius and knowledge, he seems glad of opportunities of display: being a good talker, he likes to get hold of a good listener: he admits it, and told us the anecdote of some very talkative Frenchman, who was introduced to a dumb lady, who, however, politely appeared to hear all her loquacious visitor said. When this visitor afterwards met the friend who had introduced him, he expressed his obligation to that friend for bringing him acquainted with so very agreeable and intelligent a woman, and was astonished and chagrined when he was told that she was dumb! Coleridge was recently asked his opinion as to the order in which Shakespeare had written his plays? His answer was to this effect, as well as I can remember:—that although Malone had collected a great many external particulars regarding the age of each play, they were all, in Coleridge’s mind, much less satis¬ factory than the knowledge to be obtained from internal evi¬ dence. If he were to adopt any theory upon the subject, it would rather be physiological and pathological than chronological. There appeared to be three stages in Shakespeare’s genius; it did not seem as if in the outset he thought his ability of a dramatic kind, excepting perhaps as an actor, in which, like many others, he had been somewhat mistaken, though by no means so much as it was the custom to believe.2 Hence his two poems, “Venus and Adonis,” and “Lucrece,” both of a narrative character, which must have been written very early: the first, at all events, must have been produced in the country, amid country scenes, sights and employments; but the last had more the air of a city, and of society. With regard to his dramas, they might easily be placed in groups. “Titus Andronicus” would, in some sort, stand alone, because it was obviously intended to excite vulgar audiences by its scenes of blood and horror—to our ears shocking and dis¬ gusting. This was the fashion of plays in Shakespeare’s youth; 165

Contemporary Descriptions but the taste, if such indeed it were, soon disappeared, as it was sure to do with a man of his character of mind; and then fol¬ lowed, probably, that beautiful love-poem “Romeo and Juliet,” and “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” made up entirely of the same passion. These might be succeeded by “All’s Well that Ends Well,” not an agreeable story, but still full of love; and by “As You Like It,” not Shakespeare’s invention as to plot, but entirely his own as to dialogue, with all the vivacity of wit, and the elasticity of youth and animal spirits. No man, even in the middle period of life, he thought, could have produced it. “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Twelfth Night” hardly appeared to belong to the complete maturity of his genius: Shakespeare was then ripening his powers for such works as “Troilus and Cressida,” “Coriolanus,” “Julius Caesar,” “Cymbeline,” and “Othello.” Coleridge professed that he could not yet make up his mind to assign a period to “The Merchant of Venice,” to “Much Ado about Nothing,” nor to “Measure for Measure”; but he was convinced that “Antony and Cleopatra,” “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” “Lear,” “The Tempest,” and “The Winter’s Tale,” were late produc¬ tions,—especially “The Winter’s Tale.” These belonged to the third group. When asked what he would do with the historical plays, he replied that he was much at a loss. Historical plays had been written and acted before Shakespeare took up those subjects; and there was no doubt whatever that his contributions to the three parts of Henry VI. were very small; indeed he doubted, in oppo¬ sition to Malone, whether he had had anything to do with the first part of Henry VI.: if he had, it must have been extremely early in his career. “Richard II.” and “Richard III.”—noble plays, and the finest specimens of their kind—must have pre¬ ceded the two parts of “Henry IV.”; and “Henry VIII.” was de¬ cidedly a late play. Dramas of this description ought to be treated by themselves; they were neither tragedy nor comedy, and yet at times both. Though far from accurate as to events, in point of character they were the essential truth of history. “Let no man 166

John Payne Collier (said Coleridge) blame his son for learning history from Shake¬ speare.” I felt that this last sentence was so very applicable to myself, that it will always be impressed upon my mind, and I never shall forget the peculiarly emphatic tone, and rich voice in which Coleridge delivered it. He continued in this strain:— He did not agree with some Germans (whom he had heard talk upon the subject) that Shakespeare had had much to do with the doubtful plays imputed to him in the third folio: on the contrary, he was sure that, if he had touched any of them, it was only very lightly and rarely. Being asked whether he included the “Two Noble Kinsmen,” among the doubtful plays, he an¬ swered, “Decidedly not: there is the clearest internal evidence that Shakespeare importantly aided Fletcher in the composition of it. Parts are most unlike Fletcher, yet most like Shakespeare, while other parts are most like Fletcher, and most unlike Shake¬ speare. The mad scenes of the Jailor’s daughter are coarsely imi¬ tated from ‘Hamlet’: those were by Fletcher, and so very inferior, that I wonder how he could so far condescend. Shakespeare would never have imitated himself at all, much less so badly. There is no finer, or more characteristic dramatic writing than some scenes in ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen.’ ” 3 October 17, 1811, having been in Coleridge’s company at Charles Lamb’s on the day previous: Yesterday, at Lamb’s, I met Coleridge again. I expected to see him there, and I made up my mind that I would remember as much as possible of what he said. I went into the apartment, where he and others were assembled, at 8, and before 9 my recol¬ lection was so burdened that I was obliged to leave the room for some time, that I might lighten the weight. However, I could not prevail upon myself to stay away long, and returned to the com¬ pany with a resolution to take the matter more easily. Few others talked, although Hazlitt, Lloyd, Rickman, Dyer, and Burney, with Lamb and his sister, now and then interposed a remark, and 167

Contemporary Descriptions gave Coleridge, as it were, a bottom to spin upon: they all seemed disposed to allow him sea-room enough, and he availed himself of it, and, spreading canvas, sailed away majestically. The follow¬ ing is the bare skeleton, and mere bone of what fell from him. He was speaking of Shakespeare when I entered the room: He said that Shakespeare was almost the only dramatic poet, who by his characters represented a class, and not an individual: other writers for the stage, and in other respects good ones too, had aimed their satire and ridicule at particular foibles and par¬ ticular persons, while Shakespeare at one stroke lashed thou¬ sands: Shakespeare struck at a crowd; Jonson picked out an especial object for his attack. Coleridge drew a parallel between Shakespeare and a geometrician: the latter, when tracing a circle, had his eye upon the centre as the important point, but included also in his vision a wide circumference; so Shakespeare, while his eye rested upon an individual character, always embraced a wide circumference of others, without diminishing the separate inter¬ est he intended to attach to the being he pourtrayed. Othello was a personage of this description; but all Shakespeare’s chief char¬ acters possessed, in a greater or less degree, this claim to our admiration. He was not a mere painter of portraits, with the dress, features, and peculiarities of the sitter; but a painter of likenesses so true that, although nobody could perhaps say they knew the very person represented, all saw at once that it was faithful, and that it must be a likeness. Lamb led Coleridge on to speak of Beaumont and Fletcher: he highly extolled their comedies in many respects, especially for the vivacity of the dialogue, but he contended that their tragedies were liable to grave objections. They always proceeded upon something forced and unnatural; the reader never can reconcile the plot with probability, and sometimes not with possibility. One of their tragedies 4 was founded upon this:—A lady ex¬ presses a wish to possess the heart of her lover, terms which that lover understands, all the way through, in a literal sense; and nothing can satisfy him but tearing out his heart, and having it presented to the heroine, in order to secure her affections, after 168

John Payne Collier he was past the enjoyment of them. Their comedies, however, were much superior, and at times, and excepting in the generali¬ zation of humour and application, almost rivalled those of Shake¬ speare. The situations are sometimes so disgusting, and the lan¬ guage so indecent and immoral, that it is impossible to read the plays in private society. The difference in this respect between Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher (speaking of them in their joint capacity) is, that Shakespeare always makes vice odious and virtue admirable, while Beaumont and Fletcher do the very reverse—they ridicule virtue and encourage vice: they pander to the lowest and basest passions of our nature. Coleridge afterwards made some remarks upon more modern dramatists, and was especially severe upon Dryden, who could degrade his fine intellect, and debase his noble use of the Eng¬ lish language in such plays as “All for Love,” and “Sebastian,” down to “Limberham,” and “The Spanish Friar.” He spoke also of Moore’s “Gamester,” and applauded warmly the acting of Mrs. Siddons. He admitted that the situations were affecting, but maintained that the language of the tragedy was below criti¬ cism: it was about upon a par with Kotzebue. It was extremely natural for any one to shed tears at seeing a beautiful woman in the depths of anguish and despair, when she beheld her husband, who had ruined himself by gambling, dying of poison at the very moment he had come into a large fortune, which would have paid all his debts, and enabled him to live in affluence and hap¬ piness. “This (said Coleridge) reminds one of the modern ter¬ mination of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’—I mean the way in which Gar¬ rick, or somebody else, terminated it,—so that Juliet should revive before the death of Romeo, and just in time to be not in time, but to find that he had swallowed a mortal poison. I know that this conclusion is consistent with the old novel upon which the tragedy is founded, but a narrative is one thing and a drama another, and Shakespeare’s judgment revolted at such situations on the stage. To be sure they produce tears, and so does a blunt razor shaving the upper lip.” From hence the conversation diverged to other topics; and 169

Contemporary Descriptions Southey’s “Curse of Kehama” having been introduced by one of the company, Coleridge admitted that it was a poem of great talent and ingenuity. Being asked whether he could give it no higher praise? he answered, that it did the greatest credit to the abilities of Southey, but that there were two things in it utterly incompatible. From the nature of the story, it was absolutely necessary that the reader should imagine himself enjoying one of the wildest dreams of a poet’s fancy; and at the same time it was required of him (which was impossible) that he should be¬ lieve that the soul of the hero, such as he was depicted, was alive to all the feelings and sympathies of tenderness and affection. The reader was called upon to believe in the possibility of the exist¬ ence of an almighty man, who had extorted from heaven the power he possessed, and who was detestable for his crimes, and yet who should be capable of all the delicate sensibilities sub¬ sisting between parent and child, oppressed, injured, and pun¬ ished. Such a being was not in human nature. The design and purpose were excellent, namely, to show the superiority of moral to physical power. He looked upon “The Curse of Kehama’’ as a work of great talent, but not of much genius; and he drew the distinction be¬ tween talent and genius by comparing the first to a watch and the last to an eye: both were beautiful, but one was only a piece of ingenious mechanism, while the other was a production above all art. Talent was a manufacture; genius a gift, that no labour nor study could supply: nobody could make an eye, but any¬ body, duly instructed, could make a watch. It was suggested by one of the company, that more credit was given to Southey for imagination in that poem than was due to him, since he had derived so much from the extravagances of Hindu mythology. Coleridge replied, that the story was the work of the poet, and that much of the mythology was his also: having invented his tale, Southey wanted to reconcile it with probability, according to some theory or other, and therefore resorted to oriental fiction. He had picked up his mythology from books, as it were by scraps, 170

John Payne Collier and had tacked and fitted them together with much skill, and with such additions as his wants and wishes dictated. . . . The conversation . . . then turned upon Walter Scott, whose “Lady of the Lake” has recently been published, and I own that there appeared on the part of Coleridge some disposition, if not to disparage, at least not to recognise the merits of Scott. He pro¬ fessed himself comparatively ignorant of Scott’s productions, and stated that “The Lady of the Lake” had been lying upon his table for more than a month, and that he had only been able to get through two divisions of the poem, and had there found many grammatical blunders, and expressions that were not English on this side of the Tweed—nor, indeed, on the other. If (added he) I were called upon to form an opinion of Mr. Scott’s poetry, the first thing I should do would be to take away all his names of old castles, which rhyme very prettily, and read very picturesquely; then, I would remove out of the poem all the old armour and weapons; next I would exclude the mention of all nunneries, abbeys, and priories, and I should then see what would be the residuum—how much poetry would remain. At present, having read so little of what he has produced, I can form no competent opinion; but I should then be able to ascer¬ tain what was the story or fable (for which I give him full credit, because, I dare say, it is very interesting), what degree of imag¬ ination was displayed in narrating it, and how far he was to be admired for propriety and felicity of expression. Of these, at present, others must judge, but I would rather have written one simile by Burns, Like snow that falls upon a river, A moment white, then gone for ever— than all the poetry that his countryman Scott—as far as I am yet able to form an estimate—is likely to produce. Milton’s “Samson Agonistes’’ being introduced as a topic, Coleridge said, with becoming emphasis, that it was the finest imitation of the ancient Greek drama that ever had been, or 171

Contemporary Descriptions ever would be written. One of the company remarked that Steevens (the commentator on Shakespeare) had asserted that “Samson Agonistes” was formed on the model of the ancient Mysteries, the origin of our English drama; upon which Cole¬ ridge burst forth with unusual vehemence against Steevens, as¬ serting that he was no more competent to appreciate Shake¬ speare and Milton, than to form an idea of the grandeur and glory of the seventh heavens. He would require (added Cole¬ ridge) a telescope of more than Herschellian power to enable him, with his contracted intellectual vision, to see half a quarter as far: the end of his nose is the utmost extent of that man’s ordi¬ nary sight, and even then he can not comprehend what he sees.5 Sunday, October 20, 1811: In religion Coleridge is an enthusiast, and maintains that it must be founded upon moral feeling, and not upon human reason: it must be built upon the passions and sensibilities, and not upon the understandings and intellectual faculties of man¬ kind. Religion was not given to us for any such purpose as the exercise of reason. The moment you begin to reason, that mo¬ ment you cease to be religious; and on this ground he denied that the Unitarians (to which class he avowed that he formerly belonged) had any religion: they had only a theory. If any person asked him, why he believed in the existence of God, his answer was, because he ought to believe in it, and could not help believing in it; but he would not attempt, as many did, and had done, to prove the being of God. God proved his own existence, and he (Coleridge) gladly believed the evidence. He was strongly inclined to agree with Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, that religion, in some respects, hardly required enough from our faith. Acknowledging the existence and infinite benev¬ olence of a Creator, he found every feeling of his heart, every pulse of his frame, and every atom in the outer world in harmony with the conviction, and all vibrating to it, like a well-tuned instrument of many strings. He believed in God, because it was 172

John Payne Collier inevitable: he would give no other reason, and would seek for no other reason; and he ended by quoting the famous saying of Lord Bacon—“I had rather believe all the fables of the Legend, and of the Talmud, and of the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.” In the course of the evening Coleridge among other things remarked, no doubt in a great degree fancifully, upon the singu¬ lar manner in which the number three triumphed everywhere and in everything, not to mention irreverently the Trinity— the “three that bear witness in heaven.” Three archangels—Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. Three states of being—in heaven, on earth, and in hell. Three religions—natural, revealed, and idolatrous. Three faiths in Europe—the Christian, the Jewish, and the Mahomedan. Three great Prophets—Moses, Isaiah, and Christ. Three lights of the physical world—the sun, the moon, and the stars. Three natural elements—earth, air, and fire; water being, in fact, only air. Three colours in nature—blue, yellow, and red; green being, in fact, only a mixture of blue and yellow. Three great ancient empires—the Greek, the Roman, and the Assyrian. Three forms of government—despotic, republican, and mixed. Three modern European empires—the Russian, the Austrian, and the French. Three estates in England—King, Lords, and Commons. Three Lumina Romanorum—Cicero, Seneca, and Pliny. Three lumina of the Greeks—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Three great ancient dramatists—Tschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. Three great modern dramatists—Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Goethe. Three great metaphysicians—Hobbes, Kant, and Hartley.

x73

Contemporary Descriptions Three Three Livy. Three Three Three Three

great philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, and Bacon. great ancient historians—Herodotus, Thucydides, and styles of architecture—Classic, Gothic, and Moorish. great epics—the Iliad, the Inferno, and Paradise Lost. great painters—Raphael, Titian, and Rubens. great sculptors—Praxiteles, Thorwaldsen, and Flax-

man. Three great astronomers—Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Three great satirical characters—by Dryden, Pope and Churchill. Three remarkable prose sentences—by Raleigh, Hooker, and Milton. Three degrees of comparison, three numbers, three genders, &c. All these, and some others, which I cannot remember, he enumerated off-hand, and on-hand, for he noted them in suc¬ cession upon his fingers. He was asked to name the three great satirical characters, and he mentioned either Dryden’s Bucking¬ ham, or Shaftesbury, Pope’s Addison, and Churchill’s Fitz¬ patrick: the three prose sentences were by Raleigh at the close of his “History of the World’’; by Hooker in praise of Law, in his “Ecclesiastical Polity”; and by Milton, on the value of good books, in his Areopagitica. They were not long, and he repeated them. He told us that he liked the Odyssey, as a mere story, better than the Iliad: the Odyssey was the oldest, and the finest romance that had ever been written. He could not tolerate the French Telemachus, nor indeed anything that was French, excepting Gresset’s Vert-Vert, which he had not read for many years. Boileau’s Lutrin he had never read, but thought his satires pointed and spirited. He would hardly hear of Voltaire as drama¬ tist, philosopher, historian, or novelist. Of the Italians he had the grandest opinion of Dante, but admitted that he was not himself sufficiently master of the language to form a proper estimate. He seemed to have little admiration for Ariosto, and

174

John Payne Collier perhaps less for Tasso, but I think he did not know much of them. He had the strongest liking for some of Boccaccio’s tales, and spoke in praise of the old English translation of them. Shakespeare had been indebted to several. Chapman had translated Homer excellently in some parts, but he did not agree in Lamb’s wholesale applause of the verse, and wished that the old poet had continued, as he had begun, in the ten-syllable heroic measure: it would have been more read¬ able, and might have saved us from Pope. Chapman had failed, where he had not succeeded, by endeavouring to write English as Homer had written Greek; Chapman’s was Greekified English, —it did not want vigour, or variety, but smoothness and facility. Detached passages could not be improved: they were Homer writing English. . . .6 November 1, 1811: “Shakespeare,” said Coleridge, “is full of these familiar images and illustrations: Milton has them too, but they do not occur so frequently, because his subject does not so naturally call for them. He is the truest poet who can apply to a new purpose the oldest occurrences, and most usual appearances: the justice of the images can then always be felt and appreciated.” Adverting to his contemporaries, he told us that, of course, he knew nearly every line Southey had written, but he repeated that he was far from well read in Scott, whom he now said he personally liked, adding that he had just finished Campbell’s “Gertrude of Wyoming”: though personally he did not much relish the author, he admitted that his poem contained very pretty stanzas. He disclaimed all envy: each of the three had met with more success than he should ever arrive at; but that success was quite as much owing to their faults as to their excellences. He did not generally like to speak of his contemporaries, but if he did speak of them, he must give his fair opinion, and that opinion was, that not one of the three—neither Southey, Scott, nor Campbell—would by their poetry survive much beyond the day when they lived and wrote. Their works seemed to him not

*75

Contemporary Descriptions to have the seeds of vitality, the real germs of long life. The two first were entertaining as tellers of stories in verse; but the last in his “Pleasures of Hope” obviously had no fixed design, but when a thought (of course, not a very original one) came into his head, he put it down in couplets, and afterwards strung the disjecta membra (not poetae) together. Some of the best things in it were borrowed: for instance, the line— And Freedom shriek’d when Kosciusko fell was taken from a much ridiculed piece by Pennis, a Pindaric on William III., Fair Liberty shriek’d out aloud, aloud Religion groan’d. It is the same production in which the following much-laughedat specimen of bathos is found: Nor Alps nor Pyrenneans keep him out, Nor fortified redoubt. Coleridge had little toleration for Campbell, and considered him, as far as he had gone, a mere verse-maker. Southey was, in some sort, like an elegant setter of jewels; the stones were not his own: he gave them all the advantage of his art—the charm of his workmanship (and that charm was great), but not in their native brilliancy. Wordsworth was not popular, and never would be so, for this reason among others—that he was a better poet than the rest. Yet Wordsworth liked popularity, and would fain be popular, if he could. “For my part (said Coleridge) I freely own that I have no title to the name of a poet, according to my own definition of poetry. (He did not state his definition.) Many years ago a small volume of verses came out with my name: it was not my doing, but Cottle offered me £20, when I much wanted it, for some short pieces I had written at Cambridge, and I sold the manuscripts to him, but I declare that I had no notion, at the time, that they were meant for publication; my poverty, and not my will, con¬ sented. Cottle paid my poverty, and I was dubbed poet, almost before I knew whether I was in Bristol or in London. I met 176

John Payne Collier people in the streets who congratulated me upon being a poet, and that was the first notice I had of my new rank and dignity. I was to have had £20 for what Cottle bought, but I never re¬ ceived more than £15, and for this paltry sum I was styled poet by the reviewers, who fell foul of me for what they termed my bombast and buckram. Nevertheless 500 copies were sold, and a new edition being called for, I pleaded guilty to the charge of inflation and grandiloquence. But now, only see the contrast! Wordsworth has printed two poems of mine, but without my name, and again the reviewers have laid their claws upon me, and for what? Not for bombast and buckram—not for inflation and grandiloquence, but for mock simplicity; and now I am put down as the master of a school for the instruction of grown children in nursery rhymes.” 7 About the same period: We talked of dreams, the subject having been introduced by a recitation by Coleridge of some lines he had written many years ago upon the building of a Dream-palace by Kubla-Khan: he had founded it on a passage he had met with in an old book of travels. Lamb maintained that the most impressive dream he had ever read was Clarence’s, in “Richard III.,” which was not now allowed to form part of the acted play. There was another famous dream in Shakespeare, that of Antigonus in the “Winter’s Tale,” and all illustrated the line in Spenser’s “Fairy Queen,” Book iv. c. 5: The things which day most minds at night do most appear; the truth of which every body’s experience proved, and there¬ fore every body at once acknowledged. Coleridge observed that there was something quite as true, near the same place in the poem, which was not unlikely to be passed over without remark, though founded upon the strictest and justest (his own super¬ lative) observation of nature. It was where Scudamour lies down to sleep in the cave of Care, and is constantly annoyed and roused by the graduated hammers of the old smith’s men. He called for 177

Contemporary Descriptions a copy of the F.Q., and, when it was brought, turned to the end of the Canto, where it is said that Scudamour at last, weary with his journey and his anxieties, fell asleep: Coleridge then read, with his peculiar intonation and swing of voice, the following stanza:— With that the wicked carle, the master Smith, A paire of red-hot iron tongs did take Out of the burning cinders, and therewith Under his side him nipp’d; that, forc’d to wake, He felt his hart for very paine to quake, And started up avenged for to be On him, the which his quiet slomber brake: Yet looking round about him none could see; Yet clid the smart remain, though he himself did flee. Having read this, Coleridge paused for a moment or two, and looked round with an inquiring eye, as much as to say, “Are you aware of what I refer to in this stanza.” Nobody saying a word, he went on: “I mean this—that at night, and in sleep, cares are not only doubly burdensome, but some matters, that then seem to us sources of great anxiety, are not so in fact; and when we are thoroughly awake, and in possession of all our faculties, they really seem nothing, and we wonder at the influence they have had over us. So Scudamour, while under the power and delusion of sleep, seemed absolutely nipped to the soul by the red-hot pincers of Care, but opening his eyes and rousing him¬ self, he found that he could see nothing that had inflicted the grievous pain upon him: there was no adequate cause for the increased mental suffering Scudamour had undergone.” The correctness of this piece of criticism was doubted, because in the last line it is said, Yet did the smart remain, though he himself did flee. Coleridge (who did not always answer objectors, but usually went forward with his own speculations) urged that although some smart might remain, it had not the same intensity:—that Scudamour had entered the cave in a state of mental suffering, 178

John Payne Collier and that what Spenser meant was, that sleep much enhanced and exaggerated that suffering; yet when Scudamour awoke, the cause of the increase was nowhere to be found. The original source of sorrow was not removed, but the red-hot pincers were removed, and there seemed no good reason for thinking worse of matters, than at the time the knight had fallen asleep. Cole¬ ridge enlarged for some time upon the reasons why distressing circumstances always seem doubly afflicting at night, when the body is in a horizontal position: he contended that the effect originated in the brain, to which the blood circulated with greater force and rapidity than when the body was perpendicular. The name of Samuel Rogers having been mentioned, a ques¬ tion arose how far he was entitled to the rank of a poet, and to what rank as a poet? My father produced a copy of “The Pleas¬ ures of Memory,” which its author had given to him many years ago, before the termination of their intimacy. . . . Hazlitt contended that there was “a finical finish” (his own words) about the lines, which made them read like the compo¬ sition of a mature period; and he added his conviction that they were produced with much labour and toil, and afterwards pol¬ ished with painful industry. Such was indisputably the fact; and it was generally declared that no free and flowing poet could write so neat and formal a hand: it was fit for a banker’s clerk, who was afterwards to become a banker. Coleridge dwelt upon the harmony and sweetness of many of the couplets, and was willing to put the versification about on a par with Goldsmith’s “Traveller.” Hazlitt, on the other hand, protested against Rogers being reckoned a poet at all: he was a banker; he had been born a banker, bred a banker, and a banker he must remain; if he were a poet, he was certainly a poet sui generis. “Aye sui generis (stuttered Lamb, in his cheerful jocular way, looking at every¬ thing on the sunny and most agreeable side), Rogers is not like Catiline, sui profusus, any more than he is alieni appetens, but he is sui generous, and I believe that few deserving people make appeals to him in vain.” This characteristic joke put everybody into good humour, and it was voted, almost nem. con., that

179

Contemporary Descriptions Rogers was a poet in spite of his purse;—“by virtue of it,” added Hazlitt, and so the matter ended.8 On Coleridge and Wordsworth: Coleridge by his—(powers of conversation I cannot properly call them, but)—powers of speech, and a wonderfully attractive delivery,9 had so taken possession of my mind, both as a poet and a critic, that Wordsworth had only a secondary place. I have since learned to estimate the last more justly. I then liked him, not so much for what he had written, (the hyper-simplicity of which is even now not thoroughly relished by me) as for the admiration I had always heard Coleridge express of him.10

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 1789-1851 Between 1826 and 1833 Cooper travelled widely in Europe. When he visited London and met Coleridge, in the spring of 1828, he was at the height of his fame, his reputation urns international. The Spy,

The Pilot, and, of the Leather-Stocking tales, The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Prairie had all been published. Re¬ turning to America, he wrote several very candid books about Europe and Europeans, in one of which, Gleanings in Europe: England (1837), he gave his impressions of Coleridge. During Cooper’s sojourn in London, Scott, down from Abbotsford to visit his son-in-law Lock¬ hart, was present at Sotheby’s dinner party when Cooper and Cole¬ ridge first met.1 William Sotheby, the veteran poet and translator, had once assisted in obtaining subscriptions for Coleridge’s lectures and had encouraged the publication of The Friend.

At Sotheby’s, April 22, 1828: MR. SOTHEBY invited me to dinner, pretty much as a matter of course, for all social intercourse in England, as in America, and in France, is a good deal dependent on the table. I found 180

James Fenimore Cooper him living in a house, that, so far as I could see, was American, as American houses used to be before the taste became cor¬ rupted by an uninstructed pretension. I was one of the first; but Mr. Coleridge was already in the drawing-room. He was a picture of green old age; ruddy, solid, and with a head as white as snow. His smile was benevolent, but I had scarcely time to reconnoitre him, before Sir Walter Scott appeared, accompanied by Mr. Lockhart. . . . At table I sat directly opposite to Sir Walter Scott, with Mr. Coleridge on my left. Nothing passed during dinner worth men¬ tioning, except a remark or two from the latter. . . . When the ladies had retired, the conversation turned on Homer, whom, it is understood, Mr. Sotheby is now engaged in translating.2 Some one remarked that Mr. Coleridge did not believe in his unity, or rather that there was any such man. This ■ called him out, and certainly I never witnessed an exhibition as extraordinary as that which followed. It was not a discourse, but a dissertation. Scarcely any one spoke besides Mr. Coleridge, with the exception of a brief occasional remark from Mr. Sotheby, who held the contrary opinion; and I might say no one could speak. At moments he was surprisingly eloquent, though a little discursive, and the whole time he appeared to be perfectly the master of his subject and of his language. As near as I could judge, he was rather more than an hour in possession of the floor, al¬ most without interruption. His utterance was slow, every sentence being distinctly given, and his pronunciation accurate. There seemed to be a constant struggling between an affluence of words and an affluence of ideas, without either hesitation or repetition. His voice was strong and clear, but not pitched above the usual key of conversation. The only peculiarity about it was a slightly observable burring of the r-r-rs, but scarcely more than what the language properly requires. Once or twice, when Mr. Sotheby would attempt to say a word on his side of the question, he was permitted to utter just enough to give a leading idea, but no argument, when the reason181

Contemporary Descriptions ing was taken out of his mouth by the essayist, and continued, pro and con, with the same redundant and eloquent fluency. I was less struck by the logic than by the beauty of the language, and the poetry of the images. Of the theme, in a learned sense, I knew too little to pretend to any verbal or critical knowledge, but he naturally endeavoured to fortify his argument by the application of his principles to familiar things; and here, I think, he often failed. In fact, the exhibition was much more wonder¬ ful than convincing. At first I was so much struck with the affluent diction of the poet, as scarcely to think of any thing else; but when I did look about me, I found every eye fastened on him. Scott sat, immov¬ able as a statue, with his little gray eyes looking inward and outward, and evidently considering the whole as an exhibition, rather than as an argument; though he occasionally muttered, “Eloquent!” “Wonderful!” “Very extraordinary!” Mr. Lock¬ hart caught my eye once, and he gave a very hearty laugh, with¬ out making the slightest noise, as if he enjoyed my astonishment. When we rose, however, he expressed his admiration of the speaker’s eloquence. The dissertations of Mr. Coleridge cannot properly be brought in comparison with the conversation of Sir James Mackintosh. One lectures, and the other converses. There is a vein of unpre¬ tending philosophy, and a habit of familiar analysis in the con¬ versation of the latter, that causes you to remember the substance of what he has said, while the former, though synthetic and phil¬ osophical as a verbal critic, rather enlists the imagination than any other property of the mind. Mackintosh is willing enough to listen, while Coleridge reminded me of a barrel to which every other man’s tongue acted as a spigot, for no sooner did the latter move, than it set his own contents in a flow. We were still at table, when the constant raps at the door gave notice that the drawing-room was filling above. Mr. Coleridge lectured on, through it all, for half an hour longer, when Mr. Sotheby rose. The house was full of company assembled to see Scott.3 182

James Fenimore Cooper A visit to Highgate, some time later: Mr. Sotheby has had the good nature to take me with him to see Mr. Coleridge, at Highgate. We found the bard living in a sort of New England house, that stands on what, in New Eng¬ land, would be called a green. The demon of speculation, how¬ ever, was at work in the neighbourhood, and the place was being disfigured by trenches, timber, and bricks. Our reception was frank and friendly, the poet coming out to us in his morning undress, without affectation, and in a very prosaic manner. Seeing a beautifully coloured little picture in the room, I rose to take a nearer view of it, when Mr. Coleridge told me it was by his friend Allston. It was a group of horsemen, returning from the chase, the centre of light being a beautiful gray horse. Mr. Allston had found this horse in some picture of • Titian’s, and copied it for a study; but on Mr. Coleridge’s admir¬ ing it greatly, he had painted in two or three figures, with another horse or two, so as to tell a story, and presented it to his friend. Of this little work, Mr. Coleridge told the following singular anecdote. A picture-dealer, of great skill in his calling, was in the habit of visiting the poet. One day this person entered, and his eye fell on the picture for the first time. “As I live!’’ he exclaimed, “a real Titian!” Mr. Coleridge was then eagerly questioned, as to where he had found the jewel, how long he had owned it, and by what means it came into his possession. Suddenly, the man paused, looked intently at the picture, turned his back towards it, as if to neutralize the effect of sight, and raising his hand, so as to feel the surface over his shoulder, he burst out in an ecstasy of astonishment, “It has not been painted twenty years!” This story was told with great unction and a suitable action, and embellished with what a puritan would deem almost an oath. We then adjourned to the library. Here we sat half an hour, during most of which time, our host entertained us with his flow of language. I was amused with the contrast between the two poets, for Mr. Sotheby was as meek, quiet, subdued, 183

Contemporary Descriptions simple, and regulated, as the other was redundant, imaginative, and overflowing. I thought the first occasionally checked the natural ebullitions of the latter, like a friend who rebuked his failings. One instance was a little odd, and pointed. The conversation had wandered to phrenology, and Mr. Cole¬ ridge gave an account of the wonders that a professor had found in his own head, with a minuteness that caused his friend to fidget. To divert him from the subject, I told an anecdote that occurred just before I left America. . . . I never knew a person of real genius who had any of the affec¬ tations of the smaller fry, on the subject of their feelings and sentiments. If Coleridge was scholastic and redundant, it was because he could not help himself; to use a homely figure, it was a sort of boiling over of the pot on account of the intense heat beneath.4

JOSEPH COTTLE 1770-1853 Joseph Cottle, the bookseller-poet of Bristol, is an important if not always accurate source of information regarding Coleridge dur¬ ing the days of his early association with Southey. In Bristol pre¬ paratory to emigrating to America, Coleridge and Southey made the acquaintance of Cottle through Robert Lovell in 1J94 or early I795- When applied to for financial assistance, Cottle advanced the young idealists five pounds to pay for their lodgings, and made generous offers, ivhich they eagerly accepted, for their poems. He helped arrange for the money-raising lectures on behalf of Pantisocracy, and, by promising a guinea and a half for every verse Cole¬ ridge should write, afforded him the financial assurance to marry Sara Fricker. When subscriptions to the Watchman fell off, Cottle bore part of the loss. A year before giving up business as a bookseller a?id printer, he undertook the uiiprofitable venture of publishing the Lyrical Ballads. Coming to the rescue once more in the dark days of iSiq and 1S15, when Coleridge was taking two quarts of laudanum a week, Cottle tried to urge his friend out of the ruinous

184

Joseph Cottle habit; and Coleridge was later impelled to acknowledge the wisdom and affection of his advice. In his Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (1847), a revision of the Early Recol¬ lections of ten years before, Cottle spared no detail either of Cole¬ ridge's struggles with opium or of his own numerous gifts to the impecunious poet. In Bristol in 1795, when Coleridge’s vision of a Pantisocratic colony in America was at its brightest: MR. COLERIDGE, though at this time embracing every topic of conversation, testified a partiality for a few, which might be called stock subjects. Without noticing his favourite Pantisocracy (which was an everlasting theme of the laudatory), he gen¬ erally contrived, either by direct amalgamation or digression, to notice in the warmest encomiastic language, Bishop Berkeley, David Hartley, or Mr. Bowles; whose sonnets he delighted in reciting. He once told me, that he believed, by his constant recommendation, he had sold a whole edition of some works; particularly amongst the fresh-men of Cambridge, to whom, whenever he found access, he urged the purchase of three works, indispensable to all who wished to excel in sound reasoning, or a correct taste;—Simpson’s Euclid; Hartley on Man; and Bowles’s Poems. In process of time, however, when reflection had rendered his mind more mature, he appeared to renounce the fanciful and brain-bewildering system of Berkeley; whilst he sparingly ex¬ tolled Hartley; and was almost silent respecting Mr. Bowles. I noticed a marked change in his commendation of Mr. B. from the time he paid that man of genius a visit. Whether their canons of criticism were different, or that the personal enthusiasm was not mutual; or whether there was a diversity in political views; whatever the cause was, an altered feeling toward that gentle¬ man was manifested after his visit, not so much expressed by words, as by his subdued tone of applause. The reflux of the tide had not yet commenced, and Pantisocracy was still Mr. Coleridge’s favourite theme of discourse, and 185

C ontemporary D e script ions the banks of the Susquehanna the only refuge for permanent repose. It will excite great surprise in the reader to understand that Mr. C.’s cooler friends could not ascertain that he had re¬ ceived any specific information respecting this notable river. “It was a grand river”; but there were many other grand and noble rivers in America (the Land of Rivers!); and the prefer¬ ence given to the Susquehanna, seemed almost to arise solely from its imposing name, which, if not classical, was at least po¬ etical; and it probably by mere accident became the centre of all his pleasurable associations. Had this same river been called the Miramichi or the Irrawady, it would have been despoiled of half its charms, and have sunk down into a vulgar stream, the atmosphere of which might have suited well enough Russian boors, but which would have been pestiferous to men of letters.1 Also of Bristol days: To project, with him, was commonly sufficient. The execution, of so much consequence in the estimation of others, with him was a secondary point. I remember him once to have read to me, from his pocket book, a list of eighteen different works which he had resolved to write, and several of them in quarto, not one of which he ever effected. At the top of the list appeared the word “Pantisocracy! 4to.” Each of these works, he could have talked (for he often poured forth as much as half an 8vo. volume in a single evening, and that in language sufficiently pure and connected to admit of publication), but talking merely benefits the few, to the exclusion of the many.2 In January, 1796, Coleridge set out from Bristol on a journey to distribute handbills and prospectuses of his forthcoming magazine, the Watchman. The good people, in all the towns through which Mr. Cole¬ ridge passed, were electrified by his extraordinary eloquence. At this time, and during the whole of his residence in Bristol, there was, in the strict sense, little of the true, interchangeable conver¬ sation in Mr. C. On almost every subject on which he essayed to 186

Joseph Cottle speak, he made an impassioned harangue of a quarter, or half an hour; so that inveterate talkers, while Mr. Coleridge was on the wing, generally suspended their own flight, and felt it almost a profanation to interrupt so impressive and mellifluous a speaker. This singular, if not happy peculiarity, occasioned even Madame de Stael to remark of Mr. C. that “He was rich in a Monologue, but poor in a Dialogue.” From the brilliant volubility before noticed, admiration and astonishment followed Mr. C. like a shadow, through the whole course of his peregrinations.3 Shortly after his return from Malta, in 1806, Coleridge visited Cottle in Bristol. Some weeks after, Mr. Coleridge called on me; when, in the course of conversation, he entered into some observations on his own character, that made him appear unusually amiable. He said that he was naturally very arrogant; that it was his easily besetting sin; a state of mind which he ascribed to the severe subjection to which he had been exposed, till he was fourteen years of age, and from which his own consciousness of superiority made him revolt. He then stated that he had renounced all his Unitarian sentiments; that he considered Unitarianism as a heresy of the worst description; attempting in vain to reconcile sin and holiness; the world and heaven; opposing the whole spirit of the Bible; and subversive of all that truly constituted Christianity. At this interview he professed his deepest conviction of the truth of Revelation; of the Fall of Man; of the Divinity of Christ, and redemption alone through His blood. To hear these sentiments so explicitly avowed, gave me unspeakable pleasure, and formed a new, and unexpected, and stronger bond of union. A long and highly interesting theological conversation fol¬ lowed, in which Mr. C. proved, that, however weak his body, the intellectual vigour of his mind was unimpaired. He exhibited, also, more sobriety of manner than I had before noticed in him, with an improved and impressive maturity in his reflections, expressed in his happiest language; and which, could it have

187

Contemporary Descriptions been accurately recorded, would have adorned the most splendid of his pages;—so rare and pre-eminent was the powerful and spontaneous utterance with which this gifted son of genius was endowed.4 Commenting on Coleridge’s Table Talk: Few men ever poured forth torrents of more happily-expressed language, the result of more matured reflection, in his social intercourse, than Mr. Coleridge; and at this time, the recollec¬ tion is accompanied with serious regret, that I allowed to pass unnoticed so many of his splendid colloquies, which, could they be recalled, would exhibit his talents in a light equally favour¬ able with his most deliberately-written productions. I did indeed take notes of one of his conversations, on his de¬ parture from a supper party, and which I shall subjoin, because the confirmed general views, and individual opinions of so en¬ larged a mind must command attention; especially when exer¬ cised on subjects intrinsically important. I however observe, that my sketch of the conversation must be understood as being ex¬ ceedingly far from doing justice to the original. At this time I was invited to meet Mr. Coleridge with a zealous Unitarian minister. It was natural to conclude, that such uncon¬ genial, and, at the same time, such inflammable materials would soon ignite. The subject of Unitarianism having been intro¬ duced soon after dinner, the minister avowed his sentiments, in language that was construed into a challenge, when Mr. Cole¬ ridge advanced at once to the charge, by saying “Sir, you give up so much, that the little you retain of Christianity is not worth keeping.” We looked in vain for a reply. After a manifest internal conflict, the Unitarian minister very prudently allowed the gauntlet to remain undisturbed. Wine he thought more pleasant than controversy. Shortly after this occurrence, Mr. Coleridge supped with the writer, when his well known conversational talents were emi¬ nently displayed; so that what Pope affirmed of Bolingbroke, that “his usual conversation, taken down verbatim, from its co-

188

George Daniel herence and accuracy, would have borne printing, without cor¬ rection,” was fully and perhaps more justly applicable to Mr. C.5

GEORGE DANIEL 1789-1864 Daniel's interest in the drama and in old books inevitably drew him into Charles Lamb's circle when Elia and his sister moved into lodgings in Russell Street, Covent Garden, “delightfully situated be¬ tween two great theatres." Beginning in i8iy, Daniel was a frequent visitor at Lamb's informal suppers, to which Coleridge also came. His writings included dramas and dramatic criticism, a humorous novel, and various satirical poems. Chief among his literary efforts, however, was his editing of the British Theatre and its various con¬ tinuations. As a collector of Elizabethan books and theatrical curi¬ osities, Daniel possessed much to interest Lamb and Coleridge, in¬ cluding copies of Shakespeare's works in the first four folio editions and of quarto editions of separate plays, as well as black-letter bal¬ lads, Garrick's cane, and (the relic of which he was most proud) the carved casket made out of the mulberry tree of Shakespeare's garden, which had been presented to Garrick with the freedom of the borough of Stratford-on-Avon.

A typical supper at Charles Lamb’s: AFTER winding up a narrow pair of stairs ... a visitor, on entering a middle-sized front room, would dimly discern, through tobacco smoke that was making its way up the chimney and through the key-holes, a noble head, worthy of Medusa, on which were scattered a few grey curls among crisp ones of dark brown, and an expressive, thoughtful set of features inclining to the Hebrew cast. This was mine host. Around him at that witch¬ ing time when “churchyards yawn,” and sobriety in its soft bed is past yawning, a band of brothers . . . smoking “like lime¬ kilns,” kept it up merrily. . . . The stage was the topic of dis¬ cussion. Hazlitt . . . would, after his earnest and fanciful fash-

Contemporary Descriptions ion, anatomise the character of Hamlet, and find in it certain points of resemblance to a peculiar class of mankind; while Cole¬ ridge, the invested monarch of other men’s minds by right of supreme ability, would as stoutly contend that Hamlet was a conception unlike any other that had ever entered into the po¬ etical heart or brain; adding, that Shakespeare might possibly have sat to himself for the portrait, and from his own idiosyncrasy borrowed some of its spiritual lights and shades; and the meta¬ physical subtlety and superior word-painting of Coleridge brought him off conqueror. . . . When the discourse grew tiresome, and some loquacious Cory¬ phaeus of the common-place who had yet to learn silence in the probationary school of Pythagoras, and whose imagination was too scanty for his vocabulary, with self-satisfied effrontery, was monotonously mouthing, [Lamb] would play the “logical con¬ tradictory,” or “matter of lie man” with some grotesque locution, transparent solecism or incongruous theory, to the delight of Talfourd (the pet of the bar for his frolicksome humour), who seconded his friend’s audacity with the raciest relish; while Hood, sad looking and sickly, whose brain was a quiver of sharp jests . . . gave with a well-pickled and pointed pun common-place his quietus. A plentiful supper . . . would follow;—after which the goblets were refilled, the pipes re-fused, and the talk resumed for another pleasant hour or two. The company then took their leave (Coleridge generally lingering lag-last), bidding each other “good night”; while labour, returning to its daily toil, was grum¬ bling “good morning” 1

SIR HUMPHRY DAVY 1778-1829 Sir Humphry Davy, the scientist, was a man of wide interests; from the poetry of his youth to the natural history of his latest years. Early in the career that was to include brilliant scientific discoveries and

19°

1

Thomas De Quincey inventions, a professorship at the Royal Institution, and the presi¬ dency of the Royal Society, he carried on chemical experiments at Dr. Beddoes’ Pneumatic Institution in Bristol. Coleridge and the Bristol poets, having been introduced to Davy by Dr. Beddoes, were often at the laboratory with the young scientist, fascinated by his experiments with the newly-discovered nitrous oxide. The friend¬ ship of Coleridge and Davy lasted until the latter's death. Interested in Coleridge's poetry and philosophy, Davy encouraged him to give his first course of lectures at the Royal Institution. And Cole¬ ridge, as his letters to Davy reveal, zvas himself so eagerly interested in science and scientific philosophy that he found this one of his most stimulating friendships.

Shortly before Coleridge left for Malta: I SAW him generally in the midst of large companies where he is the image of power and activity. His eloquence is unimpaired; perhaps it is softer and stronger. His will is probably less than ever commensurate with his ability. Brilliant images of great¬ ness float upon his mind; like the images of the morning clouds upon the waters, their forms are changed by the motion of the waves, they are agitated by every breeze, and modified by every sunbeam. He talked in the course of one hour of beginning three works, and he recited the poem of Christabel unfinished, as I had before heard it. What talent does he not waste in forming visions; sublime, but unconnected with the real world! I have looked to his efforts, as to the efforts of a creating being; but as yet he has not even laid the foundation for the new world of intellectual forms.1

THOMAS DE QUINCEY 1785-1859 His first meeting with Coleridge, in the summer of 180J, De Quincey has described in detail. Having long admired Coleridge's writings, and being interested in Coleridge's study of metaphysics

191

Contemporary Descriptions and psychology, he seized an early opportunity to make the poet's acquaintance. Bearing a letter of introduction to Thomas Poole, at Nether Stowey, he was directed on to Bridgwater, where Coleridge was staying with a Mr. Chubb. If we can believe De Quincey, Cole¬ ridge lost no time in confessing to him “the overclouding of his life” through indulgence in opium, and warned the younger man against a similar enslavement. Dykes Campbell, however, insists that Coleridge did not divulge his secret until later. At all events much of what De Quincey came to write of Coleridge was built around the theme of the latter’s addiction to opium, De Quincey maintaining a belief in the superiority of his own use of the drug. It was in con¬ sequence of this first meeting that De Quincey, learning that Cole¬ ridge was in financial difficulties, made him a generous loan of £300. When, fourteen years later, De Quincey was badly in need of funds and had to ask for its return, Coleridge had not a shilling and was forced to admit, in a very painful letter, his inability to repay. In the early years, especially during 1808, when Coleridge was giving his lectures at the Royal Institution and living over the Courier offices in the Strand, De Quincey was Coleridge’s trusted friend. After Coleridge’s death, hoivever, he wrote several extremely candid articles of reminiscence for Tait’s Magazine. Tactless in pointing out domestic infelicities and personal xceaknesses, they gave much offense to Coleridge’s family and friends. Allowing for a certain degree of bias and minor inaccuracies of fact, De Quincey’s picture of Cole¬ ridge remains a vivid and not wholly unsympathetic one, interesting in its reflection of De Quincey’s own personality.

The first meeting, at Bridgwater in 1807: COLERIDGE led me to a drawing-room, rang the bell for re¬ freshments, and omitted no point of a courteous reception. He told me that there would be a very large dinner party on that day, which, perhaps, might be disagreeable to a perfect stranger; but, if not, he could assure me of a most hospitable welcome from the family. I was too anxious to see him under all aspects to think of declining this invitation. That point being settled, Coleridge, like some great river, the Orellana, or St. Lawrence, that, having been checked and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, sud¬ denly recovers its volume of waters and its mighty music, swept 192

Thomas De Quincey at once, as if returning to his natural business, into a continuous strain of eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel, the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious fields of thought by transitions the most just and logical, that it was pos¬ sible to conceive. What I mean by saying that his transitions were “just” is by way of contradistinction to that mode of con¬ versation which courts variety through links of verbal con¬ nexions. Coleridge, to many people, and often I have heard the complaint, seemed to wander; and he seemed then to wander the most when, in fact, his resistance to the wandering instinct was greatest—viz., when the compass and huge circuit by which his illustrations moved travelled farthest into remote regions before they began to revolve. Long before this coming round commenced most people had lost him, and naturally enough supposed that he had lost himself. They continued to admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not see their relations to the dominant theme. Had the conversation been thrown upon paper, it might have been easy to trace the continuity of the links; just as in Bishop Berkeley’s “Siris,” from a pedestal so low and abject, so culinary, as Tar Water, the method of preparing it, and its medicinal effects, the dissertation ascends, like Jacob’s ladder, by just gradations, into the Heaven of Heavens and the thrones of the Trinity. But Heaven is there connected with earth by the Homeric chain of gold; and, being subject to steady ex¬ amination, it is easy to trace the links; whereas, in conversation, the loss of a single word may cause the whole cohesion to dis¬ appear from view. However, I can assert, upon my long and intimate knowledge of Coleridge’s mind, that logic the most severe was as inalienable from his modes of thinking as gram¬ mar from his language.1 Reminiscences of Coleridge’s talk, 1837: Coleridge, as is notorious, whenever he happened to be in force, or even in artificial spirits, was even more than brilliant; to use a word too often abused and prostituted, he was even magnificent beyond all human standards; and a felicitous con-

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Contemporary Descriptions

versational specimen from him was sometimes the most memo¬ rable chapter in a man’s whole intellectual experience through life. Yet this Coleridge was not in request, was not sought after in the aristocratic circles of London—to their shame be it said! He had just such introductions—such and so many—as would, if turned to account by a pushing, worldly man, have slipped him on sufferance into many more houses of the same distinc¬ tion. An invitation more or less costs little to a woman of fashion; and he might have kept his ground, as many admitted bores do, upon toleration, in some two or three hundred great privileged mansions. Coleridge, however, had dignity of character sufficient to court no such distinctions; nor would his spirits have been equal to the expense of labour requisite in so enormous a capital for a duty so widely dispersed. Neither do I overlook the fact that Mr. Coleridge’s peculiar powers were not adapted to parties beyond the scale of a small dinner party. Yet still I contend that, for the honour of literature, and for the sake of expressing a public homage to the most majestic forms in which the intellect of the age expresses itself, and by way of conciliating the grace and sanction of Scholarship and authentic Philosophy to the circles of rank and wealth, upon the same principle which leads those same circles to court the inferior sanction and grace of Art, even in its lowest walks—for all these reasons, Coleridge should have been courted and wooed into such society. I am not apt to praise the Continent at the expense of my own country; but here is an instance in which (generally speaking)1^ the continental taste is better than ours. No great meeting is complete in Germany, in France, in Italy, unless the intellect of the land—its scholarship, its philosophy, its literature—be there by deputation: “the table is not full,” unless these great leading interests are there represented. We inaugurate our wine cups by remembering the King’s health; we inaugurate (let it not be thought profane to make such an allusion) our great civil trans¬ actions by prayer and remembrance of our highest relations: in reason, then, and by all analogy, we should inaugurate and legitimate, as it were, our meetings of festal pleasure by the

*94

Thomas De Quincey presence of intellectual power and intellectual grace, as the ulti¬ mate sources upon which we should all be glad to have it thought that our pleasures depend. Aristocracy of Britain! be not care¬ less of the philosophy and intellect of the age, lest it be thought that your pursuits and taste exist in alienation from both. Dr. Johnson had talked himself into being so much talked of that he—had he lived for another generation—would have become indispensable to fashionable parties. Coleridge, who, most as¬ suredly, was far superior in creative power and fertility of new intuitions to Dr. Johnson, and immeasurably superior in the philosophic understanding (for, in direct philosophic specula¬ tion, Dr. Johnson never even attempted anything, except in one little pamphlet against Soame Jenyns), was scarcely beginning to be heard of amongst the higher circles of England when he died. The reason for comparing him with Dr. Johnson is on account of their common gibs of colloquial power.2 After describing the effect of opium on his own ability to perforin literary tasks: Over and above the principal operation of my suffering state, as felt in the enormous difficulty with which it loaded every act of exertion, there was another secondary effect which always followed as a reaction from the first. And that this was no accident or peculiarity attached to my individual temperament, I may presume from the circumstance that Mr. Coleridge experienced the very same sensations, in the same situation, throughout his literary life, and has often noticed it to me with surprise and vexation. The sensation was that of powerful disgust with any subject upon which he had occupied his thoughts, or had exerted his powers of composition for any length of time, and an equal disgust with the result of his exertions—powerful abhorrence I may call it, absolute loathing, of all that he had produced. In Mr. Coleridge’s case, speaking at least of the time from 1807 to 1815, this effect was a most unhappy one; as it tended to check or even to suppress his attempts at writing for the press, in a degree which cannot but have been very injurious for all of us

*95

Contemporary Descriptions who wished to benefit by his original intellect, then in the very pomp of vigour. This effect was, indeed, more extensive than with myself: with Coleridge, even talking upon a subject, and throwing out his thoughts upon it liberally and generally, was an insurmountable bar to writing upon it with effect. In the same proportion in which he had been felicitous as a talker, did he come to loathe and recoil from the subject ever afterwards; or, at least, so long as any impressions remained behind of his own display. And so far did this go—so uniformly, and so no¬ toriously to those about him—that Miss Hutchinson, a young lady in those days whom Coleridge greatly admired, and loved as a sister, submitted at times to the trouble of taking down what fell from his lips, in the hope that it might serve as ma¬ terials to be worked up at some future period, when the disgust should have subsided, or perhaps, in spite of that disgust, when he should see the topics and their illustrations all collected for him, without the painful effort of recovering them by calling up loathsome trains of thought. It was even suggested, and at one time (I believe) formally proposed, by some of Coleridge’s friends, that, to save from perishing the overflowing opulence of golden thoughts continually welling up and flowing to waste in the course of his ordinary conversation, some short-hand writer, having the suitable accomplishments of a learned education and habits of study, should be introduced as a domestic companion. But the scheme was dropped; perhaps from the feeling in Cole¬ ridge himself that he would not command his usual felicity, or his natural power of thought, under the consciousness of an echo sitting by his side, and repeating to the world all the halfdeveloped thoughts or half-expressed suggestions which he might happen to throw out. In the meantime, for the want of some such attendant, certain it is that many valuable papers perished.3 De Quincey on monologue: Above all things, I shunned, as I would shun a pestilence, Coleridge’s capital error which through life he practised, of 196

Thomas De Quincey keeping the audience in a state of passiveness. Unjust this was to others, but most of all to himself. This eternal stream of talk which never for one instant intermitted, and allowed no mo¬ mentary opportunity of reaction to the persecuted and baited auditor, was absolute ruin to the interests of the talker himself. Always passive, always acted upon, never allowed to react, into what state did the poor afflicted listener—he that played the role of listener—collapse? He returned home in the exhausted condition of one that has been drawn up just before death from the bottom of a well occupied by foul gases; and, of course, hours before he had reached that perilous point of depression, he had lost all power of distinguishing, understanding, or connecting. I, for my part, without needing to think of the unamiable arro¬ gance involved in such a habit, simply on principles of deadliest selfishness, should have avoided thus incapacitating my hearer from doing any justice to the rhetoric or the argument with which I might address him.4 Further remarks, written in 1845: There is another accomplishment of Coleridge’s, less broadly open to the judgment of this generation, and not at all of the next—viz. his splendid art of conversation,—on which it will be interesting to say a word. Ten years ago, when the music of this rare performance had not yet ceased to vibrate in men’s ears, what a sensation was gathering amongst the educated classes on this particular subject! What a tumult of anxiety prevailed to “hear Mr. Coleridge,” or even to talk with a man who had heard him. Had he lived till this day, not Paganini would have been so much sought after. That sensation is now decaying, because a new generation has emerged during the ten years since his death. But many still remain whose sympathy (whether of curi¬ osity in those who did not know him or of admiration in those who did) still reflects as in a mirror the great stir upon this sub¬ ject which then was moving in the world. To these, if they should inquire for the great distinguishing principle of Cole¬ ridge’s conversation, we might say that it was the power of vast

J97

Contemporary Descriptions combination. He gathered into focal concentration the largest body of objects, apparently disconnected, that any man ever yet, by any magic, could assemble, or, having assembled, could man¬ age. His great fault was that, by not opening sufficient spaces for reply, or suggestion, or collateral notice, he not only narrowed his own field, but he grievously injured the final impression. For, when men’s minds are purely passive, when they are not allowed to react, then it is that they collapse most, and that their sense of what is said must ever be feeblest. Doubtless there must have been great conversational masters elsewhere, and at many periods; but in this lay Coleridge’s characteristic advantage, that he was a great natural power, and also a great artist. He was a power in the art; and he carried a new art into the power.5 Returning to the discussion of monologue, in 1847: All reputation for brilliant talking is a visionary thing, and rests upon a sheer impossibility: viz. upon such a histrionic performance in a state of insulation from the rest of the com¬ pany as could not be effected, even for a single time, without a rare and difficult collusion, and could not, even for that single time, be endurable to a man of delicate and honourable sensi¬ bilities. Yet surely Coleridge had such a reputation, and without need¬ ing any collusion at all; for Coleridge, unless he could have all the talk, would have none. But then this was not conversation. It was not colloquium, or talking with the company, but alloquium, or talking to the company. As Madame de Stael observed, Coleridge talked, and could talk, only by monologue. Such a mode of systematic trespass upon the conversational rights of a whole party gathered together under pretence of amusement is fatal to every purpose of social intercourse, whether that purpose be connected with direct use and the service of the intellect, or with the general graces and amenities of life. The result is the same under whatever impulse such an outrage is practised; but the impulse is not always the same; it varies, and so far the crim¬ inal intention varies. In some people this gross excess takes its 198

Thomas De Quincey rise in pure arrogance. They are fully aware of their own intru¬ sion upon the general privileges of the company; they are aware of the temper in which it is likely to be received; but they persist wilfully in the wrong, as a sort of homage levied compulsorily upon those who may wish to resist it, but hardly can do so with¬ out a violent interruption, wearing the same shape of indecorum as that which they resent. In most people, however, it is not arrogance which prompts this capital offence against social rights, but a blind selfishness, yielding passively to its own instincts, without being distinctly aware of the degree in which this selfindulgence trespasses on the rights of others. We see the same temper illustrated at times in travelling. A brutal person, as we are disposed at first to pronounce him, but more frequently one who yields unconsciously to a lethargy of selfishness, plants him¬ self at the public fireplace, so as to exclude his fellow-travellers from all but a fraction of the warmth. Yet he does not do this in a spirit of wilful aggression upon others; he has but a glimmer¬ ing suspicion of the odious shape which his own act assumes to others, for the luxurious torpor of self-indulgence has extended its mists to the energy and clearness of his perceptions. Mean¬ time, Coleridge’s habit of soliloquizing through a whole evening of four or five hours had its origin neither in arrogance nor in absolute selfishness. The fact was that he could not talk unless he were uninterrupted, and unless he were able to count upon this concession from the company. It was a silent contract be¬ tween him and his hearers that nobody should speak but himself. If any man objected to this arrangement, why did he come? For, the custom of the place, the lex loci, being notorious, by coming at all he was understood to profess his allegiance to the autocrat who presided. It was not, therefore, by an insolent usurpation that Coleridge persisted in monology through his whole life, but in virtue of a concession from the kindness and respect of his friends. You could not be angry with him for using his privilege, for it was a privilege conferred by others, and a privilege which he was ready to resign as soon as any man demurred to it. But, though reconciled to it by these considerations, and by the

J99

Contemporary Descriptions ability with which he used it, you could not but feel that it worked ill for all parties. Himself it tempted oftentimes into pure garrulity of egotism, and the listeners it reduced to a state of debilitated sympathy or of absolute torpor. Prevented by the custom from putting questions, from proposing doubts, from asking for explanations, reacting by no mode of mental activity, and condemned also to the mental distress of hearing opinions or doctrines stream past them by flights which they must not arrest for a moment so as even to take a note of them, and which yet they could not often understand, or, seeming to understand, could not always approve, the audience sank at times into a list¬ less condition of inanimate vacuity. To be acted upon for ever, but never to react, is fatal to the very powers by which sympathy must grow, or by which intelligent admiration can be evoked. For his own sake, it was Coleridge’s interest to have forced his hearers into the active commerce of question and answer, of objection and demur. Not otherwise was it possible that even the attention could be kept from drooping, or the coherency and dependency of the arguments be forced into light.6

THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN 1776-1847 Author of Bibliomania, Bibliographical Decameron, and twoscore other books largely of a bibliographical nature, Dibdin played a nota¬ ble part in the stimulation of interest in rare books and early editions. As one of the founders of the Roxburghe Club, the members of which were expected to produce reprints of rare volumes, he must be credited with a place in the history of the English publishing socie¬ ties. In 180J, during his editorship of the weekly journal, the Direc¬

tor, he met Coleridge, who in the previous summer had returned from Malta and was at this time probably staying in London with Basil Montagu. As Dibdin had previously studied wider Montagu for the bar, it is likely that this mutual friend brought them together. Dib¬ din s account of his acquaintance with men of letters, including Cole-

200

Thomas Frognall Dibdin ridge, is to be found in his Reminiscences of a Literary Life, pub¬ lished in 1836.

At their first meeting, in 1807: I SHALL never forget the effect his conversation made upon me at the first meeting. It struck me as something not only quite out of the ordinary course of things, but as an intellectual exhibition altogether matchless. The party was usually large, but the pres¬ ence of Coleridge concentrated all attention towards himself. The viands were usually costly, and the banquet was at once rich and varied; but there seemed to be no dish like Coleridge’s conversation to feed upon—and no information so varied and instructive as his own. The orator rolled himself up, as it were, in his chair, and gave the most unrestrained indulgence to his speech—and how fraught with acuteness and originality was that speech, and in what copious and eloquent periods did it flow! The auditors seemed to be rapt in wonder and delight, as one observation, more profound or clothed in more forcible language than another, fell from his tongue. A great part of the subject discussed at the first time of my meeting Mr. Coleridge, was the connexion between Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton. The speaker had been secretary to Sir Alexander Ball, governor of Malta—and a copious field was here afforded for the exercise of his colloquial eloquence. For nearly two hours he spoke with unhesitating and uninterrupted fluency. As I retired homewards (to Kensington) I thought a second Johnson had visited the earth to make wise the sons of men; and regretted that I could not exercise the powers of a second boswell, to record the wisdom and the eloquence which had that evening flown from the orator’s lips. It haunted me as I retired to rest. It drove away slumber: or if I lapsed into sleep, there was Coleridge—his snuff-box and his ’kerchief before my eyes!—his mildly beaming looks—his occasionally deep tone of voice—the excited features of his physiognomy—the secret con¬ viction that his auditors seemed to be entranced with his powers of discourse! The speaker, however, it must be fairly admitted, 201

Contemporary Descriptions did not “give and take.” His generosity was illimitable, for he would receive nothing in return. It was true, there were very few who could give as they had received; but still, as an irritated hearer once observed by the side of me, “fair play was a jewel. The manner of Coleridge was rather emphatic than dogmatic; and thus he was generally and satisfactorily listened to. There was neither the bow-wow nor the growl which seemed usually to characterise Johnson’s method of speaking; and his periods were more lengthened and continuous; but they were sometimes “richly dight” in splendid imagery and resistless argument:— not, however, betraying such a range of reading, or fraught with so much personal anecdote, as were those of Mackintosh. In fact, it might be said of Coleridge, as Cowper has so happily said of Sir P. Sidney, that he was . . . the warbler of poetic prose. A love of truth, however, obliges me to remark that Coleridge was a mannerist. It was always the same tone—in the same style of expression—not quick and bounding enough to diffuse in¬ stant and general vivacity; and the chair would sometimes assume the solemn gravity of the pulpit. In consequence, when heard repeatedly, this would have, and did have, the effect of tiring. But there was such rhapsody, originality, and marked emphasis, in almost every thing which fell from him, that the hearer would, three times out of four, endure the manner for the matter. There was always this characteristic feature in his multifarious con¬ versation—it was delicate, reverend, and courteous. The chastest ear could drink in no startling sound; the most serious believer never had his bosom ruffled by one sceptical or reckless assertion. Coleridge was eminently simple in his manner. Thinking and speaking were his delight; and he would sometimes seem, during the more fervid moments of discourse, to be abstracted from all and every thing around and about him, and to be basking in the sunny warmth of his own radiant imagination.1

202

John R. D ix

JOHN R. DIX 1800-1865

Dix, who used the pen name John Ross, lived in Bristol until 1846, ivhen he went to America. His biography of Chatterton aroused con¬ troversy. Shortly before his meeting with Coleridge he enjoyed a so¬ journ in the Lake country, where he made the acquaintance of Words¬ worth. While walking near Highgate one evening, Dix encountered another stroller whom he took first for the clergyman of Highgate and then for a Cockney clerk. The next day, bearing a letter of in¬ troduction from Christopher North, he called on Coleridge at the Gillmans*, and learned that the clergyman-clerk was the distinguished guest of that house. Dix is credited with having originally recorded Lamb’s priceless anecdote of how he escaped from the tireless talker by severing the coat button by which he zvas held. (See Lamb, below.)

Impressions of Coleridge and his talk: OF COURSE, I was more anxious to hear, than be heard. Yet I confess, I did fancy that the consciousness of what his friends told the public, and the public repeated, of his wondrous elo¬ quence, was too visible, imparting a very little of what we dis¬ like in a be-praised beauty’s perpetual simper—an itch for ad¬ miration, prompting constant self-recollection. He seemed aware that strangers expected a treat from that eloquent mouth. The bees that clustered round his lips (no doubt) in infancy, could not, however, have deposited sweets inexhaustible; and the vast flow of his eloquence hence sometimes brawled roughly among metaphysical rocks of the strangest form, or wandered away fairly out of sight of the vulgar, mortal, intellectual eyes. As to any interjected obstacle that his hearer might venture to edge in—a suggested flaw in his argument, or doubt to be resolved— it caused not a ripple. He smiled—gesticulated seeming assent, (with too much an air of adult indulgence to innocent child’s prattle,) and pursued his “high argument’’ just the same, never recurring to yours. Mr. Serjeant Talfourd has said, that he thus 203

Contemporary Descriptions in a large circle “pleased everybody, by conceding the point without dispute.” Query? I knew several whom this lofty sort of patience did not please or content. Moreover, his love of the mystic—his strange admiration of that dashing theorist Kant, who has a sword ready for every Gordian knot in metaphysics under the name of “Practical Reason,” could find little sympathy in others. He has shipped an immense cargo of this lore in his “Biographia Literaria.” He was in full employ upon this work, as I afterwards learned, at the period I allude to; and this might have caused his conversation to be more than usually abstruse. I was charmed with the vague splendours of his thoughts, corus¬ cating like a boreal aurora, but I confess the matter of fact that gave rise to them seemed indeed veiled by them—veiled by “excess of light”; and when he had at last done, the matter which this glory or halo of language was to impress upon the mind, remained somewhat in the state of the earthly movements—wars, battles, sieges—prefigured by that heavenly northern illumina¬ tion. The actual required a seer as profound, and vision as strong as in second sight, as in that prophetical future. It was too like that state produced, according to Dr. Johnson, by the gorgeous poetry of Akenside—“sometimes amazed, always delighted, it recollects little, and carries away nothing.” . . . Of the daily, almost hourly, arrivals of packets—letters with new works, imploring his obstetric aid in their struggles to avoid the fate of the still-born children of the press,—of religious debutants on a more sacred stage, all crowding under the wing of a public character, he complained almost with groaning; yet I did somehow conceit a—not “roguish,” yet self-complacent “twinkle in his eye,” that hinted some spice of comfort under the mountain of supplications, the penalty of “finding oneself famous.” Indeed, I had proof of the fact, even on the few occa¬ sions of my seeing him at home. He inquired about Edinburgh chit-chat with ostensible in¬ difference, but ill-concealed eagerness, especially of the doings and sayings of the great little pole-star of the literary world— 204

The Earl of Dunraven Jeffrey, whose battery of long range against him, as one of the “knot of hypochondriacal and whining poets that haunt the Lakes,” as he wickedly described them, evidently broke through his habitually lofty elevation of thoughts, which kept, or seemed to keep, a calm for ever round him. He even anxiously hinted repeatedly his non-relationship to that family, in a manner which I fancied his friend Wordsworth (whose opinions of Coleridge I had listened to not a fortnight before,) would have deemed an “unkind cut” at least, and Southey not less so. Of his friend Wordsworth, however, he spoke with admiration, though dis¬ claiming for himself, as well as him, all pretension to being con¬ sidered of any school, much less founders of one. Yet Words¬ worth enunciated the pretension himself in the long preamble to the Lyrical Ballads, and the fact seemed certain; but it was not for me to controvert so eminent a man’s manifesto of ab¬ dication for himself and compeers. Mr. Wordsworth had, how¬ ever, so recently maintained the precise contrary, even to eager vindication of its peculiar tenets, as constituting a new “school,” chiefly that the most familiar dialect is fit for poetry, and the humblest subjects for its matter, that I felt rather astonished, and thought that poets differed more widely even than doctors.1

THE EARL OF DUNRAVEN 1812-1871 Edwin Wyndham, third Earl of Dunraven, also known by his cour¬ tesy title of Viscount Adare, studied astronomy at the Dublin observa¬ tory under Sir William Rowan Hamilton, who was the means of his gaining an interview with Coleridge. He was, variously, a commis¬ sioner of education, a member of Parliament, and an investigator of spiritualism, which he was convinced was genuine. An interest in archceology led to his publication of Notes on Irish Architecture. He paid a single visit to Coleridge, when the poet was in the illness of his last months,1

205

Contemporary Descriptions Writing to Sir William Rowan Hamilton, on the clay of his visit to Coleridge, June 30, 1834: UP I WENT, feeling a mixture of pleasure and awe, and was shown into a small room, half full of books in great confusion, and in one corner was a small bed, looking more like a couch, upon which lay certainly the most remarkable looking man I ever saw; he quite surpassed my expectations; he was pale and worn when I first entered, but very soon the colour came into his cheeks and his eye brightened, and such an eye as it is! such animation, and acuteness! so piercing! He began by asking how you were, and telling me how ill he had been for three months, but he is now getting a little better; he said he was sure it would give you pleasure to know (as far as I could understand) that religion had alleviated very much his hours of pain, and given him fortitude and resignation. He then talked about the Church, but really I found it so difficult to follow him that I cannot recol¬ lect what he said, but even less can I remember what I should say were the subjects of conversation: this I think arises from a great want of method; but I say this, feeling I do him injustice: still it strikes me he rambled on; but I remarked how, when once or twice he was interrupted by people coming into the room and speaking to them, he resumed at the very word he left off at—• he said he was sure you would feel very sorry at the line of conduct Thirlwall had pursued about some petition about the Dissenters, and how it had pained him. Now and then he said somethingvery droll, which made us laugh; and he conversed with so much vigour and animation, though he had difficulty in speaking at all. I ventured, when a pause came, to put in a word. This happened twice: the second time I asked him when we might hope for an¬ other work from him. He said he had one very nearly ready, and it would have been out, were it not for his illness. He gave me the plan of the book, but really he got so deep, using words in a sense not familiar to me, that I could not follow him, and I crazed on his eloquent and venerable countenance, as he went on de¬ scribing the results of his thoughts. All I can tell you is, that his 206

Ralph Waldo Emerson book is on logic of some particular kind, and is a sort of intro¬ duction to his great work, as he calls the one which Aubrey says exists only in his brain. He gave me a sketch of this also, very brief: the title I thought beautiful, and would have given any¬ thing to have written it down for you: indeed, much as I enjoyed the visit, I wished you could have been in my place, for I know you would have enjoyed it so exceedingly, and could have rec¬ ollected all. He also spoke beautifully about Kant, who, as well as Bacon, was, he says, an Aristotelian; but I was unable to com¬ prehend his explanation of the sense in which he said their methods were similar. He says he will get some one to look out for that work of Kant’s for you, which he says is very valuable, and he told me how little Kant is known or read in proportion to what he ought to be. I was with him more than half an hour— nearer an hour, I believe—and could willingly, as you may sup¬ pose, have staid all day; but I, with some resolution at last, got up and said something about fearing I had interrupted him. I told him how you liked Kant, and how delighted you would be at hearing he [Coleridge] was about to publish another work. I must say, since I came to London I have not felt so happy as this day; and I consider the visit to Coleridge has been productive of complete pleasure, unmixed with disappointment of any kind. . . . His head is finer than I had expected, and his eye different. I supposed it black and rather soft, instead of being grey and penetrating. He laughed a good deal when he alluded to some comparison, I believe he said in the Friend, about little toads, and the Emancipation Bill, and the Reform Bill. . . .2

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 1803-1882 The three Englishmen of his day in tuhom Emerson was most in¬ terested and whom he hastened to visit when in England in 1833 were Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Coleridge, then enter-

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Contemporary Descriptions ing the final year of his life, he did not see again. Although his visit to the elderly poet turned, out “rather a spectacle than a conversa¬ tion” Emerson did not allow these personal impressions of an “old and preoccupied” man to mislead him. He could still say of Cole¬ ridge that he “wrote and spoke the only high criticism of his time.” 1

Coleridge in 1833: FROM LONDON, on the 5th August, I went to Highgate, and wrote a note to Mr. Coleridge, requesting leave to pay my re¬ spects to him. It was near noon. Mr. Coleridge sent a verbal mes¬ sage that he was in bed, but if I would call after one o’clock he would see me. I returned at one, and he appeared, a short, thick old man, with bright blue eyes and fine clear complexion, lean¬ ing on his cane. He took snuff freely, which presently soiled his cravat and neat black suit. He asked whether I knew Allston, and spoke warmly of his merits and doings when he knew him in Rome; what a master of the Titianesque he was, etc., etc. He spoke of Dr. Channing. It was an unspeakable misfortune that he should have turned out a Unitarian after all. On this, he burst into a declamation on the folly and ignorance of Unitarianism, —its high unreasonableness; and taking up Bishop Waterland’s book, which lay on the table, he read with vehemence two or three pages written by himself in the fly-leaves,—passages, too, which, I believe, are printed in the Aids to Reflection. When he stopped to take breath, I interposed that “whilst I highly valued all his explanations, I was bound to tell him that I was born and bred a Unitarian.” “Yes,” he said, “I supposed so”; and con¬ tinued as before. It was a wonder that after so many ages of un¬ questioning acquiescence in the doctrine of St. Paul,—the doc¬ trine of the Trinity, which was also according to Philo Judaeus the doctrine of the Jews before Christ,—this handful of Priestleians should take on themselves to deny it, etc., etc. He was very sorry that Dr. Channing, a man to whom he looked up,—no, to say that he looked up to him would be to speak falsely, but a man whom he looked at with so much interest,—should embrace such views. When he saw Dr. Channing he had hinted to him that he

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Ralph Waldo Emerson was afraid he loved Christianity for what was lovely and excel¬ lent,—he loved the good in it, and not the true;—“And I tell you, sir, that I have known ten persons who loved the good, for one person who loved the true; but it is a far greater virtue to love the true for itself alone, than to love the good for itself alone.” He (Coleridge) knew all about Unitarianism perfectly well, because he had once been a Unitarian and knew what quackery it was. He had been called “the rising star of Unitarian¬ ism.” He went on defining, or rather refining: “Trinitarian doctrine was realism; the idea of God was not essential, but super¬ essential”; talked of trinism and tetrakism and much more, of which I only caught this, “that the will was that by which a person is a person; because, if one should push me in the street, and so I should force the man next me into the kennel, I should at once exclaim, I did not do it, sir, meaning it was not my will.” And this also, that “if you should insist on your faith here in England, and I on mine, mine would be the hotter side of the fagot.” I took advantage of a pause to say that he had many readers of all religious opinions in America, and I proceeded to inquire if the “extract” from the Independent’s pamphlet, in the third volume of the Friend, were a veritable quotation. He replied that it was really taken from a pamphlet in his possession entitled “A Protest of one of the Independents,” or something to that effect. I told him how excellent I thought it and how much I wished to see the entire work. “Yes,” he said, “the man was a chaos of truths, but lacked the knowledge that God was a God of order. Yet the passage would no doubt strike you more in the quotation than in the original, for I have filtered it.” When I rose to go, he said, “I do not know whether you care about poetry, but I will repeat some verses I lately made on my baptismal anniversary,” and he recited with strong emphasis, standing, ten or twelve lines beginning,— Born unto God in Christ— He inquired where I had been travelling; and on learning that I had been in Malta and Sicily, he compared one island with the 209

Contemporary Descriptions other, repeating what he had said to the Bishop of London when he returned from that country, that Sicily was an excellent school of political economy; for, in any town there, it only needed to ask what the government enacted, and reverse that, to know what ought to be done; it was the most felicitously opposite legis¬ lation to anything good and wise. There were only three things which the government had brought into that garden of delights, namely, itch, pox and famine. Whereas in Malta, the force of law and mind was seen, in making that barren rock of semiSaracen inhabitants the seat of population and plenty. Going out, he showed me in the next apartment a picture of Allston’s, and told me that Montague, a picture-dealer, once came to see him, and glancing towards this, said, “Well, you have got a picture!” thinking it the work of an old master; afterwards, Montague, still talking with his back to the canvas, put up his hand and touched it, and exclaimed, “By Heaven! this picture is not ten years old”—so delicate and skilful was that man’s touch. I was in his company for about an hour, but find it impossible to recall the largest part of his discourse, which was often like so many printed paragraphs in his book,—perhaps the same,—so readily did he fall into certain commonplaces. As I might have foreseen, the visit was rather a spectacle than a conversation, of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity. He was old and preoccupied, and could not bend to a new companion and think with him.2

JOSEPH FARINGTON 1747-1821 Joseph Farington, R.A., known in his time as a landscape painter whose views of English lakes and towns were engraved and published in various collections, is now better remembered as a diarist. For a third of a century a member of the Royal Academy, he was so power¬ ful in the councils of that body that, he won for himself the appella¬ tion of Dictator. His Diary, which first appeared in the Morning Post

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Joseph Farington in 1922, gives evidence not only of his wide acquaintance, but also of his alertness of observation and his industry, comparable to that of Crabb Robinson, in setting down whatever came within his ken. “In after-dinner talks across the walnuts and the ivine at town or country mansion, club, or coffee-house ” says the editor of the Diary, “he heard and recorded many important and curious thingsAt every dinner, public or private, he made a practice of drawing a plan of the table and writing down the name and position of each one of the party. Farington first mentions Coleridge in his Diary on No¬ vember 29, 1809, when Sir George Beaumont called and brought word of Coleridge, whom he describes as “a few years ago a violent Demo¬ crat but now quite opposite,—about 92 years old,—of great genius,— a Poet,—prodigious command of words,—has read everything.” 1

At Sir George Beaumont’s, March 25, 1804: THE CONVERSATION after dinner and throughout the eve¬ ning was very metaphysical in which Coleridge had the leading & by far the greatest part of it. His habit seems to be to analyse every subject. A comparison was made between the powers required, or rather what was requisite for painting and Sculpture. Sir George was decidedly of opinion that it required much more to make a complete work in Painting than to arrive at perfection in Sculpture. He instanced colouring which alone had occupied the greatest talents to arrive at excellence yet it was but a part of what was necessary to make a picture. Coleridge concurred with him. Upon it being observed that in Sculpture to make a perfect form it was necessary not to copy any individual figure, for nothing human is perfect, but to make a selection of perfect parts from various figures & assemble them together & thereby constitute a perfect whole, Coleridge ob¬ served that it was the same in good poetry,—nature was the basis or original from which all should proceed. He said that perhaps there was not in any poem a line which separately might not have been expressed by somebody, it was the assembling so many expressions of the feelings of the mind and uniting them consistently together that delighted the imagination. . . . Cole¬ ridge said Dr. Darwin was a great plagiarist, “He was like a pigeon 211

Contemporary Descriptions picking up peas, and afterwards voiding them with excrementitious additions.” Novels were mentioned. Coleridge objected to them alto¬ gether; even the best of them did harm, “they afforded amuse¬ ment to the mind without requiring exertion.” At Lady Beau¬ mont’s desire I related the story of the Apparition of His Brother [John] appearing to Captn. Wynyard. It was told at the private instigation of Lady Beaumont who was desirous to hear Cole¬ ridge’s opinion upon it.—He gave a decided opinion upon it “That it [was] an Ocular Spectrum ” a deception created by the disordered imagination of Captn. Wynyard when in a nervous, languid state, & that Coll. Sherbroke who also professed to have seen the apparition had the notion of it excited by the sudden assertion of the other. The evening was passed not in conversation but in listening to a succession of opinions, 8c explanations delivered by Cole¬ ridge, to which I attended from a desire to form a judgment of his ability. It was all metaphysical, frequently perplexed, and certainly at times without understanding His subject. Occasion¬ ally there was some brilliance, but I particularly noticed that His illustrations generally disappointed me, 8c rather weakened than enforced what He had before said. He read some lines writ¬ ten by Wordsworth upon “The Maid of Loch Lomond,” a pretty girl they found residing there; and also some lines upon West¬ minster Bridge 8c the scenery from it. His Dialect particularly when reading, is what I should call broad Devonshire, for a gen¬ tleman.—His manner was good-natured & civil, & He went on like one who was accustomed to take the lead in the company He sroes into.2 O

JOHN FRERE 1807-1851 John Frere came of a distinguished Norfolk family which included Sir Bartle Frere, the statesman, and John Hookham Frere, the diplo-

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John Frere matist and author. He probably met Coleridge through the latter, his uncle. At Cambridge, where he took the B.A. and M.A., Frere was known as one of the “Apostles” and was friendly with Tennyson and Hallam. Pursuing a career in the church, he was curate of Hadleigh; chaplain to Blomfield, the bishop of London; rector of Cottenham; and first curate of Wakes Colne. The following abstract of a discourse with Coleridge at Hampstead in 1830 was written at the time by Frere and kept in a manuscript volume in the possession of his daugh¬ ter until 1917, when it was printed in the Cornhill Magazine. It in¬ dicates that, though the burden of the talk is Coleridge’s, the other person is not excluded from doing his share.

Dialogue between Coleridge and Frere in December, 1830: C. Is there anything stirring now in the world of letters, any¬

thing in the shape of poetry lately produced, for I see nothing of the sort, nor even a Review that is not a year old? F. No, Sir, at least I have heard no talk of any such thing; these continual burnings occupy all men’s thoughts and con¬ versation. C. And what remedies are proposed? They talk I suppose of retrenchments, but what good can retrenchment do? Alas! rev¬ olutionary times are times of general demoralization; what great men do they ever produce? What was produced by the late Revolutionary Spirit in France? There must be something upper¬ most to be sure in such disturbances; some military superiority, but what great—I mean truly great—man was produced? In England the same spirit was curbed in and worsted by the moral sense, afterwards there followed times of repose, and the Muses began to show themselves. But now what is going for¬ ward? The depravity of the spirit of the times is marked by the absence of poetry. For it is a great mistake to suppose that thought is not necessary for poetry; true, at the time of composition there is that starlight, a dim and holy twilight; but is not light necessary before? Poetry is the highest effort of the mind; all the powers are in a state of equilibrium and equally energetic, the knowledge of 213

Contemporary Descriptions individual existence is forgotten, the man is out of himself and exists in all things, his eye is in a fine &c. There is no one perhaps who composes with more facility than your Uncle; but does it cost him nothing before? It is the result of long thought; and poetry as I have before observed must be the result of thought, and the want of thought in what is now called poetry is a bad sign of the times. There is want of the proper spirit; if a nation would flourish (politically speaking) there must be a desire in the breast of each man of something more than merely to live—he must de¬ sire to live well; and if men cannot live well at home they will go and live well elsewhere. The condition upon which a country circumstanced as ours is exists, is that it should become the Mother of Empires, and this Mr. W. Horton feels, but his plans are not extensive or universal enough. I had a conversation with him, but could not make him enter into my views. We ought to send out colonies, but not privately or by parishes; it should be a grand National concern; there should be in every family one or more brought up for this and this alone. A Father should say, “There, John now is a fine strong fellow and an enterprising lad, he shall be a colonist.” But then some fool like Lord-gets up and tells us, “Oh no! America should be a warning.” Good Heavens, Sir! a warning, and of what? Are we to beware of having 2 [sets] of men bound to us by the ties of allegiance and of affinity; 2 [sets] of men in a distant part of the world speaking the language of Shakespeare and Milton, and living under the laws of Alfred. But a warning they should be to us, to give freely and in good time that liberty which is their due, and which they will properly extort from us if we withhold. F. Is it not moreover true, Sir, that we should show ourselves

really a Mother and not a Stepmother to those Empires which we found? We should with a nursing hand lead them through the dangers of infancy; but why keep them in leading strings when they are able to act for themselves? We should relax our hold by slow degrees as they are able to bear it, and nurture them 214

John Frere to be free and manly states, and not the slaves of any, still less of their own Mother. What Mother ever complains of the ingrati¬ tude of her Son because he does not follow at her apron-strings all the days of his life? Why then do we complain of America, who with greater justice might complain of us that we have been far from remembering our great duty, namely that a Mother if need be should even sacrifice herself for her child? C. What you say is very true; but with regard to the execution of a plan of Colonisation, why should we not make the absurd system of Poor Laws subservient to the measure? Why not, since as Sir N. T. told Bartle the other day, An offer and refusal is as good as an acceptance, propose to any person requiring assistance of the overseer the following terms:—We have it is true bound ourselves by a most foolish promise to find you work; we have none here, but if you choose to go out to the Swan River, you shall have as much as you want, and we will carry you out there, your wife and your children too, if you have them, and you shall get your livelihood in an honourable and in¬ dependent way—and mind you are now to consider us dis¬ charged of our promise to find you work. F. It is true that this would be fair enough, but as long as the poor man sees the rich enjoy a liberty which he does not, viz. that of living in the land in which he was born, he would com¬ plain, and not without reason. Let then the young and active in the higher ranks set them the example. And why should the unlearned be deprived of the countenance and assistance of the wiser? What can hand do without head, especially in untamed countries? Heaven knows the labouring classes have been most iniquitously considered for some time and are now becoming, as Mr. Coleridge says, more things than persons, and are there¬ fore more than ever unfit to be sent alone. C. And therefore the younger sons of noblemen and the fops of town would have been employed in a manner much better for their country, and more happy for themselves had they been brought up as members and limbs of a colony instead of thrust¬ ing themselves into situations to which they do not naturally

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Contemporary Descriptions belong, and to the exclusion of all competition, or wasting their energies at Newmarket or in Crockfords. . . . C. Almost all thinking Jews are Deists. I wonder Mr. should ever have talked with you on those subjects; the per¬ secution which a Jew would undergo from his brethren if it was known that he did so, is not to be calculated. The life, you know, of Spinoza was twice attempted, but he professed Chris¬ tianity, at least in his way in a letter to a friend; for he said that if the Logos could be manifested in the flesh, it must converse and act as Jesus did. At the same time his notions of a God were very Pantheistic, a circle whose center is everywhere and circumfer¬ ence nowhere. He had no notion of a Conscious Being of a God —but with these ideas to talk of God becoming flesh appears to me very much like talking of a square circle. Spinoza is a man whom I most deeply reverence, I was going to say whom I reverence as much as it is possible for me to rever¬ ence any creature. He was on the borders of the truth, and would no doubt had he lived have attained it. But bless me! to talk of converting the Jews, people are not aware of what they undertake. Mr.-said to me, and I thought very beautifully, “Convert the Jews! Alas, Sir, Mammon and Ignorance are the two giant porters who stand at the gates of Jerusalem and forbid the en¬ trance of Truth.” . . . F. You have not read much of Keats, Sir, I think.

C. No, I have not. I have seen two Sonnets which I think showed marks of great genius had he lived. I have also read a poem with a classical name—I forget what. Poor Keats, I saw him once. Mr. Green, whom you have heard me mention, and I were walking out in these parts, and we were overtaken by a young man of a very striking countenance whom Mr. Green recognized and shook hands with, mentioning my name; I wish Mr. Green had introduced me, for I did not know who it was. He passed on, but in a few moments sprung back and said, “Mr. Coleridge, allow me the honour of shaking your hand.” 2l6

John Frere I was struck by the energy of his manner, and gave him my hand. He passed on and we stood still looking after him, when Mr. Green said, “Do you know who that is? That is Keats, the poet.” “Heavens!” said I, “when I shook him by the hand there was death!” This was about two years before he died. F. But what was it? C. I cannot describe it. There was a heat and a dampness in the hand. To say that his death was caused by the Review is absurd, but at the same time it is impossible adequately to con¬ ceive the effect which it must have had on his mind. It is very well for those who have a place in the world and are independent to talk of these things, they can bear such a blow, so can those who have a strong religious principle; but all men are not born Philosophers, and all men have not those advan¬ tages of birth and education. Poor Keats had not, and it is impossible I say to conceive the effect which such a Review must have had upon him, knowing as he did that he had his way to make in the world by his own exertions, and conscious of the genius within him. Have you seen, Mr. F., anything of Lord Byron’s poetry? F. Nothing, Sir, but the Translation of “Faust.” C. And what do you think of that? F. Being unacquainted, Sir, with the original I cannot speak of its merits as a translation. As a poem I think it meagre, nor do I conceive that the metres are adapted to the subject in Eng¬ lish whatever they may be in German. C. I have been asked why I did not translate the camp scenes in “Wallenstein.” The truth is that the labour would have been immense, and besides it would not have been borne in English, to say nothing of the fact that Mrs. Barbauld reviewed my translation of the rest of the play and abused it through thick and thin, so that it sold for wastepaper. I remember your uncle telling me that he

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Contemporary Descriptions had picked it up—he approved it, so did Canning to whom he showed it—and so might one or two more, but the edition sold for wastepaper. F. Had you ever any thought of translating the “Faust”? C. Yes, Sir, I had, but I was prevented by the consideration

that though there are some exquisite passages, the opening chorus, the chapel and the prison scenes for instance, to say noth¬ ing of the Brocken scene where he has shown peculiar strength in keeping clear of Shakespeare, he has not taken that wonderful admixture of Witch Fate and Fairy but has kept to the real original witch, and this suits his purpose much better. I say that a great deal of it I do not admire, and some I reprobate. The conception of Wagner is bad: whoever heard of a man who had gained such wonderful proficiency inNearning as to call up spirits See. being discontented? No, it is not having the power of knowledge that would make a man discontented—neither would such a man have suddenly become a sensualist. The discourses too with the pupil are dull. The Mephistopheles, or whatever the name is, is well executed, but the conception is not original. It was-who had before said, “The Devil is the great humourist of the world.” There are other parts too which I could not have translated without entering my protest against them in a manner which would hardly have been fair upon the author, for those things are under¬ stood in Germany in a spirit very different from what they would infuse here in England. To give you an example, the scene where Mephistopheles is introduced as coming before the Almighty and talking with Him would never be borne in English and this whole scene is founded on a mistranslation of a passage in Scrip¬ ture, the opening of Job. You remember how Satan means prop¬ erly one who goes his rounds, and hence it came to mean one of those officers whom the King in Eastern countries used to send round to see how his subjects were going on. This power was soon abused and the Satans used to accuse people falsely, and hence the word came to have the meaning now attached to it of a calumniator, a

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