English Men of Letters: Coleridge Part 5

This single cause indeed, namely, Coleridge's addiction to opium, is quite sufficient, through the humiliations, discomfort, and privations, pecuniary and otherwise, for which the vice was no doubt mediately or immediately responsible, to account for the unhappy issue of a union which undoubtedly was one of love to begin with, and which seems to have retained that character for at least six years of its course.

We have noted the language of warm affection in which the "beloved Sara" is spoken of in the early poems, and up to the time of Coleridge's stay in Germany his feelings towards his wife remained evidently unchanged. To his children, of whom three out of the four born to him had survived, he was deeply attached; and the remarkable promise displayed by the eldest son, Hartley, and his youngest child and only daughter, Sara, made them objects of no less interest to his intellect than to his heart. "Hartley," he writes to Mr. Poole in 1803, "is a strange, strange boy, exquisitely wild, an utter visionary; like the moon among thin clouds, he moves in a circle of light of his own making. He alone is a light of his own." And of his daughter in the same poetic strain: "My meek little Sara is a remarkably interesting baby, with the finest possible skin, and large blue eyes, and she smiles as if she were basking in a sunshine as mild as moonlight of her own quiet happiness." Derwent, a less remarkable but no less attractive child than his brother and sister (whom he was destined long to survive), held an equal place in his father's affections. Yet all these interwoven influences--a deep love of his children and a sincere attachment to his wife, of whom, indeed, he never ceased to speak with respect and regard--were as powerless as in so many thousands of other cases they have been, to brace an enfeebled will to the task of self-reform. In 1807 "respect and regard" had manifestly taken the place of any warmer feeling in his mind. Later on in the letter above quoted he says, "In less than a week I go down to Ottery, with my children and their mother, from a sense of duty"

(_i.e._ to his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge, who had succeeded his father as head master of the Ottery St. Mary Grammar School) "as far as it affects myself, and from a promise made to Mrs.

Coleridge, as far as it affects her, and indeed of a debt of respect to her for her many praiseworthy qualities." When husbands and wives take to liquidating debts of this kind, and in this spirit, it is pretty conclusive evidence that all other accounts between them are closed.

The letter from which these extracts have been taken was written from Aisholt near Bridgewater, where Coleridge was then staying, with his wife and children, as the guest of a Mr. Price; and his friend Poole's description to Josiah Wedgwood of his state at that time is significant as showing that some at least of his intimate acquaintances had no suspicion of the real cause of his bodily and mental disorders. "I admire him," Poole writes, "and pity him more than ever. His information is much extended, the _great_ qualities of his mind heightened and better disciplined, but alas! his health is much weaker, and his great failing, procrastination, or the incapability of acting agreeably to his wish and will, much increased."

Whether the promised visit to Ottery St. Mary was ever paid there is no record to show, but at the end of July 1807 we again hear of the Coleridges at the house of a Mr. Chubb, a descendant of the Deist, at Bridgewater; and here it was that De Quincey, after having endeavoured in vain to run the poet to earth at Stowey, where he had been staying with Mr. Poole, and whence he had gone to pay a short visit to Lord Egmont, succeeded in obtaining an introduction to him. The characteristic pa.s.sage in which the younger man describes their first meeting is too long for quotation, and it is to be hoped too well known to need it: his vivid and acute criticism of Coleridge's conversation may be more appropriately cited hereafter. His evidence as to the conjugal relations of Coleridge and his wife has been already discussed; and the last remaining point of interest about this memorable introduction is the testimony which it incidentally affords to De Quincey's genuine and generous instinct of hero-worship, and to the depth of Coleridge's pecuniary embarra.s.sments. The loan of 300, which the poet's enthusiastic admirer insisted on Cottle's conveying to him as from an unknown "young man of fortune who admired his talents,"

should cover a mult.i.tude of De Quincey's subsequent sins. It was indeed only upon Cottle's urgent representation that he had consented to reduce the sum from 500 to 300. Nor does there seem any doubt of his having honestly attempted to conceal his own ident.i.ty with the nameless benefactor, though, according to his own later account, he failed.

[1]

This occurred in November 1807, and in the previous month De Quincey had been able to render Coleridge a minor service, while at the same moment gratifying a long cherished wish of his own. Mrs. Coleridge was about to return with her children to Keswick, but her husband, not yet master of this 300 windfall, and undoubtedly at his wits' end for money, was arranging for a course of lectures to be delivered at the Royal Inst.i.tution early in the ensuing year, and could not accompany them. De Quincey offered accordingly to be their escort, and duly conducted them to Wordsworth's house, thus making the acquaintance of the second of his two great poetical idols within a few months of paying his first homage to the other. In February 1808 Coleridge again took up his abode in London at his old free quarters in the _Courier_ office, and began the delivery of a promised series of sixteen lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts. "I wish you could see him," again writes Poole to Wedgwood, "you would pity and admire. He is much improved, but has still less voluntary power than ever. Yet he is so committed that I think he must deliver these lectures." Considering that the authorities of the Royal Inst.i.tution had agreed to pay him one hundred guineas for delivering the lectures, he undoubtedly was more or less "committed;" and his voluntary power, however small, might be safely supposed to be equal to the task of fulfilling a contract. But to get the lecturer into the lecture-room does not amount to much more than bringing the horse to the water. You can no more make the one drink than you can prevent the other from sending his audience away thirsty. Coleridge's lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts were confused, ill arranged, and generally disappointing to the last degree.

Sometimes it was not even possible to bring the horse to the water.

Charles Lamb writes to Manning on the 20th of February 1808 (early days indeed) that Coleridge had only delivered two lectures, and that though "two more were intended, he did not come." De Quincey writes of "dismissals of audience after audience, with pleas of illness; and on many of his lecture-days I have seen all Albemarle Street closed by a lock of carriages filled with women of distinction, until the servants of the Inst.i.tution or their own footmen advanced to the carriage-doors with the intelligence that Mr. Coleridge had been suddenly taken ill."

Naturally there came a time when the "women of distinction" began to tire of this treatment. "The plea, which at first had been received with expressions of concern, repeated too often began to rouse disgust.

Many in anger, and some in real uncertainty whether it would not be trouble thrown away, ceased to attend." And what De Quincey has to say of the lectures themselves when they did by chance get delivered is no less melancholy. "The lecturer's appearance," he says, "was generally that of a man struggling with pain and over-mastering illness."

"His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and in spite of the water which he continued drinking through the whole course of the lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower" [_i.e._ I suppose to move the lower jaw]. "In such a state it is clear that nothing could save the lecture itself from reflecting his own feebleness and exhaustion except the advantage of having been precomposed in some happier mood. But that never happened: most unfortunately, he relied on his extempore ability to carry him through. Now, had he been in spirits, or had he gathered animation and kindled by his own emotion, no written lecture could have been more effectual than one of his unpremeditated colloquial harangues. But either he was depressed originally below the point from which reascent was possible, or else this reaction was intercepted by continual disgust from looking back upon his own ill success; for a.s.suredly he never once recovered that free and eloquent movement of thought which he could command at any time in a private company. The pa.s.sages he read, moreover, in ill.u.s.trating his doctrines, were generally unhappily chosen, because chosen at haphazard, from the difficulty of finding at a moment's summons these pa.s.sages which his purpose required. Nor do I remember any that produced much effect except two or three which I myself put ready marked into his hands among the _Metrical Romances_, edited by Ritson. Generally speaking, the selections were as injudicious and as inappropriate as they were ill delivered, for among Coleridge's accomplishments good reading was not one. He had neither voice (so at least I thought) nor management of voice. This defect is unfortunate in a public lecturer, for it is inconceivable how much weight and effectual pathos can be communicated by sonorous depth and melodious cadence of the human voice to sentiments the most trivial; [2] nor, on the other hand, how the grandest are emasculated by a style of reading which fails in distributing the lights and shadows of a musical intonation. However, this defect chiefly concerned the immediate impression; the most afflicting to a friend of Coleridge's was the entire absence of his own peculiar and majestic intellect; no heart, no soul, was in anything he said; no strength of feeling in recalling universal truths, no power of originality or compa.s.s of moral relations in his novelties,--all was a poor, faint reflection from pearls once scattered on the highway by himself in the prodigality of his early opulence--a mendicant dependence on the alms dropped from his own overflowing treasury of happier times."

Severe as is this censure of the lectures, there is unhappily no good ground for disputing its substantial justice. And the inferences which it suggests are only too painfully plain. One can well understand Coleridge's being an ineffective lecturer, and no failure in this respect, however conspicuous, would necessarily force us to the hypothesis of physical disability. But a Coleridge who could no more compose a lecture than he could deliver one-a Coleridge who could neither write nor extemporise anything specially remarkable on a subject so congenial to him as that of English poetry--must a.s.suredly have spent most of his time, whether in the lecture-room or out of it, in a state of incapacity for sustained intellectual effort.

De Quincey's humorous account of the lecturer's shiftless untidy life at the Courier office, and even the Rabelaisian quip which Charles Lamb throws at it in the above-quoted letter to Manning, are sufficient indications of his state at this time. "Oh, Charles,"

he writes to Lamb, early in February, just before the course of lectures was to begin, "I am very, very ill. _Vixi._" The sad truth is that, as seems to have been always the case with him when living alone, he was during these months of his residence in London more constantly and hopelessly under the dominion of opium than ever.

FOOTNOTES

1. "In a letter written by him (Coleridge) about fifteen years after that time, I found that he had become aware of all the circ.u.mstances, perhaps through some indiscretion of Mr. Cottle's." Perhaps, however, no very great indiscretion on Mr. Cottle's part was needed to enable Coleridge to trace the loan to so ardent a young admirer and disciple.

2. The justice of this criticism will be acknowledged by those many persons whom Mr. Bright's great elocutionary skill has occasionally deluded into imagining that the very commonplace verse which the famous orator has been often known to quote with admiration is poetry of a high order.

CHAPTER VII.

Return to the Lakes--From Keswick to Grasmere--With Wordsworth at Allan Bank--The _Friend_--Quits the Lake country for ever.

[1809-1810.]

From the close of this series of lectures in the month of May 1808 until the end of the year it is impossible to trace Coleridge's movements or even to determine the nature of his occupation with any approach to exact.i.tude. The probability is, however, that he remained in London at his lodgings in the _Courier_ office, and that he supported himself by rendering a.s.sistance in various ways to Mr. Daniel Stuart. We know nothing of him, however, with certainty until we find him once more at the Lakes in the early part of the year 1809, but not in his own home. Wordsworth had removed from his former abode at Grasmere to Allan Bank, a larger house some three-quarters of a mile distant, and there Coleridge took up his residence, more, it would seem, as a permanent inmate of his friend's house than as a guest. The specific cause of this migration from Greta Hall to Allan Bank does not appear, but all the accessible evidence, contemporary and subsequent, seems to point to the probability that it was the result of a definite break-up of Coleridge's own home. He continued, at any rate, to reside in Wordsworth's house during the whole seven months of his editorship of the _Friend_, a new venture in periodical literature which he undertook at this period; and we shall see that upon its failure he did not resume his residence at Greta Hall, but quitted the Lake country at once and for ever.

We need not take too literally Coleridge's declaration in the _Biographia Literaria_ that one "main object of his in starting the _Friend_ was to establish the philosophical distinction between the Reason and the Understanding." Had this been so, or at least had the periodical been actually conducted in conformity with any such purpose, even the chagrined projector himself could scarcely have had the face to complain, as Coleridge did very bitterly, of the reception accorded to it by the public. The most unpractical of thinkers can hardly have imagined that the "general reader" would "take in" a weekly metaphysical journal published at a town in c.u.mberland. The _Friend_ was not quite so essentially hopeless an enterprise as that would have been; but the accidents of mismanagement and imprudence soon made it, for all practical purposes, sufficiently desperate. Even the forlorn _Watchman_, which had been set on foot when Coleridge had fourteen years' less experience of the world, was hardly more certainly foredoomed. The first care of the founder of the _Friend_ was to select, as the place of publication, a town exactly twenty-eight miles from his own abode--a distance virtually trebled, as De Quincey observes, "by the interposition of Kirkstone, a mountain only to be scaled by a carriage ascent of three miles, and so steep in parts that without four horses no solitary traveller can persuade the neighbouring innkeepers to convey him." Here, however, at Penrith, "by way of purchasing intolerable difficulties at the highest price," Coleridge was advised and actually persuaded to set up a printer, to buy and lay in a stock of paper, types, etc., instead of resorting to some printer already established at a nearer place--as, for instance, Kendal, which was ten miles nearer, and connected with Coleridge's then place of residence by a daily post, whereas at Penrith there was no post at all. Having thus studiously and severely handicapped himself, the projector of the new periodical set to work, upon the strength of what seems to have been in great measure a fancy list of subscribers, to print and, so far as his extraordinary arrangements permitted, to circulate his journal. With _nave_ sententiousness he warns the readers of the _Biographia Literaria_ against trusting, in their own case, to such a guarantee as he supposed himself to possess. "You cannot," he observes, "be certain that the names on a subscription list have been put down by sufficient authority; or, should that be ascertained, it still remains to be known whether they were not extorted by some over-zealous friend's importunity; whether the subscriber had not yielded his name merely from want of courage to say no! and with the intention of dropping the work as soon as possible." Thus out of a hundred patrons who had been obtained for the _Friend_ by an energetic canva.s.ser, "ninety threw up the publication before the fourth number without any notice, though it was well known to them that in consequence of the distance and the slowness and irregularity of the conveyance" [it is amusing to observe the way in which Coleridge notes these drawbacks of his own creation as though they were "the act of G.o.d"] "I was compelled to lay in a stock of stamped paper for at least eight weeks beforehand, each sheet of which stood me in fivepence previous to its arrival at my printer's; though the subscription money was not to be received till the twenty- first week after the commencement of the work; and, lastly, though it was in nine cases out of ten impracticable for me to receive the money for two or three numbers without paying an equal sum for the postage."

Enough appears in this undesignedly droll account of the venture to show pretty clearly that, even had the _Friend_ obtained a reasonable measure of popularity at starting, the flagrant defects in the methods of distributing and financing it must have insured its early decease. But, as a matter of fact, it had no chance of popularity from the outset. Its first number appeared on 1st August 1809, and Coleridge, writing to Southey on 20th October of the same year, speaks of his "original apprehension" that the plan and execution of the _Friend_ is so utterly unsuitable to the public taste as to preclude all rational hopes of its success. "Much," he continues, "might have been done to have made the former numbers less so, by the interposition of others written more expressly for general interest;"

and he promises to do his best in future to "interpose tales and whole numbers of amus.e.m.e.nt, which will make the periods lighter and shorter."

Meanwhile he begs Southey to write a letter to the _Friend_ in a lively style, rallying its editor on "his Quixotism in expecting that the public will ever pretend to understand his lucubrations or feel any interest in subjects of such sad and unkempt antiquity." Southey, ever good-natured, complied, even amid the unceasing press of his work, with the request; and to the letter of lightly-touched satire which he contributed to the journal he added a few private lines of friendly counsel, strongly urging Coleridge to give two or three amusing numbers, and he would hear of admiration on every side. "Insert too,"

he suggested, "a few more poems--any that you have, except _Christabel_, for that is of too much value. And write _now_ that character of Bonaparte, announced in former times for 'to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.'" It was too late, however, for good advice to be of any avail: the _Friend_ was past praying for. It lingered on till its twenty-eighth number, and expired, unlike the Watchman, without any farewell to its friends, in the third week of March 1810.

The republication of this periodical, or rather selections from it, which appeared in 1818, is hardly perhaps described with justice in De Quincey's words as "altogether and absolutely a new work." A reader can, at any rate, form a pretty fair estimate from it of the style and probable public attractions of the original issue; and a perusal of it, considered in its character as a bid for the patronage of the general reader, is certainly calculated to excite an astonishment too deep for words. We have, of course, to bear in mind that the standard of the readable in our grandfathers' days was a more liberal and tolerant one than it is in our own. In those days of leisurely communications and slowly moving events there was relatively at least a far larger public for a weekly issue of moral and philosophical essays, under the name of a periodical, than it would be found easy to secure at present, when even a monthly discourse upon things in general requires Mr. Euskin's brilliancy of eloquence, vivacity of humour, and perpetual charm of unexpectedness to carry it off. Still the _Spectator_ continued to be read in Coleridge's day, and people therefore must have had before them a perpetual example of what it was possible to do in the way of combining entertainment with instruction. How, then, it could have entered into the mind of the most sanguine projector to suppose that the _longueurs_ and the difficulty of the _Friend_ would be patiently borne with for the sake of the solid nutriment which it contained it is quite impossible to understand. Even supposing that a weekly, whose avowed object was "to aid in the formation of fixed principles in politics, morals, and religion," could possibly be floated, even "with literary amus.e.m.e.nts interspersed," it is evident that very much would depend upon the character of these "amus.e.m.e.nts" themselves. In the republication of 1817 they appear under the heading of "landing-places." One of them consists of a parallel between Voltaire and Erasmus, and between Rousseau and Luther, founded, of course, on the respective att.i.tudes of the two pairs of personages to the Revolution and the Reformation.

Another at the end of the series consists of a criticism of, and panegyric on, Sir Alexander Ball, the governor of Malta. Such are the landing-places. But how should any reader, wearied with "for ever climbing up the climbing wave" of Coleridge's eloquence, have found rest or refreshment on one of these uncomfortable little sandbanks? It was true that the original issue of the _Friend_ contained poetical contributions which do not appear in the republication; but poetry in itself, or, at any rate, good poetry, is not a relief to the overstrained faculties, and, even if it were, the relief would have been provided at too infrequent intervals to affect the general result.

The fact is, however, that Coleridge's own theory of his duty as a public instructor was in itself fatal to any hope of his venture proving a commercial success. Even when entreated by Southey to lighten the character of the periodical, he accompanies his admission of the worldly wisdom of the advice with something like a protest against such a departure from the severity of his original plan. His object, as he puts it with much cogency from his own unpractical point of view--his object being to teach men how to think on politics, religion, and morals, and thinking being a very arduous and distasteful business to the ma.s.s of mankind, it followed that the essays of the _Friend_ (and particularly the earlier essays, in which the reader required to be "grounded" in his subject) could hardly be agreeable reading. With perfect frankness indeed does he admit in his prospectus that he must "submit to be thought dull by those who seek amus.e.m.e.nt only." He hoped, however, as he says in one of his earlier essays, to become livelier as he went on. "The proper merit of a foundation is its ma.s.siveness and solidity. The conveniences and ornaments, the gilding and stucco-work, the sunshine and sunny prospects, will come with the superstructure."

But the building, alas! was never destined to be completed, and the architect had his own misgivings about the attractions even of the completed edifice. "I dare not flatter myself that any endeavours of mine, compatible with the duty I owe to the truth and the hope of permanent utility, will render the _Friend_ agreeable to the majority of what is called the reading public. I never expected it. How indeed could I when, etc." Yet, in spite of these professions, it is clear from the prospectus that Coleridge believed in the possibility of obtaining a public for the _Friend_. He says that "a motive for honourable ambition was supplied by the fact that every periodical paper of the kind now attempted, which had been conducted with zeal and ability, was not only well received at the time, but has become popular;" and he seems to regard it as a comparatively unimportant circ.u.mstance that the _Friend_ would be distinguished from "its celebrated predecessors, the _Spectator_ and the like," by the "greater length of the separate essays, by their closer connection with each other, and by the predominance of one object, and the common bearing of all to one end." It was, of course, exactly this _plus_ of prolixity and _minus_ of variety which lowered the sum of the _Friend's_ attractions so far below that of the _Spectator_ as to deprive the success of Addison of all its value as a precedent.

Nor is it easy to agree with the editor of the reprint of 1837 that the work, "with all its imperfections, is perhaps the most vigorous" of its author's compositions. That there are pa.s.sages in it which impress us by their force of expression, as well as by subtlety or beauty of thought, must of course be admitted. It was impossible to a man of Coleridge's literary power that it should be otherwise. But "vigorous" is certainly not the adjective which seems to me to suggest itself to an impartial critic of these too copious disquisitions.

Making every allowance for their necessary elasticity of scope as being designed to "prepare and discipline the student's moral and intellectual being, not to propound dogmas and theories for his adoption," it must, I think, be allowed that they are wanting in that continuity of movement and co-ordination of parts which, as it seems to me, enters into any intelligible definition of "vigour," as attributed to a work of moral and political exposition considered as a whole. The writer's discursiveness is too often and too vexatiously felt by the reader to permit of the survival of any sense of theorematic unity in his mind; he soon gives up all attempts at periodical measurement of his own and his author's progress towards the prescribed goal of their journey; and he resigns himself in this, as in so many other of Coleridge's prose works, to a study of isolated and detached pa.s.sages.

So treated, however, one may freely admit that the _Friend_ is fully worthy of the admiration with which Mr. H. N. Coleridge regarded it. If not the most vigorous, it is beyond all comparison the most characteristic of all his uncle's performances in this field of his multiform activity. In no way could the peculiar pregnancy of Coleridge's thoughts, the more than scholastic subtlety of his dialectic, and the pa.s.sionate fervour of his spirituality be more impressively exhibited than by a well-made selection of _loci_ from the pages of the _Friend_.

CHAPTER VIII.

London again--Second recourse to journalism--The _Courier_ articles--The Shakespeare lectures--Production of _Remorse_--At Bristol again as lecturer--Residence at Calne--Increasing ill health and embarra.s.sment--Retirement to Mr. Gillman's.

[1810-1816.]

The life led by Coleridge during the six years next ensuing is difficult to trace, even in the barest outline; to give a detailed and circ.u.mstantial account of it from any ordinarily accessible source of information is impossible. Nor is it, I imagine, very probable that even the most exhaustive search among whatever imprinted records may exist in the possession of his friends would at all completely supply the present lack of biographical material. For not only had it become Coleridge's habit to disappear from the sight of his kinsmen and acquaintances for long periods together; he had fallen almost wholly silent also. They not only ceased to see him, but they ceased to hear of him. Letters addressed to him, even on subjects of the greatest importance, would remain for months unnoticed, and in many instances would receive no answer at all. His correspondence during the next half-dozen years must have been of the scantiest amount and the most intermittent character, and a biographer could hope, therefore, for but little aid in bridging over the large gaps in his knowledge of this period, even if every extant letter written by Coleridge during its continuance were to be given to the world.

Such light, too, as is retrospectively thrown upon it by Coleridge's correspondence of a later date is of the most fitful description,-- scarcely more than serves, in fact, for the rendering of darkness visible. Even the sudden and final departure from the Lakes it leaves involved in as much obscurity as ever. Writing to Mr. Thomas Allsop [1] from Ramsgate twelve years afterwards (8th October 1822) he says that he "counts four grasping and griping sorrows in his past life."

The first of these "was when" [no date given] "the vision of a happy home sank for ever, and it became impossible for me longer even to hope for domestic happiness under the name of husband." That is plain enough on the whole, though it still leaves us in some uncertainty as to whether the "sinking of the vision" was as gradual as the estrangement between husband and wife, or whether he refers to some violent rupture of relations with Mrs. Coleridge, possibly precipitating his departure from the Lakes. If soothe second "griping and grasping sorrow" followed very quickly on the first, for he says that it overtook him "on the night of his arrival from Grasmere with Mr. and Mrs. Montagu;" while in the same breath and paragraph, and as though undoubtedly referring to the same thing, he speaks of the "destruction of a friendship of fifteen years when, just at the moment of Tenner and Curtis's (the publishers) bankruptcy" (by which Coleridge was a heavy loser, but which did not occur till seven years afterwards), somebody indicated by seven asterisks and possessing an income of 1200 a-year, was "totally transformed into baseness." There is certainly not much light here, any more than in the equally enigmatical description of the third sorrow as being "in some sort included in the second," so that "what the former was to friendship the latter was to a still more inward bond." The truth is, that all Coleridge's references to himself in his later years are shrouded in a double obscurity. One veil is thrown over them by his deliberate preference for abstract and mystical forms of expression, and another perhaps by that kind of shameful secretiveness which grows upon all men who become the slaves of concealed indulgences, and which often displays itself on occasions when it has no real object to gain of any kind whatever.

Thus much only we know, that on reaching London in the summer of 1810 Coleridge became the guest of the Montagus, and that, after some months' residence with them, he left as the immediate result of some difference with his host which was never afterwards composed. Whether it arose from the somewhat trivial cause to which De Quincey has, admittedly upon the evidence of "the learned in literary scandal,"

referred it, it is now impossible to say. But at some time or other, towards the close probably of 1810, or in the early months of 1811, Coleridge quitted Mr. Montagu's house for that of Mr. John Morgan, a companion of his early Bristol days, and a common friend of his and Southey's; and here, at No. 7 Portland Place, Hammersmith, he was residing when, for the second time, he resolved to present himself to the London public in the capacity of lecturer. His services were on this occasion engaged by the London Philosophical Society, at Crane Court, Fleet Street, and their prospectus announced that on Monday, 18th November, Mr. Coleridge would commence "a course of lectures on Shakspeare and Milton, in ill.u.s.tration of the principles of poetry and their application, on grounds of criticism, to the most popular works of later English poets, those of the living included. After an introductory lecture on false criticism (especially in poetry) and on its causes, two-thirds of the remaining course," continues the prospectus, "will be a.s.signed, 1st, to a philosophical a.n.a.lysis and explanation of all the princ.i.p.al characters of our great dramatists, as Oth.e.l.lo, Falstaff, Richard the Third, Lago, Hamlet, etc., and to a critical comparison of Shakspeare in respect of diction, imagery, management of the pa.s.sions, judgment in the construction of his dramas--in short, of all that belongs to him as a poet, and as a dramatic poet, with his contemporaries or immediate successors, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Ma.s.singer, and in the endeavour to determine which of Shakespeare's merits and defects are common to him, with other writers of the same age, and what remain peculiar to his genius."

A couple of months before the commencement of this course, viz. in September 1811, Coleridge seems to have entered into a definite journalistic engagement with his old editor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, then the proprietor of the _Courier_. It was not, however, his first connection with that journal. He had already published at least one piece of verse in its columns, and two years before, while the _Friend_ was still in existence, he had contributed to it a series of letters on the struggle of the Spaniards against their French invaders. In these, as though to show that under the ashes of his old democratic enthusiasm still lived its wonted fires, and that the inspiration of a popular cause was only needed to reanimate them, we find, with less of the youthful lightness of touch and agility of movement, a very near approach to the vigour of his early journalistic days. Whatever may be thought of the historic value of the parallel which he inst.i.tutes between the struggle of the Low Countries against their tyrant, and that of the Peninsula against its usurping conqueror, it is worked out with remarkable ingenuity of completeness.

Whole pages of the letters are radiant with that steady flame of hatred which, ever since the hour of his disillusionment, had glowed in his breast at the name and thought of Bonaparte; and whenever he speaks of the Spaniards, of Spanish patriotism, of the Spanish Cortes, we see that the names of "the people," of "freedom," of "popular a.s.sembly," have some of their old magic for him still. The following pa.s.sage is almost pathetic in its reminder of the days of 1792, before that modern Leonidas, the young French Republic, had degenerated into the Xerxes of the Empire.

"The power which raised up, established, and enriched the Dutch republic,--the same mighty power is no less at work in the present struggle of the Spanish nation, a power which mocks the calculations of ordinary statecraft too subtle to be weighed against it, and mere outward brute force too different from it to admit of comparison. A power as mighty in the rational creation as the element of electricity in the material world; and, like that element, infinite in its affinities, infinite in its mode of action, combining the most discordant natures, fixing the most volatile, and arming the sluggish vapour of the marsh with arrows of fire; working alike in silence and in tempest, in growth and in destruction; now contracted to an individual soul, and now, as in a moment, dilating itself over a whole nation! Am I asked what this mighty power may be, and wherein it exists? If we are worthy of the fame which we possess as the countrymen of Hampden, Russell, and Algernon Sidney, we shall find the answer in our own hearts. It is the power of the insulted free-will, steadied by the approving conscience and struggling against brute force and iniquitous compulsion for the common rights of human nature, brought home to our inmost souls by being, at the same time, the rights of our betrayed, insulted, and bleeding country."

And as this pa.s.sage recalls the most striking characteristics of his earlier style, so may its conclusion serve as a fair specimen of the calmer eloquence of his later manner:--

"It is a painful truth, sir, that these men who appeal most to facts, and pretend to take them for their exclusive guide, are the very persons who most disregard the light of experience when it refers them to the mightiness of their own inner nature, in opposition to those forces which they can see with their eyes, and reduce to figures upon a slate. And yet, sir, what is history for the greater and more useful part but a voice from the sepulchres of our forefathers, a.s.suring us, from their united experience, that our spirits are as much stronger than our bodies as they are n.o.bler and more permanent? The historic muse appears in her loftiest character as the nurse of Hope. It is her appropriate praise that her records enable the magnanimous to silence the selfish and cowardly by appealing to actual events for the information of these truths which they themselves first learned from the surer oracle of their own reason."

But this reanimation of energy was but a transient phenomenoa It did not survive the first freshness of its exciting cause. The Spanish insurrection grew into the Peninsular war, and though the glorious series of Wellington's victories might well, one would think, have sustained the rhetorical temperature at its proper pitch, it failed to do so. Or was it, as the facts appear now and then to suggest, that Coleridge at Grasmere or Keswick-Coleridge in the inspiring (and restraining) companionship of close friends and literary compeers--was an altogether different man from Coleridge in London, alone with his thoughts and his opium? The question cannot be answered with confidence, and the fine quality of the lectures on Shakespeare is sufficient to show that, for some time, at any rate, after his final migration to London, his critical faculty retained its full vigour.

But it is beyond dispute that his regular contributions to the _Courier_ in 1811-12 are not only vastly inferior to his articles of a dozen years before in the _Morning Post_ but fall sensibly short of the level of the letters of 1809, from which extract has just been made. Their tone is spiritless, and they even lack distinction of style. Their very subjects, and the mode of treating them, appear to show a change in Coleridge's att.i.tude towards public affairs if not in the very conditions of his journalistic employment. They have much more of the character of newspaper hack-work than his earlier contributions. He seems to have been, in many instances, set to write a mere report, and often a rather dry and mechanical report of this or the other Peninsular victory. He seldom or never discusses the political situation, as his wont had been, _au large_; and in place of broad statesmanlike reflection on the scenes and actors in the great world-drama then in progress, we meet with too much of that sort of criticism on the consistency and capacity of "our contemporary, the _Morning Chronicle_," which had less attraction, it may be suspected, even for the public of its own day than for the journalistic profession, while for posterity, of course, it possesses no interest at all. The series of contributions extends from September of 1811 until April of the following year, and appears to have nearly come to a premature and abrupt close in the intermediate July, when an article written by Coleridge in strong opposition to the proposed reinstatement of the Duke of York in the command-in-chief was, by ministerial influence, suppressed before publication. This made Coleridge, as his daughter informs us on the authority of Mr. Crabb Kobinson, "very uncomfortable," and he was desirous of being engaged on another paper. He wished to be connected with the _Times_, and "I spoke," says Mr. Eobinson, "with Walter on the subject, but the negotiation failed."

With the conclusion of the lectures on Shakespeare, and the loss of the stimulus, slight as it then was to him, of regular duties and recurring engagements, Coleridge seems to have relapsed once more into thoroughly desultory habits of work. The series of aphorisms and reflections which he contributed in 1812 to Southey's _Omniana_, witty, suggestive, profound as many of them are, must not of course be referred to the years in which they were given to the world. They belong unquestionably to the order of _marginalia_, the scattered notes of which De Quincey speaks with not extravagant admiration, and which, under the busy pencil of a commentator always indefatigable in the _strenua inertia_ of reading, had no doubt acc.u.mulated in considerable quant.i.ties over a long course of years.

The disposal, however, of this species of literary material could scarcely have been a source of much profit to him, and Coleridge's difficulties of living must by this time have been growing acute. His pension from the Wedgwoods had been a.s.signed, his surviving son has stated, to the use of his family, and even this had been in the previous year reduced by half. "In Coleridge's neglect," observes Miss Meteyard, "of his duties to his wife, his children, and his friends, must be sought the motives which led Mr. Wedgwood in 1811 to withdraw his share of the annuity. An excellent, even over-anxious father, he was likely to be shocked at a neglect which imposed on the generosity of Southey, himself heavily burdened, those duties which every man of feeling and honour proudly and even jealously guards as his own....

The pension of 150 per annum had been originally granted with the view to secure Coleridge independence and leisure while he effected some few of his manifold projects of literary work. But ten years had pa.s.sed, and these projects were still _in nubibus_--even the life of Leasing, even the briefer memoir of Thomas Wedgwood; and gifts so well intentioned, had as it were, ministered to evil rather than to good." We can hardly wonder at the step, however we may regret it; and if one of the reasons adduced in defence of it savours somewhat of the fallacy known as _... non caus, pro caus_, we may perhaps attribute that rather to the maladroitness of Miss Meteyard's advocacy than to the weakness of Mr. Wedgwood's logic. The fact, however, that this "excellent, even over-anxious father" was shocked at a neglect which imposed a burden on the generosity of Southey, is hardly a just ground for cutting off one of the supplies by which that burden was partially relieved. As to the a.s.signment of the pension to the family, it is impossible to question what has been positively affirmed by an actual member of that family, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge himself; though, when he adds that not only was the school education of both the sons provided from this source, but that through his (Coleridge's) influence they were both sent to college, his statement is at variance, as will be presently seen, with an authority equal to his own.

In 1812, at any rate, we may well believe that Coleridge's necessities had become pressing, and the timely service then rendered to him by Lord Byron may have been suggested almost as much by a knowledge of his needs as by admiration for the dramatic merits of his long-since rejected tragedy. _Osorio's_ time had at any rate come. The would-be fratricide changed his name to Ordonio, and ceased to stand sponsor to the play, which was rechristened _Remorse_, and accepted at last, upon Byron's recommendation, by the committee of Drury Lane Theatre, the playhouse at whose doors it had knocked vainly fifteen years before it was performed there for the first time on the 23d of January 1813. The prologue and epilogue, without which in those times no gentleman's drama was accounted complete, was written, the former by Charles Lamb, the latter by the author himself. It obtained a brilliant success on its first representation, and was honoured with what was in those days regarded as the very respectable run of twenty nights.

The success, however, which came so opportunely for his material necessities was too late to produce any good effect upon Coleridge's mental state. But a month after the production of his tragedy we find him writing in the most dismal strain of hypochondria to Thomas Poole.

The only pleasurable sensation which the success of _Remorse_ had given him was, he declares, the receipt of his friend's "heart- engendered lines" of congratulation. "No grocer's apprentice, after his first month's permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins than I of hearing about the _Remorse_. The endless rat-a-tat-tat at our black-and-blue bruised doors, and my three master-fiends, proof-sheets, letters, and--worse than these--invitations to large dinners, which I cannot refuse without offence and imputation of pride, etc., oppress me so much that my spirits quite sink under it. I have never seen the play since the first night. It has been a good thing for the theatre. They will get eight or ten thousand pounds by it, and I shall get more than by all my literary labours put together --nay, thrice as much." So large a sum of money as this must have amounted to should surely have lasted him for years; but the particular species of intemperance to which he was now hopelessly enslaved is probably the most costly of all forms of such indulgence, and it seems pretty evident that the proceeds of his theatrical _coup_ were consumed in little more than a year.

Early in 1814, at any rate, Coleridge once more returned to his old occupation of lecturer, and this time not in London, but in the scene of his first appearance in that capacity. The lectures which he proposed to deliver at Bristol were, in fact, a repet.i.tion of the course of 1811-12; but the ways of the lecturer, to judge from an amusing story recorded by Cottle, more nearly resembled his proceedings in 1808. A "brother of Mr. George c.u.mberland," who happened to be his fellow-traveller to Bristol on this occasion, relates that before the coach started Coleridge's attention was attracted by a little Jew boy selling pencils, with whom he entered into conversation, and with whose superior qualities he was so impressed as to declare that "if he had not an important engagement at Bristol he would stay behind to provide some better condition for the lad." The coach having started, "the gentleman" (for his name was unknown to the narrator of the incident) "talked incessantly and in a most entertaining way for thirty miles out of London, and, afterwards, with little intermission till they reached Marlborough," when he discovered that a lady in the coach with him was a particular friend of his; and on arriving at Bath he quitted the coach declaring that he was determined not to leave her till he had seen her safe to her brother's door in North Wales. This was the day fixed for the delivery of Coleridge's first lecture. Two or three days afterwards, having completed his _detour_ by North Wales, he arrived at Bristol: another day was fixed for the commencement of the course, and Coleridge then presented himself an hour after the audience had taken their seats. The "important engagement" might be broken, it seems, for a mere whim, though not for a charitable impulse--a distinction testifying to a mixture of insincerity and unpunctuality not pleasant to note as an evidence of the then state of Coleridge's emotions and will.