This bishop was himself, in a secondary way, no uninteresting study. What I mean is, that, though originally the furthest removed from an interesting person, being a man remarkable indeed for robust faculties, but otherwise commonplace in his character, worldly-minded, and coarse, even to obtuseness, in his sensibilities, he yet became interesting from the strength of degree with which these otherwise repulsive characteristics were manifested. He was one of that numerous order in whom even the love of knowledge is subordinate to schemes of advancement; and to whom even his own success, and his own honour consequent upon that success, had no higher value than according to their use as instruments for winning further promotion. Hence it was that, when by such aids he had mounted to a certain eminence, beyond which he saw little promise of further ascent through any assistance of theirs — since at this stage it was clear that party connexion in politics must become his main reliance — he ceased to regard his favourite sciences with interest. The very organs of his early advancement were regarded with no gratitude or tenderness, when it became clear that they could yield no more. Even chemistry was now neglected. This, above all, was perplexing to one who did not understand his character. For hither one would have supposed he might have retreated from his political disappointments, and have found a perpetual consolation in honours which no intrigues could defeat, and in the esteem, so pure and untainted, which still attended the honourable exertions of his youth. But he had not feeling enough for that view; he looked at the matter in a very different light. Other generations had come since then, and “other palms were won.” To keep pace with the advancing science, and to maintain his station amongst his youthful competitors, would demand a youthful vigour and motives such as theirs. But, as to himself, chemistry had given all it could give. Having first raised himself to distinction by that, he had since married into an ancient family — one of the leaders amongst the landed aristocracy of his own county: he had thus entitled himself to call the head of that family — a territorial potentate with ten thousand per annum — by the contemptuous sobriquet of “Dull Daniel”; he looked down upon numbers whom, twenty years before, he scarcely durst have looked up to, except perhaps as a cat is privileged to look at a king; he had obtained a bishopric. Chemistry had done all this for him; and had, besides, co-operating with luck, put him in the way of reaping a large estate from the gratitude and early death of his pupil, Mr. Luther. All this chemistry had effected. Could chemistry do anything more? Clearly not. It was a burnt-out volcano. And here it was that, having lost his motives for cultivating it farther, he regarded the present improvers of the science, not with the feelings natural to a disinterested lover of such studies on their own account, but with jealousy, as men who had eclipsed or had bedimmed his own once brilliant reputation. Two revolutions had occurred since his own “palmy days”; Sir Humphry Davy, he said, might be right; and all might be gold that glistened; but, for his part, he was too old to learn new theories — he must be content to hobble to his grave with such old-fashioned creeds as had answered in his time, when, for aught he could see, men prospered as much as in this newfangled world. Such was the tone of his ordinary talk; and, in one sense — as regards personal claims, I mean — it was illiberal enough; for the leaders of modern chemistry never overlooked his claims. Professor Thomson of Glasgow always spoke of his “Essays” as of a book which hardly any revolution could antiquate; and Sir Humphry Davy, in reply to a question which I put to him upon that point in 1813, declared that he knew of no book better qualified as one of introductory discipline to the youthful experimenter, or as an apprenticeship to the taste in elegant selection of topics.
Yet, querulous and discontented as the bishop was, when he adverted either to chemistry or to his own position in life, the reader must not imagine to himself the ordinary “complement” and appurtenances of that character — such as moroseness, illiberality, or stinted hospitalities. On the contrary, his lordship was a joyous, jovial, and cordial host. He was pleasant, and even kind, in his manners; most hospitable in his reception of strangers, no matter of what party; and I must say that he was as little overbearing in argument, and as little stood upon his privilege in his character of a church dignitary, as any “big wig” I have happened to know. He was somewhat pompous, undoubtedly; but that, in an old academic hero, was rather agreeable, and had a characteristic effect. He listened patiently to all your objections; and, though steeped to the lips in prejudice, he was really candid. I mean to say that, although, generally speaking, the unconscious pre-occupation of his understanding shut up all avenues to new convictions, he yet did his best to open his mind to any views that might be presented at the moment. And, with regard to his querulous egotism, though it may appear laughable enough to all who contrast his real pretensions with their public appreciation as expressed in his acquired opulence and rank, and who contrast, also, his case with that of other men in his own profession — with that of Paley, for example — yet it cannot be denied that fortune had crossed his path, latterly, with foul winds, no less strikingly than his early life had been seconded by her favouring gales. In particular, Lord Holland mentioned to a friend of my own the following anecdote:—”What you say of the bishop may be very true” (they were riding past his grounds at the time, which had turned the conversation upon his character and public claims): “but to us” (Lord Holland meant to the Whig party) “he was truly honourable and faithful; insomuch that my uncle” (meaning, of course, Charles Fox) “had agreed with Lord Grenville to make him Archbishop of York, sede vacante; — all was settled; and, had we staid in power a little longer, he would, beyond a doubt, have had that dignity.”
Now, if the reader happens to recollect how soon the death of Dr. Markham followed the sudden dissolution of that short-lived administration in 1807, he will see how narrowly Dr. Watson missed this elevation; and one must allow for a little occasional spleen under such circumstances. How grand a thing, how princely, to be an English archbishop! Yet, what an archbishop! He talked openly, at his own table, as a Socinian; ridiculed the miracles of the New Testament, which he professed to explain as so many chemical tricks, or cases of legerdemain; and certainly had as little of devotional feeling as any man that ever lived. It is, by comparison, a matter of little consequence that, so slightly regarding the Church of which he called himself a member in her spiritual interest, he should, in her temporal interests, have been ready to lay her open to any assaults from almost any quarter. He could naturally have little reverence for the rights of the shepherds, having so very little for the pastoral office itself, or for the manifold duties it imposes. All his public, all his professional duties, he systematically neglected. He was a lord in Parliament, and for many a year he never attended in his place: he was a bishop, and he scarcely knew any part of his diocese by sight, living three hundred miles away from it: he was a professor of divinity, holding the richest professorship in Europe — the weightiest, for its functions, in England — drawing, by his own admission, one thousand per annum from its endowments (deducting some stipend to his locum tenens at Cambridge), and for thirty years he never read a lecture, or performed a public exercise. Spheres how vast of usefulness to a man as able as himself! — subjects of what bitter anguish on his deathbed to one who had been tenderly conscientious! In his political purism, and the unconscious partisanship of his constitutional scruples, he was a true Whig, and thoroughly diverting. That Lord Lonsdale or that the Duke of Northumberland should interfere with elections, this he thought scandalous and awful; but that a lord of the house of Cavendish or Howard, a Duke of Devonshire or Norfolk, or an Earl of Carlisle, should traffic in boroughs, or exert the most despotic influence as landlords, mutato nomine, he viewed as the mere natural right of property; and so far was he from loving the pure-hearted and unfactious champions of liberty, that, in one of his printed works, he dared to tax Milton with having knowingly, wilfully, deliberately told a falsehood.
Could Coleridge — was it possible that he could reverence a man like
this? Ordinary men might, because they were told that he had defended Christianity against the vile blasphemers and impotent theomachists of the day. But Coleridge had too pure an ideal of a Christian philosopher, derived from the age of the English Titans in theology, to share in that estimate. It is singular enough, and interesting to a man who has ever heard Coleridge talk, but especially to one who has assisted (to speak in French phrase) at a talking party between Coleridge and the Bishop, to look back upon an article in the “Quarterly Review,” where, in connexion with the Bishop’s Autobiography, some sneers are dropped with regard to the intellectual character of the neighbourhood in which he had settled. I have been told, on pretty good authority, that this article was written by the late Dr. Whittaker of Craven, the topographical antiquarian; a pretty sort of person, doubtless, to assume such a tone, in speaking of a neighbourhood so dazzling in its intellectual pretensions as that region at that time. Listen, reader, and judge!
The Bishop had fixed his abode on the banks of Windermere. In a small, but by the necessity of its situation a beautiful park, he had himself raised a plain, but handsome and substantial mansion; Calgarth, or Calgarth Park, was its name. Now, at Keswick (I am looking back to the sneer of the “Quarterly Review”) lived Southey; twenty miles distant, it is true, but still, for a bishop with a bishop’s equipage, not beyond a morning’s drive. At Grasmere, about eight miles from Calgarth, were to be found Wordsworth and Coleridge. At Brathay, about four miles from Calgarth, lived Charles Lloyd; and he, far as he might be below the others I have mentioned, could not in candour be considered a common man. Common! he was a man never to be forgotten! He was somewhat too Rousseauish; but he had, in conversation, the most extraordinary powers for analysis of a certain kind, applied to the philosophy of manners, and the most delicate nuances of social life; and his translation of “Alfieri,” together with his own poems, shows him to have been an accomplished scholar. Then, not much above a mile from Calgarth, at his beautiful creation of Elleray, lived Professor Wilson; of whom I need not speak. He, in fact, and Mr. Lloyd were on the most intimate terms with the Bishop’s family. The meanest of these persons was able to have “taken the conceit” out of Dr. Whittaker and all his tribe. But even in the town of Kendal, about nine miles from Calgarth, there were many men of information, at least as extensive as Dr. Watson’s, and amply qualified to have met him upon equal terms in conversation. Mathematics, it is well known, are extensively cultivated in the north of England. Sedburgh, for many years, was a sort of nursery or rural chapel-of-ease to Cambridge. Dawson of Sedburgh was a luminary better known than ever Dr. Watson was, by mathematicians both foreign and domestic. Gough, the blind mathematician and botanist of Kendal, is known to this day; but many others in that town had accomplishments equal to his; and, indeed, so widely has mathematical knowledge extended itself throughout Northern England that, even amongst the poor Lancashire weavers, mechanic labourers for their daily bread, the cultivation of pure geometry, in the most refined shape, has long prevailed; of which some accounts have been recently published. Local pique, therefore, must have been at the bottom of Dr. Whittaker’s sneer. At all events, it was ludicrously contrasted with the true state of the case, as brought out by the meeting between Coleridge and the Bishop.
Coleridge was armed, at all points, with the scholastic erudition which bore upon all questions that could arise in polemic divinity. The philosophy of ancient Greece, through all its schools, the philosophy of the schoolmen technically so called, Church history, &c., Coleridge had within his call. Having been personally acquainted, or connected as a pupil, with Eichhorn and Michaelis, he knew the whole cycle of schisms and audacious speculations through which Biblical criticism or Christian philosophy has revolved in Modern Germany. All this was ground upon which the Bishop of Llandaff trod with the infirm footing of a child. He listened to what Coleridge reported with the same sort of pleasurable surprise, alternating with starts of doubt or incredulity, as would naturally attend a detailed report from Laputa — which aërial region of speculation does but too often recur to a sober-minded person in reading of the endless freaks in philosophy of Modern Germany, where the sceptre of Mutability, that potentate celebrated by Spenser, gathers more trophies in a year than elsewhere in a century; “the anarchy of dreams” presides in her philosophy; and the restless elements of opinion, throughout every region of debate, mould themselves eternally, like the billowy sands of the desert as beheld by Bruce, into towering columns, soar upwards to a giddy altitude, then stalk about for a minute, all aglow with fiery colour, and finally unmould and “dislimn,” with a collapse as sudden as the motions of that eddying breeze under which their vapoury architecture had arisen. Hartley and Locke, both of whom the bishop made into idols, were discussed; especially the former, against whom Coleridge alleged some of those arguments which he has used in his “Biographia Literaria.” The bishop made but a feeble defence; and upon some points none at all. He seemed, I remember, much struck with one remark of Coleridge’s, to this effect:—”That, whereas Hartley fancied that our very reasoning was an aggregation, collected together under the law of association, on the contrary, we reason by counteracting that law: just,” said he, “as, in leaping, the law of gravitation concurs to that act in its latter part; but no leap could take place were it not by a counteraction of the law.” One remark of the bishop’s let me into the secret of his very limited reading. Coleridge had used the word “apperception,” apparently without intention; for, on hearing some objection to the word, as being “surely not a word that Addison would have used,” he substituted transcendental consciousness. Some months afterwards, going with Charles Lloyd to call at Calgarth, during the time when “The Friend” was appearing, the bishop again noticed this obnoxious word, and in the very same terms:—”Now, this word apperception, which Mr. Coleridge uses in the last number of ‘The Friend,’ surely, surely it would not have been approved by Addison; no, Mr. Lloyd, nor by Swift; nor even, I think, by Arbuthnot.” Somebody suggested that the word was a new word of German mintage, and most probably due to Kant — of whom the bishop seemed never to have heard. Meantime the fact was, and to me an amusing one, that the word had been commonly used by Leibnitz, a classical author on such subjects, 120 years before.
In the autumn of 1810, Coleridge left the Lakes; and, so far as I am aware, for ever. I once, indeed, heard a rumour of his having passed through with some party of tourists — some reason struck me at the time for believing it untrue — but, at all events, he never returned to them as a resident. What might be his reason for this eternal self-banishment from scenes which he so well understood in all their shifting forms of beauty, I can only guess. Perhaps it was the very opposite reason to that which is most obvious: not, possibly, because he had become indifferent to their attractions, but because his undecaying sensibility to their commanding power had become associated with too afflicting remembrances, and flashes of personal recollections, suddenly restored and illuminated — recollections which will
“Sometimes leap From hiding-places ten years deep,”
and bring into collision the present with some long-forgotten past, in a form too trying and too painful for endurance. I have a brilliant Scotch friend, who cannot walk on the seashore — within sight of its ανηριθμον γελασμα (anêrithmon gelasma), the multitudinous laughter of its waves, or within hearing of its resounding uproar, because they bring up, by links of old association, too insupportably to his mind the agitations of his glittering, but too fervid youth. There is a feeling — morbid, it may be, but for which no anodyne is found in all the schools from Plato to Kant — to which the human mind is liable at times: it is best described in a little piece by Henry More, the “Platonist.” He there represents himself as a martyr to his own too passionate sense of beauty, and his consequent too pathetic sense of its decay. Everywhere — above, below, around him, in the earth, in the clouds, in the fields, and in their “garniture of flowers” — he beholds a beauty carried to excess;
and this beauty becomes a source of endless affliction to him, because everywhere he sees it liable to the touch of decay and mortal change. During one paroxysm of this sad passion, an angel appears to comfort him; and, by the sudden revelation of her immortal beauty, does, in fact, suspend his grief. But it is only a suspension; for the sudden recollection that her privileged condition, and her exemption from the general fate of beauty, is only by way of exception to a universal rule, restores his grief: “And thou thyself,” he says to the angel —
“And thou thyself, that com’st to comfort me, Wouldst strong occasion of deep sorrow bring, If thou wert subject to mortality!”
Every man who has ever dwelt with passionate love upon the fair face of some female companion through life must have had the same feeling, and must often, in the exquisite language of Shakspere’s sonnets, have commanded and adjured all-conquering Time, there, at least, and upon that one tablet of his adoration,
“To write no wrinkle with his antique hand.”
Vain prayer! Empty adjuration! Profitless rebellion against the laws which season all things for the inexorable grave! Yet not the less we rebel again and again; and, though wisdom counsels resignation, yet our human passions, still cleaving to their object, force us into endless rebellion. Feelings the same in kind as these attach themselves to our mental power, and our vital energies. Phantoms of lost power, sudden intuitions, and shadowy restorations of forgotten feelings, sometimes dim and perplexing, sometimes by bright but furtive glimpses, sometimes by a full and steady revelation, overcharged with light — throw us back in a moment upon scenes and remembrances that we have left full thirty years behind us. In solitude, and chiefly in the solitudes of nature, and, above all, amongst the great and enduring features of nature, such as mountains, and quiet dells, and the lawny recesses of forests, and the silent shores of lakes, features with which (as being themselves less liable to change) our feelings have a more abiding association — under these circumstances it is that such evanescent hauntings of our past and forgotten selves are most apt to startle and to waylay us. These are positive torments from which the agitated mind shrinks in fear; but there are others negative in their nature — that is, blank mementoes of powers extinct, and of faculties burnt out within us. And from both forms of anguish — from this twofold scourge — poor Coleridge fled, perhaps, in flying from the beauty of external nature. In alluding to this latter, or negative form of suffering — that form, I mean, which presents not the too fugitive glimpses of past power, but its blank annihilation — Coleridge himself most beautifully insists upon and illustrates the truth that all which we find in Nature must be created by ourselves; and that alike whether Nature is so gorgeous in her beauty as to seem apparelled in her wedding-garment or so powerless and extinct as to seem palled in her shroud. In either case,
Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey Page 286