Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey

by Robert Southey

  “O, Lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live; Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud.

  It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life whose fountains are within.”

  This was one, and the most common, shape of extinguished power from which Coleridge fled to the great city. But sometimes the same decay came back upon his heart in the more poignant shape of intimations and vanishing glimpses, recovered for one moment from the paradise of youth, and from fields of joy and power, over which, for him, too certainly, he felt that the cloud of night was settling for ever. Both modes of the same torment exiled him from nature; and for the same reasons he fled from poetry and all commerce with his own soul; burying himself in the profoundest abstractions from life and human sensibilities.

  “For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal, From my own nature, all the natural man; This was my sole resource, my only plan; Till that, which suits a part, infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.”

  Such were, doubtless, the true and radical causes which, for the final twenty-four years of Coleridge’s life, drew him away from those scenes of natural beauty in which only, at an earlier stage of life, he found strength and restoration. These scenes still survived; but their power was gone, because that had been derived from himself, and his ancient self had altered. Such were the causes; but the immediate occasion of his departure from the Lakes, in the autumn of 1810, was the favourable opportunity then presented to him of migrating in a pleasant way. Mr. Basil Montagu, the Chancery barrister, happened at that time to be returning to London, with Mrs. Montagu, from a visit to the Lakes, or to Wordsworth. His travelling carriage was roomy enough to allow of his offering Coleridge a seat in it; and his admiration of Coleridge was just then fervent enough to prompt a friendly wish for that sort of close connexion (viz. by domestication as a guest under Mr. Basil Montagu’s roof) which is the most trying to friendship, and which in this instance led to a perpetual rupture of it. The domestic habits of eccentric men of genius, much more those of a man so irreclaimably irregular as Coleridge, can hardly be supposed to promise very auspiciously for any connexion so close as this. A very extensive house and household, together with the unlimited licence of action which belongs to the ménage of some great Dons amongst the nobility, could alone have made Coleridge an inmate perfectly desirable. Probably many little jealousies and offences had been mutually suppressed; but the particular spark which at length fell amongst the combustible materials already prepared, and thus produced the final explosion, took the following shape: — Mr. Montagu had published a book against the use of wine and intoxicating liquors of every sort. Not out of parsimony or under any suspicion of inhospitality, but in mere self-consistency and obedience to his own conscientious scruples, Mr. Montagu would not countenance the use of wine at his own table. So far all was right. But doubtless, on such a system, under the known habits of modern life, it should have been made a rule to ask no man to dinner: for to force men, without warning, to a single (and, therefore, thoroughly useless) act of painful abstinence, is what neither I nor any man can have a right to do. In point of sense, it is, in fact, precisely the freak of Sir Roger de Coverley, who drenches his friend the “Spectator” with a hideous decoction: not, as his confiding visitor had supposed, for some certain and immediate benefit to follow, but simply as having a tendency (if well supported by many years’ continuance of similar drenches) to abate the remote contingency of the stone. Hear this, ye Gods of the Future! I am required to perform a most difficult sacrifice; and forty years hence I may, by persisting so long, have some dim chance of reward. One day’s abstinence could do no good on any scheme: and no man was likely to offer himself for a second. However, such being the law of the castle, and that law well known to Coleridge, he nevertheless, thought fit to ask to dinner Colonel (then Captain) Pasley, of the Engineers, well known in those days for his book on the “Military Policy of England,” and since for his “System of Professional Instruction.” Now, where or in what land abides that

  “Captain, or Colonel, or Knight-in-arms,”

  to whom wine in the analysis of dinner is a neutral or indifferent element? Wine, therefore, as it was not of a nature to be omitted, Coleridge took care to furnish at his own private cost. And so far, again, all was right. But why must Coleridge give his dinner to the captain in Mr. Montagu’s house? There lay the affront; and, doubtless, it was a very inconsiderate action on the part of Coleridge. I report the case simply as it was then generally borne upon the breath, not of scandal, but of jest and merriment. The result, however, was no jest; for bitter words ensued — words that festered in the remembrance; and a rupture between the parties followed, which no reconciliation has ever healed.

  Meantime, on reviewing this story, as generally adopted by the learned in literary scandal, one demur rises up. Dr. Parr, a lisping Whig pedant, without personal dignity or conspicuous power of mind, was a frequent and privileged inmate at Mr. Montagu’s. Him now — this Parr — there was no conceivable motive for enduring; that point is satisfactorily settled by the pompous inanities of his works. Yet, on the other hand, his habits were in their own nature far less endurable than Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s; for the monster smoked; — and how? How did the “Birmingham Doctor” smoke? Not as you, or I, or other civilized people smoke, with a gentle cigar — but with the very coarsest tobacco. And those who know how that abomination lodges and nestles in the draperies of window-curtains will guess the horror and detestation in which the old Whig’s memory is held by all enlightened women. Surely, in a house where the Doctor had any toleration at all, Samuel Taylor Coleridge might have enjoyed an unlimited toleration.

  From Mr. Montagu’s Coleridge passed, by favour of what introduction I never heard, into a family as amiable in manners and as benign in disposition as I remember to have ever met with. On this excellent family I look back with threefold affection, on account of their goodness to Coleridge, and because they were then unfortunate, and because their union has long since been dissolved by death. The family was composed of three members: of Mr. M —— , once a lawyer, who had, however, ceased to practise; of Mrs. M —— , his wife, a blooming young woman, distinguished for her fine person; and a young lady, her unmarried sister. Here, for some years, I used to visit Coleridge; and, doubtless, as far as situation merely, and the most delicate attentions from the most amiable women, could make a man happy, he must have been so at this time; for both the ladies treated him as an elder brother, or as a father. At length, however, the cloud of misfortune, which had long settled upon the prospects of this excellent family, thickened; and I found, upon one of my visits to London, that they had given up their house in Berners Street, and had retired to a cottage in Wiltshire. Coleridge had accompanied them; and there I visited them myself, and, as it eventually proved, for the last time. Some time after this, I heard from Coleridge, with the deepest sorrow, that poor M —— had been thrown into prison, and had sunk under the pressure of his misfortunes. The gentle ladies of his family had retired to remote friends; and I saw them no more, though often vainly making inquiries about them.

  Coleridge, during this part of his London life, I saw constantly — generally once a day, during my own stay in London; and sometimes we were jointly engaged to dinner parties. In particular, I remember one party at which we met Lady Hamilton — Lord Nelson’s Lady Hamilton — the beautiful, the accomplished, the enchantress! Coleridge admired her, as who would not have done, prodigiously; and she, in her turn, was fascinated with Coleridge. He was unusually effective in his display; and she, by way of expressing her acknowledgments appropriately, performed a scene in Lady Macbeth — how splendidly, I cannot better express than by saying that all of us who then witnessed her performance were familiar with Mrs. Siddons’s match
less execution of that scene, and yet, with such a model filling our imaginations, we could not but acknowledge the possibility of another, and a different perfection, without a trace of imitation, equally original, and equally astonishing. The word “magnificent” is, in this day, most lavishly abused: daily I hear or read in the newspapers of magnificent objects, as though scattered more thickly than blackberries; but for my part I have seen few objects really deserving that epithet. Lady Hamilton was one of them. She had Medea’s beauty, and Medea’s power of enchantment. But let not the reader too credulously suppose her the unprincipled woman she has been described. I know of no sound reason for supposing the connexion between Lord Nelson and her to have been other than perfectly virtuous. Her public services, I am sure, were most eminent — for that we have indisputable authority; and equally sure I am that they were requited with rank ingratitude.

  After the household of the poor M —— s had been dissolved, I know not whither Coleridge went immediately: for I did not visit London until some years had elapsed. In 1823-24 I first understood that he had taken up his residence as a guest with Mr. Gillman, a surgeon, in Highgate. He had then probably resided for some time at that gentleman’s: there he continued to reside on the same terms, I believe, of affectionate friendship with the members of Mr. Gillman’s family as had made life endurable to him in the time of the M —— s; and there he died in July of the present year. If, generally speaking, poor Coleridge had but a small share of earthly prosperity, in one respect at least he was eminently favoured by Providence: beyond all men who ever perhaps have lived, he found means to engage a constant succession of most faithful friends; and he levied the services of sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, from the hands of strangers — attracted to him by no possible impulses but those of reverence for his intellect, and love for his gracious nature. How, says Wordsworth —

  — —”How can he expect that others should Sow for him, reap for him, and at his call Love him, who for himself will take no thought at all?”

  How can he, indeed? It is most unreasonable to do so: yet this expectation, if Coleridge ought not to have entertained, at all events he realized. Fast as one friend dropped off, another, and another, succeeded: perpetual relays were laid along his path in life, of judicious and zealous supporters, who comforted his days, and smoothed the pillow for his declining age, even when it was beyond all human power to take away the thorns which stuffed it.

  And what were those thorns? — and whence derived? That is a question on which I ought to decline speaking, unless I could speak fully. Not, however, to make any mystery of what requires none, the reader will understand that originally his sufferings, and the death within him of all hope — the palsy, as it were, of that which is the life of life, and the heart within the heart — came from opium. But two things I must add — one to explain Coleridge’s case, and the other to bring it within the indulgent allowance of equitable judges: — First, the sufferings from morbid derangements, originally produced by opium, had very possibly lost that simple character, and had themselves re-acted in producing secondary states of disease and irritation, not any longer dependent upon the opium, so as to disappear with its disuse: hence, a more than mortal discouragement to accomplish this disuse, when the pains of self-sacrifice were balanced by no gleams of restorative feeling. Yet, secondly, Coleridge did make prodigious efforts to deliver himself from this thraldom; and he went so far at one time in Bristol, to my knowledge, as to hire a man for the express purpose, and armed with the power of resolutely interposing between himself and the door of any druggist’s shop. It is true that an authority derived only from Coleridge’s will could not be valid against Coleridge’s own counter-determination: he could resume as easily as he could delegate the power. But the scheme did not entirely fail; a man shrinks from exposing to another that infirmity of will which he might else have but a feeble motive for disguising to himself; and the delegated man, the external conscience, as it were, of Coleridge, though destined — in the final resort, if matters came to absolute rupture, and to an obstinate duel, as it were, between himself and his principal — in that extremity to give way, yet might have long protracted the struggle before coming to that sort of dignus vindice nodus: and in fact, I know, upon absolute proof, that, before reaching that crisis, the man showed fight, and, faithful to his trust, and comprehending the reasons for it, declared that, if he must yield, he would “know the reason why.”

  Opium, therefore, subject to the explanation I have made, was certainly the original source of Coleridge’s morbid feelings, of his debility, and of his remorse. His pecuniary embarrassments pressed as lightly as could well be expected upon him. I have mentioned the annuity of £150 made to him by the two Wedgwoods. One half, I believe, could not be withdrawn, having been left by a regular testamentary bequest. But the other moiety, coming from the surviving brother, was withdrawn on the plea of commercial losses, somewhere, I think, about 1815. That would have been a heavy blow to Coleridge; and assuredly the generosity is not very conspicuous of having ever suffered an allowance of that nature to be left to the mercy of accident. Either it ought not to have been granted in that shape — viz. as an annual allowance, giving ground for expecting its periodical recurrence — or it ought not to have been withdrawn. However, this blow was broken to Coleridge by the bounty of George IV, who placed Coleridge’s name in the list of twelve to whom he granted an annuity of 100 guineas per annum. This he enjoyed so long as that Prince reigned. But at length came a heavier blow than that from Mr. Wedgwood: a new King arose, who knew not Joseph. Yet surely he was not a King who could so easily resolve to turn adrift twelve men of letters, many of them most accomplished men, for the sake of appropriating a sum no larger to himself than 1200 guineas — no less to some of them than the total freight of their earthly hopes? — No matter: let the deed have been from whose hand it might, it was done: ἑιργασται (heirgastai), it was perpetrated, as saith the Medea of Euripides; and it will be mentioned hereafter, “more than either once or twice.” It fell with weight, and with effect upon the latter days of Coleridge; it took from him as much heart and hope as at his years, and with his unworldly prospects, remained for man to blight: and, if it did not utterly crush him, the reason was — because for himself he had never needed much, and was now continually drawing near to that haven in which, for himself, he would need nothing; secondly, because his children were now independent of his aid; and, finally, because in this land there are men to be found always of minds large enough to comprehend the claims of genius, and with hearts, by good luck, more generous, by infinite degrees, than the hearts of Princes.

  Coleridge, as I now understand, was somewhere about sixty-two years of age when he died. This, however, I take upon the report of the public newspapers; for I do not, of my own knowledge, know anything accurately upon that point.

  It can hardly be necessary to inform any reader of discernment or of much practice in composition that the whole of this article upon Mr. Coleridge, though carried through at intervals, and (as it has unexpectedly happened) with time sufficient to have made it a very careful one, has, in fact, been written in a desultory and unpremeditated style. It was originally undertaken on the sudden but profound impulse communicated to the writer’s feelings by the unexpected news of this great man’s death; partly, therefore, to relieve, by expressing, his own deep sentiments of reverential affection to his memory, and partly, in however imperfect a way, to meet the public feeling of interest or curiosity about a man who had long taken his place amongst the intellectual potentates of the age. Both purposes required that it should be written almost extempore: the greater part was really and unaffectedly written in that way, and under circumstances of such extreme haste as would justify the writer in pleading the very amplest privilege of licence and indulgent construction which custom concedes to such cases. Hence it had occurred to the writer, as a judicious principle, to create a sort of merit out of his own necessity, and rather to seek after the graces w
hich belong to the epistolary form, or to other modes of composition professedly careless, than after those which grow out of preconceived biographies, which, having originally settled their plan upon a regular foundation, are able to pursue a course of orderly development, such as his slight sketch had voluntarily renounced from the beginning. That mode of composition having been once adopted, it seemed proper to sustain it, even after delays and interruption had allowed time for throwing the narrative into a more orderly movement, and modulating it, as it were, into a key of the usual solemnity. The qualis ab incepto processerit — the ordo prescribed by the first bars of the music predominated over all other considerations, and to such an extent that he had purposed to leave the article without any regular termination or summing up — as, on the one hand, scarcely demanded by the character of a sketch so rapid and indigested, whilst, on the other, he was sensible that anything of so much pretension as a formal peroration challenged a sort of consideration to the paper which it was the author’s chief wish to disclaim. That effect, however, is sufficiently parried by the implied protest now offered; and, on other reasons, it is certainly desirable that a general glance, however cursory, should be thrown over the intellectual claims of Mr. Coleridge by one who knew him so well, and especially in a case where those very claims constitute the entire and sole justification of the preceding personal memoir. That which furnishes the whole moving reason for any separate notice at all, and forms its whole latent interest, ought not, in mere logic, to be left without some notice itself, though as rapidly executed as the previous biographical sketch, and, from the necessity of the subject, by many times over more imperfect.