by Will Durant
When I was about thirteen, I went to a shoemaker, and begged him to take me as his apprentice. He, being an honest man, immediately brought me to Bowyer [headmaster], who got into a great rage, knocked me down, and… asked me why I had made myself such a fool? to which I answered that I had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that I hated the thought of being a clergyman. “Why so?” said he.—”Because, to tell you the truth, sir,” said I, “I am an infidel.” For that, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me.13
Obviously he had plucked some forbidden fruit, perhaps from the circulating library in King Street. There, he later claimed in his monumental way,
I read through [all the books in] the catalogue, folios and all, whether I understood them or not,… running all risks in skulking out to get the two volumes which I was entitled to have daily. Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a continual fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read, read, read.14
There is, of course, some vain enlargement here. In any case he did so well at Christ’s Hospital School that his family arranged to have him accepted as a “sizar” (on a work-and-study scholarship) at Jesus College, Cambridge (1791). There he attempted higher mathematics, and the most difficult Greek. “I am reading Pindar, and composing Greek verses like a mad dog…. At my leisure hours I translate Anacreon…. I am learning to play the violin.”15
As always in Coleridge, we must allow for hyperbole. In any case he neglected his health, and came down (1793) with rheumatic fever. He found relief from the pain by taking opium. It was at that time a common anodyne, but Coleridge fell into its habitual use. His scholastic pace slowed, and he allowed himself more interest in current affairs. However, he outran the allowance sent him by his family, fell into debt, was harried by his creditors, and, in a desperate effort to escape them, suddenly left Cambridge, and (December, 1793) enlisted in the army that was being formed to fight France. His brother George bought Samuel’s release for forty guineas, and persuaded him to return to Cambridge. He managed to graduate in 1794, but without a degree. This hardly disturbed him, for meanwhile he had discovered utopia.
He had been prepared for this by losing his religious faith; heaven and utopia are compensatory buckets in the well of hope. The French Revolution had stirred him as it stirred almost every literate and unmoneyed youth in England. Now, in the spring of 1794, word came from his friend Robert Allen at Oxford that several of the students there were eager to reform British institutions and ways. One student, reported Allen, was especially brilliant and had written verses celebrating social revolt. Could Coleridge come down to Oxford and meet these youths? In June, 1794, Coleridge came.
IV. SOUTHEY: 1774–1803
Of the Lake triad Robert Southey was the worst poet and the best man. He was born at Bristol, son of a clothier; but from that mercantile environment his wealthy aunt, Elizabeth Tyler, often borrowed him to be polished in the genteel society of Bath. At fourteen he was sent to the prestigious Westminster School in London, where, doubtless surreptitiously, he read Voltaire, Rousseau, Gibbon, and Goethe’s Werther, and wrote some epic poetry and rebellious prose. His attack upon corporal punishment, in the school magazine called The Flagellant, infuriated the headmaster, who felt that he had been disarmed. Robert was expelled just as graduation neared, but somehow he was admitted into Balliol College, Oxford, in December, 1792. There he continued his secret operations—writing an epic, Joan of Arc, in which he praised the French Revolution. He was engaged upon a verse drama about Wat Tyler, the English revolutionist of 1381, when Coleridge arrived.
The older found the younger man in a brown study, for Robespierre had sent the lustiest leaders of the Revolution—Danton and Desmoulins—to the guillotine; were the Rights of Man ending in competitive homicide? Coleridge comforted him: Europe, he explained, was decadent, worn out with history; but every week or so, from Southey’s native Bristol, a ship sailed to an America spacious, fertile, and republican. Why should not Coleridge and Southey organize a group of stout English lads and lasses, get them soundly married, migrate with them to Pennsylvania, and set up a communal colony on the lovely shores of the Susquehanna’s unpolluted stream? All that was necessary was that each male should contribute £125 to the common fund. Each couple should have an equal voice in ruling the colony, and so Coleridge named it a “pantisocracy.”
To raise their own shares of the cost the two founding fathers joined in writing a verse drama, The Fall of Robespierre; it was published, but had no sale. Southey sold Joan of Arc to Cottle of Bristol for fifty guineas. The degreeless graduates lectured in Bristol, and earned enough to raise Southey to proposal point; Edith Fricker accepted him, and they were married (November 14, 1795). Edith’s sister Mary had already accepted Robert Lovell and pantisocracy. Now, said Southey, it was extremely desirable that Coleridge should love and marry the third sister, Sara.
When Elizabeth Tyler disowned him as lost to gentility by his lowly marriage and subversive ideas, Southey accepted an invitation to visit Lisbon as companion to an uncle who was chaplain to the British Embassy there. The trip broadened the young pundit’s borders; he traveled in Spain as well as Portugal; when he returned to England (May, 1796) he discovered that he loved it, and pantisocracy faded with his youth. He studied law, found work as a journalist, and time to write more unmemorable epics, and some famous ballads, like “The Battle of Blenheim.” In 1803, armed with a friendly annuity of £160, he settled down in Greta Hall, Keswick, hardly suspecting that he would stay there to the end of his life.
V. COLERIDGE: 1794–97
He was a cross between lively nerves and hesitant will. He loved Mary Evans of London, but shrank from the task of maintaining her in her wonted style; she liked his rich and ebullient spirit, but had no faith in its earning power. She turned away, and he resigned himself to Sara Fricker, who, plain and penniless, could keep house and bear children, but could not inspire odes.
To finance his prospective marriage and his lingering dream, he delivered more lectures in Bristol, charging a shilling for each admission (January to June, 1795). These Conciones ad Populum were recklessly radical: they denounced the Established Church as the servant of the rich and knowing no Lord but the lord of the manor. They condemned the war with France as an attempt to suppress the Revolution and turn back the march of history. They excused the Terror as a response to “Pitt’s War,” and they denounced the “Gag Bills” as governmental efforts to silence the public will. They drew small though enthusiastic audiences, but on the proceeds Coleridge took Sara Fricker to the altar (October 4, 1795).
In that same autumn he first met Wordsworth. William was only two years older than Samuel, but he had experienced the Revolution, had seen utopia in the flesh. He shared the younger man’s dread of a Bourbon restoration, but he could not interest himself in Pennsylvania; the battlefield of ideas was in Europe; and as to the splendor of the Susquehanna, why not be satisfied with the glory of the English Lakes? Coleridge was only half convinced, but he put it in his tablets to watch this William grow, and perhaps learn from him how to ride the rapids of life.
He filled many tablets with gleanings from the books and souls he met. He read widely, eagerly, and in a dozen fields, about men, animals, plants, sciences, religions, philosophies, nations, literatures, arts. His was one of the hungriest, most absorbent, and most retentive minds of which we have any record. His memory became a storehouse from which he drew, to the end of his life, for images, ideas, phrases, arguments, even paragraphs. Too often he neglected to mention, or pleasantly forgot, the source of his catch, and carelessly mingled his own notions with borrowed goods. In the end the weight of his stores, and their unmanageable variety, were too great for a mind wedded to freedom and divorced from order. The storeroom nearly collapsed under its stores.
Perhaps to relieve his memory, or to feed his wife, he hit upon the idea of printing and selling a magazine almost entirely written by himself. He butto
nholed his acquaintances, and conscripted his lecture auditors, as potential subscribers, and scattered a “Prospectus: That all may know the TRUTH, and that the TRUTH may make us FREE. On Friday the 5th day of February 1796 will be published No. 1 (price four pence) of a miscellany to be published every eighth day, under the name of The Watchman, by S. T. Coleridge, author of Addresses to the People.”16 Here in print, as in his lectures, he spoke as a bridge-burning radical against the war, slavery, shackling of the press, and especially against sales taxes as falling cruelly upon the common man.17 But he did not recommend universal adult suffrage, male or female. “We should be bold in the avowal of political truth among those only whose minds are susceptible of reasoning; and never to the multitude, who, ignorant and needy, must necessarily act from the impulse of inflamed passions.”18 —Coleridge found it unbearable to fill thirty-two pages every eight days with his own pen; increasingly they depended upon alien gleanings not always acknowledged. Some watchful readers protested. Circulation fell, debts rose. After ten numbers The Watchman died.
On September 1, 1796, Coleridge’s first child was born. He named him David Hartley, from the English protagonist of the associationist psychology. Here was a delectable face, but another mouth to feed. Meanwhile he himself was feeling ailments of heart and lungs, and was relying more and more upon opium to ease the pain. He was near the end of his resources when a friendly liberal, Thomas Poole, offered him, at the nominal rent of seven pounds a year, a small house near his own at Nether Stowey, near Bridgewater. On December 31, 1796, Coleridge, Sara, and David moved in. Sara made the place comfortable and clean. “S. T. C.” worked in an adjoining garden, helped to care for Poole’s poultry and pigs, and wrote memorable, nonnegotiable poetry.
About this time, according to a memory always rich and adorned, “Kubla Khan” was conceived, and for the most part written, in a miraculous dream:
In the summer of 1797 the Author, then in ill-health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton…. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading… in Purchas’s Pilgrimage: “Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall.” The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines,… without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.
This famous preface has been interpreted as a fable with which Coleridge deceived himself or others into accepting the immaculate conception and brief continuance of “Kubla Khan.” However, it is not unknown that an author, after manufacturing phrases during the day, should continue to do so in a dream; but almost always these jewels sink into unconsciousness as the sleeper wakes. Perhaps in this case the opium induced not only the dream but the delusion that the composition was part of the dream. In any case Coleridge, with his characteristic skill of rhyme and alliteration, transformed Purchas’ prose into one of the most tempting torsos in the English language.
Perhaps a more important event than “Kubla,” in Coleridge’s year 1797, was an invitation to visit the Wordsworths at Racedown. He excused himself to Sara and David, and started off to walk nearly all the intervening miles. He sighted his goal on June 6, and ran excitedly across a field to his brother poet’s door. When William and Dorothy opened it, and their hearts, to him, a new epoch began in these three lives, and one of the most fruitful collaborations in literary history.
VI. A THREESOME: 1797–98
Coleridge was then at the height of his charm. His whole body, despite its secret pains and poisons, was responsive to the lively interests of his mind. His handsome face—sensual mouth, finely formed nose, gray eyes sparkling with eagerness and curiosity, his careless black hair curling about his neck and ears—made him immediately attractive, especially to Dorothy. It did not take her long to fall in love with him in her shy way, always keeping William unchallengeable on his pedestal. Coleridge was taken aback by her tininess, yet was drawn to her by her quiet sympathy; this was a friend who would take him with all his faults, and would overlook his shiftlessness to see his warm feeling, his strangely recondite fancies, his shaken and bewildered faith, the frightened malaise of a poet lost amid factories and wars. For the present, however, he hardly saw this timid sprite of a girl, being overwhelmed by her brother.
Here, he realized, in this man with calm, grave face, high forehead, meditative eyes, was a real and living poet, sensitive to every vibration of things and souls, shunning the economic maelstrom, quietly making it his life task to find fit evocative words for his insights and dreams. Coleridge, who at that time—with The Ancient Mariner already growing in him—was the greater poet of the two, felt the dedication in this man, envied him his freedom to give himself totally to poetry, and may have wondered whether a sister is not better than a wife. “I feel myself a little man by his side,” he wrote, soon after his coming; “and yet I do not think myself the less man than I formerly thought myself. William is a very great man, the only man to whom at all times and in all modes of excellence I feel myself inferior.”19
So began three weeks of mutual stimulation. Each read his poems to the other. Wordsworth read more, Coleridge talked more. “His conversation,” Dorothy wrote, “teemed with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good-tempered and cheerful. His eye… speaks every emotion of his animated mind.”20
Usually such a triune love affair cools after three weeks, but then Coleridge, loath to let it end, begged William and Dorothy to accompany him to Nether Stowey for some return of their hospitality. They went with him, expecting to come back to Racedown soon; but friend Poole, learning that their lease would soon expire and could not be renewed, found for them a handsome cottage, furnished, for £23 a year, in Alfoxden, four miles from Coleridge; and there William and Dorothy took comfort and inspiration for the next fifteen months.
In that happy period there was much walking between one nucleus and the other of the poetic ellipse: sometimes the two men, sometimes Coleridge and Dorothy, sometimes the three. There was a triple exchange of feelings, observations, and ideas: Wordsworth encouraged Coleridge to let imagination be his guide; Coleridge enlarged Wordsworth’s acquaintance with the philosophers, and challenged him to undertake an epic. Years later, in The Prelude, Wordsworth reminded his wandering friend of “the buoyant spirits / That were our daily portion when we first / Together wantoned in wild Poesy.”21 Dorothy was their bond and catalyst; she warmed them with her praise and eager listening, challenged them with the keenness and depth of her perceptions, and united them as their spiritual bride. They were, said Coleridge, three persons in one soul.22
Both Wordsworth and Coleridge must have looked into the journal that Dorothy began at Alfoxden on January 20, 1798. They must have been struck by a line on its second page: “The hum of insects, that noiseless noise which lives in the summer air.” But Sara Coleridge would have been struck rather with entries for February 3 to 12:
Feb. 3rd: Walked with Coleridge over the hills….
Feb. 4th: Walked a great part of the way to Stowey with Coleridge….
Feb. 5th: Walked to Stowey with Coleridge….
Feb. 11th: Walked with Coleridge near to Stowey.
Feb. 12th: Walked alone to Stowey. Returned in the evening with Coleridge.23
Sara was not happy over this ambulatory romance; it seemed sexually innocent, but where would it end?
VII. LYRICAL BALLADS: 1798
Another stimulant came to Coleridge in January, 1798: Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood—sons and heirs of the Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) who had made his pottery famous throughout Euro
pe—offered the almost penniless poet an annuity of one hundred fifty pounds (3,750) on condition that he devote himself wholly to poetry and philosophy. Coleridge welcomed the gift in a letter of January 17, and proceeded, in an ecstasy of creation, to complete The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Armed with this proof of potency, he proposed to Wordsworth that they should pool their new poems in collaborative volumes that would earn them enough money to finance a trip to Germany. He hoped that a year in Germany would teach him enough of the language and the culture to let him read in the original, and with understanding, those masterpieces which, from Kant to Goethe, had given Germany the unquestioned lead in European philosophy, and had brought it at least to rivalry with England and France in literature. Wordsworth was not enthusiastic about Germany, but France and north Italy were controlled by the Revolution; he fell in with Coleridge’s plan.
In April, 1798, they invited publisher Cottle to come over from Bristol to hear their latest verses. He came, listened, and advanced thirty pounds for the copyright. He wished to publish also the names of the authors, but Coleridge refused. “Wordsworth’s name,” he said to Cottle, “is nothing, and mine stinks.”24
Eighteen years later Coleridge explained the theory behind the collaboration:
It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic;… Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us…. With this view I wrote “The Ancient Mariner,” and was preparing, among other pieces, “The Dark Ladie” and the “Christabel,” in which I should have more nearly realised my ideal.25