Studies in Literature and History
historical gallery of literature would have missed the full-length
portrait of an extraordinary man.
The letters of Coleridge, like their writer, belong to another class,
yet, like Byron's, they have the clear-cut stamp of individuality.
Here again we have the man himself, with his intensity of feeling, his
erratic moods and singular phraseology, the softness of his heart and
the weakness of his will. He belongs to the rapidly diminishing class
of notable men who have freely poured their real sentiments and
thoughts out of their brain into their letters, who have given their
best (without keeping their worst) to their correspondents, so that
the letters abound with pathetic and amusing confessions, and with
ideas that bear the stamp of the author's singular idiosyncrasy. The
_Memorials of Coleorton_ are a collection of letters written to the
Beaumont family by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott; the
reader may pass from one to another by taking them as they come; the
book is like the _menu_ of a dinner with varied courses. Wordsworth's
letters are the product of cultivated taste, a fine eye for rural
scenery, and lofty moral sentiment. Southey is the high-class
_litterateur_, with a strong dash of Toryism in Church and State; in
both there is a total absence of eccentricity, but in neither case is
the attention forcibly arrested or any striking passage retained. When
Coleridge is served up the flavour of unique expression and a sort of
divine simplicity is unmistakable; he is alternately indignant and
remorseful; he soars to themes transcendent, and sinks anon to the
humble details of his errors and embarrassments. Uncongenial society
plunged him into such dark depression that he is not ashamed to
confess that he found 'bodily relief in weeping.'
'On Tuesday evening Mr. R----, the author of ----, drank tea and
spent the evening with us at Grasmere; and this had produced a very
unpleasant effect upon my spirits.... If to be a poet or man of
genius entailed on us the necessity of housing such company in our
bosoms, I would pray the very flesh off my knees to have a head as
dark and unfurnished as Wordsworth's old Molly's.... If I believed
it possible that the man liked me, upon my soul I should feel
exactly as if I were tarred and feathered.'
And so on through the whole letter, with a comical energy of phrase
that scorns reserve or compass in giving vent to the misery caused by
uninteresting conversation. We may contrast this melancholy
tea-drinking with Byron's rollicking account of a dinner with some
friends 'of note and notoriety':
'Like other parties of the same kind, it was first silent, then
talking, then argumentative, then disputatious, then
unintelligible, then altogethery, then articulate, and then drunk.
When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder it was
difficult to get down again without stumbling; and, to crown all,
Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a damned corkscrew
staircase, which had been certainly constructed before the
invention of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however
crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves. Both he and Coleman
were, as usual, very good; but I carried away much wine, and the
wine carried away my memory, so that all was hiccup and happiness
for the last hour or so, and I am not impregnated with any of the
conversation.'
We are, of course, not reviewing Byron or Coleridge; we are only
giving samples by the way. Here are two great poets, remote from each
other as the two poles in social circumstances and habit of mind, but
at any rate alike in this one quality--that their life is in their
letters, and that in such passages as these the genuine undisguised
temperament of each writer stands forth in a relief that could only be
brought out by his own unintentional master-strokes. For neither of
them was aware that in these scenes he was describing his own
character--though Byron may have intended to display his wit, and
Coleridge may have been to some extent conscious of his own humour. In
the way of literary criticism, again, Coleridge throws out the quaint
and uncommon remark upon Addison's Essays, that they 'have produced a
passion for the unconnected in the minds of Englishmen.' And he
touches delicately upon the negative or barren side of the critical
mind in his observation that the critics are the eunuchs that guard
the temple of the Muses.
Of Shelley's letters, again, we may say that they are unconsciously
autobiographical; they are confessions of character, spontaneous,
unguarded, abounding with brilliancies and extravagances. They betray
his shortcomings, but they attest his generosity and courage; they are
the outpourings of a new spirit, who detests what would now be called
Philistinism in literature and society; who does not stop to pick his
words, or to mix water with the red wine of his enthusiasm. He
abandons himself in his letters to the feelings of the moment; he
ardently pursues his immediate object by sophistical arguments which
convict himself but could never convince a correspondent, and which
astonish and amuse the calm reader of after days. 'A kind of
ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most
despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine
its energies.... Anti-matrimonialism is as necessarily connected with
scepticism as if religion and marriage began their course together,'
for both are the fruit of odious superstition. He was endeavouring to
persuade Harriet Westbrook to join him in testifying by example
against the obsolete and ignoble ceremony of the marriage service,
which he held to be a degradation that no one could ask 'an amiable
and beloved female' to undergo. In Shelley's case, as in Byron's, the
letters are of inestimable biographical value as witnesses to
character, as reflecting the vicissitudes of a life which was to the
writer more like the 'fierce vexation of a dream' than a well-spent
leisurely existence, and as the sincere unstudied expression of his
emotions. For all these reasons they are essential to a right
appreciation of his magnificent poetry.
William Godwin, pedantic, self-conceited, and impecunious, has come
down to us as a kind of central figure in a literary group which
included such men as Coleridge, Shelley, and Lamb, of whom the
somewhat formal English world at the beginning of this century was not
worthy. By reason of this position, and because Shelley married his
daughter, he became the cause and subject of excellent letter-writing,
though his own correspondence is heavy with philosophic platitudes. It
is of the class which, as we have said, is akin to essays; he
discourses at large upon first principles in religion and politics;
and out of his frigid philosophy came some of Shelley's most ardent
paradoxes. But some of the most amusing letters in the English
language were addressed to him. It was after a supper at Godwin's that
Coleridge wrote remorsefully acknowledging 'a certain tipsiness'--not
that he felt any 'unpleasant titubancy'--whereby he had been seduced
into defending a momentary idea as if it had been an old and firmly
established principle; which (we may add) has been the way of other
talkers since Coleridge. No one, he goes on to say, could have a
greater horror than himself of the principles he thus accidentally
propounded, or a deeper conviction of their irrationality; 'but the
whole thinking of my life will not bear me up against the crowd and
press of my mind, when it is elevated beyond its natural pitch.' The
effect of punch, after wine, was to make a philosopher argue hotly
against his profoundest beliefs; yet it is to Godwin's supper that we
owe this diverting palinodia. And all Englishmen should be grateful to
Godwin for having written the tragedy of _Antonio_; for not only was
it most justly damned, but it also elicited some letters to the
unlucky author that are unmatched in the record of candid criticism.
Mrs. Inchbald writes, briefly:
'I thank you for the play of Antonio, and I most sincerely wish you
joy of having produced a work which will protect you from being
classed with the successful dramatists of the present time, but
which will hand you down to posterity among the honoured few who,
during the past century, have totally failed in writing for the
stage.'
Coleridge goes to work more elaborately:
'In the tragedy I have frequently used certain marks (which he
gives). Of these, the first calls your attention to my suspicions
that your language is false or intolerable English. The second
marks the passages that struck me as _flat_ or mean. The third is a
note of reprobation, levelled at those sentences in which you have
adopted that worst sort of vulgar language, commonplace book
language. The last mark implies bad metre.'
All this is free speaking beyond the compass of modern literary
consultations. It may be added that Lamb also discussed the play,
before it was performed, in his letters to Godwin; and that his
description of Godwin's deportment, of his own feelings, and of the
behaviour of the audience on the memorable night that witnessed its
utter failure, has bequeathed to us a comedy over which the tragic
Muse herself might well become hysterical.
There is, indeed, in the correspondence of this remarkable group a
tone of frankness and sincerity which, combined with the absence of
malice and a strong element of fun, distinguishes it from the
half-veiled disapproval and prudish reserve of later days. 'When you
next write so eloquently and well against law and lawyers,' says
Coleridge to Godwin, 'be so good as to leave a larger place for your
wafer, as by neglect of this a part of your last was obliterated.'
Again, in a more serious tone, 'Ere I had yet read or seen your works,
I, at Southey's recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the
author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but half
understanding of your principles, and the _not_ half understanding of
my own, combined to render me a warm and boisterous anti-Godwinist.'
His moods and circumstances, his joys and pains, are reflected in his
language with remarkable fertility of metaphor; his feelings vary with
his society. Of Lamb he writes that 'his taste acts so as to appear
like the mechanic simplicity of an instinct--in brief, he is worth a
hundred men of more talents: conversation with the latter tribe is
like the use of leaden bells, one warms by exercise, Lamb every now
and then _irradiates_.' In the best letters of this remarkable group
we perceive the exquisite sensitiveness of open and eager minds,
giving free play to their ideas and feelings, their delight and
disgust, so that their life and thoughts are mirrored in their
correspondence as in their conversation. Such writing has become very
rare, if it is not entirely extinct, in these latter days of temperate
living and guarded writing. Lamb's own letters are all in a similar
key; and that which he wrote to Coleridge, who had a bad habit of
borrowing books, is a model of jocose expostulation: 'You never come
but you take away some folio that is part of my existence.... My third
shelf from the top has two devilish gaps, where you have knocked out
its two eye teeth.' And his lament over the desolation of London, as
it appears to a man who has lived there jovially, and revisits it as a
stranger in after years, may even now touch a chord in the hearts of
some of us.
'In London I passed houses and places, empty caskets now. The
streets, the shops are left, but all old friends are gone. The