ESTIMATIONS IN CRITICISM HARTLEY COLERIDGE.1 HARTLEY COLERIDGE was not like the Duke of Wellington.2 Children are urged by the example of the great statesman and warrior just departed-not indeed to neglect their book' as he did-but to be industrious and thrifty; to 'always perform business,' to 'beware of procrastination,' to 'NEVER fail to do their best:' good ideas, as may be ascertained by referring to the masterly despatches on the Mahratta transactions great events,' as the preacher continues, which exemplify the efficacy of diligence even in regions where the very advent of our religion is as yet but partially made known.' But '[Oh] what a wilderness were this sad world, And it were almost a worse wilderness if there were not some, to relieve the dull monotony of activity, 1 Hartley Coleridge's Lives of the Northern Worthies. A new edition. 3 vols. Moxon. [Poems by Hartley Coleridge. With a Memoir of his Life: by his Brother. 2 vols. Moxon, 1851.] 2 This essay was first published in the Prospective Review for October 1852, immediately after the death of the Duke of Wellington. a Hartley Coleridge: Childhood' (sonnet). VOL. I.-I who are children through life; who act on wayward impulse, and whose will has never come; who toil not and who spin not; who always have fair Eden's simpleness' and of such was Hartley Coleridge. 'Don't you remember,' writes Gray to Horace Walpole,1' when Lord B. and Sir H. C. and Viscount D., who are now great statesmen, were little dirty boys playing at cricket? For my part I do not feel one bit older or wiser now than I did then.' For, as some apply their minds to what is next them, and labour ever, and attain to governing the Tower, and entering the Trinity House,-to commanding armies, and applauding pilots, so there are also some who are ever anxious to-day about what ought only to be considered to-morrow; who never get on; whom the earth neglects, and whom tradesmen little esteem; who are where they were; who cause grief, and are loved; that are at once a byword and a blessing; who do not live in life, and it seems will not die in death: and of such was Hartley Coleridge. A curious instance of poetic anticipation was in this instance vouchsafed to Wordsworth. When Hartley was six years old, he addressed to him these verses, perhaps the best ever written on a real and visible child : 'O thou! whose fancies from afar are brought; And fittest to unutterable thought The breeze-like motion and the self-born carol; In such clear water, that thy boat May rather seem To brood on air than on an earthly stream; O blessed vision! happy child! Thou art so exquisitely wild, 1 Letter to West, 27th May 1742. I think of thee with many fears For what may be thy lot in future years. O too industrious folly! O vain and causeless melancholy ! Nature will either end thee quite ; Or, lengthening out thy season of delight, Preserve for thee, by individual right, A young lamb's heart among the full-grown flocks.' And so it was. As often happens, being very little of a boy in actual childhood, Hartley preserved into manhood and age all of boyhood which he had ever possessed-its beaming imagination and its wayward will. He had none of the natural rough. ness of that age. He never played-partly from weakness, for he was very small, but more from awkwardness. His uncle Southey used to say he had two left hands, and might have added that they were both useless. He could no more have achieved football, or mastered cricket, or kept in with the hounds, than he could have followed Charles's Wain or played pitch and toss with Jupiter's satellites. Nor was he very excellent at schoolwork. He showed, indeed, no deficiency. The Coleridge family have inherited from the old scholar of Ottery St. Mary a certain classical facility which could not desert the son of Samuel Taylor. But his real strength was in his own mind. All children have a world of their own, as distinct from that of the grown people who gravitate around them as the dreams of girlhood from our prosaic life; as the ideas of the kitten that plays with the falling leaves, from those of her carnivorous mother that catches mice and is sedulous in her domestic duties. But generally about this interior existence children are dumb. You have warlike ideas, but you cannot say to a sinewy relative, 'My dear aunt, I wonder when the big bush in the garden will begin to walk about; I'm sure it's a crusader, and I was cutting it all the day with my steel sword. But what do you think, aunt, for I'm puzzled about it's legs, because you see, aunt, it has only one stalk; and besides, aunt, the leaves.' You cannot remark this in secular life; but you hack at the infelicitous bush till you do not altogether reject the idea that your small garden is Palestine, and yourself the most adventurous of knights. Hartley had this, of course, like any other dreamy child, but in his case it was accompanied with the faculty of speech, and an extraordinary facility in continuous story-telling. In the very earliest childhood he had conceived a complete outline of a country like England, whereof he was king himself, and in which there were many wars, and rumours of wars, and foreign relations and statesmen, and rebels and soldiers. 'My people, Derwent,' he used to begin, 'are giving me much pain; they want to go to war.'1 This faculty, as was natural, showed itself before he went to school, but he carried on the habit of fanciful narration even into that bleak and ungenial region. 'It was not,' says his brother, by a series of tales, but by one continuous tale, regularly evolved, and possessing a real unity, that he enchained the attention of his auditors, night after night, as we lay in bed, . . . for a space of years, and not unfrequently for hours together.' 2 There was certainly,' he adds, 'a great variety of persons sharply characterised, who appeared on the stage in combination and not [merely] in succession.' 3 6 Connected, in Hartley, with this premature development of the imagination, there was a singular deficiency in what may be called the sense of reality. 1 Cf. Memoir, p. xxxiii. n. 2 Ibid. p. liii. 3 Ibid. It is alleged that he hardly knew that Ejuxrea, which is the name of his kingdom, was not as solid a terra firma as Keswick or Ambleside. The deficiency showed itself on other topics. His father used to tell a story of his metaphysical questioning. When he was about five years old, he was asked, doubtless by the paternal metaphysician, some question as to why he was called Hartley. 'Which Hartley?' replied the boy. Why, is there more than one Hartley?' 'Yes, there is a deal of Hartleys; there is Picture Hartley (Hazlitt had painted a portrait of him), and Shadow Hartley, and there's Echo Hartley, and there's Catch-me-fast Hartley,' seizing his own arm very eagerly,1 and as if reflecting on the 'summject and ommject," which is to say, being in hopeless confusion. We do not hear whether he was puzzled and perplexed by such difficulties in later life; and the essays which we are reviewing, though they contain much keen remark on the detail of human character, are destitute of the Germanic profundities; they do not discuss how existence is possible, nor enumerate the pure particulars of the soul itself. But considering the idle dreaminess of his youth and manhood, we doubt if Hartley ever got over his preliminary doubts-ever properly grasped the idea of fact and reality. This is not not nonsense. If you attend acutely, you may observe that in few things do people differ more than in their perfect and imperfect realisation of this earth. To the Duke of Wellington a coat was a coat; there was no mistake;' no reason to disbelieve it; and he carried to his grave a perfect and indubitable persuasion that he really did (what was his best exploit), without fluctuation, 1 Memoir, p. xxvii. 2 Carlyle's Life of John Sterling: Part 1. chap. viii. |