Part 6

It is not always easy to follow Ruskin's own canons of Art in his exaltation of Turner--as, for instance, in the article of 'Truth touched with Imagination'--in such a picture as Whitby. There the painter's cliffs are unnatural and impossible, reminding us more of a straight-cut pound of cheese than anything ever seen in Nature--specially at Whitby! We are tempted to praise Turner more for revealing Ruskin than Ruskin for discovering Turner! Thus, in describing Heysham, it is Ruskin who in 'Harbours of England' gives us the true and very graphic painting, and Turner a glorified and unrecognisable one. 'A simple, north-country village on the shore of Morecambe Bay, not in the common sense a picturesque village; there are no pretty bow-windows, or red roofs, or rocky steps of entrance to the rustic doors, or quaint gables; nothing but a single street of thatched and chiefly clay-built cottages ranged in a somewhat monotonous line, the roofs so green with moss that at first we hardly discern the houses from the fields and trees. The village street is closed at the end by a wooden gate, indicating the little traffic there is on the road through it, giving it the look of a large farmstead, in which a right of way lies through the yard.' The rutty roads, the decayed fencing--haystacks and pigstyes--the parsonage--the church--the craggy limestone rocks amid the brushwood, and the pleasant turf upon their brows, the gleams of shallow water on the sandy shore, the fisher-boat on the beach--all help us to see old Heysham rather through the eyes of the prose-poet than those of the painter he is lauding.

Opening other--excluding his more voluminous--books, 'Love's Meinie' or 'Proserpina' to wit--the one of birds and the other of flowers--what exquisite passages meet us on every page! What Ruskinite does not revel in such as those contrasting the flight of the eagle and the seagull with that of the swallow, or as that speaking of 'the beauty of the bird that lives with you in your own houses, and which purifies for you, from its insect pestilence, the air that you breathe. Thus the sweet domestic thing has done, for men, at least, these four thousand years. She has been their companion, not of the home merely, but of the hearth, and the threshold; companion only endeared by departure, and showing better her loving-kindness by her faithful return.' She is a type of the stranger, or the supplicant, herald of our summer, 'who glances through our days of gladness'--and he gives us much more of the same sweet poetry about her. Then there are sentences like that outburst of joy at the discovery of the blue asphodel in the fields beyond Monte Mario--'a spire two feet high, of more than two hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue as well as the flowers. Heaven send all honest people the gathering of the like, in Elysian fields, some day!'

Ruskin confessed ignorance of the writings of political economists, of which he had read none but Adam Smith's--twenty years before--and his continual travesty of them as though 'buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest'--labour included--was their sole message to the world, makes it difficult to quote from his more philosophical or social science works. It must be remembered that Smith had forestalled Ruskin in stating that wage-earners had a right to a living wage, and that others, like Jeremy Bentham, had forestalled him in the doctrine of the 'greatest good of the greatest number' underlying his own strictures on our land system.

In his usual contradictory way he sometimes tells us the sword must still be whetted to settle international disputes. At others he calls war the mother of all evils, and writes paragraphs worthy of Carlyle on the French and English villagers from their respective Drumdrudges, pitying the peasantry upon whom the losses and cruelties fall, and denouncing the squires who officer them and lead them to death. Women he calls upon to exercise their influence in favour of peace, because they can, if they will, put an end to all wars for ever. The idleness of the upper classes, and the seeking of outlets for their capital by financial speculators are, he says, its chief causes, and ill-accumulated moneys are spent on it. In all this an ever-increasing multitude of Christians agree with him, as well as in his denunciation of the inhumanity of mere mercenary commerce uncontrolled by consideration for others, and in his pleadings for purer and happier homes, equal opportunities of education, and the glory and grace of honest labour. When a man who has done much for the good of his fellows can write of Ruskin in the second phase of his literary career, 'to him I owe the guidance of my life, all its best impulses, and its worthiest efforts,' we may be sure his later books were really great, notwithstanding their blemishes.

VIEWS FROM GRETA HALL

'This Greta Hall is a house on a small eminence, a furlong from Keswick, in the county of Cumberland. Yes, my dear Sir, here I am, with Skiddaw at my back--on my right hand the Bassenthwaite Water, with its majestic _case_ of mountains, all of simplest outline. Looking slant, direct over the feather of this infamous pen, I see the sun setting. My God! what a scene! Right before me is a great _camp_ of single mountains--each in shape resembles a giant's tent--and to the left, but closer to it far than the Bassenthwaite Water to my right, is the Lake of Keswick, with its islands and white sails, and glossy lights of evening,--crowned with green meadows; but the three remaining sides are encircled by the most fantastic mountains that ever earthquakes made in sport, as fantastic as if Nature had laughed herself into the convulsion in which they were made. Close behind me flows the Greta; I hear its murmuring distinctly. Then it curves round, almost in a semi-circle, and is now catching the purple lights of the scattered clouds above it directly before me.'--_A letter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's._

VII

A GREAT LIFE MARRED

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

'This illustrious man, the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet existed among men.'--DE QUINCEY.

In him we have another of our intellectual giants, a many-sided man, a poet, a theologian, a politician, or, in Charles Lamb's well-known phrase, a logician, a metaphysician, a bard. He was a fortunate man in so far as he has attained literary immortality. He was a singularly unfortunate man in so far as his natural character was deficient in will-power, and lacking in that subtle but invaluable property known as common-sense. His story, once you begin it, holds you, like the story of his own 'long, lank, brown, and ancient Mariner's,' captive to the end, it is so full of pathetic romance.

Garrulous, kind-hearted old Bookseller Cottle, of Bristol, very minor poet himself, yet devoted to letters, and staunch friend in their utmost need to an afterwards famous band of young men, tells us how Robert Lovell, an inexperienced and sanguine Quaker, was carried away by a Socialistic colonization scheme to be tested on the banks of the Susquehannah--the community to be called a Pantisocracy--from which injustice, wrath, anger, clamour, and evil-speaking, were to be excluded, thereby setting an example of human perfectability. Four young men, Lovell said, had joined the movement, who were to embark at Bristol for the American colonies--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Cambridge with whom the idea was supposed to have originated, Robert Southey and George Burnett from Oxford, and himself. In due time he introduced his friends--Southey, 'tall, dignified, possessing great suavity of manners, an eye piercing, with a countenance full of genius, kindliness, and intelligence'; Burnett, son of a Somersetshire farmer, who soon vanished from sight--never, indeed, comes fairly into it; and Coleridge, with 'an eye, a brow, and a forehead indicative of commanding genius.' The last soon applied on behalf of the fraternity for a loan, not to pay for the emigrants' sea passage, but their lodgings bill! The good man lent £5, and afterwards advanced Coleridge £30, taking the value back in MSS. as he could secure them. Meanwhile, Coleridge lectured to small audiences on somewhat abstruse subjects for a Bristol population, and managed to fall in love with a sister of his friend Lovell's wife, a third of these Miss Frickers becoming engaged to and marrying Southey, though he had not the remotest prospect of supporting a family. Lecturing and literature had not paid, Pantisocracy had perished in the bud, and Coleridge had not in any other direction shown the least capacity for dealing with every-day affairs. His antecedents both proved, and had intensified, his want of sagacity.

Born in 1772, into the large family of a learned Devonshire clergyman, who was also Head Master of a Grammar School--'a gentle and kindly eccentric'--he lost his father when only nine years of age, and was sent to the Blue Coat School (Christ's Hospital) in London. Here Charles Lamb was his schoolfellow. He grew, ere he left it, to be a tall lad of striking presence, with long black hair. At nineteen he was sent to Cambridge University. From Cambridge--owing, it is now generally believed, to some disappointment in a love affair, though others will have it that it was owing to debts recklessly contracted--he went up to London with little money in his pocket, and enlisted as a private in a regiment of light cavalry, under the assumed name of Silas Titus Comberback. In this regiment he remained only four months, proving 'an execrable rider, a negligent groom of his horse, and generally a slack and slovenly trooper.' Here a Latin quotation scribbled on a whitewashed wall discovered him, and led to his discharge, a visit to Oxford and an introduction to Lovell and Southey, then students, made him a more decided Pantisocratist, then a Bristolian, a protégé of Cottle and Charles Lloyd, and a benedict. In 1795 he was married at St. Mary de Redcliffe Church, and the thriftless pair set up housekeeping forthwith in a rose-covered cottage at Clevedon, then a village on the shores of the Severn Sea, though now a fashionable watering-place. Little furniture, no cash, no income beyond a promise of a guinea and a half for every hundred lines of copy, whether in rhyme or blank verse, offered a poor matrimonial prospect. Two days after the wedding, however, Cottle sent him 'with the aid of the grocer, and the shoemaker, and the brewer, and the tin-man, and the glass-man, and the brazier,' all he required--and more. In this retreat Coleridge did some necessary bread-winning with his pen, but still more planning and projecting of great world-astonishing magazines. Combined with his fancy for projecting big schemes was an unconquerable habit of procrastination. 'His strongest intentions were but feebly supported after his first paroxysm of resolve.' Such a man was unlikely to launch a serial on the world successfully. He issued circulars of a paper to be called _The Watchman_, travelled through the Midlands into Lancashire and Yorkshire to obtain subscribers, and issued a few numbers, and then it collapsed. In his travels he made the acquaintance of Lloyd, afterwards of Ambleside, who found him in books, and made a home for him at Nether Stowey. Wordsworth was then at Alfoxden, a close adjoining village. It was during a walk taken by the two poets over the Quantock Hills that their joint volume 'Lyrical Ballads,' was conceived, and that the 'Ancient Mariner' was partly written. 'Christabel' is another product of this period of Coleridge's life, and what has been aptly called the dream-poem of 'Kubla-Khan.' It was also now that he avowed himself a Unitarian, and commenced to preach in the chapels of that sect. Travelling to Shropshire in this ministry he captivated young William Hazlitt by his extraordinary discourses in public and in private, who records how it seemed to him poetry and philosophy were met together in the preacher, truth and genius had embraced under the eye and sanction of religion. At this time, he adds, Coleridge's personal appearance was of one above the middle height, inclining to be corpulent, with hair still raven-black, forehead broad and high, light as if built of ivory, projecting brows, with rolling, bright eyes beneath them, and a mouth 'gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent.' His preaching, too, brought him into contact with the generous De Quincey, and with the two Wedgwoods, the eminent Staffordshire potters, who defrayed the expenses of himself and William and Dorothy Wordsworth to Germany, and granted Coleridge a pension to enable him to devote his life to literature. On their return, Coleridge went to London on the staff of the _Morning Post_, in the columns of which he did first-class work.

In 1800 he removed his family to Keswick. He came to that town in many respects a changed man. The torrents of revolutionary talk he indulged in during his undergraduate days had lapsed into ultra-Toryism under the reaction from the disappointed hopes excited by the upheaval in France, but chiefly from his connection with the London Tory organ, although, as his German biographer somewhat grimly remarks, 'a trace of his partiality for the community of goods lingered in his blood; he never ceased to live upon his friends'! The Church of England doctrines he was intended to imbibe at school and college had given way before Unitarianism and the mysticism and pantheism of the Continent. Goethe, Kant, and Lessing had become his masters. He came, too, in broken health. At Keswick dwelt a good man in Greta Hall, or rather in the smaller of the two houses now known by that name. Mr. Jackson, who started as a common carrier, was a well-to-do man, and had accumulated a library. He charged Coleridge half the proper rent for the other cottage, and gave him access to his books. There seemed no reason why our poet-philosopher should not have been happier here than ever before. But the end of his poetical career was at hand. 'Opium,' says De Quincey, himself a victim to the drug, 'killed Coleridge as a poet.' He began taking the deadly poison to allay the pains of gout, to which he was a martyr. His 'Ode to Dejection' is undoubtedly his dirge over the grave of his muse. In his hours of awakening he gave himself afresh to philosophy to compel mental activity. He found the study an alleviation, but by no means a cure. An artist friend took him a voyage up the Mediterranean. On returning to his care-worn wife he found himself without sufficient means for the support of a growing family, though Sir George Beaumont, of Coleorton, and the ever-faithful Cottle and Sir Humphry Davy, helped him and interested themselves on his behalf, to enable him to earn something by lecturing in London. Returning again to the Lake Country, he started another weekly paper, which he called _The Friend_. It failed to capture the public, and ceased at the twenty-seventh number. He had magazine and review work, and published something. The opium habit still increased till these Kendal Black Drops (he probably so calls them because he first procured them as a quack medicine from this town) were at last taken in doses amounting to two quarts of laudanum in a week. Yet he was visited by the Lambs, the Wordsworths, Hazlitt, Professor Wilson, and many another who admired and loved him for his genius and his unique personality. In four years' time his brother-in-law, Robert Southey, and his family joined him at Greta Hall. On the other hand, the Wedgwood annual allowance was withdrawn, on the ground that his side of the agreement was not being fulfilled. More and more he drifted about from place to place, leaving his wife and children to the care of their relatives. One while he stayed with the Wordsworths at Grasmere, and another with a benevolent friend at Calne (he was three years there), till his generous host's means being much reduced he was compelled to withdraw his hospitality. Here he had been partly weaned from opium, but on going up to London in search of a livelihood he fell back under its complete tyranny. In a kind of desperation he carried his case to a Dr. Gillman, of Highgate. This gentleman, an able physician and a man of standing and culture, was happily married, and needed no 'paying guest,' but as Professor Brandle puts it, 'the spell of his talk, and the repute of his name, vanquished the Gillmans at once, and from that time he became the inmate and friend of the family, and remained so till his end.' Here in this beautiful home--beautiful in its then countrified surroundings, beautiful in its moral atmosphere--he was once again happy, and for no fewer than sixteen years. No opium was permitted within the walls. His wife and children, and friendly visitors like Irving, Hallam, Maurice, Hare, and T. H. Green, were welcomed. He became an undoubted Christian, and a powerful advocate of a form of orthodoxy commoner now than it was then--an attractive Anglican theology impregnated with the German type of platonic philosophy. His utter simplicity of character was never lost, and, unfortunately, his endeavours after pecuniary recovery were thwarted by a scoundrelly publisher cheating him of large sums he had fairly earned by hard work and genius. It was at this time he issued 'Aids to Reflection,' 'Lay Sermons,' and other memorable books.

Towards the end of his days he suffered much, notably from an affection of the heart, which 'bent his figure, furrowed his face, and hindered his work.' Finding death within sight, he settled what outward affairs he had to settle, ordered mourning rings for his friends, composed an epitaph for his tombstone, and in a marvellous calm, not begotten of narcotics, but of a living faith, he passed away into the fulness of light, in the year of our Lord 1834, and the sixty-second of his age.

What is the true estimate of his character? His was empathically a self-marred life. With a steady, reliable temperament and will he might have achieved one of the very highest positions among England's greatest men. 'Frailty,' cries a modern essayist, 'thy name is Genius.' His conversational powers were unequalled, and attracted eminent people from afar to hear him pour forth his brilliant scientific knowledge, philosophic speculations, and wealth of illustration. It is true that Charles Lamb adjudged him too great a monopolist of the situation. 'Lamb,' was the response, 'did you ever hear me preach?' 'I never heard you do anything else,' retorted Lamb. His talks were really spontaneous orations which electrified his hearers. That ineffectual outward life of his, so full of latent possibilities, has not, happily, been altogether thrown away. Both the pre-opium-drinking days and the post-opium-drinking were long enough for him to influence the thoughts and teaching of his own and future ages, and he still leavens the literature of the pulpit and the desk. His poetry yet delights young and old. It is comforting to know that one whom the 'Circean Chalice' had driven to wish for annihilation, and created in him a desire to place himself in a madhouse, could write from his death-bed to a 'dear god-son' that on the brink of the grave he had proved Christ to be an Almighty Redeemer, who had reconciled God, and given him, under all pains and infirmities, 'the peace that passeth understanding.'

His literary output I will neither expound nor criticise, tempting as it is to do both. His poems are on the shelves of every well-selected library, however small. His more solid works are not for the general public. They are too profound, and go far too deeply into the secret springs of life and thought, too far afield into the Divine and human undercurrents of motive and action; are too theological, too speculative, to lay hold of any but those who themselves are, in their spheres, and to some extent, at least, guides and moulders of other men's emotions and duties. They are essentially books for the patiently reflective, who learn that they may teach. If spiritual things are only spiritually discerned, so also are philosophical theories, methods, and categories appreciated only by those who have a natural leaning towards them, and some degree of training. Nine-tenths of my readers will be 'practical' men and women, to whom his revelations will seem guess-work and his intuitions dreams. But if any want a delicate and subtle analysis of Coleridge's mind, and whatsoever was in it, they may read the late Walter Pater's 'Appreciation' of him.

TO BE READ AT HIS GRAVESIDE

'I have no particular choice of a churchyard, but I would repose, if possible, where there were no proud monuments, no new-fangled obelisks or mausoleums, heathen in everything but taste, and not Christian in that. Nothing that betokened aristocracy, unless it were the venerable memorial of some old family long extinct. If the village school adjoined the churchyard, so much the better. But all this must be as He will. I am greatly pleased with the fancy of Anaxagoras, whose sole request of the people of Lampsacus was, that the children might have a holiday on the anniversary of his death. But I would have the holiday on the day of my funeral. I would connect the happiness of childhood with the peace of the dead, not with the struggles of the dying.'--_Written on a book-margin by Hartley Coleridge._

VIII

A LIFE TO PITY

HARTLEY COLERIDGE

'Hartley Coleridge has come much nearer us, and probably you might see as much of him as you liked. Of genius he has not a little, and talent enough for fifty.'--WORDSWORTH.

'Dined at Mrs. Fletcher's. H. Coleridge behaved very well. He read some verses on Dr. Arnold which I could not comprehend, he read them so unpleasantly; and he sang a comic song that kept me very grave. He left us quite early.'--CRABBE ROBINSON'S _Diary_.

Poor 'Lile Hartley'--_little_ Hartley, as the neighbours called him--is one of the most pathetic figures in English literature. Undersized in body, of promising intellect from childhood, of child-like simplicity in character, devoid of self-control, and overmastered by the alcoholic habit, as his father was by the opium habit, he is at once pitiable, excusable, and lovable. As you ride from Ambleside to Grasmere you pass a low cottage on your right, just beneath Nab Scarr, where the young farmer and his wife lived who cared so unselfishly for him and for his comfort and welfare. It is locally known as 'Coleridge's Cottage.' Here he lived in later manhood, followed and brought home tenderly, when he had wandered away, by his kind-hearted caretakers, and writing prose essays and sweet sonnets in hours of freedom from his besetment.