Hartley Coleridge: A Reassessment of His Life and Work

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HARTLEY COLERIDGE

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HARTLEY COLERIDGE A REASSESSMENT OF HIS LIFE AND WORK

Andrew Keanie

HARTLEY COLERIDGE

Copyright © Andrew Keanie, 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7437–2 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7437–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Keanie, Andrew. Hartley Coleridge : a reassessment of his life and work / by Andrew Keanie. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1–4039–7437–3 1. Coleridge, Hartley, 1796–1849. I. Title. PR4468.K43 2008 8219.7—dc22

2007041187

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

In memory of John Keanie (1916–2007), my Grandad.

Dead? What is that? A word to joy unknown, Which love abhors, and faith will never own. A word, whose meaning sense could never find, That has no truth in matter, nor in mind. The passing breezes gone as soon as felt, The flakes of snow that in the soft air melt, The wave that whitening curls its frothy crest, And falls to sleep upon its mother’s breast. The smile that sinks into a maiden’s eye, They come, they go, they change, they do not die. (Hartley Coleridge—“New-Year’s Day”)

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Abbreviations Perspective: The Hereditary Longing

xiii 1

1

His Childhood The Child of the Plaintive Married Man The Road to Ejuxria

23 23 40

2

His Ripening Childhood From the Sublime to the Oxonian Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford Leeds

51 51 62 87

3

Designated Misfit From Elf to Everyman The Echo of a Small Voice

109 109 129

4

His Ripening Achievement Nothing to Write About Corpus of Consequence

145 145 161

5

King of Ejuxria The First Flâneur Self and Sensibility

167 167 173

Conclusion Hartley the Obscure

177 177

Bibliography

187

Index

191


PREFACE

T

he last full-length study of Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) was published in 1931, so a reassessment of his literary career is overdue. With the publication of Bricks Without Mortar: The Selected Poems of Hartley Coleridge (2000), Lisa Gee aimed at putting the remarkable, though overlooked, poet back in circulation. Taking my cue from Gee, I offer a detailed justification for Hartley Coleridge’s claim on the modern reader’s attention. Inspired by the novelist Louis de Bernières’s introduction to Gee’s book, I write with the awareness that impressionistic views—in the manner of Hartley Coleridge himself—can often be more revealing than the judgments of academics. Since the publications of Earl Leslie Griggs’s Hartley Coleridge: His Life and Work (1929) and Herbert Hartman’s Hartley Coleridge: Poet’s Son and Poet (1931), our perception of Romanticism has changed as dramatically as Newton changed how we perceive the universe. I believe a study of the figure, Hartley Coleridge, who was marginalized, will contribute significantly to our understanding of the nineteenth century ethos. I explore Hartley’s life and work from a new perspective, and reassess his state of mind, not the least with regard to his having failed to support himself financially. I challenge the view that his eccentricity cut him off from the main literary activities of his time. Specific moments in Hartley’s life and their textual manifestations are connected to broader issues in literary theory, and to the deeper currents operating in large cultural processes. The book is amenable to the necessary interactions between instance and deep structural patterns that make what J.C.C. Mays called the “aesthetics of inachievement” possible. The book offers new insights into the familial culture of Romanticism, and the closed circle. Those who were part of the first emerging generation of Romantic poets (William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) were drawn into it; those who were biologically related (or related by marriage) became part of it; and those drawn into it for aesthetic

x

P R E FAC E

or other reasons became part of the family. The book explores the sense in which Hartley Coleridge became the working model of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s ideas, but it also follows Hartley’s progression away from those ideas toward anticipating aspects of Imagism. While Judith Plotz argues that “[Hartley] formally and thematically stake[d] out the territory of the miniature, the youthful, and the minor,” I contend that his commitment to miniaturism is the key to our recognition of a figure who both transcended the prevailing modes and concerns of his period and most significantly anticipated the aspects of Modernism. None of these ideas have been recognized in the two standard studies by Griggs and Hartman.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

O

ver the years, my colleagues at the University of Ulster, Coleraine, have been super in more ways than I could begin to enumerate. I would like to thank Dr Paul Davies, Dr Tim Hancock, Professor Jan Jedrzejewski and Professor Robert Welch. I am particularly grateful to Professor Richard Bradford for all his advice and support in relation to this project. I am particularly grateful to James Hodgson at Greenwich Exchange, London. My thanks, too, to Graham Davidson and all at the Coleridge Bulletin. Thanks to Professor Marilyn Gaull, whose encouragement has been priceless. Thanks to Mrs Priscilla Coleridge Cassam for permission to quote from the Coleridges’ writings. Finally, thanks to Eleanor and Emma. I do not know what I would do without them.


ABBREVIATIONS

BL BRE BRH BWM CUD DA DQCW DR DSL DWMF ECV ES EV FS HCCI HCL HCPW HCNP HCRD HEM HLW HW JRCP LAEL LBAR LNW PC PHC MQ

The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink Bulletin of Research in the Humanities Bricks Without Mortar: Selected Poems of Hartley Coleridge [S.T.] Coleridge and the Uses of Division [S.T.] Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel De Quincey: Collected Writings [S.T.] Coleridge: Darker Reflections The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style The Dramatic Works of Massinger And Ford The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse English Studies [S.T.] Coleridge: Early Visions A Flame in Sunlight: The Life and Work of Thomas De Quincey The Hartley Coleridge Letters: a calendar and index Hartley Coleridge Letters Hartley Coleridge Complete Poetical Works Hartley Coleridge: New Poems Henry Crabb Robinson Diaries Hartley Coleridge: Essays and Marginalia Hartley Coleridge: His Life and Work The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy James Reeves: Collected Poems 1929–1959 Literary Associations of the English Lakes (3 vols) Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered Lives of Northern Worthies A Poet’s Children The Poetry of Hartley Coleridge Manchester Quarterly XVII

xiv

PPCH PSP PTL PWS PWWW RA RADV RET RVC SAQ STCL STCN STCPW THN TWC UC WCT WF WHSW

A B B R E V I AT IO N S

Essays: On parties in poetry and on the character of Hamlet Hartley Coleridge: Poet’s Son and Poet Poets Through Their Letters Poetical Works of Shelley Poetic Works of William Wordsworth Romantic Affinities Recollections of Aubrey De Vere Romanticism and Esoteric Tradition Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood South Atlantic Quarterly Samuel Taylor Coleridge Letters Samuel Taylor Coleridge Notebooks Samuel Taylor Coleridge Poetical Works A Treatise of Human Nature The Wordsworth Circle The Unknown Coleridge: Life and Times of Derwent Coleridge Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time Wordsworth and Feeling William Hazlitt: Selected Writings

PERSPECTIVE: THE HEREDITARY LONGING

T

he biographer Richard Holmes once said that Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) treated his friends and acquaintances in the same way he used books, by getting what he needed from them (often money) before leaving them with annotations and moving on (EV 99). For STC, Hartley was like a living Coleridgean annotation, so lively, yet so little that he was unable to climb off the page and be. Just as there is no word in English for the back of the knee, so there is no word to use in reference to the ideas, and the expressions, characteristic of Hartley Coleridge: “Coleridgean” refers to the thinking characteristic of his father, and “Hartleian” refers to the thinking of the English philosopher, David Hartley (1705–57), who introduced associationism (the psychological theory that all mental activity is based on connections between basic mental events, such as sensations and feelings). What about Hartley Coleridge? Even at birth the words of his own name were already spoken for, and his work was destined to slide into the interstices of English Romanticism, just as he was left to inhabit the interstices of life. The following little stanza provides an example of Hartley’s acceptance of his marginalized status: And yet if you should praise myself I’ll tell you, I had rather You’d give your love to me, poor elf, Your praise to my great father. (HCNP 93)

Limited by the number of words that happen to rhyme with “self,” the adult poet casts himself as a mischievous and whimsical little creature of little consequence.

2

H A RT L E Y C O L E R I D G E

The following letter from STC to his friend, the tanner and philanthropist, Thomas Poole (1765–1837), outlines some of the details of Hartley’s birth, and reveals the typical first-time father’s proud and shell-shocked reaction: On Tuesday Morning I was surprised by a Letter from Mr Maurice, our medical attendant, informing me that Mrs Coleridge was delivered on Monday, September 19th, 1796, half past two in the Morning, of a SON—& that both she and the Child were uncommonly well. I was quite annihilated with the suddenness of the information—and retired to my room to address myself to my Maker—but I could only offer up to him the silence of stupefied Feelings.—I hastened home & Charles Lloyd returned with me.—When I first saw the Child, I did not feel that thrill & overf lowing of affection which I expected—I looked on it with a melancholy gaze—my mind was intensely contemplative & my heart only sad.—But when two hours after, I saw it at the bosom of it’s Mother; on her arm; and her eye tearful & watching it’s little features, then I was thrilled & melted, & gave it the Kiss of a FATHER. (STCL I 236)

The next paragraph of the letter is interesting because it contains a hint of the father’s sense of detachment from, and his philosophical intentions in relation to, the new family member: Mrs Coleridge was taken ill suddenly—& before the Nurse or the Surgeon arrived, delivered herself—the Nurse just came in time to take away the after-birth—& when the whole was over, Mr Maurice came.—My Sara had indeed (God be praised) a wonderfully favorable time—& within a few hours after her delivery, was, excepting weakness, perfectly well.—The Baby seems strong, & the old Nurse has over-persuaded my Wife to discover a Likeness of me in it’s face—no great compliment to me—for in truth I have seen handsomer Babies in my Life time.—It’s name is DAVID HARTLEY COLERIDGE.—I hope, that ere he be a man, if God destine him for continuance in this life, his head will be convinced of, & his heart saturated with, the truths so ably supported by that great master of Christian Philosophy. (STCL I 236)

Right away, little Hartley became another piece in the puzzle of STC’s all-consuming sense of wonder. The following sonnet shows that STC quickly re-wrought into poetry his initial reaction to the birth of his son: CHARLES! [Lamb or Lloyd] my slow heart was only sad, when first I scann’d that face of feeble infancy: For dimly on my thoughtful spirit burst

PERSPECTIV E

3

All I had been, and all my child might be! But when I saw it on its mother’s arm, And hanging at her bosom (she the while Bent o’er its features with a tearful smile) Then I was thrill’d and melted, and most warm Impress’d a father’s kiss: and all beguil’d Of dark remembrance and presageful fear, I seem’d to see an angel-form appear— ’Twas even thine, beloved woman mild! So for the mother’s sake the child was dear, And dearer was the mother for the child. (STCPW 154)

STC continued to make notes about his growing son— Hartley fell down & hurt himself—I caught him up crying & screaming—& ran out of doors with him.—The Moon caught his eye—he ceased crying immediately—& his eyes & the tears in them, how they glittered in the Moonlight! (STCN 219)

in order to convert them into hot-eyed poetry: My dear babe, Who, capable of no articulate sound, Mars all things with his imitative lisp, How he would place his hand beside his ear, His little hand, the small forefinger up, And bid us listen! And I deem it wise To make him Nature’s play-mate. He knows well The evening-star; and once, when he awoke In most distressful mood (some inward pain Had made up that strange thing, an infant’s dream—) I hurried with him to our orchard-plot, And he beheld the moon, and, hushed at once, Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently, While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears, Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam! (STCPW 266–7)

Hartley’s much celebrated father—“the Da Vinci of literature” (DA 292)—always longed for the freedom of Paradise. In a notebook entry of 1816, STC wrote: If a man could pass through Paradise in a Dream, & have a Flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & found that Flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye! and what then? (STCN 4287)

4


STC recorded his (and helped William Wordsworth to record some of his) intimations of a beauty inaccessible, and yearned after the legendary land which some call Eden, some Erin, some Tibet, and some Zion. STC called it Xanadu. Xanadu, spoken, sibilates like a whoosh of cosmic energy before leaving its vapor trail, u. “Kubla Khan” (which STC wrote in 1797, when Hartley was an infant) is the poem that showcases the never-never-world of Xanadu, as if it has been verbally slung-shot into syncopation with the very pulse of existence. Teeming with ravishing reverberations, the poem has survived literary-critical dissection for more than 200 years. Hartley would have been beginning to struggle up onto his feet around the time his father caught sight of Xanadu. Despite (or because of ) his opium habit, STC’s relish of the English language had become peculiarly vascular with life and sensation: . . . it [opium] leaves my sensitive Frame so sensitive! My enjoyments are so deep, of the fire, of the Candle, of the thought I am thinking, of the old Folio I am reading—& the silence of the silent House is so most & very delightful. (STCL I 539)

STC was tracing the taproots of his own talent to their antediluvian depths, and heights. He also frequently portrayed himself as a fond father, which he genuinely was (when he was there), but he had a great deal more in him than domestic aspirations, and he was beginning to feel what Wordsworth (1770–1850) would call “A presence that disturb[ed him] with the joy / Of elevated thoughts” (PWWW 134). He told his friend, the political lecturer, revolutionary, and poet, John Thelwall (1764–1834): We are very happy—& my little David Hartley grows a sweet boy—& has high health—he laughs at us till he makes us weep for very fondness.—You would smile to see my eye rolling up to the ceiling in a Lyric fury, and on my knee a Diaper pinned, to warm. (STCL I 308)

“Lyric fury” is the key phrase in the above excerpt. STC lived with his wife and child in their cottage at Nether Stowey, Somerset, but (as the notebooks show) he was often turning in upon himself to find the sort of wild energy that contemporary writers kept in subterranean accommodations. Of course, the wild energy found its way out. Every syllable of “Kubla Khan” is animated by preternatural urgency. The momentum modulates

PERSPECTIV E

5

with the untaught, exhilarated control of a wild animal on the hunt: here, sinewy, feigned indifference;1 there, rough, rapid pursuit through the undergrowth.2 “Kubla Khan” was written because it had to be. It quickened in and found its way out of STC with an insatiable craving for a multiplicity of meanings. It has since devoured readers’, and listeners’, attentions. The language still struggles with an imperishable rudeness of health and violence of appetite: “Could I revive within me / Her symphony and song” expresses a longing new at the time in English literature, a longing which will permeate Hartley Coleridge’s lifelong search for something beyond learned books’ concepts and insights, and beyond the tangle of sense-perceptions and thought-systems. As an adult, Hartley would ask “What was’t awaken’d first the untried ear / Of that sole man who was all human kind?” (HCPW 5), but, unlike his father’s, Hartley’s writing would not become less accessible the more he contemplated the mystery of existence. René Wellek has argued that the ideas in STC’s later prose are “heterogeneous, incoherent and even contradictory which makes the study of [S.T.] Coleridge’s philosophy so futile” (Immanuel Kant in England 1793–1838, 68). Without announcing any intention to formulate a metaphysical explanation of the universe, Hartley delivered extraordinarily condensed insights: What is the meaning of the word ‘sublime’, Utter’d full oft, and never yet explain’d? It is a truth that cannot be contain’d In formal bounds of thought, in prose, or rhyme. ’Tis the Eternal struggling out of Time. (HCPW 117)

Hartley’s brother, Derwent Coleridge (1800–83), has discussed the difference between Hartley and S.T. Coleridge: Both father and son were in the habit of writing freely in the margins of books, as if disputing with the author; and here, where each appears in undress, the original similarity of their minds is observable, yet with a marked difference: the former is exploratory and shifting, the latter conclusive and self-consistent. From the one we obtain a profound intuition, from the latter a summary of observation. The father sometimes mistakes;—he is incorrect in particulars; if the son err, it is in principle;—he is one-sided or sophistical. Both write with precision, even to the placing of a comma; but the style of one is close and pregnant, of the other easy and sparkling. (Memoir xvi–xvii)

6


In “Kubla Khan,” STC showed an uncommon aptitude for making a closer acquaintance with what Wordsworth would later call “unknown modes of being” (Prelude I 420). He was excited, having brought back some verbal evidence of his strange, successful hunts, but he was disappointed because he had not brought back more. STC’s “Paradise” was (and is) the mental space where self-truths and universal truths are no longer f launted against one another, but are reconciled: “Where was heard the mingled measure / From the fountain and the caves” (STCPW 298). STC would search again and again, paradoxically stimulated by his own “disabling immersion in the diversity of sense experience” (CUD 26), looking for union with the mystery. M.H. Abrams has suggested a key aspect of the lasting charm of Xanadu: . . . if Plato’s dialectic is a wilderness of mirrors, [S.T.] Coleridge’s is a very jungle of vegetation. Only let the vehicles of his metaphors come alive, and you see all the objects of criticism writhe surrealistically into parts of plants, growing in tropical profusion. Authors, characters, poetic genres, poetic passages, words, metre, logic become seeds, f lowers, blossoms, fruit, bark, and sap. (The Mirror and the Lamp 169)

“Kubla Khan” was not the result of STC’s conscientious approach to family life. STC “was rather a f lagrant example of Samuel Johnson’s observation that ‘poets, with reverence be it spoken, do not make the best parents’” (PSP 1). Norman Fruman has found STC’s record as a parent wanting: It is a mournful fact that after 1823 son [Hartley] and father were never to meet again. Hartley was thirty-eight years old when his father died. In all those thirty-eight years he did not live in his father’s presence for as much as five years. Coleridge’s brilliant daughter, Sara, who was to do so much for his after-fame, did not see him once between her tenth and twentieth years. The orphanhood which death had inf licted on the young Samuel Coleridge was in effect visited upon all his children. (DA 432)

Kathleen Coburn, editor of STC’s notebooks, has recalled Lord Geoffrey Coleridge’s caustic comments, from the early 1930s when she asked him for access to the family library in Ottery St Mary: Old Sam was only a poet, you know, never did anything practical that was any good to anybody, actually not thought much of in the family, a bit of a disgrace in fact, taking drugs and not looking after his wife and children. Of course STC must have been a wonderful man—in a way—he was somehow clever enough to take in so many great men—but why a young girl like you

PERSPECTIV E

7

should spend your time on the old reprobate, I can’t think! All those badly written scribblings—couldn’t even write a decent hand that ordinary people can read—full of stuff and nonsense. But all you pedants live on this sort of thing. Useless knowledge, perfectly useless. Now I at least know something about beef cattle . . . (In Pursuit of Coleridge 27–28)

Before marriage and the arrival of children to feed, STC could pronounce a moral philosophical line of reasoning, while at the same time making it plain that digestion was a process about which he was feelingly appreciative: It is each Individual’s duty [he told Robert Southey] to be Just, because it is in his Interest. To perceive this and assent to it as an abstract proposition—is easy—but it requires the most wakeful attentions of the most ref lective minds in all moments to bring it into practice.—It is not enough, that we have once swallowed it—The Heart should have fed upon the truth, as Insects on a Leaf—till it be tinged with the colour, and show its food in every the minutest fibre. (STCL I 115)

Unfortunately for his family, STC would continue to formulate more moral arguments (of which the above is a representative instance) than he would fund hot dinners. No doubt when hungry Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1770–1845) and little Hartley would have been more interested in slices of second-rate topside than in the following choice lines: A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ’twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His f lashing eyes, his f loating hair! Wave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. (STCPW 298)

8


The finale of “Kubla Khan” effects the whip and snap of the fabric of STC’s “so sensitive” (STCL I 539) self in a one-off storm of metaphysical insight. Perhaps the poet forgot all about the diaper that he had told Thelwall was pinned to his knee. Perhaps the diaper was not there in the first place. “Kubla Khan” would not bring the Coleridges in a sixpence until it was actually published in 1816. Meanwhile, Sarah Coleridge (née Fricker) was at a loss what to think or do: why would her obviously brilliant husband who could dream up “Kubla Khan” not simply snap out of nonprofessional meditation? Why could he not settle down? His letter to Thelwall, in February 1797, suggest that he was far from uxorious: I have society—my friend, T. Poole [Hartley’s godfather] and as many acquaintances as I can dispense with—there are a number of very pretty young women in Stowey, all musical—& I am an immense favorite: for I pun, conundrumize, listen, & dance. The last is a recent acquirement. (STCL I 308)

Why could he not be more like the deadline-honoring, mortgage-sensible Robert Southey (1774–1843), to whom Sarah’s sister, Edith Fricker (1774–1837), seemed to be more comfortably married?3 Consideration of some of the most urgent questions STC asked—not his wife, but himself— provides an answer: I would compare the human Soul to a Ship’s Crew cast on an unknown Island (a fair simile: for these questions could not suggest themselves unless the mind had previously felt convictions, that the present World was not its whole destiny and abiding Country). What would be their first business? surely, to enquire what the Island was? in what Latitude? what ships visited the Island? when? and whither they went? . . . to think, how they should maintain and employ themselves during their stay—& how best stock themselves for the expected voyage, & procure the means of inducing the Captain to take them to the Harbour, which they wished to go to? (STCN 3593)

In 1800 STC would write without excessive admiration for the sort of first-class talent (a quantum leap away from genius) possessed by Southey, and also by William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806), who had become Prime Minister in 1783, at the age of 24: At college he [Pitt] was a severe student . . . That revelry and that debauchery, which are so often fatal to the powers of intellect, would probably have

PERSPECTIV E

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been serviceable to him; they would have given him a closer communion with realities . . . The inf luencer of his country and of his species was a young man, the creature of another’s [Pitt’s father’s] predetermination, sheltered and weatherfended from all the elements of experience; a young man, whose feet had never wandered; whose very eye had never turned to the right or to the left; whose whole track had been as curveless as the motion of a fascinated reptile! (Essays on his Times 220)

Unlike Pitt, neither Wordsworth nor STC had a father present to mold and orientate them. They molded and orientated themselves: The moment, when the Soul begins to be sufficiently self-conscious, to ask concerning itself, & its relations, is the first moment of its intellectual arrival in the World. Its Being—enigmatic as it must seem—is posterior to its Existence. Suppose the shipwrecked man stunned, & for many weeks in a state of Idiocy or utter loss of Thought and Memory. And then gradually awakened. (STCN 3593)

Their lives, as Paul Davies has put it, were marked by the variety of interests they pursued, religion, science, philosophy, and travel being amongst them. They were not simply “career” poets, interested only in verse form, the intricacies of meter, or the byways of classical reference and medieval allegory . . . Their real field was immense . . . (RET 22)

At Cambridge, by 1791, Wordsworth’s want of interest in his undergraduate work left him without honors. Kenneth R. Johnston has called Wordsworth’s lack of clear academic progress “a bitter harvest” (HW 240). However, Kim Blank has argued that that lack of progress helped to bring about in Wordsworth’s “individual history and subjectivity” the evolution of “certain elements, certain feelings and problems . . . that [Wordsworth] had to work through” (WF 215). Wordsworth found that as a poet he could profit from working through his own feelings and problems, which in turn made regular solitude a matter of vital importance to him. The trivial, boyish mirth and conventional teaching at university were often to Wordsworth . . . empty noise And superficial pastimes; now and then Forced labour, and, more frequently, forced hopes; And, worse than all, a treasonable growth

10


Of indecisive judgements that impaired And shook the mind’s simplicity. (Prelude III 211–6)

The homeopathic dose of routine academia at Cambridge served to sharpen Wordsworth’s awareness to the danger of becoming a punctilious, pedestrian thinker. For A.S. Byatt, “What was to be avoided [by Wordsworth] at all costs was the acquisition of useless knowledge” (WCT 176). STC had left Cambridge in December 1794 without taking his degree, thereby proving himself to be an even more exuberant expression than Wordsworth of the Romantic impulse not to shovel university examiners’ fodder. Again, Paul Davies has put it well: From the point of view of the next dimension, in which Imagination is active, as [S.T.] Coleridge relates, intellectual work is on an equal footing with book-keeping, moving earth, or rearranging furniture. It has no value above its contingent function . . . there is a great need to broaden the means of research into human possibility beyond the use of the intellect or rationalizing faculty alone. (Its prevalence has been attributed to the principles of the Greek language having been imposed on the entirety of human experience; a process which must inevitably restrict our breadth of competence.) This need to broaden the repertoire of faculties probably accounts for the Romantics’ privileging of a far wider field of inquiry than could be undertaken in the manner-bound belles-lettres, poetry, and fiction of the 18th century. (RET 28–29)

As young men, Wordsworth and STC had a great deal to be getting on with, even if it did not entail distinguishing themselves academically in order to win places. One difference between the two was that while Wordsworth had his adoring sister Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) and his quiet wife Mary (née Hutchinson) to support him as he worked, STC had no such comfort. As Rupert Christiansen has said: [Mrs] Sarah [Coleridge] was an ordinary woman, with ordinary suburban ambitions to see her husband do well. She had married him on the understanding that he was a genius, and that a genius would rise to worldly consequence. (RA 63)

Sarah would always be baff led. She would not always be tolerant. Poor Hartley. “Kubla Khan” is one of the most important poems written in English. It is a sudden eruption (“momently . . . forced”) through a familiar verbal

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crust: until STC created the poem, it had been the comparatively placid spirit of sensibility that merely dribbled through porous eighteenthcentury poetic language. Almost every acre of England’s arable language had been devoted to the cultivation of descriptive specifics. One thinks of R. Dodsley’s essay, “A Description of the Leasowes,” which virtually guides the reader through the landscaped estate to the seat of the late William Shenstone (1714–63): You now proceed a few paces down the valley to another bench, where you have this cascade in front, which, together with the internal arch, and other appendages, makes a pretty irregular picture . . . The stream attending us, with its agreeable murmurs, as we descend along this pleasing valley, we come next to a small seat, where we have a sloping grove upon the right, and on the left a striking vista to the steeple of Hales Owen, which is here seen in a new light. We now descend farther down this shady and sequestered valley, accompanied on the right by the same brawling rivulet running over pebbles, till it empties itself into a fine piece of water at the bottom. The path here winding to the left, conforms to the water before-mentioned, running round the foot of a small hill, and accompanying this semicircular lake into another winding valley, somewhat more open, and not less pleasing, than the former: however, before we enter this, it will be proper to mention a seat about the centre of this water-scene, where the ends of it are lost in the two vallies on each side, and in front it is invisibly connected with another piece of water, of about twenty acres . . . The back ground of this scene is very beautiful, and exhibits a picture of villages and varied ground finely held up to the eye. (The Poetical Works of William Shenstone with the life of the author and a description of the Leasowes, xvii)

The best descriptive poets knew how to ripen such classical conventionalities to their optimum vividness. The Seasons (1726–30), by James Thomson (1700–48), and The Task (1785), by William Cowper (1731– 1800), afford first-rate examples of poetry aglow with mild, placid, and confinable exclamations of sensibility. STC’s image of “gardens bright with sinuous rills, / Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree” seems to suggest that the poet is sitting the reader down, in the first stanza, for the usual, cool, sensible recitation. “But oh!,” he exclaims unexpectedly, at the beginning of the second stanza, dropping the preparatory, therapeutic first stanza like a coal suddenly gone hot. There is an immediate increase in the intensity of jostling consonants, and then a fiery f lash f lood of transfigured words, “With ceaseless turmoil seething.” The hssing, fssing and thssing suggests the visceral sensation of unprecedented passage. The words left behind, as if to cool, look like the

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monument to a moment’s convulsive consideration of what life—that dreamlike, f leeting and tortured occurrence—actually is . . . all things appear little—all the knowledge, that can be acquired, child’s play—the universe itself—what but an immense heap of little things? . . . My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great— something one & indivisible—and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty! (STCL I 349)

The cold embrace of the literary historian has not reduced STC’s “sense of sublimity or majesty,” his Xanadu, to a funny little thing bathetically belying the mighty throes that brought it into being. The magnificence, the scope, and the irregular aliveness of the vision remain intact. How then is Hartley’s world not a much diminished and degraded one by comparison? As a 46-year-old man, he sat smoking in search of the truth: If truth had been a vapour still aspiring From passive matter’s self-consuming brands, A smoky something, while we stand admiring, But nothing when you take it in your hands; Then would I bid you puff the truth away, And watch it thinning from your pipe of clay. (PHC 109)

Hartley’s pursuit of the truth had little of his father’s fervor. Perhaps the conclusion to the above poem, “Thoughts While Smoking” (1842), is too lightweight and trite to have been uttered by one of the great poets: Where each true man may say unto his brother, One thing is true at least, we love each other. (PHC 109)

While it is remarkable that as a young boy Hartley had an imaginary country (when many children just have imaginary friends), his vision may suggest to the modern reader the wooden props of an amateur-theatrical adaptation of one of C.S. Lewis’s (1898–1963) Chronicles of Narnia more than it calls to mind the magical synthesis of a Xanadu. Derwent Coleridge has given an account of his brother’s fantasy world, “Ejuxria:” Taken as a whole, the Ejuxrian world presented a complete analogon to the world of fact, so far as it was known to Hartley, complete in all its parts;

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furnishing a theatre and scene of action, with dramatis personae, and suitable machinery, in which, day after day for the space of long years, he went on evolving the complicated drama of existence. There were many nations, continental and insular, each with its separate history, civil, ecclesiastical, and literary, its forms of religion and government and specific national character . . . The names of generals and statesmen were “familiar to my [Derwent’s] ears as household words”. I witnessed the jar of faction, and had to trace the course of sedition. I lived to see changes of government, a great progress of public opinion, and a new order of things! (Memoir, xxxvii–xxxix)

During Hartley’s childhood, his father’s thinking, talking, and writing were often about politics—about politicians and power, and the human interactions that take place within the architecture of political organization and discourse. Hartley’s father was, as Peter J. Kitson says, a deeply political man . . . [whose] writings reveal him as someone who closely followed the contemporary political scene as it unfolded during one of the most turbulent and exciting periods in the nation’s history. (The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, 156)

Still not 10 years old, Hartley did not have to clutter up his writing with correlations to the real political landscape of any actual, identifiable place. Whereas, for example, STC could amplify for readers of the Morning Post (March 19, 1800) the elements of inhumanity in William Pitt the Younger, little Hartley’s narratives were unfettered by the limitations of the political system familiar in Britain, or, for that matter, in America or France. Hartley’s chronicle occupied a sealed space, where he could allow his characters and ideas to blossom, clash, develop, realign and transform, without the restriction of correctness. STC’s poem to his son, “Answer to a Child’s Question” (1802), indicates the untrammelled imaginative journey upon which he had already encouraged Hartley to embark: Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove, The Linnet and Thrush say, ‘I love and I love!’ In the winter they’re silent—the wind is so strong; What it says, I don’t know, but it sings a loud song. But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather, And singing, and loving—all come back together. But the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love, That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he— ‘I love my Love, and my Love loves me!’ (STCPW 386)

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Hartley learned to make things up. Where would it end? Having made up a country, why could he not make up other countries with which his had to agree, trade, and compete? If he was making up countries then he might as well have made up the geography as well, given that natural resources, populations and territorial boundaries would have been bound to play a large part in those countries’ dealings. Such things would have contributed to distinctive religious and cultural practices, so they might as well have been made up too. Also, what about a historical perspective? Without it, the whole creation means nothing. Is Hartley’s imaginary kingdom an island (like Thomas De Quincey’s Gombroon)? Is it a planet? If Hartley’s idea was to make everything up, then surely he should have made up a new planet. If one is inventing everything, then is it not fraudulent to use Earth? If Hartley’s kingdom is an island, did its inhabitants come from another place from which they were exiled? Would their origin not explain more about them, such as the kind of people they are? Would it not provide more context? Are they human? Has Hartley just shipwrecked them on an imaginary island? Such a self-imposed task would make anyone weary. Hartley could have ended up feeling as diligent and dog-tired as God, to whom it must have seemed like a good idea at the time too. To many observers Hartley would continue for the rest of his life to appear escapist to a profound and troubling extent. Some time between 1835 and 1849 (when he was well into his 40s) he would write “Adolf and Annette,” a fairytale which seems to confirm his lifelong avoidance of growing up. In the following “song” from Hartley’s parable, there are, typically, echoes of his father’s “Kubla Khan,” suggesting the inherited pleasure dome that Hartley is loath to leave for good: Saw ye ever sight like this? Where the broad bright waters f low To the shining vale below. There are butterf lies and lilies, And a thousand daffodillies Velvet turf beneath your feet Berries juicy, ripe and sweet! There are joys beyond all measure, Mirth, and fun, and sport and pleasure; Plunge into the white abyss Ye shall win that land of bliss. (Children’s Literature 157–8)

He retained a spellbound imagination to which he f lew for comfort when the world got the better of him (which was nearly always), and from the

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shelter of which he often witnessed worldly people react to his behavior in bewilderment. Just after his university career went stunningly amiss, he told his father (in October 1820) that he was “the one scabby sheep turn’d out of an immaculate f lock” and “the sole jarring note in the concert of the Coleridges” (HCL 153). In September 1846, when Hartley had just turned 50, even his best apologist, Derwent, was unable to contain his irritation when he heard that Hartley (probably drunk) had set fire to his own bedclothes: Would not this be playing a part, justifiable only toward a child, or a lunatic? My dear, dear Brother, there are those who regard you in one or both of these lights—some with kindly feelings, that they may excuse that which they must else condemn . . . And would you shelter yourself, would you wish me to shelter you under such a plea?

Derwent continued the letter by registering a protest on behalf of the Coleridge family against Hartley’s strange behavior: Oh my dear Brother, need I remind you what this cruel enchantment has cost you? that it has cut you off from those who yearn to have you with them . . . My circumstances have ever been such that the possibility of your losing your self-respect has put it out of my power to see you . . . Not to say that my health would immediately give way under the misery which it w[ould] occasion me. (HCCI 19)

During Hartley’s childhood and teenage years, his uncle Southey and Wordsworth worried that Hartley would spend his entire life in reclusive preparation for work that would never actually come into being. STC noted Hartley’s claim about some Tale & wild fancy of his Brain—“It is not yet, but it will be—for it is—& it cannot stay always in here (pressing one hand on his forehead and the other on his occiput)—‘and then it will be—because it is not nothing.’” (STCN 3547)

The portrait of an artist as a boy and then a man eternally engaged in groundwork might fill some temperaments with horror. Others of a Romantic disposition might warm to the idea. As he contemplated his Grecian urn, John Keats (1795–1821) toyed with, and in the process made enchanting, his notions of the superior sweetness of unheard music and unconsummated desires: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

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Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (Poetical Works 261)

The word Hartley invented for his world (“Ejuxria”) seems to represent the received wisdom: Hartley’s achievement is inferior to his father’s. But the Hartley who coined Ejuxria was only 8 years old. It is just because of the way things have since fallen into place in the public imagination that Hartley’s reputation as an adult writer has remained as bound up with Ejuxria (initially, the excrescence of an 8-year-old) as STC’s reputation has remained bound up with Xanadu (the “symphony and song” of an artist at the height of his power). The critic Stanley T. Williams said in 1924: When the name of Hartley Coleridge is mentioned we dispose of it lightly. We say: “Oh, his sonnets—.” Apart from family distinction he survives in hardly any other way . . . He has done enough to seem the spiritual son of his father, but very little more. (SAQ xxiii 73)

Ejuxria is an unwieldy word of four syllables that does not look as if it could fit sweetly into a sentence, let alone into a line of verse. (In contrast, the five syllables of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” make up a magical handful of imaginative power.) Ejuxria does not advertise, with any euphoniousness, much aptitude for the gregariousness with which the words summoned by a great Romantic can mysteriously unite (as, for example, the rolling swells and peals of STC’s “Kubla Khan,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” or “Christabel”). Ejuxria seems too oddly curlicued to contain the rough magic that wins a writer popularity or critical acclaim. The pattern of the vowels and consonants on the page somehow gives the word the appearance of a word turned inside out, as if the threads and fabrics on the underside of an embroidered cloth were on display by mistake. The word might sound better said backwards. Whereas the sound Zan-a-doo, in “Kubla Khan,” is like the exotic music with which, say, the middle-Eastern vision of “Mount Abora” may be summoned from a basket (mosques and minarets glinting in the background), Hartley’s word seems brittle, or self-extinguishing; the sound of each

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syllable collides with, or even cancels out, the sound of the preceding syllable—perhaps reminding one of the succession of “quickly form’d and quickly broken resolutions” (HCL 62) that would make up much of Hartley’s adult life: A WOEFUL thing it is to find No trust secure in weak mankind; But ten-fold woe betide the elf Who knows not how to trust himself. What then remains? Can oath or vow, Or formal protest aid me? Ah! no, for if I make them now, Next week they will upbraid me: For what I am, oh! shame and sorrow, I cannot hope to be tomorrow. (HCPW 218)

Ejuxria is an important word to consider when reassessing Hartley’s life and work. The word (how on earth is it to be pronounced?) suggests awkwardness more than exoticism. Many readers will have an easier familiarity with STC’s water-snakes and his demon-lover than with Hartley’s “pipe of clay” (PHC 109), his goldfishes (HCPW 86), his nightingale (HCPW 158), his anemone (HCPW 159), and his “daily round of household things” (HCPW 23). Could it be that Hartley’s greatness has been overlooked, and that it lies in his search for the lost lineaments of the most high in the most low? Hartley’s observations concerning the vital importance of love to human life remain unappreciated: . . . The worst— The worst of hearts, that hath not ceased to feel, Grows soft and childish, when the number’d hour Records the moment of a mother’s pain— When the faint mother lifted first her eyes To Heaven in thankfulness—then cast them down Upon her babe in love.—Oh, gracious Heaven! Thy mighty law—in spite of rebel will, Spite of all theories of doubting man, Still rules triumphant through the tribes of life, Confutes the quirks of calculating pride, And o’er the feeblest of all feeble things, Sheds the strong potency of love divine: For God is stirring in the mother’s heart—

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The living God is in her milky breast; And God’s own image, fresh from paradise, Hallows the helpless form of infancy. (HCPW 98–99)

The succession of “quickly form’d and quickly broken resolutions” that constituted Hartley’s life constitutes most lives. The reader should readily appreciate the sense (in the above passage) of a life muddled through, a sense underpinned by Hartley’s heartfelt consciousness of “the quirks of calculating pride” and how love “Confutes” them. In Hartley’s sonnet, “February 1st, 1842,” “the better mind / Puts forth some f lowers, escaped from Paradise” (HCPW 143), which inclines the reader to speculate sympathetically about the (unmentioned) activity of the worse mind the previous January (the month during which most new year’s resolutions are broken). In acquainting himself with the small and the broken, and in cultivating the wisdom to make the best of them (because they are all we have), Hartley made poetic use of his humbler spirit [that] Hears . . . A low sweet melody, inaudible To the gross sense of worldlings. (HCPW 23)

This is not to portray an autistic Hartley who unwittingly revealed his unawareness of anything beyond the ken of personal odds and ends. No, Around you, and above you, and within you . . . The stars of heaven (as elder sages told) Roll on from age to age their lonely way To their own music. (HCPW 23)

In Hartley’s poetry the personal gives immediacy to the universal, which in turn gives meaning and eminence to the personal. Who is not familiar with the personal feeling that “every birth-day [is] a new argument / Of hope and pride?” (HCPW 98). Yet who has ever put the idea into words, as Hartley did? It would be as easy to overlook Hartley’s achievement in that particular little instance as it would be in many other little instances in his writings. He has expressed the idea so unobtrusively, and with such economy, that one might be enriched by it, but forget where one read it. The quiet brilliance is typical. Whereas his father had been (or so he told

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Poole), by the age of 8, “habituated to the Vast” (STCL I 354), Hartley stood in awe before the minute because it contained the sort of scattered wisdom and power that only he could—or would—assimilate and synthesize: Whither is gone the wisdom and the power That ancient sages scatter’d with the notes Of thought-suggesting lyres? The music f loats In the void air; e’en at this breathing hour, In every cell and every blooming bower The sweetness of old lays is hovering still . . . (HCPW 6)

The stars in the sky and the smallest particles bear a resemblance that has often been observed. In one characteristic sonnet, the poet John Masefield (1878–1967) has looked at the sky: So in the empty sky the stars appear, Are bright in heaven marching through the sky, Spinning their planets, each one to his year, Tossing their fiery hair until they die . . . (Collected Poems 429)

In another equally characteristic sonnet, Masefield has looked at himself: What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt Held in cohesion by unresting cells . . . (Collected Poems 430)

For Hartley (as for his father), the charm of science was aesthetic, and the big philosophical questions often informed equally his contemplation of the vast and the minute. Just as the popular science writers of the twentyfirst century wonder about how exactly it came to pass that chemical activity switched to biological activity (at the molecular level), from which humankind eventually evolved (accidentally?), so Hartley asks: Was there a time, when, wandering in the air, The living spark existed, yet unnamed, Unfixt, unqualitied, unlaw’d, unclaim’d, A drop of being, in the infinite sea, Whose only duty, essence, was to be? Or must we seek it, where all things we find,

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In the sole purpose of creative mind— Or did it serve, in form of stone or plant, Or weaving worm, or the wise politic ant, Its weary bondage—ere the moment came, When the weak spark should mount into a f lame? (HCPW 74)

STC had his “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) in which to explore a profound sense of guilt. The above sonnet, however, is Hartley’s rhyme of the ancient molecule, in which he explores a profound sense of uncertainty: is everything we know (or think we know) the result of an accident? Hartley’s question has yet to be answered. Meantime, the insistent sense of wonder in the above sonnet is a powerful lesson in humility. Hartley Coleridge has not given the Lake District its legend, nor has he led readers to a land of retrospective milk and honey like his friend and hero, Wordsworth, about whom he wrote many glowing lines, such as the following: A village lies, and Rydal is its name. Its natives know not what is meant by fame; They little know how men in future time Will venerate the spot, where prose and rhyme Too strong for aught but Heaven itself to tame, Gush’d from a mighty Poet. (HCPW 119)

Nonetheless, any idea about writing Hartley off as a stylist, as someone whose talent may be lovely to look at but remains essentially a frippery, or a non-essential luxury, is inadequate, and a mere cliché of misunderstanding. Notes 1. “So twice five miles of fertile ground / With walls and towers were girdled round: / And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, / Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; / And here were forests ancient as the hills, / Enfolding sunny spots of greenery” (STCPW 297). 2. “But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted / Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! / A savage place! as holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon lover! / And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, / As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, / A mighty fountain momently was forced: / Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst / Huge fragments

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vaulted like rebounding hail, / Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s f lail: / And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever / It f lung up momently the sacred river” (STCPW 297). 3. In “Southey’s Organ of Vanity,” Tom Paulin says that Southey was always “rigidly busy” and “lacking . . . grace and indolence” in his “fixed aridity” (DSL 185).


CHAPTER 1

HIS CHILDHOOD

The Child of the Plaintive Married Man Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into here . . . Where did you get that little tear? I found it waiting when I got here. —“Baby,” George Macdonald

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t a time when his family was poorly protected against life’s vicissitudes by his irregular earnings, STC was offered the comfortably salaried post of Unitarian minister at Shrewsbury, with a good family house to live in as well (BL 365–7). He did not take up the post. Analogously, STC’s Ancient Mariner and fellow crewmembers were poorly protected against the changeable weather conditions until the presence of the Albatross appeared to offer the chance of a change for the better. The Mariner’s rejection of comforts from heaven was instinctive and violent, not reasonable. Without a shudder, the Mariner took aim and fired: “I shot the Albatross” (STCPW 530). STC obliterated his prospective career as a minister of religion, preferring instead to rely on the financial support of the Wedgwood brothers. He ended up feeling as guilty about his continued dependence on his patrons as the killer of the Albatross felt about his continued dependence on the benevolence of the elements. STC had abandoned a career in the church as soon as he received a letter, signed by Josiah Wedgwood on behalf of his brother, offering STC an “annuity” of £150 for life (STCL I 373–4). The “annuity,” however, as Chris Rubenstein has demonstrated,1 actually consisted of a series of donations which could at any time be stopped without STC being in a position to do anything about it legally. STC must have been continually frightened by the f limsiness of the arrangement. The arrangement, as it turned

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out, remained intact until 1814, when Josiah Wedgwood was forced by financial difficulties of his own to withdraw his half of the “annuity” (UC 22). The Wedgwood brothers had decided to finance STC because they understood that he was a professional intellectual in need of the leisure time to produce the sort of books that would guide readers safely across the seas of moral error. But Charles Lloyd (1775–1839), who knew much about STC’s private life and past, published his novel, Edmund Oliver (April 1798), which contained the disclosure that STC was addicted to opium, and less than perfect morally. There would therefore always be the danger of one of the Wedgwood brothers reading, or hearing about, the novel and deciding to investigate STC’s moral credentials more thoroughly, with a view to reassessing the point of the “annuity.” No wonder “The Rime” is so powerfully compacted and hauntingly complicated. In Section III, the ship, initially so gratefully, but mistakenly, accepted by the Mariner and the crew as their salvation (STCPW 532), turns out to be the horror that kills everyone except the Mariner (STCPW 534). If any of STC’s past sins were to be found out by the Wedgwood brothers, it could well have been his wife and children who would have suffered undeservedly in the event of the “annuity” being stopped or suspended. STC’s anticipation of the possible non-arrival of the next £150 must have troubled him with an intensity that found its way into “The Rime.” In those days of distress, STC, by a desperate effort, created one of his greatest and most beautiful works. Into “The Rime” he exhaled his anguish, though he also intended to produce a piece of craftsmanship for which the Monthly Magazine might pay £5.00 (STCL I 387). Without the steady wind of regular financial support in their sails, Mrs Coleridge and her son could have found themselves having unwittingly crossed a shadowline into worse poverty than ever. That would have been the kind of stasis that STC may not have been able to bring himself to forewarn them about, so the first they would have known of the worsened hardship would have been as it happened to them, unannounced: Down dropt the breeze, the Sails dropt down, ’Twas sad as sad could be. (STCPW 531)

Sarah would in that case have had to form her own conclusion regarding the cause of her latest discomfort, and STC would have had to endure the isolation that the guilt brought: Ah wel-a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young. (STCPW 532)

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Condemned by his own earlier choice to shoot the Albatross, the Mariner sees ghastly visions unseen by the rest of the crew (STCPW 534–5), or family. The dead crew looks at the Mariner with curses for him on their faces (STCPW 535). Fighting off these dark forebodings, living in dread of decisions taken against him or even of clear ideas, STC summoned all his energies as though for a last great exertion, much as a pursued animal musters every ounce of strength for the leap that will save it: Like one, that on a lonely road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turn’d round, walks on And turns no more his head: Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread. (STCPW 540)

Hartley’s father’s restlessness and remoteness are crucially important elements of the atmosphere in which Hartley grew. STC named his son David Hartley—shortened to Hartley (HLW 4)—because of a temporary enthusiasm for the work of the philosopher of that name. Later, STC would name his second son Berkeley, when his philosophical enthusiasm veered away from Hartleian necessitarianism toward the idealism of the Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop, George Berkeley (1685–1753). Berkeley Coleridge did not survive infancy. It is intriguing to speculate what might have become of him; but then again, it is intriguing to speculate what might have become of many of STC’s literary and philosophical projects, had they survived their early stages. Notoriously, his unfinished projects outnumbered his finished projects. His letter to his Bristol publisher, Joseph Cottle (1770–1835), in April 1797, gives an idea of the tangential tendencies of STC’s mentality: I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem. Ten to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine—then the mind of man—then the minds of men—in all Travels, Voyages and Histories. So I would spend ten years—the next five to the composition of the poem—and the last five to the correction of it. (STCL I 320–1)

Hartley became (as Berkeley Coleridge might have become, had he lived) a significant part of STC’s metaphysical jigsaw puzzle. Critics have tended

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to argue that Hartley lived his life in a way that fulfilled his father’s poem, “Frost at Midnight” (1798), and Wordsworth’s poem, “To H.C., Six Years Old” (1802).2 STC said to his baby son: But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags, so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself. Great universal Teacher! he shall mould Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. (STCPW 242)

It was, as Anya Taylor has pointed out, STC who “moulded” Hartley’s spirit (BRE 133). Hartley’s mother could not have done it. She did try, even after his formative years: “her letters [to Hartley] seldom stray far from lectures on pubs, the state of Hartley’s clothes, and her own penury and ill health” (HCCI 19). Hartley would remain “unmanageable clay” (HLW 14) to her. As if parenting was a form of art,3 STC expressed himself through his use of his son in a way that no other art form facilitated. In the conclusion to the second (less inspired) part of STC’s “Christabel” (1801), Hartley became the effortless poet that STC felt he had been, once: A little child, a limber elf, Singing, dancing to itself, A fairy thing with red round cheeks, That always finds, and never seeks . . . (STCPW 235)

As the following notebook entry illustrates, STC made notes on the infant Hartley’s development with more of the scientist’s detachment than the average father: 1. The first smile—what reason it displays . . . 2. Asleep with the polyanthus fast in its hand, its bells drooping over the rosy face . . . 3. Stretching after the stars . . . 5. Sports of infants—their incessant activity, the means being the end.—Nature how lovely a school-mistress—A blank-verse, moral poem . . . 9. mother directing a Baby’s hand. Hartley’s love to Papa—scrawls

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pothooks. 8. reads what he meant by them . . . 14. The wisdom & graciousness of God in the infancy of the human species—its beauty, long continuance etc etc. Children in the wind—hair f loating, tossing, a miniature of the agitated Trees, below which they played . . . (STCN 330).

STC was not slow to note the things he did not like about his son’s appearance and character. The description of Hartley as “a Poet, spite of the Forehead ‘villainous low’, which his Mother smuggled into his Face” (STCL II 847) offers a telling breath of the atmosphere of emotional violence in which Hartley was brought up. By the time Hartley’s memories began (HLW 14)—when his father returned from a trip to Germany in 1799 and began working as a journalist for the Morning Post—STC, married since October 1795, and a father since September 1796, was not happy, calm, balanced, confident, or secure. He was plagued by uncertainty, doubts, and guilts. He had still not finished “Christabel,” and he tried to account for his inability to complete the task: . . . immediately on my arrival in this country I undertook to finish a poem which I had begun, entitled ‘Christabel’, for a second volume of the Lyrical Ballads. I tried to perform my promise; but the deep unutterable Disgust, which I had suffered in the translation of that accursed Wallenstein seemed to have stricken me with barrenness—for I tried & tried & nothing would come of it. I desisted with a deeper dejection than I am willing to remember. (STCL I 643)

STC’s marriage might, with greater justice than Friederich von Schiller’s (1759–1805) trilogy, Wallenstein (1799), have been called “accursed.” The marriage was full of tensions, complications, and resistances: Our virtues and our vices are exact antitheses . . . Never, I suppose, did the stern match-maker bring together two minds so utterly contrariant in their primary and organical constitution. (STCL I 389)

Hartley came to consciousness in a very troubled household. STC was a struggling, ambitious writer with a needy temperament: I want to read something by somebody expressly on Pain, if only to give an arrangement to my own thoughts, though if it were well treated, I have little doubt it would revolutionize them.—For the last month I have been tumbling on through sands and swamps of Evil, & bodily grievance. (STCL I 648)

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STC’s wife had more ordinary ambitions for an attentive, productive husband who could provide for her and their family. STC’s poetry had become hot with the frictions of tightly packed metaphors suggesting the instinctual energies of a life curbed: The Ice was here, the Ice was there, The Ice was all around: It crack’d and growl’d, and roar’d and howl’d— Like noises of a swound. (STCPW 530)

STC and Sarah felt closed in by the straitened circumstances. When there is financial insecurity in a household for months, or even years, there may be the feeling that something is about to give in. Sarah Coleridge, STC’s “second choice bride” (PSP 2), about whom Molly Lefebure has written so sympathetically in The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1986), became a sort of spectral presence in STC’s life. He was a book reviewer4 and a provider-failure,5 often attitudinizing about what a wife should be—“a compassionate Comforter . . . innocent and full of love” (STCL I 667)—but not including her in his best list: “Pleasures—children, Books, Friends, Nature, the Muse” (STCN 1600). Like many writers, STC wanted his wife to play the part he had assigned her in his special way of being alone. She could not, or would not, oblige him. Mr and Mrs Coleridge’s antithetical expectations electrified the household in which Hartley spent his formative years: Sara’s . . . coldness perhaps & paralysis in all tangible ideas & sensations—all that forms real Self . . . Nothing affects her with pain or pleasure as it is but only as other people say it is—nay by an habitual absence of reality in her affections I have had a hundred instances that the being beloved, or the not being beloved, is a thing indifferent; but the notion of not being beloved— that wounds her pride deeply. I have dressed perhaps washed with her, & no one with us—all as cold & calm as a deep Frost . . . (She) is uncommonly cold in her feelings of animal Love. (STCN 979)

STC may have tried to convince himself that his anxieties and insecurity were hidden from his son, but from childhood nothing is hidden: Hartley . . . ran to & fro in a sort of dance to the Jingle of the Load of Money, that had been put in his breeches pockets; but he did not roll & tumble over and over in his old joyous way—No! it was an eager & solemn gladness, as if

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he felt it to be an awful aera in his life.—O bless him! bless him! bless him! If my wife loved me, and I my wife, half as well as we both love our children, I should be the happiest man alive—but this is not—will not be. (STCL II 774–5)

Children see the reality, not the disguise parents wear, even though it is their parents’ love for them that makes them wear the disguise. STC withheld himself to protect both Hartley and him from his own secret inner wounds. He withheld himself also because he was passionately in love with another woman, Sara Hutchinson (1775–1835), the “Asra” of STC’s notebooks: Love unutterable fills my whole Spirit, so that every fibre of my Heart, nay, of my whole frame seems to tremble under its perpetual touch and sweet pressure, like the string of a Lute—with a sense of vibratory Pain distinct from all other sensations, a Joy, that cannot be entered into while I am embodied—a pain of yearning which all the Pleasure on earth could not induce me to relinquish, even if it were in my power—and yet it is a pain, an aking that spreads even into the eyes . . . O well may I be grateful—She loves me—me, who—O noble dear generous [Asra]!—Herein my Love, which in degree cannot be surpassed, is yet in kind inferior to yours! (STCN 3370)

By his passion for Asra, STC’s imagination was absorbed, to his son’s exclusion. The dream nourished his poetry (as the love poems show)6 but not Hartley. Having managed to contrive the circumstances in which Hartley would be in Asra’s (rather than his mother’s) company for a while, STC wrote to his wife: “your name sake takes upon her all the duties of his [Hartley’s] Mother & darling Friend, with all the Mother’s love and fondness.” But despite STC’s assertion that “He [Hartley] is very fond of her” (STCL II 1205), “Sara Hutchinson was the one member of the Wordsworth household whom Hartley never liked” (DR 80). In 1814, a remorseful STC would confide in his friend, the Unitarian businessman, Josiah Wade: Dear Sir, For I am unworthy to call any good man friend—much less you, whose hospitality and love I have abused; accept, however, my intreaties for your forgiveness, and for your prayers. Conceive a poor miserable wretch, who for many years has been attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to the vice that reproduces it. Conceive a spirit in hell, employed in tracing out for others

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the road to that heaven, from which his crimes exclude him! In short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and you will form as tolerable a notion of my state, as it is possible for a good man to have. I used to think the text in St James that ‘he who offended in one point, offends in all,’ very harsh; but now I feel the awful, the tremendous truth of it. In the one crime of OPIUM, what crime have I not made myself guilty of!—Ingratitude to my Maker! And to my benefactors—injustice! and unnatural cruelty to my poor children!—self-contempt for my repeated promise—breach, nay, too often, actual falsehood! After my death, I earnestly entreat, that a full and unqualified narration of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made public, that at least some little good may be effected by the direful example! (STCL III 511)

STC had always lived primarily in his imagination, and especially in the murkier regions, “among the tombs & . . . pollutants of / the Dead” (STCN 194), whereas his wife was frequently irritated to notice his lack of engagement with the everyday problems, which in turn drove him away. He made close friends because he felt that he desperately needed them: I used to feel myself more at home in his [Tom Poole’s] great windy Parlour [at Nether Stowey], than in my own cottage. We were well suited for each other—my animal Spirits corrected his inclinations to melancholy; and there was some thing both in his understanding & in his affection so healthy & manly, that my mind freshened in his company, and my ideas & habits of thinking acquired day after day more of substance & reality. (STCL I 643–4)

In November 1802, he would try to explain to his wife that mutual “honor and esteem” could sooth their mutual lacerations if they would let it: I owe duties, & solemn ones, to you, as my wife; but I owe equally solemn ones to Myself, to my Children, to my Friends, and to Society. Where Duties are at variance, dreadful as the case may be, there must be a Choice. I can neither retain my Happiness nor my Faculties, unless I move, live, & love, in perfect Freedom, limited only by my own purity & self-respect, & by my incapability of loving any person, man or woman, unless I at the same time honor & esteem them. (STCL II 887)

The above may reveal a rather commonplace male ego—expansive and (despite the attempted tact) fundamentally tactless—but on closer inspection there is at least a clarity of purpose, with which STC seems to have

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made bold to cut free of all the sorrowfully circular arguments. He decided to grasp the nettle and say the “right” thing, which, alas, often cannot be done without the opposite effect to the one intended, transforming the aforementioned circularity into spiralling destruction. The suppressed tension, punctuated by the explosive rows, had already too often pushed STC outside his home, tempting him more and more to describe each choking eff lorescence of his own unhappiness: I am forced to write for bread—write the high f lights of poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing a groan of pain from my Wife—groans, and complaints & sickness!—The present hour I am in a quickset hedge of embarrassments, and whichever way I turn, a thorn runs into me—. The Future is cloud and thick darkness—Poverty perhaps, and the thin faces of them that want bread looking up to me!—Nor is this all . . . I have been composing in the fields this morning. (STCL I 185–6)

By the time Hartley was 5 years old, his father was talking and writing explicitly about his domestic difficulties, but even before then STC must have wordlessly infused his son with the doubts and fears of the contemplative temperament denied peace. When Hartley was 6, STC published “Dejection: an ode” in the Morning Post (October 4, 1802). Such a public display of some of the bits and pieces of STC’s inner life did not necessarily mean an increase in his honesty about what exactly was troubling him. The earliest draft of “Dejection: an ode,” addressed as a letter to Asra (April 4, 1802), is the only version of the poem containing STC’s “half-wish . . .” that his own children had “never . . . been born!” The Morning Post version contains no such matter. In the Morning Post version, STC found a way to dress his real anxiety as something less unpalatable, a versified common denominator defining a psychological condition, to be known much later as depression: A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stif led, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear. (STCPW 364)

With his “damned bad” (STCL II 768) habits of mind, Hartley’s father robbed himself of that elasticity known as perspective. Lefebure has observed how violently [STC] over-reacted to any kind of agitation or emotional or physical strain; in short, how dangerously vulnerable he was to stresses

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which those of less common clay barely detected: [S.T.] Coleridge could be damaged, wounded by the world without the world ever having noticed that it had wounded him. (BL 71)

On the one hand STC was the Philoctetes of Keswick, weeping and wailing for all to see: I have begun to take Bark, and I hope, that shortly I shall look back on my long & painful illness only as a Storehouse of wild Dreams for Poems, or intellectual Facts for metaphysical Speculation. Davy in the kindness of his heart calls me the Poet—philosopher—I hope, Philosophy & Poetry will not neutralize each other, & leave me an inert mass. But I talk idly—I feel, that I have power within me: and I humbly pray to the Great Being, the God & Father who has bidden me to “rise & walk” that he will grant me a steady mind to employ the health of my youth and manhood in the manifestation of that power . . . O my dear dear Friend! that you were with me by the fire side of my Study here, that I might talk over with you to the Time of the Night Wind that pipes its thin doleful climbing sinking Notes like a child that has lost its way and is crying aloud, half in grief and half in hope to be heard by its Mother. (STCL II 668–9)

On the other hand he was still the poetic fountain that overf lowed, the verbally uproarious word-drunkard, whose voluptuousness of language, essential gaudiness, and sheer bedazzlement at the glitter of words seemed irresistible: The Poet is dead in me—my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed and mitred with Flame. That is past by!—I was once a Volume of Gold Leaf, rising & riding on every breath of Fancy—but I have beaten myself back into weight & density, & now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat & square on the earth amid the hurricane, that makes Oaks and Straws join in one Dance, fifty yards high in the Element. (STCL II 714)

He depicted his son so bewitchingly because it was upon Hartley that he was now pinning his own airy hopes: He watched the boy build a model fireplace, from stone blocks, in which the fire itself was also represented by a stone: “four stones, fireplace—two stones, fire—arbitrary symbols in Imagination.” (EV 298)

STC himself felt irretrievably freighted. Hartley became the “fairy elf [the word—perhaps appallingly—would reappear many times in Hartley’s

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own later writings]—all life, all motion—indefatigable joy—a spirit of Joy dancing on an Aspen Leaf ” (STCL L 376). Other evidence may suggest that STC romanticized the image of the boy beyond recognition. Did he consider himself as one of those “Fathers” who, as he told Southey, “call. . . their children rogues, rascals, & little varlets—&c—” (STCL L 398)? To outward appearances, STC did his best for Hartley, and it would be easy enough for the biographer of either father or son to cherry-pick the happier moments from the available evidence. The glimpses of them, in the summer of 1801, crawling about together in the vegetable gardens of Greta Hall, Keswick, are beguiling, particularly when they turn their attention to the ant-heaps: Ants having dim notions of the architecture of the whole System of the world, & imitating it, according to their notion in their ant-heaps—& even these little Ant-heaps no uncomely parts of the great architecture— Hartley’s intense wish to have Ant-heaps near our house / his Brahman love & awe of Life / N.B. to commence his Education with natural History. (STCN 959)

The biographer could easily deploy some of the recorded conversations between STC and Hartley, with a view to promoting a heart-warming view of their unusual closeness: Tuesday—Hartley looking out of my study window fixed his eyes steadily & for some time on the opposite prospect, & then said—Will yon Mountains always be?—I shewed him the whole magnificent Prospect in a Looking Glass, and held it up, so that the whole was like a Canopy or Ceiling over his head, & he struggled to express himself concerning the Difference between the Thing & the Image almost with convulsive Effort.—I never before saw such an Abstract of Thinking as a pure act & energy, of Thinking as distinguished from Thoughts. (STCN 923)

They were close, but often in a way that may remind one of the odd unity of a barrister and the witness he cross-examines. STC did cross-examine Derwent occasionally, too: Derwent ( July 6th/1803) to whom I was explaining what his senses were for—he had never once thought of connecting sight with his eyes, & c—I asked him what his Tongue was for & I told him / & to convince, held his Tongue / he was not at all affected—having been used to have his voluntary power controlled by others. Sometime after I asked him again / he had forgotten—I bade him hold his Tongue and try to say, Papa—he did, & finding that he could not speak, he turned pale as death and in the reaction

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from fear f lushed red, & gave me a blow in the face / 2 years & 10 months old, within 8 days. (STCN 1400)

But clearly it was Hartley who was, for STC, most worth the effort. By comparison, STC recognized in Derwent the rudiments of a conventional, good-looking ninny, a congenital dunce who would probably wear his schoolmasters’ patience thin before they finally managed to send him out into the world as a pious, obedient son of the church: [Derwent was] very unlike Hartley—very vain & much more fond and affectionate—none of his Feelings so profound—in short, he is just what a sensible Father ought to wish for—a fine, healthy, strong, beautiful child, with all his senses & faculties as they ought to be—with no chance, as to his person, of being more than a good-looking man, & as to his mind, no prospect of being more or less than a man of good sense & tolerably quick parts. (STCL II 1014–15)

Being the father’s favorite did not guarantee happiness. The solidity of real happiness did not lie at the core of the STC-Hartley relationship. Instead, there was the smashy pith of the father’s broken resolutions, his temporary infatuations, his infectious (if temporary) enthusiasms, and all his frustrations, pains, and preoccupations. An appreciation of the quagmire would go some way to explaining the otherwise perplexing passage in the second part of STC’s poem, “Christabel” (written in 1801, when Hartley was 5): [Hartley] Makes such a vision to the sight As fills a father’s eyes with light; And pleasures f low in so thick and fast Upon his heart, that he at last Must needs express his love’s excess With words of unmeant bitterness. (STCPW 235)

STC did not share his spiritual life with Hartley. In this he greatly wronged him. As a boy, Hartley does seem to have irritated his father consistently, and in a way that permeated his father’s dreams (though contained in the private space of STC’s notebooks): Frid. Morn. 5 o’clock—Dosing, dreamt of Hartley as at his Christening— how as he was asked who redeemed him, & was to say, God the Son / he

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went on, humming and hawing, in one hum & haw, like a boy who knows a thing & will not make the effort to recollect it—so as to irritate me greatly. Awakening (gradually [I found] I was able compleately to detect, that) it was the Ticking of my Watch which lay in the Pen Place in my Desk on the round Table close by my Ear, & which in the diseased State of my Nerves had fretted on my Ears—I caught the fact while Hartley’s Face & moving Lips were yet before my Eyes, & his Hum & Ha,7 & the Ticking of the Watch were each the other, as often happens in the passing off of Sleep—that curious modification of Ideas by each other . . . I arose instantly, & wrote it down—it is now 10 minutes past 5. (STCN 1620)

Publicly, STC liked to show his son off to his friends, and the jocularity in the father’s evocations of the child genius (“whisk[ing], whirl[ing], and edd[ying]”) is charming, if not accurate: “. . . the air, which yonder sallowfaced & yawning Tourist is breathing, is to my Babe a perpetual Nitrous Oxyde. Never was more joyous creature born” (STCL I 612). Hartley’s father could froth the top of his darker ref lections with humor, yet he privately faced a harder truth in regard to his mixed feelings about the commitment involved in parenthood: My little children are a Joy, a Love A good Gift from above! But what is Bliss, that still calls up a Woe, And makes it doubly keen Compelling me to feel, as well as KNOW, What a most blessed Lot mine might have been. Those little Angel Children (woe is me!) There have been hours, when feeling how they bind And pluck out the Wing-feathers of my Mind, Turning my Error to Necessity, I have half-wish’d, they never had been born! (STCL II 797)

The importance of the last line cannot be overestimated: Hartley Coleridge was at best only half wanted by his most crucial parent, who had only half wanted so many things in his life, such as a career in the church (from which the Wedgwood “annuity” saved him), or a wife (from whom he would eventually f lee to Malta, in 1804, never to return as a fully committed husband). It was as if Hartley had unavoidably come into existence among the sparks that f lew around STC’s irresponsibly beaten anvil. Romantic biographers and critics have reinforced the notion by tending to include Hartley—when at all—as merely another little aperture through which to admire (DR 385–7) or disapprove of (DA 378) his father.

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Having committed to paper the fantasized death of his “fairy elf ” (STCL L 376) encumbrance, STC continued to monitor his own thought processes. The following notebook entry presents, in peculiarly Coleridgean note form, the phases of the literary genius at work: “The heat of fermentation from the warmth of Life / the bustling Dotage of Composition & the calm long-subsequent admiration” (STCN 1409). The second point is telling. STC is writing about himself in the process of composition: the mental activity is hidden by what an external observer (such as Sarah Coleridge) would probably perceive as unwarranted selfabsorption, and cross-grained incompetence. (Tom Poole considered STC to be a Pegasus in terms of intellect, but more like an ass in terms of “the rational discharge of the common duties of life” [Poole 96–97]). As Mr and Mrs Coleridge’s marriage was made “not in Heaven, but in Bristol” (HLW 5), there was no heavenly guarantee that Mrs Coleridge would be able to tolerate the symptoms of Mr Coleridge’s solitary thinking: Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens—it either stupefies me, and I perhaps look at a merry-make & dance the hay of Flies, or listen entirely to the loud Click of the great Clock / or I am simply indifferent, not without some sense of philosophic Self-complacency.—For a Thing at the moment is but a Thing of the moment / it must be taken up into the mind, diffuse itself thro’ the whole multitude of Shapes & Thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged . . . (STCN 1597).

STC may have evolved an elaborate, if eccentric, system of cross-referencing that accommodated his—and only his—peculiar quirkiness of thought, but, off the page, there were the maturing debts, and children: What is it, that I employ my Metaphysics on? To perplex our clearest notions, & living moral Instincts? To extinguish the Light of Love & of Conscience, to put out the Life of Arbitrement—to make myself & others Worthless, Soul-less, Godless?—No! To expose the Folly & the Legerdemain of those, who have thus abused the blessed Organ of Language, to support all old & venerable Truths, to support, to kindle, to project, to make the Reason spread Light over our Feelings, to make our Feelings diffuse vital Warmth thro’ our Reason—these are my Objects—& these my Subjects. Is this the metaphysics that bad Spirits in Hell delight in? (STCN 1623)

If Sarah suspected that her husband was actually acting up the aspects of his personality that were most unhelpful to her, the potential for the household stock-in-trade—the domestic row—would not have been likely to diminish.

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Sarah was not as docile and submissive as the wife whom the craftier Southey had picked for himself, Edith Fricker. STC would say as much to Southey: You are happy in your marriage Life; & greatly to the honor of your moral self government, Qualities & manners are pleasant to, & sufficient for, you, to which my Nature is utterly unsuited: for I am so weak, that warmth of manner in a female House mate is necessary to me . . . I am happy and contented in solitude, or only with the common Inhabitants of a Batchelor House: an old woman, and a sharp Child. (STCL II 929)

Sarah’s confrontationally unimaginative approach to life meant that, in the end, STC would retreat from her for good. Marriage is often founded, only to founder, upon the conviction that always being able to explain one’s behavior is a prerequisite for remaining trustworthy as a partner. STC’s alter ego, the Mariner, does not explain why he shot the Albatross. He does say that he “had done an hellish thing” (STCPW 531), but the reader is left to wonder why. The crew at first perceives the killing of the bird as a wrong act (“all averr’d, I had kill’d the Bird / That made the Breeze to blow” [STCPW 531]), but then the crew perceives the killing as “right” (STCPW 531) because such birds only “bring the fog and mist” (STCPW 531). The crew’s superstitious, self-contradictory grasping at straws illustrates the insatiable, unrefined thirst for meaning that motivates conventional, fearful people to band together and impose their opinions on subjects about which they know nothing. STC knew about such people. He had married one. For Sarah it was confounding that her brilliant husband would prioritize the writing of poetry—nay, the scribbling of notes—above the earning of money. And yet STC had been stimulated by the contemplation of life into such a state of cerebral urgency that neither second, nor third, nor final reminders about bills to be paid could reel him cleanly out of himself: “my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action. In plain and natural English, am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man” (STCL 783). STC did not particularly want to divorce himself from utility, but until he could feel that he had driven himself far enough to take cognizance of what he was actually equipped to do as a writer, he was prepared to endure (and make his wife endure) the feeling of “existential inefficiency” (PTL 373), as Martin Seymour-Smith (1928–98) has called it. Hartley’s mother continually censured, and self-approvingly condemned, STC’s dilatory habits, seeing no point in her husband’s heterogeneous

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jumble of joyousness, curiosity, hesitancy, disconnectedness, discontentment, regretfulness, capriciousness, and opium-eating. In 1834, Hartley’s sister, Sara, would explain their mother’s character in a letter to her own husband, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1798–1843): [T]he sort of wife to have lived harmoniously with my father need not have possessed high intellect or a perfect temper—but greater enthusiasm of temperament than my mother possessed. She never admires anything she doesn’t understand . . . This faith, this docility, is quite alien to the Fricker temperament . . . They are too literal and do not believe as I do that matters of imagination . . . can work as many practical effects as what we see with our own eyes and touch with our hands . . . Neither had my mother that dexterity in managing the temper of others which is often a substitute for an even temper in the possessor. She has no power over her mind to keep the thought of petty cares and passing interests . . . in abeyance . . . though her talents are above mediocrity and her understanding is clear and good—on its own range—she has no taste whatever for abstractions and formerly had less toleration for what she did not relish than now. (UC 20)

In 1816, Mrs Coleridge would write to Poole that “[STC] has been so unwise as to publish his fragments of ‘Christabel’ and ‘Koula-Khan’ ” (UC 19). Anyone who believes that good is only done by busy people would be unlikely to live in tranquillity with a husband who finds opiumkissed silence and inactivity “so most & very delightful” (STCL I 539): What a beautiful Thing Urine is, in a Pot, brown yellow, transpicuous, the Image, diamond shaped of the Candle in it, especially, as it now appeared, I having emptied the Snuffers into it, & the Snuff f loating about, & painting all-shaped Shadows on the Bottom. (STCN 1766 )

“After all,” as Seymour-Smith has said, she [Mrs Coleridge] could only really appreciate what sold. We do not need to forgive her for not being able to appreciate her husband’s genius, and we can often sympathize with her in what she had to go through. But she had little warmth, and most defences of her are in fact apologies. (PTL 373)

Hartley’s mother was without curiosity because for her all ought to have been settled. As Christiansen puts it, She expected to be materially comfortable and secure, with Coleridge showing himself to be as “steady” a character as her sister Edith’s husband, Southey. She was disappointed to find instead someone unstable and

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pathologically unmethodical, whose hours of reading, scrawling and messing about issued no visible return. (RA 63)

Of, and into, this disparity Hartley was born. His inheritance was an irreconcilable conf lict of values which his parents took too long to confess, because for too long they did not want to acknowledge it. After one particularly bitter row, in 1802 (when Hartley was 6), there was an unexpected period of peace. Sarah appeared to be as close to STC’s Platonic approximation of a wife as she ever had been, or ever would be: Mrs Coleridge was made serious—and for the first time since our marriage she felt and acted, as beseemed a Wife & a Mother to a Husband, & the Father of her children—She promised to set about an alteration in her external manners, & looks & language, & to fight against her inveterate habits of Thwarting & unintermitting Dyspathy—this immediately—and to do her best endeavors to cherish other feelings. I on my part promised to be more attentive to all her feelings of Pride, etc etc and to try to correct my habits of impetuous & bitter censure. We have both kept our Promises . . . I have the most confident Hopes, that this happy Revolution in our domestic affairs will be permanent . . . (STCL II 913–4).

Sarah had been “made serious” by her husband’s first explicit threat of separation (EV 321). Could any spirited person have stayed “serious” in such circumstances for very long? Shades of the prison house closed around the prematurely aging woman and her sensitive son. The grown woman could do little but endure the circumstances as they unfolded. The growing boy, however, was growing wary, and adept at evasion, like a seed of thistledown which f loats away on the slightest movement of air made by the motion of the capturing hand. Hartley would end up calling the family home at Greta Hall “a House of Bondage” (HCL 32). Ejuxria would remain his preferred haunt. Notes 1. “Coleridge, the Wedgwood Annuity and Edmund Oliver,” The Coleridge Bulletin, New Series 20, Winter 2002, 129–136. 2. “Thou faery voyager! that dost f loat / In such clear water, that thy boat / May rather seem / To brood on air than on an earthly stream;/ Suspended in a stream as clear as sky, / Where earth and heaven do make one imagery; / O blessed vision! happy child! / Thou art so exquisitely wild, / I think of thee with many fears / For what may be thy lot in future years” 3. One more to add to the gamut of STC’s activities as outlined by Richard Holmes: “. . . [S.T.] Coleridge was much more than a Romantic poet: he

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4.

5.

6. 7.

was also a journalist of genius, a translator, a matchless letter-writer (six volumes), an incomparable autobiographer and self-interrogator in his Notebooks (over sixty surviving between 1794 and his death), a literary critic, a spectacular lecturer, a folklorist, a philosopher, a psychologist (specializing in dreams and creativity), a playwright and dramatic critic, and—that much disputed word—a metaphysician. He was also a travelwriter, a fell-walker, and amateur naturalist . . .” (EV xv). “. . . indeed I am almost weary of the Terrible, having been an hireling in the Critical Review for these last six or eight months—I have been lately reviewing the Monk, the Italian, Hubert de Sevrac & &c & &c—in all of which dungeons, and old castles, & solitary houses by the Sea Side, & Caverns, & Woods, & extraordinary characters, & all the tribe of Horror & Mystery, have crowded in on me—even to surfeiting—” (STCL I 318). “Ghosts indeed! I should be haunted with . . . the phantasms of a wife broken-hearted, & a hunger-bitten Baby! O Thomas Poole! Thomas Poole! if you do know what a Father & Husband must feel, who toils with his brain for uncertain bread! I dare not think of it—The evil Face of Frenzy looks at me!” (STCL I 275). Whalley, George, Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson and the Asra Poems (1955). Anya Taylor has noted STC’s continued annoyance at the adult Hartley, evident in STC’s marginalia to Hartley’s Lives of Northern Worthies (BRE 153).

*

*

*

The Road to Ejuxria Hartley’s father alternately neglected and hectored him, in a way similar to the guilty, anxious way in which he dealt with himself.1 In 1807, STC wrote Hartley a letter in a surprising tone for a father to take with his 10-year-old son. Ostensibly laying down a set of guidelines for his son’s conduct during a projected visit to Hartley’s uncle (STC’s brother), George Coleridge (1764–1828), STC enumerated his son’s shortcomings— such as daydreaming, self-delusion, “procrastination,” making excuses, and standing “between the half-opened door” when “speaking, or spoken to”—and drew them into an elegant (not to mention unchallengeably authoritative) diagnosis of his son’s central problem: Nothing that gives you pain dwells long enough upon your mind to do you any good, and as in some diseases the medicines pass so quickly through the stomach and bowels as to be able to exert none of their healing qualities. (STCL II 510)

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The metaphorical patrolling of Hartley’s alimentary canal is a piece of parental impertinence without parallel. No one knew more keenly than STC the difficulty—if not the impossibility—of doing what one is supposed to be doing: “O way-ward and desultory Spirit of Genius! ill canst thou brook a task-master! The tenderest touch from the hand of Obligation wounds thee, like a scourge of scorpions!—” (STCL I 186); and “I am a Starling self-incaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole Note is, Tomorrow, & tomorrow, & tomorrow” (STCL II 784). STC the poet knew the pain involved in having otherworldly yearnings, but it was not beyond STC the parent to do some earthbound finger-wagging. As a young man, STC had himself received anxious letters from Poole, who was just one of the concerned father figures in STC’s life. (Other such figures had included Southey, did include Wordsworth, and would later include James Gillman.) In 1798, Poole (writing from England) hoped that STC (sojourning in Germany) was working hard at garnering the fruits of German metaphysics, not frittering his talents away attended by a clique of admiring undergraduates at Göttingen: You are now, dear Col, fixed in Germany, and what you have to do is to attend wholly to those things that are better attained in Germany than elsewhere . . . I should spend no time to send anything to Stuart . . . Begin no poetry—no original composition—unless translation from German may be so called . . . Beware of living too much with Chester . . . Live with Germans. Read in German. Think in German.

Poole’s effort, to minister as precisely as he could to the complex needs of the potentially prodigal recipient, was strenuous: Make a strict arrangement of your time and chain yourself down to it . . . It would counteract a disease of your mind—which is an active subtlety of imagination . . . This many of your friends falsely call irresolution. No one has more resolution and decision than you. (Poole I 279–280)

Poole’s attempt at finger wagging conjoined with praise—the fond hope being that STC would heed him—is similar to STC’s later attempts to help little Hartley, except that STC’s attempts seem more heavy-handed by comparison: . . . never pick at or snatch up anything, eatable or not. I know it is only an idle, foolish trick; but your Ottery relations would consider you as a little thief . . . it is a dirty trick; and people of weak stomachs would turn sick at a dish which a young filth-paw had been fingering. (STCL II 510)

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The imagined sputtering disgust (“filth-paw . . . fingering”) of the “proper” Coleridges must have been inscribed lastingly on the young addressee’s heart. Such an oddly forbidding letter, and from a father who could otherwise write in such a spirit of fun, as when he told his friend, the Unitarian preacher, John Prior Estlin: “I would overwhelm you with an Avalanche of Puns & Conundrums loosened by a sudden thaw from the Alps of my Imagination” (STCL I 223). Hartley, however, must have felt that there were few mental recesses into which he could retreat, so searching, so dazzling was the light that ref lected right at him off the Alps of his father’s Imagination: Next, when you have done wrong acknowledge it at once, like a man. Excuses may show your ingenuity, but they make your honesty suspected. And a grain of honesty is better than a pound of wit. We may admire a man for his cleverness; but we love and esteem him only for his goodness; and a strict attachment [remember Poole’s suggested “strict arrangement” of STC’s time] to truth, and to the whole truth, with openness and frankness and simplicity is at once the foundation stone of all goodness, and no small part of the superstructure. (STCL II 510)

Hartley knew his father at that time at his best (as well as at his worst); for with who else could Hartley have shared the love of ancient speech, when STC taught him Greek? At least on some occasions it must have seemed to them both that they walked together in an ancient civilized world. (Memoir xxix–xxxi; clxxxviii–cxcvii.) All the turbid selfdestructiveness that embittered their personal lives was forgotten as STC taught Hartley the ancient lyric meters, and explained famous passages to him: May the Almighty God prolong my life if it be useful to you, and may the knowledge which I am labouring to communicate produce in you those effects for which alone knowledge is desirable or valuable,—namely, 1. Habits of attention and the power of self-control; 2. Habits of intellectual accuracy, greatly favourable and even akin to habits of moral truth; 3. A taste born and nursed in simplicity, a sense of continuous admiration, with an aversion from wonderment, and an attachment to that manner of writing which seldom or never becomes an object of conscious attention for itself, yet gives an additional soul, as it were, to the matter. Thus Virgil describes Eneas as modified by the power of Venus; she did not walk beside or before him to be wondered at for herself, and to draw off all attention from her companion, but herself invisible,— “ipsa decoram Cæsariem nato genetrix, lumenque juventæ

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Purpureum, et lætos oculis aff lavit honores, Quale manus addunt ebori decus. RESTITT ENEAS.” Æneidos Lib. I., 592. (Memoir cxcv–cxcvi)

Sometimes it seems as if STC was holding his beloved pupil tight, giving him the time, love, and support to develop his own feel for a grown-up’s bicycle. From time to time STC did closely supervise Hartley’s intellectual progress, before removing the stabilizers, as it were, thus enabling his son to pedal on, alone, toward the light of refinement, growth, and development. Yet that has to be set against the hypocritical intricacies in STC’s “guidance” of his son’s manners and morals. How often since, from the turmoil of emotion, Hartley would seek and find sanctuary in the calm regions of the mind (for which he would have his father to thank): 4. A resource in solitude, a consequent love of occasional solitude, and a freedom from low or ruinous pleasures by the mind’s having been preoccupied by nobler pleasures. 5thly, and lastly, A tranquillity,—partly arising from the sense of stability in the objects of your love, and that consequent veneration of ancient things of that which was and yet is and will continue to be, which feeling counterpoising the natural love of novelty, reduces the mind to the proper balance, and connecting it with the future without breaking it off from the past makes it truly continuous in itself, and an harmonious part of a continuous whole; and partly by habitually associating your enjoyments and intellectual efforts with objects that are far above the unwholesome atmosphere of envy, jealousy, anxious rivalry, hatred, or selfish exultation, which surrounds us as men of the world living wholly among the persons and works of our contemporaries, unites passion with calmness, animates peace by love, and by habitual admiration of the permanent past tends, in the very fountain of our feelings, to check the propensity to factious idolatry of present greatness, and so, independent of the facts which ancient literature supplies, precludes fanaticism by furnishing a steady rule of measurement. (Memoir cxcvi)

If STC made Hartley’s escape into his own fantasy world necessary, he did also make it possible: . . . by living affectionately in the past, we gain the power of transporting ourselves to the future, and by considering all things as partaking of unity we foster that power, the accomplishment of which is the proud distinction of our nature, the power of contemplating the innumerable distinctities of the world as moving and having their actual being in the adorable

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indivisibility; and become practical knowers that GOD IS, and thereby partake of his existence. (Memoir cxcvii)

By the age of 10, Hartley felt the truth right through him of the absolute necessity of cultivating and expanding further, rather than giving up, his interior world, in order to deal with his overbearing father: Idolatry, my son, is atheism; and all passions which dimming the eye of the soul with the drowsy film of sensual materialism make us honour or love anything or person as excellent in its dividual self, is idolatry. The ambitious, the lustful, the covetous, are more despicably idolaters than the poor African, who takes the first stick or stone on which his eyes open after sleep for his god of the day, to that devotes his thoughts, and from that expects his happiness. (Memoir cxcvii)

One thinks of Wordsworth’s poem, “Anecdote for Fathers” (1798), narrated from the viewpoint of a father who eventually sees how insensitive he has been in grabbing his young son by the shoulders and forcing him to tell a lie. STC warmed, like many fathers, with annoying readiness to his boy’s immaturity, in the development and evolution of which he felt he could masterfully intervene. Wordsworth’s poem offers the reader a melancholy glimpse of an all-too-familiar non-meeting of minds. The child’s true answer to the adult’s question should have been, in fact, no answer: “Now tell me, had you rather be,” I said, and took him by the arm, “On Kilve’s smooth shore, by the green sea, Or here at Liswyn farm?” In careless mood he looked at me, While still I held him by the arm, And said, “At Kilve I’d rather be Than here at Liswyn farm.” “Now, little Edward, say why so: My little Edward, tell me why.”— “I cannot tell, I do not know.”— “Why, this is strange,” said I; “For here are woods, hills smooth and warm: There surely must some reason be Why you would change sweet Liswyn farm For Kilve by the green sea.”

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At this my boy hung down his head, He blushed with shame, nor made reply; And three times to the child I said, “Why, Edward, tell me why?” His head he raised—there was in sight, It caught his eye, he saw it plain— Upon the house-top, glittering bright, A broad and gilded vane. Then did the boy his tongue unlock, And eased his mind with this reply: “At Kilve there is no weather-cock; And that’s the reason why.”

The child in Wordsworth’s poem was simply not allowed to tell the truth, which he could have told by remaining silent, rather than having to utter some quasi-mature mot juste. STC was exactly like the imperious father delineated above. At the age of 6, Hartley said: “Don’t ask me so many questions, Papa! I can’t bear it” (RVC 191). It is easy to imagine that the boy would often slip into a fantasy world, which he had invented specifically for the approach of his father: Lastly, do what you have to do at once, and put it out of hand. No procrastination; no self-delusion; no ‘I am sure I can say it, I need not learn it again,’ etc., which sures are such very unsure folks that nine times out of ten their sureships break their word and disappoint you. (STCL I 510)

Later, the adult “Hartley’s refusal to turn immediately to his father for help in . . . a crisis” (DR 513) would be telling. Hartley would always have reason to expect “a well-meaning, but over-intense and probably humiliating interrogation” (DR 514) from his father. As a child, Hartley developed a lifelong longing to climb into the little secret places that had, for him, the numinous quality of sanctuaries, where plant-forms had composed themselves into harmonies of equilibrium, and in which even the smallest moss-scale had achieved its orientation towards the sun; as a man, he realized those longings in his poetry: WHO would have thought a thing so slight, So frail a birth of warmth and light, A thing as weak as fear or shame, Bearing thy weakness, in thy name, — Who would have thought of finding thee, Thou delicate Anemone. (HCPW 159)

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Molly Lefebure has understood the science behind the creation of Hartley’s lifelong solitude: The child, exposed to his father’s irritable tongue-lashing, retired into his own world; either remaining out of view with Mr Jackson and Mrs Wilson (“Wilsy”) or, when the finer weather came, burying himself in the kitchen garden among thickets of burgeoning raspberry canes and jungles of jerusalem artichokes; daydreaming; inventing a fantasy world of his own: Ejuxria. [S.T.] Coleridge spoke of this seemingly contented reclusiveness as further proof of Hartley’s joyous Rousseauist temperament and uniqueness . . . (BL 136–7).

Whether it was in the kitchen garden or in a field in Keswick, Hartley learned from those minute harmonies in which every leaf and tendril is in balance with every other, and all with the light, to know when he was himself in orientation: In youth and manhood’s careful sultry hours, The garden of my youth bore many f lowers That now are faded; but my early faith, Though thinner far than vapour, spectre, wraith, Lighter than aught the rude wind blows away, Has yet outlived the rude tempestuous day, And may remain, a witness of the spring, A sweet, a holy, and a lovely thing; The promise of another spring to me, My lovely, lone, and lost Anemone! (HCPW 160)

He knew he shared much with the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and he knew he would never lose it through disuse because he would never really vacate his place in his personal paradise. In February 1839, he would write to his sister about the apparent delay in the changing of the seasons: —hardly one indication of approaching Spring at a time when I have often seen the gardens all in a glow, the birds and insects busy, the buds bursting with the pimply parturition of vegetable life, the rathe primrose, and the starry celandine “telling tales to the Sun”. In plain speech, it is very late season, and I can’t help thinking, that the sky and the earth who are certainly in the agricultural interest, are consumedly in the sulk at corn-law agitation. (HCL 226)

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He would not commit himself to “dwell within the gaol of sense” (HCPW 50); in other words, he would not commit himself to adulthood. He saw in an infant’s smile something worth holding on to, even though the real world made the holding on impossible: Sweet infant, we might deem thy smile was brought From some far distant Paradise, where nought Forbad to hope whate’er of good may be, Where thou could’st know, and feel, and trust, and see That innocence which, lost, is vainly sought In this poor world. (HCPW 178)

As John Beer has said about William Blake (1757–1827), Hartley “was performing a radical act: he was quietly indicating the fragility, in his view, of all ‘traditions’ that had been constructed solely on adult experience” (William Blake: A Literary Life 28). Hartley wrote to his mother in 1829, and eulogized his own paradise lost: But Cuthbert is welcome to the shells. I wish I could bequeath to him, along with them, a tithe of the pleasure I have felt in arranging them (not, perhaps, according to the most scientific system of mineralogy or conchology) on dear Wilsy’s worm-eaten table, with that beloved check toilet-cover on it. Oh, could I impart but a tithe of the pride with which I used to exhibit these treasures, assigning them names and histories, with the fearless inventiveness of unsuspecting innocence! Could I disburse from the treasure of my memory but one farthing in the pound of the mighty debt of happiness which I owe to dream-nourished childhood, and pay the dividend to the heirs and assignees of childhood! (Memoir xxix)

Hartley would always remember that during his “dream-nourished” childhood he had been indulged by most of the people around him, such as Mrs Wilson (referred to, affectionately, as “Wilsy,” above), under whose care he had been placed for a time, as a child at Greta Hall. He does not appear to have remembered much about how awful his father often was, such as the time when STC wrote to Derwent to remind him of his duty to his mother: she gave you nourishment out of her own Breasts for so long a time, that the Moon was at it’s least and it’s greatest sixteen times, before you lived entirely on any other food, than what came out of her Body; and she brought you into the world with shocking pains, and yet loved you the better for the

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Pains, which she suffered for you; and before you were born, for eight months together every drop of Blood in your body, first beat in HER Pulses and throbbed in HER Heart. So it must needs be a horrible wicked Thing ever to forget, or wilfully to vex, a Father or a Mother: especially, a Mother. God is above all: and only good and dutiful Children can say their Lord’s Prayer, & say to God, ‘OUR FATHER’, without being wicked even in their Prayers . . . always to tell the Truth . . . to tell a Lie . . . is such a base, hateful and wicked Thing, that when good men describe all wickedness put together in one wicked mind, they call it the Devil, which is Greek for a malicious Liar . . . Never, never, tell a Lie—even tho’ you should escape a whipping by it: for the Pain of a whipp[ing] does not last above a few minutes; but the Thought of having told a Lie will make you miserable for days—unless, indeed, you are hardened in wickedness, and then you must be miserable for ever. (STCL III 1–2)

One may find the above missive even more disturbing when one knows that the recipient was 6 years old. Despite his earlier boasts to his friends about his exquisitely wild quasi-nitrous-oxide-breathing genius of a son, STC actually attempted to persuade 10-year-old Hartley to prune his f lourishing, tangling impulses, and to forfeit what was feral in him: I pray you, keep this letter, and read it over every two or three days. Take but a little trouble with yourself, and every one will be delighted with you, and try to gratify you in all your reasonable wishes. And, above all, you will be at peace with yourself . . . (STCL I 510)

Only Hartley’s “reasonable” wishes would be welcomed by the inhabitants of the real world (in this case, the George Coleridges). What on earth (if on earth) was he supposed to do? Like the child that burps loudly and naturally at the age of 2 but is reprimanded for it at 10, the growing Hartley was finding that his eccentricities were no longer acceptable, however natural they had felt before. After all, he had been whimsically indulged, at the age of 3, as the burgeoning bludgeoner of a celebrated philosopher: To morrow Sara & I dine at Mister Gobwin’s as Hartley calls him—who gave the philosopher such a Rap on the shins with a ninepin that Gobwin in huge pain lectured Sara on his boisterousness. I was not at home. (STCL I 553)

It is impossible to read too much into that last short sentence: young Hartley had an intermittently present father. Hartley would continue—or

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discontinue, depending on the momentary status of his broken resolutions—to labor under the conf licting demands of society’s expectations (of the son of STC) and his own unique individuality. Hartley would inherit his father’s lifelong feeling of “Dread” (STCN 2398), but he would also inherit his father’s Mariner-like inexplicableness: An eye sharpened for closer observation may, in the retrospect, descry the shadow of a coming cloud. A certain infirmity of will, the specific evil of his [Hartley’s] life, had already shown itself. His sensibility was intense, and he had not wherewithal to control it. He could not open a letter without trembling. He shrank from mental pain,—he was beyond measure impatient of constraint. He was liable to paroxysms of rage, often the disguise of pity, self-accusation, or other painful emotion—anger it could hardly be called—during which he bit his arm or finger violently. He yielded, as it were, unconsciously to slight temptations, slight in themselves, and slight to him, as if swayed by a mechanical impulse apart from his own volition. It looked like an organic defect—a congenital imperfection. I do not offer this as a sufficient explanation. There are mysteries in our moral nature upon which we can only pause and doubt. (Memoir lix–lx)

Note 1. For example, “My face, unless when animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great Sloth, & great, indeed almost ideotic, good nature. ’Tis a mere carcase of a face . . . my gait is awkward, & the walk, & the Whole man indicates indolence capable of energies . . . I cannot breathe thro’ my nose—so my mouth, with sensual thick lips, is almost always open. In conversation I am impassioned, and oppose what I deem error with an eagerness, which is often mistaken for personal asperity—but I am ever so swallowed up in the thing, that I perfectly forget my opponent. Such am I” (STCL I 259–260).


CHAPTER 2

HIS RIPENING CHILDHOOD

From the Sublime to the Oxonian

G

riggs has made his view of Hartley’s ordinariness (compared with the more colorful lives of the other Romantics) clear at the beginning of his biography: “[Hartley’s] existence was particularly uneventful” (HLW vii). Hartley did not travel abroad. Unlike his father and Wordsworth, he never saw France, Germany, or the Alps. He may have visited Edinburgh.1 Were there a low-ranking league table for not-welltravelled Romantic writers, Hartley would have to be placed below even the home-bird De Quincey (1785–1859), who had at least visited Ireland in his adolescence (FS 27–30). Otherwise, the Romantic writers did tend to relocate regularly. Shelley (1792–1822) persuaded an exceedingly conventional middle-class girl, Harriet Westbrook (1795–1815), to share his risky way of life. During a period of just four years, they lived in London, Edinburgh, York, Keswick, North Wales, Lynmouth, Wales again, Dublin, London, and the Thames Valley. As Paul Johnson says, Shelley was incapable of leading a normal life: He thrived on change, displacement, danger and excitement of all kinds. Instability, anxiety seem to have been necessary for his work. He could curl up with a book or a piece of paper anywhere and pour out his verses. He spent his life in furnished rooms or houses, moving about, often dunned by creditors, or the still centre of the anguished personal dramas that beat around him.. he continued to work and produce . . . But the mouvemente existence he found stimulating was disastrous for others . . . (Intellectuals 36)

Like STC, Shelley was prepared to make those close to him suffer as he evolved. Lord Byron (1788–1824), too, as Doris Langley-Moore puts it, had in his “desire for dominance a kind of intuitive . . . authority, springing

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from the conviction of having a right to be entirely [him]self” (LBAR 149). Byron cut his swathe through books, experiences, and people, subordinating them all to his requirements as a growing creative intelligence. His mind was strong enough to master it all, to integrate it with the f low of his thinking, and so make it fit in with the unity of his insight, which, though huge, was always increasing. In the process, his own thinking always dominated and was never drowned by others’ thinking. LangleyMoore has tidily explicated the difference between Lord and Lady Byron (1793–1860), following their separation “after a year of lacerating incompatibility” (LBAR 215): In the end Lady Byron proved the more grievously hurt. He had resilience, she almost none. He was self-critical and, in acknowledging “the nightmare of my own delinquencies”, could in some measure purge them. She was self-admiring, and contemplated with ever renewed amazement the transcendent injustice of her ill-usage, feeling more and more virtuous, more and more wronged, as the years went by. He was able to distil from his experience new materials, new ideas about life . . . (LBAR 216)

Whereas Byron and Shelley left roadkills behind them as they zipped along the fast-lane, Hartley went easy on everyone—not least on himself—and his single approach to (or avoidance of ) the real world’s frightful vortex was consistent throughout his life: I would not have the restless will That hurries to and fro Searching for some great thing to do Or secret thing to know I would be treated as a child And guided where to go. (Children’s Literature 147)

Southey discussed Hartley’s character: There is not the slightest evil in his disposition, but it wants something to make it steadily good; physically and morally there is a defect of courage. He is afraid of receiving pain to such a degree that, if any person begins to read a newspaper, he will leave the room, lest there be anything shocking in it. (HLW 27)

Just as Byron was a poet who desired, and in a sense required, warm Mediterranean weather in order to live and write at his best, so Hartley

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needed the unconditional love and sympathy of his family and friends. At first he got it. As a child, he was permitted, and even encouraged, to be very impractical in his everyday habits. Dorothy Wordsworth wrote feelingly on the issue: Poor thing! he has been so much accustomed to move about after his own fancies that we find some trouble in checking him . . . he is absolutely in a dream when you tell him to do the simplest thing—his Books, his Slate, his pencils, he drops them just where he finds them no longer useful. (HLW 32)

He was not persecuted at school like Cowper (HCL 9) or Shelley (RA 39), but the adults who cared about him monitored the growth of his mind with anxious solicitude. Southey felt that “such an intellect can never reach maturity [and that] The springs are of too exquisite workmanship to last long” (HLW 20). However, Hartley the growing child found increasingly that love and sympathy were coming to him alloyed with less soothing ideas about selfimprovement. STC’s letter, which explained to the 10-year-old Hartley what was wrong with him and what he should do to fix it, is a key piece of advice received—if not actioned—by Hartley: . . . this power which you possess of shoving aside all disagreeable ref lections, or losing them in a labyrinth of daydreams, which saves you from some present pain, has, on the other hand, interwoven with your nature habits of procrastination, which, unless you correct them in time (and it will require all your best exertions to do it effectually) must lead you into lasting unhappiness. (STCL IV 10)

STC was (apparently) helping Hartley to see what was “wrong” with him, but nobody would (or could) compel Hartley to fix it. He did not fix himself, either as a child or as a man. He was, as Griggs says, “a queer mixture of shyness and self-satisfaction” (HLW 55). By manhood, he would have learned the wisdom of resignation to the fits and starts of his own malfunctioning mind; his “irregular passions and [his] intellect, powerful perhaps in parts, but ever like ‘a crazy old church clock, and its disordered chimes’” (HCL 163). Hartley was inf luenced to become a writer not just by his voracious reading, but also by the culture of the people amongst whom he grew up, which was transmitted in countless imponderable ways. It was “by the living voice of [S.T.] Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, Lloyd, Wilson and De Quincey” (Memoir lvii) that Hartley first came to unveil the vistas

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of awareness into which his consciousness could f low. He imbibed the idea that he (like his father, and unlike his mother) could refine and modulate his being into a fineness consistently invisible to those inclined to view his eccentricities as inadequacies: Lady fair, Thy presence in our little vale has been A visitation of the Fairy Queen, Who for a brief space reveals her beauty rare, And shews her tricksy feats to mortal eyes, Then fades into her viewless Paradise. (HCPW 11)

The “Fairy Queen” is, to borrow Marina Warner’s words, “both enhanced and concealed by attributes of nebulousness” (Phantasmagoria 85), and the poet is capable of following her even as she melts out of one dimension and into another. When Hartley began “to f lutter,” as his mother said, “the callow wings of his intellect” (STCL I 220), he began also to live a double-edged life. He was his mother’s son and he was his father’s son, and his mother and father were growing apart. One thinks, for example, of how many times “the pang of divided duty,” which left STC “stormy and miserable” (STCN 3041), penetrated Hartley’s growing mind. The following excerpt from a letter from STC to Tom Wedgwood in 1802 indicates the volatile atmosphere—so different from the “Nitrous Oxyde” (STCL I 612) drolly postulated by STC—breathed by little Hartley: If any woman wanted an exact & copious Recipe, ‘How to make a Husband completely miserable’, I could furnish her with one—with a Probatum est, tacked to it.—Ill-tempered Speeches sent after me when I went out of the House, ill-tempered Speeches on my return, my friends received with freezing looks, the least opposition or contradiction occasioning screams of passion, & the sentiments, which I held most base, ostentatiously avowed— all this added to the utter negation of all, which a Husband expects from a Wife—especially, living in retirement—& the consciousness that I was myself growing a worse man / O dear Sir! no one can tell what I have suffered. (STCN I 876)

Amidst the emotional and intellectual intensity, Hartley knew he was the special child in the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle; he never doubted it. At the age of 10, having spent some stimulating months with his father (and without his mother) in London, in 1807, he returned home to


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Greta Hall and made, on a spot of waste ground, his own model of London as governed by children: This was divided into kingdoms, and subdivided into provinces, each of the former being assigned to one of his playmates. A canal was to run through the whole, upon which ships were to be built. A tower [Hartley had actually been taken to visit the Tower of London] and armoury, a theatre [he had actually been taken to see Matthew Lewis’s play, The Wood Demon] and a “chemistry-house,” [he had actually met STC’s friend, the Cornish chemist, Humphry Davy] (under which mines were expected to be formed), were to be built, and considered common property. War was to be declared and battles fought between sovereign powers . . . [He] had a scheme for training cats and even rats for various offices and labours, civil and military. (Memoir xli–xlii)

His expectation that his immediate surroundings (including people) should respond to his controlling touch had not yet suffered, nor would it at grammar school in Ambleside. Perhaps it should have. If his indulgent schoolmaster, Rev John Dawes, did tread on any of Hartley’s dreams, he trod lightly (and at the same time he refused remuneration for the privilege of taking the boy genius on). STC knew all about Hartley’s extra special status over his brother at the school: that [Rev] Dawes does not love him [Derwent] because he can’t help crying when he is scolded, and because he ain’t such a genius as Hartley—and that though Hartley should have done the same thing, yet all the others are punished, and [Rev] Dawes only looks at Hartley and never scolds him, and all the boys think it very unfair—he is a genius. (STCL II 577)

Hartley would leave school in 1814 and spend a year in independent study, mostly with Southey (HCCI 14). At that time, STC was at one of the lowest points of his life, due to his opium addiction, and looked unlikely to help himself, let alone anyone else. Thanks to Southey, Hartley’s privileged intellectual existence continued. For all Hartley knew, perhaps all souls were special ones, though not all awakening to self-knowledge, as he was. There was nothing competitive in Hartley’s sense of vocation; for vocation differs from ambition in that it concerns no one but ourselves; it is secret; its obligations, being self-imposed, are inescapable: I had always an intense feeling of beauty. I doted on birds, and kittens, and f lowers. I was not able to take in and integrate an extensive landscape, but

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a mossy nook, a fancy waterfall, an opening in a wood, an old quarry, or one of those self-sufficing angles which are dale in miniature, filled me with inexpressible delight, and I was pleased to hear, or read, or dream of such places. (HEM I 346)

Griggs has pointed out that “Time meant nothing to [Hartley]” (HLW 23), which may offer the misleading impression that Hartley had an easy-going nature. The truth is that wherever Hartley happened physically to be, his attention was usually elsewhere. As a young boy, he fretted about the social unrest in Ejuxria. In 1849, Basil Montague’s wife would recall one of Hartley’s anxieties: He called this nation the “Ejuxrii;” and one day, when walking very pensively, I asked him what ailed him. He said, “My people are too fond of war, and I have just made an elegant speech in the Senate, which has not made any impression on them, and to war they will go.” . . . he believed to all intents and purposes in the creations of his own mind . . . (Memoir xxxiii–xxxiv)

With the capacity for such a deep and rich interior life, Hartley had no strong wish to excel or to be admired as a pupil. His true task concerned no one but himself; the children with whom he played (with the exception of Derwent)2 knew nothing of his real interests, in which they played no part: Southey says wickedly that “all Hartley’s guts are in his brains, and all Derwent’s brains are in his guts.” Verily the constitutional differences in the children are great indeed. From earliest infancy Hartley was absent, a mere dreamer at his meals, put the food into his mouth by one effort, and made a second effort to remember it was there and swallow it. (STCL II 577)

As an adult, Hartley would recall the intensity with which he had read books as a boy: If I was deeply interested in the course of a story, the interest was so violent as to be painful; I feared—I shrunk from the conclusion, or else I forestalled it. My pleasure arose, not from curiosity, or anxiety about events and results, but from the workings of the visual imagination—from a picture daguerreotyped upon my mind; a scene in which I was at once spectator and actor, for I always identified myself with some personage or other . . . (HEM I 345–6)


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Derwent noted his brother’s outward ordinariness at his lessons: [Hartley’s] themes and verses were clever and sensible, but they do not exhibit any remarkable precocity. They were, strictly speaking, exercises. He was acquiring, not without visible effort, the use of his tools. (Memoir iv)

So it was with good outward reason that Hartley did not feel superior, inferior, or anything at all in relation to others. Children do not make comparisons; things are as they are. Hartley happened to be able to read stories and make up his own stories, but at the time it would not have occurred to him to consider his ability any more or less interesting than anything else about him, such as the shape of his head: Whatever I had heard or read, I worked up into a tale of my own, in which there was no invention of incident, but sometimes great circumstantiality of description, and something like an attempt at character. (HEM I 346)

By his teenage years, Hartley had developed into an exquisitely impractical individual. His mother wrote about him in a letter to Poole: Hartley is now just turned 16—he is much grown in the last 4 years, and has a voice deeper than his father’s, with a great deal of his father’s manner . . . his Master [Southey] speaks in high terms of his powers of mind and habits of Study, but laments his procrastinating ways, and habits of doing anything rather than the right thing in the right time, too much in this respect like a near relation of his [STC] who sees this likeness, and bitterly laments it. (HLW 53–54)

It is worth comparing Hartley’s inability to do “anything . . . right” with the young STC’s more protean ability as a communicator. STC could elicit the favor of others, in all its forms, often putting himself in the way of getting what he wanted. The 15-year-old STC’s letter to his brother, Luke Coleridge (1765–90), shows a self-justifying charm similar to that which Hartley would show a generation later—but STC learned to exploit it in order to acquire things or get his way, whereas Hartley would only tend to use it to apologize: I pray you pardon my not writing before. Five times have I set down with a fix’d resolution to write to you; and five times have I torn it before I have writ Half of it. (STCL I 2)

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The 19-year-old STC’s letter to his brother George reveals an increment in the value of his earthbound accomplishment—his charming eloquence: My dear Brother Indeed I should have written you before, but a bad sore throat and still worse cough prevented me from mustering Spirits adequate to the undertaking. The sore throat gargarization and attention have removed: my cough remains—and is indeed at its zenith: not Cerberus ever bark’d louder: every act of tussitation seems to divorce my bowels and belly— indeed if the said parties had not had a particular attachment to one another, they must have been long ago separated . . . I availed myself of your note to draw upon my Aunt for half a guinea. (STCL I 10)

The 21-year-old STC’s letter to Mrs Evans shows some of the re-usable (STCL II 714) nuts and bolts of STC’s self-dramatization and self-mockery: . . . in point of Spirits I am but the Dregs of my former self—a decaying f lame agonizing in the Snuff of a tallow Candle—a kind of hobgoblin, clouted and bagged up in the most contemptible Shreds, Rags, and yellow Relics of threadbare Mortality. (STCL I 47)

Hartley, like his father, an otherworldly creature (an elf ), would remain comparatively unskilled in the arts of the beggar. As his contemporary, Caroline Fox, said: “He lived as a child, and therefore he was loved as only a child is loved” (HLW 171). Hartley would try to perform his adult life in the real world: “I feel not unlike an actor who has come upon the stage to speak, with his character but half-learned” (HCL 12). He would not be very successful at it: And now my years are thirty-five, And every mother hopes her lamb, And every happy child alive, May never be what now I am. (HCPW 223)

Having taught Hartley at Greta Hall for a year, in preparation for university, Southey wrote to Hartley’s cousin, John Taylor Coleridge (1790–1876), in March 1815: Let me tell you, as well as I can what kind of youth this cousin of yours and nephew of mine is. Without being an ugly fellow, he is a marvellously odd one—he is very short, with remarkably strong features, some of the thickest


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and blackest eyebrows you ever saw, and a beard which a Turk might envy. His manners are almost as peculiar as his appearance, and having discovered that he is awkward by nature, he has formed an unhappy conclusion that art will never make him otherwise, and so resigns himself to his fate. My endeavours have not been wanting to remedy or rather palliate this; but it is bred in the bone—and you know the remainder of the proverb. I have even habitually quizzed him for the purpose of teaching him to bear such things with good humour, knowing how much he will be exposed to it. (HCL 10)

Southey continued the letter on the subject of Hartley, outlining the obstacles that Hartley would have to vault in order to become as happy, normal, and successful as the possessor of such raw talent deserved: Hartley’s intellect will soon overcome all disadvantages that his exterior may incur, if he do but keep the course. And here, indeed, I feel how fortunate it is that he has a kinsman on the spot so willing and able to direct him, and whom he is so well prepared to respect. The great lesson which Wordsworth and myself have endeavoured to impress upon him is that he goes to Oxford to devote himself to the studies of the place, and that no degree of general ability or general knowledge can, or ought to atone for any deficiency in the attainments which the University requires; that to these he must apply himself totis viribis while he is there, and when he has attained by these the establishment for which we look, life will be before him to cultivate his intellect in whatever manner he may then please. (HCL 10)

Still in pursuit of his ideal Hartley Coleridge (the unlikely future product of a life lived correctly), Southey praised Hartley’s better qualities while at the same time implying the fault lines along which future crises could develop: His disposition is excellent, his principles thoroughly good, and he has instinctively a devotional feeling which I hope will keep them so. An overweening confidence in his own talents, and a perilous habit of finding out reasons for whatever he likes to do, are the dangerous points of his character. To extravagance he has not the slightest propensity—but he knows as little of frugality, and it is well that he has a friend at hand who may question him concerning his ways and means, for in these things he is, I believe always will be, a child—I ought to say that Hartley has Greek enough for a whole college. (HCL 10)

Before he went off to read for his BA Honors degree at Merton College, Oxford, Hartley anticipated that his eccentricities would become more

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problematic than they had been when he was surrounded only by those whose fondness for him had been unconditional: . . . and I know I shall be laughed at for I always have been so, but the laugh I have hitherto encountered has no scorn or bitterness in it, but I shall go pretty well prepared to meet the scoffs and ridicule of the unfeeling . . . (HLW 61)

When the time finally came for Hartley to move, his mother wrote to him, including in her letter (very) detailed instructions on such practical matters as packing a trunk and addressing a letter properly (HCCI 146). Inept as he was, it was as much as he could do to move away from home for the first time in his life, and hope for the best, if even he feared the worst. The well-bred are not necessarily the best-educated. STC’s lessons to Hartley had been anything but formal, as the following shows: Troˉche˘e trıˉps fro˘m loˉng to˘ shoˉrt; From long to short in solemn sort Sloˉw Spoˉndeˉeˉ staˉlks; stroˉng foˉoˉt! yet ill able Eˉve˘r to˘ coˉme u˘p wı˘th Daˉcty˘ l trı˘sy_ lla˘bleˉ. I˘aˉmbics maˉrch fro˘m shoˉrt to˘ loˉng; — Wı˘th a˘ leˉaˉp a˘ nd a˘ boˉuˉnd the˘ swı˘ ft Aˉna˘pae˘sts throˉng . . . Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not from its whole ridge See a man who so loves you as your fond S.T. Coleridge. (Memoir clxxxviii–cxcvii)

Out of kilter with the contemporary educationalists, STC had seen no necessity for teaching his special son Latin first and Greek later. Out of kilter with the hopes and fears of his wife (now in 1806 a mother of three), STC returned from a two-year stay on his own in Malta, having no intention of returning as a permanent father and husband. Hartley had never been constrained beyond the basic discipline required during school hours, and it was to his schoolmaster, Rev Dawes, that Hartley would owe the continuation of the most precious solitude in which he would lose himself. Eleanor Towle has appreciated the combination of circumstances: Out of school hours there was . . . little supervision, and they spent their time on the hillsides or by the lake, roaming about at pleasure, as far as Hartley’s vagrant inclinations or Derwent’s sturdier legs could carry them. The master [Rev Dawes] was honourable and upright, the tone of the school good, and the life wholesome, and here for six years (those critical and


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important years from twelve to eighteen) Hartley led a perfectly blameless and simple life; winning for himself, as in the old days at Greta Hall, the wondering indulgence of his elders . . . (PC 63)

In such unforced (if not very happy) conditions, Hartley developed his own peculiar ways of feeling and thinking. Later in his life his little piece of doggerel, “Butter’s Etymological Spelling Book, &c,” would exhibit his playful defiance: BUTTER’S books I ne’er have read, I hope they butter him his bread, But such is Youth’s depravity And so averse to gravity, They’d rather dabble in the gutter Than learn to spell of Mr. Butter; Yes their perverseness is so utter They’d rather eat than study butter. (HCNP 102)

Why analyze exhaustively when one can leap intuitively? Hartley was the thing itself—the Romantic child, the fairy voyager—and so he did not have to excel at his studies to prove it: He is very backward in his book learning, cannot write at all, and a very lame reader. We have never been anxious about it, taking it for granted that loving me, and seeing how I love books, he would come to it of his own accord, and so it has proved, for in the last month he has made more progress than in all his former life. Having learnt everything almost from the mouths of people whom he loves, he has connected with his words and notions a passion and a feeling which would appear strange to those who had seen no children but such as had been taught almost everything in books. (STCL I 443)

Hartley’s father was at least partly responsible for his son’s inconvenient classical lacunae that would, in 1818, cause the examiners of his BA Honors to disagree fundamentally on the question of classification. The second-class degree (in literis humanioribus) he was eventually awarded was the result of a compromise. Some of the examiners wanted to award him a first-class degree for the sheer talent and general knowledge he displayed, and others wanted to award him a fourth. Fairy voyaging offers no guarantee that the voyager will always be safe and happy. So far, things were going well enough for the otherworldly Hartley in the real world, though such peculiar ways as his were not to be observed by faint-hearted

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parents. Southey said: “I know not whether I should wish to have such a child or not” (Letters of Robert Southey I 311). Notes 1. Christopher North’s “Interscript” in Blackwood’s (November 1828) failed to entice Hartley to Edinburgh: “But, my dear H., how the deuce could I answer your letters—kept, as I have been, in Cimmerian darkness as to your local habitation in this unintelligible world? You have absolutely annihilated time and place, that two friends might be unhappy; and withheld from me the slightest clue by which I could discover your sylvan, champaign, mountainous, city, or suburban retreat” (Reprinted in HEM I 148–50). 2. Derwent considered himself “the depository of all [Hartley’s] thoughts and feelings, and in particular of that strange dream-life which . . . he led in the cloud-land of his fancy” (Memoir xxxvi).

*

*

*

Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford In December 1818, in a letter to his uncle George Coleridge, Hartley outlined in retrospect how he thought he had performed in his university examinations: But I can say for myself—and those who best can judge—and support me in the plea—that unfortunate circumstances weigh’d heavier against me than any fault of my own. In my Logic, Latin composition, Aristotle, and most part of my history, I was respectable; in Divinity and Ethics perhaps rather above par; in my Sophocles I fail’d, chief ly from being put on in a misprinted passage—for the play was one I had studied with more than common attention. In Virgil I stumbled from mere confusion; the passage I had read, and that too carefully—fifty times at least. In Pindar I was not very far amiss; in the O-dyssee alone have real cause for shame, for to tell the truth, I took it up for a make-weight, in the expectation of not being put on in it at all. My Iliad, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Horace, were given me on paper. I heard nothing how these were done, but I hope, respectably. (HCL 19)

Hartley’s performance was basically respectable, but uneven. His acknowledgment of the help he received from Nathaniel Ellison and John Keble, Fellows of Merton College and Oriel College respectively, indicates that


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Hartley was not inclined to couple any personal regrets with bitterness toward others: Here I must take an opportunity of expressing the high sense I entertain of Mr Ellison’s kindness, whose mild and gentlemanly system of examination, enabled me to acquit myself in many particulars, better than I should otherwise have done. Mr Keble volunteer’d his assistance in examining me previous to my appearance in the schools—a good office I gratefully remember. (HCL 19)

He had already experienced a bitter disappointment during his first year at Merton College. He had tried for the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry. His entry, “The Horses of Lysippus,” failed to win him the prize, despite containing such f lashes of promise as: Black lour their brows, and fiercely gleam their eyes, As lightnings glisten from o’erclouded skies . . . (HCPW xxx)

Extreme bleakness awaited him in the awareness that his best efforts—so adored back home—were not accepted as the best at Oxford. A later notebook entry recollects the adolescent’s struggle to keep his cheerfulness af loat, his freshly-launched hope having sunk in the world’s choppy reality: It was almost the only occasion in my life wherein I was keenly disappointed; for it was the only one upon which I felt any confident hope. I had made myself very sure of it, and the intelligence that not I, but Macdonald, was the lucky man, absolutely stupefied me. Yet I contrived, for a time, to lose all sense of my own misfortune in exultation for Burton’s success . . . The truth is, I was fea. I sang, I danced, I whistled, I leapt, I ran from room to room announcing the great tidings, and tried to persuade even myself that I cared nothing at all for my own case. But it would not do. It was bare sands with me the next day. (HLW 69–70)

He had not simply come to university with gaps in his knowledge. He had been brought up in such a peculiarly sheltered way that he lacked some of the basic skills of emotional self-management: It was not the mere loss of the prize, but the feeling or phantasy of an adverse destiny. I was as one who discovered that his familiar, to whom he has sold himself, is a deceiver. I foresaw that all my aims and hopes would

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prove frustrative and abortive; and from that time I date my downward declension, my impotence of will, and melancholy recklessness. It was the first time I sought relief from wine . . . (HLW 70)

When he won his Fellowship at Oriel College, the success seemed to Hartley to have been the result, if not of a clerical error, certainly of some sort of relaxation in the usual rigors of peer-assessment. He wrote to Poole in April 1819: Success has at length crown’d my literary labours, and I am fellow elect of Oriel. After five days strict examination, on Friday last the joyful tidings were announced that I was chosen. Nothing could have been more contrary to my expectation, for I was doubtful whether or not I should stand, and at last determined on it rather with the view of opening the way for a second trial, than coming in immediately. (HCL 22)

Strangely, Hartley felt a barrier between himself and success, and the most he felt he could hope for was “a second trial” rather than the actual prize of the Fellowship itself, “immediately.” The letter shows Hartley to have considered himself academically inferior to the other candidates: I had two rivals for the fellowship I stood for which was a close one—i.e. confined to Worcestershire and Gloucestershire men. Both had taken higher honours than myself, which certainly made the odds against me. (HCL 23)

Hartley’s lack of confidence was based on the feeling that he was out of his field. He was not, however, out of his depth: Hartley came to Merton College from the Lake Country, a youth wholly untutored in the ways of the world, and although he had entered Merton with fearful apprehensions, he seems by virtue of his conversational powers and brilliance of mind to have won the approbation not merely of his fellow undergraduates but of the college authorities as well. The atmosphere of Oriel, however, was as distinct from that of Merton as black from white. Thus Hartley was taken from a college where gaiety and easy conversation were at least condoned, and placed among a group of men noted for austerity, sobriety, and decorum. The Oriel authorities had elected Hartley probationary Fellow, not without misgivings, simply because his intellectual gifts were so unmistakable, hoping that his avowed sense of his shortcomings and his youth would aid him in adapting himself to their ideals. “His examination was so superior,” Keble had written after Hartley’s election, “that one could not make up one’s mind to reject him ‘odditatis causâ’”; but


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Keble went on to add: “One thing especially I could wish him taught, i.e., to refrain from abstract questions in conversation . . .” Hartley, too, entered on his probationary year with a conscious conviction of his deficiencies. (HCL 30–31)

Hartley’s tendency to pose “abstract” questions is significant. Writing is so often about making the abstract concrete, and one’s concrete, or physical, vocabulary is bound to be formed, and informed, by the topography in which one grew up. On one hand, Wordsworth’s Prelude (1805) contained recollections of “The Sands of Westmoreland, the Creeks and Bays / Of Cumbria’s rocky limits” (I 594–5), and Wordsworth’s anxiety about losing his grip on reality is demonstrated by the excerpt below from his note to Isabella Fenwick: I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped a wall or tree to recall myself from the abyss of idealism to the reality. At that time I was afraid of such processes. (Prelude 255 note)

On the other hand, Hartley’s boyhood strangeness had been incubated by those who looked after him. Southey had reported: The boy’s great delight is to get his father to talk metaphysics to him—few men understand him so perfectly;—and then his own incidental sayings are quite wonderful. “The pity is,” said he one day to his father, who was expressing some wonder that he was not so pleased as he expected with riding in a wheelbarrow,—“the pity is that I’se always thinking my thoughts.” (Children’s Literature 134)

He would drift into his middle age, weightless and ineffectual, marooned in the “antipodes” of his life within, as Aubrey de Vere (1814–1902) sensed when he met Hartley in his decidedly unroaring 40s: It was a white-haired apparition . . . He could scarcely be said to have walked, for he seemed with difficulty to keep his feet on the ground, as he wavered about near us with arms extended like wings. Everything that he said was strange and quaint, while perfectly unaffected, and, though always amusing, yet always represented a mind whose thoughts dwell in regions as remote as the antipodes . . . It was a strange thing to see Hartley Coleridge f luctuating about the room, now with one hand on his head, now with both arms extended like a swimmer’s. There was some element wanting in his being. He could do everything but keep his footing, and, doubtless, in

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his inner world of thought, it was easier for him to f ly than to walk, and to walk than to stand. There seemed to be no gravitating principle in him. One might have thought he needed stones in his pockets to prevent his being blown away . . . and he might, perhaps, have been more easily changed into an angel than into a simply strong man. (RADV 133–134)

The Coleridge family did experience joy—if short-lived—at Hartley’s having been elected a Fellow of Oriel College: A proud and happy day it was for me [Derwent], and for us all, when these tidings reached us. Obviously unfit for the ordinary walks of professional life, he [Hartley] had earned for himself an honourable independence, and had found, as it seemed, a position in which he could exert his peculiar talents to advantage. (Memoir lxxiii)

A letter from Hartley’s mother to Poole encapsulates the sense of triumph as shared by the family and close friends in the Lake District: He [Hartley] therefore, went to bed on Thursday night with a full determination to sleep out the ringing of the Bells which would peal to the happiness of his rivals next day; when sitting and yawning over a late breakfast, the welcome annunciation was brought in, which he thought must be only a deceitful dream, so much was he stunned by the tidings, until the succession of fees with their “imperative faces” stamped the real thing. Little William Wordsworth, on his return in the evening from school told his Mother that he never saw master [Rev Dawes] in such good humour in his life; “As soon as he got the letter about Hartley, he rose up, gave a shout, and proclaimed a holiday: the boys all huzza’d and there was such an uproar, Mother!” (HCL 22)

“But,” as Derwent was obliged to record, “a sad reverse was at hand”: At the close of his probationary year he was judged to have forfeited his Oriel fellowship, on the ground, mainly, of intemperance. Great efforts were made to reverse the decision. He wrote letters to many of the Fellows. His father went to Oxford to see and to expostulate with the Provost. It was in vain. The specific charges might have been exaggerated. Palliations and excuses might have been found for the particular instances in which they were established. A life singularly blameless in all other respects, dispositions the most amiable, principles and intentions the most upright and honourable, might be pleaded as a counterpoise in the opposite scale. It was to no purpose. The sentence might be considered severe, but it could not be said to be unjust . . . (Memoir lxxiv–lxxv)


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On May 30, 1820, the Provost and Fellows had a formal meeting and decided that they would not confirm Hartley as a Fellow. The decision was unprecedented in the history of Oriel College. The psychological damage sustained (and not just by Hartley) would be immense. In June 1820, Derwent happened to be with his father to witness his initial reaction to the bad news, which had come in the form of a letter from John Taylor Coleridge: I was with him at the time, and have never seen any human being, before or since so deeply aff licted: not as he said, by the temporal consequences of his son’s misfortune, heavy as those were, but for the moral offense which it involved. (HCL 33)

The Dean, James Endell Tyler, suggested to Hartley that he should resign immediately rather than suffer the shame of formal dismissal after the next meeting in October 1820. (HCCI 16) Hartley disappeared. The family worried. Derwent went to Oxford to find him, but heard only rumors that Hartley had left for Liverpool with a view to getting on a ship to America. The nightmare was now in full swing. STC would have remembered all too clearly that as a young man he too had bolted (from Cambridge University) to escape the shame of debt and a disappointing academic record. In 1793 he had changed his name to Silas Tomkyn Comberbache (a pseudonym somehow indicative of penitential ridiculousness) and enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons. Soon, having made a fool of himself on horseback (EV 54), he sought desperately to be discharged, and pleaded with his brother George: I became a proverb to the university for Idleness—the time, which I should have bestowed on the academic studies, I employed in dreaming out wild Schemes of impossible extrication . . . How many and how many hours have I stolen from the bitterness of Truth in these soul-enervating Reveries—in building magnificent Edifices of Happiness on some f leeting Shadow of Reality! My Affairs became more and more involved—I f led to Debauchery—f led from silent and solitary Anguish to all the uproar of senseless Mirth! Having, or imagining that I had, no stock of Happiness, to which I could look forwards, I seized the empty gratifications of the moment, and snatched at the Foam, as the Wave passed by me.—I feel a painful blush on my cheek, while I write it—but even for the Un. Scholarship, for which I affected to have read so severely, I did not read three days uninterruptedly—for the whole six weeks, that proceeded the examination, I was almost constantly intoxicated! My Brother, you shudder as you read. (STCL I 67–68)

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With difficulty, George sorted out the mess, and STC was discharged, “Insane,” in April 1794 (STCL I 76 note). No wonder now in 1820 STC was deeply upset to witness the life of the son most like him going wrong. STC wrote to Derwent: Last night . . . I screamed out but once only in my sleep, and my stomach felt but in a very slight degree sore after I woke—the exceeding order and wild Swedenborgian rationality of the Images in my Dreams, whenever I have been in any great aff liction, so that they haunt me for days—and the odd circumstance that these dreams are always accompanied with profuse weeping in my sleep towards morning, and probably not long before I wake—for my pillow is often quite wet: (or the screaming fits take place in the first sleep, and from dreams that are either frightful or mere imageless sensation of affright and leave no traces)—these are problems which I encourage myself in proposing and trying to solve, were it only to divert my attention from the occasion of them. So surely if Hartley knew or believed that I love him & linger after him as I do and ever have done, he would have come to me . . . Oh! if he knew how much I feel with him as well as how much I suffer for him, he could not so forget that he has a most affectionate Friend as well as Father in—S.T. Coleridge. (STCL V 85)

Eventually, Derwent found Hartley hiding with friends in Oxford, and managed to persuade him to met his father at Highgate by mid-July, 1820. A letter to his father dated September 1820 illustrates that Hartley’s decision to “plead . . . guilty” (HCL 38) to the charge of intemperance had turned out to be even more damaging: I pleaded guilty—said I relied on the mercy of the College—whereby I meant, not the mercy which is contrary to justice, but that which takes a liberal and hopeful view of errors, which may be merely accidental, and at [any] rate cannot be considered in a very heinous light, as acts, tho’ fearful in truth if taken as symptoms of a habit . . . Throughout the whole I was haunted with the fear of owning to less than the truth—of not representing myself in colours black enough. I measured myself by the strictest standard, and as such I expected they would have been taken. I had always understood that Oriel fellows made Xtian perfection their rule and aim, and never suspected they would employ the overf lowings of my contrition as a witness against me. (HCL 38–40)

Still unskilled at self-preservation after his years at university, Hartley had looked for the kindness of strangers, only to waste his finer sensibilities. As Richard Holmes says: Hartley’s previous college, Merton, was celebrated for its laxities. But Oriel was a special case: its tone was tea-drinking and austere, its Fellows’


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Common Room Spartan and intellectually formidable, and its membership included John Keble and J.H. Newman (future founders of the Oxford Movement) and Thomas Arnold, soon to become the charismatic headmaster of Rugby school. Hartley had fallen among saints, and they were unsparing in their righteousness. (DR 514)

Unlike Hartley’s lenient family circle, his accusers at Oriel were tone deaf when it came to his intricate admission of partial guilt. Whereas young Hartley’s “sweet temper [had] made [Dorothy Wordsworth] forgive him everything” (DR 81), his doom was sealed in the exchange and receive of fusty academia, because he was incapable of impersonating the person he was expected to be. As Fran Carlock Stephens has said: This group of letters, though of questionable literary value, sheds a great deal of light on the characters of the men involved and on the temper of the times. The letters of the Oriel party are unrelentingly correct, pious, and sententious; those of the Samuel Taylor Coleridge party full of love and understanding of Hartley. (HCCI 16)

Hartley’s own protestations to his father were as wide-eyed as one might expect from the son of the man who imagined the Mariner: You know I was placed, by no choice of my own, in a College not famous for sobriety or regularity, without acquaintance with the world, without introductions, and after the first term, without any to guide or caution me. It is true, William Hart [Coleridge] had introduced me to Keble and Tyler, but it is also true, that neither of them thought proper to look after me, or give me either advice or warning, which, considering the friendship professed by the former for my family, might to one unacquainted with Oxford, seem rather extraordinary. At all events I confess I felt it so; nothing was more to my wish, than to have had some one among the superiors of the University, interested for me, whose eye might have kept me clear of folly—and the consciousness of this, contributed in no small degree to the freedom, with which I afterwards gave my society to Undergraduates, which has been emphatically call’d “keeping low company.” (HCL 37–38)

The fact that the letter (quoted below) that Hartley sent to the Provost and Fellows of Oriel College, in October 1820, is in his father’s handwriting typifies Hartley’s utter failure to simulate some other kind of creature than a country child who was growing up into a poet: I here . . . protest against the charge of frequent acts of Intoxication, if by the word frequent more than two or at the utmost three single instances be meant; and declare that I am permitted by my conscience to admit the truth

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even of so many, only as far as by intoxication a culpable degree of Intemperance be understood, and not if by intoxication a temporary deprivation of my mental and bodily faculties, such as we commonly mean to express when we say that a man is thoroughly drunk, i.e. either does not know what he is doing or saying, or will be incapable of recollecting it on the return of sobriety; or (recollecting the same, or having had it brought to his recollection and knowledge) disclaims what he has said or done; as said or done in the suspension of his judgement and moral will . . . (HCL 45–46)

The Coleridges’ attempt to create some rhetorical wriggle room around the reality of the conduct that led to the predicament is informative. One might imagine the agonizing conversations between father and son, in preparation for drafting the above letter. The best response the Coleridge campaign could elicit from the Oxford authorities was that they would offer Hartley £300 as a compensation. With Hartley’s full agreement, STC refused to accept the money. STC tried again to have Hartley reinstated, but despite strenuous efforts— including a long letter to, and two interviews with, the Provost, Dr Edward Copleston (on October 15 in Oxford, and on October 19 in London)—the decision would stand. Hartley’s life was in tatters. Thankfully, the Coleridges’ capacity to look out for each other was intact. A year later, it would come to light that John Taylor Coleridge had shrewdly stayed in touch with the least severe Oriel Fellow, John Keble, and eventually collected the £300 consolation for his cousin. Hartley would quietly accept the money, and give it to his mother, in January 1823. After losing his Fellowship, the effect on poor Hartley was life-long. Never particularly sure of himself . . . he always felt himself to be physically inferior to other men, and incapable of maintaining a good position . . . (Memoir lxxvii)

He stayed for a while with the Montagus in London, during which time his mother was at a loss as to what he could do, or, more to the point, what could be done for him: Poor H. is preparing a volume of Poems for the press, but I fear is at a loss for a publisher; he talks of writing for present support, but what, and how, Alas, I know [not]. It is impossible for me to have any peace of mind until he is in a regular way of providing for himself. (HCL 71)

In London, in order to survive at all, Hartley had to pretend to be some other person or perish. He had now, so he thought, to make himself into


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something other than himself, for money-making purposes, since the failed poet (and, now, on top of that, the failed academic) could not hope to survive as such, but only by the help of whatever other self he could extemporize. Hartley’s mother would never have any “peace of mind” when it came to thinking about “Poor H.” In London, he worked spasmodically on (and, of course, never completed) his most ambitious poem, “Prometheus.” He also contributed a series of essays—“Parties in Poetry” (November 1821), “Mythology” (February 1822), “Black Cats” (March 1822), “On Brevity” (April 1822), and “Melancholy” (September 1822)—to the London Magazine. His incurably irregular professional habits made it obvious to all who knew him that he would never make enough money to live in London. His inability to resist the temptation of alcohol only made things worse. His resolve to play the writer in London would soon crumble. His attempts at insouciance before his inevitable, humiliating homecoming make sobering reading: The wish to be popular infers at least a wish to be intelligible to the generality of mankind, and induces a writer to consult general sympathies, the effect of which wish on the mind of genius, will be the repressing of individualities, over-refinement, and self-indulgence, and a praedominance of the universal. For myself, I cannot pretend to an extraordinary reverence for that same public, that huge shadow cast by a multitude of tiny bodies, that cloud composed of various exhalations, where the fragrance of roses is interpenetrated with the vapour of Dunghills, but then, I respect their money and their patronage—and that the length of loyalty. Prometheus is in a great state of forwardness. He will extend over about 700 lines. (HCL 64–65)

“Prometheus,” which was to be Hartley’s major poetic work, establishing his presence as a significant literary talent, would remain “A Fragment” (HCPW 293) of 622 lines, including the conclusion (HCL 65). In losing the Oriel Fellowship, Hartley had been stung most severely. He must have known during his time in London that the poison would never really leave his system. In September 1820, he wrote to his father: I do not disguise my own feeling that I have been wrong’d, illiberally, ungentlemanly treated, but I am a prejudiced judge—speaking of men I cannot pretend ever to have loved, though I highly esteemed and revered them—who have certainly done me almost as much harm as they could . . . (HCL 37)

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Hartley had been “wrong’d” and, as Griggs has pointed out, the Oriel authorities may have “felt that their course of action was exceptionally severe.” Nevertheless, “no other decision was possible” for them (HCL 36). Hartley’s guilt about his own part in the loss of his Fellowship manifested itself in a way that has some curious parallels with STC’s guilt about plagiarism. The poem, “The Reproof and Reply” (written in 1823, and published in 1834), is STC’s attempt to develop a self-protective sense of humor around the very uncomfortable personal reality that he was a plagiarist.1 He prefixed the poem with the motto: “I expect no sense worth listening to, from the man who never does talk nonsense” (STCPW 441). Hartley, guilt-ridden about his behavior that led to the loss of his Fellowship, wrote to Derwent in August 1821: “I am thoroughly convinced that there is nothing so wholesome for mind and body, as talking Nonsense” (HCL 68). Hartley would develop the idea in the same letter, as if taking advantage of the opportunity to take refuge in an emergent verbal sanctuary—just as, in his childhood, he had often buried himself among the thickets of the kitchen garden in Keswick, in order to escape the censure of his father: Writing it [nonsense] is not half so good [as talking it]—it’s like sending Sal volatile by the wagon with the cork out, but situated as we are, what can one do better? Nonsense, however, should never be written except to one’s very intimate friends—good folks, whose careful memories can supply the proper looks and tones, and whose imaginations can restore our stalest good thing[s] to their original freshness. Even a Pun does not look well on paper—it’s so like deliberate villainy, and then its orthographical imperfections are so open to the gaze of a censorious world . . . (HCL 68–69)

Taking stock of how his own sense of humor has evolved, Hartley reminds his brother that the funniest things are more often to be found in family memories than in books: I never laugh now at Hogarth, or Fielding, or Cervantes—or if I do, it is at their meanest jokes—unless in sympathy with others. But at our old Funny things I can laugh by myself for an hour together—nay, they furnish me with a reservoir of laughter for all needful occasions. If ever any of those jokes, “which must be laugh’d at” are obtruded upon me, I have but to recall the image of you, kicking about the stone in my Aunt’s Court, and complaining how you did hurt yourself—(I can hardly write for thinking of it) and I gratify the Joker to the very altitude of his ambition. (HCL 69–70)


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Wordsworth had been unable to discover the source of his creative power until “mellower years.. br[ought] a riper mind / And clearer insight” (Prelude I 237–238). The discovery had proved worth the wait, empowering Wordsworth to produce his definitive poem: Those recollected hours that have the charm Of visionary things, the lovely forms And sweet sensations that throw back our life And almost make our Infancy itself A visible scene, on which the sun is shining. (Prelude I 660–3)

Hartley was unable to exploit his own (smaller) discovery concerning the creative power in humor: But—funny thing, that son and heir of laughter, which never grows old, and may be as good a hundred years hence, as at the moment of utterance, alas—alas—Pen and Ink are its destruction . . . (HCL 69)

Even Hartley’s little verbal sanctuary itself registers the tremors of a realization—despite having been uncompetitive as a child, he could not help now but feel anxious about his inability to transmit the full value of his personality via the printed page. The anxiety would permeate Hartley’s writings, and sometimes, as in the following example from a letter to Derwent in 1826, it would haunt his parentheses like the lingering spirit of shame: “Seriously, my dear Derwent, (alas, how hard it is for a wounded and self-reproaching spirit to be serious) . . .” (HCL 90). Hartley would leave London in 1822 (never to see his father again). STC had in the meantime seen to it that Hartley could at least return to a regular job in the Lake District. He had written Hartley’s fond old schoolmaster, Rev Dawes, a remarkable letter, which forms a sort of apologia for Hartley’s peculiarities. The letter is worth quoting at length because it marks out so persuasively the natural evolution of Hartley’s profound recalcitrance: Giving no trouble to any one—to no one opposing himself—happy from his earliest infancy, “a spirit of Joy dancing on an aspen Leaf ”—to what better can I appeal than to Mr. Wordsworth’s own beautiful lines addressed to H.C. six years old? From the hour, he left the nurses’ arm, Love followed him like his Shadow. All, all, among whom he lived, all who saw him themselves, were delighted with him—in nothing requisite for his age, was he backward—and what was my fault? That I did not, unadvised and

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without a hint from any one of my friends or acquaintances, interrupt his quiet untroublesome enjoyment by forcing him to sit still, and inventing occasions of trying his obedience—that I did not without and against all present reason, and at the certainty of appearing cruel, and arbitrary not only to the child but to all with whom he lived, interrupt his little comforts, and sting him into a will of resistance to my will, in order that I might make opportunities of crushing it? Whether after all that has occurred, which surely it was no crime not to have foreseen at a time when a Foreboding of a less sombre character was passionately retracted, as . . . as “vain and causeless Melancholy”—whether I should act thus, were it all to come over again, I am more than doubtful . . . Whatever else has been said—how far truly, and how far calumniously, I humbly leave it to my merciful God and Redeemer to determine for me—it will not surely be said, that the two Lads were left friendless, or under the protection of Friends incompetent, or whom I dared believe myself permitted to apprehend unwilling, to observe their goings-on, during their holidays or holiday-tides. Since the time of Hartley’s first arrival at Calne [in Wiltshire], to the present day I am not conscious of having failed in any point of duty, or admonition, persuasion, intreaty, warning, or even (tho’ ever reluctantly, I grant) of—parental injunction—and of repeating the same whenever it could be done without the almost certain consequence of baff ling the end in view . . . I appeal to God and to their own Consciences and to all good men who have observed my conduct towards them whether I have aught to condemn myself for, except perhaps a too delicate manner of applying their affections and understandings and moral senses—and by which, it is to be feared, I have in Hartley’s case unwittingly fostered that cowardice as to mental pain which forms the one of the two calamitous defects in his disposition . . . But let it be, that I am rightly reproached for my negligence in withstanding and taming his Self-will—yet is this the main Root of the Evil? I could almost say—would to God, it were! for then I should have more Hope. But alas! it is the absence of a Self, it is the want or Torpor of Will, that is the mortal Sickness of Hartley’s Being, and has been, for good and for evil, his character—his moral Idiocy—from his earliest Childhood—Yea and hard it is for me to determine which is the worse—morally considered, I mean: the selfishness from the want or defect of a manly Self-love, or the Selfishness that springs out of the excess of a worldly Self-interest. In the eye of a Christian and a Philosopher, it is difficult to say, which of the two appears the greater deformity, the relationless, unconjugated, and intransitive Verb Impersonal with neither Subject nor Object, neither governed or governing, or the narrow proud Egotism, with neither Thou or They except as its Instruments or Involutes. Prudentially, however, and in regard to the supposed good and evil of this Life, the balance is woefully against the former, both because the Individuals so characterized are beyond comparison the smaller number, and because they are sure to meet with their bitterest enemies in the latter. Especially, if the poor dreamy Mortals chance to be amiable in other


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respects and to be distinguished by more than usual Talents and Acquirements. Now this, my dear Sir! is precisely the case with poor Hartley. He has neither the resentment, the ambition, nor the Self-love of a man—and for this very reason he is too often as selfish as a Beast—and as unwitting of his own Selfishness. With this is connected his want of a salient point, self-acting principle of Volition—and from this, again, arises his shrinking from, his shurking, whatever requires and demands the exertion of this inward power, his cowardice as to mental pain, and the procrastination consequent on these His occasional wilfulness results from his weakness of will aided indeed, now and then, by the Sense of his intellectual Superiority and by the Sophistry which his ingenuity supplies and which is in fact the brief valiancy of Self-despondence. Such is the truth and the fact as to Hartley—a truth, I have neither extenuated nor sought to palliate. But equally true it is, that he is innocent, most kindly natured, exceedingly good-tempered, in the management and instruction of children excels any young man, I ever knew; and before God I say it, he has not to my knowledge a single vicious inclination—tho’ from absence and nervousness he needs to be guarded against filling his wine-glass too often . . . Whatever else is to be done or prevented, London he must not live in—the number of young men who will seek his company to be amused, his own want of pride, and the opportunity of living or imagining rather that he can live from hand to mouth by writing for Magazines, etc.—these are Ruin for him. I have but one remark to make— That of all the Waifs, I ever knew, Hartley is the least likely and the least calculated to lead any human Being astray by his example. He may exhibit a warning—but assuredly he never will afford an inducement. (HCL 72–74)

Hartley had gone even beyond making himself unemployable and downwardly mobile. The closing couple of sentences of the above passage seem prescient: no nineteenth-century writer would wish to emulate Hartley, despite the existence of a reading-public whose collective imagination involuntarily dilated in other writers’ Romantic gloom. (Think of the sombre mood of Sir Walter Scott’s hugely popular Marmion [1808], or the astonishing success of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Think of some of the publications in 1820, the year it all went wrong for Hartley at Oxford: Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound; Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Hyperion; Scott’s The Monastery and the Abbot; and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.) At the same time he wrote to Dawes, STC also wrote to Hartley: You have tried—nay, that is scarcely true; but you have made the experiment of trying—to maintain yourself by writing for the Press—and the result—I do not know what conclusion you have drawn from it—has been such as makes me shrink, and sink away inwardly, from the thought of a second trial. A domestic Tutorship seems out of all question: and even if by

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any sacrifice of my political free-agency I could—which I have no reason to believe that I possess, or could obtain interest enough to do—procure you any situation abroad—you would not like it or set about to suit yourself for it. What remains but something of the School kind? If you have thought of anything else, let me know it . . . If anything tries your temper here you ought to be glad of it, as an opportunity of disciplining it for severer trials, which . . . you will meet with at Keswick, without the greatest caution on your part. To Mr. Dawes exclusively you must look and apply yourself— God bless you! While I live I will do what I can—what and whether I can must in the main depend on yourself, not on your affectionate Father, S.T. COLERIDGE. (HCL 74)

The above letter to Hartley is different from the letter to the 10-year-old boy in 1807 in that STC now makes no attempt to improve Hartley’s tablemanners or social skills. Instead, STC makes a desperate effort to get his troubled, and troubling, son to move away from a city in which he looks unlikely to survive, let alone succeed. Deep must have been the Coleridge family’s shared sigh of relief when Hartley finally agreed to go back to Ambleside to assist his old schoolmaster, Rev Dawes, with his teaching. At Ambleside, Hartley would be quite unable to conduct himself in a consistently authoritative manner with the more boisterous boys. If the stuffy Oriel Fellows had had little time to spare for their probationary colleague’s peculiarities, Hartley was just as unlikely to hit it off with a group of gangly teenagers full of joie de vivre. Griggs has suggested continuity in Hartley the scholar and Hartley the teacher: As at college he had shown himself unable to absorb knowledge in the usual manner, so in teaching he could bind himself to no methods. He would, he could, exercise no discipline; and the boys were consequently his master, not he theirs. He loved to peruse quaint old classics in the seclusion of his room, not in the presence of unmanageable youngsters. (HLW 118)

Dorothy Wordsworth said he was “liked by his scholars,” but that “the biggest address him ‘Hartley’! This will give you an idea of the nature of the discipline exercised by him” (Later Years I 162). If his career as a schoolteacher failed to fill his life with joy, it did for a time at least provide him with a livelihood. He even managed the school himself, successfully, for a while after Dawes’s retirement (HLW 120), and went into partnership with a Mr Stuart, but by about 1827, the school had to close because of the insufficient intake of students. Derwent explained: Mr. Stuart, relying on the name and talent of his new associate, took a large house, and endeavoured to establish a boarding school on a considerable


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scale. For the failure of this scheme my brother was not exclusively, or even mainly, responsible. It was owing to other causes, with which he had had no connexion. (Memoir xcviii)

The loss of his livelihood was not his fault this time, but the vestiges of his self-confidence took a battering. With two brief exceptions, he would not work regularly again. Irregularity would continue to characterize his writing habits, not to mention his temperance. STC would end his days having seen in his son those most troublesome elements of his own character writ large: Can anything be more dreadful than the thought that an innocent child has inherited from you a disease or a weakness, the penalty in yourself of sin or want of caution? (HLW 133)

After STC’s death in 1834, Hartley was supposed to write a long and glowing tribute to his father’s genius, in the shape of an essay introductory to the Biographia Literaria (1817). Hartley repeatedly promised that he would eventually complete the essay. He would not complete it. Twelve years after his father’s death, Hartley was still promising to deliver the essay, but by then Wordsworth had long established that the disappointing of expectations was the Coleridgean stock-in-trade: Poor fellow! he has no resolve; in fact, nothing that can be called rational will or command of himself as to what he will do or not do; of course setting aside the fundamental obligations of morality. (HLW 141)

As it has turned out, Hartley has left his tribute to his father, but it is like aventurine, in that the reader may find it by chance in Hartley’s letters For me, I can only hope that no painful thought of me adulterated the final out gushing of his spirit, that if he breathed a prayer for me, it was a prayer of comfortable love, foreseeing, in its intensity, its own effect. . . . I never forgot him—no, Derwent, I have forgot myself—too often— but I never forgot my father, and now—if his beautified spirit be permitted to peruse the Day book of the Recording Angel, to contemplate the memory of God which forgets nothing . . . then will he know that among my many sins, I was not one that I loved him not; and wherever the final bolt of judgement may drive me, it will not be into the frozen region of sons that loved not their fathers. (HCL 162–163)

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and in his finished works My revered father, in a lecture which I shall never forget, with an eloquence of which the Notes published in his Remains convey as imperfect an impression as the score of Handel’s Messiah upon paper compared to the Messiah sounding in multitudinous unison of voices and instruments beneath the high embowered roof of some hallowed Minster, contrasted the calm, patriotic, constitutional loyalty of Shakespeare, with the ultraroyalism of Fletcher on the one hand, and the captious whiggism of Massinger on the other. (DWMF xxxvi)

but not unified as a formal statement. Hartley seems to have felt that writing—or at any rate his writing— should f lower from an immediate impulse toward self-expression or communication, and should wither with the passing of the impulse. He seems to have determined that all he would produce should spring directly from the mysterious, irrational source of power within him. Such feelings put him at odds with society, his friends and, eventually, his family. The feelings even put him at odds with himself, because part of him wished to emulate the industriousness of a Southey or a Wordsworth. At the age of 33, in 1829, Hartley would tell his mother: “the happiness of internal quiet I cannot enjoy” (HCL 103). Meantime, in 1821, he would elucidate for Derwent’s benefit his own “wish [as a student] to conquer neutralized by a fear of contending,” “the uncertainty of [his] prospects,” which “cast a gloom on what was before [him],” and his “not lov[ing] to dwell in the future, and gradual . . . reconcil[iation] to present scenes, which at first were painful to [him]” (HCL 61). Just as the Wedgwood brothers had decided in 1798, without exhaustive investigation, that STC was morally fit to advise humanity and would require £150 per year to do so, so the authorities at Oriel College, Oxford, had initially assumed, with a similar lack of rigor, Hartley’s provisional suitability as a Fellow. Hartley explained to Derwent: You will scarcely believe that after the first f lush of success, I was seized with uneasy melancholy—triste augurium—a feeling that I was among strangers, and a suspicion, not yet wholly removed, that my election arose in great measure from the failure of my county opponents, and the vague appearance of Talent, rather than from that hearty conviction of my eligibility . . . (HCL 61–62)

The idea that STC’s “Rime” and firstborn son are interconnected may at first seem unhelpfully experimental, yet it had occurred to STC himself


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as he drafted a letter to Dr Copleston, saying that the news of Hartley’s dismissal had burst upon me at once and irrevocably like a Squall from a Fogbank in which the secure Mariner had been fancying images of shore and Coastland, all calm and not a sail in reef. (STCL V 108)

However, as Holmes says, STC “then crossed this passage out, as too obvious a reference to his own most famous poem” (DR 516). Even so, the above letter from Hartley to Derwent reveals Hartley’s glances back at his own “lonely road” and “frightful fiend[s],” suggesting that STC was not the only one to have metaphorically slain an Albatross. The letter continues: And to tell the truth, I did not much like the state of a probationer, or submit as I ought to have done to a yoke of observances, which I sincerely think very absurd, and which I hoped I had escaped by being made a Fellow. I knew, I felt that I was subjected to a kind of espionage, and could feel no confidence in men who were watching me . . . The natural effect of all this on my mind was a tendency to resistance, and I was not bold enough to fight, or prudent enough to make peace. I was induced to f ly, to shun the enquiring eyes which I ought to have met bravely, and to vent my chagrin in certain impotent, but I dare say not forgotten threats, of great reformations to take place in the College and the University when my unripe fortunes came of age. The complex effect of all this discontent and imprudence was, of course, self-reproach, inconsistency, quickly form’d and quickly broken resolutions, just enough caution to lose my reputation for frankness, increasing dread of my consocii—incapability of proceeding on any fixt plan, and an extreme carelessness whenever the painful restraint was removed. You know the consequences. (HCL 62)

One can imagine the unconventionally reared Derwent Coleridge at the feisty age of 21, with his good looks and quick (STCL II 1015) intellect, just about to risk squandering (like his father and elder brother before him) his opportunity to do very well at St Johns College, Oxford. One can imagine “A sadder and a wiser” Derwent having perceived in his brother’s epistle the implications for his own developing circumstances. Hartley’s confession of his own “ghastly aventure” on the treacherous sea of academia is Mariner-like in the amount of feeling it so economically conveys. From the vantage point of his (inherited) personalizing poetic imagination, Hartley was uniquely equipped to stun rather than lecture his brother into tighter self-management at a crucial early stage of his

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career. Compare Hartley’s counselling skill with his father’s fingerwagging. STC, by now (at 49) the much celebrated—and criticized— lecturer, wrote to Derwent in May 1821: We are quite satisfied that you both do and do without, to the utmost of your power—and God forbid that by hook or crook you shall be enabled to make both ends meet, without incurring any Cambridge Debt—the very thought of which agitates me . . .

STC continued, expressing his hope that Derwent would leave Cambridge with an honourable character, as a Man, with a respectable degree . . . and with all the several faculties of your mind . . . cultivated in symmetry . . . You may be a Tutor in a wealthy or noble family—you may (and I truly hope, will) be a Clergyman—a man of Letters—a Secretary to a public man . . . In short do you mean to find your World in the University, or to make use of the University as a stepping stone to the World?

The letter concludes on the urgent note of advice with which it would fain have started: I need not say, my dear Derwent! that if I had reason to suppose you inclined to scatter the stream of your Power and Time in a multiplicity of Channels, or to be dallying with the Desultories, which is the sad case with Hartley, my advice would be as different as the source of my anxiety. (UC 30)

Like any pontiff or presbyter, STC was ready to instruct Derwent, just as he had instructed the 10-year-old Hartley in 1807. He wrote to Derwent on January 11, 1822: You cannot do without intermissions of Study, without recreation and such as society only can afford you—?—Be it so! But is dissipation of mind and spirit the fit recreation of a Student? Or not rather the fever fit, of which your Studies are likely to be the cold, feeble and languid Intermittents? . . . But extra-academic Society Concerts, Balls—Dressing, and an hour and a half or two Hours not seldom devoted to so respectable a purpose—O God!— even the disappointment as to your success in the University, mortifying as I feel it, arising from such causes and morally ominous as it becomes in your particular case and with the claims, that you must recognize on your exertions, is not the worst. This accursed Coxcombry . . . sends a ferment into the very Life-blood of a young man’s Sense and Genius—and ends in a schirrus of the Heart. (UC 33–34)

One might wish to turn away for a moment’s relief from the spectacle of the conservative parent aff licted—again—by the dread of a son’s failure.


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How different is the tone of the above letter from STC’s public lectures some 24 years earlier. One thinks of William Hazlitt’s (1778–1830) recollection of STC’s rousing inaugural sermon, in January 1798: . . . the organ was playing the 100th psalm, and, when it was done, Mr Coleridge rose and gave out his text, “And he went up into the mountain to pray, HIMSELF, ALONE.” As he gave out his text, his voice “rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes,” and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have f loated in solemn silence through the universe . . . The preacher [STC] then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war; upon church and state—not their alliance, but their separation—on the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had “inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore.” He made a poetical and pastoral excursion,— and to shew the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his f lock, “as though he should never be old,” and the same poor country lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the loathsome finery of the profession of blood. (Selected Writings 212–3)

Somewhere between the younger STC’s sermon in Shrewsbury, and the middle-aged STC’s sermonizing to his sons, his “power of vocalization which fascinate[d] Hazlitt” (DSL 200) deteriorated. STC felt incapable of giving permanent expression to his genius, but in his middle age he was parodying himself, and in doing so he was betraying his anxiety related to how the Zeitgeist was pushing all that he embodied to one side. Hazlitt’s authoritative collection of pen-portraits, Spirit of the Age (1825), would contain the essay, “Mr. Coleridge,” which characterizes STC as a talker, not a doer, and therefore as the spokesman for a mode of literary life soon to be out of date. Later in the nineteenth century, a more fully resigned Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) would judiciously formulate what it meant to be a writer (or, indeed, alive at all) in the Victorian era: Well, well. It is best to be up and doing, The world has no use for one today Who eyes things thus—no aim pursuing! (Selected Poetry 65)

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There were fortunes to be made and trains to be caught. The Victorian reading-public’s preference for finished products over fragments made the general preference for, say, Wordsworth or Alfred Tennyson (1809– 1892) over STC inevitable. The boundary between STC the talker and STC the writer—which Hazlitt defined so damningly—would not be widely perceived as commendable until well into the twentieth century, after STC’s personal notebooks had emerged in their entirety (thanks to Kathleen Coburn), representing the nebulous inner life. Anthony Harding has said that [S.T.] Coleridge’s Notebooks constitute a vast and fecund but (by Kathleen Coburn’s own admission) desperately chaotic resource for the study of an era, and the “working papers” of one of its most prolific thinkers.2

Hartley inherited his father’s intuitive and tenuous understanding of what pleasure, and anguish, it is to exist. With complete empathy for his father’s gift, Hartley said: Dear papa has often said things which he would not himself have published: and I have heard him utter opinions both in Religion and in Politics not very easy to reconcile with what he has published. (HCL 174)

STC had told Poole in 1801 that he was soon going to be able to evolve all the five senses, that is, to deduce from them one sense, & to state their growth, & the cause of their difference—& in this evolvement to solve the process of Life and Consciousness. (STCL II 706)

But he would not. How could he? How could anyone “solve” such a “process,” if it may with justice be called such? Like his father, Hartley wished to know what life is and what it is for; and, like his father, he intuited the necessity of remembering at all times that philosophical questions are much more than merely academically, or merely intellectually, significant, and that the writings left behind in the pursuit of truth will make demands on readers similar to the demands made on the poet himself. Through the writings he left behind, Hartley seems to summon the reader’s emotions to an understanding—“the unknown joy, which knowing kills” (HCPW 3)—and sing about it with sacred care, rather than pursue it via exasperating digressions (like his father sometimes did), or explicate it with deadening knowingness (like Wordsworth sometimes did). The texture of the world was, for S.T. and Hartley Coleridge, painful and inadequate. People noticed how


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ill-equipped they both were. Poole formed the following first impression of STC: He speaks with much elegance and energy, and with uncommon facility, but he, as generally happens to men of his class, feels the justice of Providence in the want of those inferior abilities which are necessary to the rational discharge of the common duties of life. (Poole I 97)

Southey would say that at the age of 16 Hartley was all beard and eyes,—and as odd and extraordinary as ever he was, with a very good disposition, but with ways and tendencies which will neither be to his own happiness nor to the comfort of anyone connected with him. (HLW 62)

STC would say of himself: “By what I have effected, am I to be judged by my fellow men, what I could have done, is a question for my own conscience.” Hartley would say: For I have lost the race I never ran: A rathe December blights my lagging May; And still I am a child, tho’ I be old, Time is my debtor for my years untold. (HCPW 7)

Some critics3 have considered the above sonnet, “Long time a child,” to be a justly limiting snapshot of Hartley the failure, surveying the disordered state of his accounts; as Hartley in a nutshell, but no longer with the potential to count himself a king of infinite space. For the modern reader, with the inf luence in mind of Colin Wilson’s book, The Outsider (1956)—that rationalization of the psychological dislocation so characteristic of Western creative thinking into a coherent theory of alienation—a reconsideration of Hartley’s marginal status is long overdue. The popular philosopher, Alain De Botton, has written Status Anxiety (2004), amongst many pages of which he discusses the problem of the outsider—the person too clever to fit into everyday society and accept the jobs that other people do, but not focussed enough to be a scientist or an artist and create his own niche. De Botton understands that many of the so-called “losers” of modern life feel that they are losing races they are not running. One of the main reasons they are not running those races is that they find them ugly and peopled with unpleasant participants: the physiognomy of the individual on the make

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is not normally beautiful to behold, and the thought of mingling and jostling with a number of such creatures on a daily basis will at best sober (and at worst depress) the sensitive young person about to embark on his or her career. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) would rarely show his enthusiasm for gregariousness to be anything more than exceptionally discreet. In writing that remains engagingly suave and astringent, Schopenhauer declared himself the least optimistic networker: Now, to be a useful member of society, one must do two things: firstly, what everyone is expected to do everywhere; and, secondly, what one’s own particular position in the world demands and requires. But a man soon discovers that everything depends upon his being useful, not in his own opinion, but in the opinion of others; and so he tries his best to make that favourable impression upon the world, to which he attaches such a high value. (“The Wisdom of Life,” Chapter IV, Section iv, Essays From the Parerga and Paralipomena)

To run, and win, the race, one must manage to impress those concerned with one’s unambiguous clearness of goal; if the race happens to be in pursuit of, say, a permanent academic position, one must acquire enough social and academic tact not to wrong-foot oneself, but to take in one’s stride, for example, dealing with the psychic cost involved in parrying and distributing throughout the workplace the various counterpointing moods of the other ambitious individuals. When Hartley remembered having offered himself for election as a candidate for the Oriel Fellowship, he gave utterance to something that many individuals have since felt when applying for a job in, say, civil-service middle-management. On “winning” such a position, one may feel (and may attempt to suppress the feeling) that one is colluding in one’s own mediocrity, and sheltering oneself from the real energies of life: And indeed, from the first moment that I conceived the purpose of offering myself as Candidate, I felt that I was not consulting my own happiness. But duty, vanity, and the fear of being shipped off to Brazil—determined me on the Trial. (HCL 61)

When Griggs said “Hartley felt he was nothing; but he did not hesitate to thrust forward his own individual point of view” (HLW 101), he pointed out a paradox in Hartley peculiar to the modern outsider. Some inner being, thirsting for experience and for self-knowledge, was able to enter


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into every situation and emotion, while as yet remaining itself cloud-like and without personal identity: WHAT is the life of man? From first to last, Its only substance, the unbeing past! (HCPW 73)

Unlike the later Imagist poets—such as T.E. Hulme (1883–1917), F.S. Flint (1885–1960), and Amy Lowell (1874–1925)—Hartley kept his continuity of voice; but, like them, he seems to have realized that keeping the continuity of voice entailed his hanging on to something illusory, since mind itself was illusory: So man delights in the wide waste of time, The tide of moments ebbing as they f low, To set his land-marks; and recording names, Pavilions of the pausing memory, Historic pillars, quaintly sculptured o’er With hieroglyphics of the heart. (HCPW 97)

In grasping that life is a disputable mirage, yet at the same time holding on to the mirage, Hartley became a poet of quirky and compelling originality, “though he was often regarded as a sort of superior being, left perfectly helpless, in a world unsuited to him” (Memoir cxxx). If, in the Wordsworthian sense, Hartley entered the world “trailing clouds of glory,” then simultaneously, in the Coleridgean sense, he often fancied he could detect the fumes of his secret self coming through the cracks in his character: “No man believes in Heaven till he finds something in himself that demands it, or in Hell, till he finds something in himself that deserves it” (HLW 163). Sometimes Hartley seemed to allow his poems to form and precipitate like little lyrical teardrops, as causeless, incomprehensible, and truly obscure as the innocence of a newborn baby: To see thee sleeping on thy mother’s breast, It were indeed a lovely sight to see— Who would believe that restless sin can be In the same world that holds such sinless rest? (HCPW 68)

Yet babies grow eventually into “adulthood,” having been molded and given “meaning” first by their families, and later by the world. They

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eventually become strapping ploughboys, or doctors of philosophy, or inky-fingered misfits. Though undeceived by the outward show of the world, Hartley had the additional wisdom not to despise society’s conventional arrangements related to the production of ploughboys, doctors of philosophy, and misfits. Everything has its place: But who may count with microscopic eye The multitudes of lives, that gleam and f lash Behind the sounding keel, and multiply In myriad millions, when the white oars dash, Through waves electric, or at stillest night Spread round the bark becalm’d their milky white? (Children’s Literature 138–9)

Or has everything its place? What about the “Pure, precious drop of dear mortality” (HCPW 67) that every individual human that has ever lived has first been as an infant—“Unconscious witness to the promised birth / Of perfect good, that may not grow on earth” (HCPW 67)? Hartley also knew the validity of the belief that much does not have its place: “Nor to be computed by the worldly worth / And stated limits of mortality” (HCPW 67). Wanting to have faith, but wary of nurturing his “Fond ignorance” (HCPW 68) in a “work-day” world of “worldly care” and “hard-eyed thrift” (HCPW 69), Hartley sometimes felt his spirit “Sinking beneath the base control / Of mindless chance” (HCPW 84). Was Hartley (and, for that matter, is any stone, or tree, or reader of this book) a random coalescence of atoms, or a (Berkeleian) construct of mind? He could not resolve the problem in him of antagonistic answers to life’s riddle. In a strangely modern (Modernist?) way, he often worked the riddle too obliquely to be taken seriously by inf luential, taxonomically rigorous readers, to whom he would have seemed to be engaging in what twentieth-century psychologists would call displacement activity. His family had wanted him to become a scholar, living a life of learned ease in the firelit studies and libraries of Oxford. Instead, they witnessed him become an alcoholic, and a Lakeland recluse. What Hartley himself witnessed with his imagination is more fascinating: in one instance, he could become a comically violent donkey (HLW 169); in another instance, he could become an embarrassing, nameless insect (Memoir cxlii). He could have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the f loors of silent seas. Pursuing the metaphor, the great vessels of twentieth-century literary criticism (their hulls to become so barnacle-encrusted) would glide far above him, not knowing he was there.


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Notes 1. Andrew Keanie, “Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel,” Essays In Criticism 56.1 2006. 2. “Coleridge’s Notebooks: Manuscript to Print to Database,” The Coleridge Bulletin, New Series 24, Winter 2004, 10. 3. Including Fran Carlock Stephens (HCCI 20–21) and Judith Plotz (RVC 191).

*

*

*

Leeds Thus like one drop of oil upon a f lood, In uncommunicating solitude, Single am I amid the countless many. (HCPW 15)

Hartley wrote the above lines in Leeds, in 1832, while he was staying with the publisher, Francis Edward Bingley, and Bingley’s wife and baby. Leeds was totally unfamiliar to Hartley, and he had only gone there because Bingley had commissioned him to write a series of biographies of eminent persons from the north of England. The agreement between Hartley and Bingley, dated December 22, 1832, was that the series—Biographia Borealis; or, Lives of Distinguished Northerns— was to be delivered in 12 parts of 40 pages each, octavo, at weekly intervals. Parts one and two (on Andrew Marvell and Dr Richard Bentley) had been delivered before the agreement, having already been written by John Dove, with some minor changes by Hartley (BRH 458–86). In exchange for all 12 parts and the copyright, Bingley was to pay Hartley £250 in instalments throughout the series. Hartley was to pay Bingley £10 for each part not delivered. Also, Bingley was to pay Hartley £50 for a volume of poems, which was to be followed by a second volume. Hartley wrote to his mother in July 1832: The work in which I am engaged is a history of the worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire . . . Mr Bingley is also to publish my Poems, for which I am to have fifty pounds. I am also engaged to assist in a Magazine, for which I shall be handsomely remunerated . . . I ought to be scribbling the introductory article at this moment, for it should come out tomorrow. (HCL 142)

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The letter is apologetic and placatory, and full of Hartley’s acknowledgments of his mother’s fears for him: Understand distinctly that I involve myself in no pecuniary risk in connection with any of these works . . . I shall give them [the Bingleys, with whom Hartley was staying] no unnecessary trouble . . . Don’t be alarm’d. I am less in temptation at Leeds, where I know no public house people, than at Grasmere . . . I begin to know what hard work is. (HCL 143)

Later, on Christmas Day 1832, Hartley would tell his mother: “I am tied by the leg to the Worthies, and am not sure that I shall accomplish a fortnight’s holy day for half a year to come.” Hartley would apprise his mother of his business arrangement with the publisher. One might imagine Mrs Coleridge reading between the lines of the following with a mother’s worried perceptiveness: Mr. Bingley and I have now sign’d a[..] legal agreement—I am to receive £250 certain for my labour, and if the work succeeds, an additional £50; but this rests on Mr. B’s honour. I must mention that the whole addition to the £200 originally bargain’d for, was proposed by Mr. Bingley himself. For this remuneration I am to furnish the press with the matter for forty printed pages—which amount to about seventy two long pages of my scribble, or twelve per day—no light work let me tell you, and the poems going on too—but I am well content to live by labour and on the whole, do not regret, for my own sake, my not having enter’d a regular profession. (HCL 149)

It was the only regular employment Hartley had had since his schoolteaching in Ambleside in the 1820s. Since then, he had been contributing poems and articles irregularly to various periodicals. To Blackwood’s Magazine he had contributed “Books and Bantlings” (HEM 84–92) in November 1826, “De Omnibus Rebus et Quibusdam Aliis” (HEM 93–112) in July 1827, “Leonard and Susan” (HCPW 151–171) in September 1827, “Minced Pie” in February 1828, “Evening—an ode” in July 1828, “Shakespeare, etc.” in November 1828, “On the Character of Hamlet” (HEM 151–171) in November 1828, “Ignoramus on the Fine Arts I” (HEM 178–203) in February 1831, “Ignoramus on the Fine Arts II” (HEM 204–49) in March 1831, “Ignoramus on the Fine Arts III” (HEM 250–86) in October 1831. To The Gem in 1829 (edited by Thomas Hood) he had contributed “She is not fair to outward view” (HCPW 41) and “It must be so—my infant love must find” (HCPW 14). To The Literary


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Souvenir (edited by Alaric A. Watts) in 1830 he had contributed “Address to Certain Gold Fishes” (HCPW 86–87). To The Winter’s Wreath in 1829 he had contributed “Lines on the Death of a Young Lady,” and, in 1830, “To the Nautilus” (HCPW 38–39), “Song (’Tis sweet to hear)” (HCPW 35), “Pride” (HEM 308–333), and “Genius and Madness;” in 1831, “A Nursery Lecture,” “Fragment of Callimachus,” and the sonnets “Long time a child” (HCPW 7), “Youth, love, and mirth” (HCPW 7), “How long I sailed, and never took” (HCPW 8), “Once I was young, and fancy” (HCPW 8), “The Vale of Tempe,” and “Fair Maid, had I not heard” (HCPW 19); in 1832, “Thoughts on Horsemanship,” “An Old Man’s Wish” (HCPW 67), “On the First of November, 1820” (HCPW 29–30), “Defense of Portrait Painting” (HEM 287–293), “The Sabbath Day’s Child” (HCPW 67), and “There have been poets” (HCPW 10). A consideration of the forms into which Hartley had cast his work immediately suggests a reason for the neglect from which his reputation has suffered. Much of his work consists of poems and essays which, until his brother Derwent posthumously edited them, remained either scattered up and down the back numbers of various periodicals or simply unpublished. Thus the public long lacked an opportunity to judge Hartley’s work as a whole; and even after the publication of Poems (1851) and Essays and Marginalia (1851), the lack of homogeneity—the general effect of Hartley’s eccentric and erratic improvisation—presented by the collections militated against that uniformity of impression which is so necessary to the growth of a reputation. Despite his intermittent productivity during the 1820s and early 1830s, Hartley’s reputation did grow enough to impress Bingley, who was on the lookout for a new writer. Hartley was not used to the world of work and the ancillary inconveniences and irritations involved in holding down a full-time position. As he walked through the streets peopled with strangers indifferent to his welfare, he experienced the alienation that readers now associate with more celebrated aesthetes such as De Quincey or Charles Baudelaire (1821–67). In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), one of De Quincey’s achievements was that he discovered a means of expression best suited to conveying the nature of urban life. Drawing on the work of Wordsworth and others, De Quincey managed, almost in passing, to communicate some of the complexity, the cacophony, and the unexpected juxtapositions of life in Manchester, and in London. The author of a notable biography of De Quincey, Edward Sackville West, has put it well: London, which seemed to Thomas [De Quincey] a nightmare and a portent, was now, in the year 1802, at a transition stage of its development. It had

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not yet acquired all the driving ambition and turbid hurry of the industrial age, which was beginning, nor had the dour fog of Victorian England yet settled down upon it. On the other hand, the spacious ease and dignity of the eighteenth century were fast disappearing, and in its disintegration incongruous fragments of both centuries lived side by side, all but unconscious of each other. The population was increasing rapidly, and, with it, poverty; the underworld which the genius of Cruikshank was later to make vivid for all time, was already sordidly ubiquitous. Merry England was developing the modern slum . . . (FS 55–56)

Hartley’s focus on urban life was different from De Quincey’s: while De Quincey populated his account with memorable proto-Dickensian characters (such as Brunell, the money-lender, and Pyment, his clerk), Hartley capitalized exclusively on the potential for isolation of the individual within the crowd: To wander forth, and view an unknown race; Of all that I have been I find no trace, No footstep of my by-gone pilgrimage. (HCPW 15)

Hartley found the feeling of rootlessness uncomfortable. As a postscript to his letter to his mother from Leeds in October 1832, he expressed his need for the family kindness to which he could best respond: “Write soon, or I shall think you are angry.” (HCL 144.) On one hand, De Quincey’s pageants of colorful, often sordid, urban characters reveal a tremendous appetite for novelty in their creator. De Quincey was a skilled self-publicist, and marketed himself cleverly as the detached, solitary observer of the urban scene. On the other hand, Hartley’s understated reaction to his new full-time occupation—“I begin to know what hard work is. It is not amusing . . .” (HCL 143)—was a symptom of his slow temporal metabolism, which was not equipped for the digestion of modern life: Thousands I pass, and no one stays his pace To tell me that the day is fair, or rainy; Each one his object seeks with anxious chase, And I have not a common hope with any. (HCPW 15)

What Hartley was and had in himself was the only immediate and direct factor that he wanted in his mental development: Yes, I am old, and older yet must be, Drifting along the everlasting sea;


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And yet, through puzzling light and perilous dark, I bear with me, as in a lonely ark, A precious cargo of dear memory; For, though I never was a citizen, Enroll’d in Faith’s municipality, And ne’er believed the phantasm of the fen To be a tangible reality, Yet I have loved sweet things, that are not non, In frosty starlight, or the cold moonbeam. I never thought they were; and therefore now No doubt obscures the memory of my dream. (HCPW 215)

All else, including the external specifics of Leeds (of which there is not much mention in Hartley’s writings), was mediate and indirect, and its inf luence could be neutralized and frustrated. He may have got to know some “good natured, hospitable plain folks” and noticed “The walls of course now [October 16, 1832] plastered with Election puffs and squibs, the newspapers rancorous against one another” (HCL 145), but: Then all the vision melted quite away; As from the steel the passing stain of breath . . . (HCPW 216)

His lifetime of “homely familiarity with [Cumbrian] town’s folk, and country folk, of every degree [and his] daily recurring hours of solitude,—by lonely wanderings with the murmur of the Brathay in his ear” (Memoir lvii) had made his Ejuxrian mind a portable citadel. Enclosing “a copy of the first number of the Yorkshire Worthies” (containing the lives of Marvell, Bentley, Thomas Lord Fairfax, and James Earl of Derby), Hartley wrote to one of his closest friends, Dr William Fell, on October 16, 1832: I cannot say that Biography is just altogether my forte, for I don’t at all excel in plain statement; neither, in the haste with which the work is to be got out, is it possible to hunt out for original facts, or collate original documents, even were they accessible, which is far from being the case. Moreover there is nothing in the world so difficult as to write good plain prose, in a style which attracts no notice for itself, but sets off the sense to the best possible advantage. For myself, I find it easier to write simply in verse than in prose. . . . (HCL 144)

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Hartley continued in that letter by letting Fell know that he was not prepared to countenance changing his research habits or his writing style to cater for metropolitan tastes: It is easy enough to write colloquially or familiarly, that is, to introduce into your composition a quantum suff. of needless expletives, solecisms vulgarisms and impertinences, (oh las and ah buts, egads and damnes) and fancy that you are quite at your ease, and that your book or epistle differs in nothing from elegant conversation—but fie fie this is affectatious. But there is no occasion to make this here letter a literal translation of Cicero de Oratore interlarded with St. Augustine’s Confessions. So wishing that you may [find] any thing to like in the Worthies, I leave it to its fate—only if you could get it into the society. (HCL 145)

The last few words of the above excerpt reveal Hartley’s hope that Dr Fell might begin to create a climate of approbation around the biographies, despite their shortcomings in professional terms. Hartley’s brief presence in Leeds, with all its “toiling, buying, selling—/ Getting and spending,” did not undo his attachment to nature’s “lovely forms”: Now for the brook from moss-girt fountain welling, I see the foul stream hot with sleepless trade; For the slow creeping vapours of the morn, Black hurrying smoke, in opaque mass up-borne . . .

The obliterating forces of industrialization could not, Hartley determined, deprive him of the world he had in himself, bound up as it was with his attachment to nature: O’er dinning engines hangs, a stif ling shade— Yet Nature lives e’en here, and will not part From her best home, the lowly-loving heart. (HCPW 15)

Despite his typical use of the word “lowly” in relation to himself, Hartley still spoke as if on behalf of a battered, truth-loving elite: THE Man, whose lady-love is virgin Truth, Must woo a lady that is hard to win: She smiles not on the wild and wordy din Of all-confiding, all-protesting Youth;


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The Sceptic’s apathy, the garb uncouth, And Cynic sneer of o’er-experienced Sin, The Serpent, writhing in its worn-out skin, Craving again to f lesh its sated tooth, She quite abhors. (HCPW 4)

For Hartley, skepticism, cynicism and uncouthness were all caked around the souls of city dwellers, who writhed in their attempts to ignore, or slough off, the collective discomfort. Unlike De Quincey, Hartley found the phosphorescence from any effort to unearth something elemental from urban life too unpleasant. However, he did not convert his aversion into teaching, or preaching, as Wordsworth sometimes did. His writings were therefore fit for readers of remote posterity (us) to consider in quietness, and without bias. Most people come from, or have to live most of their lives in, urban or suburban areas, yet the culture we have grown up in tends to value wildness, and extravagant beauty, and landscape. Most people live in an un-rooted way, yet curiously, there is a strong tradition of valuing certain kinds of places that leaves many people feeling as if they do not come from anywhere valuable. The feeling of belonging and not belonging is a tension central to the creative life of Hartley Coleridge. By his mid-30s, when he was living and working in Leeds, Hartley had already tried on, as it were, some of the “costumes” available to “normal” members of society. He had tried to be an academic at Oxford, but he had felt “proud but not glad of academic honors, with all the material, but, alas! without the moral of happiness” (Memoir clxix). After the Oriel debacle, he had considered becoming a preceptor, after which abortive plan he tried school-teaching at Ambleside. All his broken resolutions were coalescing into confirmation of his otherworldliness ill at ease in the world: There is none of my delinquencies for which I feel so much remorse as for my foolish compliance with the advice of some well-meaning people who knew nothing of me . . . For all the duties of a preceptor, except the simple communication of knowledge, I am as physically unfitted as dear papa for those of a horse-soldier. For a teacher who has to deal with females or young men, it may be sufficient that you can engage attention; but the master of school-boys must be able to command it, and this is a faculty not to be acquired. It depends upon the voice, the eye, and the nerve. Every hour that I spent with my pupils was passed in a state more nearly related to fear than to anything else. How, then, could I endure to be among unruly boys, from seven in the morning to eight or nine at night, to be responsible

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for actions which I could no more control than I could move a pyramid? (Memoir xcviii–xcix)

Now, based in Leeds, he was trying to be a biographer. Unsurprisingly, he was finding it hard going. Normality was something Hartley could not feel part of. Like the accumulation of dry facts required to write biographies (to be got at only after much difficulty and labor), a normal life was an inert and lifeless thing to Hartley. “What duller looking volume than a Parish Register?,” he exclaims at the beginning of his introduction to the series. He could never occupy himself for long enough with special branches of knowledge, with all their petty details: All, all is stale: the busy ways of men, The gorgeous terrors of the steel-clad warrior, The lover’s sighs, the fair one’s cruelty, Or that worse state, when love, a rayless fire, Is sever’d quite from hope and tenderness, Or dogg’d by base suspicion . . . (HCPW 23–24)

He had no strong appetite for seeking out subjects difficult to access in order to distinguish himself. His uniqueness (including his f laws) tended to emerge unprotected, “Like the bright berry from the naked thorn” (HCPW 36). The reason for his peculiar vulnerability is that his experience of society was composed mostly of his relations with people who knew and loved him, and whom he knew and loved: I [Thomas Blackburne] never saw him at a large party; it was chief ly at [William] Fell’s, and when he dined with two or three friends, that I met him. “I hate fashionable parties,” he said, “I feel very uncomfortable. The other night I was at one, and I shrank up, like a rat in a corner, and conceived the idea of jealousy. There was a beautiful girl there that I should have talked to; but a fop came ‘With crooks and cringes;— Sleek were all his oily hinges,’ and I could’nt say a thing.” The description of the dance I remember as very beautiful. (Memoir cxxxiii)

As a child, and as a young man, Hartley had listened to and participated in countless conversations involving his father, Southey, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, De Quincey, and others. Like any child, Hartley could, from the tone of these admired friends’ voices, more than


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from his own erudition, probably have told when they were alluding, or exercising some other subtlety well-known to him. Hartley’s expression of his personality, as applauded in the private arena of Greta Hall, did not translate itself as easily into success in the great world. Lucy Newlyn has elucidated the problem succinctly in her essay, “The Little Actor and his Mock Apparel:” What the child [Hartley] learns, with increasing “joy” and “pride” is how to imitate empty stereotypes of adulthood. He becomes expert: “a little actor,” with a wardrobe of costumes or disguises, which he puts on and takes off at appropriate moments in the comedy of life—as though with an innate knowledge of what is fitting. As the dressing-up becomes a habit, his identity is taken over, insidiously, by the disguise he puts on. Aged six, he had used a “mock apparel” of words to protect himself from adult interference; aged eight and onwards, he makes his “apparel” his own, and fails to prevent it from replacing his personality. Instead of the “self-born carol” of his private language, he speaks the adult “dialogues of business love or strife;” instead of dancing with a “breeze-like motion,” he is involved in a prolonged and sterile adoption of adult roles . . . (TWC 34)

Hartley did not know the people of Leeds and their ways, and they did not know him, so they were like closed books to him: ’Tis strange to me, who long have seen no face, That was not like a book, whose every page I knew by heart, a kindly common-place, And faithful record of progressive age. (HCPW 15)

Yet from the benign reception given by the inhabitants of Leeds to the f lawed public speeches of Michael Thomas Sadler and “a very famous [female] Preacher from Derby,” Hartley could infer “a favourable symptom of national manners” (HCL 146). Hartley in adulthood was still the child who could talk and behave with remarkable imagination and intelligence, but who could only really be that remarkable person when a small number of close friends or family members was present. He was the child for whom the presence of less sympathetic onlookers transformed and diminished his performance into that of an odd little creature, resembling “a stunted replica, or effigy, of the grown man” (TWC 35). Only when it was assessed with sympathy could the true extent of Hartley’s genius exist. Hartley’s friend, Chauncey Hare Townsend (best known as the man to whom Charles Dickens dedicated

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Great Expectations),1 portrays Hartley with an enthusiasm similar to Giorgio Vasari’s for Da Vinci: For intellectual powers of the highest kind had Hartley; never did I meet with any one who so completely, in his own person, demonstrated the specific difference between talent and genius;—genius, intense, glowing, ever-kindling genius, breathed in every word he uttered; originality, the unfailing companion—no, rather the essential form of genius, which in its very nature is creative—was the life and soul of his most common converse. The merest trif le, coming from his lips, acquired a spirit and an interest which the gravest matter might have missed in being moulded by another tongue. (HCPW xxix–xxx)

Derwent would sympathetically preface the posthumous collection of biographies that Hartley produced during his stay in Leeds: Thus forewarned, the reader will not desiderate either the documentary research, or the critical examination, which might be looked for in a less popular work. He will not unwillingly see the veil of conventional reserve occasionally withdrawn, and welcome the appearance of the author speaking like old Fuller or Montaigne in his own person, sometimes in a sportive, often in a familiar vein. There is no strain of affectation, no mannerism in these freedoms. The style of the work passes through every variety of tone; but the transition is always easy, because it is always natural. Sometimes it is grave and solemn; shortly after, playful and careless; then dogmatic and sententious. It is sometimes highly poetical, or rather poetry itself, pede soluto: but it is never forced. Throughout it may be recognised as the spontaneous issue of the author’s mind, varied by the varying mood. (LNW I x–xi)

The less sympathetic critic might find in Hartley’s biographies what Southey had known during Hartley’s teenage years—his “habits of doing anything rather than the right thing in the right time” (HLW 54). Hartley did have plenty to say about education: The world is still too much in the habit of confounding the absence of regular tuition with positive ignorance; though we do hope that the preposterous folly of dignifying a little, a very little Latin, and very, very, very little Greek (forgotten long ago), with the exclusive name of learning, is far gone in the wane. Indeed, there is more need to assert and vindicate the true value of Greek and Roman lore, than to level the by-gone pretensions of its professors. (LNW III 3)


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But in the above instance Hartley discusses education at some length in what was after all supposed to be a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759–97) patron, William Roscoe. Hartley continues with the most stimulating and provocative writing (albeit irrelevant to the subject of Roscoe): This age has a sad propensity to slay the slain, to fight with wrath and alarm against the carcase of extinct prejudices, because some two or three men of genius, and perhaps a score of blockheads, are striving to galvanise them to a posthumous vitality. Admitting, however, that Shakspeare could not, with the assistance of grammar and dictionary, construe an ode of Horace, (which is a pure and rather improbable assertion, for Latin was then taught far more generally than at present), he certainly was not unacquainted with the ancient authors, most of which were translated early in Elizabeth’s reign, rudely and incorrectly enough it may be (there was little or no accurate scholarship in England before Bentley), but still so that neither the feelings nor the thoughts were wanting . . . (LNW III 3–5)

Hartley does something similar in his piece on William Congreve (1637–1708): We admit, therefore, that up to a certain point, an established order of learned men is absolutely necessary for the conservation of literature and the prevention of barbarism; and that this order can only be preserved by the power of the state, or by the superstitious reverence of the people,—that is, while the people remain so ignorant as to be incapable of conceiving the true value of knowledge, or till knowledge is so far perfected as to demonstrate its own value by its practical results. (LNW III 308–9)

In the next paragraph, Hartley explores his own understanding of what can and cannot be taught. The writing is wise and wry, but, again, strictly speaking, in a biography of Congreve, irrelevant: But, after a certain point, there needs no adventitious advantages to conciliate regard to the perfections and achievements of the intellect. The danger is, that they will be too much prized, too much desired, too much sought for. Already there are many who expect from human knowledge the work of Divine Grace. Science has made man master of matter; it has enabled him to calculate the revolutions of nature, to multiply his own powers beyond all that was dreamed of spell or talisman: and now it is confidently prophesied that another science is to remove all the moral and political evils of the planet; that by analysing the passions we shall learn to

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govern them; and that, when the science of education is grown of age, virtue will be taught as easily as arithmetic, and comprehended as readily as geometry—with the aid of wooden diagrams. (LNW III 309)

Having spun himself into cobwebs, Hartley concludes the paragraph by snapping out of his ironic reverie and making his own view explicit: “Let us not be deceived. ‘Leviatan is not so tamed.’ The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life” (LNW III 30). Did Hartley seek to induce forgetfulness in his readers, many of whom, it can reasonably be assumed, must have picked up the piece in the first place because they were interested in Congreve? Whereas Byron had been able quickly to produce Oriental tales after the French novelist and critic, Madame de Staël (1766–1817), had advised him that “the public are orientalising” (RA 195), Hartley was unable to collect and steer his imaginative and intellectual energies on a fixed course that would see through to completion an unequivocally substantial piece of work. He had conceded as much in 1831 with the publication of the following sonnet: How long I sail’d, and never took a thought To what port I was bound! Secure as sleep, I dwelt upon the bosom of the deep And perilous sea. And though my ship was fraught With rare and precious fancies, jewels brought From fairy-land, no course I cared to keep, Nor changeful wind nor tide I heeded ought, But joy’d to feel the merry billows leap, And watch the sun-beams dallying with the waves; Or haply dream what realms beneath may lie Where the clear ocean is an emerald sky, And mermaids warble in their coral caves, Yet vainly woo me to their secret home;— And sweet it were for ever so to roam. (HCPW 8)

In the poem above, Hartley at once celebrates and complains about the simultaneously debilitating and empowering proximity of imaginative treasures. In October 1835, Sarah Hustler Fox would compliment Hartley’s “greatly increased capacity for continued & systematic exertion of the mind” (HCCI 46). The remark, however, probably ref lects Mrs Fox’s “singular sweetness of character and lightness of touch” (HCCI 18) more than it genuinely charts any lengthening of Hartley’s attention span. Mrs Fox may have been underestimating the poet’s most valuable


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commodity, the “quirks of wayward glee” (HCPW 8) which dart about like beautiful fish in the “sad, swaying rhythm” (HLW 186) of his versification and his prose. Just as there are many poetic beauties lying hidden in the curlicues of Hartley’s prose, so the variety and the lack of an exact type of causal logic illustrates the point. The above sonnet (“How long I sail’d”) first appeared in the London Magazine in 1823, when Hartley was living in London, his life having recently gone spectacularly wrong at Oxford. One can more easily imagine sonnet-length bursts of inspiration interrupting Hartley’s sorrow, than any overmastering enthusiasm to see a book-length project through to completion. The businessman, essayist and journalist, Walter Bagehot (1826–77), argued that with the sonnet form, Hartley found his métier: Perhaps there is something in the structure of the sonnet rather adapted to this species of composition: it is too short for narrative, too artificial for the intense passions, too complex for the simple, too elaborate for the domestic; but in an impatient world where there is not a premium on self-describing, whoso would speak of himself must be wise and brief, artful and composed—and in these respects he will be aided by the concise dignity of the tranquil sonnet. (PHC 42)

It was in a sonnet that Hartley could write about Wordsworth with the level of insight one would wish for in the best biography. “To Wordsworth” is the cohobated juice of an incisive critique: THERE have been poets that in verse display The elemental forms of human passions: Poets have been, to whom the fickle fashions And all the wilful rumours of the day Have furnish’d matter for a polish’d lay: And many are the smooth elaborate tribe Who, emulous of thee, the shape describe, And fain would every shifting hue pourtray Of restless Nature. But thou mighty Seer! ’Tis thine to celebrate the thoughts that make The life of souls, the truths for whose sweet sake We to ourselves and to our God are dear. Of Nature’s inner shrine thou art the priest, Where most she works when we perceive her least. (HCPW 10)

Conceptually, Hartley’s appreciation of Wordsworth is on a par with De Quincey’s, but, stylistically, it is a more condensed blend of the primary

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aspects of a master-essayist: intimacy and critical distance. The same is true of Hartley’s précis of Donne: BRIEF was thy reign of pure poetic truth; A race of thinkers next, with rhymes uncouth, And fancies fashion’d in laborious brains, Made verses heavy as oe’rloaded wains. Love was their theme, but love that dwelt in stones, Or charm’d the stars in their concentric zones; Love that did erst the nuptial bond conclude ’Twixt immaterial form and matter rude; Love that was riddled, sphered, transacted, spelt, Sublimed, projected, everything but felt, Or if in age, in orders, or the cholic, They damn’d all loving as a heathen frolic; They changed their topic, but in style the same, Adored their Maker as they wooed their dame. Thus DONNE, not first, but greatest of the line, Of stubborn thoughts a garland thought to twine; To his fair maid brought cabalistic posies, And sung quaint ditties of metempsychosis; ‘Twists iron pokers into true love-knots’, Coining hard words, not found in polyglots. (HCPW 320–1)

Such joyous writing does not f low from Hartley’s pen to order. He is not always able to form new ideas, or to command original thoughts: they come if they will, and when they will. He cannot always succeed in completely considering some particular matter at the precise time at which he has determined beforehand to consider it, and just when he set himself to do so. For the peculiar train of thought which is favorable to it may suddenly become active without any special call being made upon it, and he may then follow it up with keen (if brief ) interest. He could write the lives of his favorite poets from the inside out: that is, from the perspective of the creative spirit at work. When he had to work as a conventional biographer, writing the lives of the northern worthies from the outside in, his attempts to breathe life into the inert compartments of the past left him open to criticism. Look at the following paragraph from Hartley’s biography of the explorer, navigator, and cartographer, Captain James Cook (1728–79): But the moral greatness of Cook, his perfection of self-command, the power whereby he impressed inferior minds with the feeling of his mental


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superiority in emergencies, where nothing but such an impression could have maintained obedience, his considerate and manly humanity, his pastoral anxiety for all entrusted to his charge, his industrious zeal for the good of men so far removed from European sympathies and associations, that many would hardly have acknowledged them for fellow-creatures, the strength of his intellect in conceiving and comprehending great ends, his adroitness in adapting, his perseverance in applying means conducive to those ends; all, in short, which constitute the man, apart from the science and the profession, may be rendered intelligible to all; and to these points we shall direct our principal attention. (LNW III 118)

One could substitute from any number of names for the name of Cook. Admiral Nelson (1758–1805), perhaps; or the reformer, campaigner, and Vice-President of the Anti-Slave Trade Society, Thomas Clarkson (1760– 1846). The end of the above paragraph seems to promise a sharpened focus, and the next paragraph begins, “James Cook was born on the 27th of October, 1728,” but Hartley simply cannot curtail his natural inclination—as natural as self-forgetfulness in a child—to use the occasion as an opportunity to discuss whatever he likes. The depiction of Cook collapses into mere projection before the reader’s eyes (though without the noise or fuss sometimes created by lesser writers with greater pretensions), and the reader is again drawn into Hartley’s world of free association, improvising and lyricism: Yet his [Cook’s, ostensibly, but Hartley does not care in the same way that Cook’s official biographer, J.C. Beaglehole,2 cares] parents, who seem to have been good in a class where goodness is not rare, contrived, even from the pittance of a labourer’s wages, to set apart a few pence weekly, to procure for their offspring such instruction as the village dame could supply. (LNW III 119)

Next, Hartley, in possession of the fact that Dame Walker was young Cook’s “spectacled tutoress” (LNW III 119), discusses village dames in general: The village dame, a character so useful in fact, so delightful to contemplation, and so beautifully described by Shenstone, is fast disappearing from society. Compared to the speed and efficiency of modern plans of education, their methods of instruction were as the toil of the distaff and spindle to the operation of the spinning jenny. It would be idle to regret a change which may produce much good, and which the present condition of the community in a manner necessitates; yet it is not without a strong feeling of interest that we regard the few survivors of this venerable sisterhood, and

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we cannot bear to see their little charges, their joy and their pride, taken from under their care . . . (LNW III 119–120)

Then Hartley moves again to the subject of education: It is a common-place argument against improvements in education, that the new systems will never produce greater or better men than have grown up under the old ones. Persons who pursue this line of reasoning may possibly point to the fame of Cook, in order to vindicate the sufficiency of dames’ schools for popular education . . . (LNW III 120)

Hartley sometimes pays lip service to the biographical task at hand, but gratifies his own leisurely instincts whilst shimmying round the brute fact that the materials required to write “authoritative” biographies are nowhere near him. Not many collections of biographical studies contain an admission by the editor that the author was “embarrassed by want of books” (LNW I xii). Hartley’s looseness of research has to be set against the fact that Hartley does not aspire to be an “authority.” Authority is dry and non-digressive.3 The historians are to Hartley what the scientists were to Blake; their creed is non-deviation from the nature of things, which is, arguably, a most external and empty means to a most external and empty end. Hartley calls it “the hard passionless spirit of enquiry, so essentially necessary to arrive at those grand principles which convert facts into truths” (LNW I xxi). As Paul Magnuson said in his Rime of the Ancient Edytor (1978): Research, research everywhere ’Twas sad as sad could be Research, research everywhere, Facts f loating all at sea. (The Coleridge Bulletin, New Series 29, Summer 2007, 109)

Study of the painstakingly constructed—and canonically embedded— “truths” of, say, Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), William Godwin (1756– 1836), and Edmund Burke (1729–97), may, indeed, do no harm, for the same reason that it does no good, viz., because it takes no hold; it glides away like globules of crude quicksilver over a smooth surface, or at most is deposited in the show-room of memory:—because no conclusions, applicable to common life, can be


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drawn from it; because it excites no sense of reality. It is gone through as a task,—by children on compulsion . . . (LNW I xxiii–xxiv)

Thrown “into the chancery of public opinion” (Memoir clv), Hartley became something of a hole-in-the-corner man. He was what he himself defined as a “Quizz:” Next to being born a Queen, the greatest misfortune in the World is to be born a Quizz. It is infinitely better to squint or stammer, to be hunchback’d, club-footed, hare-lipped, to be blind, deaf, dumb, or an idiot, anything in fact, but a rascal, than to be a Quizz. Even insanity, when it amounts to that degree which is irresponsible and unconscious of itself, is a lighter inf liction. All other natural infirmities are to good minds, objects of pity, and in some measure, of respect . . . The Quizz alone is condemned as wilfully miserable, for miserable indeed he is, who is out of the pale of human sympathy, who may have well-wishers, but neither friends nor lovers—who is an inexplicable riddle to his fellow-creatures, whose thoughts and feelings have no intelligible language, who is subject to an alien law that cannot be repeated, as strange in the wide world as if he were, like the Mosasaurus and Megatherium, a relic of a perished system, or dropped, like a selenite from the moon. (HCNP 70)

The “Quizz” is a forerunner of the problematic figure discussed in the mid-twentieth century, by Colin Wilson: The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have . . . unnameable impulses, yet they keep up a pretence, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganised, irrational . . . That is his case. But it is weakened by his obvious abnormality, his introversion. It looks, in fact, like an attempt at self-justification by a man who knows himself to be degenerate, diseased, self-divided. (The Outsider 13–14)

Doubtless, the biographers and critics who pride themselves on being earthbound will continue to discard Hartley as casually as they would the insect he drolly said he was. Few have felt that there is more to Hartley’s writings than just a few “rare gems shining amidst an otherwise muddy mediocrity” (BWM xi). But Hartley has cut the gemstone of his own genius in such ways that it often appears to have no facets, because they do not sparkle or shine. Instead, something of Hartley’s personality makes them glow with a restrained and secret ardor. In just such a way do the

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reveries and brighter ideas of ordinary persons occur—persons not like Shelley, who, in his drive to stretch and sculpt his original thoughts into poetic templates for future human behavior, has a non-human brightness of purpose: He [Shelley] ransacks every thing like a bee grappling with it in the same spirit of penetration and enjoyment, till you lose sight of the field he entered upon, in following him into his subtle recesses. (Leigh Hunt: Selected Writings 103)

In lieu of a critical response to Thomas Arnold’s Thucydides (three volumes that appeared between 1830 and 1835), Hartley said to his mother: As to the Thucydides, I cannot think it exactly the book for me— considering how little access I have at present to classical books, and how little I know of those critical niceties, on which the merits of an edition of Thucydides must hang. (HCL 177)

Whenever he did anything, he felt (or said he felt) that he had to apologize for not having done it properly, and sometimes he would speculate about what he thought he should otherwise have undertaken, with a greater chance of success, such as a less ambitious task: Had I access to books I might indeed be a useful compiler, for I have the knack of dovetailing miscellaneous particulars into something like continuous compositions in a readable style. (HCCI 61)

He exercised less self-f lattery in a letter to James Spedding (March 18, 1839), where he lamented his inability to research his projected essay on Massinger and Ford properly. He would have to “compile much after the fashion of the Bore-all Biography, eking out the paucity of fact with umbrageous ref lections, deductions, and criticism” (BRH 480). In his writings, he was forever shrinking and shrivelling himself into the proportions of the self-deprecating figure only mean-spirited critics could attack. He talked himself down. The scattered, anecdotal evidence of his friends’ recollections of his presence all point to the same informing principle behind Hartley’s instincts and abilities: . . . I have been constantly struck with new astonishment in every interview with Hartley. The mine of his knowledge was inexhaustible. He had an acquaintance with every subject—with all books . . . In relating the smallest anecdote his powers of humour and pathos were alternately brought into


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play. He would bring every little circumstance of a scene or event before the very vision with astonishing vivacity; eye and voice, and gesture, all speaking and working to one end . . . what a valued privilege was Hartley’s conversation! What a true enjoyment was a walk with him amidst the glorious scenery with which he was, and will long remain, identified! (Memoir cxxix–cxxx)

Hartley did not make—or challenge—any great theory. He did not, like Blake, question the right of discursive reason to dictate to the energies of life. Nor, for that matter, could he write a biography with anything like the overt professionalism of a Southey: “When I compare Southey’s biographical style with my own, I confess I am almost driven to plunge myself over head and ears in the slough of despond” (HCL 144). But a certain fund of wisdom was bound up in Hartley with his peculiar sympathy, and it was through it that he filtered his consideration of all matters. As a result, his writings still shine from within, like he once shone in person: But it was not only by the qualities of his mind that Hartley was favourably known; he had a kind of affectionate heart, a kindly genial disposition, a fine temper and a peculiar generosity of sentiment; capable as he was of forcible and satiric painting, his word-pictures were ever free from offence, and always had the light of his own geniality over them;—never have I heard one word from him of personal bitterness. The keenest arrow in his speech was “tipped with good nature.” (Memoir cxxx–cxxxi)

Bingley went bankrupt in 1833, while the Northern Worthies was still unfinished. However, Bingley had published Hartley’s first collection of poems, Songs and Sonnets, in 1833. The collection was to have been the first of a two-volume set, but by now the story of Hartley’s life was a list of disappointments. The second volume of poetry would never appear in Hartley’s lifetime. Hartley returned to Grasmere, where he stayed with Mrs Fleming, until she died. He then moved in with the Richardsons of Nab Cottage in Rydal, in 1840, where he would remain, unemployed (save for a few months’ teaching at Sedburgh School in 1837), for the rest of his life. William Richardson is reported to have adored Hartley like a son: His [Richardson’s] eyes would almost fill with tears as he spoke of Hartley’s end. “Ya kna”, he would say, “Lile Hartley was as manashable as a bairn, and was a bairn that needed manashing until the end.” (LAEL II 138–39)

Hartley would wander around the countryside. Sometimes he would be drunk. He was often too ashamed to visit the Wordsworths (who lived a

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short walk from him at Rydal Mount) for weeks on end, and they would in turn worry about him. The beautiful lines his father had written about him in “Frost at Midnight” had acquired a horrible irony: “But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores . . .” (STCPW 242). The miserable conviction of his failure underlay all Hartley’s thought processes. His sister Sara referred to him as “our Trouble in the North” (HCCI 13). Derwent—by now the successful, happily married churchman—did not come to visit him until 1843. Some months before the visit, Derwent wrote to Hartley, reminding him of his past wrongdoings, and exhorting him to behave like an ordinary middle-aged gentleman (HCCI 136). During the visit, Hartley could not help but be painfully conscious of his feeling of inferiority when in the presence of his brother, who seems to have greatly impressed the inhabitants of Rydal and Grasmere. Hartley wrote to his mother in October 1843: Derwent was exorbitantly admired by high and low . . . I wish he could have stayed longer. He was so much sought after, that we had very little quiet time together, and besides, the meeting after so long an interval, in which so much to regret, and on my part, so much to blame had taken place, produced a degree of nervous feverishness, which was only just subsiding, when his leave of absence expired. I own, the irritability was, chief ly on my side—he has great command of temper, and if he be moved to wrath, anger makes him eloquent, while it renders me a pitiful stammerer. (HCL 269)

Derwent’s life’s work was to put into practice his father’s religious faith in the educability of all people and the social powers of education. He was passionately motivated, and Hartley must have seemed to him hopelessly unfocussed. But if one spends even just an hour browsing through the letters written by Derwent and Hartley, one will experience many moments illustrative of the difference between the careerist’s competence and the poet’s genius. Notes 1. Dennis Low, The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets 106. 2. The Life of Captain James Cook (1974). 3. I am reminded irresistibly of J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. An example of Holden’s impatience with academic exercises designed to kill the joys of wayward thinking is worth including: Mr Antolini: You don’t care to have somebody to stick to the point when he tells you something?


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Holden Caulfield: Oh, sure! I like somebody to stick to the point and all. But I don’t like them to stick too much to the point. I don’t know. I guess I don’t like it when somebody sticks to the point all the time. The boys that got the best marks in Oral Expression were the ones that stuck to the point all the time—I admit it. But there was this one boy, Richard Kinsella. He didn’t stick to the point too much, and they were always yelling “Digression!” at him. It was terrible, because in the first place, he was a very nervous guy . . . though, I liked his speeches better than anybody else’s. He practically f lunked the course, though, too. He got a D-plus because they kept yelling “Digression!” at him all the time. For instance, he made this speech about this farm his father bought in Vermont. They kept yelling “Digression!” at him the whole time he was making it, and this teacher, Mr Vinson, gave him an F on it because he hadn’t told what kind of animals and vegetables and stuff grew on the farm and all. What he did was, Richard Kinsella, he’d start telling you all about that stuff—then all of a sudden, he’d start telling you about this letter his mother got from his uncle, and how his uncle got polio and all when he was forty-two years old, and how he wouldn’t let anybody come to see him in the hospital because he didn’t want anybody to see him with a brace on. It didn’t have much to do with the farm—I admit it—but it was nice. It’s nice when somebody tells you about their uncle. Especially when they start out telling you about their father’s farm and then all of a sudden get more interested in their uncle. I mean it’s dirty to keep yelling “Digression!” at him when he’s all nice and excited . . . I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. Mr Antolini: Holden . . . One short, faintly stuffy, pedagogical question. Don’t you think there’s a time and place for everything? Don’t you think if someone starts to tell you about his father’s farm, he should stick to his guns, then get around to telling you about his uncle’s brace? Or, if his uncle’s brace is such a provocative subject, shouldn’t he have selected it in the first place as his subject—not the farm? Holden Caulfield: Yes—I don’t know. I guess he should. I mean I guess he should’ve picked his uncle as a subject, instead of the farm if that interested him most. But what I mean is, lots of times you don’t know what interests you the most till you start talking about something that doesn’t interest you most. I mean you can’t help it sometimes. What I think is, you’re supposed to leave somebody alone if he’s at least being interested and he’s getting all excited about something. I like it when somebody gets excited about something. It’s nice. You just didn’t know this teacher, Mr Vinson. He could drive you crazy sometimes,

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him and the goddam class. I mean he’d keep telling you to unify and simplify all the time. Some things you just can’t do that to. I mean you can’t hardly ever simplify and unify something just because somebody wants you to. You didn’t know this guy, Mr Vinson. I mean he was very intelligent and all, but you could tell he didn’t have too much brains. J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye (Chapter 24).

CHAPTER 3

DESIGNATED MISFIT

From Elf to Everyman

T

he following is from a contemporary anonymous review of Hartley’s Songs and Sonnets (1833):

We are not aware of any instance in our literary history of the son of a great poet achieving for himself the name of poet. Here, however, is such a claim advanced by the son of Coleridge; and, weak and merely imitational as many of the pieces included in this volume are, we are bound to say that we consider its author as having already placed himself on high vantage-ground, as compared with any of the rhymers of these latter years. From the locality of the publication, Leeds, taken together with various melancholy allusions in the verses themselves, we are compelled to believe that the fate of this gentleman has not been such as his birth, education, and talents, with the well-won celebrity of several of his immediate connexions, might have been expected to lead him to. What his actual situation may be we know not; but we are grieved to hear the language not only of despondency, but of self-reproach bordering almost on remorse, from one who must be young, and who certainly possesses feelings the most amiable, together with accomplishments rich and manifold, and no trivial inheritance of his father’s genius . . . It is an old saying, that the oakling withers beneath the shadow of the oak; and perhaps it had been the happier destiny of this lady’s ‘poor kinsman’ [referring to Hartley’s sonnet, To a Lofty Beauty, from her Poor Kinsman] to spend his early manhood under the same roof with the ‘father and bard revered’ to whom he dedicates his little book, we should never have been called upon to announce a second English poet of the name of Coleridge. If he will drop somewhat of that overweening worship of Wordsworth which is so visible in many of these pages—so offensively prominent in the longest piece they contain [Leonard and Susan]—and rely, as our extracts show he

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is thoroughly entitled to do, solely on himself, we are not afraid to say that we shall expect more at his hands than from any one who has made his first appearance subsequent to the death of Byron. (Quarterly Review vol. xlix 1833)

The reviewer acknowledged Hartley’s unusual gifts, but hemmed him in the shadow of Wordsworth and STC, while allowing the possibility that Hartley might find his own voice at a later stage. The reviewer would have no further opportunity to consider Hartley’s progress, because Songs and Sonnets would remain the only book of poems that Hartley would publish. The public perception of Hartley as a wistful, half-made creature has lingered for 175 years. Hartley has never been anywhere near inclusion in the English Romantic canon. His work has not been revisited with the same sense of excitement and humility as other “minor” Romantics’ works have recently elicited from biographers, critics, and poets. The laboring-class poet, John Clare (1793–1864), has been rehabilitated by two essays in Tom Paulin’s collections, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation-State (1992) and Writing to the Moment (1996). Furthermore, Clare’s reputation has been lifted considerably by Jonathan Bate’s biography, John Clare (2003), the first full-length study of the poet since 1932. One thinks of Hartley’s view of the industry of biographers: Letters, diaries, memoirs, family papers, public records—everything in manuscript or print—has been rummaged with indefatigable eyes. Every syllable, parenthesis, blank, and erasure, has been tortured—yea exorcised, for intelligence respecting men, of whom their contemporaries hardly thought it worth while to invent anecdotes. Much collateral knowledge has been elicited by the research, and much forgotten literature brought to light; but, with regard to the immediate objects of enquiry, it has rather led to additional doubt of what was heretofore taken for granted, than added to the scanty amount of ascertained facts. (DWMF xi)

Unlike Clare or Southey,1 Hartley Coleridge has remained the literary equivalent of undeveloped real estate. Derwent Coleridge published a number of Hartley’s writings posthumously, and published his account of Hartley’s life and work, his Memoir, in his edition of Hartley’s Poems (1851). Invaluable as Derwent’s Memoir remains, it is, strictly speaking (and one commentator in particular has enjoyed speaking strictly), an unvetted whoop of fraternal enthusiasm. The PhD candidate in the twentieth century has usually been encouraged to find and exploit a very specific niche with a view to focussing persuasively in front of the

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employer or the grant-awarding body. The candidate has not often been inclined (as Derwent was in the mid-nineteenth century) to compose a sentence invoking Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) and Charles Lamb (1775–1834) in order to celebrate an obscure writer: We read the essays of Montaigne and Charles Lamb, not so much for the sake of the thoughts or opinions themselves, as of the coloured medium through which they pass. (Memoir xiii)

Modern professional biographers’ interest in appearing detached from their subject has made the personalized insight an endangered species. Name-dropping (Montaigne and Charles Lamb?) is often greeted with the kind of muted enthusiasm that the refined reserve for the vulgar. Derwent’s enthusiasm for his brother’s work does not, apparently, meet the modern standards of intellectual hygiene. Literary criticism that fizzes and sings with enthusiasm tends to do so alone. In the construction of her argument against celebrating the life and work of Hartley Coleridge, Elizabeth Story Donno has sifted through the diaries of the occasionally unkind Henry Crabb Robinson (BRH 459). In her essay, “The Case of the Purloined Biography: Hartley Coleridge and Literary Protectivism” (1979), Donno has revealed a plain truth about Hartley hitherto obscured by a “gaggle of writers,” including (claims Donno) the Coleridge family, “friendly reviewers,” and “twentieth- century scholars” (BRH 459). Donno has cited Crabb Robinson’s view that Derwent’s Memoir was the outcome of the Coleridge family’s “diseased impression of the extent of Hartley’s poetical & philosophising powers” (BRH 459 note). Can the burden of Donno’s central thesis be supported by such épingles? What about another comment or two from the same diarist? (Perhaps it would be unsuitable for Donno’s purpose.) For example, does Crabb Robinson’s judgment of Hartley’s low “poetical & philosophising powers” not square with his personal antipathy toward Hartley the “foreign Jew boy” (HCRD 67), or Hartley the “unpleasant youth” (HCRD 76)? How much further will analysis take the reader? The plain truth that has emboldened Donno to attempt a comprehensive demolition of Hartley’s reputation is that Hartley did not write the biography of Marvell in Lives of Northern Worthies. John Dove wrote it. Also, Hartley’s biography of Bentley was “based largely on one recently published (1830) by James Henry Monk” (BRH 463). On top of that, Hartley did not strive to dispel the impression that he was the sole author of all the biographies in the series. After Hartley’s death, Derwent would

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maintain the illusion. In 1840 Hartley thanked Derwent as his most understanding critic: My best apologist you always were, because you were the only man who ever knew me, the only man to whom I dared tell the whole truth about myself . . . in fact the only man that ever knew enough of my faults to forgive them. (HCCI 46)

Hence, Donno’s trump phrase: “fraternal protectivism” (BRH 463). So there. Having had her suspicions about the “family concern” (BRH 459) confirmed, Donno’s sequent elation has run away with the topic. She sweepingly calls Hartley’s works “less than distinguished” (BRH 458), yet she has only examined a small portion of them. So much for the “objective” (BRH 459) approach. Just because Hartley was advertised as a genius by another member of the Coleridge family, it does not necessarily mean, according to some sterilely inverse law, that Hartley was not a genius. In deference to such a directive, the Hartley enthusiast may feel it necessary to qualify his keenness and become circumspect in the presence of academics who have won their places as accomplished debunkers of literary sentimentality. Writing about Hartley shortly after the publication of Donno’s article, Lucy Newlyn said: when [Hartley] wakes from his Wordsworthian enchantment, to find that he is aging . . . He is metaphorically still a “child,” retarded in his growth, and mocked by a potential he will never be able to fulfil. [Yet he] protest[s] against being embalmed. There is pathos both in his acceptance of a symbolic role, and in his never growing beyond it. (TWC 38)

Newlyn’s indication of Hartley’s inability to achieve his ambitions—or, rather, others’ ambitions for him—seems to allow for the possibility that such a writer in such a quandary would plagiarize and playact in lieu of the reality of genius. The building of Hartley’s reputation, post-Donno, remains as slow as the recovery of STC’s reputation after Norman Fruman, nerved with the foursquare assumption that all plagiarism is wrong, published Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (1971), in which he “harried” STC like “a remorseless prosecutor intent upon diminishing a literary giant” (DA xix). The works of Donno and Fruman are congruent with their larger agenda and involve placing the Coleridges on the outskirts of culture: Stress on the biographical [courtesy of Derwent’s Memoir], then, with its inevitable linkage to the esteemed if slightly damaged archangel [STC],


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served to create a kindly venue for Hartley Coleridge’s writing in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is one that has continued to obtain in this [20th] century . . . (BRH 483)

It would be easy to express a similar awareness of Donno’s own ability to construct, out of a mélange of echoes (from, say, James Ferrier, J.M. Robertson, John Sterling, James Stirling, René Wellek, and Joseph Warren Beach), a substitute for the custom of cutting-edge writing that she seems to have held dear.2 Donno’s assurances are those of a natural timidity at home within the secure protection of the academic rules and virtues that she practices and proclaims. Hartley’s soul was caught in the toils of life. Hartley knew he had something to write about, and a way in which to write about it that had much more originality, rigor, and significance than unkind critics saw (or would later see) in his work. The case is clear in his essay, “A Preface that may serve for all modern works of imagination:” But is it necessary for a thought to be new, in order to be original? Is every honest man a plagiary, because a few honest men have existed in every generation since the pupilage of old Father Adam? Or am I a plagiary, in my love of venison, because old Quinn declared— “If the Devil in Styx should in fishing delight, Let him bait but with venison, by—I would bite.” In truth, every sentiment that proceeds from the heart, every thought that emanates from the individual mind, or is suggested by personal observation, is original, though, in all probability, it has been thought and felt a thousand times before. (HEM I 70)

As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) said, “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.” The concept is metaphysical and Platonic: Shakespeare could have illustrated it with airy sprites. Blake could have illustrated it with angels. The critic and poet, I.A. Richards (1893–1979), could have illustrated it with little drawings of electric wires, switches, and boxes meant to represent communication from an unknown source to an unknown recipient—a process beginning and ending in mystery. To discard Hartley as a writer who would have been considered mediocre but for “his brother’s singleminded effort to present a sympathetic image” (BRH 486) would entail ignoring something unique that Hartley offers the reader of both his poetry and his prose: a newly velvety feel in the mind to many well-worn, commonplace emotions.

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There is considerable intellectual pleasure in reading Hartley’s poetry and prose. One often recognizes those familiar aspects of one’s mentality— sometimes those aspects about which one has little reason to be vain— returning to one in alienated majesty. In his essay, “On Pride,” Hartley anatomizes the universal slough of self-regard into which individuals almost always manage to slide: Humility is the congenital temperament of no human being, far less the epidemic of any particular clime or season. Pride seems to be involved in the very essence of conscious ref lective individuality; it is the peculiar self-love of a rational creature, only subdued by that faith, which introduces the creatures into the presence of the Creator, and merges the finite understanding in the infinite Reason. (HEM I 308)

In a letter to his mother, whose feelings he was attempting to repair (having hurt them with the “wild and disponding talk [he] often indulged in”), Hartley summoned to his aid a universal insight (worthy of inclusion in one of the essays of Montaigne or Schopenhauer)—the provisionality of all utterances: Now, disputes arise much more frequently from misunderstanding, than real difference: in the hurry of argument words are seldom selected with accuracy, and what is delivered as a fix’d opinion, is often little more than the imperfect expression of a feeling. (HCL 102)

Hartley’s intuition—the child’s intuition—was of complex and subtle totalities, and it accepted wholes before it distinguished their parts; therefore, he did not need to simplify the idea that little that is said or written actually survives the conditions of provisionality. He had the gift of being able to call to mind what is written in our nature. In “The Sabbath-Day’s Child,” he contemplated a sleeping baby, and identified her (he dedicated the poem to Elizabeth, infant daughter of the Rev Richard Fleming) as a sort of gold that, having fallen from heaven to earth, had not yet been transmuted into dross: . . . that slumber’s perfect peace . . . seems too absolute and pure to cease, Or suffer diminution, or increase, Or change of hue, proportion, shape, or feature; A calm, it seems, that is not, shall not be, Save in the silent depths of calm eternity. (HCPW 69)


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Then, Hartley summoned quietly, rather than conjuring spectacularly, the sort of propinquity of visual riches with which lesser poets would have stif led the soft breathings of the main point: A star ref lected in a dimpling rill That moves so slow it hardly moves at all; The shadow of a white-robed waterfall, Seen in the lake beneath when all is still; A wandering cloud, that with its f leecy pall Whitens the lustre of an autumn moon; A sudden breeze that cools the cheek of noon, Not mark’d till miss’d—so soft it fades, and soon— Whatever else the fond inventive skill Of Fancy may suggest can not supply Fit semblance of the sleeping life of infancy. (HCPW 69)

Child of nature that Hartley was, he perhaps grew up too long without access to ordinary civilization. To be with people other than those of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle was often to be diminished to the stature of an amusing little fellow with odd mannerisms. There is something to do with narcissism in Hartley’s attachment to the family circle and the countryside he grew up in—something to do with his being the only person there and the whole world being configured around him. Alone in the Lake District, he could be all the earth, as far as the horizon and to the depths of the sky. And then, a little later, he could cadge a drink or a sovereign from someone he knew. In London or Leeds society, however, he had to involve himself in a whole form of sociability, including not knowing what was coming next in conversations with people he did not know, and finding his way about in unfamiliar streets. Hartley’s work requires the reader to be aware, in advance, of the spiritual sensibility behind the verbal result. He had, as it were, if not an overview of the infrastructure of links interanimating the visible and invisible, a panoramic feeling of the whole, the one, the indivisible aliveness of Everything: WHITHER—Oh whither, in the wandering air, Fly the sweet notes that ’twixt the soul and sense Make blest communion? When and where commence The self-unfolding sounds, that every where Expand through silence? seems that never were A point and instant of that sound’s beginning,

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A time when it was not as sweet and winning, As now it melts amid the soft and rare And love-sick ether? Gone it is—that tone Hath pass’d for ever from the middle earth; Yet not to perish is the music f lown— Ah no—it hastens to a better birth! Then joy be with it—wheresoe’er it be, To us it leaves a pleasant memory. (HCPW 12)

There is often the suggestion of multidimensional reality in Hartley’s works. He does not, like Blake, quarrel bitterly with the dominance of materiality, despite its inadequacy to him as an explanation of reality. In the following passage, from “New Year’s Day,” he takes issue with the concept of death by softly calling to his aid a pageant of magically pertinent observations: Dead? What is that? A word to joy unknown, Which love abhors, and faith will never own. A word, whose meaning sense could never find, That has no truth in matter, nor in mind. The passing breezes gone as soon as felt, The f lakes of snow that in the soft air melt, The wave that whitening curls its frothy crest, And falls to sleep upon its mother’s breast. The smile that sinks into a maiden’s eye, They come, they go, they change, they do not die. (HCPW 36–37)

Hartley knew, like his father, 3 that the surface of the incalculably unfolding surface of life is not necessarily solid, which in turn meant that a convincing sense of his own place in nature was difficult to establish. The difficulty was compounded by the strength and multiplicity of his yearnings. For Hartley, The wider my sympathies extend, the more I feel my helplessness; the greater my faculties of enjoyment, the more conscious I become of the state of circumspection in which I exist, and it would be but poor consolation to a man bound and handcuff ’d so that he could not stir, to know that he possessed the power of walking. Therefore, when I say that I never can be happy, I mean that I require a larger area, or in other terms, a greater degree of liberty than is compatible with the condition of humanity, which I nevertheless could not be content to enjoy for my particular self, unless


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those beings were participators which sympathy had made me to a multiplied self. (HCL 102–103)

The knowledge that existence builds its forms over an abyss can exhilarate and terrify, as in the following sonnet: Let me not deem that I was made in vain, Or that my being was an accident, Which Fate, in working its sublime intent, Not wish’d to be, to hinder would not deign. Each drop uncounted in a storm of rain Hath its own mission, and is duly sent To its own leaf or blade, not idly spent Mid myriad dimples on the shipless main. The very shadow of an insect’s wing, For which the violet cared not while it stay’d, Yet felt the lighter for its vanishing, Proved that the sun was shining by its shade: Then can a drop of the eternal spring, Shadow of living lights, in vain be made? (HCPW 112)

Hartley’s personal anxiety was that he himself was “an accident,” halfwanted by his parents who were already finding life difficult enough as it was. The universal anxiety—related to agnosticism (interestingly, a word that did not exist until the mid-nineteenth century, after the Romantic era)—is that life on earth may well be “an accident.” Such a conjunction of anxieties could have redoubled the possibility of madness in Hartley. The crash-landings of such un-upholstered thinkers as Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) and Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843)4 are worth considering in contrast with Hartley, who was neither suicidal nor insane. He did sense how precariously the phenomenal world is held together, how thin the texture of its appearances, and how easily torn it is to let in nothingness. He did experience the waxing and waning of the substantiality of himself, upon whose reality he sometimes felt he could keep no permanent hold: Those sweet, sweet snatches of delight That visit our bedarken’d clay, Like passage birds, with hasty f light, It cannot be they perish quite, Although they pass away. (HCPW 33)

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There are states of insanity in which the loss of reality is continuous; but to call such a condition insane is to evade the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from the experience as such—that the sensible world coheres not by physical but by mental agency: And there are thoughts, that ever more are f leeing, The moments that make up our being’s being, The silent workings of unconscious love, Or the dull hate which clings and will not move, In the dark caverns of the gloomy heart, The fancies wild and horrible, which start Like loathsome reptiles from their crankling holes, From foul, neglected corners of our souls, Are these less vital than the wave or wind, Or snow that melts and leaves no trace behind? (HCPW 37)

At best, the “real” world coheres precariously; there is nothing inherently safe or solid about it, even though normally, at least by daylight, and in adult life, we accept it for real without thinking about the matter too much. It is a marvel of adaptation that we do so, but Hartley did not so unthinkingly adapt. He often reassessed received wisdom, such as the concept of “Time,” in such a way that the “efficiency” with which we “measure” time as “days,” “months,” and “years” appears to wobble less convincingly across the shuddering, transient f lux of the reality (whatever that is) behind “Time:” A New-Year’s day—’tis but a term of art, An arbitrary line upon the chart Of Time’s unbounded sea—fond fancy’s creature, To reason alien, and unknown to nature. (HCPW 37)

And yet he did, by his own admission, have what he called a “girlish love of display.” That is not surprising. In fact, the matter may be stated more boldly: Hartley inherited his girlish love of display. People read the writings of STC and accept his sillier moments as the excrescences that the prolonged strain of his intense discipline will throw off. For example, STC called Southey “a man of perpendicular Virtue—a down-right upright Republican!” (STCL I 152). Also, remember the f lash of pure fun produced by STC’s f lopping about in the verbal mudbath of his recreational drollery: “I would overwhelm you with an Avalanche of Puns & Conundrums


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loosened by a sudden thaw from the Alps of my Imagination” (STCL I 223). On one hand, Coleridgeans know that the Alps of STC’s Imagination will just as suddenly freeze back into mountain-ranges of metaphysics which only habitual breathers of the rarefied atmosphere will be fit enough to traverse. On the other hand, Hartley’s imagination is more consistently, or, one might say, more thoroughly, thawed through: You must know then, that I do not, in the course of the day, talk half as much nonsense as my health requires—in consequence whereof, so great an accumulation of that substance takes place upon my brain, that the vessels occasionally discharge their contents in my most serious conversation, nay, even in my gravest compositions. (HCL 68)

How arbitrary, it seemed to Hartley throughout his life, are those frontiers that adults choose to draw upon the world: for example, this year / next year; or life / death. Another such artificial division exists between humor and seriousness. In Hartley’s writings, the membrane that divides recreational drollery and serious philosophical contemplation is often of an airy thinness. The following sonnet contains the trait: The Sun, sweet girl, hath run his year-long race Through the vast nothing of the eternal sky— Since the glad hearing of the first, faint cry Announc’d a stranger from the unknown place Of unborn souls. How blank was then the face, How uninform’d the weak light-shunning eye, That wept and saw not. Poor mortality Begins to mourn before it knows its case, Prophetic in its ignorance. But soon The hospitalities of earth engage The banish’d spirit in its new exile— Pass some few changes of the fickle Moon, The merry babe has learn’d its Mother’s smile, Its Father’s frown, its Nurse’s mimic rage. (HCPW 12)

Drollery and seriousness are inextricably combined in the above lines. Of course the baby does not actually “mourn” as if lamenting its year-long immurement in human form. Hartley’s work does not demand to be taken seriously, but, without any formal announcement, many of the concepts and insights can slip into the reader’s heart, sans façon, and quietly invite deep consideration.

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In a letter to Derwent in August 1830, Hartley considers the manner in which a baby’s relatives will hold it up to the light to examine and comment upon its features: For what on earth, more pure chrystalline, more innocently insignificant, than the Face of an Infant, that mere abstraction of humanity? Yet, God bless it, the good gossips hold it up to the light (as if it were a bottle of Claret) to the infinite discomfort of its small eyes, and with noticeable inconsistency, in one breath pronounce it “a little beauty” and yet the very moral of the very ugliest of all its ugly Aunts, Uncles and Cousins. (HCL 107)

Hartley is aware of how most people treat everything (and everyone, including babies) as things to be ticketed and treated as so many goods. Such people make up the vast majority: they often live unobtrusively, but above all respectably, and they do not allow raw reality to disrupt and throw into ruin the false constructions they have built to shelter them from the terrible energies of life: Nay, [they] find more prognostication in the knobs of its skull and the elevation of its forehead and the arc of its eyebrows, and the spherical angle of its eyes, and the balley-corns of its nose (and what I think of no small importance) the interval twixt nose and upper lip, and the cycloid of the open mouth and the conic section of the shut lips, and all the projections, concavities and convexities, of the under lip, chin, and chops, than the Kephanonomantists could in the head of a Donkey, or the Talmudists in Urim and Thummim. (HCL 107)

So great in humankind is the desire to remain untroubled by the problem of existence. What is existence? And why do most people not want to think about it? Throughout Hartley’s work there are many instances of his refusal to ignore the presence of the abyss—a presence scarcely intuited in “real” life before it is suppressed by churchmanly assessments of babies’ faces and bottles of claret: . . . Good it were To be a Persian, and adore the sun At morn and eve—or deem the changeful moon Imperial arbitress of fickle fate, To hail the day-dawn as a visible God, Or, trembling, think the terrible vast sea A living Godhead in a wrathful mood, Rather than dwell within the gaol of sense, To see no God in all the beauteous world— To feel no God in man. (HCPW 50)


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Hartley’s ingrained informality of style enabled him to melt and recast historical events in ways not to be found, say, in Edward Gibbon’s (1737–94) History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88): Fifty thousand subjects of one king stood face to face on Marston Moor. The numbers on each side were not far unequal, but never were two hosts speaking one language of more dissimilar aspects. The Cavaliers, f lushed with recent victory, identifying their quarrel with their honour and their love, their loose locks escaping beneath their plumed helmets, glittering in all the martial pride which makes the battle day like a pageant or a festival, and prancing forth with all the grace of gentle blood, as if they would make a jest of death, while the spirit-rousing strains of the trumpets made their blood dance, and their steeds prick up their ears: the Roundheads, arranged in thick dark masses, their steel caps and high crown hats drawn close over their brows, looking determination, expressing with furrowed foreheads and hard-closed lips, the inly-working rage which was blown up to furnace heat by the extempore effusions of their preachers, and found vent in the terrible denunciations of the Hebrew psalms and prophecies. The arms of each party were adapted to the nature of their courage: the swords, pikes, and pistols of the royalists, light and bright, were suited for swift onset and ready use; while the ponderous basket-hilted blades, long halberds, and heavy fire-arms of the parliamentarians were equally suited to resist a sharp attack, and to do execution upon a broken army. The royalists regarded their adversaries with that scorn which the gay and high-born always feel or affect for the precise and sour-mannered: the soldiers of the covenant looked on their enemies as the enemies of Israel, and considered themselves as the elect and chosen people—a creed which extinguished fear and remorse altogether. It would be hard to say whether there were more praying on one side or swearing on the other, or which, to a truly Christian ear, had been the most offensive. Yet both esteemed themselves champions of the church, there was bravery and virtue in both; but with this high advantage on the parliamentary side, that while the aristocratic honour of the royalists could only inspire a certain number of gentlemen, and separated the patrician from the plebeian soldier, the religious zeal of the Puritans bound officer and man, general and pioneer, together, in a fierce and resolute sympathy, and made equality itself an argument for subordination. The captain prayed at the head of his company, and the general’s oration was a sermon. (HLW 203–205)

Hartley’s natural imaginative habitat is one of strong contrasts, sweeping generalizations, and colorful exaggeration. How could he have known that “The royalists regarded their adversaries with that scorn which the gay and high-born always feel or affect for the precise and sour-mannered” (above)? Perhaps he has remembered Hamlet’s wonderfully dismissive

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treatment of Osrick (Hamlet V ii). At any rate, the sentence is so sonorous and resonant that it makes it easy for the reader not to notice that it is not necessarily true. Hartley belonged to a species of writers yet to be properly known. Marcel Proust (1871–1922) would often be able to open up a similarly wide imaginative perspective that would set readers dreaming of its meaning at once precise and manifold: How often, in the Divine Comedy, in Shakespeare, I have had this impression of having in front of me, inserted into the present moment, something of the past, that dream-like impression one feels in Venice, on the Piazzetta, before its two columns of pink and grey granite which carry on their capitals, the one the lion of St Mark and the other St Theodore trampling on the crocodile—beautiful foreigners come there from the Orient across the sea they are gazing at in the distance and which comes to die at their feet, and the two of them, uncomprehending of the remarks exchanged around them in a language not that of their own land, on this public square where their distracted smile still gleams, continue belatedly in our midst, interpolating their twelfth-century days into our own days. Yes, in the heart of a public square, in the midst of a today whose domination is fractured on this spot, something of the twelfth century, of a twelfth century so long since f led, rises up in a double thrust of slender pink granite . . . (On Reading 54–55)

As a donkey ridden by a prelate in pre-Elizabethan days, Hartley (if one is to accept as true his pretended belief in metempsychosis) caused the death of his rider, and in doing so he effectively sentenced himself to living his next life as the joker, the boozer, the failed academic, the minor poet, and the son of the famously “inefficient” STC: [The prelate] used to ride me in his full canonicals, which enveloped my body, leaving my four legs to appear like those of my rider, and my hinder parts emerging to complete the Reverend compound, indeed it was impossible to tell where the Prebendary ended and the Ass began . . . [I] kicked so furiously as to throw the Prebendary over my head into a ditch—this caused his death, and so grievous as sin it is, that I am now a man, such as you see me. (HLW 169)

In another of Hartley’s accounts of his previous life, he claimed that he had been present at the siege of Troy: Don’t you know that I was one of the martyrs to Helen’s beauty? I was then an insect which in these days is nameless, & having crawled upon her bright yellow hair, I was pointed out to her by Paris, and she crushed me with her pearly nail. (Memoir cxlii)


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When Wordsworth described the unevenness of Hartley’s education (PSP 70), he described something that would become common among prominent thinkers and writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For the Irish novelist, John Banville, the typically celebrated modern writer is really, behind the publicity, “the trembling autodidact hunched over his Webster’s, his Chicago Manual, his Grammar for Foreign Students” (Shroud 62). Nowadays, it is common for critically acclaimed writers to be laconic about their lacunae, but Hartley’s admissions about his struggles were innovative: What youthful poet, wooing his Fancy’s Queen with tender poesy, would choose to have her witness to “his poetic pains,”—the blots, the erasures, the gnawing of his pen,—his stolen glances at the rhyming dictionary,—his furtive forays into the “Elegant Extracts” and the “Beauties of the Living Poets?” What extempore preacher would expose his note-book to his congregation? (HEM I 180)

Next, Hartley delivers a mot juste: “For my own part, I like a good beef-steak, but have no desire to follow it from the stall to the gridiron” (HEM I 180). Such a tactfully timed reappearance of classy, humorous detachment is never far away in Hartley’s prose, even when he is at his most serious. Southey lamented the fact that Hartley was “headstrong, violent, perilously disposed to justify whatever he may wish to do, eccentric in all his ways, and willing to persuade himself that there is a merit in eccentricity” (PSP 62). But Hartley’s tongue in cheek argument that dogs may well have a language of smell (Memoir lxv) is especially engaging precisely because it is also philosophically serious. Between the conception (1797) and publication (1816) of “Kubla Khan,” Hartley’s father continued contemplating the issue of what may exist beyond the earthly senses: In short, all the organs of Sense are framed for a corresponding World of Sense: and we have it. All the organs of Spirit are framed for a corresponding World of Spirit: & we cannot but believe it . . . And what is Faith?—it is to the spirit of Man the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned f ly to build its involucrum as long again as itself to make room for the Antennae, which are to come, tho’ they never yet have been.—O the Potential works in us even as the Present mood works on us! (STCN 4088)

As if by osmosis, Hartley learned from his father that his reflecting on of the endless flux of a seeming world would result in contradictory anticipations of Everything and Nothing bewildering his consciousness with their

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simultaneity. In that sense, despite his work containing elements of the contemplative poetry of the seventeenth century, Hartley is quite unlike, say, the Welsh religious writer and metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan (1621–95), who could open his poem, “The World,” with the assurance that: I saw Eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light . . . (The Metaphysical Poets 271)

Hartley is capable of introducing a similarly miraculous panorama—“the vast nothing of the eternal sky” (HCPW 12)—as the void through which the Sun must travel. Yet, having been born in an era whose cognoscenti have fully assimilated Gallileo Galilei’s (1564–1642) contribution to science, Hartley understands that the Sun does not move. On top of that, however, he knows that the 1-year-old he addresses in the poem will not understand his words, regardless of whether or not he speaks with postPtolemaic integrity. Hartley is talking to himself and, like Hamlet, thinking about his attempts to direct the play of his life: Aye, I grant That earth and sky are cunning instruments; But who may rouse their sleeping harmony, And not torment the strings to grinding discord, Or vex the hearers with the weary drone Of half-forgotten lays, like buzzing night-f lies, Thwarting the drowsiness themselves produce? (HCPW 23)

Every attempt to encapsulate a point—to write—means a closing, a limiting, a diminution, as the world slips into (or out of ) place in the realm of ink and paper: All, all is stale: the busy ways of men, The gorgeous terrors of the steel-clad warrior, The lover’s sighs, the fair one’s cruelty, Or that worst state, when love, a rayless fire, Is sever’d quite from hope and tenderness, Or dogg’d by base suspicion, hurries onward, Scared by its own black shadow. (HCPW 23–24)

Hartley’s work can be reread in the context of the twenty-first century. Think, for example, of the passive evil of e-mail (including having to


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delete spam messages), or the amount of time and psychic energy one spends in the grip of modern technology (attending and delivering power-point presentations, watching DVDs with advertisements that cannot be skipped, and obtaining from cash-points receipts that have not been requested), and consider the following, from Hartley’s essay, “Brief Observations Upon Brevity:” But it is not the appalling sum total [of wasted time] that I regard. It is the mizzling insignificant items, the heart-breaking fractions, the endless subdivisions of misery, that provoke me. It is as if one were condemned to be blown up with a mass of gunpowder, and at the same time to feel the separate explosion of every grain. (HEM 50)

Or consider (from the same essay) the following passage on the misery of coach-travel. One might easily modify the vision into that of a modern airport, where f lights have been delayed, and commuters of all ages are experiencing the desolation of imprisonment: Scenes of this kind are particularly distressing to children; confinement and the want of fresh air are themselves sufficiently painful to them, and they seldom possess the faculty of deriving amusement from inconveniences. But all the troubles of our progress were nothing to the intolerable stopping. All conversation, even that of the politicians, ceased instantly. Sigh answered sigh, and groans were heard in all the notes of the gamut. The very horses seemed to sympathise with the feelings of the passengers, by various inarticulate sounds expressing, not, indeed, impatience to be gone, but uneasiness at staying. It was a hopeless condition. Every face was a glass, in which one might perceive the lengthening of one’s own. For the last stage, a dozing silence prevailed, which made me almost wish for noise again. Anything to drown the rumble of the wheels, and the perpetual and unavailing crack of the whip, which was applied unmercifully, and, as it were, mechanically, without the smallest acceleration. (HEM I 50)

Without making explicit any clear polemical intention, Hartley often explored the consequences for all of us of civilization’s comprehension that, even among the fundamental laws of nature, the goal of happiness is unattainable. In the above excerpt, the clarity and wittiness of the prose is geared toward making the author and reader intimate and complicit at the same time. The reader is invited to consider the sort of unhappiness that results in the attempt to go somewhere or do something in the external world, with its ironic convenience of utilitarian objects and procedures. Yet Hartley’s writing remains porous with humanity, rather than hardening into the misanthropic verbal carapace worn by a Byron or a Schopenhauer,

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or the French miscellaneous writer, Nicholas Chamfort (1741–94), who specialized in sarcasm and epigrammatic force. Hartley surveyed the pattern of his own dilatory ways that led him into his middle-age without the consolation (that must have sustained the aging Wordsworth) of having put the full force of his youthful vitality into literary works that would always remain young: Too true it is, my time of power was spent In idly watering weeds of casual growth, That wasted energy to desperate sloth Declined, and fond self-seeking discontent; That the huge debt for all that nature lent I sought to cancel, and was nothing loth To deem myself an outlaw, sever’d both From duty and from hope,—yea, blindly sent Without an errand, where I would to stray:— Too true it is, that, knowing now my state, I weakly mourn the sin I ought to hate, Nor love the law I yet would fain obey: But true it is, above all law and fate Is Faith, abiding the appointed day. (HCPW 9)

Again, the personal anxiety of the individual coincides with a universal problem: many people “weakly mourn the sin[s they] ought to hate,” and recognize (even as they spend them) many of the hours spent watching television and surfing the Internet as time wasted. The problem is aggravated by the fact that our awareness of the waste does not stop us from persisting in “idly watering weeds of casual growth.” The social and political issues thought through by poets aspiring to greatness in the nineteenth century (such as Wordsworth and Shelley) were not issues which arose with the same force to Hartley’s mind. Out of the moral ruins left by the French Revolution, Wordsworth had tried to find some vestige of truth upon which he could base his life and the lives of his readers. He wanted, as Hugh Sykes Davies has put it, to be “both a Teacher and a Poet” (Wordsworth and the Worth of Words 3). Shelley recorded his view that French people in 1793 would not have supported the leader of the radical Jacobins in the National Assembly, Robespierre (1758–94)—who backed the execution of Louis XVI, implemented a purge of the Girondists, and initiated the Terror—had they been vegetarians (Being Shelley 29). Hartley, however, did not find much comfort in the generalized solutions of problems which would have been remote from any presenting themselves to him. He could, however, find


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Giovanni, in John Ford’s (1586–1639) play, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633), a repository of some of his own demons: I have too long suppress’d my hidden f lames, That almost have consum’d me; I have spent Many a silent night in sighs and groans; Ran over all my thoughts, despised my fate, Reason’d against the reasons . . . Done all that smooth-cheek’d virtue could advise . . . (DWMF 28)

The critic’s schematizing attempts invariably simplify Hartley’s moods and techniques. A single passage of a few lines may move from a moment of intense lyricism to a passage of sharp analysis or def lating irony, but Hartley’s imagination has created a context and a psychology for the modulations. Hartley’s essay, “Pins,” is a case in point. The essay begins in an apparently self-mocking tone: “How seldom are we aware, that every atom of the universe is a text, and every article of our household an homily!” We mistakenly, says Hartley, gain from pins anything beyond “a temporary concinnity of garments, the support of an apron, or the adhesion of a neckerchief.” So, when Hartley formally announces his intention to analyze a very important subject, the humorous surprise is quickly followed by the equally surprising serious insights gained as Hartley continues to work through the issue: Let us divide it into matter and form, and we shall perceive that it is the form alone that constitutes a pin. Time was when it slumbered in the chaos of brazen wire, amid the multitude of concentric circles, cycles and epicycles. Time was, too, when that wire was molten in the furnace, when the solid brass became as water, and rushed from its ore with a glowing rapidity. When this took place we know not; what strange mutations the metals may have undergone we cannot conjecture. It may have shone on the breast of Achilles, or ejected the spirit of Hector. Who knows but it may have partaken of the sacredness of Solomon’s lavers, or have gleamed destruction in the mirror of Archimedes? From form, then, is derived disgrace or dignity; of which the poor passive matter is but the involuntary recipient; yet forms are all f leeting, changeable creatures of time and circumstance, will and fancy: there is nothing that abides but a brute inert mass, and even that has no existence at any time, but in the form which then it bears. Just like this pin is man . . . (HEM I 80–81).

One might detect an echo from Cowper’s poem, Yardley Oak (1804), in which the speaker, on seeing an oak tree mighty enough to “rib . . . the

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sides or plank . . . the deck / Of some f lagged admiral” (ECV 610), is inclined to imagine the feeble, fecal origin of the erstwhile acorn: Thou wast a bauble once; a cup and ball, Which babes might play with; and the thievish jay Seeking her food, with ease might have purloined The auburn nut that held thee, swallowing down Thy yet close-folded latitude of boughs And all thine embryo vastness, at a gulp. But Fate thy growth decreed: autumnal rains Beneath thy parent tree mellowed the soil Designed thy cradle, and a skipping deer, With pointed hoof dibbling the glebe, prepared The soft receptacle in which secure Thy rudiments should sleep the winter through. (ECV 608–609)

For Cowper, the tree is to be addressed in terms of awed respect and wonder, as it towers above the spectator, living its life in an alien, majestic, and mysterious way. For Hartley, the pin (neither alive nor awesome) may be picked up and contemplated with a sense of wonder and a sense of humor— the same blend that informed Hamlet’s encounter with the late Yorick’s skull. The pin had appeared in noteworthy writing long before Hartley Coleridge. The Irish novelist, poet, essayist, and dramatist, Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74), had invoked the pin in order to illustrate the sheer scale of scarcely acknowledged labor in society: “Thus a magazine is not the result of any single man’s industry, but goes through as many hands as a new pin, before it is fit for the public” (Poems and Essays 97). Hartley’s essay vis-à-vis the mighty pin (shining on the breast of Achilles and ejecting the spirit of Hector) is simultaneously droll and in keeping with the philosophically serious “bond between [Hartley] and insignificant things” (PHC 67). Hartley has blended the delightful urbanity of a Charles Lamb with the heavyweight thinking of an Edmund Burke: to be struck with his [God’s] power, it is only necessary that we should open our eyes. But whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner annihilated before him. (On the Sublime and Beautiful 58)

Hartley, in the minuteness of his own nature, and in a sense annihilated, was—and, most importantly, is—everyman.


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Notes 1. One thinks in connection with Southey of Mark Storey’s Robert Southey: A Life (1997). 2. For example, Wellek had suggested STC’s central problem as a plagiarist: “[S.T.] Coleridge has little insight into the incompatibility of different trends of thought. He lacks a sense for the subtle shades of terminological differences in different thinkers, he seems sometimes almost blind to the wide implications in this or that idea. It is not the fact that several central passages in Coleridge are borrowed or paraphrased or inf luenced by other thinkers; it is rather the circumstance that these adaptations of other thought are heterogeneous, incoherent and even contradictory which makes the study of Coleridge’s philosophy ultimately so futile. He was no doubt a great mediator of ideas, we feel also in most of what he wrote a certain unifying temperament which cannot be mistaken, but if we look more closely we find that Coleridge has built a building of no style” (Immanuel Kant in England 1793–1838 66–67). For Thomas McFarland, Wellek’s perception is a classic example of a “slower mind” contemplating, with inevitable “distrust,” the genius’s “instinctive jump[ing] from premise to correct conclusion” (Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition 13). 3. Richard Bradford sees the problem inherent in any attempt to interpret “Kubla Khan” as referring to any particular “reality.” Bradford furthermore sees that the component parts of the poem are seemingly held in one harmony: “It is virtually impossible to isolate a single word or syllable [of “Kubla Khan”] that is not linked phonetically with at least two others: Xanadu, did, dome, decree, Down; stately, sacred, sunless, sea; Kubla Khan, decree, sacred, caverns. Such a listing could be extended and supplemented by an almost infinite series of permutations in which alliteration connects with stress pattern, semantic foregrounding, syntactical structure and rhyme scheme” (A Linguistic History of English Poetry 124). In other words, the whole of the poem’s life—the soul of the poem—is engaged in nothing else but the embodiment and unfolding of verbal forms, in all the intricate and complex delicacy of nature herself. 4. Rupert Christiansen provides succinct summaries of both poets’ tragic lives (RA 76–83; 83–91).

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The Echo of a Small Voice And yet Judith Plotz has nodded neatly in agreement with Hartley’s selfcondemnations, such as the following: WHEN I review the course that I have run, And count the loss of all my wasted days,

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I find no argument for joy or praise In whatsoe’er my soul hath thought or done. I am a desert, and the kindly sun On me hath vainly spent his fertile rays. (HCPW 114)

Plotz has not been alone in remaining unaware of the possibility of disingenuousness in Hartley’s self-deprecation. The title of Hartman’s biography, Hartley Coleridge: Poet’s Son and Poet, has prioritized Hartley’s credentials according to Hartley’s supposed wishes and the supposedly overwhelming evidence in his writings. Hartman’s overall view of Hartley has since become familiar: For one, indeed, of his name and associations he proved, both as poet and man of letters, a signal failure. For a few imperishable sonnets, a fine lyric or two, much “miserably magazinish” verse, and a body of essays, critical and informal, and marginalia, all of diffuse merits—these scarcely fulfilled the promise of his birthright. (PSP vii)

The available accounts of Hartley’s life and work have grown similar, focussing on the evidence (usually to be traced back to Hartley himself ) that supports a powerful, if inaccurate, point of view: by peculiarly underexploiting his mental resources, Hartley shaped himself into an awkward little scrap of sociology that could not be blown into its designated corner of the world. Hartman has explained that the only thing separating Hartley from the other “lesser poets” of the nineteenth century—such as Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–49), George Darley (1795–1846), and Tom Moore (1779– 1852)—was not achievement, but “patrimony and environment” (PSP 172). Rather unsatisfyingly, Hartley still tends to be considered as either one of Harry Graham’s Splendid Failures (1913) or worthy of inclusion in the literary paleontologist’s cabinet of curiosities: “As a lamentable quiz, abortion, louse, donkey, dunce, Hartley is able to write only by positioning himself as a small poet” (RVC 205). Neither suggestion is adequate. Hartley’s writing should be reread, not dismissively or sentimentally, but with the sort of naturally rigorous sympathy that he himself had for the work of Beddoes: In the “Bride’s Tragedy,” by Thomas Beddoes, of Pembroke College, Oxon, occurs a hypothetical simile which some prose-witted dunce of a reviewer thought proper to assail with great animosity. Something, I forget what, is Like f lower’s voices—if they could but speak. Whoever feels the beauty of that line, has a soul for poetry. (HCNP 6)

Listening for (or to) f lowers’ voices may have been an original and provocative idea in itself, but it lacked the obviously significant connection


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with the social issues of the day displayed by, say, Shelley. Shelley’s famous request that the west wind scatter his words like sparks among mankind has effectively been granted: R.B. Woodring’s (ed.) Shelley: Modern Judgements (1968), Timothy Webb’s Shelley: A Voice Not Understood (1977), and Paul Foot’s Red Shelley (1980) are just three indications of the posthumous radiance of Shelley’s propensity for politicizing trees’ leaves in the same breath as England’s people. Hartley has been less triumphant, as he knew would be the case: Together must we dwell, my dream and I,— Unknown must live, and unlamented die . . . (HCPW 14)

Like his father at the time of his unsuccessful struggle to complete the second part of “Christabel,” Hartley often felt his own inspiration slipping out of reach like a dream-discovered formula that fumbled from his mind the moment he woke up. He documented the slippage: Youth, love, and mirth! too quickly they consume Their passive substance, and their small proportion Of f leeting life, in memory’s backward view, Still dwindles to a point, a twinkling star, Long gleaming o’er the onward course of Being, That tells us whence we came, and where we are, And tells us too, how swiftly we are f leeing From all we were and loved, when life was new. (HCPW 7)

He was under the inf luence of his father, but did not have his father’s (or Shelley’s) aptitude for cultivating a public reputation. For Anya Taylor, Hartley plays his father’s self as it might have been, had he not fought lifelong for free agency, had he not roamed, imagined and supposed. Of the two aspects of Bacchus that Samuel Taylor Coleridge proposed to explore in his unwritten long poem, Hartley is the Bastard Bacchus, the Gnome, twisted and incomplete, fixed in his foreknown life by a script spoken by his father . . . (BRE 156)

For Plotz, “Just as Hartley felt himself inscribed and enunciated by [S.T.] Coleridge, so [S.T.] Coleridge saw himself replicated in Hartley” (RVC 239): Already gray at thirty-four, already “loveless and confined” to a Grasmere banishment as a “hopeless” case, Hartley Coleridge looked back from 1830 to

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his glory days as a ten-year-old prodigy. In the very notebook his father had given him at ten, the self-proclaimed loser in “the race I never ran” recalled his annus mirabilis with his great father in the great world. (RVC 191)

Some critics have tended to speculate about why Hartley did not become as great a poet as his father. They have missed the point: while some children of famous fathers are destroyed and others empowered, Hartley is both, and subsequent historians have not read and identified the power. While Hartley served as a model for both his father and Wordsworth, his success came only through emancipating himself from their ideal images: ’Tis better to dwell among cornfields and f lowers, Or even the weeds of this world of ours, Than to leave the green vale and the sunny slope, To seek the cold cliff with a desperate hope. (HCPW 158)

If one thinks of Hartley’s poetry as not on the highest plane, and at best adequate—enlivened only on occasion by the orchestration of texture or the local adjustment of rhythm to sense—then perhaps it is time to lift it out of his father’s “dome in air,” and off “the cold cliff.” Significant groundwork for the re-emergence of Hartley Coleridge as a poet in his own right has already been done. James Reeves’s Understanding Poetry (1967) is shot through with references to Hartley’s poetry, and at no stage in his dissertation does Reeves feel the need to qualify his enthusiasm for Hartley as a poet of pivotal importance. Perhaps Reeves has recognized Hartley as the unjustly neglected poet he is himself: “It seems naïve,” says Reeves, “to indulge in private feelings. But without them existence is pointless.” To reread Hartley’s work, having considered Reeves’s views on what poetry means to him, is to begin to reassess Hartley out of his father’s usual shadow: To me poetry is rooted in the particular and the immediate. How therefore can I write poetry about what is experienced mainly through the newspapers, the films, and the radio? If any can make poems out of this, I can only admire and do otherwise. It may be that this is an unpoetic time. The nightmare of sensationalism, violence, hysteria and threatened destruction which presses on us as we read the news removes all relevance and meaning from the only kind of poetry I can write. ( JRCP Intro)

Reeves’s idea is that the neglect of a certain kind of individual poet in “an unpoetic time” may well be inevitable in historical terms, but its inevitability does not necessarily make it right.


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After the French Revolution of 1789, no writer of the time could avoid the terrifying, exciting feeling that history was on the move. The Romantic movement (as we now know it) was born. Blake attacked the new industrialism. Wordsworth idealized the simple ways of the countryside (which, even as he wrote, was being invaded by new roads, railways, and other signs of “progress”). Byron and Shelley became notorious as free spirits, sexually and politically. (Southey referred to them as the “Satanic” school of poets.) In Britain, the fear of revolution hardened into an excuse for using bad law and brute force to suppress signs of discontent. It seemed to be up to writers like Scott (1771–1832) to express the new sense of changing history. Europe was in uproar. The past became a matter for more lively and informed interest. There emerged a nostalgia for the old life that had been pushed aside. Sentimentality was one reason for the new interest in history, but the need to understand change was another, and a stronger, reason. When King Louis XVI (1754–93) was executed, people remembered the English Revolution 150 years before, when the Roundheads had beheaded King Charles. Violence in the past helped people to understand violence in their own time. There no longer appeared to be a calm procession of kings and queens gliding through history above the masses who duly stayed in their place. The clash of the classes disrupted the deeprooted notion that humanity was always going to remain the same. By the 1810s, humanity had been throwing up new ideals and new potentialities, as well as new kinds of wickedness and heroism. The rise and fall, and the second rise and fall, of Napoleon Bonaparte (emperor 1804–14, and again in 1815) could constitute a historical syllogism to fit behind Shelley’s poetic metaphor, “Mutability” (a poem published with Alastor in 1816): We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver, Streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon Night closes round, and they are lost forever . . . Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability. (PWS 353)

Hartley, however, did not offer himself to the Zeitgeist, and did not dedicate himself in mediumistic obedience to the collective desire to set a torch to anything, or anyone. Like James Reeves, Hartley could admire those writers who did contribute to the political and social debates, but himself could only “do otherwise.” Even in his sonnet, “On a picture of the corpse of Napoleon lying in State,” Hartley did not fall upon the

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subject, as many poets would have, as if it had been waiting specifically for him to politicize it: Lo! there he lies. Is Death no more than this? Is this the worst that mighty mortal can Inf lict upon his fellow? Could the man— The strongest arm of angry Nemesis,— The rod that routed hosts were fain to kiss, Whom failing Faith afar with terror eyed, And Atheism madly deified— Could he with all his wars and policies Effect but this? To antedate a year That cold unfeeling calm, that even now Blanks the dark meaning of that deep-lined brow, And from the loose lip half uncurls the sneer? If such be Death, O man, then what art thou, That for the fear of Death would’st live in fear? (HCPW 9)

Hartley could softly un-think the sort of rebellious, and reactionary, assumptions that tend to f lourish in the forcing-houses of troubled times. Shelley lived in a state of imaginative exaltation deriving in part from his visionary sense of the auguries and writings on the walls of those strange years after the French Revolution had caused the phenomenon of the rising towards the surface of unconscious themes: I do remember well the hour which burst My spirit’s sleep. A fresh May-dawn it was, When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, And wept, I knew not why; until there rose From the near school-room voices that, alas! Were but one echo from a world of woes— The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. (PWS 49)

Gothic literature (a huge inf luence on Shelley’s writing) seemed to articulate the unformulated content of the unconscious state of many individuals, a brew of brooding fear and somnambulist eroticism, passive, bewitched, yet also seeking, among the wreckage of the outer and inner worlds in which people were astray—worlds which had weirdly and worryingly converged, as if the outer, instead of offering people protection from their nightmare, had become possessed by it—some pearl beyond price felt to be just behind and beyond the veil of each obsessive symbol.


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In August 1794, STC had reviewed Ann Radcliffe’s (1764–1823) The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and complained of the frustration in store for readers looking for enlightenment in the Gothic genre (of which Radcliffe was the leading exponent): Curiosity is raised oftener than it is gratified; or rather, it is raised so high that no adequate gratification can be given it; the interest is completely dissolved when once the adventure is finished, and the reader, when he has got to the end of the work, looks about in vain for the spell which had bound him so strongly to it. (The Critical Review 361–72)

Many writers, like Radcliffe, f lailed (muddying their own prospects as they did so) in search of some mysterious world-transforming talisman. Hartley would not: Not such am I,—a petty man of rhyme, Nursed in the softness of a female time. From May of life to Autumn have I trod The earth, not quite unconscious of my God; But apter far to recognize His power In sweet perfection of a pencill’d f lower, A kitten’s gambols, or a birdie’s nest, A baby sleeping on its mother’s breast, Than in the fearful passages of life,— The battle-field, the never-ceasing strife Of policy that ever would be wise, Dissecting truth into convenient lies; The gallows, or the press-gang, or the press; The poor man’s pittance, ever less and less; The dread magnificence of ancient crime, Or the mean mischief of the present time. (HCPW 211)

The past enchanted Hartley and the supernatural thrilled him, but he could feel (and communicate) with precision how “truth” was often dissected “into convenient lies;” and he could juxtapose the “mean mischief ” of his own time with the “dread magnificence” of bygone epochs, when individuals indulged personal freedom, and had followed will with passion, and known, in doing the latter, something no longer frequent in human life. In the above excerpt, when a couplet kindles a social or political insight, the spark is kept under control by Hartley’s dexterous excellence. Hartley kept his fires light and bright. Not to be political then was held to be a mark either of incorrigible selfishness or lack of seriousness.1 Hartley felt no less than Shelley that the

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current of history, which f lows in one direction only, was f lowing the way that Shelley was going; and much of the sense of power that possessed Shelley came from the sense of f lowing with the tide: I vowed that I would dedicate my powers To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow? With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now I call the phantoms of a thousand hours Each from his voiceless grave . . . They know that never joy illumed my brow Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery . . . (PWS 357)

To move with the tide—or, as Shelley called it, “The awful shadow of some unseen Power” (PWS 357)—seemed to be a kind of virtue in itself, an implicit faith in the purpose of whatever hidden power conducts the world. Hartley’s faith was alloyed with doubt: Yes, thou dost well to build a fence about Thine inward faith, and mount a stalwart guard Of answers, to oppose invading doubt. All aids are needful, for the strife is hard; But still be sure the truth within to cherish, — Truths long besieged too oft of hunger perish. (HCPW 350)

On the surface, Hartley appeared to be little attuned to what John Masefield has since identified as the source of the great Romantic poets’ power: The convulsion known as the Romantic Movement was urged by many longings in millions of minds, some, perhaps, only eager to destroy existing authorities, many hungry for freedom to use the inventive faculties special to each human soul, and many others hungering and thirsting for the mystical experiences of religion. The results of these longings may be seen in the French Revolution and its sequent wars . . . All these hungers of mind affected poetry, which is itself often a hunger of the mind. (Thanks Before Going 1)

Hartman has nicely summed up the absence of political passion in Hartley’s work: Through the half century his life spanned, history was in the making: there were Coalitions, Irish Rebellions, Specie Payments, the Birmingham


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Riots, and Corn Laws; the War of 1812 and Waterloo; the Manchester Riots; the great Reform Bill—and through it all Hartley wandered in a sort of somnambulism . . . (PSP 180)

The absence of fervor is perhaps summed up even better by Hartley’s four lines, “On A Dissolution Of Ministry”: SHOUT Britain, raise a joyful shout, The Tyrant Tories all are out— Deluded Britons—cease your din— For lo—the scoundrel Whigs are in. (HCNP 102)

For Hartley, in the broadest sense (and without bitterness), one party was as bad as another. Again, in order to illustrate the point, one has to unearth the evidence from the jumble of Hartley’s casual writings. He had written to his mother from Leeds in December 1832: Our election has gone of[f ] very quietly, only a little scuff ling on the day of nomination. Some of the respectable supporters of both parties really seem to think it worth while to dispute about who began the fray; as if there were not plenty of blackguards on both sides! (HCL 150)

In Recollections (1897), Aubrey de Vere remembered Hartley meeting an anti-Catholic, Irish lecturer. Hartley solemnly announced to his new acquaintance, “Sir, there are two great evils in Ireland.” When asked to name them, Hartley pleased the enthusiast a great deal by saying “popery.” But when Hartley was asked to name the second evil, he replied (as he ran away screaming with laughter), “Protestantism” (RADV 153). In the 1830s Hartley wrote to Thomas Hood (editor of The Gem since 1829) as a kindred spirit in matters pertaining to politics and religion: I believe you are neither Whig, Tory, nor Radical High-Churchman, Puritan, or Socinian—that you have a sensible contempt for the whole race of—ologies and isms, with a most kindly disposition towards all—ologists, ists, and inians . . . If I possess any humour at all—it is of the Shandean school, and not according to the taste of the times . . . (PSP 109)

Hartley’s reference to Laurence Sterne’s (1713–68) Tristram Shandy (1760–67) deserves pause. The novel is about—if it is about anything— the growth of the author’s imagination of his own world, with all its emergent contingencies, personal perceptions, and alternations of cosmic

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and confined dimensions. If Hartley followed anything, or anyone, he followed Sterne’s taste for fragmentary disorder in art. There is tremendous tenderness and compassion in Tristram Shandy, and the novel represents the liberal warmth of the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Buoyed by aspirations, jettisoning pre-revolutionary baggage, Hartley’s contemporaries advertised different enthusiasms. Hartley’s sonnet, “Written in a Season of Public Disturbance,” suggests the temperament of a poet for whom the distant din of street protest songs exists primarily to be re-contextualized amidst Lakeland scenery: CALM is the sky: the trees are very calm. The mountains seem as they would melt away, So soft their outline mingles with the day. Surely no sound less holy than a psalm Should interrupt the stillness and the balm Of such a morn, whose grave monastic grey Clothes the meek east in garment meet to pray With sweet humility, without a qualm. And yet, even now, in this most blessed hour, Who knows but that the murderous shot is sped In the fell jar of poverty and power? The man but now that lived, may now be dead. Has Nature of her human brood no care, That on their bloody deeds she smiles so fair? (HCPW 132)

Hartley has imbibed his Toryism from his deep reading of Shakespeare: A strong evidence of Shakspeare’s Toryism is the respect with which he always treats established orders, degrees, institutions, and opinions; never seeking to desecrate what time and the world’s consent have sanctified. Even prejudices and superstitions he touches gently, as one would be loth to pull down an old crazy shed, if the swallows had built under its eaves, and the ewe and her lamb resorted to its shelter from the storm . . . (HEM I 127)

Hartley’s shrewdness in preserving—and even in performing—his Shakespearean Toryism has not enticed those twentieth-century scholars for whom, say, Shelley’s eruptions, or even the radical political messages encoded in Keats’s great odes, are of primary importance: Yet there is something in my heart that would Become a witness to eternal good. Woe to the man that wastes his wealth of mind,


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And leaves no legacy to human-kind! I love my country well,—I love the hills, I love the valleys and the vocal rills; But most I love the men, the maids, the wives, The myriad multitude of human lives. (HCPW 211)

The niche that Hartley occupied has remained intact (if untended), and it still contains his personal pain, his humor, and his energy, as in an inviolate hypogeum. Hartley’s quintessence has not been eradicated by critics ever-bent on reducing literary works to things they can politicize: It [poetry] has often been called an activity of religion, philosophy, aesthetics, [or politics,] but in so naming it we find that the very limitations these poet figures sought to free themselves from are reimposed. (RET 28)

Hartley was sometimes “subversive” with simultaneous mildness and shrewdness, which is a striking combination not to be put easily from the reader’s mind once detected. For example, there is probably a degree of perfidy in the following casual footnote, in Hartley’s essay, “Ignoramus On the Fine Arts I:” “a University [Oxford] which is continually stocking the country with scholars and divines, cannot be expected to produce a great poet every year” (HEM I 188). Like Leonard, in the poem, Leonard and Susan, Hartley was essentially untaught to bow his way Through servile crowds, to fix the f litting eye Of selfish patronage, or cling secure To the huge timbers of the rotting state A battening barnacle, by sloth retain’d, And nourish’d by decay. (HCPW 51–52)

By the time Hartley published the above lines (in the September 1827 edition of Blackwood’s Magazine), Southey (having been a fiery republican as a younger man) had been Poet Laureate since 1813, and would remain zealously conservative until his death in 1843; Wordsworth was a tax collector; and STC was writing editorials for right-wing newspapers. In 1821, Byron wrote The Vision of Judgement, which attacked Southey for having published his sycophantic homage to the recently deceased

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King George III, A Vision of Judgement. Southey as portrayed by Byron does—to borrow Hartley’s words—“bow his way” and “cling secure:” He [Southey] had written praises of a regicide; He had written praises of all kings whatever; He had written for republics far and wide, And then against them bitterer than ever. (The Vision of Judgement 97)

Byron expresses his sense of disillusionment at Southey’s transparently self-interested transmogrification with intense, yet controlled, anger. With a masterstroke, Byron has Southey, the poet/biographer, place himself at Satan’s disposal: He had written Wesley’s life:—here turning round To Satan, “Sir, I’m ready to write yours, In two octavo volumes, nicely bound, With notes and preface, all that most allures The pious purchaser; and there’s no ground For fear, for I can choose my own reviewers: So let me have the proper documents That I may add you to my other saints. (The Vision of Judgement 99)

Byron’s sarcasm is loud and rough enough not to be drowned out in the Niagara of contemporary affairs. However, Hartley has learned from the Sylphs in his own “Prometheus” that insistent gentleness can be much more effective than Prometheus’s arrogance and pride: There is a spell of unresisted power In wonder-working weak simplicity, Because it is not fear’d. (HCPW 301)

For Hartley, even Prometheus himself comes to acknowledge that the Sylphs’ power is superior to his own: You, at least, Have nought to fear. Your unsubstantial forms Present no scope to the keen thunderbolt; Nor adamant can bind your subtle essence, Which is as fine as scent of violets, Quick as the warbled notes of melody,


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And unconfinable as thoughts of gods. Then go your way . . . (HCPW 304–5)

Sylph-like himself (rather than Promethean/Byronic), Hartley prefers to register his awareness of rottenness in the world with a mild, and all the more effective, touch, as the following passage from “Young and His Contemporaries” demonstrates: As long as men can read, and boys recite, As long as critics sneer, and bards endite, And lavish lords shall print their jingling stuff, ’Mid ample margin, leaving verge enough; So long shall GRAY, and all he heard and sung, Tang the shrill accents of the school-girl’s tongue; So long his Ode, his Elegy, and Bard, By lisping prodigies be drawl’d and marr’d. (HCPW 325)

Hartley has the urbane acidity to refer—almost in passing—to the spacious amplitude of the half-filled pages published by those members of the social stratum with literary pretensions and sumptuous resources at their disposal. Yet, as Mary Joseph Pomeroy has said, Hartley “did not . . . appear as the champion of any class, for it was not humanity that Hartley Coleridge loved so much as individual human beings” (PHC 29). The following composite picture of a gentleman is typical of Hartley’s power of general observation, in that there is just a hint of acidity dispersed throughout the mass of amusing detail: A smack of the antique is an excellent ingredient in gentility. A gentleman, to be the beau ideal of his order, should live in an old house (if haunted, so much the better), well stocked with old books and old wine, and well hung with family portraits, and choice pieces of the old masters. He should keep all his father’s old servants (provided they did not turn modern philosophers), and an old nurse, replete with legendary lore . . . . His face should have something of the cavalier cut—a likeness to the family Vandykes; and his manners, without being absolutely antiquated, should show somewhat of an inherited courtesy. In all, he should display a consciousness, that he is to represent something historical, something that is not of to-day or yesterday—a power derived from times of yore. (PSP 178)

Hartley balances his respect for history and tradition beautifully with his levity. Even in Hartley’s grander poetic statements, where he seems to

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assume more authority as a critic of humankind, he offers his views (of the foolishness of people in general) in peace, rather than via satire or other verbal swordplay: But there is war, because man craves the fruit Of Autumn in the aye-beginning Spring. We would have perfect freedom upon earth;— Ah, fools! to think that freedom can consist In selfish singleness of myriad wills, Worse than the old Epicurean fancy Of warring atoms hook’d into a world! (HCPW 201)

The argument, “Written on a calm and beautiful day in May, 1848,” acquires the energy of a philosopher in hot pursuit of “a meaning, as precise and categorical as the polarity of moral truth” (HEM I 79): But madder yet to think that million wills, Each crushing other, can compose one will, Constituent of universal truth. We would be the sons of Nature—would be free As Nature is. But can we then forget That Nature is an everlasting law, And free because she cannot disobey? (HCPW 201)

Hartley would not go with the mainstream of Romanticism, if such it was. He knew that in rejecting the mainstream he was putting himself in a “losing” position. Where, say, Edmund Burke had perfected his rhetoric to persuade Britain’s opinion-mongers away from the idea of a violent revolution, Hartley rarely used rhetoric to persuade his readers on matters pertaining to international upheaval, or national security, or anything “bigger” than those close, warm, human concerns that make up day-today living: These detestable Politics jam up the periodicals cruelly, and I who could f lourish away to some tune, am constrained to leave that most profitable subject untouched because I would not willingly contradict the opinions of my family and friends, and cannot coincide with them without wounding my own conscience. Not that I am an advocate for the Bill, but neither am I an advocate for things as they have been, and I have nothing to propose but what would be, tho’ much less democratic, even more radical! (HCL 137)


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Hartley is a peculiarly modern writer in the sense that his eloquence bubbles and f lows too lightly to be siphoned off profitably by any political party, or even by any academic institution, as the following illustrates: Have several offers of work, some of which shall accept; others must think about. A schoolmaster wants me to puff his establishment. Can’t do it. Poor old Dr Bell [Andrew Bell (1753–1832) founded the Madras system of education]. What will he do in Heaven, where I suppose all Education is suspended. (HCL 137)

According to Hartley’s friend and former pupil, Thomas Blackburne, Hartley’s favourite spot was a little glade above Stockgill force, quite shut in with trees and hills, where the stream f lows in deep lucid pools. “I wonder what pleasure the people find in that noisy fall,” he one day said to me, “I like this silence a great deal better; but no one notices it.” (Memoir cxxxv)

Left to himself, Hartley never wished to struggle, but only to be forever in the places he loved, to sit hour after hour “in the cloud-land of his fancy” (Memoir xxxvi); not to visit but to be eternally (at least for the moment eternally) at one with places remote from the human world, where optimism did not have to be political optimism: ALL Nature ministers to Hope. The snow Of sluggard Winter, bedded on the hill, And the small tinkle of the frozen rill, The swoln f lood’s sullen roar, the storms that go With crash, and howl, and horrid voice of woe, Making swift passage for their lawless will— All prophesy of good. The hungry trill Of the lone birdy, cowering close below The dripping eaves—it hath a kindly feeling, That cheers the life that lives for milder hours. (HCPW 90)

He would rather have been one of those hermits who in some cave of the Himalayas meditated upon transience and nirvana, than their European “conquerors;” but the mainstream writers were essentially conquerors of summits. Hartley is a tantalizing figure in that he left behind him “the difficulty . . . of arranging by means of anecdotes and table-talk, any sufficient

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idea of the living man” (Memoir cxxxii). As Thomas Blackburne said: His genius was too uneven to run in a groove. His conversation was a continual sparkle; very irregular and unequal, yet, when worked up to a certain warmth, throwing out jets and gushes so radiant and hilarious that, like a Christmas fire, it inspirited and made happy everybody. (Memoir cxxxiii)

Hartley’s writings have echoed through the centuries, and into here and now. Having made his fairy voyage, he has finally arrived, and can tell us what we feel: To live without a living soul, To feel the spirit daily pining, Sinking beneath the base control Of mindless chance, itself consigning To the dull impulse of oppressive time, To find the guilt without the power of crime. (HCPW 84)

We twenty-first century readers—alienated yet also fully owned in a computerized, postmodern, post-human western world—can hear the aspects of our condition as foretold by our most unsung ancestral voice: Such is the penance, and the meed Of thoughts that, boasting to be free, Spurning the dictates of a practic creed, Are tangled with excess of liberty, Making themselves sole arbiters of right, Trampling on hallow’d use with proud delight. (HCPW 84–85)

Note 1. Hazlitt was unable to stand Byron for not having high seriousness, particularly in Canto II of Don Juan, a thoroughly debunking sea tale in which the protagonist, having wept over a love letter, sees the same letter torn up for use as lots to decide who is going to be eaten (the crew and passengers having been stranded upon the ocean, out of food, and about to engage in cannibalism): “The Noble Lord is almost the only writer who has prostituted his talents in this way. He hallows in order to desecrate; takes a pleasure in defacing the images of beauty his hands have wrought; and raises our hopes and our beliefs in goodness only to dash them to the earth again, and break them in pieces the more effectively from the height they have fallen” (Spirit of the Age 122).

CHAPTER 4

HIS RIPENING ACHIEVEMENT

Nothing to Write About YOU bid me write, and yet propose no theme. Must I then shoot my shafts of poesy At the vast, void, invulnerable air? (HCPW 23)

I

n 1822, Hartley’s father made the rather startling suggestion that his son did not have a “Self ” (HCL 73). In the light of that suggestion, it is perhaps also startling that Hartley’s intellectual importance has escaped the activities of professional biographers. Sarah Coleridge, whom STC once also said had no “real Self ” (STCN 979), has since had her self hood reinstated by Molly Lefebure’s acclaimed biography. Hartley’s self hood has remained expunged. There is something about nothing, or no one. The reason is not just to do with post-modern irony. Nothing, or no-one (particularly where one would have expected something, or someone), has a serious intellectual pedigree. Disbelief in a person’s innate character goes back, even past STC, at least to the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76), who said that the self is no more than “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which . . . are in perpetual f lux and movement” (THN 252). Nothing was significant in great drama before any of the Coleridges were thought of. In Shakespeare’s most powerful play, King Lear’s sweetest daughter, Cordelia, offered her father “Nothing” when he asked her what she had to say that would give him an idea of how much she loved him. Byron would say: “I know nought. Nothing I deny, Admit, reject, contemn . . .” (Don Juan XIV iii), thus boldly aligning his agnosticism (though the word did not yet exist) with his (and all humans’) ignorance about

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what it really means (if it means anything) to be alive and in the world. And in Dickens’s (1812–70) Bleak House (1852–53) Captain Hawdon would become known as “Nemo” (no-one), having resigned his commission in the army and further descended in the estimation of society by becoming addicted to opium. For most of his life, Hartley felt that he was little or nothing compared to the great writers whose books he read, and whose conversations he had grown up listening to and even participating in. His essay, “Brief Observations on Brevity,” illustrates the point with suitably gnomic neatness: “I am brief myself; brief in stature, brief in discourse, short of memory and money, and far short of my wishes” (HEM I 47). Instead of becoming one of the Lake poets’ peers, he became an effete paragon of the type, and his life, “too like an Australian river, wide at first, a f low of hopeful waters . . . speedily contract[ed] into a feeble, narrow stream, and [was] insensibly lost in the sand” (Memoir xlix). As Hartman has said, Hartley knew the ways of the Lake poets “better than the Scotch reviewers” (PSP 172). In his essay, “Ignoramus on the Fine Arts I,” Hartley humorously sketched the natural habitat of the Lakeland literati: Talking of lakishness, the Southerns, and some of you Northerns too, have a strange idea of the lakes—as if they constituted a sort of rural Grubstreet—as if rhythm, blank verse, and English hexameter were the vernacular dialect of the hills—as if Windermere were a huge puddle of ink, and the wild geese, when they f ly over our vales, dropped ready-made pens out of their pinions. Tout au contraire, I assure you, gentlemen. The Lake Poets are aliens to a man; they brought their disease with them, and not a single native has caught the infection. (HEM I 190)

Hartley was the Lake poets’ fellow alien who shared “their disease,” but, compared with, say, Wordsworth or Southey, Hartley did nothing, had nothing, and was nobody. Some of the sonnets he left behind, such as the one below, can seem like mere f lashes of self-protective irony from a non-person who knows his place: WHAT can a poor man do but love and pray? But if his love be selfish, then his prayer, Like noisesome vapour, melts in vacant air. I am a debtor, and I cannot pay. The alms which drop upon the public way, — The casual tribute of the good and fair, With the keen, thriftless avarice of despair

H I S R I P E N I N G AC H I E V E M E N T

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I seize, and live thereon from day to day, Ingrate and purposeless . . . Since I have nothing, yet I bless the thought, — Blest are they paid whose earthly wage is nought. (HCPW 17)

Never has a writer so gifted seemed to connive as ingeniously as Hartley did in fixing his own image as a distant, nebulous, unconsidered, and unimportant afterthought of the decaying Romantic movement. In giving laconically democratic consideration to the Romantic movement and the modish counter-belief that that movement did not exist, the critic P.L. Carver has effectively put Hartley in the category of literary anti-matter: . . . if Hartley Coleridge was part of the Romantic movement he lived and died in ignorance of the fact. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who is not without a following, has contended for years that there never was a Romantic movement, and if he and the anonymous dogmatist are both right it must follow that Hartley Coleridge, being part of nothing, was a mathematical impossibility. (ES 360)

Carver’s idea of a mathematically impossible Hartley is amusing, but it is also serious (a combination typical of the poet in question): when Wordsworth, STC, Byron, Keats, and Shelley were beating their luminous wings, Hartley somehow or other positioned himself in relation to the age at an ineffectual angle. Carver has said: His [Hartley’s] sprightliness, his metrical skill, his taste in graveyards, his delight in the elegant, the ingenious and the trivial, would have been appreciated in the age of Johnson, and would have commended him to the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine. (ES 360)

Hartley won admiration for the breadth of his knowledge and the agility of his intellect, but he seemed incapable of seizing and turning to account any career opportunity. Despite having “hopes—more than hopes—of [his] own steady perseverance in the right path” he also had, again by his own admission, an “unavoidable weakness of nerves, and defect of that sort of sternness” (Memoir xciv) which is a prerequisite in achievement. If only he had more character, like his father, who in his early middle-age battled with his terrible opium addiction and succeeded in producing the Biographia Literaria: The writing of the Biographia, between April and September 1815, became the decisive creative struggle of [STC’s] later career. It is, in many ways,

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astonishing that he ever produced it at all. After the opium collapse of 1813–14, the possibility of sustained composition maintained in the event, at an ever-increasing pace over six months—must have seemed very remote. (DR 378)

Or if only Hartley had more character like Byron, who was prepared to publish the sort of poetry likely to annoy a great many people, and who was prepared to live the sort of life likely to elicit howls of execration from a homophobic and hypocritical English society. However, Hartley fought no foe, and erected no monument. He is the sort of nobody that everybody is. He took cognizance of his own psychology via the insights of Shakespeare and other writers. The following is from Hartley’s essay, “On the Character of Hamlet,” which was published in Blackwood’s Magazine in November 1828 (when Hartley was in his early 30s): Such a man is Hamlet; an habitual dweller with his own thoughts,—preferring the possible to the real,—refining on the ideal form of things, till the things themselves become dim in his sight, and all the common doings and sufferings, the obligations and engagements of the world, a weary task, stale and unprofitable. By natural temperament he is more a thinker than a doer. His abstract intellect is an overbalance for his active impulses. (PPCH 38)

Despite Hartley’s ability “To bring to light the intermingling ways, / By which unconscious motives darkling steal” (HCPW 91), it is difficult to deny the truth in Griggs’s view that “with age came not maturity, but a sort of ripening childhood” (HLW 125). The temperamental blend of the advanced and the stunted in Hartley is a typical feature in any given piece of his writing. For that reason he has remained something of an extracanonical curiosity, considered more deserving of fond smiles of approbation than substantial scholarly attention: No hope have I to live a deathless name, A power immortal in the world of mind, A sun to light with intellectual f lame The universal soul of human kind. (HCPW 91)

The message is the opposite of that conveyed by the self-assurance of, say, Shakespeare’s sonnet, “Shall I compare thee to a summers day?”: So long as men can breath or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (xviii)


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As he entered middle age, Hartley continued existing apologetically, and therefore continuing to corroborate what his father had said in his letter to Dawes in 1822: of all the Waifs I ever knew, Hartley is the least likely and the least calculated to lead any human Being astray by his example. He may exhibit a warning—but assuredly he will never afford an inducement. (HCL 74)

STC saw a curious lack of charisma in his son—an alarming deficit of the personal charm with which more successful people often manage the reception of their misbehavior. STC could be a very bad father and husband, but still somehow manage to woo the collective imagination (including top scholars’) into forgetting—or suppressing—the evidence of others’ suffering for which he was responsible. (Norman Fruman and Molly Lefebure are two notable exceptions.) Byron, too, was a model for many, despite the reading public’s having been over-informed about the poet’s exquisitely bad behavior. In his Preface to the 1881 edition of Byron’s poetry, Matthew Arnold (1822–88) discussed Byron’s magnetism on the superficial level, but Arnold also identified the vitality of genius beneath the show and swagger: In spite of his prodigious vogue, Byron has never yet . . . had the serious admiration which he deserves . . . Even of his passionate admirers, how many have never got beyond the theatrical Byron, from which they caught the fashion of deranging their hair, or knotting back their neck-handkerchief, or of leaving their shirt-collar unbuttoned; how few profoundly felt his vital inf luence, the inf luence of his splendid and imperishable excellence of sincerity and strength!

Hartley’s work has none of the fury or impetuosity with which the more excitable Romantics burned their way towards recognition. The following passage from Hartley’s essay, “Shakspeare a Tory and a Gentleman,” makes the point clear: The proper state of man can only be maintained in sympathy and communion with his fellow-men. Nulla salus extra ecclesiam. All legitimate rules, motives, and purposes of action must be universally explicable and intelligible. All lawful and salutary knowledge must be communicable to every capable understanding. (HEM I 147)

Keats’s presence was in one sense quieter than the presences of the other Romantics, but it was charismatic nonetheless. Keats, as immortalized

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by his friend, the painter Joseph Severn (1793–1879), was a small, sensitive man contemplating the other-world for which he was obviously destined. Hartley was small and sensitive too, but somehow the popular image of Keats has been swept along by, and still included as part of, the culture of a country in a hurry. Hartley’s short poem on the subject of “The proposed inscription on the tomb of John Keats” might at first appear diffident to the point of characterlessness, but another reading reveals a rather magical meeting of minds: I HAVE WRITTEN MY NAME ON WATER . . . AND if thou hast, where could’st thou write it better Than on the feeder of all lives that live? The tide, the stream, will bear away the letter, And all that formal is and fugitive: Still shall thy Genius be a vital power, Feeding the root of many a beauteous f lower. (HCPW 212)

Hartley’s appreciation of the necessarily delicate solidity of Keats’s contribution to poetry is all the more touching in that Hartley’s own contribution has been unappreciated. Then there is the charisma of Shelley, whose poetry can best be understood in terms of his own definitions and principles, as he formulated them in his essay, “Defence of Poetry” (written 1821): Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. (PWS 606)

Shelley was a political and spiritual rebel, and was therefore maligned and misunderstood with a ferocity that Hartley, in his “helpless oddity” (Memoir li), could not have endured (nor indeed incited in the first place). In the twentieth century, despite disapproval from T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), F.R. Leavis (1895–1978), Allen Tate (1899–1979), and W.H. Auden (1907–73), Shelley’s work has enjoyed a growing number of readers. But when one considers the self-promoting achievement of Shelley’s “Defence of [his own] Poetry,” one may appreciate the relentlessly steely application with which he preached from the pulpit of his assumed superiority, so determined was he that his counsel would eventually reach more


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appreciative generations. Hartley left behind no such defense of his own poetry: I own I like to see my works in print; The page looks knowing, though there’s nothing in’t . . . . . . who’ll admire me when, poor barren elf, I scarce, with all my pains, admire myself? (HCPW 64)

It would have felt uncomfortable to Hartley to have anyone goggle learnedly over what he had to say. He felt that it would be wrong to “show what the work is about, not what it is” (HEM I 181). Hartley has excited neither the adulation nor the opprobrium that a writer of great significance tends to excite. Though he can write about sin, there is no sign of any dark secret lurking beneath the light idiom. No vapors from some central iniquity rise up through the cracks and fissures in Hartley’s versification. The utterances may be too persistently apologetic for readers who prefer their mental pabulum to have come from a more ostentatiously backboned being: “When I am unwell, which, I thank Heaven, is much seldomer than I have deserved . . .” (Memoir xcviii). There is the continual presence in Hartley’s writing of an inferiority complex of the insidious kind that would linger in twentieth-century women until Germaine Greer’s feminist treatise, The Female Eunuch (1971)—that fine continuous jet of angry power—began to burn away the problem. Unlike twentiethcentury women, Hartley has remained undefended by any writer fired up enough on his behalf, despite John Wilcock’s incitement to critics in 1898: All the critics I have read have lamented upon what Hartley Coleridge might have been with his gifts, but none has duly valued what he overcame to be what he was. (MQ 127)

Wordsworth, STC, Byron, Shelley, and Keats aimed at respect from their readerships, and they eventually got it. They had exquisite sensitivities, but they also had plenty of the crude insistent passion that one must have in order to achieve anything. Respect is something firm and strong, and it is very different from love, which is what Hartley gets, at best. Love is erratic and a mere luxury, and most people cannot afford to give it consistently. Hartley became a kind of emotional mendicant, sometimes referring to himself as “Tom Thumb,” or even (in a letter to Poole) “your

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grateful and sincere little friend” (HCL 18). Whereas Shelley could conclude letters until the end of his life with the words I am not Your obedient servant P.B. Shelley. (Being Shelley 390)

Hartley would remain humble, writing (in 1848) the last sonnet before his death, which shows his intimate sympathy with the feminine predicament— the penitential love of Mary Magdalene: SHE sat and wept beside His feet; the weight Of sin oppress’d her heart; for all the blame, And the poor malice of the worldly shame, To her was past, extinct, and out of date, Only the sin remain’d,—the leprous state; She would be melted by the heat of love, By fire far fiercer than are blown to prove And purge the silver ore adulterate. She sat and wept, and with her untress’d hair She wiped the feet she was so blest to touch; And He wiped off the soiling of despair From her sweet soul, because she loved so much. I am a sinner, full of doubts and fears, Make me a humble thing of love and tears. (HCPW 359)

The absence of quotation marks around the final couplet, above, says it all. “I” is Hartley. In the following sonnet, Hartley wonders how his soul may be absolved of the sins that he has thought about, but not actually carried out. The self-arguing may put one in mind of John Donne’s (1572–1631) poem, “A Hymn to God the Father:”1 IF I have sinn’d in act, I may repent; If I have err’d in thought, I may disclaim My silent error, and yet feel no shame: But if my soul, big with an ill intent, Guilty in will, by fate be innocent, Or being bad, yet murmurs at the curse And incapacity of being worse, That makes my hungry passion still keep Lent


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In keen expectance of a Carnival; Where, in all worlds, that round the sun revolve And shed their inf luence on this passive ball, Abides a power that can my soul absolve? Could any sin survive, and be forgiven, One sinful wish would make a hell of heaven. (HCPW 16)

The suggestion of the potentially sinful poet half-expecting to be swept away by a “Carnival” of sinful passions (whichever specific ones Hartley might have in mind) fails to make a point with any particular force. The force of Hartley’s thinking on the issue (as on many issues) seems to have been dispersed through his different writings. The following excerpt from a letter to Derwent shortly after their father’s death corroborates Hartley’s Donne-like preoccupation with the question of the sinfulness of sins not actually committed: “. . . the very abortions of time, the thoughts which we think we never thought, the meanings which we never meant to mean, live everlastingly” (HCL 162). But his content and style have no unifying brightness of purpose. Hartley could make sparks in individual readers’ minds, but he never could have calibrated his formal statements to burst into controversy in the collective imagination. The following sonnet juxtaposes young and adult passion, but it looks like the utterance of a man prepared to forfeit the privilege of being frank or naïve when the subject is indelicate: WHAT is young passion but a gusty breeze Ruff ling the surface of a shallow f lood? A vernal motion of the vital blood, That sweetly gushes from a heart at ease, As sugar’d sap in spicy-budding trees? And tho’ a wish be born with every morrow, And fondest dreams full oft are types of sorrow, Eyes that can smile may weep just when they please. But adult Passion, centred far within, Hid from the moment’s venom and its balm, Works with the fell inherency of sin, Nor feels the joy of morn, nor evening calm: For morn nor eve can change that fiery gloom That glares within the spirit’s living tomb. (HCPW 18)

The outline of the subject—sexual passion—is just about visible, despite the verbal ivy-growth, but there is none of the boldness, none of the

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sweeping audacity, none of the impatient power that inhabits every sentence and sub-clause of Byron’s, or Shelley’s, poetry. Even when Hartley’s writing becomes more involved and intricately rhythmical, there is still the same sense of an unhurried intellectual instinct, rather than radiance and rhapsody. That is why Griggs has said that Hartley “wrote as if he were old and settled, with a great deal of experience behind him” (HLW 196). Hartley’s writing typically feels to the reader as if Hartley were enjoying emancipation from his once tyrannous youthful susceptibilities—the paradoxically creative/destructive cast of mind encapsulated by the young Byron: But quiet to quick bosoms is a hell, And there hath been thy bane; there is a fire And motion of the soul which will not dwell In its own narrow being . . . (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III xlii)

The above lines would be misleading if applied to Hartley. It is with consistent imaginative propulsion that Hartley can fathom personal anxieties. In the following sonnet, Hartley confronts the possibility of Meaninglessness, and he sustains the confrontation, but without having to resurface, gasping and spluttering epithets all over the page: IT were a state too terrible for man, Too terrible and strange, and most unmeet, To look into himself, his state to scan, And find no precedent, no chart, no plan, But think himself an embryo incomplete, Or else a remnant of a world effete, Some by-blow of the universal Pan, Great Nature’s waif, that must by law escheat To the liege-lord Corruption. Sad the case Of man, who knows not wherefore he was made; But he that knows the limits of his race Not runs, but f lies, with prosperous winds to aid; Or if he limps, he knows his path was trod By saints of old, who knew the way to God. (HCPW 116)

Hartley may himself be a “by-blow” not just of “the universal Pan,” but also of his father’s shifting preoccupations. (Hartley was conceived in love but later became, effectively, a child of divorce.) The poem has enough autobiographical pain in it to merit more theatrical Romantic f lailing.


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Think of Shelley falling upon the thorns of life and bleeding (PWS 378). Think of STC’s “woman wailing for her demon-lover!” in “Kubla Khan,” or the “Life-stif ling fear, soul-stif ling shame” that erupts out of the cumulative hysteria of “The Pains of Sleep” (1803). Hartley’s writing identifies him as someone who no longer craves the lyrical spasm, and who can therefore afford to be congenial, as in the following letter: So true is Wordsworth’s observation (somebody has borrow’d my Wordsworth, and I’m like a Jack Tar without his tobacco pouch) that the older we grow, the more we become attach’d to things that typify Youth. (HCL 117–8)

The lines of Hartley’s poetry and prose run like ivy or other f lora. They are full, f lexible, and f leeting. They are not too dense. They advance softly over a surface and cover it evenly, but they have the added spirit to shoot rapidly to selected points and pinnacles. For example, the following sonnet, “September,” is replete with the easy details of the natural world, yet at two points (italics added) Hartley is aware of the world not as a coalescence of atoms separate from the observer, but as a construct of the observer’s mind: The dark green Summer, with its massive hues, Fades into Autumn’s tincture manifold. A gorgeous garniture of fire and gold The high slope of the ferny hill indues. The mists of morn in slumbering layers diffuse O’er glimmering rock, smooth lake, and spiked array Of hedge-row thorns, a unity of grey. All things appear their tangible form to lose In ghostly vastness. But anon the gloom Melts, as the Sun puts off his muddy veil; And now the birds their twittering song resume, All Summer silent in the leafy dale. In Spring they piped of love on every tree, But now they sing the song of memory. (HCPW 148)

Again, there is the obliquely autobiographical element: Hartley was born in September—that is, at a time of the year when the full glory of the summer has already faded. Similarly, Hartley the poet came of age in the September of Romanticism, when Byron, Keats, and Shelley were dead, and the full glory of Wordsworth and STC had already faded. Hartley’s language overspreads its subject, embracing all it meets with an easy

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grace. He can modulate between descriptive accuracy and expansive mysticism (somewhere between Cowper and Shelley). His style is personal, yet also prevailingly intellectual. There is nothing violent in Hartley’s style, and the reader does not feel hurried along by excesses of rage or other animating passions. Inspirited with a resigned, autumnal tone of thought, Hartley did not take the time to build and control his dramas, or exegeses, with any of the acumen that promptly assures the satisfaction of readers in search of sensational matter. His sonnets apart, he never tried hard enough to finish or formalize the documents that could have made unequivocal the authenticity and extent of his inner-aff luence: He never kneaded, or pounded his thoughts; they always came out cap-àpie, like a troop in quick march. To see him brandishing his pen . . . and now and then beating time with his foot, and breaking out into a shout at any felicitous idea, was a thing never to be forgotten. The common method of keeping up the velocity, by muttering and re-muttering what is written, and using one line as a spring-board to reach another, was not the method which he adopted. His sonnets were all written instantaneously, and never, to my knowledge, occupied more than ten minutes . . . (Memoir cxxxiii)

With that spontaneity in mind, one may recall Hartley’s continental contemporary, the Pisan law student, Tommaso Sgricci (1789–1836), who had won international celebrity for his soirées, at which the audience would be invited to present him with any theme, on which he would immediately improvise a long poem in either blank or terza rima verse, complete with the appropriate gestures and dramatically modulated declamation: subjects might range from Samson and Delilah to Charles I, and the speed and f luency of his performances appeared miraculous. (RA 238)

But, of course, although Hartley had, like Sgricci, something of the improvvisatori, he had little interest in merely entertaining “busy men” or “cumbrous critics” (HCPW 319) with verbal trapeze-artistry. Hartley’s lifelong intellectual habit was of expressing his ideas in the abstract. Hence, his self-alienation often appeared pathological. L.R. Phelps has explained that during Hartley’s probationary year as a Fellow at Oriel College, he was “chilled and repelled” by the Fellows’ “conversation . . . [because it was] of a critical type—insisting on clear definition of terms and logical sequence in argument” (HCL 300). Hartley produced his verbal pearls (and waste) when others hunted the clear, the logical and the sequential. The value of each of Hartley’s lines


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seems to depend on the temper and intellectual alertness of the reader: this phrase may be voted needlessly quaint, that phrase abstruse. For example, in his poem, “New Year’s Day,” Hartley imagines the passing of the just-departed year, and envisions it meeting its parents: At such a time, the ancient year goes by To join its parents in eternity. (HCPW 36)

Straight after that rather modestly inspired concept, a more arresting one pops into view with an immediacy that may override any accumulated sense of the poem’s mediocrity: At such a time the merry year is born, Like the bright berry from the naked thorn. (HCPW 36)

Any Hartley-lover fretting phrase by phrase may well feel disposed to linger over the above little triumph of lateral-thinking, and also feel disposed to skip quickly over the less felicitous phrases. Couplet by couplet, there is the crackle of anxiety because the writer (the son of STC) feels the critics sitting in judgment over every nuance: At best he [the author] can only claim a kindred genius with his quondam self, and not always that. Hence, an author should look upon his former works very much as upon those of a predecessor. He is their appointed guardian; but if he abuses his trust they will be thrown into the chancery of public opinion, and taken out of his hands. (Memoir cliv–clv)

Elsewhere, Hartley recollects his failure as an undergraduate at Oxford, at the age of 17, to win the Newdigate Prize, and he feels that he can actually pinpoint the couplet that was his undoing: . . . I mention a little circumstance attending my lines on the Farness Hercules. Speaking of the protuberance of the muscles, I wrote as follows:— “Those starting sinews which thick-ranged appear, Like the broad pebbles in a river clear.” This couplet excited considerable ridicule, was pronounced “lakish,” (a term as opprobrious at Oxford, in respect to poetry, as Whiggish applied to politics,) and, as my f latterers insinuated, caused the rejection of my fifty lines. (HEM I 188–9)

For Hartley to have written in such a way, he must have felt that each little failure, or false note, however fine, could not be torn out of the critics’

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netting, but needed to be carefully disentangled with delicate fingers. The business of building a public reputation was a nervous one indeed for the son of a great poet, and, during the perpetual probation of his life, each f lick of his creative mind would put him within a f lint-spark of failure. The continual frisson of his unease between potential failure and potential success continued to haunt Hartley’s writing. For example, there are the lines Hartley composed on the death of Mary Fleming in 1846— We shall not see her, for she will not walk In the cold moonshine, and she will not talk, In the chill whistling of the midnight wind; No buried treasure has she left behind; No sin she did not upon earth confess Obscures her hope of perfect blessedness. (HCNP 80)

which the printer criticized as being obscure. Hartley replied: As to the lines which you characterise as obscure, I think you will find them clear enough if you recollect that according to the received belief of the Ages of Faith, two principal causes of a ghost’s walking were the concealment of treasures or concealed sins. Except under these cases, persons who died from natural causes seldom or never became common-place bugga-boo ghosts, tho’ eminent saints sometimes were permitted to appear in a glorified state to warn or console beloved survivors. (HCNP 80)

One imagines that Hartley’s anxiety would have been felt in fuller force by the members of the closed circle, the family and friends of Wordsworth and Coleridge: I HAVE been cherish’d, and forgiven By many tender-hearted, ’Twas for the sake of one in Heaven Of him that is departed. Because I bear my Father’s name I am not quite despised, My little legacy of fame I’ve not yet realized. (HCNP 93)

His use of the word “yet” (in the last line above) shows that he still thought there might still be enough time for him to be a success in the great world.


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Often, he did not stretch his habitual mode of expression beyond that of the stunted figure: The more my faults became obvious to those most interested in me the more I was possessed with that helpless consciousness of them, which conduces to anything rather than amendment . . . (HLW 103)

So, when it came to writing not for the closed family circle, but for the general public, Hartley felt that he lacked something to express himself with the same intensity to readers he did not know: So Fare thee well—my little book— Thou art a witness sad to me— Of what a life, I once forsook— To be—what least I thought to be. (HCNP 86)

Readers with no knowledge of the ways of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle would not be equipped with the framework of personal reference to appreciate, say, Hartley’s quasisubliminal allusions to his father’s self-mismanagement: You must be aware [Hartley tells his father], that the pain arising from the contemplation of a mis-spent past, is often the cause of continuance in misdoing, even after the temptations which first misled have lost their powers, and when the sophisms which have long deluded, appear in their true deformity. (HCL 75)

The justification for remaining passively self-destructive was subtle, and supple. Hartley could weave the general impression of his own shortcomings through the general impression of his father’s. But, committed to the printed page, and therefore stepping automatically into the public arena, Hartley’s words would be separated from the informing principle of their provenance. Unlike his father, Hartley did not, prior to the publication of his poetry, exercise the verbal deftness to help make the atmosphere propitious to the reception of his work. In 1816, STC prefaced “Kubla Khan” in order to contextualize it more alluringly, richly, and suggestively as a fragment remembered from a dream.2 STC was shrewd enough to introduce the poem “rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits” (STCPW 295). He attempted to decoy readers from examining his wares too harshly. Every writer who has read a detailed and forthright rejection of his own work will have felt STC’s

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underlying desire for a sympathetic readership. What writer has not felt the urge to accompany the work he has submitted to the critic’s perusal with some sort of ingratiating preamble? By half-disowning his work, STC could pre-empt the sting of censure. Similarly, prior to the publication in the Morning Post of “Dejection: an ode” (1802), STC made common knowledge the news that he had relinquished his poetic ambitions. Holmes’s idea—that STC was living out what many people experience, in the dark disorder of their hidden lives, but living it on the surface and with astonishing, even alarming candour that many . . . found unendurable or simply ludicrous. (DR 65)

is important. There was a largeness of gesture in the way STC publicly conducted some of his personal affairs, and it became bound up in the public imagination with the anticipation and reception of his published works. Hartley did not have the commanding presence with which the more eminent Romantic writers stage-managed the contents and styles of their life-writings. In short, Hartley did not maneuver his oeuvre. The sympathy with which he wrote about forgotten poets is interesting: ’Tis sad to think, of all the names that strive For immortality, how few survive; How many leave preferment’s open ways, Smit by the love of hard-earn’d, barren praise, Defying poverty, and worldly shame, And self-reproach, to win the puff of fame; Unhappy breathe, and unregarded rot, First starved to death, and soon as dead forgot. (HCPW 324)

The sympathy with which he wrote about forgotten playwrights is fascinating: It may be regretted that quiet, useful, unostentatious virtue so seldom survives in the world’s memory: but the regret is foolish and presumptuous; and I am by no means assured that the modern custom of courting fame, for qualities sufficiently rewarded by peace of mind, as approving conscience, and the affectionate esteem of a worthy few, is not one of the worst symptoms of the times. Good people in a private station should be thankful if their lives are not worth writing . . . They can be understood by none, and known only to those who love the good beings whom they actuate,—and by loving know them. For in the spiritual world there is no knowledge but by love. (DWMF xvi–xvii)


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Notes 1. “Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun, / Which was my sin, though it were done before? / Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run, / And do run still: though still I do deplore? . . . Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won / Others to sin? and, made my sin their door? / Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun / A year, or two: but wallowed in, a score?” ( John Donne: The Complete English Poems 348–9). 2. David S. Hogsette, “Eclipsed by the Pleasure Dome: Poetic Failure in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’” (Romanticism on the Net February 5, 1997): “the preface is elevated to the literal and (mis)construed as an expository addition to the imaginative poem . . .” (2).

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Corpus of Consequence Throughout the ages, countless individuals have, as it were, f litted like moths through the cathedrals of literary and cultural history (the Industrial Revolution, the McCarthy Era, the Age of Aquarius, post-modernism) and historiography without themselves becoming part of the overall designs. Hartman has accounted for Hartley’s lack of connection with his time: Hartley Coleridge was the child, by birth and association, of the forbears of the Romantic Movement; he was thus a generation too late for innovation, for another gospel or a new aesthetic . . . He grew up with and into an era of sentiment and industrialism, when great poetry has passed with the pre-Waverly Scott, Wordsworth, S.T.C., Shelley, Keats, and Byron; when political upheaval, the encroachment of science, and changing economic standards had deafened the national ear to strains of the muse. Hartley’s Poems appeared the year after the Reform Bill of 1832—“that huge tapeworm lie of some threescore and ten yards”, his father called it—when the tidal wave of Romanticism had left the literature of its wake in the charge of poetasters. A spurious sentimentality was in the air. Scott’s novels supplanted even Byron’s Oriental epics with an incalculably large public, while the annuals teemed with the purlings of Mrs. Hemans, Montgomery, Procter, Joanna Baillie, and the saccharine insipidity of Letitia Landon. Chronologically, Hartley had no choice, admitting himself to be —a petty man of rhyme, Nursed in the softness of a female time. The old order was, before his very eyes, yielding place to new; the Victorian era was at hand. With Carlyle fingering the stops of his trumpet, and Dickens becoming a staff reporter for the Morning Chronicle, Tennyson (whom Hartley met and admired, enjoying “the perfume that exhales from

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[his] pure soul”) began writing poetry which he was later to delete. All in all, as he sensed, it was “a dubious, twilight existence” for the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (PSP 114–5)

Hartley declared that “Never was there an age which strained so hard after originality as the present,—yet it is not an original age” (HEM I 71). For Hartley, his age (and any age) was one in which “The completest originals in the world are your plain, matter-of-fact, every-day folks, that never utter a word but what they mean” (HEM I 71). Hartley had in mind the rustic, Lakeland individuals whose fondness for him was recollected by Canon H.D. Rawnsley (LAEL II 139). Hartley also had himself in mind: Stanley T. Williams has said that Hartley “did not write [literary criticism] unless he had something to say” (SAQ xxiii 73). Many ordinary individuals simply quietly undergo the thousand natural shocks to which their f lesh is heir. They take the un-watered seeds of their talents with them to their graves. In the eighteenth century, Thomas Gray (1716–71) praised such people, albeit at a safe, formal distance, in his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751): Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile, The short and simple annals of the poor . . . Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre. (ECV 356)

In the nineteenth century, Hartley would drink with such people in the pub. “Hartley always had a bit of a smile or a twinkle in his face . . .” (LAEL II 139). There is a popular saying to the effect that everyone has a book in him (or her). In many cases it should stay there. In many other cases the “fresh candidate for literary fame” (HEM I 86) will try to string together the detached jewels of his varying thoughts, only to provide a commissioning editor (if not himself ) with compelling evidence of his not being remarkable. That is half of Hartley’s case, and it is the half to which most candidates for an obscure plot in Gray’s eternal churchyard should be able to relate immediately. The other half of Hartley’s case is what sets him apart from other people, or, to borrow from his own drollery, makes him “a corpse of consequence” (HCNP 102)—he is able to draw out potentially


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transformational ideas from previously neglected areas of experience, such as in the following passage, where he speculates upon the existence of such a thing as expatriate plant-life: The Chinese, or monthly rose, so frequently seen clustering round the cottage-porch, both in the remotest vales and in the immediate outskirts of busy, smoky towns, is almost destitute of scent. The manner in which this cheerful foreigner perseveres in the habits of a warmer climate, through all the vicissitudes of ours, is a remarkable instance of vegetable nationality. (HCNP 12)

A reader predisposed to like the author might consider the above idea persuasive, but the cooler commentator might say the same passage is not unpersuasive. Hartley’s style of thinking and writing was unlikely to harmonize with the muted bitchiness of any academy. While Hartley could elicit the enthusiastic approval of the members of his family circle, his success with less sympathetic people looked more likely to be limited: Is there any anxiety greater than that of a young poet on the eve of appearing in print, when his darling effusions are to throw off their nursery-attire of manuscript, in which they were only produceable at family parties, or, at most, to a few friends, and appear in type, à-la-mode, with fashionable margins, to the expectant public? (HEM I 86)

Hartley was “self-conscious” (PSP 174) about the ineffectuality of his efforts. The feeling haunts his work. In his essay, “Ignoramus on the Fine Arts I,” he acclaimed the “mystery” (HEM I 178) of painting: In truth, I am well contented to be ignorant of the mechanical arcane of art. Secrets of practice are profitable to none but practitioners. When I look on a fine picture, I would gladly forget the laborious, greasy, dirty-handed process that produced so much beauty, and believe it a living emanation of the inspired intellect,—a magic mirror of the artist’s mind. (HEM I 179–180)1

It soon becomes apparent that the essay on painting is also a vehicle for the author’s anxieties with regard to his own work. In 1848, Hartley would compose a sonnet revealing in detail his awareness of how he lacked the basic clarity of will and lucidity of desire with which to win great acclaim: AH! woeful impotence of weak resolve, Recorded rashly to the writer’s shame, Days pass away, and Time’s large orbs revolve, And every day beholds me still the same, Till oft neglected purpose loses aim,

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And hope becomes a f lat unheeded lie, And conscience weary with the work of blame, In seeming slumber droops her wistful eye As if she would resign her unregarded ministry. (HCNP 87)

The sonnet makes clear the underlying reason for Hartley’s failure to compete with the more prolific contemporary writers, acclaimed for their “trash . . . so liberally set forth” (HCL 253). Hartley did not pay the psychic cost usually paid by the writer in pursuit of success. He played, rather than worked. He concocted combinations of Wordsworthian, Coleridgean, and Shakespearian insights, only to wish to destroy or forget about them immediately. He was like a child playing with blocks in that he was inventive and destructive, with no apparent norms for his creativity. Serendipitously, some of Hartley’s beautiful rhetoric emerges from his awareness that he is doing nothing, or that he has left something undone. Writing to his mother in October 1836 about whether or not his brother, Derwent, by now a busy headmaster and family man, will be sufficiently motivated to write a substantial commentary on their father’s Biographia Literaria, Hartley says: I dare say, indeed, that when his school is over and he is fairly in his armchair and slippers, he does not take up a pen very willingly, or if he does, it would rather be to add a few notices for some ponderous work of learning: to collect the metal whereof to cast a cannon, some centuries hence, than to pound up sulphur, charcoal and nitre to make a squib for immediate explosion. (HCL 199)

Such a vivid metaphor, bearing its ruddy fruit on every branch, seems rooted in rich self-knowledge. The metaphor exhales sympathy for Derwent’s daily, necessary, and well-earned periods of relaxation in the comfort of his own home. Hartley’s poetry and prose is porous with such witty generosity. With something of the gambler’s sense of how much of himself he needs to give away in order to make the recipient of his letter pliable, Hartley—despite being the “dwarf man . . . a repellent version of the pygmy child” of Wordsworth’s “Intimations” ode (TWC 35)—could be present on the page in an irresistibly willowy way. He began the following letter to his mother (October 10, 1831) with just such an apology: My dear Mother I deserve it, and yet to hint the possibility that a son could outlive his affection for his mother, and such a mother, is sufficient reproach for a fault great as mine. You cannot, do not seriously suspect this, for if you did, no profession, scarce any performance of mine, could exorcise the evil spirit


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from your soul, for dead affections have no earthly resurrection—it is vain to puff at the cold ashes of extinguish’d love, to galvanize the corpse of tenderness to a mimicry of posthumous life. But no, my mother, I never ceased to love you, tho’ times have been, when that love was more remorse and agony, proclaiming aloud the duties which it gave no strength to perform. You have not experienced as your main sorrow, what it is to fear the voice, to shrink from the eye of offended love, or you would know that any thing rather than indifference occasion’d my absence when you were paying your last visit to Rydal Mount . . . (HCL 132–3)

Like Hamlet’s, Hartley’s “thoughts.. f loat[ed] without chart or compass on the ocean of eternity” (PPCH 59). He would send a sonnet to his brother-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge— KINSMAN, Yea—more than kinsman, brother, friend— O more than Kinsman, more than Friend or Brother My Sister’s Spouse, Son to my widowed mother, How shall I praise thee right and not offend? For thou wert sent a sore heart-ill to mend: Twin-stars were ye—Thou and thy wedded Love Benign of aspect, as those imps of Jove In antique Faith commissioned to portend To sad sea-wanderers peace. Or like the Tree By Moses cast into the bitter pool Which made the tear-salt water fresh and cool— Or even as Spring, that sets the boon Earth free Free to be good, exempt from winter’s rule Such hast thou been to our poor family. (HCL 218)

but he would stress that he did not intend to submit the poem for scrutiny by the ultimate poetry tribunal—Wordsworth: As for the thing on the other side [the sonnet above], over and above the more pressing reasons for keeping it to ourselves, I know it is very open to Criticism. I protest I would not show it to Wordsworth on any account. His austere taste would be mortally bored with the confusion of Astrology, Mythology, Scripture, and Hylozoism [pantheism] it exhibits—and perhaps some people not quite so particular in matters of composition would be horrified to find Moses between the Dioscuri and the Anima Mundi . . . (HCL 217)

Hartley felt that he could write on his own informal terms, but he also felt that if he published a sustained work, the critics whose opinions he most valued would assert that he had no real reason to do so. They would publicly single out his book as one without a sufficiently important

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subject. They would suggest, lying at the book’s heart, a terrible lack of urgency, an absence of engagement, a blandness of outlook. Southey said that Hartley was always “too much delighted with his own ideas ever to embody them, or suffer them, if he can help it, to be disturbed” (PSP 43). True to himself, he appreciated that “to resolve [to have better working habits] is to fetter f lame with cords of f lax” (Memoir clxx): A THOUSAND thoughts were stirring in my mind, That strove in vain to fashion utterance meet, And each the other cross’d—swift as a f leet Of April clouds, perplex’d by gusts of wind, That veer, and veer, around, before, behind. (HCPW 107)

Hartley is uncannily like Shakespeare in that he is capable of comprehending with clarity—not solving—the problems encountered by great thinkers of the past: Now History pointed to the custom’d beat, Now Fancy’s clue unravelling, led their feet Through mazes manifold, and quaintly twined. So were they straying—so had ever stray’d; Had not the wiser poets of the past The vivid chart of human life display’d, And taught the laws that regulate the blast, Wedding wild impulse to calm forms of beauty, And making peace ’twixt liberty and duty. (HCPW 107)

Note 1. In his essay, “On Reading,” Proust would discuss the same thing: “What makes them [great paintings] appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world, is that they carry on them like some elusive ref lection the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted. This semblance with which they charm and disappoint us, and beyond which we would wish to go, is the very essence of that in a sense depthless thing—a mirage arrested on a canvass—which is a vision. And the mist that our eager eyes would like to pierce is the last word in the painter’s art. The supreme effort of the writer as of the artist ends in raising only partially for us the veil of ugliness and insignificance that leaves us incurious before the universe. Then he says to us: ‘Look, look . . . Learn to see!’ At which moment he vanishes” (31–32).

CHAPTER 5

KING OF EJUXRIA

The First Flâneur

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artley’s heritage was an intangible one of imaginative riches. In his essay, “Introduction to the World of Strife,” De Quincey (perhaps in implicit defense of his own “sacred laziness”) said that Hartley Coleridge, for example, had a kingdom which he governed for many years; whether well or ill, is more than I can say. Kindly, I am sure, he would govern it; but, unless a machine had been invented for enabling him to write without effort (as was really done for our Fourth George during the pressure of illness), I fear that the public service must have languished deplorably for want of the royal signature. (DQCW X 72)

One thinks of De Quincey’s recollection, elsewhere in his writings, of the piano lessons and the piano that his mother had bought for him when he was a teenager: the first discovery I made was that practice through eight or even ten hours a day was indispensable towards any great proficiency on this instrument. Another discovery finished my disenchantment: it was this. For the particular purpose I had in view, it became clear that no mastery of the instrument, not even that of Thalberg, would be available. Too soon I became aware that to the deep voluptuous enjoyment of music absolute passiveness in the hearer is indispensable. Gain what skill you please, nevertheless activity, vigilance, anxiety must always accompany an elaborate effort of musical execution: and so far is that from being reconcilable with the entrancement and lull essential to the true fruition of music, that, even if you should suppose a vast piece of mechanism capable of executing a whole oratorio, but requiring, at intervals, a co-operating impulse from the

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foot of the auditor, even that, even so much as an occasional touch of the foot, would utterly undermine all your pleasure. (DQCW III 270)

Hartley’s Hamlet is of a similar disposition: “he [Hamlet, but, really, Hartley is writing about himself in the essay] is constantly reminding himself of his great commission, which he nevertheless in the end seems almost entirely to lose sight of ” (PPCH 36). According to Hartley, Hamlet may be “accomplished . . . and urged by all motives to the performance,” but his “existence is nevertheless an unperforming dream” (PPCH 37). De Quincey’s humorous evocation of a kingdom sliding into chaos because of “King” Hartley’s failure to do anything at all has empathy at its core: In sailing past his own dominions, what glorious outcries would have saluted him [Hartley] from the shore—“Holloa, royal sir! here’s the deuce to pay: a perfect lock there is, as tight as locked jaw, upon the course of our public business; throats there are to be cut, from the product of ten jaildeliveries, and nobody dares to cut them, for want of the proper warrant; archbishoprics there are to be filled, and because they are not filled, the whole nation is running helter-skelter into heresy;—and all in consequence of your majesty’s sacred laziness.” (DQCW X 73)

De Quincey knew what it was to lose his grip on his own practical affairs, but unlike Hartley, De Quincey had a practical-minded wife who actively prevented his affairs from running into irretrievable confusion. Derwent wrote that Hartley’s time was spent much as it had been when he was a boy, out of doors in lonely reverie, in intercourse with his many friends, or at his desk; for though he read much, it was commonly with the pen in his hand . . . his purposeless wanderings had been sometimes pursued till he lost the power to return . . . He could not fall among strangers. Go where he would, be where he might, he was treated with affectionate respect. Love followed him like his shadow . . . Among his friends we must count men, women, and children, of every rank and every age . . . In the farmhouse or the cottage, not alone at times of rustic festivity at a sheep-shearing, a wedding, or a christening, but by the ingle side with the grandmother or the “bairns,” he was made, and felt himself, at home . . . He would nurse an infant by the hour. A like overf lowing of his affectionate nature was seen in his fondness for animals—for anything that would love him in return—simply, and for its own sake, rather than for his. (Memoir cxxxiv–cxxvi)

Hartley never even thought about how his rent was paid for him, or who paid it, until he was asked about it: “Rent? I never thought of that.”

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It was not the freedom of Paradise but a foretaste of exile that first awakened the poetic instinct in Hartley; the first intimation of a beauty inaccessible. He admired his father and his father’s friends from the obscurity of his smallness, but poetry was a cause of division. Wordsworth and STC considered their poetry as a means to an end (the betterment of mankind): Too much of Wordsworth’s verse, in the last thirty years of his life, was inspired—if the word is permissible in this connection—by a view of nature according to which this vast, mysterious world is nothing more than an object-lesson pointing the way to Heaven. The prevalence of this view among hymn writers is a chief cause of the general failure of their productions, as poems. (PSP 163)

To Hartley, poetry seemed rather as one of the ends to which humanity was only the means Hartley lived and worked before the era of the French Romantic figure of the later nineteenth century, the flâneur. In the earlier nineteenth century, what Hartley knew instinctively was not at all appreciated; that, for instance, when one does nothing, one can explore one’s “labyrinth of daydreams,” which leads, inevitably, to the darker, more malodorous purlieus that STC knew so well in himself. Given that STC often indulged his own negative emotions memorably and minutely, it is worth quoting from one of his notebooks at some length: It is a most instructive part of my life, that I have been always preyed on by some Dread, and perhaps all my faulty actions have been the consequence of some Dread or other on my mind / from fear of Pain, or Shame, not from the prospect of Pleasure / —So in my childhood & Boyhood . . . imaginary fears of having the Itch in my Blood—then a short-lived Fit of Fears from Sex—then horror of DUNS, & a state of struggling with madness from an incapability of hoping that I should be able to marry Mary Evans (and this strange passion of fervent tho’ wholly imaginative and imaginary Love uncombinable by my utmost efforts with Hope— / possibly from deficiency of bodily feeling, of tactual ideas connected with the image) had all the effects of direct Fear, and I have lain for hours together awake at night, groaning and praying—then came that stormy time / and for a few months America really inspired Hope, & I became an exalted Being—then came Rob. Southey’s alienation / my marriage—constant dread in my mind respecting Mrs Coleridge’s Temper, &c—and finally stimulants in the fear and prevention of violent Bowel-attacks from mental agitation / then night-horrors in my sleep / & since then every error I have committed, has been the immediate effect of the

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Dread of these bad most shocking Dreams—any thing to prevent them / — all this interwoven with its minor consequences, that fill up the interspaces— the cherry juice running in between the cherries in a cherry pie / procrastination in dread of this—& something else in consequence of that procrast. &c . . . (STCN 2398)

The state of mind illustrated above—which later writers such as Proust, and still later John Banville would render familiar to a much larger twentieth-century readership—involves the feeling that one’s life, experienced on the inside, feels as if it lies around in fragments. With his insights into his own, and his son’s, psychological condition, STC foreshadowed seminal European literature. In À Rebours (1884), J.K. Huysmans (1848– 1907) would have his character, des Esseintes, declare that [Charles] Baudelaire had gone further [than the saner, and therefore more pedestrian, Honoré De Balzac]; he had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had pushed his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, had penetrated those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind f lourish. (À Rebours 133–4)

Baudelaire (like STC before him) would reveal . . . the morbid psychology of the mind that has reached the October of its sensations, detail.. the symptoms of souls challenged by grief, set apart by spleen . . . demonstrate . . . the ever encroaching caries of the impressions at a time when the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth are faded; when there remains only the barren memory of miseries endured, of tyrannies suffered, of vexations undergone, in intelligences crushed by an incongruous fortune. He [would] trace . . . all the phases of this lamentable Autumn, as he watched the human creature, quick to grow embittered, ingenious at self-deception, forcing his thoughts to cheat each other, all to render his suffering more acute, spoiling in advance, thanks to his powers of analysis and observation, all possibility of happiness. (À Rebours 134)

STC documented his son’s (and his own) ingenuity at self-deception long before Baudelaire: He has neither the resentment, the ambition, nor the Self-love of a man— and for this reason he is too often as selfish as a Beast—and as unwitting of his own Selfishness. With this is connected his want of a salient point, selfacting principle of Volition—and from this, again, arises his shrinking from, his shurking, whatever requires and demands the exertion of this


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inward power, his cowardice as to mental pain, and the procrastination consequent on these. (HCL 73)

But when Hartley anatomized his own psychology, he achieved what STC and Baudelaire could not: he documented the common psychology of the individual whose sorrows are not Olympian, which is in itself a significant reason for studying his writings. How different to the works one might have expected from the anodyne imp that STC’s son is supposed to have been. They say a poet finds out something new about himself with each poem he writes, but that can only be true when it first transports him to some interior hall of mirrors. Hartley did not write poems about children because he was a childish man incapable of putting away childish things. He was canny, observant, and successful (artistically, if not financially): FOUR years—a very little time they seem, To children longer is a half hour’s dream, Yet ’tis to thee thy total sum of Being Thine all of breathing, feeling, stirring, seeing. Little thou knowst of sorrow—Boy—as yet, Or sorrow which a moment may forget . . . No term of measure fitly can express Its infinitely little Littleness. (HCNP 108)

He understood what makes children (and adults, if not always publishers) tick: “[Hartley] is innocent, most kindly natured, exceedingly goodtempered, in the management and instruction of children excels any young man, I ever knew . . .” (HCL 74). But he was cursed by the belief that life is assembled back-to-front, with the best coming first and nothing much to look forward to after that: For sweet is hope’s wild warbled air, But, oh! its echo is despair. (HCPW 67)

As he advanced in years, he returned time and time again to his annus mirabilis of 1806: On the 4th of November 1806 my dear Father presented this book to me—little thinking I guess that some pages of it would still be blank in 1830—and still less foreseeing through what dark and miry ways, what

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dark vicissitudes of ill my own Fancies would lead me before the last leaf was written. High were his hopes for me, for his love was strong, and finding an understanding and creative spirit in the ready tears, repentance close upon offence and simple notions of the nature of ill he never thought the heart could be wrong. (RVC 191)

The above is a typically regretful ref lection which has aggrandized itself into a representative instance of Hartley’s f lawed approach to life. He became an example to be held up: Sermonizers pounced upon the shades of the defenceless poet; he became, along with Burns, Byron, and Campbell, exemplary matter for the abstemious. A howl went up from the National Magazine: These men are needed as warnings. The moral world must have its lighthouses. Thousands of young men are running down upon the same rocks on which they were cast away . . . the wine destroys the intellect, and the man of wit degenerates into a buffoon, and dies a drunkard . . . let all young men, having these gifts, remember “poor Hartley Coleridge.” (PSP 168)

Other contemporaries of Hartley had been more eager to f latter English readers as members of the superior race, and as believers in the one, true God. De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater contains an instinctive hatred of all things Eastern. De Quincey is keen to distance his way of taking opium from the ways of his Oriental counterparts: No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and capricious superstitions of Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of Hindostan. The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories,—above all, of their mythologies, &c.,—is so impressive that to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed . . . South-eastern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life . . . Man is a weed in those regions . . . I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, by the barrier of utter abhorrence placed between myself and them, by counter-sympathies deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics, with vermin, with crocodiles or snakes . . . (DQCW III 441–2)

De Quincey demonstrates his (and, marketably, the middle-class English reader’s), fear of becoming an Oriental (in taking opium), and of not doing any work at all. De Quincey’s opium-eater becomes an image for an alternative way of life that threatens nineteenth-century industrial


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European capitalism, so he ameliorates that threat by peppering his writing with references to the virtues of achievement, productivity, and not wasting one’s opportunities in life. On one hand, De Quincey was very much part of his time in that he carefully informed his readers that the consumption of opium in a British, Christian (as opposed to an Eastern, God-forsaken) spirit was possible. On the other hand, Hartley wrote essays (many of which were unpublished during his lifetime) containing gentle criticisms of the British attitude in general. In the following example, Hartley casts a quizzical look at Britain’s “ownership” of the fifth century B.C. Greek sculptures that originally decorated the Parthenon in Athens but were brought to England by Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin (1766–1841): I wonder whether a drunk Athenian was as asinine as a drunk Englishman— how many generations of fair and wise and wicked citizens gazed upon them—on those very statues then before me, till they became like the dim blue Hymettus, and the dark blue sea, the natural inheritance of Athenian eyes, the pride of Athenian prosperity, the prouder solace of Athens in decay. But this also was vanity, and worse—it was a sore vexation. Better that Britain had remained, as in the days of Chaucer and Spenser, even of Milton, a land where thought alone ref lected or consummated the beauty of nature, than that we should learn the mechanism and trick of the cunning artificer, by plundering the helpless and the fallen. If it please Heaven that we should have painters and sculptors, they will rise in due time; and the same power that made Homer a poet, without antique models,—that in every art has made the makers of models with no model but Nature, will teach our artists to realise their own ideal, and to equal, not resemble, the masters of brighter climes and ages of historic fame. The Elgin marbles may make sculptors of lads who ought to be carpenters—they may possibly humanise the bodiless cherubs on our churchyard stones; but they will not conjure the soul of Phidias into John Bull. (HEM I 191–2)

The above excerpt reveals an impressive feeling for “the unity of beauty” (HEM I 186), and a personal distaste for anything that might spoil that unity, belying Hartley’s having crowned himself an “Ignoramus” in matters pertaining to the fine arts. Self and Sensibility STC’s very father-like knowledge about many things, and intermittent basic decency, made him a special father, despite Mrs Coleridge’s reservations about his opium-eating, and Hartley experienced sorrow at having become a child of divorce. When Hartley was 23, STC formulated the

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central problem around which Hartley would thereafter find it impossible to reengineer his personality: But alas! it is the absence of a Self, it is the want or Torpor of Will, that is the mortal Sickness of Hartley’s Being, and has been, for good & for evil, his character—his moral Idiocy—from his earliest Childhood . . . (HCL 73)

There is a Self, a unifying force, underneath STC’s fragmented output, gathering the heterogeneous matter into a mighty unity. Thomas McFarland has argued the case compellingly in Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Modalities of Fragmentation (1981). But no such central tenet can as easily be seen to assemble into a comparable unity the distresses in Hartley’s life, or the digressions in his writings. In a letter (October 1841) to Mrs Louise Claude (with whom Hartley had studied German when she lived at Ambleside), Hartley meandered through topics such as bad weather and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, before giving vent to some of his own anxiety as a struggling author: I am rather in a state of uncertainty respecting my publications. My muse, however, has been productive of late, but I cannot produce either prose or verse to please myself completely, and some times when I read the trash that is so liberally set forth, I am tormented with the suspicion, that my own is no better. (HCL 253)

The worry quickly evaporates into the “Nonsense” (HCL 108) that suggests Hartley’s habitual preference for self-concealment: for no doubt A. and B. and so on to Z. had friends whose sincere opinion they desired, which sincere opinion responded—admirable! Beautiful!!! Too good I’m afraid , for the public taste!!!! But why should I trouble you [C?] with an author’s perplexities? (HCL 253)

Why indeed. Hartley’s writing burgeons with local irrelevances. All things, however trivial, came to be included for their own sake—simply for their vitality. There is a kind of unity detectable in Hartley’s work—a unity in the light of which much that has hitherto been neglected receives a bright glow. Hartley took his tendency to include both the facile and the esoteric very far, and as a result he appears to have helped to pin himself in space and time like a bizarre little specimen in a box: Like a rich jewel hid beneath the wave, Or rebel spirit bound within the rind


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Of some old wreathed oak, or fast enshrin’d In the cold durance of an echoing cave . . . (HCPW 14)

The absence of a self, to which his father referred, does not necessarily contradict Hartley’s perception of himself as “a rich jewel hid,” or a “rebel spirit bound within . . . some old . . . oak:” whereas in the world Hartley made no significant impression,1 at the same time he was the king in his own personal paradise. Hartley could only feel that he was dominant when he contrived a cessation of the slavery involved in acquiring the materials prerequisite to the upkeep of his kingly mind: “I seldom enjoyed a book while I was reading, or a tale while it was telling; my pleasure was not in grazing but in rumination” (HEM I 346). Outwardly, Hartley Coleridge, as seen by the literary historian in subordinate relation to the commonwealth, is a nobody, an insignificant person with a whole world of thoughts and feelings that—historically speaking – do not matter, such as the following sympathetic insight in relation to the life of Thomas Gray: I HAVE heard or read somewhere that Gray, nervously apprehensive of fire, kept a rope-ladder in his rooms, of which some young men of fortune being apprised, set a tub of water under his window, and raised a cry of fire. The poet, descending rapidly, plunged into the aqueous pitfall, and resolved to quit the spot where young men of fortune were perhaps only laughingly admonished for a frolic, for which men of no fortune would and ought to have been expelled. All practical jokes are in bad taste; but I most of all abhor those which play upon the fears of the timid, or, like forged loveletters work on the affections of the susceptible; while I confess perhaps a too lenient toleration for such tricks as only infringe on the purses of the avaricious, or the dignity of self or official importance. Age and infirmity however should at any rate be held sacred. (HEM II 107)

Hartley is hidden behind his work. He is an ideal artist, unlike STC. Hidden and humble, he is not moralizing; he is, as artist, self less, and it could no more have occurred to him to comment pushily on his writings than it could have occurred to one of Wordsworth’s daffodils to discuss what it is to be a f lower. Hartley’s “philosophy” and his “ethic” are consumed in anonymous work. He does not speak formally about politics or religion, but his works are showings, and they are indeed “criticisms” of important aspects of human life, offered to readers by a fair and compassionate understanding: not “beyond good and evil,” but goodness converted completely into art. His works are not philosophy or

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philosophical, but may be compared, mutatis mutandis, with Shakespeare’s dialogues in that they contain the wisdom of the affectionate intellect. The following stanza from Hartley’s poem, “The Birth-Day,” illustrates the point, because it so lovingly drops into the reader’s mind the image of a mother bidding her son a fond farewell: So childhood passes—but the whistling breeze Of Time calls shrill, and forth the vessel f lies:— The mother, wailing on the wave-kissed shore, Trusts her last counsels to the impatient breeze That will not hear them—strains her dewy eyes Till the proud sails diminish to a speck— That speck to nothing,—questions still the grey Unfixt horizon, till the setting sun Sinks sudden in the darkness of the waves; Then homeward hastening, looks upon the stars, And knows that he beholds them, who no more Shall look with her upon their household f lowers. (HCPW 100)

Note 1. Elizabeth Story Donno quotes from one of the unsigned notices on Hartley that appeared after his death on January 6, 1849: “his [Hartley’s] genius can hardly be said to have yet made any impression on the general public.”

CONCLUSION

Hartley the Obscure ecent critics’ essays on Hartley1 apply the sort of illuminating terminology and explanations that the discipline of Psychology has provided since Griggs concluded his study of Hartley with the following words:

R

Weak of will, not against moral obligations, not against personal actions, but against the unceasing demands of life, Hartley Coleridge ran his strange race, unadjusted to the last to the world about him. He could not find pleasure in the senses and in a successful combat with the world, but, introverted as he was, he sought his pleasure in the realm of his imagination. And there we must leave him. (HLW 227)

On the contrary: there we must join him. Hartley, the neglected nineteenth-century poet, the genuine Romantic article, belongs much more integrally to our cultural inheritance than does the list of Fellows (HLW 84 note) who represented the Oxford to which he had been persuaded to aspire as a young man. The same misguided aspirations (or inevitable process) would turn thousands besides Hartley into displaced persons, without caste or orientations. To give one emblematic example from the pages of later Victorian fiction, Thomas Hardy’s character, Jude Fawley, did not have a good opinion of himself, because he was a failure in outward terms. He got drunk to escape the pressure of his own negative emotions. He had the instincts (but not the money) of a gentleman. He managed to teach himself enough Greek and Latin to enter the university in “Christminster” (obviously based on Oxford). In the end, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) is a somber vision of intellectual disappointment. Jude would never overcome the circumstances of class-conscious Victorian society or the f laws in his own nature. Of course, Hartley Coleridge did not suffer the class-barrier that obstructed Jude Fawley’s progress, but

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there was undoubtedly something that made Hartley feel it necessary to address a young child in the following way: Nor will I come, an uninvited Ghost, To tell thee, all thy charms are transitory. (HCNP 107)

There are many “uninvited Ghost[s]” in society today—individuals who wander like waifs in the midst of crowds whose applause is reserved for professional accomplishments and spousal acquisitions. From Hartley’s “failure” f lowed his humiliation, his corroding awareness that he had been unable to convince the world of his value and his being hence condemned to consider the more successful members of society around him with bitterness and shame: To my love—that her charms may to her be a blessing, Tho’ to me I confess, they are rather distressing— For the man of her choice may good fortune await him, And then—why, I’ll try very hard not to hate him. (HCPW 97)

Hartley also wrote a sonnet about his disinclination to congratulate his newly married friend: HOW shall a man fore-doom’d to lone estate, Untimely old, irreverendly grey, Much like a patch of dusky snow in May, Dead sleeping in a hollow, all too late— How shall so poor a thing congratulate The blest completion of a patient wooing . . . (HCPW 115)

He did try to see at least the possibility of appreciating in some way “The loving looks that look not love to me” (PHC 112), and so he remained, as the following suggests, never to be disabused of his vision of domestic bliss: But have ye found the song of love less sweet Because translated into household prose? Duties there needs must be, and toils, and cares, And there may be some salutary pains, That unexpected come and unawares To all that walk in wedlock’s lightest chains. The man who tills the blessed Saviour’s land, Must sow a seed that oft is long a-growing;

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And she that would assist with patient hand, Must water daily while her spouse is sowing. The world besieges sore the wedded pair, And many a charm of youth is early blighted, But Heaven preserve ye both from fruitless care, And bless the day whereon ye were united. (HCPW 247)

Hartley fancied that marriage would have given him the tranquillity, the happiness, the innocence, and good conscience he so badly missed as a bachelor. Such an impulsive creature as Hartley did not really appreciate the degree of circumspection and self-control that would have been required of him to make a marriage work. Other poets who knew from experience what marriage actually involved wrote differently. Byron exploded almost in passing the idea that there could really be such a thing as a happily married couple: Don José and the Donna Inez led For some time an unhappy sort of life, Wishing each other not divorced, but dead; They lived respectably as man and wife, Their conduct was exceedingly well-bred, And gave no outward signs of inward strife . . . (Don Juan I xxvi)

Oddly, Hartley appears to have forgotten his own parents’ unhappy marriage,2 in which the husband had been secretly frightened by his own desire for his wife’s death: There is one thing wholly out of my Power. I cannot look forward even with the faintest pleasure of Hope to the Death of any human Being, tho’ it were, as it seems to be, the only condition of the greatest imaginable Happiness to me, and the emancipation of all my noblest faculties that must remain fettered during that Being’s Life.—I dare not, for I can not: I cannot, for I dare not. The very effort to look onward to it with a steadfast wish would be a suicide, far beyond what the dagger or pistol could realize— absolutely suicide, coelicide, not mere viticide. (STCN 1421)

One would think Hartley ought to have appreciated not only the possibility of making a wrong choice in marriage, but, more deeply, the problem of marriage for a writer altogether. STC had complained that “My wife’s every day self and her minor interests, alas, do not at all harmonize with my occupations, my temperament, or my weaknesses”

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(STCL I 317). Knowing exactly how it felt to have his wife fall out of love with him, Shelley could let fall the following drop of condensed wisdom: “Love, how it sells poor bliss / For proud despair!” (PWS 414). Hartley’s sense of his own inconsequentiality stems at least in part from his lack of experience, and, more specifically, from his lack of sexual experience. Though he felt constrained “for ever to the heart-solitude of celibacy” (HCL 106), he considered himself “a great advocate for marriage”—or so he told Derwent in August 1830 (Derwent having been married to Mary Pridham since 1827). Hartley elaborated: Married people are in general, better than single ones; they are less selfish because attention to self-interest is become a more obvious duty; they are far more pious and conscientious, know themselves better, and feeling the intensest anxiety for the moral purity of each other and of their offspring, they experience, what batchelors seldom more than half believe, the infinite importance of purity in itself. (HCL 106)

Despite Hartley’s self-possessed self-effacement—“But it is a good joke for me to be prating to you on these points, with all the insolence of an article writer” (HCL 106)—his abstract reverence for women remained unchallenged by what Shelley called “love’s sad satiety” (PWS 391). Hartley would never know what it would have been like to have to upholster his soul with indifference in order to enjoy mechanically sensual sex, or in order to endure the petty horrors of sterile domesticity. Bold as butterf lies, he would even work through his idea of the potential psychological difficulty in store for any widower wishing to remarry: There is no jealousy in realms above: The spirit purified from earthly stain, And knowing that its earthly loss was gain, Transfers its property in earthly love (Tho’ love it was she does not yet reprove) To her by Heaven appointed to sustain The honour’d matron’s part; to bear the pain, The joy, the duty, all things that behove A Christian wedded. She that dwells on high May be a guardian angel to the wife That her good husband chooses to supply Her place, vacated in the noon of life; With holy gladness may support the bride Through happy cares to her by death denied. (HCPW 128)

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Perhaps it was unwise of Hartley in the above sonnet to expand the Coleridgean view— That we may lift the soul, and contemplate With lively joy the joys we cannot share (STCPW 181)

beyond the range of his own experience. Hartley’s never having actually met Mrs Derwent Coleridge seems to have suited his taste for the deliciously vague: Often have I strain’d my imagination to construct for my own mind’s eye a perfect image of your beloved Mary, but there is a shadow, a reminiscence that baff les still my efforts, a figure which I know is not, cannot be the true one, always presents itself instead. (HCL 106)

Hartley continued to request that Derwent collaborate with him in protecting the purity of the unspecific: I do not desire you to describe my Sister in Law. Prose descriptions create no images, and poetical ones may, but all false. Nothing but deformity can be accurately described. In vain would you schedule her perfections, tell the very hue of her tresses, and communicate to your style the lustre of her eyes, scientifically delineate her facial angles and tell with arithmetical exactness the length, breadth and thickness of every feature. I should never be a whit the wiser. (HCL 106–107)

Hartley saw certain realities as great mountains of unbearable solidity and height. They only summed up in terms of granite and groaning structures the ultimate, unpalatable truth of the soul having to live for a time in the mud hut of the body. Often, realistic expressions were to Hartley either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he would circumvent alone if he had to, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world: My Fairy Land was never upon earth, Nor in the heaven to which I hoped to go; For it was always by the glimmering hearth, When the last fagot gave its reddest glow . . . (HCPW 215)

Such an approach to—or, rather, away from—life appeared pale-handed (even by Romantic poets’ standards) in the fault-finding light of, say, metropolitan radicalism, or in the broad light of an intellectual tradition which saw literature as a product of a particular society and as a social fact, an inf luence, within society.

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Byron had the self-searching motivation to express some unpalatable truths about our earthbound appetites and emotions: Ecclesiastes said, “that all is vanity”— Most modern preachers say the same, or show it By their examples of true Christianity: In short, all know, or very soon may know it; And in this scene of all-confessed inanity, By Saint, by Sage, by Preacher, and by Poet, Must I restrain me, through the fear of strife, From holding up the nothingness of life? (Don Juan VII vi)

Shelley could be dismissive of the game of life: I dare not guess; but in this life Of error, ignorance and strife, Where nothing is, but all things seem, And we the shadows of the dream . . . (PWS 386)

Uniquely, Hartley’s appetite for beauty would not be brought on by weariness of the “inanity” or the “nothingness” of the “dream” of this life. Rather, it would be activated by the very sights and sounds unseen and unheard by the more prominent poets. The trembling delicacy of the minute—the form of petals and the strength of their curve as they open and curl back to reveal the mysterious flower-centres with their anthers and hearts—is caught in the following poem with an odd kind of perceptiveness: OH! why is beauty still a bud, infolding, A greater beauty that can never be, Yet always is its faint fair self beholding, In all of fair and good that man may see? Nay, beauty is with thee the power of life, The germ and sweet idea of thy being; As beauty fashion’d that first maid and wife, That made primeval man rejoice in seeing. He dream’d of beauty, and he wish’d to see A form to be the substance of his dream; So want begot a child of vacancy, And that now is which did before but seem. Adam did love before he look’d on Eve; He found himself unblest in Eden’s bower.

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A love there is that does not yet conceive Its own existence: ’tis a simple power,— A power that most does recognise its might In weakness, want, and everlasting yearning; Whose heaven is soaring, seeking, endless f light, Whose hell is thirst and everlasting burning. For what is hell, but an eternal thirst, And burning for the bounty once rejected? And what is heaven, but God on earth rehearsed, In the calm centre of the Lord perfected? Then ask not why is beauty but a bud, That never more than half itself discloses; Sweet f lower, like thee is every human good, And love divine is seen in unblown roses. (HCPW 214–215)

It is as if Hartley is held in a kind of fine attention in which he can sense the very flow of life in the flower. He is not perceiving the flower but living it. He is aware of the life of the plant as a slow flow or circulation of a vital current of energy of the utmost purity. He can apprehend as a simple essence formal structure and dynamic process. The dynamic form seems of a spiritual, not a material, order; or of a finer matter, or of matter itself apparent as spirit. Hartley apprehends an intricate and organized whole as a whole. The whole is living; and as such inspires a sense of holiness. “Living form” is how one could best name the essence or soul of Hartley’s plant. “Living” does not mean that which distinguishes animal from plant or plant from mineral, but rather a quality possessed by all these in their different degrees. Either everything is, in that sense, living, or nothing is; the negation—being the view to which materialism tends—for lack, as Hartley knows, of the immediate apprehension of life, as life. The experience lasts some time (as in the poem above), and then one is obliged to shrink back into dull common consciousness. He found treasures in the grain of his unpolished solitude. It is a pleasure to reread them and experience the rub. To Hartley, the experience is not strange but infinitely familiar, as if he has been experiencing at last things as they are. This is where Hartley belongs, and where in a sense he has always been and always will be. The almost continuous sense of exile and incompleteness of experience, which is the average human state, is gone like an uncomfortable recurring dream: The world is a contradiction—a shade, a symbol—and, spite of ourselves, we know that it is so. From this knowledge does all melancholy proceed. We crave for that which the earth does not contain . . . (HEM I 58)

184


Such was the rapt imagination Hartley possessed: THE crackling embers of the hearth are dead; The indoor note of industry is still; The latch is fast; upon the window sill The small birds wait not for their daily bread; The voiceless f lowers—how quietly they shed Their nightly odours;—and the household rill Murmurs continuous dulcet sounds that fill The vacant expectation, and the dread Of listening night. And haply now she sleeps; For all the garrulous noises of the air Are hush’d in peace; the soft dew silent weeps, Like hopeless lovers for a maid so fair— Oh! that I were the happy dream that creeps To her soft heart, to find my image there. (HCPW 11)

Hartley’s obscurity, his feeling of separation from a scholarly, or happy, existence is not explainable by the class barrier that obstructed Jude Fawley’s progress, but by “Something” in himself, which has nothing to do with the distinctions made in society: SOMETHING has my heart to say Something on my breast does weigh That when I would full fain be gay She pulls me back . . . Sometimes, as with mocking guile The pain departs a little while, Then I can dance and sing and smile With merry glee— But soon, too soon it comes again . . . (HCNP 88)

Whatever “it” is that “comes again” is more deadly to personal happiness than any social reality alone. Hartley, “daily know[ing him]self [his] own heart’s enemy” (HCL 96), is startlingly ahead of his time. The troubled recluse in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s (1821–1881) short story, Notes From Underground (1864), would stare at his own face in the mirror until he fancied he caught something servile in it—some outward manifestation of his core inadequacy, which rendered useless to him the activities

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regarded by less troubled individuals as pleasant or practical. But decades before Dostoevsky, Hartley could house similar torsions in the realm of ink and paper: But soon, too soon it comes again The sulky, stif ling, leaden pain, As a black cloud is big with rain ’Tis big with woe. (HCNP 88)

Hartley could not even hold a sovereign without becoming fidgety with the feeling that it threw into greater relief his shabby being: OH when I have a sovereign in my pocket I cannot sit—my toes extempore dance Gay as a limber son of merry France; ’Tis like grey hair enclose[d] in gilded locket Whose gold and glass by contrast seem to mock it . . . (HCNP 72)

Those who know what it is to have been in need and destitution are much less afraid of it, and consequently more inclined to extravagance than those who know poverty only by hearsay. People who are consistently in good circumstances are as a rule much more careful about how they use their money than those who have suddenly acquired some money by a piece of good fortune. That may look as if poverty was not really such a wretched thing as it appears from a distance. The true reason, however, is the fact that the person who is habitually in a poor position looks upon it as the natural one, and if by any chance he comes in for a fortune, he regards it as a superf luity, something to be enjoyed or wasted, because, if it comes to an end, he can get on just as well as before, with one anxiety less: So momentary riches will enhance The pride of Poverty, so high advance The hope of man—but soon alas a docket— Misfortune strikes, the obliterating sponge Of fell reverse makes all our joys exhale. (HCNP 72)

Hartley could solve the problem of the out of place coin by exchanging it for a drink (and drunkenness is no sin if it is whimsical): Shall I in ocean take a fatal plunge Or shall I with sixpenny worth of ale

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Condole the sovereign spent—or get quite frisky And just hibernify myself with whiskey? (HCNP 72)

Hartley could not, however, attempt to solve the problem of the out of place world—or his out of place life—with the same levity: . . . Yet could a wish, a thought, Unravel all the complex web of age, — Could all the characters that Time hath wrought Be clean effaced from my memorial page By one short word, the word I would not say . . . (HCPW 13)

Hartley the poet felt the riddle too deeply, and too minutely. Hartley the man continued to dance, and drink, and sing till some blind hand brushed his wing. Notes 1. For example, Plotz’s “The Perpetual Messiah: Romanticism, Childhood, and the Paradoxes of Human Development,” in Regulated Children/ Liberated Children (1979) 63–95. 2. Plotz argues that “To retain Coleridge the wonderful father, Hartley regressively suppresses everything he knows about Coleridge the bad father. But such an evasion of knowledge and remembrance blocked the possibility of the child’s own maturation and growth since he could not bear to separate from a merely life-sized, merely human father. A willed obliviousness to the conditions of his childhood existence was the very condition of keeping alive the happiness of that childhood and the greatness of his father” (RVC 198).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Coleridge, S.T., Essays on his Times, 3 volumes, edited by D.V. Erdman, Bollingen Series (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton, 1978). Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 volumes, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–1971). Davies, Hugh Sykes, Wordsworth and the Worth of Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Davies, Paul, Romanticism and Esoteric Tradition (Herndon, VA: Lindisfarne Books, 1998). De Botton, Alain, Status Anxiety (London: Penguin, 2004). De Quincey, Thomas, The Collected Writings, edited by David Masson, 11 volumes (London, 1890). Donne, John, The Complete English Poems, edited by A.J. Smith (London: Penguin, 1986). Donno, Elizabeth Story, “The Case of the Purloined Biography: Hartley Coleridge and Literary Protectivism,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 82 (1979): 458–486. The Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford, with an introduction by Hartley Coleridge edited by Hartley Coleridge (London: Moxon, 1840). Fruman, Norman, The Damaged Archangel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971). Gardner, Helen, ed., The Metaphysical Poets (London: Penguin, 1957). Goldsmith, Oliver, Poems and Essays (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1858). Graham, Harry J.C., Splendid Failures (NY: Longmans, 1913). Griggs, Earl Leslie, Hartley Coleridge: His Life and Work (London: University of London, 1929). Hainton, Raymonde and Godfrey, The Unknown Coleridge:The Life and Times of Derwent Coleridge 1800–1883 (London: Janus, 1996). Hardy, Thomas, Selected Poetry, edited by David Wright (London: Penguin, 1978). The Hartley Coleridge Letters: A Calendar and Index, edited by by Fran Carlock Stephens (Austin, TX: Humanities Research Center, 1978). Hartley Coleridge: New Poems, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs (London: Oxford University Press, 1942). Hartman, Herbert, Hartley Coleridge: Poet’s Son and Poet (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931). Hayter, Alethea, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London: Harper Collins, 1968). Hazlitt, William, Selected Writings, edited by Jon Cook (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). ———, Spirit of the Age, edited by E.D. Mackerness (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1825 [1991]). Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, 3 volumes, edited by Edith J. Morley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927). Holmes, Richard, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London: Harper Collins, 1998). ———, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989). Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed., rev. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). Hunt, Leigh, Selected Writings, edited by David Jesson Dibley (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990).


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Huysmans, J.K., Á Rebours 1884, with an introduction by Havelock Ellis (New York: Dover, 1931). Johnson, Paul, Intellectuals (London: Phoenix, 1988). Johnston, Kenneth R., The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (New York: Norton, 1998). Jones, Kathleen, A Passionate Sisterhood (London: Constable, 1997). Keats, John, The Poetical Works, edited by H.W. Garrod (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958). Langley-Moore, Doris, Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered (London: John Murray, 1974). Lefebure, Molly, The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Gollancz, 1986). Letters of Hartley Coleridge, edited by Grace Evelyn Griggs and Earl Leslie Griggs, (London: Oxford University Press, 1941). Letters of John Keats, edited by Robert Gittings (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970). The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years I, 1821–1830, edited by E.de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939). Lindop, Grevel, The Opium Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (New York: Taplinger, 1981). Low, Dennis, The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2006). Masefield, John, Collected Poems (London: Heinemann, 1936). ———, Thanks Before Going (London: Heinemann, 1946). Mays, J.C.C., “Coleridge’s Love: All He Can Manage, More Than He Could,” Coleridge’s Visionary Languages: Essays in Honour of J.B. Beer, edited by Tim Fulford and Morton Paley (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993). McFarland, Thomas, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969). A Minnow Among Tritons: Mrs S.T. Coleridge’s Letters to Tom Poole, edited by Stephen Potter (London: Nonesuch, 1934). Mudge, Bradford Keyes, Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). Newlyn, Lucy, ed., Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). ———, “The Little Actor and His Mock Apparel,” The Wordsworth Circle 14, 1 New York (1983): 30–39. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4 double volumes of Texts and Notes, 1794–1826, edited by Kathleen Coburn and volume 4 edited by Merten Christensen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957–1990). Paulin, Tom, William Hazlitt’s Radical Style: The Day-Star of Liberty (London: Faber and Faber, 1998). Perry, Seamus, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999). Plotz, Judith, “Childhood Lost, Childhood Regained: Hartley Coleridge’s Fable of Defeat,” in Children’s Literature, edited by Margaret Higonnet and Barbara Rosen (1986). ———, “The Perpetual Messiah: Romanticism, Childhood, and the Paradoxes of Human Development,” Regulated Children/Liberated Children (1979).

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Plotz, Judith, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Poems by Hartley Coleridge, With a Memoir of His Life by His Brother, edited by Derwent Coleridge, 2 volumes (London: Moxon, 1851). Pomeroy, Sister Mary Joseph, The Poetry of Hartley Coleridge (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1927). Proust, Marcel, On Reading, translated by John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1994). Recollections of Aubrey de Vere (London, 1897). Reeves, James, Collected Poems 1929–1959 (London: Heinemann, 1959). ———, Understanding Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1967). Salinger, J.D., Catcher in the Rye (London: Penguin, 1951). Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works, edited by E.H. Coleridge (London, 1912). Sandford, Mrs Henry, Thomas Poole and His Friends, 2 volumes (London, 1888). Schopenhauer, Arthur, Essays from the Parerga and Paralipomena, translated by T. Bailey Saunders (London: Allen and Unwin, 1951). Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, edited by T.J.B. Spencer (London: Penguin, 1980). Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Poetical Works of Shelley, edited by Newell F. Ford (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1974). Shenstone, William, The Poetical Works of William Shenstone with the Life of the Author and a Description of the Leasowes (London: C. Cooke, undated). Storey, Mark, Robert Southey: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). Taylor, Anya, Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink, 1780–1830 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). The Letters of Willliam and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 1806–1820, 2 volumes, edited by E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937). Towle, Eleanor, A Poet’s Children (London, 1912). Warner, Marina, Phantasmagoria (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007). Webb, Timothy, Shelley: A Voice Not Understood (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1977). Wellek, René, Immanuel Kant in England 1793–1838 (New Jersey: Princeton, 1931). Whalley, George, Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson and the Asra Poems (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955). Wilson, Colin, The Outsider (London: Gallancz,1956). Woodring, R.B., ed., Shelley: Modern Judgements (London, 1968). Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, 1805 Text, edited by Ernest De Selincourt, corrected by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1805 [1970]). ———, William Wordsworth, edited by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). Wroe, Ann, Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007).

INDEX

Abrams, M.H. 6 Aeschylus 62 Aristotle 62 Arnold, Matthew 149 Arnold, Thomas 69, 104 Auden, W.H. 150 Bagehot, Walter 99 Baillie, Joanna 161 Balzac, Honoré de 170 Banville, John 123, 170 Bate, Jonathan 110 Baudelaire, Charles 89, 170–171 Beach, Joseph Warren 113 Beaglehole, J.C. 101 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell 130 Beer, John 47 Bell, Andrew 143 Bentley, Richard 87, 91, 97, 111 Berkeley, George 25, 86 Bingley, Francis Edward 87–89, 105 Blackburn, Thomas 94, 143–144 Blackwood’s Magazine 88, 139, 148 Blake, William 47, 102, 105, 113, 116, 133 Blank, Kim 9 Bonaparte, Napoleon 133 Bradford, Richard 129 Bruce, Thomas (Seventh Earl of Elgin) 173 Burke, Edmund 102, 128, 142 Burns, Robert 172 Byatt, A.S. 10, 133

Byron, Lord 51–52, 75, 98, 109, 125, 139–140, 144–145, 147–148, 149, 151, 154–155, 161, 172, 179, 182 Carlyle 161 Carver, P.L. 147 Cervantes, Miguel de 72 Chamfort, Nicholas 126 Chaucer, Geoffrey 173 Christiansen, Rupert 10, 38, 129 Clare, John 110 Clarkson, Thomas 101 Claude, Mrs Louise 174 Coburn, Kathleen 6, 82 Coleridge, Berkeley 25 Coleridge Bulletin 102 Coleridge, Lord Geoffrey 6–7 Coleridge, Derwent 5, 12–13, 15, 33–34, 47, 54–57, 60, 62, 66, 67, 72–73, 76–80, 89, 96, 106, 110–112, 120, 153, 164, 168, 180 Coleridge, George 40, 48, 58, 62, 67–68 Coleridge, Henry Nelson 38, 165 Coleridge, Hartley Ejuxria 12–13, 16–17, 39–40, 46, 56, 91, 167 “Ah! woeful impotence of weak resolve” 163–164 “Album Verses” 151 “The Anemone” 45–46

192

IN DE X

Coleridge, Hartley—continued “An Old Man’s Wish” 171 “A thousand thoughts were stirring in my mind” 166 “Beauty” 182–183 “The Birth-Day” 18, 97, 176 “Butter’s Etymological Spelling Book, &c” 61 “Donne” 100 “Fairy Land” 90–91, 181 “Faith—how guarded” 136 “The First Birthday” 119 “Fragment” 85 “From Country to Town. Written in Leeds, July 1832” 87, 90–92, 95 “Hidden Music” 135, 138–139 “The Horses of Lysippus” 63 “How long I sail’d, and never took a thought” 98 “If I have sinn’d in act, I may repent” 152–153 “I have been cherish’d, and forgiven” 1, 158 “I Have written my Name on Water” 150 “It were a state too terrible for man” 154 “Let me not deem that I was made in vain” 117 Leonard and Susan 120, 139 “Lines Written Opposite A Drawing Of A Parrot And Butterf ly” 132 “Married Life” 178–179 “Multum dilexit” 152 “New-Year’s Day” 116, 118, 157 “Night” 184 “Oh when I have a sovereign in my pocket” 185–186 “On a Dissolution of Ministry” 137 “On a Picture of the Corpse of Napoleon lying in State” 134

“On parting with a very Pretty, but very Little Lady” 54 “On the Late Mrs. Pritt, Formerly Miss Scales” 158 “Poietes Apoietes” 148 “Presentiment” 184–185 Prometheus 140–141 “Rydal” 20 “The Sabbath-Day’s Child” 85, 114–115 “Second Nuptials” 180 “September” 155 “So Fare thee well—my little book” 159 “A Task ad Libitum” 18, 94, 124, 145 “Thoughts” 144 “Too true it is, my time of power was spent” 126 “To a Newly-married Friend” 178 “To an Infant” 47 “To James, Son of T. Jackson, on his Fourth Birthday” 171 “To Somebody” 117 “To Young and his Contemporaries” 141 “Weak Resolves” 17 “What can a poor man do but love and pray?” 146–147 “What is young passion but a gusty breeze” 153 “When I review the course that I have run” 129–130 “Why is there War on Earth?” 142 “To Wordsworth” 99 “Written in a Season of Public Disturbance” 138 Coleridge, John Taylor 58, 67, 70 Coleridge, Luke 57 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Biographia Literaria 77, 147, 164 opium 4, 24, 30, 38, 55, 147, 173

IN DE X

“Kubla Khan” 4–8, 10–11, 14, 16, 20–21, 38, 123, 129, 155, 159, 161 “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 16, 20, 23–25, 28, 37, 49, 69, 78–79 “Christabel” 16, 26–27, 34, 38, 131 “The Pains of Sleep” 155 “Answer to a Child’s Question” 13 “Frost at Midnight” 26, 106 “Dejection: an ode” 31, 160 “Trochee trips from long to short” 60 “The Reproof and Reply” 72 “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” 181 Coleridge, Sara 6, 38, 106 Coleridge, Sarah (née Fricker), 2, 7, 8, 10, 24, 26–28, 35–39, 47–48, 54, 57, 60, 66, 70–71, 78, 88, 90, 106, 114, 137, 145, 164, 169, 173, 179 Comberbache, Silas Tomkyn (aka Samuel Taylor Coleridge) 67 Congreve, William 97–98 Cook, Captain James 100–102, 106 Coplestone, Edward 70, 79 Cottle, Joseph 25 Cowper, William 11, 53, 127–128, 156 Da Vinci 96 Darley, George 130 Davies, Hugh Sykes 126 Davies, Paul 9, 10 Davy, Humphrey 32, 54 Dawes, Rev John 54, 60, 66, 73, 75–76, 149 de Bernière, Louis ix De Botton, Alain 83 De Quincey, Thomas 51, 53, 89–90, 93–94, 99, 167–8, 172–3

193

Gombroon 14 de Staël, Madame 98 de Vere, Aubrey 65, 137 Defoe, Daniel 174 Dickens, Charles 90, 95, 146, 161 Dodsley, R. 11 Donne, John 100, 152, 153, 161 Donno, Elizabeth Story 111–113, 176 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 184–185 Dove, John 87, 111 Eliot, T.S. 150 Ellison, Nathaniel 62–63 Estlin, John Prior 42 Essays In Criticism 87 Euripides 62 Evans, Mary 169 Fairfax, Thomas Lord 91 Fell, William 91–92, 94 Fenwick, Isabella 65 Ferrier, James 113 Fielding, Henry 72 Fleming, Mary 158 Fleming, Rev Richard 114 Flint, F.S. 85 Foot, Paul 131 Ford, John 104, 127 Fox, Caroline 58 Fox, Sarah Hustler 98 Fricker, Edith 8, 37, 38 Fruman, Norman 6, 112, 149 Gallileo 124 Gee, Lisa ix The Gem 88, 137 Gentleman’s Magazine 147 Gibbon, Edward 121 Gillman, James 41 Godwin, William 48, 102 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 113 Goldsmith, Oliver 128

194

IN DE X

Graham, Harry 130 Gray, Thomas 141, 162, 175 Greer, Germaine 151 Griggs, Earl Leslie ix, x, 51, 53, 56, 72, 76, 84, 148, 154, 177 Hamlet 121–2, 124, 128, 148, 165, 168 Handel 78 Harding, Anthony John 82 Hardy, Thomas 81, 177 Hartley, David 1, 25 Hartman, Herbert ix, x, 130, 136, 146, 161 Hazlitt, William 81, 82, 144 Hemans, Felicia 161 Hogarth, William 72 Hogsette, David S. 161 Hölderlin, Friedrich 117 Holmes, Richard 1, 39–40, 68, 79, 160 Homer 173 Hood, Thomas 88, 137 Horace 62, 97 Hulme, T.E. 85 Hume, David 145 Hunt, Leigh 104 Hutchinson, Sara (“Asra”) 29, 31, 40 Huysmans, J.K. 170 Johnson, Paul 51 Johnson, Samuel 6 Johnston, Kenneth R.

Langley-Moore, Doris 51–52 Leavis, F.R. 150 Lefebure, Molly 28, 31, 46, 145, 149 Lewis, C.S. 12 Lewis, Matthew (“Monk”) 54 The Literary Souvenir 88–90 Lloyd, Charles 2, 24, 53 London Magazine 71, 99 Louis XVI, King 126, 133 Low, Dennis 106 Lowell, Amy 85 Lyrical Ballads 27 Macdonald, George 23 Magnuson, Paul 102 Malthus, Thomas 102 Marvell, Andrew 87, 91, 111 Masefield, John 19, 136 Massinger, Philip 78, 104 Maturin, Charles 75 Mays, J.C.C. ix McFarland, Thomas 129, 174 The Metaphysical Poets 124 Milton, John 173 Monk, James Henry 111 Montagu, Basil 56, 70 Montaigne, Michel de 96, 111, 114 Monthly Magazine 24 Moore, Tom 130 Morning Chronicle 161 Morning Post 13, 27, 31, 160

9

Kant, Immanuel 129 Keanie, Andrew 87 Keats, John 15–16, 75, 138, 147, 149–50, 151, 155, 161 Keble, John 62–64, 69, 70 Kitson, Peter J. 13 Kleist, Heinrich von 117 Lamb, Charles 111, 128 Landon, Letitia 161

National Magazine 172 Newdigate Prize 63, 157 Newlyn, Lucy 95, 112 Newman, J.H. 69 Newton, Sir Isaac ix North, Christopher (aka John Wilson) 62 Paulin, Tom 21, 110 Phelps, L.R. 156 Pindar 62

IN DE X

Pitt, William the Younger 8–9, 13 Plato 6, 176 Plotz, Judith x, 87, 129–130, 186 Pomeroy, Mary Joseph 141 Poole, Thomas 2, 8, 19, 30, 36, 38, 40–42, 57, 64, 66, 82–83, 151 Pridham, Mary (Mrs Derwent Coleridge) 180–181 Proust, Marcel 122, 166, 170 Quarterly Review 110 Quiller-Couch, Arthur

147

Radcliffe, Ann 135 Rawnsley, Canon H.D. 162 Reeves, James 132, 133 Richards, I.A. 113 Richardson, William 105 Robertson, J.M. 113 Robespierre 126 Robinson, Henry Crabb 111 Roscoe, William 97 Rubenstein, Chris 23 Sackville West, Edward 89 Sadler, Michael Thomas 95 Salinger, J.D. 106–108 Schiller, Friederich von 27 Schopenhauer, Arthur 84, 114, 125 Scott, Sir Walter 75, 133, 161 Severn, Joseph 150 Seymour-Smith, Martin 37, 38 Sgricci, Tommaso 156 Shakespeare, William 78, 97, 113, 122, 138, 145, 148, 164, 166, 176 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 16, 51–53, 75, 104, 126, 131, 133–136, 138, 147, 149–152, 154–156, 161, 180, 182 Shenstone, William 11, 101 Sophocles 62 Southey, Robert 7–8, 14, 21, 33, 37–38, 41, 52–56, 58–59, 62, 64, 78, 83, 94, 96, 105, 110, 118,

195

123, 129, 133, 139, 140, 146, 166, 169 Spedding, James 104 Spenser, Edmund 173 Stephens, Fran Carlock 69, 87 Sterling, John 113 Sterne, Laurence 137 Stirling, James 113 Storey, Mark 129 Tate, Allen 150 Taylor, Anya 26, 40, 131 Tennyson, Alfred 82, 161 Thelwall, John 4, 8 Thomson, James 11 Towle, Eleanor 60 Townsend, Chauncey Hare 95 Tyler, James Endell 67, 69 Vasari, Giorgio 96 Vaughan, Henry 124 Virgil 42, 62 Wade, Josiah 29 Warner, Marina 54 Watts, Alaric A. 89 Webb, Timothy 131 Wedgwood, Josiah 23–24, 35 Wedgwood, Thomas 54 Wellek, René 5, 113, 129 Westbrook, Harriet 51 Whalley, George 40 Wilcock, John 151 Williams, Stanley T. 16, 162 Wilson, Colin 83, 103 The Winter’s Wreath 89 Wollstonecraft, Mary 97 Woodring, Carl 131 Wordsworth, Dorothy 10, 53, 69, 76, 94 Wordsworth, Mary (née Hutchinson) 10

196

IN DE X

Wordsworth, William ix, x, 4, 6, 9–10, 14, 20, 53, 59, 64, 73, 77–78, 82, 85, 93–94, 99, 105, 109–110, 112, 115, 123, 126, 132–133, 146–147, 151, 155, 158–159, 161, 164–165, 169, 175

Prelude 6, 9–10, 65, 73 “To H.C., Six Years Old” 26, 39, 73 “Anecdote for Fathers” 44–45 Xanadu 4, 6, 12, 16

Hartley Coleridge: A Reassessment of His Life and Work

Semmelweis: his life and work

Max Stirner: His Life and His Work

John Henry Newman: His Life and Work

The Life of Sir William Hartley

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