Notes on Shakespeare - Lectures by Coleridge

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

By Leslie Stephen

A poet and philosopher. He was born 21 Oct. 1772 at Ottery St. Mary. His father, John Coleridge (1719–1781), vicar of the town and master of the grammar school, was a man of learning and simplicity, often compared by his son to Parson Adams. He edified his congregation by quoting Hebrew in the pulpit. In 1768 he published Miscellaneous Dissertations, arising from the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book of Judges; and in 1772 a Critical Latin Grammar, in which the name 'quale-quare-quidditive' was substituted for the old-fashioned ablative. An advertisement appended states that he took pupils at sixteen guineas a year for boarding and teaching. Many anecdotes were told of his absent-mindedness. He was twice married. He had three daughters by his first wife (Mary Lendon). His second wife, Anne Bowdon (d. 1809), was a sensible woman and a good housekeeper, though not highly educated. He had by her ten children. James, the third son (1760-1836), entered the army, married a lady of fortune, Miss Frances Duke Taylor, and by her was the father of Mr. Justice Coleridge, of Henry Nelson Coleridge, of Edward Coleridge, assistant-master at Eton, of Frances Duke, the wife of Sir John Patteson and mother of Bishop Patteson, and three other children. The fifth and sixth children of John Coleridge, Edward and George, took orders, George (d. 1828, aged 63) afterwards succeeding to his father's school and benefice. The seventh child, Luke Herman, became a surgeon, and died in 1790, aged 25, leaving one son, William Hart, afterwards bishop of Barbados. The tenth, Samuel Taylor, was singularly precocious and imaginative. 'I never thought as a child,' he says, 'never had the language of a child.' He read the Arabian Nights before his fifth birthday (The Friend, 1818, i. 252), and preferred day-dreams to active games (for anecdotes of his infancy see Biog. Lit. 1847, ii. 313-28). His father died 4 Oct. 1781. Sir Francis Buller, the judge, a former pupil of the father, obtained for the son a presentation to Christ's Hospital, where the boy was placed 18 July 1782. Here he was protected by Middleton, afterwards bishop of Calcutta, then a 'deputy Grecian,' and became the friend of Charles Lamb.

Lamb describes the school in his Recollections of Christ's Hospital and in Christ's Hospital Thirty-five years ago, one of the Essays of Elia. In the last there is the often-cited description of Coleridge as the 'inspired charity-boy,' expounding Plotinus and reciting Homer in the Greek. The 'poor friendless boy' also represents Coleridge (Gillman, Life of Coleridge, p. 13). Middleton found the boy reading Virgil for his pleasure, and spoke of him to the head-master, James Boyer, often called Bowyer (for whom see Trollope, Christ's Hospital, pp. 136-41), a severe but sensible teacher. Boyer flogged pitilessly, but Coleridge was grateful for his shrewd onslaughts upon commonplaces and bombast. Coleridge became a good scholar, and before his fifteenth year had translated the ‘Eight Hymns of Synesius from the Greek into English Anacreontics’ (Biog. Lit. 1817, i. 249).

In one of his day-dreams in the street his hands came in contact with a gentleman's clothes. On being challenged as a pickpocket, Coleridge explained that he was Leander swimming the Hellespont. His accuser was not only pacified but paid his subscription to a library; whither he afterwards 'skulked out' at all risks and read right 'through the catalogue' (Gillman, pp. 17, 21). His brother Luke was now walking the hospitals. Coleridge was seized with a passion for the study of medicine, begged to hold plasters and dressings at operations, and devoured medical books, learning Blancard's Latin Medical Dictionary almost by heart. From medicine he diverged, 'before his fifteenth year,' into metaphysics. Thomas Taylor's Plotinus concerning the Beautiful, published in 1787, probably fell in his way and affected his speculations (Brandl, S. T. Coleridge, p. 21). Voltaire seduced him into infidelity, out of which he was flogged by Boyer, the 'only just flogging' he ever received (Gillman, p. 24). He was ready to argue with any chance passenger in the streets, and it is doubtless to this phase that Lamb's description of the 'inspired charity-boy' applies. He was recalled from metaphysics to poetry, in which he had already dabbled, by falling in love with Mary Evans, a schoolfellow's sister (Gillman, p. 28; Allsop, 1836, ii. 86), and by reading the sonnets of Bowles, first made known to him by Middleton. Within a year and a half he had made over forty transcriptions of Bowles for presents to friends, being too poor to purchase the book.

At the same time he incurred permanent injuries to his health by such imprudence’s as swimming the New River without undressing, and neglecting to change his clothes. The food was both scanty and bad. Half his time between seventeen and eighteen was passed in the sick ward with jaundice and rheumatic fever. He rose to the top of the school, having abandoned a passing fancy for an apprenticeship to a friendly shoemaker (Gillman, p. 21), and left Christ's Hospital on 7 Sept. 1790, He was appointed to an exhibition of 40l. a year in 1791. He was entered as a sizar at Jesus College, Cambridge, on 5 Feb. 1791, and came into residence in the following October, when he became a pensioner (5 Nov. 1791). He matriculated on 26 March 1792. He no doubt came to Jesus to obtain one of the Rustat scholarships, which are confined to the sons of clergymen. He received something from this source in his first term, and about 25l. for each of the years 1792-4. He became also a foundation scholar on 5 June 1793 (information from the master of Jesus). He was stimulated to work in his first year by his friend Middleton (B.A. 1792); he won the Browne medal for a Greek ode (on the slave trade) in 1792, but failed in 1793. He was one of four selected candidates for the Craven scholarship in 1793, Keate, the famous headmaster of Eton, being another; but it was won by S. Butler, afterwards head-master of Shrewsbury. The chief test of classical excellence at that time, the chancellor's medal, was open only to wranglers and senior optimes. Coleridge's ignorance of mathematics made it improbable that he would even be qualified to compete, and this prospect is said to have discouraged him. Whether from discouragement or indolence, his reading became desultory, while he enjoyed society, was already famous as a talker, and keenly interested in the politics of the day (Le Grice's Recollections in Gent. Mag. for December 1834, pp. 605-7).

Coleridge had taken the liberal side, and shared the early revolutionary fervour. He always disavowed Jacobin principles, but he was an ardent admirer of Fox and of more extreme radicals. From Lamb's letters, it appears that the two friends were rivals in 'adoring' Priestley, then at the height of his fame, whom Coleridge addresses in the Religious Musings (Christmas, 1794) as 'patriot and saint and sage.' In May 1793 William Frend, a fellow of Jesus College, was tried in the vice-chancellor's court at Cambridge for a pamphlet expressing strong liberal opinions both in politics and theology. After various legal proceedings he was banished from the university. Coleridge, a member of the same college, was deeply interested, and is said to have incurred some risk by applauding Frend at the trial. The master of his college afterwards demonstrated with him 'for his extreme opinions; and Coleridge was getting into other difficulties. It is said by Gillman (pp. 42, 56) that he had rashly incurred a debt 'of about 100l.' for furnishing his rooms. His own statement (ib. p. 64) is that his debts were the cause of great depression and of a flight to London at the end of 1793; while his family believed them to be the result of debauchery on that occasion.

Cottle (Reminiscences, p. 279) states that the love affair with Mary Evans, which certainly continued beyond this time, had something to do with his escapade. For whatever reason, he went to London. Here, according to Stuart, he sold a poem for a guinea to Perry of the Morning Chronicle, in which paper he published a series of Sonnets on Eminent Characters in 1794-5 (Hall Caine in Athenæum, 11 July 1885). He then enlisted in the 15th dragoons, and was sent to be drilled with his regiment at Reading, where he was entered as a recruit on 4 Dec. 1793, under the name Silas Tomkyn Comberback, suggested by, or suggesting, the obvious pun (Cottle gives the name Cumberbatch, and says that it was taken at random from a name in the Inns of Court). Coleridge was always a totally incapable horseman. His officers, however, noticed him kindly; he conciliated his comrades by writing their letters and nursing them in hospital. An accident which discovered his classical knowledge, or the chance encounter with a Cambridge friend, led, according to various accounts, to his recognition and discharge, 10 April 1794. A penitent letter (20 Feb.) to his brother James, first printed by Brandl (pp. 66-8), shows that his brothers had consented to buy him out (see Gillmart, pp. 57-61; Cottle, Reminiscences, p. 279; Bowles's Letter to Times, 13 Aug. 1834, reprinted in Poetic Works, 1877, p. xxii; and Miss Mitford, Literary Life, ii. 144, for questionable anecdotes of this transaction). Charles Lloyd introduced the incident in a novel called Edmund Oliver, Coleridge returned to Cambridge, where on 12 April he was admonished by the master in presence of the fellows (College Register). In June of the same year he visited an old schoolfellow at Oxford, and made the acquaintance of Robert Southey, then at Balliol. In July he made a trip to Wales, described by himself (Biog. Lit. Appendix); and by his companion, J. Hucks, in a little book called A Pedestrian Tour in North Wales (1795). At Wrexham he had a glimpse of Mary Evans. He returned to Bristol, and there met Southey and Robert Lovell. Lovell was married to Mary Fricker, one of the six children of the widow of a ruined Bristol manufacturer, whose sister Edith was engaged to Southey. Coleridge himself now became engaged to a third sister, Sara, a year or two his senior (Cottle, Reminiscences, p. 404). Southey, Coleridge, Lovell, George Burnett, and others formed an enthusiastic scheme to which they gave the name 'Pantisocracy.' They were to marry and emigrate to the banks of the Susquehanna, selected, according to Cottle, on account of its melodious name, though they seem to have had some rather better reasons. (Southey, Correspondence, i. 218). Two hours a day of labour were to provide them with food, and the rest of their time was to be spent in rational society and intellectual employment. Private property was to be abolished. It must be doubted how far this dream was seriously entertained, though for a year or two it was the theme of Coleridge's enthusiastic eloquence. The Fall of Robespierre was projected by the three friends, each of them having one day agreed to produce an act of a tragedy by the next evening. Coleridge produced the first act, though not in the time proposed; Southey the second and ultimately the third, as Lovell's work would not fit. The tragedy was published as Coleridge's at Cambridge in September 1794. An appended prospectus of a work by Coleridge in two volumes, containing imitations from the modern Latin poets, with an essay on the Restoration of Literature, shows that he was looking to writing for support (see Cottle, Rem. p. 73).

Coleridge left Cambridge without a degree at the end of 1794. He visited London during the winter, where he met Lamb, who has celebrated their meetings at the Cat and Salutation. The landlord is said to have found his conversation so attractive that he begged him to prolong his stay with free quarters. Ultimately Southey had to go to London to induce him to return to Miss Fricker at Bristol (ib. p. 405). On 24 Dec. 1794 he addressed a letter to Mary Evans, who had finally dismissed him, and says that his passion, now hopeless, will ‘lose its disquieting power’ (Morrison MSS., where there are other letters to the Evanses, written during his Cambridge career). Here he formed an acquaintance with Joseph Cottle, a young bookseller, already known to Lovell. The ‘pantisocratians’ lodged together at 48 College Street, and at present had not the funds to carry out their scheme or even to pay for their lodgings. Coleridge applied to Cottle for a loan of five pounds to enable him to discharge this bill. Cottle advanced the money, and then offered thirty guineas to Coleridge for a volume of poems, offering Southey fifty guineas at the same time for his Joan of Arc. Both offers were gladly accepted, and the two young men endeavoured to increase their supplies by lecturing. Coleridge's first two lectures were delivered at the Plume of Feathers, Wine Street. Two more followed at the end of February 1795, which were published as Conciones ad Populum. Two others were published as the Plot Discovered. In June he gave a series of six political lectures, followed by six On Revealed Religion: its Corruptions and its Political Views. The lectures all represented his strong political sympathies and were vehemently ‘anti-Pittite.’ The preparation of his volume of poems continued, though with many characteristic delays. At last Cottle offered him a guinea and a half for every hundred lines he should write after finishing his volume. He regarded this as a sufficient provision for a couple, and was married to Sara Fricker at St. Mary Redcliffe's on 4 Oct. 1795. He then settled at a small cottage at Clevedon, one story high, with a garden, for which the rent was 5l. a year. The cottage, described in his contemporary poems, still exists.

Southey married Edith Fricker 14 Nov. 1795, leaving his bride at the church door for Portugal. He wrote to Coleridge, stating that the scheme of pantisocracy must be abandoned. Coleridge was still so far an enthusiast as to take offence at this desertion, and a temporary coolness ensued, followed by a reconciliation on Southey's return to England next year. Lovell and Edmund Seward, another friend of Southey's, who had sympathised with the scheme, both died in the summer of 1796, and pantisocracy vanished.

At the end of 1795 Coleridge returned to Bristol, where his first volume of poems, including three sonnets by Lamb, was published by Cottle in April 1796. Another sonnet, twice printed as Lamb's, was afterwards published as Coleridge's. He now thought of journalism. In January 1796 he started on a tour to the north (described with great humour in the Biographia Literaria) to engage subscribers for his new venture. He visited Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, and other towns, and came back with a list of nearly a thousand names. A prospectus was issued of the Watchman, price fourpence, which was to appear on 1 March, and on every eighth day (in order to avoid the tax payable on weekly newspapers), and to contain original matter, reviews, and full reports of parliamentary speeches. Cottle procured many subscribers at Bristol, and provided for part of the expenditure. The first number, as Coleridge tells us, was behind its time; the second (on ‘fast days’) lost five hundred subscribers by ‘a censurable application of a text from Isaiah for its motto’ (the motto was, ‘my bowels shall sound like an harp,’ Isaiah xvi. 11); the two next disgusted the Jacobins and republicans, and the work dropped at the tenth number, with a frank statement of the ‘short and satisfactory reason’ that it did ‘not pay its expenses.’ Many subscribers did not pay, and the result was a loss, borne chiefly, it would seem, by Cottle (Cottle, Reminiscences, pp. 74–82). Coleridge had become an occasional preacher in unitarian chapels. Frend, according to Gillman (p. 317), had influenced his studies. Cottle records his first performance in the chapel of David Jardine at Bath, where he discoursed in ‘blue coat and white waistcoat’ on the corn laws and the powder tax, and put to flight a very thin congregation. He preached during his Watchman tour at Nottingham and Birmingham, submitting to a black coat in the latter place. At Birmingham Coleridge had won the admiration of Charles Lloyd, son of a banker in the town, one of the first of the many friends so fascinated by the extraordinary charm of his conversation that they were willing to contribute to his support rather than see his genius wasted in mere writing for bread. Lloyd now abandoned his bank and came to live with Coleridge at Bristol in a house on Kingsdown. Coleridge's first son, Hartley, so called in his zeal for David Hartley's philosophy, was born 19 Sept. 1796. His other children were Berkeley, born 30 May 1798, died 16 Feb. 1799; Derwent, born 14 Sept. 1800; and Sara, born 22 Dec. 1802. Various plans for writing in the Morning Chronicle, for tuition in the family of Mrs. Evans (of Darley, near Derby), and other occupations, were contemplated without success in the summer of 1796. Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, near Bridgewater, whose acquaintance he had made as early as 1794, now found Coleridge a small house at Nether Stowey for 71. a year, and Coleridge, with Lloyd, settled there in the winter of 1796-7. Poole, a man of plain exterior, was engaged in business in a tannery at Nether Stowey. He had acquired much knowledge of literature and economics, and was beloved in the district in spite of his strong political views. He got up a subscription to provide Coleridge with a small annuity, and remained one of his best friends. (A life of Poole is in preparation by Mrs. Sandford of Chester.) Coleridge still dreamed of maintaining himself in part by manual labour. He told Thelwall that he should raise enough corn and vegetables from his acre and a half to keep himself and his wife, and feed a couple of pigs from the refuse. A second edition of Coleridge's poems, with additional poems by Lloyd and Lamb, appeared in the course of 1797. Lamb, with his sister, visited Coleridge in June, and in the same month Coleridge went to see Wordsworth at Racedown in Dorsetshire. They had already met (Memoir prefixed to Poems, 1877, i. xxviii). Soon afterwards the Wordsworths moved to Alfoxden (or Alfoxton), near Nether Stowey, the 'principal inducement' being 'Coleridge's society.' Coleridge had already been struck at Cambridge by the power manifested in Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches. Both poets had tried their hands at dramatic writing. Wordsworth had written the Borderers. At Stowey Coleridge wrote Osorio, afterwards called Remorse. Cottle (Recollections, i. 167) offered thirty guineas apiece for the Borderers and Osorio. which was declined in the hope of producing them on the stage. Remorse was sent to Sheridan, who took no notice of it. The Borderers was declined. The poets had long conversations, which exposed them to the suspicions of the authorities. Coleridge's avowed principles had made him sufficiently notorious. An intimacy with the agitator Thelwall, who also visited Coleridge here, encouraged the suspicion. In writing to Thelwall (who thought of settling at Stowey) Coleridge expresses serious alarm as to the probable effect upon the 'aristocrats' of such a conjunction of extreme politicians. The discussions with Wordsworth really turned upon the principles of their art. They agreed to combine forces in a volume, where Wordsworth should exemplify the power of giving interest to the commonplace by imaginative treatment, while Coleridge should make the supernatural interesting by the dramatic truth of the emotions aroused. The result was the Lyrical Ballads, published in September 1798. Coleridge's principal contribution was the Ancient Mariner. The circumstances of the composition have been described by Wordsworth (Memoir, i. 105-8). It was planned during a walk across the Quantocks in November 1797. Wordsworth supplied a few lines, and suggested some subsidiary points. The original thought, as he says, was suggested to Coleridge by a dream of his friend Cruikshank. Wordsworth suggested the albatross from a passage lately read by him in Shelvocke's Voyages (1726), where an albatross is shot in hopes of improving the weather. De Quincey (Works, ii. 45) has made a needless charge against Coleridge for denying obligations to Shelvocke, of which he may have been ignorant or which he may have forgotten. In the Gentleman's Magazine for October 1853 it is suggested that Coleridge took some hints from a story told by Paulinus, secretary to St. Ambrose. The only other poems contributed by Coleridge were the Nightingale and two scenes from Osorio. The next edition (1800) included also the poem called Love, or an Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie. The first parts of Christabel and Kubla Khan were also written in the winter of 1797. Coleridge tells us that he composed from two to three hundred lines of Kubla Khan during a sleep of three hours, and wrote down the fragment now existing (fifty-four lines) upon awaking.