At Nether Stowey
The Stowey period was the blossoming time of Coleridge's genius. All the
poems in this volume except the last four, and besides these "This
Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," "Frost at Midnight," and "Fears in
Solitude"—the bulk of his achievement in poetry—were either written or
begun in 1797 and 1798. It will be proper, then, to dwell a little on
his circumstances, his friends, and his ideas during these two years.
The means of livelihood for himself and his family when he went to
Stowey were a subscription of about £40 that Poole and some friends got
together for him, £20 that Cottle paid for the second edition of the
"Poems," the promise of £80 from the father of Charles Lloyd, who was to
live with him and study under his direction, and such money as he could
earn by reviews and magazine articles, which he estimated at £40 a year;
not a munificent provision for a household of three adults and a child.
But the theories of the simple life that had made Pantisocracy seem a
feasible project still inspired him with confidence. "Sixteen
shillings," he wrote to Poole, "would cover all the weekly expenses of
my wife, infant, and myself. This I say from my wife's own
calculations." Further, he will support himself by the labor of his
hands. "If you can instruct me to manage an acre and a half of land, and
to raise in it, with my own hands, all kinds of vegetables and grain,
enough for myself and my wife and sufficient to feed a pig or two with
the refuse, I hope that you will have served me most effectually by
placing me out of the necessity of being served." This was in December,
just before he moved to Stowey. In February he wrote from his new home
to another friend: "From seven till half past eight I work in my garden;
from breakfast till twelve I read and compose, then read again, feed the
pigs, poultry, etc., till two o'clock; after dinner work again till tea;
from tea till supper, review. So jogs the day, and I am happy.... I
raise potatoes and all manner of vegetables, have an orchard, and shall
raise corn with the spade, enough for my family. We have two pigs, and
ducks and geese. A cow would not answer the keep: we have whatever milk
we want from T. Poole."
There is a suspicious regularity about this schedule. Lamb wrote from
London in January: "Is it a farm that you have got? And what does your
worship know about farming?" His agricultural activity, in the month of
February, must have been chiefly prospective; and we may safely assume
that Poole supplied other things besides milk, and that the poet spent
more time reading, dreaming, and talking than he did raising potatoes. A
good deal of time must have been spent in the actual composition of his
poetry, including his play "Osorio," which was written in 1797, and in
studying the landscape beauties of the Quantocks. After the coming of
the Wordsworths to Alfoxden he spent much of the time walking between
Alfoxden and Stowey, or further afield with Wordsworth and his sister.
"My walks," he wrote afterwards, "were almost daily on the top of
Quantock, and among its sloping coombs. With my pencil and
memorandum-book in my hand, I was making studies, as the artists call
them, and often moulding them into verse with the objects and imagery
immediately before my eyes." This does not sound much like "raising corn
with the spade."
On Sundays he would sometimes preach before such Unitarian
congregations, within walking distance, as cared to hear him. But as he
would take no pay for his services his preaching contributed nothing
toward the support of his family. Lloyd, who was epileptic and subject
to moody variation in his attachments, was but an irregular housemate
after the first few months, and his contribution to the household
expenses was correspondingly uncertain. The future looked so dark in
October, 1797, that in spite of misgivings and former scruples he had
concluded that he "must become a Unitarian minister, as a less evil than
starvation." Accordingly he was in Shrewsbury in January, 1798,
preaching in the Unitarian church and on the point of accepting the
pastorate at a salary of £150 a year, when the sky brightened in another
quarter. Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood, sons of the famous potter and
friends of Thomas Poole, offered him an equal sum annually as a free
gift. They were wealthy men, well able to afford it; they attached no
condition to the gift except that he should devote himself entirely to
the study of poetry and philosophy, which was precisely what he wanted
to do; and he was not long in determining to accept the offer. "I
accepted it," he wrote to Wordsworth while still at Shrewsbury, "on the
presumption that I had talents, honesty, and propensities to perseverant
effort." The propensities, alas, remained propensities, never acquiring
the force of habit. The pension, however, continued to be paid in full
until 1812, when Josiah Wedgwood withdrew his half of it. The other
half, upon the death of Thomas Wedgwood in 1805, had been secured to
Coleridge for life; and this annuity must have constituted the chief
reliance of Mrs. Coleridge for many years.
If Coleridge did not prosper financially, he was at least fortunate in
his friends; and a man's friends are after all the best testimony to the
character of his mind and heart. When he went to Stowey in December,
1796, he was again on good terms with Southey, though the enthusiasm of
their first fellowship was gone. The friendship with Lamb, begun in
their school-days and renewed at the "Salutation and Cat" in 1794, was
maintained by an eager correspondence and by Lamb's visit to Stowey in
July, 1797; and although Lloyd's vagaries led to a coolness between the
old friends in the following year, the breach was soon healed, and the
friendship continued till death. Another with whom Coleridge maintained
a voluminous correspondence in 1796-7 was John Thelwall, theoretical
democrat, atheist, and admirer of Godwin, whose visit to Coleridge and
Wordsworth in the summer of 1797 so shocked the good conservatives of
the neighborhood that Wordsworth had to leave Alfoxden in consequence of
it. But without doubt the dearest and most influential friend Coleridge
had before the Wordsworths came into his life was Thomas Poole. It was
in order to be in daily intercourse with Poole that he moved to Stowey;
and Poole's hesitation about securing the cottage for him, arising,
Coleridge seemed to fear, from imperfect confidence and friendship, was
a source of agonized apprehension to the sensitive poet. When we
consider that Poole was a self-educated man, a Somersetshire tanner with
no claim to literary genius or philosophical acquirements, Coleridge's
devotion to him and dependence on him bring out in a strong light the
substantial, elemental character of the man. "O Poole!" Coleridge wrote
to him from Germany afterwards, "you are a noble heart as ever God
made!" Poole had indeed in a marked degree the genius for friendship.
Strength of character, sympathy, and self-effacing devotion, combined
with prudence and sincerity, made this man a tower of refuge for the
unstable spirit of the poet.
No other single relation, however, can compare in importance, for
Coleridge's poetic development, with that which sprang up in the summer
of 1797 between him and William Wordsworth. Just when they first met is
not recorded. We have seen that Coleridge was acquainted with
Wordsworth's younger brother in his college days, and discussed with him
Wordsworth's first published poems. In January, 1797, he told Cottle
that he wished to submit his "Visions of the Maid of Arc" to Wordsworth
for criticism. The earliest definite record of their personal
acquaintance is a letter Coleridge wrote to Cottle while on a visit to
Wordsworth at Racedown (just over the Somerset border in Dorsetshire)
early in June. About the beginning of July he is again at Racedown; and
when he returns he brings Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy with him for
a visit. On the 7th Lamb arrived for his long-planned reunion with
Coleridge. The second week of July, 1797, was thus a rich and
long-remembered time for all of them, despite the fact that Mrs.
Coleridge "accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk" on her
husband's foot, which confined him "during the whole time of Charles
Lamb's stay." The others took long walks in the neighborhood, amid such
scenery as is described in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," a poem
that admirably voices the happiness, of those days of spiritual
fellowship. The Wordsworths did not return to Racedown. "By a
combination of curious circumstances a gentleman's seat, with a park and
woods, elegantly and completely furnished,... in the most beautiful and
romantic situation by the seaside, four miles from Stowey—this we have
got for Wordsworth at the rent of twenty-three pounds a year, taxes
included!" Coleridge triumphantly announced to Southey; and in this
house, the Manor of Alfoxden, the Wordsworths remained for a year, in
daily companionship with Coleridge and surrounded by scenes of natural
beauty that have left a lasting mark on the work of both poets.
What the friendship with Coleridge meant to Wordsworth may best be seen
in "The Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet's Mind," Wordsworth's greatest
long poem, written some years afterwards and addressed throughout to
Coleridge.
"There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair,
No languor, no dejection, no dismay,
No absence scarcely can there be, for those
Who love as we do."
What Wordsworth was to Coleridge is more important for us here. The
admiration which the brilliant child of genius felt for the great
preacher-poet is chiefly, one feels, an admiration for his character. As
a matter of fact, Wordsworth had written nothing, up to his coming to
Alfoxden, that would have preserved his name as a poet, nothing so
noteworthy or promising as what Coleridge had already written. But
Coleridge felt in this lean and thoughtful young man a strength of mind,
a depth and sureness of heart that compelled his allegiance and even
imparted, for the time, some of that resolution in which he was by
nature so sadly deficient. The character of their friendship is to be
seen not only in the published work of the two poets from this time on
(notably in "Dejection"), but perhaps even more clearly in Dorothy
Wordsworth's Journal and in Coleridge's letters. "I speak with
heart-felt sincerity," he wrote to Cottle in June, 1797, "and (I think)
unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself a little man by
his side, and yet do not think myself the less man than I formerly
thought myself.... T. Poole's opinion of Wordsworth is that he is the
greatest man he ever knew; I coincide." Wordsworth's influence is
evident in a letter from Coleridge to his brother George in April, 1798:
"I love fields and woods and mountains with almost a visionary fondness.
And because I have found benevolence and quietness growing within me as
that fondness has increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of
implanting it in others, and to destroy the bad passions not by
combating them but by keeping them in inaction." Under the calming and
clarifying influence of the stronger Northern spirit the fever of his
revolutionary dreams abated, he found happiness in the conscious
exercise of his poetic powers, and for one year in his troubled
existence his genius showed itself in all its splendor.
The immediate poetic result of their friendship was the "Lyrical
Ballads," published by Cottle in September, 1798. The origin of the work
has been described both by Wordsworth (in a prefatory note to "We Are
Seven") and by Coleridge (in the Biographia Literaria, chap. xiv.). At
first, they were to collaborate in writing a poem the proceeds of which
should pay the expenses of a little tour they were making when the plan
was thought of, in November, 1797; and thus "The Ancient Mariner" was
begun. As this poem grew under Coleridge's "shaping-spirit of
imagination" Wordsworth saw that he "could only be a clog" upon its
progress, and it was resigned to Coleridge. The plan was then enlarged
to include a volume illustrating "two cardinal points of poetry, the
power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to
the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by
the modifying colours of imagination." Wordsworth was to illustrate the
former principle, Coleridge the latter, and the proceeds of the book
were to go toward the expenses of a trip to Germany, decided on in the
spring of 1798. The bulk of the volume was Wordsworth's, and was
typically Wordsworthian, ranging from such simple ballads of humble
incident as "Goody Blake" and "The Idiot Boy" to the magnificent blank
verse of "Tintern Abbey"; Coleridge's share consisted of a brief poem
called "The Nightingale," two short extracts from "Osorio," and "The
Rime of the Ancyent Marinere."
Apart from the "Lyrical Ballads" Coleridge conceived and finished
between June, 1797, and the departure for Germany in 1798, and published
in the latter year, "Fire, Famine, and Slaughter," "Frost at Midnight,"
"Fears in Solitude," and "France." He conceived and partly executed, but
did not then publish, "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," "Love," "The Ballad of
the Dark Ladie," and "The Three Graves." Thus, all Coleridge's best
poetry, with the exception of those three saddest of voices out of a
broken life, "Dejection" (1802), the lines to Wordsworth on hearing him
read "The Prelude" (1807), and "Youth and Age" (1823-32), belongs either
wholly or in its inception to the year of his fellowship with the
Wordsworths in the Quantock Hills.
Of his political, religious, and literary opinions at this time he has
left a fairly adequate account in his published writings and his
correspondence, especially in the Biographia Literaria and in the
letter to the Rev. George Coleridge referred to above. The first year of
his married life saw him still, in spite of the failure of Pantisocracy,
an eager visionary reformer upborne by generous enthusiasm and ardent
religious feeling. "O! never can I remember those days," he wrote in the
Biographia, "with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, most
disinterested! My opinions were indeed in many and most important points
erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself, then
seemed cheap to me, compared with the interest of (what I believed to
be) the truth, and the will of my Maker." However much he may have
consorted with unbelievers like Thelwall and distressed his good brother
George by his heterodoxy, he was by nature deeply religious. He tried in
his letters to recover Thelwall from his "atheism," though he heartily
approved a sentiment expressed by the latter: "He who thinks and feels
will be virtuous; and he who is absorbed in self will be vicious,
whatever may be his speculative opinions." Godwin's system of "Justice,"
with its soulless logic, he abhorred. He preached often in Unitarian
churches. To young Hazlitt, who heard him preach in January, 1798, from
the text "And He went up into the mountain to pray, Himself, alone,"
it seemed "as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human
heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence
through the universe." In politics he was, when he went to Stowey,
"almost equidistant from all the three prominent parties, the Pittites,
the Foxites, and the Democrats"; he was "a vehement anti-ministerialist,
but after the invasion of Switzerland, a more vehement anti-Gallican
[see the last two stanzas of "France"], and still more intensely an
anti-Jacobin." Under Wordsworth's influence his thoughts turned in great
measure from contemporary politics to more fundamental matters. Always
his poetry had been the utterance of his essential being. "I feel
strongly and I think strongly," he wrote to Thelwall in 1796, "but I
seldom feel without thinking or think without feeling. Hence, though my
poetry has in general a hue of tenderness or passion over it, yet it
seldom exhibits unmixed and simple tenderness and passion. My
philosophical opinions are blended with or deduced from my feelings."
Wordsworth gave his feelings a new object and his philosophy a higher
aim. In April of the second year at Stowey, in the letter to his brother
already quoted, Coleridge wrote: "I have for some time past withdrawn
myself totally from the consideration of immediate causes, which are
infinitely complex and uncertain, to muse on fundamental and general
causes, the 'causae causarum.' I devote myself to such works as encroach
not on the anti-social passions—in poetry, to elevate the imagination
and set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate
impregnated as with a living soul by the presence of life—in prose to
the seeking with patience and a slow, very slow mind, 'Quid sumus, et
quidnam victuri gignimus,'—what our faculties are and what they are
capable of becoming." This last sentence is a sort of half-prophetic
summary of his life's work; but the poetry soon gave way to the prose,
and he never again so nearly realized his poetical ideal as he had
already done in "The Ancient Mariner."
Of his person and the impression he made upon people at this time there
are various contemporary accounts. To Thelwall, in November, 1796, he
sent the following description of himself: "... my face, unless when
animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, and great,
indeed almost idiotic good-nature. 'Tis a mere carcass of a face; fat,
flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpression. Yet I am told that my
eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are physiognomically good; but of this the
deponent knoweth not. As to my shape, 'tis a good shape enough if
measured, but my gait is awkward, and the walk of the whole man
indicates indolence capable of energies.... I cannot breathe through
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 said that I forget my opponent. Such am
I." The Rev. Leapidge Smith, in his "Reminiscences of an Octogenarian,"
remembered him as "a tall, dark, handsome young man, with long, black,
flowing hair; eyes not merely dark, but black, and keenly penetrating; a
fine forehead, a deep-toned, harmonious voice; a manner never to be
forgotten, full of life, vivacity, and kindness; dignified in person
and, added to all these, exhibiting the elements of his future
greatness."[1] Hazlitt, in "My First Acquaintance with Poets" (a paper
that every student of Coleridge's life and poetry should read),
describing him as he appeared on his visit to Hazlitt's father at Wem in
1798, says: "His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright. His
forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large
projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with
darkened lustre.... His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his
chin good-humored and round, but his nose, the rudder of the face, the
index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing—like what he has done."
And Dorothy Wordsworth (to close with a contemporary and sympathetic
impression) set him down in her journal after their first meeting at
Racedown thus: "He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul,
mind, and spirit.... At first I thought him very plain, that is for
about three minutes: he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and
not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, half-curling, rough black
hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of
them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark, but grey[2]—such an
eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it
speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of 'the poet's
eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark
eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead." The friendly and keen-sighted
woman gives a more sympathetic picture than the others; but there must
have been truth, too, in the view of the equally keen-sighted and less
friendly Hazlitt, whose description accords well with Coleridge's
self-portraiture, and in the last sarcastic item, too well, with the
remainder of the poet's career.
