"We talked with open heart and tongue,Affectionate and free—A pair of friends, though I was young,And Matthew seventy-three."
"We talked with open heart and tongue,Affectionate and free—A pair of friends, though I was young,And Matthew seventy-three."
I have stated a second reason for this record, in the fact that Mr. Clowes was the first of my friends who had any connexion with the press. At one time I have reason to believe that this connexion was pretty extensive, though not publicly avowed, and so far from being lucrative that at first I believe it to have been expensive to him, and whatever profits might afterwards arise were applied, as much of his regular income, to the benefit of others.[23]Here, again, itseems surprising that a spirit so beneficent and, in the amplest sense, charitable, could coalesce in any views with Swedenborg, who, in some senses, was not charitable. Swedenborg had been scandalized by a notion which, it seems, he found prevalent amongst the poor of the Continent—viz., that, if riches were a drag and a negative force on the road to religious perfection, poverty must be positive titleper seto the favour of Heaven. Grievously offended with this error, he came almost to hate poverty as a presumptive indication of this offensive heresy; scarcely would he allow it an indirect value, as removing in many cases the occasions or incitements of evil. No: being in itself neutral and indifferent, he argued that it had become erroneously a ground of presumptuous hope; whilst the rich man, aware of his danger, was, in some degree, armed against it by fear and humility. And, in this course of arguing and of corresponding feeling, Mr. Swedenborg had come to hate the very name of a poor candidate for Heaven, as bitterly as a sharking attorney hates the applications of a pauper client. Yet so entirely is it true that "to the pure, all things are pure," and that perfect charity "thinketh no ill," but is gifted with a power to transmute all things into its own resemblance—so entirely is all this true, that this most spiritual, and, as it were, disembodied of men, could find delight in the dreams of the very "fleshliest incubus" that has intruded amongst heavenly objects; and, secondly, this benignest of men found his own pure feelings not outraged by one who threw a withering scowl over the far larger half of his fellow-creatures.
Concurrently with this acquaintance, so impressive and so elevating to me, from the unusual sanctity of Mr. Clowes's character, I formed another with a well-known coterie, more avowedly, and in a more general sense, literary, resident at Liverpool or its neighbourhood. In my sixteenth year [1801] I had accompanied my mother and family on a summer's excursion to Everton, a well-known village upon the heights immediately above Liverpool; though by this time I believe it has thrown out so many fibres of connexion as to have become a mere quarter or suburban "process" (to speak byanatomical phrase) of the great town below it. In those days, however, distant by one third of a century from ours, Everton was still a distinct village (for a mile of ascent is worth three of level ground in the way of effectual separation); it was delightfully refreshed by marine breezes, though raised above the sea so far that its thunders could be heard only under favourable circumstances. There we had a cottage for some months; and the nearest of our neighbours happened to be that Mr. Clarke, the banker, to whom acknowledgments are made in theLorenzo the Magnificent, for aid in procuring MSS. and information from Italy. This gentleman called on my mother, merely in the general view of offering neighbourly attentions to a family of strangers. I, as the eldest of my brothers, and already with strong literary propensities, had received a general invitation to his house. Thither I went, indeed, early and late; and there I met Mr. Roscoe, Dr. Currie (who had just at that time published his Life and Edition of Burns), and Mr. Shepherd of Gatacre, the author of some works on Italian literature (particularly a Life ofPoggio Bracciolini), and, since then, well known to all England by his Reform politics.
There were other members of this society—some, like myself, visitors merely to that neighbourhood; but those I have mentioned were the chief. Here I had an early opportunity of observing the natural character and tendencies of merely literary society—by which society I mean all such as, having no strong distinctions in power of thinking or in native force of character, are yet raised into circles of pretension and mark by the fact of having written a book, or of holding a notorious connexion with some department or other of the periodical press. No society is so vapid and uninteresting in its natural quality, none so cheerless and petrific in its influence upon others. Ordinary people, in such company, are in general repressed from uttering with cordiality the natural expression of their own minds or temperaments, under a vague feeling of some peculiar homage due, or at least customarily paid, to those lions: such people are no longer at their ease, or masters of their own natural motions in their own natural freedom; whilst indemnification of any sort is least of all to be looked for from the literarydons who have diffused this unpleasant atmosphere of constraint. They disable others, and yet do nothing themselves to fill up the void they have created. One and all—unless by accident people of unusual originality, power, and also nerve, so as to be able without trepidation to face the expectations of men—the literary class labour under two opposite disqualifications for a good tone of conversation. From causes visibly explained, they are either spoiled by the vices of reserve, and of over-consciousness directed upon themselves—this is one extreme; or, where manliness of mind has prevented this, beyond others of equal or inferior natural power, they are apt to be desperately commonplace. The first defect is an accident arising out of the rarity of literary pretensions, and would rapidly subside as the proportion became larger of practising literati to the mass of educated people. But the other is an adjunct scarcely separable from the ordinary prosecution of a literary career, and growing in fact out of literatureper se, as literature is generally understood. That same day, says Homer, which makes a man a slave robs him of half his value. That same hour which first awakens a child to the consciousness of being observed, and to the sense of admiration, strips it of its freedom and unpremeditated graces of motion. Awkwardness at the least—and too probably, as a consequence ofthat, affectation and conceit—follow hard upon the consciousness of special notice or admiration. The very attempt to disguise embarrassment too often issues in a secondary and more marked embarrassment.
Another mode of reserve arises with some literary men, who believe themselves to be in possession of novel ideas. Cordiality of communication, or ardour of dispute, might betray them into a revelation of those golden thoughts, sometimes into a necessity of revealing them, since, without such aid, it might be impossible to maintain theirs in the discussion. On this principle it was—a principle of deliberate unsocial reserve—that Adam Smith is said to have governed his conversation; he professed to put a bridle on his words, lest by accident a pearl should drop out of his lips amongst the vigilant bystanders. And in no case would he have allowed himself to be engaged in a disputation, because boththe passions of dispute and the necessities of dispute are alike apt to throw men off their guard. A most unamiable reason it certainly is, which places a man in one constant attitude of self-protection against petty larceny. And yet, humiliating as that may be to human nature, the furtive propensities or instincts of petty larceny are diffused most extensively through all ranks—directed, too, upon a sort of property far more tangible and more ignoble, as respects the possible motives of the purloiner, than any property in subjects purely intellectual. Rather more than ten years ago, a literary man of the name of Alton published, some little time before his own death, a very searching essay upon this chapter of human integrity—arraying a large list of common cases (cases of hats, gloves, umbrellas, books, newspapers, &c.) where the claim of ownership, left to itself and unsupported by accidents of shame and exposure, appeared to be weak indeed amongst classes of society prescriptively "respectable." And yet, for a double reason, literary larceny is even more to be feared; both because it is countenanced by a less ignoble quality of temptation, and because it is far more easy of achievement—so easy, indeed, that it may be practised without any clear accompanying consciousness.
I have myself witnessed or been a party to a case of the following kind:—A new truth—suppose for example, a new doctrine or a new theory—was communicated to a very able man in the course of conversation, notdidactically, or directlyasa new truth, butpolemically,—communicated as an argument in the current of a dispute. What followed? Necessarily it followed that a very able man would not be purelypassivein receiving this new truth; that he wouldco-operatewith the communicator in many ways—as by raising objections, by half dissipating his own objections, and in a variety of other co-agencies. In such cases, a very clever man does in effect half-generate the new idea for himself, but then he does this entirely under your leading; you stand ready at each point of possible deviation, to warn him away from the wrong turn—from the turn which leads nowhither or the turn which leads astray. Yet the final result has been that thecatechumen, under the full consciousness ofself-exertion, has so far confounded his just and true belief of having contributed tothe evolution of the doctrine,quoadhis own apprehension of it, with the far different case of having evolved the truth itself into light, as to go off with the firm impression that the doctrine had been a product of his own.[24]There is therefore ground enough for the jealousy of Adam Smith, since a robbery may be committed unconsciously; though, by the way, it is not a peril peculiarly applicable to himself, who has not so much succeeded in discovering new truths as in establishing a logical connexion amongst old ones.
On the other hand, it is not by reserve, whether of affectation or of Smithian jealousy, that the majority of literary people offend—at least not by the latter; for, so far from having much novelty to protect against pirates, the most general effect of literary pursuits is to tame down all points of originality to one standard of insipid monotony. I shall not go into the reasons for this. I make my appeal to the matter of fact. Try a Parisian populace, very many of whom are highly cultivated by reading, against a body of illiterate rustics. Mr. Scott of Aberdeen,[25]in his "Second Tour to Paris" (1815), tells us that, on looking over the shoulder of poor stall women selling trifles in the street, he usually found them reading Voltaire, Rousseau, or even (as I think he adds) Montesquieu; but, notwithstanding the polish which such reading both presumes as a previous condition and produces as a natural effect, yet no people could be more lifeless in their minds, or more barren of observing faculties, than they; and so he describes them. Words! words! nothing but words! On the other hand, listen to the conversation of a few scandalous village dames collected at a tea-table. Vulgar as the spirit may be which possesses them, and not seldom malicious, still how full of animation and of keen perception it will generally be found, and of a learned spirit of connoisseurship in human character, by comparison with thefadegeneralities and barren recollections of mere literati!
All this was partially illustrated in the circle to which I was now presented. Mr. Clarke was not an author, and he was by much the most interesting person of the whole. Hehad travelled, and, particularly, he had travelled in Italy—then an aristocratic distinction; had a small, but interesting, picture gallery; and, at this time, amused himself by studying Greek, for which purpose he and myself met at sunrise every morning through the summer, and read Æschylus together. These meetings, at which we sometimes had the company of any stranger who might happen to be an amateur in Greek, were pleasant enough to my schoolboy vanity—placing me in the position of teacher and guide to men old enough to be my grandfathers. But the dinner parties, at which the literati sometimes assembled in force, were far from being equally amusing. Mr. Roscoe[26]was simple and manly in his demeanour; but there was the feebleness of a merebelle-lettrist, a mere man ofvirtù, in the style of his sentiments on most subjects. Yet he was a politician, and took an ardent interest in politics, and wrote upon politics—all which are facts usually presuming some vigour of mind. And he wrote, moreover, on the popular side, and with a boldness which, in that day, when such politics were absolutely disreputable, seemed undeniably to argue great moral courage. But these were accidents arising out of his connexion with the Whig party, or (to speak more accurately) with theOppositionparty in Parliament; by whom he was greatly caressed. Mr. Fox, the Duchess of Devonshire, Mr. Sheridan, and all thepowerson that side of the question, showed him the most marked attention in a great variety of forms; and this it was, not any native propensity for such speculations, which drove him into pamphleteering upon political questions. Mr. Fox (himself the very feeblest of party writers) was probably sincere in his admiration of Mr. Roscoe's pamphlets; and did seriously think him, as I know that he described him in private letters, an antagonist well matched against Burke; andthathe afterwards became in form. The rest of the world wondered at his presumption, or at his gross miscalculation of his own peculiar powers. An eminent person, in after years (about 1815), speaking to me of Mr. Roscoe's political writings, especially those which had connected hisname with Burke, declared that he always felt of him in that relation not so much as of a feeble man, but absolutely as of aSporus(that was his very expression), or a man emasculated. Right or wrong in his views, he showed the most painful defect of good sense and prudence in confronting his own understanding, so plain and homely, with the Machiavelian Briareus of a hundred arms—the Titan whom he found in Burke; all the advantages of a living antagonist over a dead one could not compensate odds so fearful in original power.
It was a striking illustration of the impotence of mere literature against natural power and mother wit that the only man who was considered indispensable in these parties, for giving life and impulse to their vivacity, was a tailor; and not, I was often assured, a person deriving a designation from the craft of those whose labours he supported as a capitalist, but one who drew his own honest daily bread from his own honest needle, except when he laid it aside for the benefit of drooping literati, who needed to be watered with his wit. Wit, perhaps, in a proper sense, he had not—it was rather drollery, and sometimes even buffoonery.
These, in the lamentable absence of the tailor, could be furnished of an inferior quality by Mr. Shepherd,[27]who (as may be imagined from this fact) had but little dignity in private life. I know not how far he might alter in these respects; but certainly, at the time (1801-2), he was decidedly, or could be, a buffoon, and seemed even ambitious of the title, by courting notice for his grotesque manner and coarse stories, more than was altogether compatible with the pretensions of a scholar and a clergyman. I must have leave to think that such a man could not have emerged from any great University, or from any but a sectarian training. Indeed, about Poggio himself there were circumstances which would have indisposed any regular clergyman of the Church of England, or of the Scottish Kirk, to usher him into the literature of his country. With what coarseness and lowbuffoonery have I heard this Mr. Shepherd in those days run down the bishops then upon the bench, but especially those of any public pretensions or reputation, as Horsley and Porteus, and, in connexion with them, the pious Mrs. Hannah More! Her he could not endure.
Of this gentleman, having said something disparaging, I am bound to go on and add, that I believe him to have been at least a truly upright man—talking often wildly, but incapable of doing a conscious wrong to any man, be his party what it might; and, in the midst of fun or even buffoonery, a real, and, upon occasion, a stern patriot, Mr. Canning and others he opposed to the teeth upon the Liverpool hustings, and would take no bribe, as others did, from literary feelings of sympathy, or (which is so hard for an amiable mind to resist) from personal applications of courtesy and respect. Amusing it is to look back upon any political work of Mr. Shepherd's, as upon his "Tour to France," published in 1815, and to know that the pale pink of his Radicalism was then accounted deep, deep scarlet.
Nothing can better serve to expound the general force of intellect amongst the Liverpool coterie than the quality of their poetry, and the general standard which they set up in poetry. Not that even in their errors, as regarded poetry, they were of a magnitude to establish any standard or authority in their own persons. Imitable or seducing there could be nothing in persons who wrote verses occasionally, and as a παρεργον (parergon) or by-labour, and were themselves the most timid of imitators. But to me, who, in that year, 1801, already knew of a grand renovation of poetic power—of a new birth in poetry, interesting not so much to England as to the human mind—it was secretly amusing to contrast the little artificial usages of their petty traditional knack with the natural forms of a divine art—the difference being pretty much as between an American lake, Ontario, or Superior, and a carp pond or a tench preserve. Mr. Roscoe had just about this time published a translation from theBaliaof Luigi Tansillo—a series of dullish lines, with the moral purpose of persuading young women to suckle their own children. The brilliant young Duchess of Devonshire, some half century ago, had, for a frolic—a great lady's caprice—set aprecedent in this way; against which, however, in that rank, medical men know that there is a good deal to be said; and in ranks more extensive than those of the Duchess it must be something of an Irish bull to suppose anygeneralneglect of this duty, since, upon so large a scale, whence could come the vicarious nurses? There is, therefore, no great sense in the fundamental idea of the poem, because the abuse denounced cannot be large enough; but the prefatory sonnet, addressed to the translator's wife, as one at whose maternal breast "six sons successive" had hung in infancy—this is about the one sole bold, natural thought, or natural expression of feeling, to which Mr. Roscoe had committed himself in verse. Everywhere else, the most timid and blind servility to the narrowest of conventional usages, conventional ways of viewing things, conventional forms of expression, marks the style. For example, Italy is alwaysItalia, ScotlandScotia, FranceGallia; so inveterately had the mind, in this school of feeling, been trained, alike in the highest things and in the lowest, to a horror of throwing itself boldly upon the greatrealitiesof life: even names must be fictions fortheirtaste. Yet what comparison between "France, an Ode," and "Gallia, an Ode"?
Dr. Currie was so much occupied with his professional duties that of him I saw but little. His edition of Burns was just then published (I think in that very month), and in everybody's hands. At that time, he was considered not unjust to the memory of the man, and (however constitutionally phlegmatic, or with little enthusiasm, at least in external show) not much below the mark in his appreciation of the poet.[28]
So stood matters some twelve or fourteen years; after which period a "craze" arose on the subject of Burns, which allowed no voice to be heard but that of zealotry and violent partisanship. The first impulse to this arose out of an oblique collision between Lord Jeffrey and Mr. Wordsworth;the former having written a disparaging critique upon Burns's pretensions—a little, perhaps, too much coloured by the fastidiousness of long practice in the world, but, in the main, speaking some plain truths on the quality of Burns's understanding, as expressed in his epistolary compositions. Upon which, in his celebrated letter to Mr. James Gray, the friend of Burns, himself a poet, and then a master in the High School of Edinburgh, Mr. Wordsworth commented with severity, proportioned rather to his personal resentments towards Lord Jeffrey than to the quantity of wrong inflicted upon Burns. Mr. Wordsworth's letter, in so far as it was a record of embittered feeling, might have perished; but, as it happened to embody some profound criticisms, applied to the art of biography, and especially to the delicate task of following a man of original genius through his personal infirmities or his constitutional aberrations—this fact, and its relation to Burns and the author's name, have all combined to embalm it.[29]Its momentary effect, in conjunction with Lord Jeffrey's article, was to revive the interest (which for some time had languished under the oppression of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron) in all that related to Burns. Fresh Lives appeared in a continued succession, until, upon the death of Lord Byron in 1824, Mr. Allan Cunningham, who had personally known Burns, so far as a boycouldknow a mature man, gave a new impulse to the interest, by an impressive paper in which he contrasted the circumstances of Burns's death with those of Lord Byron's, and also the two funerals—both of which, one altogether, and the other in part, Mr. Cunningham had personally witnessed. A man of genius, like Mr. Cunningham, throws a new quality of interest upon all which he touches; and, having since brought fresh research and the illustrative power of the arts to bear upon the subject, and all this having gone on concurrently with the great modern revolution in literature—that is, the great extension of apopularinterest, through the astonishing reductions of price—the result is, that Burns has, at length, become anational, and, therefore, in a certain sense, a privileged subject; which, in a perfect sense, he wasnot, until the controversial management of his reputation had irritated the public attention. Dr. Currie did not address the same alert condition of the public feeling, nor, by many hundred degrees, sodiffuseda condition of any feeling which might imperfectly exist, as a man must consciously address in these days, whether as the biographer or the critic of Burns. The lower-toned enthusiasm of the public was not of a quality to irritate any little enthusiasm which the worthy Doctor might have felt. The public of that day felt with regard to Burns exactly as with regard to Bloomfield—not that the quality of his poems was then the staple of the interest, but the extraordinary fact that a ploughman or a lady's shoemaker should have written any poems at all. The sole difference in the two cases, as regarded by the public of that day, was that Burns's case was terminated by a premature, and, for the public, a very sudden death: this gave a personal interest to his case which was wanting in the other; and a direct result of this was that his executors were able to lay before the world a series of his letters recording his opinions upon a considerable variety of authors, and his feelings under many ordinary occasions of life.
Dr. Currie, therefore, if phlegmatic, as he certainly was, must be looked upon as upon a level with the public of his own day—a public how different, different by how many centuries, from the world of this present 1837! One thing I remember which powerfully illustrates the difference. Burns, as we all know, with his peculiarly wild and almost ferocious spirit of independence, came a generation too soon. In this day, he would have been forced to do that, clamorously called upon to do that, and would have found his pecuniary interest in doing that, which in his own generation merely to attempt doing loaded him with the reproach of Jacobinism. It must be remembered that the society of Liverpool wits on whom my retrospect is now glancing were all Whigs—all, indeed, fraternizers with French Republicanism. Yet so it was that—not once, not twice, but daily almost, in the numerous conversations naturally elicited by this Liverpool monument to Burns's memory—Iheard every one, clerk or layman, heartily agreeing to tax Burns with ingratitude and with pride falsely directed, because he sate uneasily or restively under the bridle-hand of his noble self-called "patrons." Aristocracy, then, the essential spirit of aristocracy—this I found was not less erect and clamorous amongst partisan democrats—democrats who were such merely in a party sense of supporting his Majesty's Opposition against his Majesty's Servants—than it was or could be among the most bigoted of the professed feudal aristocrats. For my part, at this moment, when all the world was reading Currie's monument to the memory of Burns and the support of his family, I felt and avowed my feeling most loudly—that Burns was wronged, was deeply, memorably wronged. A £10 bank note, by way of subscription for a few copies of an early edition of his poems—this is the outside that I could ever see proof given of Burns having received anything in the way ofpatronage; and doubtless this would have been gladly returned, but from the dire necessity of dissembling.
Lord Glencairn is the "patron" for whom Burns appears to have felt the most sincere respect. Yet even he—did he give him more than a seat at his dinner table? Lord Buchan again, whose liberalities are by this time pretty well appreciated in Scotland, exhorts Burns, in a tone of one preaching upon a primary duty of life, to exemplary gratitude towards a person who had given him absolutely nothing at all. The man has not yet lived to whose happiness it was more essential that he should live unencumbered by the sense of obligation; and, on the other hand, the man has not lived upon whose independence as professing benefactors so many people practised, or who found so many others ready to ratify and give value to their pretences.[30]Him, whombeyond most men nature had created with the necessity of conscious independence, all men besieged with the assurance that he was, must be, ought to be dependent; nay, that it was his primary duty to be grateful for his dependence. I have not looked into any edition of Burns, except once for a quotation, since this year 1801—when I read the whole of Currie's edition, and had opportunities of meeting the editor—and once subsequently, upon occasion of a fifth or supplementary volume being published. I know not, therefore, how this matter has been managed by succeeding editors, such as Allan Cunningham, far more capable of understanding Burns's situation, from the previous struggles of their own honourable lives, and Burns's feelings, from something of congenial power.
I, in this year, 1801, when in the company of Dr. Currie, did not forget, and, with some pride I say that I stood alone in remembering, the very remarkable position of Burns: not merely that, with his genius, and with the intellectual pretensions generally of his family, he should have been called to a life of early labour, and of labour unhappily not prosperous, but also that he, by accident about the proudest of human spirits, should have been by accident summoned, beyond all others, to eternal recognitions of some mysterious gratitude which he owed to some mysterious patrons little and great, whilst yet, of all men, perhaps, he reaped the least obvious or known benefit from any patronage that has ever been put on record. Most men, if they reap little from patronage, are liberated from the claims of patronage, or, if they are summoned to a galling dependency, have at least the fruits of their dependency. But it was this man's unhappy fate—with an early and previous irritability onthis very point—to find himself saddled, by his literary correspondents, with all that was odious in dependency, whilst he had every hardship to face that is most painful in unbefriended poverty.
On this view of the case, I talked, then, being a schoolboy, with and against the first editor of Burns:—I did not, and I do not, profess to admire the letters (that is, the prose), all or any, of Burns. I felt that they were liable to the charges of Lord Jeffrey, and to others beside; that they do not even express the natural vigour of Burns's mind, but are at once vulgar, tawdry, coarse, and commonplace; neither was I a person to affect any profound sympathy with the general character and temperament of Burns, which has often been described as "of the earth, earthy"—unspiritual—animal—beyond those of most men equally intellectual. But still I comprehended his situation; I had for ever ringing in my ears, during that summer of 1801, those groans which ascended to heaven from his over-burthened heart—those harrowing words, "To give him leave to toil," which record almost a reproach to the ordinances of God—and I felt that upon him, amongst all the children of labour, the primal curse had fallen heaviest and sunk deepest. Feelings such as these I had the courage to express: a personal compliment, or so, I might now and then hear; but all were against me on thematter. Dr. Currie said—"Poor Burns! such notions had been his ruin"; Mr. Shepherd continued to draw from the subject some scoff or growl at Mr. Pitt and the Excise; the laughing tailor told us a good story of some proud beggar; Mr. Clarke proposed that I should write a Greek inscription for a cenotaph which he was to erect in his garden to the memory of Burns;—and so passed away the solitary protestation on behalf of Burns's jacobinism, together with the wine and the roses, and the sea-breezes of that same Everton, in that same summer of 1801. Mr. Roscoe is dead, and has found time since then to be half forgotten; Dr. Currie, the physician, has been found "unable to heal himself"; Mr. Shepherd of Gatacre is a name and a shadow; Mr. Clarke is a shadow without a name; the tailor, who set the table in a roar, is dust and ashes; and three men at the most remain of all who in those convivialmeetings held it right to look down upon Burns as upon one whose spirit was rebellious overmuch against the institutions of man, and jacobinical in a sense which "men of property" and master manufacturers will never brook, albeit democrats by profession.[31]
It was, I think, in the month of August, but certainly in the summer season, and certainly in the year 1807, that I first saw this illustrious man. My knowledge of him as a man of most original genius began about the year 1799. A little before that time Wordsworth had published the first edition (in a single volume) of the "Lyrical Ballads,"[33]and into this had been introduced Mr. Coleridge's poem of the "Ancient Mariner," as the contribution of an anonymous friend. It would be directing the reader's attention too much to myself if I were to linger upon this, the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind. Let me say, in one word, that, at a period when neither the one nor the other writer was valued by the public—both having a long warfare to accomplish of contumely and ridicule before theycould rise into their present estimation—I found in these poems "the ray of a new morning," and an absolute revelation of untrodden worlds teeming with power and beauty as yet unsuspected amongst men. I may here mention that, precisely at the same time, Professor Wilson, entirely unconnected with myself, and not even known to me until ten years later, received the same startling and profound impressions from the same volume.[34]With feelings of reverential interest, so early and so deep, pointing towards two contemporaries, it may be supposed that I inquired eagerly after their names. But these inquiries were self-baffled; the same deep feelings which prompted my curiosity causing me to recoil from all casual opportunities of pushing the inquiry, as too generally lying amongst those who gave no sign of participating in my feelings; and, extravagant as this may seem, I revolted with as much hatred from coupling my question with any occasion of insult to the persons whom it respected, as a primitive Christian from throwing frankincense upon the altars of Cæsar, or a lover from giving up the name of his beloved to the coarse license of a Bacchanalian party. It is laughable to record for how long a period my curiosity in this particular was thus self-defeated. Two years passed before I ascertained the two names. Mr. Wordsworth publishedhisin the second and enlarged edition of the poems[35]; and for Mr. Coleridge's I was "indebted" to a private source; but I discharged that debt ill, for I quarrelled with my informant for what I considered his profane way of dealing with a subject so hallowed in my own thoughts. After this I searched, east and west, north and south, for all known works or fragments of the same authors. I had read, therefore, as respects Mr. Coleridge, the Allegory which he contributed to Mr. Southey's "Joan of Arc."[36]I had read his fine Ode entitled "France,"[37]his Ode to the Duchess of Devonshire, and various other contributions, more or less interesting, to the two volumes of the "Anthology"published at Bristol, about 1799-1800, by Mr. Southey[38]; and, finally, I had, of course, read the small volume of poems published under his own name. These, however, as a juvenile and immature collection, made expressly with a view to pecuniary profit, and therefore courting expansion at any cost of critical discretion, had in general greatly disappointed me.[39]
Meantime, it had crowned the interest which to me invested his name, that about the year 1804 or 1805 I had been informed by a gentleman from the English Lakes, who knew him as a neighbour, that he had for some time applied his whole mind to metaphysics and psychology—which happened to be my own absorbing pursuit. From 1803 to 1808, I was a student at Oxford; and, on the first occasion when I could conveniently have sought for a personal knowledge of one whom I contemplated with so much admiration, I was met by a painful assurance that he had quitted England, and was then residing at Malta, in the quality of secretary to the Governor. I began to inquire about the best route to Malta; but, as any route at that time promised an inside place in a French prison, I reconciled myself to waiting; and at last, happening to visit the Bristol Hotwells in the summer of 1807, I had the pleasure to hear that Coleridge was not only once more upon English ground, but within forty and odd miles of my own station. In that same hour I bent my way to the south; and, before evening, reaching a ferry on the river Bridgewater, at a village called, I think, Stogursey (i.e., Stoke de Courcy, by way of distinction from some other Stoke), I crossed it, and a few miles farther attained my object—viz., the little town of Nether Stowey, amongst the Quantock Hills. Here I had been assured that I should find Mr. Coleridge, at the house of his old friend Mr. Poole. On presenting myself, however, to that gentleman, I found that Coleridge was absent at Lord Egmont's, an elder brother (by the father's side) ofMr. Perceval, the Prime Minister, assassinated five years later; and, as it was doubtful whether he might not then be on the wing to another friend's in the town of Bridgewater, I consented willingly, until his motions should be ascertained, to stay a day or two with this Mr. Poole—a man on his own account well deserving a separate notice; for, as Coleridge afterwards remarked to me, he was almost an ideal model for a useful member of Parliament.[40]I found him a stout, plain-looking farmer, leading a bachelor life, in a rustic, old-fashioned house; the house, however, upon further acquaintance, proving to be amply furnished with modern luxuries, and especially with a good library, superbly mounted in all departments bearing at all upon political philosophy; and the farmer turning out a polished and liberal Englishman, who had travelled extensively, and had so entirely dedicated himself to the service of his humble fellow-countrymen—the hewers of wood and drawers of water in this southern part of Somersetshire—that for many miles round he was the general arbiter of their disputes, the guide and counsellor of their difficulties; besides being appointed executor and guardian to his children by every third man who died in or about the town of Nether Stowey.
The first morning of my visit, Mr. Poole was so kind as to propose, knowing my admiration of Wordsworth, that we should ride over to Alfoxton[41]—a place of singular interest to myself, as having been occupied in his unmarried days by that poet, during the minority of Mr. St. Aubyn, its present youthful proprietor. At this delightful spot, the ancient residence of an ancient English family, and surrounded by those ferny Quantock Hills which are so beautifully glanced at in the poem of "Ruth," Wordsworth, accompanied by his sister, had passed a good deal of the interval between leaving the University (Cambridge) and the period of his final settlement amongst his native lakes of Westmoreland: some allowance, however, must be made—buthow much I do not accurately know—for a long residence in France, for a short one in North Germany, for an intermitting one in London, and for a regular domestication with his sister at Race Down in Dorsetshire.
Returning late from this interesting survey, we found ourselves without company at dinner; and, being thus seatedtête-à-tête, Mr. Poole propounded the following question to me, which I mention because it furnished me with the first hint of a singular infirmity besetting Coleridge's mind:—"Pray, my young friend, did you ever form any opinion, or, rather, did it ever happen to you to meet with any rational opinion or conjecture of others, upon that most revolting dogma of Pythagoras about beans? You know what I mean: that monstrous doctrine in which he asserts that a man might as well, for the wickedness of the thing, eat his own grandmother as meddle with beans."[42]
"Yes," I replied; "the line is, I believe, in the Golden Verses. I remember it well."
P.—"True: now, our dear excellent friend Coleridge, than whom God never made a creature more divinely endowed, yet, strange it is to say, sometimes steals from other people, just as you or I might do; I beg your pardon—just as a poor creature like myself might do, that sometimes have not wherewithal to make a figure from my own exchequer: and the other day, at a dinner party, this question arising about Pythagoras and his beans, Coleridge gave us an interpretation which, from his manner, I suspect to have been not original. Think, therefore, if you have anywhere read a plausible solution."
"I have: and it was a German author. This German, understand, is a poor stick of a man, not to be named on the same day with Coleridge: so that, if Coleridge should appear to have robbed him, be assured that he has done the scamp too much honour."
P.—"Well: what says the German?"
"Why, you know the use made in Greece of beans in voting and balloting? Well: the German says that Pythagoras speaks symbolically; meaning that electioneering, or, more generally, all interference with political intrigues, is fatal to a philosopher's pursuits and their appropriate serenity. Therefore, says he, follower of mine, abstain from public affairs as you would from parricide."
P.—"Well, then, Coleridgehasdone the scamp too much honour: for, by Jove, that is the very explanation he gave us!"
Here was a trait of Coleridge's mind, to be first made known to me by his best friend, and first published to the world by me, the foremost of his admirers! But both of us had sufficient reasons:—Mr. Poole knew that, stumbled on by accident, such a discovery would be likely to impress upon a man as yet unacquainted with Coleridge a most injurious jealousy with regard to all he might write: whereas, frankly avowed by one who knew him best, the fact was disarmed of its sting; since it thus became evident that, where the case had been best known and most investigated, it had not operated to his serious disadvantage. On the same argument,—to forestall, that is to say, other discoverers, who would make a more unfriendly use of the discovery,—and also as matters of literary curiosity, I shall here point out a few others of Coleridge's unacknowledged obligations, noticed by myself in a very wide course of reading.[43]
1. The Hymn to Chamouni is an expansion of a short poem in stanzas, upon the same subject, by Frederica Brun, a female poet of Germany, previously known to the world under her maiden name of Münter. The mere framework of the poem is exactly the same—an appeal to the most impressive features of the regal mountain (Mont Blanc), adjuring them to proclaim their author: the torrent, for instance, is required to say by whom it had been arrested in its headlong raving, and stiffened, as by the petrific touch of Death, into everlasting pillars of ice; and the answer to these impassioned apostrophes is made by the same choral burst of rapture. In mere logic, therefore, and even as tothe choice of circumstances, Coleridge's poem is a translation. On the other hand, by a judicious amplification of some topics, and by its far deeper tone of lyrical enthusiasm, the dry bones of the German outline have been awakened by Coleridge into the fulness of life. It is not, therefore, a paraphrase, but a re-cast of the original. And how was this calculated, if frankly avowed, to do Coleridge any injury with the judicious?
2. A more singular case of Coleridge's infirmity is this:—In a very noble passage of "France," a fine expression or two occur from "Samson Agonistes." Now, to take a phrase or an inspiriting line from the great fathers of poetry, even though no marks of quotation should be added, carries with it no charge of plagiarism. Milton is justly presumed to be as familiar to the ear as nature to the eye; and to steal from him as impossible as to appropriate, or sequester to a private use, some "bright particular star." And there is a good reason for rejecting the typographical marks of quotation: they break the continuity of the passion, by reminding the reader of a printed book; on which account Milton himself (to give an instance) has not marked the sublime words, "tormented all the air" as borrowed; nor has Wordsworth, in applying to an unprincipled woman of commanding beauty the memorable expression "a weed of glorious feature," thought it necessary to acknowledge it as originally belonging to Spenser. Some dozens of similar cases might be adduced from Milton. But Coleridge, when saying of republican France that,