Observe the march of Milton; his severe application; his laborious polish; his deep metaphysical researches; his prayer to God before he began his great work; all that could lift and swell his intellect became his daily food.
I should not think of devoting less than twenty years to an epic poem. Ten years to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician. I would thoroughly understand 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 in the composition of the poem and the five last in the correction of it. So would I write, haply not unhearing of that divine and nightly-whispering voice, which speaks to mighty minds, of predestined garlands, starry and unwithering.
This is an extract from a letter from Coleridge to Joseph Cottle, the Bristol bookseller who befriended him in youth and published his early works and the Lyrical Ballads. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth had the highest possible respect for the work of literary genius—both of them saw what they wrote, or meant to write, in terms of eternity, measured against the great poets—although Coleridge’s diffidence and mental anxieties led him to despair of his own gifts, and Wordsworth in his old age, closed in and stolidly pessimistic, said his ‘interests in Literature and books in general seem to be dying away unreasonably fast—nor do I look or much care for a revival of them’. This chapter is about their work, not sub specie aeternitatis but as part of the contemporary literary life.
I have already said that neither of them made much money by their poetic writings. Cottle gave the young Coleridge thirty guineas in advance for a volume of poems and offered a guinea and a half per hundred lines of any more verse he might write. The London publisher, Longman, offered Wordsworth and Coleridge £80 for the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Longman continued to publish Wordsworth, but Wordsworth felt he was not doing very well out of him and made several attempts to interest John Murray in a new six-volume edition of his poems in 1825. He complained about overheads:
Southey tells me that Murray can sell more copies of any book that will sell at all than Longman—but it does not follow from that that in the end an Author will profit more, because Murray sells books considerably lower to the Trade and advertises even more expensively than Longman; though that seems scarcely possible …. my little tract on the Lakes, the first Ed: for which I got £9/8/2 was charged £27/2/3 advertising. The 2nd ed. is already charged to me £30.7.2: the immense profits are yet to come. Thus my throat is cut.
The same Murray, Byron’s publisher, after an enthusiastic report from Byron on Kubla Khan, published this and Christabel in 1817 in a volume with The Pains of Sleep—for Christabel he paid £70 and for Kubla Khan, £20.
Both poets had trouble with unsuitable publishing houses—Wordsworth negotiated with a firm called Hurst and Robinson through a poet and journalist called Alaric Watts. Watts stopped negotiations just in time to avoid the firm’s failure in the financial crisis in which Constable, Scott’s publishers, also failed, leaving the novelist struggling to pay off debts for the rest of his life. Wordsworth at that stage wanted £300 down for an edition of 1,000 copies and no expenses: he finally negotiated an arrangement with Longman’s, since Murray simply did not answer his letters. This was for 750 copies, with Wordsworth paying two-thirds of the expense and receiving two-thirds of the profits. Some of the profits he would have made were eroded by a pirated edition produced in Paris in 1828—copyright did not extend abroad.
Coleridge’s major publishing troubles were with a publishing firm called Gale and Curtis, who had issued the bound sheets of the periodical Friend in 1812. He felt obliged to offer them his reconstructed Friend: he had intended to publish other works with Murray but found himself contracting to let Gale and Curtis publish Sybilline Leaves, Biographia, The Statesman’s Manual and his unperformed drama, Zapolya. Coleridge felt that this firm was honourable, particularly since Mr Curtis, who called on him, was a gentleman in clerical orders. He was distressed when it was pointed out to him that Murray had reasonably expected to have published the other poems and the drama. His indignation, therefore, when the firm turned out to be neither honest nor stable was extreme. Early in 1817 the firm (now called Rest Fenner) asked him to draw up a plan for an encyclopaedia, of which he was to be general editor on condition that he worked for the encyclopaedia full time and lived in Camberwell, where the press was situated. He dared not leave Highgate because he needed the Gillmans to supervise his opium addiction, but offered to work on it four days a week there and two days, 9–5, in the Paternoster Row office. This was already a parody of all the high hopes he had had for the epic he would write, unifying all knowledge. He wrote despairingly that he felt ‘compelled to give up all thought and hope of doing anything of a permanent nature, either as a Poet or a Philosopher’ for he had hired himself ‘as a Job writer and Compiler’ of a work that would consume all his remaining years. In the end it was agreed that he should write the Introduction only—at six guineas a sheet for six sheets. It appeared in the first volume of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, January 1818, as ‘General Introduction; or Preliminary Treatise on Method’. He had agreed that the treatise should be cut, but not that it should be changed. When he received his copy his introduction was ‘so bedevilled, so interpolated and topsy-turvied’, such a ‘compleat Muddle of Paragraphs, without sub—or co-ordination’ that he was ashamed of it as a man and a scholar. Worse was to come. Curtis and Fenner spread scandals about him—that they had sent him money to keep him out of jail, that he had cheated Longman, borrowed money from the printer, appeared drunk. Then they went bankrupt. Coleridge had to borrow money to buy back his half-copyrights and the unsold copies of his books. Later he discovered that he had been cheated. Fenner had told him that 1,000 copies of Zapolya were to be printed and that Coleridge would receive half the profits. He was told that only 100 copies were sold—but the bankruptcy revealed that 2,000 had been printed and 1,100 sold. He believed himself to have lost over £ 1,200 through the cheating and failure of these publishers.
Not all poets fared so badly. Longman, who offered £80 for the Lyrical Ballads paid Tom Moore 3,000 guineas for Lalla Rookh.Murray offered Byron 1,500 guineas for a single canto of Childe Harold—Byron cited the amount Longman paid Moore and asked for 2,500 guineas. Cowper’s Task made £10,000 for Joseph Johnson. But it was not surprising that Coleridge admired the toast Tom Campbell gave at Longman’s Saturday public dinner—‘Buonaparte—for having shot a bookseller!’ Or even that Wordsworth should declare ‘I would a thousand times rather that not a verse of mine should enter the Press again, than to allow any of them to say that I was to the amount of the strength of a hair dependent upon their countenance, consideration, Patronage, or by whatever term they may dignify their ostentation and selfish vanity.’ He quoted Dr Johnson’s dictum ‘No, Sir; Authors above Booksellers’.
Another major literary force with which writers had to contend was newspapers, periodicals and journals. The publication of newspapers and periodicals increased enormously at this time. In 1753 7,500,000 stamps for newspapers were sold: by 1821 this had risen to 25 million. In 1818 more than 100,000 people read literary reviews. The Tory newspaper, The Morning Post, besides Coleridge’s political articles, published much good poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey among others. It bought jokes from Lamb at 6d. a joke. The Morning Chronicle first employed Hazlitt: The Times employed Crabb Robinson as the first foreign correspondent during the Napoleonic Wars. Southey was offered the editorship of The Times but refused it—at that time the newspapers were often corrupt and their proprietors not above collecting money to suppress news. But it was the big reviews which were influential. The Edinburgh Review was founded in 1802 by Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner and Sydney Smith—its views were Whig and liberal. Its great rival, The Quarterly, founded in 1809, was a Tory publication. The two together at the time of Waterloo had a circulation of over 20,000. The Westminster Review was utilitarian and supported Reform. Blackwood’ s Magazine published poetry, essays, tales and novels, including, later, those of George Eliot—but in its early days it was characterized by a strong political bias in favour of the Tories, and a style of wild personal abuse, and invective, particularly against the so-called ‘Cockney’ school which included Keats as well as Leigh Hunt. Leigh Hunt himself ran various short-lived periodicals: The Liberal, for which Byron and Shelley wrote; The Reflector; The Examiner, for which Hazlitt wrote great theatre criticism and essays and in which Keats was first published. The Examiner ran from 1808 to 1825. The London Magazine (1820–9) was edited by John Scott as a deliberately London magazine to a very high standard. It published De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, the essays of Elia, work by Keats, Hazlitt, Clare, Landor, and Carlyle. The Gentleman’s Magazine was a true miscellany ranging from information about sheep dips to religious poems—and the fashionable magazines of the period too, The Beau Monde for instance, had political, literary and artistic sections amongst reports on clothes and high life.
The poets’ encounters with these periodicals were not always happy. The Edinburgh Review was edited by Francis Jeffrey, whose standards were neo-classical, conservative and conventional—he claimed that he knew most of the Lyrical Ballads by heart, but was critical of the Romantic poets in public. Coleridge in the Biographia wrote an excellent passage on The Edinburgh Review: he recommended it for its services in the diffusion of knowledge and for its avowed intention only to review selected books of merit, but pointed out that it frequently reviewed ‘works neither indecent or immoral, yet of such trifling importance even in point of size and, according to the critic’s own verdict, so devoid of all merit as must excite in the most candid mind the suspicion either that dislike or vindictive feelings were at work; or that there was a cold prudential pre-determination to increase the sales of the review by flattering the malignant passions of human nature’. This vindictiveness, he considered, was bad—not because of the ‘damnatory style’ itself—but because it was often personal, dragging in an author’s cast-off youthful work, making wild unillustrated assertions about books.
Coleridge himself wrote a review for the Edinburgh of Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and was distressed because two paragraphs were added to it, in which he was ‘(In a vulgar style of rancid commonplace metaphors) made to contradict myself—first, in a nauseous and most false ascription of the Supremacy of Merit to Mr Wilberforce, and secondly, in an attack on Mr Pitt’s Sincerity substituted for a Paragraph, in which I had both defended it and him; and proved that of all the parliamentary Friends of the Africans he was the most effective.’ The distortion of his views about Wilberforce was particularly galling as there was much unpleasant controversy at the time as to the respective parts played in the abolition of slavery by Wilberforce and Clarkson, and Clarkson was a personal friend of the Wordsworths and of Coleridge himself.
Jeffrey is now probably best remembered for his ferocious review of Wordsworth’s Excursion in 1814 which began ‘This will never do’, and continued to berate Wordsworth for ‘rapturous mysticism’ and for placing unsuitable intellectual harangues in the mouths of low characters—Wordsworth said he had refused to ‘pollute my fingers with touching his book’, but had probably read and was clearly deeply hurt by the review, which he quoted as ‘This will not do’ in a letter to Mrs Clarkson. Coleridge was enraged by the ‘infamous’ review, and it was partly to correct its imperceptive views that he wrote his famous critique of Wordsworth’s characteristic merits and defects in the Biographia. He also claimed in the Biographia that Jeffrey had visited Keswick, paid innumerable ‘high coloured compliments’ to Coleridge, and been told that there was no Lake School of poets since their styles and dates of composition did not agree—but Jeffrey had immediately gone home and written an attack on ‘the School of whining and hypochondriacal poets that haunt the Lakes’. Jeffrey denied this charge in a review of Biographia in 1817. But his hostility to the ‘Lake School’ was persistent.
Hazlitt’s review of The Excursion in The Examiner was, by contrast, highly percipient. It was true that he made a wild attack on country people—‘All country people hate each other’—dictated more by metropolitan loyalty than relevance, but his understanding of Wordsworth’s greatness and defects was excellent. He praised Wordsworth’s quality of imagination in a landscape metaphorfn1 both poets might have used. ‘Every object is seen through the medium of innumerable recollections, is clothed with the haze of imagination like a glittering vapour; is obscured with the excess of glory, has the shadowy brightness of a waking dream.’ He criticized Wordsworth, percipiently, for ‘an intense intellectual egotism’ which swallowed up everything and made Wordsworth incapable of writing dramatically—all three protagonists of the poem, the recluse, the pastor and the peddler, were really the one poet, a trinity speaking with one voice. But he quoted a magnificent sentence from Sir Thomas Browne which he felt illustrated Wordsworth’s interest in the elements and early formation of the human personality: ‘God knew Adam in the elements of his chaos, and saw him in the great obscurity of nothing.’
It is perhaps worth pointing out that Coleridge’s summing up—in a letter to Lady Beaumont—of what he believed to be the causes of the apparent stiffness, banality and egocentricity of parts of The Excursion covers the same area as both Hazlitt’s praise and blame. He believed that Wordsworth was so absorbed in the examination of the mental processes by which he personally had arrived at certain aspects of knowledge of the elements of his chaos that he forgot that many of his discoveries might seem obvious to someone who had not shared the working through:
As proofs meet me in every part of the Excursion, that the Poet’s genius has not flagged, I have sometimes fancied, that having by the conjoint operation of his own experiences, feelings and reason himself convinced himself of Truths, which the generality of persons have either taken for granted from their Infancy, or at least adopted in early life, he has attached all their own depth and weight to doctrines and words, which come almost as Truisms or Common-places to others.
Lady Beaumont unwisely showed this letter to Wordsworth, who wrote Coleridge an agitated letter of self-defence—he had meant to be commonplace—demanding why Coleridge thought the unpublished Poem on his own Life better. Coleridge answered the letter, but his full explanation was left to Biographia, which the sensitive Wordsworth rejected. Charles Lamb, too, became embroiled in the critical reception of the poem—he wrote a long and laudatory review for The Quarterly, which the editor altered out of recognition, and Lamb, too, was writing agitated letters—of apology to Wordsworth.
Coleridge’s relationship with reviewers was even stormier than Wordsworth’s. From The Quarterly he might have expected encouragement, since Southey wrote regularly and prominently for it—indeed, Coleridge in 1819 was proposing to William Blackwood of Blackwood’s Magazine that he should write their leading articles—‘by leading I mean that one article which is expected to be most talked of, as for instance several of Mr Southey’s in the Quarterly.’ (This is possibly the first use of the term ‘leading article’.) But Southey had already, anonymously, in The Critical Review dismissed The Ancient Mariner as ‘a poem of little merit’, ‘a Dutch attempt at German sublimity’. In 1816 Coleridge was saying that his reputation suffered more from the ‘studied silence’ of The Quarterly than from the attacks of The Edinburgh, and in 1817 he was reporting the gossip of ‘a very eminent bookseller’ who, he said, had been told by Byron, Scott and other great men that ‘taking him all in all Mr C. is the greatest man, we have; but I would not have a work of his, if it were given me ready printed—for the Quarterly Review takes no notice of his works, or but in a half way that damns a man worse than anything; and our Review (the Edinburgh) is decided to write him down.’
The history of Hazlitt’s periodical attacks on Coleridge makes frightening reading. He tried to annihilate the Christabel volume in The Examiner in June 1816: in September of that year he attacked The Statesman’s Manual before it had appeared and after publication wrote two more attacks on it. On 2 August 1817 he reprinted in The Morning Chronicle a passage from Fears in Solitude to show up the contrast between Coleridge’s early and late views on the war. He attacked The Statesman’s Manual again in The Edinburgh Review and reviewed the Biographia savagely in its August 1817 issue. He also wrote two tirades in The Yellow Dwarf. Other well-known figures joined in: the popular poet Tom Moore berated Christabel in The Edinburgh and John Wilson (‘Christopher North’) was savage in Blackwood’s.
Blackwood’s was run by John Gibson Lockhart and John Wilson, who was so assiduously and charmingly attentive to the Wordsworths at Rydal, but wrote anonymous and virulent abuse under the pen name of Christopher North. Lockhart was Walter Scott’s son-in-law and biographer, and was probably the author of Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, full of literary and personal gossip. This distressed Wordsworth and his family and even Mrs Coleridge, who wrote of it ‘What a rage for personality in the present day! not a periodical publication comes out but something is said upon living characters; ’tis not the thing I think, at all, to speak so much of people while they are living; in the literary gazette there was a full account of our juvenile american Scheme, and that Mrs Fricker and Mrs Southey had consented to go with the young people in their wild Scheme of colonization.’ Wordsworth was more severe still on Blackwood’s in 1819.
I know little of Blackwood’s Magazine, and wish to know less. I have seen in it articles so infamous that I do not chuse to let it enter my doors. The Publisher sent it to me some time ago and I begged (civilly you will take for granted) not to be troubled with it any longer …. Perhaps I ought to have mentioned that the articles that disgusted me so were personal—referring to myself and friends and acquaintance, especially Coleridge.
This literary vituperation overflowed into tragedy. John Scott, the brilliant editor of The London Magazine, after his magazine had attacked Lockhart’s work in Blackwood’s was called out to fight a duel at Chalk Farm with one of Lockhart’s henchmen, in which he was fatally wounded within a year of founding the London. Lamb’s biographer, Serjeant Talfourd, describes this incident of black comedy most movingly. Scott, he said, ‘at last met his death almost by lamentable accident, in the uncertain glimmer of moonlight, from the hand of one who went out resolved not to harm him …. Such was the melancholy result—first of a controversy too envenomed—and afterwards of enthralment in usages, absurd in all, but most absurd when applied by a literary man to a literary quarrel.’
Wordsworth particularly attracted, as well as critical hostility and personal spite, a great deal of comment by parody. Peter Bell’s publication in 1819 aroused a spate of these. Keats’s friend Reynolds wrote one before publication—with a Wordsworthian preface, supplementary essay and footnotes; there was ‘The Dead Asses, a Lyrical Ballad’ as well as Shelley’s savage Peter Bell the Third, which attacked in general complacency about poverty and Peterloo. Coleridge asked to see Reynolds’s parody before publication and found it funny and inoffensive (it was designed with ‘Peter Bell’ as the Leech-gatherer ‘poring and prosing’ over the graves of all Wordsworth’s characters and Wordsworth himself). Coleridge’s judgment on parodies seems sane and, in Wordsworth’s case, prophetic:
Parodies on new poems are read as satires; on old ones—the soliloquy of Hamlet for instance—as compliments. A man of genius may securely laugh at a mode of attack by which his reviler, in half a century or less, becomes his encomiast.
Coleridge himself made two attempts to run periodicals single-handed. In 1796 he launched The Watchman, a largely political paper, anti-Pitt, advocating general suffrage—it was to be published every eight days in order to avoid the newspaper tax. It folded at a considerable loss after ten issues had appeared; Coleridge’s description in Biographia of his tour through the Midlands (where the wealthy dissenting Liberals were most in evidence), to gain subscribers is still fascinating. He describes himself lecturing a Calvinist tallow-chandler for half-an-hour:
I argued, I described, I promised, I prophesied, and beginning with the captivity of nations I ended with the near approach of the millennium, finishing the whole with some of my own verses describing that glorious state out of the Religious Musings …. My taper man of lights listened with perseverent and praiseworthy patience …. ‘And what, Sir,’ he said, after a short pause, ‘might the cost be?’ Only four-pence,’ (O! how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that four-pence)! ‘Only four-pence, Sir, each number, to be published on every eighth day.’ ‘That comes to a deal of money at the end of a year. And how much did you say there was to be for the money?’ ‘Thirty-two pages, Sir! large octavo, closely printed.’ ‘Thirty and two pages? Bless me, why except what I does in a family way on the Sabbath, that’s more than I ever reads, Sir! all the year round. I am as great a one as any man in Brummagem, sir! for liberty and truth and all them sort of things, but as to this (no offence, I hope, Sir) I must beg to be excused.’
The Friend appeared much later in 1809–10. It is difficult not to see The Friend; a Literary, Moral and Political Weekly Paper as a tragedy. It meant so much to its author, on all sorts of fronts. Sara Hutchinson worked with him on it, as his amanuensis: it was to prove that he had the tenacity and courage to produce regular work. It was also to be a vindication of his literary beliefs and his beliefs about the way the language used affected moral and political thought. He saw it as a serious writer’s attempt to counteract the debasing influences of slick and vituperative or partisan journalism. He saw it in opposition both to Cobbett’s Political Register and to Addison and Steele’s Spectator. Cobbett ‘applies to the Passions that are gratified by Curiosity, sharp and often calumnious Personality, the Politics and the Events of the Day and the names and characters of notorious Contemporaries. From all these Topics I not only abstain as from Guilt; but to strangle these Passions by the awakening of the nobler Germ in human nature is my express and paramount Object.’ Addison’s easy prose, he considered, had ‘innocently contributed to the general taste for unconnected writing’—people now disliked long words, long sentences and complex thoughts. His periodical was to restore all these and was addressed only to men who made an effort to think. It was to be produced one sheet at a time on stamped paper like a newspaper, but sent through the post to avoid paying news-vendors (like Cobbett’s work). It is usually claimed that he was hopelessly idealistic and incompetent about The Friend, but the truth is that on many fronts he was both pertinacious and competent. He organized the paper, printing and distribution well, and produced twenty-eight numbers. Readers were annoyed by his ponderous style and his habit of breaking off in mid-thought or even mid-sentence ‘to be concluded in next number’—but some of the delays were caused by Wordsworth’s and Southey’s views, retailed to Daniel Stuart in London who was organizing Coleridge’s supply of stamped paper, that he was quite incapable of going on with it. He was admittedly hopelessly over-confident about his subscribers, too many of whom were agreeable ‘friends of friends’ who never paid up, and he organized his payments badly, hoping vaguely that subscribers would send him the money, post-paid, and then requesting subscribers to send money, to a certain George Ward, a bookseller in London, without warning Ward—who was understandably irritated when he received letters from subscribers asking him to call and collect the money—the letters often not post-paid. The Friend is hard reading, intricate, Jacobean in style, and spends several issues defining the nature of communication between writer and reader before it communicates. But there are moments when Coleridge succeeds in his primary aim—that of communicating the kind of ‘delight’ that comes from true understanding—‘the distinct perception of a fundamental truth’—things taught in childhood about the nature of language or morals and suddenly truly grasped. It was like him to try and do this in an intermittent journal, combining as always, an inevitable element of failure with any achievement.
Wordsworth wrote for The Friend, and published poems in newspapers: he never made great efforts to reach a large audience. He had the desire, often found in great and original writers, for a popular, uneducated audience. He remarked the influence: amongst the poor of ‘half-penny Ballads and penny and two penny histories’—some of which were good, though others were ‘superstitious’ or ‘indelicate’. He felt the power of these ‘struggling papers’ to be so strong ‘that I have many a time wished I had talents to produce songs, poems and little histories that might circulate among other good things in this way, supplanting partly the bad; flowers and useful herbs to take the place of weeds. Indeed some of the Poems which I have published were composed, not without a hope that at some time they might answer this purpose.’
But, unlike Burns, Wordsworth, although he wrote about the poor, did not write close to any vernacular tradition that might appeal to them. His brush with popular methods of disseminating literature came with the modish Annuals—designed, as he told the editor of The Friendship’s Offering, ‘principally for the sofa table’. These precursors of the coffee-table book were embellished with pretty pictures. Wordsworth said that he would have liked this one better if it were less about the fine world and ‘pressed closer upon common life’—but he saw that ‘would not suit the market’. However, these annuals paid well, and Wordsworth, after refusing several invitations to write for them, accepted an offer from The Keepsake in 1828—100 guineas for 12 pages of verse. He was very short of money; as his daughter Dora said, the commission was ‘degrading enough I must confess but necessity has no law’. It is interesting to note that George Eliot uses The Keepsake in Middlemarch as an example of provincial vulgarity, which the sophisticated Dr Lydgate can afford to sneer at. She describes it as ‘the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress at that time’, with silly engravings of ‘ladies and gentlemen with shiny copper-plate cheeks and copperplate smiles’. Wordsworth sent six sonnets to the Christmas 1828 Keepsake, which contained several full-page steel engravings and contributions by Walter Scott, Tom Moore, Southey, Coleridge, Mrs Hemans and Shelley. He wrote a poem to go with a picture by James Holmes of a girl with a sheaf of corn simpering coyly from under a shady hat. He was inclined to be belligerent about this popularizing and wrote to the poetess Maria Jane Jewsbury: ‘I think you do quite right in connecting yourself with these light things. An Author has not fair play who has no share in their Profits …. Therefore let the Annuals pay—and with whomseo-ever you deal make hard bargains. Humility with these gentry is downright simpleness.’
But he was angered to find that of the six sonnets he sent in only two were printed—and the editor had the impudence to write to Wordsworth complaining that he had not filled the agreed number of pages, and asking for more poems. As Wordsworth indignantly pointed out, this meant in principle that he could go on writing forever and being rejected without his contract being fulfilled. He became highly disillusioned and commented ruefully: ‘I am properly served for having had any connection with such things. My only excuse is, that they offered me a very liberal sum, and that I have laboured hard through a long life without more pecuniary emolument than a lawyer gets for two special retainers or a public performer sometimes for two or three songs.’
The financial uncertainties of authorship led Wordsworth to an eloquent and sustained campaign in the cause of the extension of copyright. A Copyright Act in 1814 had increased the term of protection for an author’s work from fourteen to twenty-eight years after the date of publication—or for the rest of the author’s life, if that was longer. At his death, a writer’s works became public property, except for posthumous works, which were protected for a further twenty-eight years. Thomas Noon Talfourd, Lamb’s biographer, introduced a bill to extend the period to sixty years in 1837 and again in 1838 with Wordsworth’s whole-hearted support, but it failed to become law. Talfourd tried again in 1839 and again in 1841 when the Bill was opposed by Macaulay and defeated by 7 votes despite Talfourd’s sincere eloquence. Talfourd said that he hoped that ‘the voices of Wordsworth and Southey, of Moore and Rogers, of Coleridge speaking as it were from the grave and the son of Sir Walter Scott would weigh against all the powers and genius of my right honourable friend’s address’. In 1842 a Bill was made law allowing a period of forty-two years from publication, or the length of the author’s life, whichever was longer. Wordsworth was energetic, writing to Peel, Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and persuading Lockhart to publish an article in The Quarterly for which he furnished information. He was chiefly concerned with the heirs of the author, and gave the copyright law as one reason for delaying the publication of the poem on the formation of his own mind:
Its publication has been prevented merely by the personal character of the subject. Had it been published as soon as it was finished, the copyright would long ago have expired in case of my decease. Now I do honestly believe that that poem, if given to the world before 28 years had elapsed after the composition, would scarcely have paid its own expenses. If published now, with the aid of such reputation as I have acquired, I have reason to believe that the profit from it would be respectable; and my heirs, even as the law now is, would benefit by the delay: but in the other case neither they nor I would have got a farthing from it, if my life had not been prolonged; the profit, such as it might be, would all have gone to printers and publishers and would, of course, continue to do so.
In the summer of 1840 when he was asked to subscribe to a memorial to Shakespeare at Stratford, he refused:
Literature stands much less in need of monuments to the dead than of justice to the living. And while so little attention is paid by the Legislature and by the public also to the principles set forth in Sergeant Talfourd’s Copyright Bill, I cannot do more, upon the present occasion, than offer respectfully to the Committee my good wishes.
What was the poets’ relationship with the other writers of the time? They were contemporaries after all of Blake, Byron, Jane Austen, Keats, Mrs Radcliffe and Tennyson. Coleridge in his early days was much influenced by the eighteenth-century poems of sensibility as opposed to the neo-classical polished verse of Pope: he wrote several ‘effusions’ and several casual conversation poems with a deliberately informal structure. An interesting example of his early poetry of sensibility is a poem addressed to the Reverend W. J. Hort while teaching a young lady some song-tunes on his flute. The exclamations and emotionalism are typical of the slighter verse of the time:
O skill’d with magic spell to roll
The thrilling tones that concentrate the soul!
Breathe through thy flute those tender notes again,
While near thee sits the chaste-eyed maiden mild;
And bid her raise the poet’s kindred strain
In soft empassioned voice, correctly wild.
‘Correctly wild’ seems at first glance an anomaly—an eighteenth-century propriety yoked by violence to a romantic virtue—but in fact may well be an indication that Coleridge had learned what Boyer taught him, that poetry, even of the ‘wildest odes’, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science. But the tone of the whole poem suggests not passion but a poetic convention of emotion, and the ‘correctly’ suggests in context propriety rather than strict logic.
The poem of sensibility was part of the tradition of the conversation poem, and Coleridge, sending his long and beautiful meditation on The Nightingale to Wordsworth in 1798, accompanied it with a much more vulgar conversational letter-poem, half-mocking the whole convention he was using:
In stale blank verse a subject stale
I send per post my Nightingale;
And like an honest bard, dear Wordsworth,
You’ll tell me what you think, my Bird’s worth.
My opinion’s briefly this—
His bill he opens not amiss;
And when he has sung a stave or so,
His breast, and some small space below,
So throbs and swells, that you might swear
No vulgar music’s working there.
So far, so good; but then ’od rot him!
There’s something falls off at his bottom.
Yet sure, no wonder it should breed
That my Bird’s Tail’s a tail indeed
And makes its own inglorious harmony
Aeolio crepitu, non carmine.
A hero of the Romantic movement both in France and England was Chatterton, the young poet who wrote works of an imaginary fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley, and poisoned himself with arsenic at the age of seventeen in despairing poverty. Chatterton’s poems showed great talent, forgeries or not, and he became an archetypal symbol of genius crushed by indifference. Coleridge’s Monody on his death is another early effusion—and Coleridge’s own later criticism of it (1797) shows his appreciation of the faults of its style:
The Monody must not be reprinted … on a life and death so full of heart-giving realities as poor Chatterton’s to find such shadowy nobodies, as cherub-winged DEATH, Trees of HOPE, bare-bosom’d AFFECTION, and simpering PEACE—makes one’s blood circulate like ipecacacuanha [sic]—But so it is. A young man by strong feelings is impelled to write on a particular subject—and this is all, his feelings do for him. They set him upon the business and then they leave him.—He has such a high idea, of what Poetry ought to be, that he cannot conceive that such things as his natural emotions may be allowed to find a place in it—his learning therefore, his fancy, or rather conceit, and all his powers of buckram are put on the stretch—It appears to me, that strong feeling is not so requisite to an Author’s being profoundly pathetic, as taste and good sense.
This passage introduces at an early point in Coleridge’s life the insistence on the concrete as opposed to the abstract, reality as opposed to fancy and dramatics, which recurred in his political and educational thinking. The eighteenth-century models are rejected partly because of their lack of immediacy and their abstraction, powerful enough in the forms in which it was first used.
Coleridge published three sonnets under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom, parodying his own (and Charles Lamb’s) early style, one mocking ‘the spirit of doleful egotism’, the second ‘low creeping language and thought under the pretence of simplicity’, and the third, a burlesque lament for the house that Jack built, composed of over-elaborate and ‘swelling’ phrases from his own work. He said later that what he had early learned from Cowper and Bowles whom he early admired was the combination of natural thoughts with natural diction—the reconciliation of head and heart. The ballads collected by Bishop Percy seemed in some ways to have the same qualities of naturalness and immediacy—and since Wordsworth and Coleridge’s medievalizing sprang from a desire for the direct and non-ornamental they did not approve of the excesses of the Gothic school of the time, the novels of Mrs Radcliffe and Monk Lewis, with their spectres, mouldering skeletons, dungeons and delightful horrors. Coleridge indeed wrote a letter with a high moral tone to the daughter of the poetess Mrs Robinson, refusing to contribute a poem to a memorial collection for Mrs Robinson on the grounds that Monk Lewis and Tom Moore were contributing. He begged Mrs Robinson not to be wounded ‘but I have a wife, I have sons, I have an infant Daughter—what excuse could I offer to my own conscience if by suffering my name to be connected with those of Mr Lewis or Mr Moore I was the occasion of their reading the Monk or the wanton poems of Thomas Little Esqre?’
In 1798 he was criticizing Monk Lewis’s drama Castle Spectre on more literary grounds. There was, he said, no character at all in the play. The author had written a postscript claiming originality in one character—‘a negro who had a warm and benevolent heart but having been kidnapped from his country and barbarously used by the Christians becomes a Misanthrope—This is all! Passion—horror! agonizing pangs of Conscience! Dreams full of hell, serpents and skeletons! starts and attempted murders etc. etc. etc.; but positively not one line that marks even a superficial knowledge of human feelings, could I discover …’.
The benevolent bookseller Cottle, whom Coleridge dismissed as ‘a well-meaning Creature; but a great Fool’ (because he told Coleridge it was not opium that had injured him but the Devil), had epic ambitions and wrote a twenty-four volume Alfred clearly in the Gothic tradition. Lamb describes it magnificently:
I got as far as the Mad Monk the first day and fainted … Mr Cottle soars a high pitch: and when he is original it is in a most original way indeed. His terrific scenes are indefatigable. Serpents, asps, spiders, ghosts, dead bodies, staircases made of nothing, with adder’s tongues for bannisters. What a brain he must have! He puts as many plums in his pudding as my grandmother used to do;—and then his emerging from Hell’s horrors into light, and treading on pure flats of this earth—for 23 books together!
William Combe, in his Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, a remarkably sustained parodical commentary on the aesthetic tastes and social life of the time, has the learned and impoverished doctor musing in a graveyard:
What golden gains my book would boast
If I could meet a chatty ghost
Who would some news communicate
Of its unknown and present state:
Some pallid figure in a shroud
Or sitting in a murky cloud
Or kicking up a new-made grave
Or screaming forth some horrid stave ….
Something to make the misses stare
And force upright their curly hair ….
And thus to tonish folks present
The Picturesque of Sentiment.
Walter Scott was an early admirer of Monk Lewis. He was a friend of Wordsworth, who admired his stoicism in illness and his moral rectitude, and wrote Yarrow Revisited and his sonnet on Scott’s hopeless departure for Naples in search of health, moved by the great man nearing his end when he visited him at Abbotsford. But both poets were stringently critical of Scott as a poet. Coleridge wrote a long letter to Wordsworth on the publication of The Lady of the Lake in 1810, complaining that the poem was prosaic and verbose with a movement ‘between a sleeping Canter and a Marketwoman’s trot—but it is endless—’ He went on:
In short, my dear William!—it is time to write a Recipe for Poems of this sort—I amused myself a day or two ago on reading a Romance in Mrs Radcliffe’s style with making out a scheme, which was to serve for all romances a priori—only varying the proportions—A Baron or Baroness ignorant of their Birth and in some dependent situation—Castle—on a Rock—a Sepulchre—at some distance from the Rock—deserted Rooms—Underground Passages—Pictures—A ghost so believed—or—a written record—blood on it—A wonderful Cut Throat etc. etc. etc.—Now I say it is time to make out the component parts of the Scottish Minstrelsy—The first Business must be, a vast string of patronymics and names of Mountains, Rivers, etc.—the most commonplace imagery the Bard gars look almaist as well as new by the introduction of Benvoirlich, Vam Var ….
Coleridge produced his own cogent parody:
How should the poet e’er give o’er
With his eye fix’d on Cambus-More—
Need reins be tightened in Despair
When rose Benledi’s ridge in air
Tho’ not one image grace the Heath,
It gains such charm from flooded Teith—
Besides you need not travel far
To reach the Lake of Vennachar—
Or ponder refuge from your Toil
By far Lochard or Aberfoil.
He ended his ‘recipe’ with ‘Item—the Poet not only may but must mix all dialects of all ages and all styles’.
There was perhaps something of envy in Coleridge’s reaction to Scott’s immense popularity, which he saw as another instance of the desire for facility and refusal to think which affected periodical literature, and induced him to make the style of The Friend so perversely complex: in places Scott’s poems and novels, he said, ‘supply both instance and solution of the present conditions and components of popularity, viz., to amuse without requiring any effort of thought, and without exciting any deep emotion’. This was not just: Scott was a voluminous writer and wrote many meretricious and ephemeral tales, but his great novels show a sense of history which is both profound and as practical and particular as Coleridge could have desired.
Wordsworth himself was capable of banal medievalizing and romantic rubbish; although, as with the simpler lyrical ballads, one has the sense that he envisaged some more basic human drama even where he drops off into apparent overdone sentiment. He was quite shrewd about Scott’s novels, predicting accurately that they were ‘likely to be much overrated on their first appearance and will afterwards be as much undervalued’. He also neatly picked out a real fault in Scott’s presentation—the fact that his pictures of life did not rise and fade unostentatiously but were ‘fixed upon an easel for the express purpose of being admired’. He liked Scott’s accurate delineation of Highland manners but felt he had not enough humour to do creditable caricatures, and merely made his characters ‘too peculiar and outŕe’. Dorothy was a careful reader of novels and a severe critic of them. She admired Richardson’s masterpiece the voluminous Clarissa, and complimented Mrs Clarkson on one of her husband’s books by saying ‘Clarissa Harlowe was not more interesting when I first read it at 14 years of age’. She describes Mary reading the second volume of a novel The Recluse of Norway by one of the celebrated lady novelists, the sisters Anna Maria and Jane Porter, in which she found ‘a wonderful cleverness … notwithstanding the badness of the style’. But Dorothy objected to love in novels: ‘When love begins almost all novels grow tiresome. The first volume has not a word of it.’ She condemned Scott for the same reasons. In Waverley she found the hero completely unsympathetic and ‘all the Scotch Characters outrageously masked by peculiarities … and as usual the love is sickening’. This is not just Dorothy being spinsterish: in Scott’s novels the romantic passion often is sickening, whatever the political tensions.
Coleridge was observant enough to notice the qualities of William Blake’s work, about which he wrote with enthusiasm and wit:
I have this morning been reading a strange publication—viz. Poems with very wild and interesting pictures, as the swathing, etched (I suppose) but it is said—printed and painted by the Author, W. Blake. He is a man of Genius—and I apprehend, a Swedenborgian—certainly, a mystic emphatically. You perhaps smile at my calling another Poet, a Mystic; but verily I am in the very mire of commonplace common-sense compared with Mr Blake ….
He was also a decisive critic of Blake’s pictures, disliking the ‘title page and following emblem’ of Songs of Innocence which had ‘as few beauties as could be in the compositions of a man who was capable of such faults and such beauties’. He referred perceptively to Blake’s ‘despotism in symbols’ and criticized his
irregular unmodified Lines of the Inanimate, sometimes as the effect of rigidity and sometimes of exossation—like a wet tendon. So likewise the ambiguity of the Drapery. Is it a garment—or the body incised and scored out? The Limpness (c the effect of Venigar on an egg) in the upper one of the two prostrate figures in the Title page, and the eye-likeness of the twig posteriorly on the second—and the strait line down the waistcoat of pinky gold-beater’s skin in the next drawing, with the I don’t know whatness of the countenance, as if the mouth had been formed by the habit of placing the tongue, not contemptuously, but stupidly between the lower gums and the lower jaw—these are the only repulsive faults I have noticed.
The poets’ friendship with Southey has already been described. He wrote on Coleridge’s death: ‘Forty years have elapsed since our first meeting—and one consequence of that meeting has been that I have resided during the last thirty in this place, whither I first came with no other intention than that of visiting him’. Southey seems to have been in many ways an admirable man—industrious both as a writer and in his attempts to move public opinion on behalf of the poor. He was a bibliophile with a vast collection of books, and wrote on an immense variety of subjects. He wrote several large epics, and excellent Lives of Nelson, Wesley and Cowper, an erudite History of Brazil and a History of the Peninsular War as well as editing various medieval works, including Malory, and translating from the Spanish. He became Poet Laureate in 1813 after Scott had refused an offer of the post, and was succeeded by Wordsworth, who would not accept it until Sir Robert Peel assured him that it carried with it no obligation to write poems in celebration of public events—Southey was distressed at failing to produce a poem for Queen Victoria’s coronation. Southey died of brain damage from overwork, having had no capacity to recognize or remember people for some time before his death. Coleridge, writing to Godwin to comfort him for Southey’s unfavourable review of Godwin’s Life of Chaucer in 1803, summed up his views of the man—and the reviewer—after his own period of hero-worship was over. Personal distress dictated some of his later judgments of Southey, who supported his own wife and children when he could not, but (besides the initial fatal encouragement of Coleridge’s marriage) had the coldness of heart to write his contemptuous review of The Ancient Mariner ‘with Hartley playing in the same room with him’. Coleridge disliked Southey’s reviewing. Reviewing, he said, brought out even in the best minds ‘presumption, petulance, and callousness to personal feelings, and a disposition to treat the reputations of their Contemporaries as playthings placed at their own disposal’. Reviewing, he said flatly, was immoral, ‘injurious in its effects on the public Taste and Morality, and still more injurious in its influences on the Head and Heart of the Reviewer himself’. But his summing-up of the high-handed disregard for feelings that Southey’s undoubted rectitude could take is a masterly piece of psychology. ‘I have learnt,’ he told Godwin, ‘how difficult it is for a man who has from earliest Childhood preserved himself immaculate from all the common faults and weaknesses of human nature, and who never creating any small disquietudes has lived in constant and general esteem and honor, to feel remorse or admit that he has done wrong. Believe me, there is a bluntness of Conscience superinduced by a very unusual Infrequency as well as by the Habit and Frequency, of wrong Actions.’
There seems to have been something protective and irritated together in the feelings of the Wordsworths, Coleridge and Lamb about Godwin, once the first flush of wild enthusiasm had left them. Godwin was in some ways a tragic figure. He did not believe in marriage but married Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 for the birth of their child Mary, who later became Shelley’s second wife. He seems to have been made happy and humanized by this relationship, but Mary Wollstonecraft died at the birth of her daughter and his second wife, Mrs Clairmont (whose daughter by a former marriage bore a daughter to Byron), was not nearly so congenial. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s letters suggest he was prickly-tempered: both apologize more than once for not calling on him as immediately as he expected, and Coleridge once got drunk and attacked Godwin in front of his wife, for which he suffered agonies of slightly comic remorse for days afterwards. Lamb’s biographer, Serjeant Talfourd of the Copyright Bill, described Godwin as monumentally calm and unshockable: he sat at the performance of his tragedy, Antonio orthe Soldier’s Return, which failed hopelessly, applauding the sense of the audience who would applaud when the proper season arrived—at last he admitted ‘that the audience seemed rather patient than interested, but did not lose his confidence till the tumult arose, and then he submitted with quiet dignity to the fate of genius’. In later life, in desperate financial straits, the Godwins ran a shop in Skinner Street which sold ‘the prettiest and wisest books for children issued’ and had a reputation for shamelessly and calmly borrowing money from friends to keep the business going. Talfourd wrote of his usual appearance:
No one would have expected the author of these wild theories which startled the wise and shocked the prudent, in the calm, gentlemanly person who rarely said anything above the most gentle common-place, and took interest in little beyond the whist-table. His peculiar opinions were entirely subservient to his love of letters. He thought any man who had written a book had attained a superiority over his fellows which placed him in another class, and could scarcely understand other distinctions.
He seems, perhaps for this reason, a curiously remote and unfinished human being, whose major quality is an engaging innocence, accompanied, as it so often is, by general benevolence and mild private egotism.
Much the most attractive of their friends was Charles Lamb, who objected to being described as ‘my gentle-hearted Charles’ in Coleridge’s This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison. He does seem to have been almost entirely without malice, and the circumstances of his life forced him into a persistent goodness of heart which was very nearly saintly. He was at Christ’s Hospital with Coleridge and in early youth clearly worshipped him. In 1796 he had an attack of insanity and was confined to a madhouse for six weeks, and wrote to Coleridge after the event in a vein that suggested it was Coleridge’s letters which ‘roused me from my lethargy and made me conscious of existence’. His madness he said gave him ‘many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so.’ His respectable brother clearly felt Coleridge to be in some way responsible for this fit of mania, deprecated ‘you and your damned foolish sensibility and melancholy’, and Lamb guiltily burned most of his dangerous ‘literature’ and his own poems, his book of extracts from Beaumont and Fletcher and, almost, all Coleridge’s letters.
It was not, however, Lamb’s insanity which finally caused the trouble. In 1796 his sister Mary, in an attack of madness, knifed and killed her mother. At the inquest the jury, of course, brought in the verdict—‘Lunacy’.
Mary was confined in an asylum but released on Charles’s assurance that he would personally be responsible for her safekeeping. Throughout the rest of his life he cared for her devotedly, taking her back at intervals to the asylum when she told him she could feel the madness returning—they kept a strait-jacket with them. Together they wrote the famous Tales from Shakespeare which, with Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses, made available to children the great imaginative stories they believed so strongly should be part of their education. This meant that he was unable to marry, though he did once propose to a beautiful actress. He took to drink and smoking, and described his excesses with rueful charm. In 1798 he refused an invitation to stay with Coleridge because ‘you have a power of exciting interest, of leading all hearts captive, too forcible to admit of Mary’s being with you. I consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness. I think you would almost make her dance within an inch of the precipice: she must be with duller fancies, and cooler intellects.’ Indeed, Coleridge’s distress over the quarrel with Wordsworth—over which Lamb behaved with generosity and tact—did bring on an attack of Mary’s madness.
In 1800 Lamb was again appealing to Coleridge as a close and understanding friend when his old servant died and Mary was made ill again. The simplicity of his pain is a powerful contrast to his jocular, self-deprecating public style:
My dear Coleridge—I don’t know why I write, except from the propensity misery has to tell her griefs …. I am left alone in a house with nothing but Hetty’s dead body to keep me company. Tomorrow I bury her, and then I shall be quite alone, with nothing but a cat, to remind me that the house has been full of living beings like myself. My heart is quite sunk, and I don’t know where to look for relief. Mary will get better again, but her constantly being liable to such relapses is dreadful; nor is it the least of our evils that her case and all our story is so well known around us. We are in a manner marked. Excuse my troubling you but I have nobody by me to speak to me. I slept out last night, not being able to endure the change and the stillness; but I did not sleep well and I must come back to my own bed. I am going to try and get a friend to come and be with me tomorrow. I am completely ship-wrecked. My head is quite bad. I almost wish that Mary were dead.
This is another side of the man who wrote, more in the style of Elia, to Southey:
I am going to stand godfather; I don’t like the business; I cannot muster up decorum for these occasions; I shall certainly disgrace the font. I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral. Yet I cannot read about these ceremonies with pious and proper feelings. The realities of life only seem the mockeries.
It was the serious side of Lamb which objected to the ‘gentle-hearted’ in This Lime-Tree Bower: because he admired Coleridge so much, it was necessary for him to keep a proper distance and preserve his own identity. He was one of the shrewdest and best critics of Coleridge’s work in his life-time, and understood the import of The Ancient Mariner and the wrong-headedness of Wordsworth’s apology for it. On receiving the volume containing This Lime-Tree Bower he wrote:
For God’s sake (I never was more serious) don’t make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses. It did well enough five years ago when I came to see you and was moral cox-comb enough at the time you wrote the lines, to feed upon such epithets; but besides that the meaning of ‘gentle’ is equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited; the very quality of gentleness is abhorent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is long since vanished. I hope my virtues have done sucking. I can scarce think but you meant it in joke.
It seems likely that Lamb, whose public persona was mildly gentle-hearted, resented Coleridge seeing him in that way with all the ferocity with which one does resent imperceptive half-truths from friends. He himself liked to mock Coleridge in public, and in one of Elia’s essays on borrowing he castigated ‘Comberbatch, matchless in his depredations’ for taking people’s books on the theory that they should be the property of the people who could best understand and appreciate them. ‘Should he go on acting upon this theory, which of our shelves is safe?’ Coleridge, sensitive about his book-borrowing, was indignant about this. It is difficult not to see Lamb’s relationship with Coleridge, too, in the passage where he declared ‘I would not be domesticated all my days with a person of very superior capacity to my own’ not out of jealousy, but because ‘too frequent doses of original thinking from others restrain what lesser portion of that faculty you may possess of your own. You get entangled in another man’s mind even as you lose yourself in another man’s grounds …. The constant operation of such potent agency would reduce me, I am convinced, to imbecility. You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mold in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.’
And Lamb kept his independence and his lifelong friendship with both Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth dedicated The Waggoner to him, but there was a bad time when Lamb criticized The White Doe before publication, on the grounds that ‘the principal characters do nothing’. Wordsworth, who had intended to present a spiritual state, not a drama, was infuriated by this, although it is arguable that in fact the poem does fail because as a tale it is not fully realized, and therefore the response to the spiritual truths is confused. Wordsworth wrote most unpleasantly to Coleridge ‘Let Lamb learn to be ashamed of himself in not taking some pleasure in the contemplation of this picture, which supposing it to be even but a sketch, is yet sufficiently made out for any man of true power to finish it for himself …. Of one thing be assured, that Lamb has not a reasoning mind, therefore cannot have a comprehensive mind, and, least of all, has he an imaginative one.’
Lamb died in the same year as Coleridge, by whose death he was deeply affected. Wordsworth wrote an epitaph for him of which only three lines appeared on his tombstone—Mary Lamb disliked Wordsworth’s veiled references to the family troubles and to Lamb’s employment as a clerk in the India Office—but Wordsworth published a much longer version elaborating on Lamb’s care for this sister, a subject that moved him in Dorothy’s state of collapse, despite Crabb Robinson’s belief that it should not be published in Mary Lamb’s life-time.
Hazlitt was a friend of Lamb’s and in the early days of the other poets: his essay My First Acquaintance with Poets, in which he described his first meeting with Coleridge and subsequently with Wordsworth, is amusing and illuminating. His physical descriptions of the poets were good: Wordsworth ‘gaunt and Don Quixote-like’ with ‘an intense high narrow forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose and feeling and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth a good deal at variance with the solemn stately expression of the rest of his face’. He described their intonation when reading as ‘a chaunt which acts as a spell upon the hearer and disarms the judgement’. His descriptions of Coleridge show signs of a mixture of malice and disappointed hero-worship. Coleridge’s walk, shifting from one side of the footpath to the other ‘struck me as an odd movement; but I did not at that time connect it with any instability of purpose or involuntary change of principle as I have done since.’ His comments on Coleridge’s nose were ruder: ‘The rudder of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing—like what he has done.’ But his tribute to Coleridge’s effect on his life says much of him as well as of Coleridge:
I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, lifeless …. My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the prison house of this rude clay, has never found nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and ‘brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge.
Hazlitt meant to be a genius and for a long time tried to be a genius at painting, in the manner of Titian. His earliest published work, an Essay on the Principles of Human Action, was a philosophical refutation of Hobbes’s contention that the spring of all our actions is self-love. He believed that sympathetic identification with others—imagination—was a necessary and inevitable function of the human mind. But he was driven to rapid journalism as a means of subsistence, and this, some kind of personal incapacity for friendship, and sexual troubles soured him. His marriages were not happy; the first ended in divorce, and his Liber Amoris, published in 1823, is the record of a desperate and miserable love affair with a young girl at an inn. When he was visiting Southey and Coleridge at Grasmere in 1804 he had to leave secretly at night, in Coleridge’s shoes, over the mountains because the farmers of the neighbourhood were chasing him on horseback for ‘some gross attacks on women’, one of which, Wordsworth reported, included his spanking a girl who ‘refused to gratify his abominable and devilish propensities’. Coleridge later believed that shame over his indebtedness to them over this episode prompted his viciousness as a reviewer, which is in part likely. Lamb describes him plunged in some private gloom when taken to see two very pretty girls: ‘They neither laughed nor sneered, nor giggled, nor whispered—but they were young girls—and he sat and frowned blacker and blacker, indignant that there should be such a thing as youth and beauty, till he tore me away before supper, in perfect misery, and owned he could not bear young girls; they drove him mad.’
The sourness was very real. His review of The Statesman’s Manual published before the book asserted that Coleridge only believed things against reason. ‘Truth is to him a ceaseless round of contradictions: he lives in the belief of a perpetual lie, and in affecting to think what he pretends to say … He would have done better if he had known less. His imagination thus becomes metaphysical, his metaphysics fantastical, his wit heavy, his arguments light, his poetry prose, his prose poetry, his politics turned—but not to account.’ Exaggerated partial truths are always the most damaging abuse. Wordsworth declared grandly that Hazlitt was ‘not a proper person to be admitted into respectable society, being the most perverse and malevolent Creature that ill luck has ever thrown in my way’.
But to the young Keats, who possessed his Essay on the Principles of Human Action and attended his lectures on the English Poets, Hazlitt’s mind was one of the three great things to be thankful for in his time. It was from Hazlitt, Walter Jackson Bate argues, that Keats learned about Shakespeare’s ‘Negative Capability’: Hazlitt who said that Shakespeare was ‘the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become.’ It was this ideal of the poet that Keats set so magnificently against ‘the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’, and Walter Jackson Bate points out with great insight that Hazlitt was more perceptive than any other English critic about the growing subjective and personal emphasis in the arts which was alienating the arts from society. Some of his strictures on Wordsworth were of ‘what he feels to be an obtrusion of the poet’s personal feelings, interests, defenses, and the danger of losing that “high and permanent interest beyond ourselves” to which arts should aim’.
Thomas De Quincey was another who began by passionate admiration and ended by attacking. As a young man he made an anonymous gift of money to Coleridge. He made friends with the Wordsworths and rented the Town End cottage to be near them: he was helpful with Wordsworth’s proofs and charming to the children. He was estranged from the Wordsworths when he took to opium in heavy doses and took a local ‘statesman’s’ daughter, Margaret Sympson, as his mistress, whom he married after she bore him a child. The Wordsworths were unpleasant as much because of Margaret’s low social standing as because of the illicit affair, and De Quincey did not forgive them. He was a strange, brilliant, dilatory man, a loved and loving husband and father, now chiefly remembered for his glamorous and horrific descriptions of the effects of opium and opium dreams. His interest in the effect of his own childhood experiences—‘the deep, deep tragedies of infancy that lurk to the last’—on his creative powers and adult admiration illuminates, in another luridly lit world, that of Wordsworth. His interest in the creative power and the insights of opium dreams illuminates Coleridge and Kubla Khan, that ‘involute’ of dream imagery (De Quincey’s word). His oriental dreams of unimaginable horror and mythological torture relate to The Ancient Mariner. His descriptions of his opium indolence are very much akin to Coleridge’s:
The opium eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations; he wishes and longs as earnestly as ever to realize what he believes to be possible and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt. He lies under the weight of incubus and nightmare; he lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease who is compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his tenderest love ….
His essays on Coleridge and Opium and Coleridge’s plagiarisms, and his Recollections of the Lake Poets are lively and fascinating but, as mentioned earlier, bear traces of malice and exaggeration: critics, particularly of Coleridge, have shown a strange propensity to believe De Quincey’s opium-laden fantastic reports about Coleridge’s fantasies and evasions rather than Coleridge himself.
Wordsworth could find few good words for the glamorous and successful Lord Byron. ‘Let me only say one word upon Lord B. The man is insane; and will probably end his career in a madhouse. I never thought him anything else since his first appearance in public. The verses on his private affairs excite in me less indignation than pity. The latter copy is the Billingsgate of Bedlam,’ he wrote to John Scott, the ill-fated editor of The London Magazine in 1816, and went on in the same vein for another paragraph. And later he was suggesting to Gifford, the editor of The Quarterly
that every true Englishman disallows the pretensions of The Review to the character of a faithful defender of the institutions of the country while it leaves that infamous publication, Don Juan, unbranded. I do not mean by a formal critique, for it is not worth it—it would also tend to keep it in memory—but by some decisive words of reprobation, both as to the damnable tendency of such works, and as to the despicable quality of the powers requisite for their production ….
What avails it to hunt down Shelley and leave Byron untouched?
He did once meet Byron at a London dinner party, where he is said to have ‘tried to talk his best and talked too much’. And Byron, though on that occasion he said Wordsworth inspired him with ‘reverence’, attacked him violently for his ‘drowsy, frowzy poem called the Excursion’, and for his politics, in Don Juan.
Byron’s relationship with Coleridge was happier. He helped Coleridge to find a publisher for his poems, and encouraged him to write another tragedy for Drury Lane. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of Coleridge in the matter of the unpublished Christabel, whose metre had been plagiarized by Scott in the Lay of the Last Minstrel and used by Wordsworth in The White Doe, which was printed originally with an acknowledgment to Christabel, later omitted, to Coleridge’s distress. It was after Byron’s publication of the priority of Christabel that Scott belatedly acknowledged his indebtedness: Byron spoke of it as ‘that wild and singularly original and beautiful poem’, and his enthusiasm was a great encouragement to Coleridge at that time. Byron also sent Coleridge £ 100, although, he said, he himself ‘could not command 150 in the world’ when he heard that Coleridge ‘in great distress’ had applied to the Literary Fund for help. The two poets met once only—when Coleridge recited Kubla Khan and said of Byron that ‘He has the sweetest Countenance that I ever beheld—his eyes are really Portals of the Sun, things for Light to go in and out of’. He asked Byron for a signed copy of his poems, to be left to his children.
Both poets met the young Keats, and both outlived him. Keats records his walk with Coleridge across Hampstead Heath for two miles—which Coleridge, since he clearly did most of the talking, remembered as lasting ‘a minute or so’—the conversation covering ‘Nightingales, Poetry—on Poetical sensation—Metaphysics—different genera and species of Dreams—Nightmare—a dream accompanied by a sense of touch—single and double touch—A dream related—First and second consciousness—the difference explained between will and Volition …. Monsters—the Kraken—Mermaids—southey believes in them—southey’s belief too much diluted—A Ghost story—Good morning—I heard his voice as he came towards me—I heard it as he moved away—I had heard it all the interval—if it may be called so.’ The subjects are deeply part of the poetry of both poets, and Coleridge is seen for an immortal moment almost like the nightingale itself talking in a timeless interval to the perfectly receptive audience.
Wordsworth’s impression on Keats was less fortunate: Keats was amused and annoyed at being told by Mrs Wordsworth ‘Mr Wordsworth is never interrupted’. But one of their meetings, too, achieved immortality of a different kind—at Haydon’s ‘immortal dinner’ in his painting room with his huge painting ‘Christ’s entry into Jerusalem’ (in which Wordsworth appears) ‘towering up behind us as a background’. Lamb got drunk and merry, and mocked the Comptroller of Stamps—but Haydon’s description of the party is marvellously memorable:
Wordsworth’s fine intonation as he quoted Milton and Virgil, Keat’s eager inspired look, Lamb’s quaint sparkle of lambent humour, so speeded the stream of conversation that in my life I never passed a more delightful time. All our fun was within bounds. Not a word passed that an apostle might not have listened to. It was a night worthy of the Elizabethan age, and my solemn ‘Jerusalem’ flashing up by the flame of the fire, with Christ hanging over us like a vision, all made a picture which will long glow up on
that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude
Keats made Ritchie promise he would carry his ‘Endymion’ to the great desert Sahara and fling it in the midst. Poor Ritchie went to Africa and died, as Lamb foresaw, in 1819. Keats died in 1821, at Rome. C. Lamb is gone, joking to the last. Monkhouse is dead, and Wordsworth and I are the only two now living [1841] of that glorious party.