Mrs. S. T. Coleridge
OPPOSITE the portrait of Mrs. Coleridge which reappears as frontispiece to this volume, a cut of a large bear with a malicious eye and a staff in his paws seizes the attention—an emblematic animal. It is only because Mrs. Coleridge is described as a Minnow that one feels she is safe in such neigh- bourhood—and possibly, though the minnow is one of the prettiest fishes below the sluices, even that safety is not a happy one. Of course, among the grandees of thought and poetry from Wordsworth to Hartley Coleridge, Mrs. Coleridge was no intellectual champion ; and of course she could not keep S. T. Coleridge with her for many years. But let us shun the bear, and even forget the minnow ; then these letters may be enjoyed as an old-fashioned account of family occurrences with some matters of permanent importance. I shall go so far as to say that if among one's correspondents nowadays one had half a dozen so plainly informative as Mrs. Coleridge the postman's knock would be more welcome.
So far as these letters—which Mr. Potter found no further away than the British Museum—relate to S. T. Coleridge, they are remarkable for their tone of patience and self-restraint. The earliest belongs to the year 1799 ; Mrs. Coleridge is alone with her dead child Berkeley, and not unnaturally she wishes S. T. C. were with her. His absence continues. " I am weary," she says, " of this long long absence." Then there is a gulf in the correspondence, as it is printed, until 1807, when she is still puzzled by her husband's absenteeism. In 1810 :
" S. T. C. has been here the last four or five months . . . Poor Man !—I have not the least doubt but he is the most unhappy of the two ; and the reason is too obvious to need any explanation.— It must, however, be confessed, he has been in almost uniform kind disposition towards us all during his residence here."
After this, Mrs. Coleridge settled down with considerable success to her isolation—a position which at the period implied more of social discomfort than it would nowadays. She heard little more of Coleridge, in general, than any other acquaintance, but in 1832 he is still " my poor S. T. C."
Mrs. Coleridge's views were simple : her husband was embarrassed by " eccentricity " in meeting a world of con- vention and efficiency. As time went on, she had a second great example in her life of the same unsuitable originality. She could do nothing about it ; and yet she was the mother of that breeze-like wanderer Hartley, who caused not only her but Mr. Wordsworth too such early apprehension. Her amusingly (or pathetically) detached observations on Hartley's peculiarities are worth finding. His biographers, I believe, have not used them all, but the best passage (1815) has pre- viously been in print :
" One thing I have warned him against, that of flying about in the open air, and uttering his poetic fancies aloud : this he con- stantly does, when the fit is on him, whether it rain or shine, whether it be dark or light, and when we are sitting in the Parlour with the Curtains drawn, between the whistling of the wind, we hear him whizzing by, and sometimes his Uncle [Southey] calls out to him ' whither so fast Endymion ? ' alluding to his visits at Rydal-hall to Lady Diana Flemming, who is an old lady, about whom poor H. cannot endure to be teized."
Even Derwent Coleridge, who in the end achieved a large measure of sober security, and became the first Principal of St. Mark's College, Chelsea, once caused his mother some admiring concern. " He is full as romantic, and abstracted as ever his poor father was at his age." She writes of the Coleridgean tendency with a certain pride, overshaded by her sense of common needs and business. " I have not heard from Derwent a very long time ; he was far from well when he last wrote ; had been writing a few poems, which by the way he would not let me see because, forsooth, I had dissuaded him, while at Cambridge, from indulging that luxury, and had not praised his productions." Mrs. Coleridge liked Southey's poetry better than her husband's ; but it is un- likely that the reason for that lay in her husband's excluding her from his verse. Mr. Potter includes a facsimile of part of " Lewti," in which perhaps Sara had been the original unkind " Circassian." But one would not apply that to Mrs. Cole- ridge's judgements on other writings. Her disapproval of Coleridge's publishing " Christabel " and what she calls " Koula-Khan " was probably involved with a fear that they were only opium dreams.
Mr. Potter has once more shown himself a spirited editor of Coleridgeana. In his Introduction, he discusses the separation of Coleridge and his wife, using many sources of fact and opinion. In the order of the Letters, the present No. 29 should precede 28 and indeed 27, receiving the date 1824
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