BOOKS.

MR. HALL CAINE'S " COLERIDGE."

BIOGRAPHY, save in one instance, has not been kind to the great authors and poets who made the earlier years of this century among the most famous in our literature. Lockhart's Scott is a life only second, if second, in value to Boswell's Johnson; but Wordsworth and Southey are not remembered in association with their biographies, and Coleridge, whom his friends regarded as the most wonderful of men, has received as yet no literary monu- ment of this sort worthy of his greatness. From numberless points of view it is possible to gain glimpses of this exquisite poet and matchless critic ; but that no adequate biography has been published is due, probably, to the difficulties of the subject, —to the natural shrinking which all Coleridge's admirers must feel, from bringing to the light the abject frailty of a man so great and 80 revered.

Perhaps the most noteworthy work recently published on the subject is Samuel Taylor Coleridge mid die englische Romantik, a monograph remarkable for insight, and for a knowledge of English literature in its byways as well as in its beaten paths. It is not necessary to agree with all Professor Brandrs con- clusions in order to thank him heartily for a volume which every reader interested in Coleridge will do well to consult. It is written in a clear and lively style, and we are glad to see that its readers will before long be largely increased by the issue of an English translation.

In England, two attempts have been made of late to represent the many-sided character of Coleridge in a vivid literary form. Three years ago, Mr. Traill published a monograph of the poet in "English Men of Letters ;" and now Mr. Caine has performed a similar feat in the series of "Great Writers," edited by Pro- fessor Robertson. Of these two little volumes Mr. Traill's is, we think, the ablest, and Mr. Caine's the most entertaining. In the brief space allotted to the writers, it is impossible that either should he wholly satisfactory ; and in the latest of the two bio- graphies, the writer escapes much thought and toil by adhering as closely as possible to narrative.

Coleridge had one of the most illuminating and suggestive intellects this century has produced. In criticism, in philosophy, in theology, he saw into the life of things, and teaches others to see. Yet of his position as a critic and Christian philosopher, Mr. Caine says little or nothing. We do not quarrel with his monograph on this account, thinking that Mr. Train's attempt to criticise all the phases of the poet's marvellous genius is a failure in point of judgment as well as too concise to be of much value. Enough that Mr. Caine strives, and in some measure succeeds in giving a just impression of Coleridge as a man. For an estimate of his genius, the reader e 14e of Samufl Taylor Coleridge. By Hall Cabe. London W. &oft.

will look elsewhere. We say "in some measure," because there are one or two points on which the writer seems to us to be entirely misleading. One of these is the relation in which Smithey stood to his friend. The writer's innuendoes—for they are little more—raise suspicion at the outset. There never was a man moreloyal to friendship than Southey; certainly there is mo man of letters of whom we have a record so generous and self-abnegating. The story of his relations to Coleridge—painful enough, we admit—does not contradict this statement. The feeling between the two men in the early days of their friend- ship was without a flaw; and the misunderstanding that occurred afterwards was healed before the autumn of 1803, when Southey became joint tenant with Coleridge of Greta Hall. With Wordsworth, Coleridge had been wandering in Scotland, and returned home ill,—not long, we believe, before Southey's arrival. Already, without the knowledge of his friend, he seems to have been experimenting with opium, the drug that was fated to destroy the happiness of his life. There was no cloud between the two poets at this time. "Coleridge and I," Southey wrote, "are the best companions possible in almost all moods of taint in all kinds of wisdom, and all kinds of nonsense, to the very heights and depths thereof ;" and fearing Coleridge's -death, he wrote to Taylor —" It vexes and grieves me to the heart, that when he is gone, as go he will, nobody will believe that a mind goes with him,—how infinitely and ten thousand- thousand-fold the mightiest of his generation." In the follow- ing spring (April, 1804), Southey wrote :—" Coleridge is gone for Malta, and his departure affects me more than I let be seen." He seems to have been seriously ill when he left, and his friend said that the tidings of his death would come upon him more dike a stroke of lightning than anything he had yet endured. And now we will quote a passage from Mr. Caine's narrative :—

"So they waited eagerly at Keswick for the first news that should give hint of an improved condition. A letter came saying that he was worse rather than better. Then after an interval, another letter described his official appointment. This intelligence mast have been of the nature of a baffling difficulty. How Coleridge could under- take the daties of a public office, and yet be as ill as he described, was more than wife and family could comprehend, at a distance of thousands of miles from the scene. At longer intervals, other letters were received, all unsatisfactory as to matters of fact, all indefinite as to ultimate intentions. At length there came the announcement that the secretaryship had been resigned. Wife, family, and friends were then looking oat for Coleridge's return. Probably he led them to expect it. But instead of returning, he went yet farther afield, and then, amid bewildering uncertainty, all correspondence was stopped. from Aagast, 1805, when he was on the point of leaving Malta, to May, 1806, Coleridge did not write one letter home."

Let the reader try to realise Southey's position through -these long months of anxiety, and under the same roof with the anxious, waiting wife looking to her brother-in-law for hope and sympathy. If he sometimes felt indignation, and expressed it strongly, can we wonder, believing as he did that Coleridge was wasting "unequalled powers," and neglecting every duty of a husband and a father. "If he does die," he wrote, " without -doing his work, it would half break my heart, for no human being has had more talents allotted." Yet after Coleridge had forsaken his wife and family for the greater part of eight years, leaving the care of them to his friend, Southey, knowing now the true cause of the estrangement, could still write :—"I see nothing so advisable for him, as that he should come here to

Greta Hall He knows in what manner he would be received :—by his children with joy ; by his wife, not with tears, if she can control them, certainly not with reproaches ; by myself only with encouragement." That Southey felt the burden thrown upon him by Coleridge, and would gladly have been freed from it, may be fully admitted. How, indeed, could it be otherwise? But Mr. Caine's sneer at "the dear brother-in-law " who had superseded Coleridge at Greta Hall, is wholly uncalled for, and although he has Herr Brandi on his side, he must excuse us for saying that he talks nonsense when he says that no man who came so near to Coleridge so painfully misunderstood him, and that "when the days of sorrow came, and the sufferer was silent as to the worst of his sufferings, the casual friend, made relative and honsemate, had no plummet wherewith to sound the deep places of the heart." It was surely no proof of incapacity to understand -Coleridge when Southey said that, while all other men he had known were mere children to him, yet all was "palsied by a total want of moral strength." In other words, and quite as strongly, Mr. Caine says the same thing.

Southey might have been a wealthy man had he pleaeed. Bat he loved literature better than money, and never until old age had he a year's income in advance. Was he put to expense by the Coleridge family P Miss Meteyard says he was, and Mr. Train is of the same opinion. Mr. Caine writes :—

"Greta Hall had been rented by Coleridge in 1800. Three years afterwards Southey joined him and shared the rent. In 1807 Southey undertook the whole of that part of the house which was not occu- pied by the landlord. From April, 1807, to January, 1810, Mrs. Coleridge and her children lodged with Southey, paying for their maintenance out of the permanent Wedgwood pension of 2150, every penny of which was appropriated to their sole use. Then, the land- lord being dead, Mrs. Coleridge took his sham of Greta Hall, mainly in order that her husband might have a home of his own to come to."

—and he refers to Southey as the "most hostile" authority for this statement. We turn to this authority, under the date the biographer mentions (April 17th, 1814), and read, in a letter addressed to Cottle :—

"The annuity to which your intended letter refers (2150) was given him [Coleridge] by the Wedgwoods. Thomas, by his will, settled his portion on Coleridge for his life. Josiah withdrew his about three years ago. The half still remaining amounts, when the Income-tax is deducted, to 267 10s. That sum Mrs. C. receives at preeent, and it is all which she receives for supporting hermit, her daughter, and the two boys at school—the boys' expenses amounting to the whole. No part of Coleridge's embarrassment arises from his wife and children,—exeept that he has insured his life for a thousand pounds, and pays the annual premium."

Now, if we admit that £150 a year was sufficient to support Mrs. Coleridge and her children up to 1811, will Mr. Caine in- form no how they managed to live after that period on an annuity that was absorbed by the boys' expenses, and whether they were not indebted for a home and maintenance to the "hostile" Southey?

Professor Brandi, whose unfavourable estimate of Southey's conduct to Coleridge would, we think, be removed or modified by larger knowledge, does not doubt that Mrs. Coleridge was partially supported by Southey, but adds :—" Doch war dies bei den victim Geschaften, die eie wegen der dauernden Krankheit seiner Frau im Hause verrichtete, keineswegs sin Almosen." For once this generally careful writer is seriously at fault. In 1811, as we have pointed out, half of the Wedgwood annuity was withdrawn, and from that year up to 1829, if we read the story correctly, the Coleridge family were largely indebted for their support to Southey. We are not sure that this was the case, though such conduct would be in accordance with the splendid generosity that was a part of his nature. But this at least is certain, that Mrs. Southey, through nearly all those years, was not only perfectly qualified to manage her household, but did, as her husband gratefully confesses, take every domestic burden off his hands. On her death in 1837, he wrote to Bed-

ford No man ever had a truer helpmate ! no children a more careful mother, no family was ever more wisely ordered, no housekeeping ever conducted with greater prudence or greater comfort. Everything was left to her management." For a few years before the end, Edith Southey's powers failed, but Mrs. Coleridge had left Greta Hall eight years prior to her sister's death, so that it is clear she never occupied the post assigned to her by Professor Brandi.

Coleridge described some one he knew as a weak-moralled man, "with whom the meaning to do a thing means nothing." This was a picture of himself during the years that he was a slave to opium. Mr. Caine thinks he was far less dependent even in those years than is generally supposed, and would fain make his readers believe that Coleridge was a diligent man, with a strong sense of duty. He draws a pitiful picture of this wonderful man of genius writing as a news- paper hack, and receiving irregular sums of money as his necessities required ; and we are told that, to nave 9s. a week, he walked home every night from the Strand to Hammersmith. Does any one believe that, apart from the "accursed drug," there was any reason for this slavery P He was in the prime of life, and could have commanded his own terms either as a writer or a lecturer ; but he had lost all freedom of will, and too often, when an intelligent and eager audi- ence gathered in Albemarle Street to hear a lecture from the poet, they received an excuse instead. Meanwhile, Coleridge, with the largest intellect in London, if not in the country, was asking for loans and receiving them, and spending, according to some reports, more money weekly upon opium than his wife possessed for family expenses. Mr. Caine's narrative is written with care, and the account of Coleridge's connec- tion with the Courier newspaper is told for the first time ; but we cannot always accept his statements, since at times they are more like the pleadings of a barrister than the jut-

partiality of a biographer. To show Southey's ignorance of Coleridge's life at this period, for example, he quotes him as saying that "Coleridge had sources of direct emolument open to him in the Courier and in the &heave [sic] Review." Southey may have been mistaken as to the Courier; but assuredly he was not mistaken when he wrote shortly afterwards,—the passage is not quoted by Mr. Caine :—" There are two reviews—the Quarterly and the Eclectic —in both of which he might have employment at ten guineas a sheet. As to the former, I could obtain it for him ; in the latter, they are urgently desirous of his assistance. He promises, and does nothing." Again, he does not surely contradict Southey's assertion that Coleridge was leaving his family to chance and charity, by saying that at this time he was paying his friend Morgan fifty shillings a week for board and lodging. Whether he ever did pay it, by the way, seems doubtful, for he writes of being five-and.twenty pounds in arrear.

One would wish to judge as gently as possible a great genius who has left so noble a legacy to his country ; bat Mr. Caine's method of animadverting wherever an opportunity occurs upon Southey's conduct towards his friend, provokes a reply. We think that method ill-considered and unjust, and could readily strengthen our objections to it; but enough, perhaps, has been said on a subject painful to every one who venerates the name of Coleridge.