MEMORIALS OF COLEORTON.*
THESE two interesting volumes give us the best possible materials for the delineation of a group of friends who have exerted a better influence over the spiritual as well as the literary life of England during the present century than any other group we could name. Sir George and Lady Beaumont, to whom almost all these letters were addressed, are not, indeed, the writers of any of them, and we can judge only by what Coleridge, and the Wordsworths, and Southey, and Sir Walter Scott wrote to them and of them, as to what they were. But if one heard habitually the conversation addressed to a man by a good many different speakers, without being able to hear his- replies, one would have a very distinct idea of his character; and so it is in this correspondence. Sir George and Lady Beaumont are always addressed in a tone which gives the im- pression that it was a pleasure to write to them, and yet that it was impossible to write to them otherwise than deferentially ; that when a favour was asked, the request would be received cordially, and yet without the esker feeling any perfect certainty as to how it would be answered ; and farther, that what the recipients of the letters would best appreciate was perfect independence in the. writer, though only the kind of independence which is consistent with a certain tenderness and delicacy of feeling. Whether it is Coleridge with his impulsive self-reproaches, or Words- worth with his sturdy self-respect, or Dorothy Wordsworth with her fresh and gentle gratitude, or Southey with his somewhat formal and businesslike piety, or Sir Walter Scott with his frank and easy courtesy, who writes, the reader has always the same feeling that those who are addressed are regarded with a certain respectful admiration, as the centre of a world of pure and almost stately beauty, with. which familiarity was impossible, though those who lived in it inspired the most heartfelt gratitude and confidence. Sir George was not only a good artist dud patron of Art, but one who, loved poetry, purity, and simplicity as the very soul of beauty ;. and his wife was evidently, in this respect, the very reflection of himself. There is something very pathetic in the way-in which poor Coleridge, even at times when Wordsworth seems to have found the utmost difficulty in getting any reply at all out of him, used to pour forth his woes to Sir George and Lady Beaumont with, apparently, a kind of feeling that they were impersonations of sympathy and pity who could not help giving him strength if. they wrote at all. Observe how, in the following letter for example, he confides to Sir George first one of those ambitions literary dreams which he never went near to executing, and next,, the amiable weakness which so often interfered with his execution. of his own projects:— "In explaining what I shall do with Shakespeare, I explain the nature of the other five [projects]. Each scene of each play I read as if it were the whole of Shakespeare's works—the sole thing extant. I' ask myself what are the characteristics, the diction, the cadences, and metre, the character, the passion, the moral or metaphysical inherencies and fitness for theattic effect, and in what sort of theatres. All these I write down with great care and precision of thought and language (and when I have gone through the whole, I' then shall collect my paper'', and observe how often such and such expressione recur), and thus shall not only know what the charac.. teristics of Shakespeare's plays are, bat likewise what proportion they bear to each other. Then, not carelessly, though of mime with far less care, I shall read through thu old plays, just before Shake- speare's time, Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, Ben J01111013, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Messinger in the same way ; so as to see, and to- be able to prove, what of Shakespeare belonged to his age, and wag common to all the first-rate men of that true saeculum aureum of English poetry, and what is his own, and his only. Thus I shall both- exhibit the characteristics of the plays and of the mind of Shake- speare, and a philosophical analysis and jtultification of almost every character, at greater or less length, in the spirit of that analysis of the character of Hamlet, with which you were much pleased, and by being so, I solemnly assure, gave me heart and hope, and did me much good. For ranch as I loathe flattery from the bottom of my very stomach, and much as I wriggle under the barthen and discomfort of the praise of people, for whose heads, hearts, and specific competence I have small respect, yet I own myself no self.
• Memorials of Coleorto n being Letters from Coleridge, Wordsworth and his Sinter, Southey, and Sm. Walter Scott, to Sir George and Lady Beaumont, of Coleorton. Leicestershire, 18054831. Edited, with Introduction and Dam, by William Knight. Edinburgh; David Dollen. mbsisting mind. I know, I feel, that I am weak, apt to faint away, itwardly self.deserted, and bereft of the confidence in my own yowers; and that the approbation and sympathy of good and intelli- gent men is my sea-breeze, without which I should languish from morn to evening,—a very trade-wind to me, in which my bark drives ID regularly and lightly. An author of some celebrity, and more notoriety, was with me all yesterday, and inflicted on me five acts of it tragedy, and all to.day, with aching spirit, I am to be employed in pencil-marking its thousand flatnesses and incongruities of diction and sentiment, in addition to a conversation of two home yesterday, in which I persuaded him to many essential alterations; and yet, do all lean, I could as easily pray Caligula or (within a month after his arrival in England) Bnonaparte out of purgatory as help this poor devil of a tragedy out of absolute damnation. It will die the death of a red-hot poker in water—all one hiss. But what can a decently good.natured man say to a brother bard who tells you that it is of importance to his happiness and pecuniary circumstances ?"
Coleridge's letters are far the most striking in these volumes. They give the notion of how childlike, how humorous, and how loveable he was,—at least, as a correspondent, —in spite of his somewhat inflated dreams, and this at the time when his wisest friends found him most unmanageable. Even the grandiosity of his projects, though it provokes a smile, is painted with so much self-distrust and such a penitent air,— there is no obvious a sob in the style of many of the letters,—that it is impossible not to like Coleridge better even for the letters written in the extremity of his weakness. There is not much, for example, except character in the following short letter; but character there is, character both attractive and the reverse, for we seem to read in it that tendency of feeling to overflow the bounds prescribed by a manly reticence, which we must ascribe to Coleridge's want of self-restraint and the habits to which that want of self-restraint led. Yet, in spite of this inflatedness of grateful and affectionate feeling, how taking such a letter as the following must have been to those who received it !—
" COLERIDGE to SIR GEO% c and LADY BEAUMONT.—[No date.] "My dear and honoured Ft iends,—Having left this house, I shall have small heart to return hither merely to leave it again. It will not be easy for me to forget the sudden and impetuous transition of feeling which I experienced last night, when, having bade you good-night- almost our last words a mirthful story—I opened the second green door, and when I was at length left alone in my bedroom—oh dear and heart-honoured Sir George and Lady Beanmont!—I eat by the fire, a world of confused images of Keswick, Danmow, London, passing before my very eyes, till the waters dropped from them, and the walls of the room brought me back to more serious, and deeper, oh far deeper, emotion. I knelt and prayed for you. May Almighty
God preserve and bless you- If I did not in my heart's heart feel toward you, dear Sir George and dear Lady Beaumont, even as though
'We had been rear'd upon the selfsame hills, Fed the same seeks by fountains, shades, and rills,'
I should find in the consciousness of your affectionate and zealous esteem of me, a bartlaen which my spirit coald not support. Wherever I am, and whatever, yet sick or well, on this or on the other side of the world of waters, yet be it my faith, that—alike on this or on the other side of the grave—I shall remain, dear friends, with grati- tude, esteem, and with many affections blended in one, year friend,— " S. T. COLERIDGE."
Wordsworth's letters are much less remarkable. The letter to Lady Beaumont in which he rebukes all and sundry who did not admire even his poorest sonnet, is not- new. A great part of it at least was published in Bishop Wordsworth's Life of the poet. The deep conviction Wordsworth evidently indulged that it was chiefly men's vices, or at least their pitiable frivolities, which kept them from admiring his poetry, receives some striking illustrations in his letters to Lady Beaumont ; but there are better things than these. His conceptions of the true way of laying out a winter.garden are full of artistic feeling, and show him at his best. And there are a few sentences written to Sir George Beaumont towards the end of the latter'e life, which con- centrate what he has to say as to the sources of his own faith in language so brief and simple, and yet so weighty, that they add anew depth to the picture which his poems have given us of the poet's character :— " Theologians may puzzle their heads about dogmas as they will, the religion of gratitude cannot mislead us. Of that we are sure, and gratitude is the handmaid to hope, and hope the harbinger of faith. I look abroad upon Nature, I think of the best part of ear Species, I lean upon my Friends, and I meditate upon the Scriptures, especially the Gospel of St. Sohn, and my creed rises up of itself with the ease of an exhalation, yet a fabric of adamant."
The picture which these volumes suggest to us gains much beauty from Dorothy Wordsworth's letters, or at least from some of them, in which we see, though hardly in as perfect a form as in her journal, the wonderful freshness and sunniness -of her delight in Nature. What a picture is this, for instance, of her vividness and freshness of feeling !—
" DOROTHY WORDSWORTH to LADY BEAUMONT. " Grasmere, Tuesday evening, .Tune 17th. "My dear Friend,—You will rejoice with us in my sister's safety, and the birth of a sou. There was something peculiarly affecting to us in the time and manner of this child's coming into the world. It WU like the very same thing over again which happened three years ago; for on the 18th of June, on such another morning, after such a clear and starlight night, the birds singing in the orchard in full assembly as on this 15th, the young swallows chirping in the self- same nest at the chamber window, the rose-trees rich with roses in the garden, the sun shining on the mountains, the air still and balmy, —on such a moreing was Johnny born, and all oar first feelings were revived at the birth of his brother two hours later in the day, and three days earlier in the mouth; and I fancied that I felt a double rushing-in of love for it, when I saw the child, as if I had both what had been the first-born infant John's share of love to give it, and its
own."
Or take this sentence, again, written from Coleorton, where Sir George and Lady Beaumont had left the Wordsworths established for a time in the house which they themselves were about to desert for the newly built mansion :—
"For more than a week we have had the most delightful weather. If William had bat waited a few days, it would have been no antici- pation when he said to you the 'songs of spring were in the grove,' for all this week the birds have chanted from morn till evening,— larks, blackbirds, thrashes, and far more than I can name ; and the busy rooks have joined their happy voices."
Sonthey's letters are not, on the whole, interesting. He is often too formal, sometimes too edifying, as when lie says,—we cannot imagine why,—that "a wicked man of genius is a monster in the moral world" (Vol. II., p. '207), which is just as true and no truer than that a wicked man of enormous physical strength is a monster in the moral world, or that a wicked man of learning, who can be wicked in seven languages, for example, is a monster in the moral world. Wickedness, if exceptional, is always monstrous, but it is not more monstrous when it implies the abuse of great gifts, than it is when it implies the abuse of petty gifts. We are not sure that there may not sometimes be more excuse for the former than the latter. But Southey liked to be conventional in his morality. The best of his letters is the one written to Lady Beaumont after Sir George's death. There is in that letter a depth of piety which quite breaks through the somewhat conventional tone which he usually assumes.
The book is, on the whole, a delightful one, and Professor Knight's preface, which is graceful, simple, and effective, gives us just such an introduction to the social circle of Sir George and Lady Beaumont as we desire. Were there no means of giving an engraving of Sir George and Lady Beaumont as frontispieces to these volumes? If it were possible, it would add greatly to the value of a new edition.
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