servatism. It is a most skilful attempt to rest Church and State, in their British guise, on a high philosophic basis, by defining and connecting the essential 'Idea of each.' The process of justifying the existing fact by an appeal to eternal reason is familiar enough, but Hooker himself did not employ it more ably. Coleridge's analysis of the State, in its narrower sense, into the classes of the landowning nobility who furnish forth the Lords, and the mercantile, labouring, and professional ones, who constitute the Commons; with the sovereign as head, or rather as the beam of the balance'; and his recital (with suggestions of moderate reform) of the duties and privileges of each class;-this account leads at once to his vindication of the clergy, or what he calls the clerisy,' as a kind of co-equal fourth estate, of which the king is also head. This Church, together with the secular groups described, forms the State in its larger and comprehensive meaning. For his idea,' or ideal, Coleridge in effect goes back to the Middle Ages. The 'clerisy' have not merely to do with theology (the crown, indeed, of the sciences) and with worship; men's brains, as well as men's souls, are their affair, and almost their monopoly; they are the clerks, the learned class, the preservers of the treasures of the past, the bringers of light, the providers (and controllers) of education. They are to sustain the true historical feeling, the immortal life of the nation, generation linked to generation by faith, freedom, heraldry, and ancestral fame. His diatribe against the age is like one of Ruskin's or of Carlyle's; it is an age of mechanical improvement, of uppish empirical science, of talent without genius, of 'understanding' without 'reason,' of social misery and vice unfathomed and uncured, and of the Ouran Outang theology' instead of the first ten chapters of Genesis. All this chaos is due to the absence of a dynamic' and spiritual conception of the State and the Church in their vital relationship. Nothing can be remoter from the dominant thoughts of to-day, or more eloquently said. In Coleridge, then, better than in Wordsworth or Shelley, is seen how the new current of Continental thought reaches our shores, how our poetry and prose are affected by it, and what is meant by such a phrase as the 'Romantic philosophy." There is no such philosophy; there is a philosophical tendency; and this signifies a convergent impulse of creative art and of speculation, each acting on and colouring the other. The unexplained in human life; in the desires of the intellect, and in the thoughts of the heart'; in the mystery of the moral will, and in the forces that shape traditional creeds and polities -things that are not invented but grow; this is the novel sphere both of art and philosophy. Each works in its own way, one representing in plastic form, and the other attempting a methodical synthesis; but they both explore. The whole world of the senses, both in its moral and æsthetic aspect, is seen, as well as the world of ideas, in a new import. In the process, old schools are thrown over; both the philosophy whose last word is mechanical analysis, and the poetry that is abstract in tissue and logical in movement, distrusts the seen world, and is cold to the principle of beauty. Such changes go on for a while independently and fitfully, in all ages; but after a time minds arise which feel them both, and attempt to interpret their connection. Such a mind was Coleridge's, perhaps equally, and beyond doubt signally gifted for either side of his task. To its immensity his broken achievement was partly due. VII In Coleridge, not least when he suffers, there is something of the child; and this element, together with the poetic voice he gave to it, descended to his son, Hartley Coleridge1 (17961849); as well as the tremulous fineness, though not the intellectual grip and energy, of his critical sensibility. But in his verse, and also in his delicate and perceiving love for the poets, Hartley is no mere filial echo; his writing has a shading of its own, like that of some flower that fears the daylight. His childish dreams and utterances prophesied genius, but in Wordsworth's famous lines, written when Hartley was six years old, he is truly portrayed as an alien in the world and living there on a fragile tenure. His academic career bid fair, but was broken by intemperance, and something broke in Hartley himself; yet his misfortunes, which tint his poetry, after all left, or made, him a poet, and it is not clear that without them he would have done more, or so much. His harmless, elfish, vagrant life and gentle premature old age have left a delicate tradition in Wordsworth's countryside. He published some of his best verse in 1833. It is hard to reckon with, partly because his voice, like Cordelia's, is low, and we have to listen for its undertones with purged hearing ; and partly because he thought, perhaps, too little of himself always to endeavour after due poetic finish. His longest pieces are Leonard and Susan, a tragical ‘English idyll' somewhat overwrought in feeling, but a link between the older generation and Tennyson's experiments; and the fragment Prometheus, which shows, though fitfully, an unexpected kind of power. But most of his poems are short;-little lyrics, of which The Old Man's Wish and the better-known 'She is not fair to outward view' are the best; or personal and pathetic, like the beautiful lines in blank verse To my Unknown Sisterin-Law. Some of the Sketches of English Poets in heroic rhyme, such as those on Spenser, Drayton, and Dryden, rank with his finest criticisms. But the true bequest of Hartley Coleridge is found in his sonnets, and surely he is the best practitioner in this kind between Wordsworth and the Rossettis. He often combines the Italian structure of the octave in closed rhyme (abba abba) with the final couplet; a scheme which is supposed only by pedants to be inadmissible. He is by no means always careful to place the turn, or break, in the sense at the beginning of the sestet, which is a more disturbing heresy; and the loftiest of his sonnets in feeling are not always the best composed. This is the case with the poem To Shakespeare, and with another noble one, 'In the great city we are met again.' But room may be found for one that is technically symmetrical (granting three rhymes in the octave), and in emotion most characteristic: Hast thou not seen an aged rifted tower, E'en such a thing methinks I fain would be, Yet, to the last, a rugged wrinkled thing To which young sweetness may delight to cling! Here, as in other places, the models of Shakespeare and Wordsworth count for something to Hartley Coleridge; but he is most himself, and most faultless in form, when he is nearest to the earth and the simple affections, from the fulness of which his own lot cuts him off; and when his spirit wanders like an air among the leaves and the lakeside rushes. We should choose the following for a brief anthology: the landscapes in Night, September, and November ('The mellow year is hasting to its close'); 'Let me not deem that I was made in vain,' with its subtle and proud humility of tone; the spirited and tender poem, To a Lofty Beauty, from her poor Kinsman ; that To Louise Claude, the homage of age to youth; and the magnificent Multum Dilexit, worthy of Christina Rossetti. Criticism, in both its elements of sharp sensibility and searching judgment, is in the veins of Hartley and Sara Coleridge; and of the two, the learned sister is more decisive and dogmatic than her brother, and she has hardly the same flexible, open spirit. Hartley's gift of literary comment, though spilt and scattered, and never fully trained or concentrated, is most authentic, and all his prose is too much forgotten. In the Biographia Borealis, or Lives of Northern Worthies, who include such diverse figures as Ascham, Bentley, Mason, and William Roscoe, the biographical matter is now somewhat antiquated; but the criticism is often startlingly fresh and fine, and worthy of the great company which Hartley had kept. The pages on the satires of Andrew Marvell, and above all those on the comedies of Congreve, do not deserve thus to have been buried alive. Hartley Coleridge is less oppressed than his father, or than his sister, by philosophy and reading, and is nearer to Lamb or Hazlitt in his direct plain utterance of what he feels. His style is purer and more dignified than Leigh Hunt's. In his introduction to his edition of Massinger and Ford, his most sustained piece of commentary, there is the same quality; and in his paper on Hamlet, and indeed in all he says upon Shakespeare, it is never far off. As a pure essayist he has the discursive ease and unobtrusive nicety, amidst a good deal of whim and surplusage. The best writing of Sara Coleridge is found in her letters, though in the little fairy tale, Phantasmion (1837), there is a rich and fanciful inventiveness, and a feeling for colour unreal and magical, that beseems the daughter of Coleridge. Her opinions of books are frank and always well argued; and her plain speaking about the diction and sentiment of Laodamia, her analysis of Shylock, and her notes on Cowper's Homer, on In Memoriam, and on Vanity Fair, are all worthy of resurrection. The least remembered of the 'Lake poets,' Charles Lloyd1 (1775-1839), may here be named. He lives rather in the letters of Lamb and Coleridge and in the reminiscences of De Quincey than by his own work; yet his almost frustrate literary gift is curious and distinctive enough. Lloyd begins as a sonneteer in the company of his two friends; the strain of juvenile melancholy, of fine-spun sentiment, and of an introspection that may easily defeat itself for want of material, is common to all three. Lamb and Coleridge escaped from this 'obscure wood' and found their genius; Lloyd never quite escaped, or expressed himself. His bent for analysis and psychology, recorded by several observers, seems to have been at its best in talk. 'He was,' says De Quincey, 'somewhat too Rousseauish'; and he is found, in 1795, exercised by the same kind of difficulties as Wordsworth in his early Godwinian stage. 'Oswald,' the hero of one of his poems, seems to be Lloyd himself; and the theme is to trace the possible effects of the principal abuses of the social system on a Youth more accustomed to feel than to reason; who is doomed, when his sentiments had been raised to a high-toned enthusiasm, by contemplating the wildest features of nature through the magnifying medium of sensibility, to view not only the effects of the selfish principle in others, but to feel himself its unfortunate victim. It would be hard to pack more of the floating doctrines and catchwords of that decade into a single sentence. Lloyd's Desultory Thoughts in London (1821), his best piece, written in a not very successful form of the Don Juan octave measure, contains some touching stanzas to Coleridge, with whom he had been at first intimate, then estranged, and lastly halfreconciled; and its topics are odd and thistly enough: 'Reflections on Unfortunate Females 'The Philosophy of Penance-The Millennium.' More promising is 'The Folly of making Works of Imagination subservient to speculative Theory'; and Lloyd shows no little address in the conduct of these abstract matters. The 'Stanzas' ('let the reader,' he adds, 'determine their title ') in his Nugae Canorae (1819) show the same kind of power, and vividly describe his solitude and dreariness. Lloyd continued to make sonnets, and Nugac Canorae contains many of the type he terms 'metaphysical,' sombrely and sincerely written, but lamed by some inborn and fatal failure in form. His novel, Edmund Oliver, is rubbish, and only of interest for its allusions, unpermitted and duly resented, to Coleridge's military escapade. Lloyd also translated Alfieri's tragedies and the Twenty-fourth Iliad. |