You might indeed so call it now, if inclined to poetry, but you would be wholly wrong. The painful fact must be recorded that “Myrtle Cottage” stands beside the road, directly on the busiest route between the railway-station and the sea-front (such as the sea-front is), and that flys, “charleybanks,” wagonettes, motor-cars, and all conceivable traffic come this way. Indeed, this cottage and its trim fellow are now almost the only vestiges in the road left of the Clevedon that Coleridge knew. What little remained of the rocky bluff at the back is now being actively blasted and quarried away by the local authority, in its attempt—highly successful, too—at matching the place with the London district of Notting Hill. Property owners have already filled Clevedon with stuccoed semi-“Italian” villas on the Ladbroke Grove model, that became discredited a generation ago; the kind of property that has dismal semi-underground dungeons called “breakfast-rooms” (by way of a penitential beginning of the day), and long flights of stone steps to the front door, alleged to be ornamental, and certainly excessively tiring. This is a kind of property that never, or rarely, lets nowadays; and Clevedon has many empty villas.

The white-paled, red-tiled trim cottages—Coleridge’s and another—are among the pleasantest sights of Clevedon, by reason of their unconventional, homely style, and the fine trees that surround and overhang them. Tiles, you will observe, have replaced the thatch of the poet’s description; but the jessamine still twines over the porch. Five pounds a year, the landlord paying the taxes; that was the rent of this then idyllic spot.

It should here be added that doubts have recently been expressed as to the genuine nature of the tradition that makes “Myrtle Cottage” the temporary home of Coleridge. And not only have these doubts been expressed, but very strongly worded statements have been made, to the effect that the real Coleridge Cottage was in the valley at East Clevedon, adjoining Walton-in-Gordano. But the matter is controversial, and at any rate the legend—if, indeed, it be but a legend—that has attached to the cottage popularly known as Coleridge’s, has had so long a start that it will be difficult, if not impossible, ever to demolish it.

CHAPTER V
CLEVEDON (continued)—LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS: TENNYSON

But Clevedon has more prominent literary associations than that just considered, and has a place unforgettable in poetry by reason of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” that lengthy poem written by the future laureate to the memory of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who, born in 1811, died untimely, at the age of twenty-two, in September 1833.

Arthur Hallam, a son of that Henry Hallam who is generally alluded to as “the historian”—although it would puzzle most of those airy, allusive folk to name offhand the historical works of which he was the author—would appear to have been in posse an Admirable Crichton. He composed poetry and wrote philosophical essays at a tender age, thought great and improving things, and had already begun to set up as something of a paragon, when death rendered impossible the fulfilment of this early promise. There were at that time some terribly earnest young men, ready and willing—if not realty able—to set the world right. Prophets and seers abounded in that dark first half of the nineteenth century, when religion was at odds with the comparatively new era of steam and machinery. Each one had a panacea for the ills of the age, and each had his own little band of devoted admirers, devoted on condition that he should in his turn spare a little admiration for those who hung upon his words and doings. Prigs and prodigies stalked the earth, preaching new gospels. They formed mutual-admiration societies, wherein each protested how vastly endowed with all the virtues and all the intellect possible was the other; and before they had outgrown their legal definition of “infants” and had come of age and become technically men, were ready with criticisms and appreciations of Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare, and were laying down the laws of conduct in this life, with speculations upon what awaits us in the next. It was a morbid, unhealthy generation; but at the same time, these sucking philosophers were not without the tradesman instinct, and zealously combined to advertise one another. Thus, the early Tennysonian circle at Cambridge was a Society of Mutual Encouragement, with its eyes well fixed on publicity. How valuable were some of these early friendships may well be guessed from the one outstanding fact that it was Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, one of this circle, who at an early date, when Tennyson himself was little more than a hopeful promise as a poet, procured by his influence with Sir Robert Peel, the then Prime Minister, a pension of £200 a year for his friend. It fortunately proved a wise selection; but in the case of Tennyson’s over-elaborate post-mortem praise of his friend Hallam, we have foisted upon us a very high estimate of one who, although engaged to the poet’s sister, Emily, and thus additionally endeared to him, had not yet proved himself beyond this narrow circle. He was, therefore, no fitting subject for the “rich shrine,” as Tennyson himself styled it, of “In Memoriam,” but should have been mourned privately.

The connection of the Hallams with Clevedon was through the mother of Arthur. She was a daughter of Sir Abraham Elton, of Clevedon Court. Arthur Hallam died in Austria, and his body was brought to Clevedon for burial; hence the allusion in the poem, in that metre Tennyson fondly imagined himself had originated:

The Danube to the Severn gave

The darkened heart that beat no more: