His general critical character.
On the whole, we have few better examples than Lockhart, if we have any, of the severer type of critic—of the newer school, but with a certain tendency towards the older—a little too prone, when his sympathies were not specially enlisted, to think that his subjects would be “nane the waur of a hanging”—a little too quick to ban, and too slow to bless—but acute, scholarly, logical, wide enough in range, when his special prejudices did not interfere, and entitled to some extent to throw the responsibility of those prejudices on the political and literary circumstances of his time.
Hartley Coleridge.
If the pixies had not doomed Hartley Coleridge[[917]] to a career (or an absence of one) so strange and in a manner so sad, there would pretty certainly have been a case, not merely of poetic son succeeding poetic father, against the alleged impossibility or at least non-occurrence of which succession he himself mildly protested, but of critical faculty likewise descending in almost the highest intensity from father to son. And the not ungracious creatures might plead that, after all, opportunity was not lacking. During that strange latter half of his lifetime when he fulfilled, more literally than happily, the poetic prophecy of Wordsworth in his childhood, he seems to have had very little other occupation—indoors at least—besides criticism actual and practical. But, with the inveterate Coleridgean habit of “marginalling,” and the equally inveterate one of never turning the Marginalia to any solid account, the results of this practice, save in the case of the famous copy of Anderson’s Poets (shabbiest and slovenliest treasure-house of treasures immortal and priceless!) which bears his father’s and uncle’s notes as well as his own, are mostly Sibylline Leaves after the passage of the blast. Forlorn condition of his criticism. When a man commits his critical thoughts to the narrow margins of weekly newspapers unbound—indeed, if he had them bound, the binder would no doubt have exterminated them after the fashion of his ruthless race—he might just as well write on water, and better on sand. Still, the disjecta membra do exist—in the Biographia Borealis, or Northern Worthies, to some extent; in the Essays, collected by the pious, if sometimes a little patronising, care of his brother Derwent, to a much greater; and perhaps in one instance only, the “Massinger and Ford” Introduction, after a fashion in a manner finished. Yet even here the intended critical coda is wanting, and the inevitable critical divagation too much present.
Its quality.
But in all this there is also present, after a fashion of which I can remember no other instance, the evidences of a critical genius which not only did not give itself, but which absolutely refused itself, a chance. Hartley Coleridge has never, I think, been the subject of much study: but a more tempting matter for “problem” lovers can hardly exist. Nothing in his known history accounts for the refusal. He was admittedly not temperate: but no one has ever pretended that he was the slave of drink to the extent to which his father was the slave of opium; his interest in literature was intense and undying—that every page that he ever wrote shows beyond possibility of doubt; and the fineness of his critical perceptions is equally indubitable. Defects But the extraordinary and, I think, unparalleled intellectual indolence—or rather intellectual paralysis—which beset him, seems to have prevented him not merely from writing, but from that mere reading in which men, too indolent to make any great use of it, constantly indulge as a mere pleasure and pastime. He confesses frankly that he had read very little indeed: and this, though he had been almost all his life within reach of, and for great part of it actually under the same roof with, Southey’s hardly equalled library. This ignorance leads him wrong not only on matters of fact, but also on matters of opinion: indeed, he seldom goes wrong, except when he does not know enough about the matter.
It is unfortunate that we have hardly anything finished from him in the critical way, except the “Massinger and Ford” and the Essays he wrote for Blackwood, while these last bear such a strong impress of Wilson’s own manner[[918]] that it is impossible not to think them Christopherically sophisticated. In the Northern Worthies he professes not to meddle with Criticism at all, or to touch it very little. In the “Marvell,” however, the “Bentley,” the “Ascham,” the “Mason,” the “Roscoe,” and the “Congreve,” he is better than his word, and gives some excellent criticism as a seasoning to the biography. and examples. One cannot, indeed, but grudge the time that he spends on such worthless stuff as Elfrida and Caractacus, but we must remember that in that generation of transition, the generation of Milman and Talfourd earlier, of Henry Taylor and others later, the possibility of reviving the serious drama was a very important subject indeed. Hartley, whose reverence for his father is as pleasant as his affection for his mother, evidently thought much of Remorse and Zapolya, and might probably, if he ever could have got his will to face any hedge, have tried such things himself. On Congreve he is nearly at his best: and his essay certainly ought to be included in that unique volume of variorum critical documents on the Restoration Drama, which somebody some day may have the sense to edit.