To God, thy conscience, and the grave."
Few of his contemporaries spoke or wrote harshly of Coleridge. Lamb and Wordsworth loved him, despite occasional and regrettable misunderstandings. He collaborated with Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads and with Southey in The Fall of Robespierre, a three-act drama of which the last-named poet wrote the second act. There were few who were not happy in his brief fortunes or without sympathy in the long-drawn period of his trouble and pain, while all who came within the charmed circle of his personality delighted in his company and sought it eagerly. Judged by ordinary standards, his life-work would provide a monument for any man whose attainments fall short of absolute genius, and perhaps they have been most severe who realise how nothing more than order and self-control kept Coleridge from the very highest rank. They are jealous for his gifts, they feel that he hid his light under a bushel. For the most of us it will suffice that the poet's utterances are melodious, inspiring, and finely wrought, that he himself was a greatly suffering man who fought desperately and at last successfully against his own worst failings. Even as he arrests our imagination he claims our sympathy, which we give the more gladly because he would have welcomed it. Not only did he ask for merciful judgment while he was alive, but appealed for it when life should have passed. Few who have read even a tithe of what he wrote will grudge a little tribute to his memory, while those who study Coleridge become his debtors, and realise that he played no insignificant part in moulding some aspects of nineteenth-century thought and faith.
CHAPTER I
EARLY YEARS
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest of the nine sons of the Rev. John Coleridge, Vicar of Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire and Chaplain-Priest as well as Master of King's School, a Free Grammar School founded by King Henry VIII, who suppressed and replaced a long-standing monastic institution in the town. The Rev. John Coleridge, who was twice married, was the father of three daughters by his first wife and ten children by the second. He was the son of a trader in woollen goods who suffered serious financial losses when John was a boy, and the lad owed his Cambridge education to the generosity of a friend of the family. He married young, and kept a school at Southampton until his first wife died and he had married again. Then he obtained the living and mastership at Ottery St. Mary. Of his nine sons the youngest was destined to be the most distinguished, but James, who was born twelve years before Samuel Taylor, became the father of one Judge of the High Court, the grandfather of Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, and great-grandfather of the present Judge. The Vicar was a man of letters, who published several long-forgotten books by subscription, and was noted, to quote his youngest son's description, for "learning, good-heartedness, absentness of mind, and excessive ignorance of the world." It would not be hard to find all these qualities reproduced in the poet himself; they are of the kind that need a country school-house or vicarage for their home if they are not to be the cause of grave trouble to their possessor. From the very early days Sam, as his family called the future poet and philosopher, was a strange, precocious and unhappy child. Perhaps our modern ideas are shocked at the thought that he was sent to school at the age of three years. Should the twentieth-century theories be correct, such a brain as his would have been far healthier if the stage of happy ignorance had been extended until he was at least twice as old. Spoiled by his parents, the share of attentions he received from them provoked, naturally enough, the jealousy and resentment of his brothers and sisters, while his strange ways made him the unhappy butt of his school-fellows. Small wonder if, when he described his early childhood in the latter days, he had but a sorry tale to tell. Compared with his friends Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth, Coleridge was an unhappy boy.
Nervous, self-conscious, and irritable, he took no pleasure in outdoor games, and at the earliest possible age was busy with books. With their aid he lived in a world of his own, a world peopled with the heroes and heroines who dwell between book covers. By the time he was six years of age he had read the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and though it was certainly an abridged version in a single volume, there is no doubt that it must have provided a powerful and unhealthy stimulant to an imagination already far too active. Happily his father found that these books were dangerous to his youngest born, and destroyed them.
The boy entered the grammar school, where he speedily passed all the other lads of his age. For the next three years the life at Ottery St. Mary continued in the seemingly peaceful fashion that was in reality so harmful. The little lad was disliked by his school-fellows and flattered and petted by his elders. His father took him seriously enough to pave the way, by a series of discourses, for the service of the Church. His mother's friends delighted in exhibitions of his precocity. His temper, sometimes sullen and perverse, showed itself disastrously on one occasion, when he ran away from home to avoid some punishment, doubtless well earned, and slept all night by the banks of the river that gives its name to his home. He woke so exhausted that his rescuer was obliged to carry him home. To this escapade he attributed the fits of ague to which he was subject for many following years.
It is worth remarking in this place that for all the boy's undoubted precocity, the beauty of the scenes in which the first decade of his life was set seem to have left little or no impression. Had Coleridge been a lover of the country for its own sake, he must have been at least as deeply impressed by the all-pervading charm of Ottery St. Mary as his friend Wordsworth was by Hawkshead. For Ottery has beauty and history in plenty with which to reward the visitor or resident; its romance travels far away into the first twilight of legendry. In later years, of which the historical record is safe, the Manor of Ottery was granted by King Edward the Confessor to the Cathedral Church of Rouen. The poet might have seen as a child the royal arms of England and France on the stone scutcheons above the church altar, with the armorial bearings of several distinguished Devon families to bear them company. In the reign of Edward III, the head of one of these families, John de Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter, bought the manor and advowson of Ottery and established there the college of Monks. This was dissolved by Henry VIII, who made the college over to a corporation of four governors, and established the "King's New Grammar School," a building whose irregular roof is still a feature of the landscape. Here the Rev. John Coleridge was master and his son pupil. At Hayes Farm, close by, Sir Walter Raleigh was born; the family pew is to be seen in the parish church of East Budleigh.
When Coleridge was a young man, the house of Raleigh in Ottery St. Mary was still standing; it was burnt down in the year of Trafalgar. He does not mention it, he does not even tell us of the wonderful orchards in the valley of the Otter, perhaps the most outstanding feature of the country in which his earliest years were passed. They say that these orchards are the more remarkable because mistletoe will not grow round the trees, the Druids having laid all Devonshire under a ban! The Valley of the Otter is a district no country lover could forget. The river, swift, though narrow, runs sparkling over many-coloured soil—Coleridge recalls this single feature in his Sonnet on the Otter. It separates the chalk flint and red marls of Ottery East Hill from the heather-clad black earth of West Hill, and makes a clean division between the plant growths on one side of its banks and those on the other. The high peaks of Dartmoor can be seen from either hill. In the valleys, while summer lasts, the red Devon kine stand amid luxuriant grasses which rise to their dewlaps. We are told that the transceptal towers of St. Mary's Church at Ottery inspired Bishop Quivil when he planned Exeter Cathedral. St. Mary's dominates the little town and adds to the perennial air of peace and seclusion that breathes over it. Coleridge might have made Ottery St. Mary immortal, but he did little more than write his well-remembered sonnet and a short ode inspired by the "Pixies' Parlour," a cave in the red sandstone cliffs below the town. The curious may still find "S.T.C. 1789" carved on the soft stones. If the valley of the Otter was not able to impress the early years of the poet, it is hardly surprising that neither Somersetshire nor Westmorland should succeed where Devonshire failed. The failure adds to the clear proof that Coleridge was at heart a philosopher, a student of life, faith, reason, and the immortality of the soul, but withal a man who was seldom or never on intimate terms with his immediate surroundings.
The Rev. John Coleridge passed away, beloved by his pupils and parishioners, when his son Samuel Taylor was but nine years old, and within a year the efforts of friends had resulted in obtaining for the lad a presentation to Christ's Hospital.