Or swerved, by no base interest warped awry,
But erring in his heart’s deep fervency;
Genius for him asserts the unthwarted claim,
With these to mate—the sacred Few of fame—
Explore, like them, new regions for mankind,
And leave, like theirs, a deathless name behind.
CHAPTER XVIII
MRS. COLERIDGE. LAST STAY AT THE LAKE DISTRICT
[Coleridge married Sarah Fricker, as we have already seen, on 5th October, 1795. The first period of Coleridge’s married life had been a happy one. Although there is reason to believe Coleridge married his wife to “heal a deeper wound,” and that Mary Evans would have been the object of his choice, there is no reason to suppose that he ever regretted his union with Sarah Fricker during the first years of their marriage. All accounts we have of the Clevedon and Stowey periods agree that Coleridge was happy in the new domestic bond. Cottle prints a glowing picture of the life at Clevedon (Reminiscences);[44] and Richard Reynell concurs regarding the Stowey cottage life (Illustrated London News, 1893). Coleridge, too, wrote most affectionately to his wife during his absence in Germany (Letters), and he was a deep lover of his children, and always in dread lest any calamity should happen to them while he was in Germany and Malta (Letters). Coleridge, above most men, was peculiarly fitted to make a good husband. He never spoke of his wife as his intellectual inferior, although he knew perfectly well she was not fitted to follow him in his Platonic imaginings. Dorothy Wordsworth’s remarks (Coleorton Memorials, p. 164) on this point are beside the mark. Coleridge never expected to find in the woman he was prepared to love intellectual grasp of his philosophic system. The woman ideals he has given us are not blue-stockings, but domestic Ophelias and Imogens. Read in this connection The Eolian Harp and Lines written on having left a Place of Retirement, Lewti, Christabel, Love, Fears in Solitude, the Day Dream. “I could,” said Coleridge to Thomas Allsop in 1822, “have been happy with a servant-girl had she only in sincerity of heart responded to my affection.” (Allsop’s Letters of S. T. Coleridge, p. 206.)
Strained relations commenced to develop between the poet and Mrs. Coleridge between the summer of 1801 and the summer of 1802; and that Coleridge was not living happily with his wife began to leak out among their acquaintances during 1802; and by 1807 it had become a recognized fact. The evidence of all this does not require to be quoted to those who have read the Journals and Letters of Dorothy Wordsworth. There are numerous notices of the estrangement, and Dorothy in a letter to Lady Beaumont (Coleorton Memorials, i, 162), enumerates what she supposes were the causes of the gulf of separation.
The causes of the estrangement were cumulative. While Coleridge never looked upon his wife as his inferior, and never expected attainments in her which she did not have, Mrs. Coleridge, as she advanced in years, could not be slow to perceive that there were other women beside herself who deeply interested themselves in her husband with his conversational fascinations and gentlemanly bearing toward woman. She could not be oblivious to the fact that Dorothy Wordsworth, for instance, was intellectually better fitted than herself to comprehend the “large discourse” which characterized Coleridge; and into Dorothy’s ear was poured many a transcendental disquisition not understandable by the wife. Very few wives, as we know from the Carlyle history, can allow their husbands to have a “Gloriana;” and it is not likely that Sarah Fricker was one of the exceptions. Later, Charlotte Brent became one of Coleridge’s Platonic sisterhood, but of what intellectual capacity she was of we cannot tell. But she added to the wife’s resentment. Opium, too, of course, had its share in irritating the discontented wife.