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Page 47
Charles Lamb's is even better. On his way to the city he met
Coleridge, and "in spite of my assuring him that time was precious, he
drew me within the door of an unoccupied garden by the roadside, and
there, sheltered from observation by a hedge of evergreens, he took me
by the button of my coat, and closing his eyes, commenced an eloquent
discourse, waving his right hand gently, as the musical words flowed
in an unbroken stream from his lips. I listened entranced; but the
striking of a church-clock recalled me to a sense of duty." Charles
cut himself free with a pen-knife, he says, and went off to his
office. "Five hours afterwards, in passing the garden on my way home,
I heard Coleridge's voice, and on looking in, there he was, with
closed eyes--the button in his fingers--his right hand gracefully
waving." A good story, at least. This was no company for Lady
Jerningham, who demanded clarity, and probably had a good deal to do.
Lastly, we have Coleridge's own confession to Miss Betham that
"Bacchus ever sleek and young," as at this time Lamb called him,
"pouring down," he went on to say, "goblet after goblet," must
have outdone his usual outdoings. Here is the best he can say for
himself:--
"True history will be my sufficient apology. After my return
from Lady J.'s on Monday night, or rather morning, I awoke
from my short sleep unusually indisposed, and was at last
forced to call up the good daughter of the house at an early
hour to get me hot water and procure me medicine. I could not
leave my bed till past six Monday evening, when I crawled
out in order to see Charles Lamb, and to afford him such
poor comfort as my society might perhaps do in the present
dejection of his spirits and loneliness."
There is much more to the same effect; and surely it is not often that
a philosopher, or even a poet, will treat his post-prandial dumps (to
call them so) as a stroke of adverse fortune. Coleridge takes it as
an act of God. "This, my dear Miss Betham, waiving all connexion of
sentences, is the history of my breach of engagement, of its cause,
and of the occasion of that cause." There is much of Mr. Micawber
here.
And here, so far as _A House of Letters_ can help us, Coleridge's
correspondence with Matilda Betham ends. It may well have been the end
indeed. From that date onwards the wreck of the thinker and poet slid
swiftly down the slope appointed, until he came up, after many bumps,
in the hospitable Highgate backwater where he was to end his days.
It was a wonderful London which within the same twenty years could
harbour three men, like Blake, Coleridge and Shelley, in whom the
incondite spirit which we call genius dwelt so near the surface
of conscious being, and had such freedom to range. With Blake and
Shelley, however, once over the threshold, it was untrammelled--and
with Blake at least entirely innocuous to society, except to one
drunken soldier who richly deserved what he got. But with Coleridge,
throughout his career, one sees it struggling like a fly glued in
treacle, pausing often to cleanse its wings. The fly, you adjudge,
walked into the treacle. But Coleridge always thought that it was the
treacle which had walked over him.
THE CRYSTAL VASE
I have often wished that I could write a novel in which, as mostly
in life, thank goodness, nothing happens. Jane Austen, it has been
objected, forestalled me there, and it is true that she very nearly
did--but not quite. It was a point for her art to make that the
novel should have form. Form involved plot, plot a logic of events;
events--well, that means that there were collisions. They may have
been mild shocks, but persons did knock their heads together, and
there were stars to be seen by somebody. In life, in a majority of
cases, there are no stars, yet life does not on that account cease to
be interesting; and even if stars should happen to be struck out, it
is not the collision, nor the stars either, which interest us most.
No, it is our state of soul, our mental process under the stress which
we care about, and as mental process is always going on, and the state
of the soul is never the same for two moments together, there is ample
material for a novel of extreme interest, which need never finish,
which might indeed be as perennial as a daily newspaper or the _Annual
Register_. Why is it, do you suppose, that anybody, if he can, will
read anybody else's letter? It is because every man-Jack of us lives
in a cage, cut off from every other man-Jack; because we are incapable
of knowing what is going on in the mind of our nearest and dearest,
and because we burn for the assurance we may get by evidence of
homogeneity procurable from any human source. Man is a creature of
social instinct condemned by his nature to be solitary. Creatures in
all outward respects similar to himself are awhirl about him. They
cannot help him, nor he them; he cannot even be sure, for all he may
assume it, that they share his hope and calling.
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