button to main menu  Gents Mag 1851 part 1 p.580
button introduction
button list, 3rd qtr 19th century
button previous page button next page
Gentleman's Magazine 1851 part 1 p.580
know the constitutional weakness against which it had to struggle. In them we shall find at once the explanation and the excuse of his short-comings; and far better it is that they should be fairly expounded by a friend who understands the whole case, than that scattered evidences of them should be picked up one by one and exhibited as curiosities and fragments of "truth brought to light by time," - such fragments being often only scandals and errors which truth had in their own day disowned and dismissed to oblivion.
All this we believe to be eminently true with regard to Hartley Coleridge, and in the copious and candid memoir attached to these volumes we think the Editor has not only rendered a service to literary history, by contributing to it the portrait of a man in all ways interesting and in many ways remarkable, but has also performed an office of piety to the memory of his brother. We should have preferred, indeed, a tone less elaborately apologetic, a more sparing introduction of censures and regrets, and generally a style of narrative more concise, and simple, and straight-onward. But when we remember the relation iin which the Editor stands to his brother and his family on one side, and to a jealous and not very reasonable public on the other, we feel that it would be rash to pronounce judgment on the execution of a task so very delicate and difficult. Enough that the story he has recorded is full of interest and instruction, and as we have good reason to believe that no material part of the case has been suppressed or misrepresented, those who are dissatisfied with his treatment of it may treat it better for themselves.
Hartley Coleridge was born at Clevedon on the 19th of September, 1796, the eldest son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and therefore with a hereditary title both to gifts of the intellect and infirmities of the will. About the end of his fourth year his home was transferred from the banks of the Severn to the lakes of Cumberland and Westmerland, and fixed in the house which will long be remembered as the residence of Southey. He appears to have been distinguished from other children at a very early age by a certain oddity of manner and absence of mind, and by a constitutional inaptitude for all games requiring attention and manual dexterity. This, rather than any premature devotion to books or aversion from the society of playmates, prevented him from mixing in childish sports, and caused him to spend the greater part of his time in an imaginary world of his own, strangely peopled with shadows abstracted from the real world in which he lived, and of the concerns of which he was at the same time no inattentive observer. How far he was distinguished from others of the same age by any extraordinary powers of mind it is not easy to gather. There is hardly any child whose mind, when subjected to the inspection of poets and metaphysicians is not full of wonders; and we may more confidently infer that Hartley was an extraordinary child from the fact that he certainly grew up to be no ordinary man, than from the impressions he made on Wordsworth at six years old, or from his father's report of the metaphysical mysteries with which his childish understanding perplexed itself.* Though a clever boy, and not idle, it seems that he made no remarkable progress in his school-studies, and it is rather singular that the faculties by which he was most decidedly distinguished from other boys were not those which he much cultivated or much excelled in afterwards. That he lived a great deal in a phantom-world we should not mention as anything singular - all children do so. Chairs are turned into carriages and
* "Hartley, when about five years old, was asked a question about himself being called Hartley. 'Which Hartley?' asked the boy. 'Why, is there more than one Hartley?' 'Yes,' he replied, 'there's a deal of Hartleys.' 'How so?' 'There's Picture-Hartley (Hazlitt had painted a portrait of him) and Shadow-Hartley, and there's Echo-Hartley, and there's Catch-me-Fast-Hartley,' at the same time seizing his own arm with the other hand very eagerly, and action which shews that his mind must have been drawn to reflect on what Kant calls the great and inexplicable mystery, viz. that man should be both his own subject and object, and that these two should be one." - p.xxvii.
button next page
button to main menu Lakes Guides menu.