Gents Mag 1851 part 1 p.579
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introduction | ||
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list, 3rd qtr 19th century | ||
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Gentleman's Magazine 1851 part 1 p.579
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biography Hartley Coleridge |
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Hartley Coleridge
book review HARTLEY COLERIDGE.* IT is a common weakness in persons who are not so handsome as they would be, or have been, to abhor a faithful portrait-painter; and a still commoner weakness in their friends to prefer what they call an "idealised" likeness of them, by which they mean, not one in which the true and permanent character prevails over the accidental peculiarities of the face, but one which. being sufficiently like to be recognised, approaches otherwise as nearly as may be to the academical standard of beauty. A similar weakness prevails with regard to men's lives and characters, and a biographer who so portrays his subject that those who did not know the man may know what he was like, must not expect to escape popular censure. Yet we all long to have some definitite image both of the features and the character of any man in whom we are interested, whether the interest be excited by his writings or his actions; and it is only when a faithful record of the face or the life destroys some cherished ideal that the minutest personal details are unwelcome. Then, indeed, when the real man falls short of the idea formed of him from his writings, people are apt to exclaim, "Why undeceive us? Why publish what might have been kept private? That part of his life and character which his works reveal is all the the world has interest in; why not leave it to speak for itself?" To this appeal the obvious and sufficient answer is, that if the works bespeak a life and character which does not correspond with the fact, they speak falsely, and those who so interpret them are living in a false belief, which to hold unconsciously is an eveil, to cherish deliberately is a sin. Some provinces of the intellect there are, indeed, which may be said to be independent of the moral character. We may inherit the full fruits of a life devoted to science, for instance, without caring to imagine or to ask what sort of man he was who bequeathed them to us. In such cases, if the life be otherwise unworthy of rememberance, let it by all means be forgotten. But it is not so with the poet. All poetry which is worthy anything is a voice out of a human heart, and every human heart beats in some individual man. We must sympathise, and we cannot sympathise with an abstraction. If we do not know what he was like, we imagine him - we make a picture of him in our mind - and if we imagine him other than he was, we deceive ourselves, and, so far, the truth is not in us. To us, therefore, when a poet dies whose works are worthy or likely to live, a candid account of his personal history shall always be welcome, and, provided it reveals the truth, it shall not be the less welcome though the truth be painful. Indeed we are persuaded that, even where the truth is most painful, it is for the interest of the poet's own memory that it should be frankly told. To estimate the strength of a man's virtue we must |
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* Poems by Hartley Coleridge; with a Memoir of his
Life, by his Brother. In two volumes. Lond. 1851.
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