ness arrangements were deficient in despatch, and it is conceivable that Coleridge, who was never a proficient in monetary concerns, was even more than ordinarily handicapped in this regard when the double duty of editor and business manager devolved upon him. But it would be folly to follow De Quincey in his picturesque but not very accurate account of the causes that contributed to the failure. If it were allowed-it certainly ought not to be on such dubious evidence-that Coleridge was an utter child in all financial affairs, the fact would remain that he was living in hourly intercourse with Wordsworth, who was at least above suspicion of complete artlessness where money was in question. Wordsworth had a personal interest in The Friend; he contributed to it with his pen, and the friend whose sole hope of earning a livelihood was centred in its success was then domesticated under his roof. The simple truth is that Coleridge was harassed by the defalcations of subscribers, and the lukewarmness of friends, and that these causes of anxiety acting on the inevitable worries, risks, and losses of publishing enterprise, led to a speedy collapse. There is, therefore, no reason to go far in search of reasons why The Friend should have failed. Its rivals were numerous, powerful, and the reverse of poor. Coleridge was possessed of a hundred pounds at the utmost computation, his literary coadjutors were men who could not help him, and his rich admirers from Albemarle Street and elsewhere would not. Stuart, alone, seems to have done anything to keep The Friend alive. Disappointed, depressed, more than before under the dominion of opium, Coleridge went back to his wife and children at Keswick in the summer of 1810. There he remained about five months, with distinct benefit to his health. 'Coleridge has been with us for some time past," writes Mrs. Coleridge, "in good health, spirits, and humour, but The Friend, for some unaccountable reason, or for no reason at all, is utterly silent. This, you will easily believe, is matter of perpetual grief to me, but I am obliged to be silent on the subject, although ever uppermost in my thoughts; but I am obliged to bear about a cheerful countenance, knowing as I do by sad experience that to expostulate, or even hazard one anxious look, would soon drive him hence." From this letter it is sufficiently clear, that Coleridge shared De Quincey's opinion that his wife was wanting in cordial appreciation, or indeed comprehension, of her husband's intellectual powers, and was, therefore, not a person with whom he could share the anxieties in which every friend was made to participate. The letter makes it no less obvious that, whatever the depth of her affection for her husband, Mrs. Coleridge was wishful to live at peace with him, and was willing to undergo in silence much suffering, and to support with patience a constrained cheerfulness, in order to keep him at her side. That her efforts failed was not a mark of cruelty on the part of Coleridge. Once for all, for good or for ill, the idea had fixed itself upon his mind that it was no longer possible for him to hope for domestic happiness; that the vision of a happy home had sunk for ever; and— "That names but seldom meet with Love, When and how this idea was engendered, in what degree it was a hallucination, and how far it came of a morbid reality, we have already vaguely conjectured. If it were needful to say in a word or two to what the idea was due, we should promptly attribute it, not to the incompatibility pointed to by De Quincey, not to faults. of intellect or temper on Mrs. Coleridge's part, and not to any lack of the domestic temperament in Coleridge himself, but to the drug-" the accursed drug." Coleridge left his home early in October, 1810, and never again returned to it. "He loved no other place, and yet Home was no home to him." His immediate purpose seems to have been that of consulting Abernethy. He came up to London with Basil Montagu, having accepted the invitation of the Chancery barrister to live in his house. The connection soon terminated in a rupture, brought about by a rather trivial incident in which Coleridge had exercised with some freedom the privileges of guestship. He removed to the house of his friends, the Morgans, at Hammersmith, and remained there from November to the following January. Then he took lodgings in Southampton Buildings. To be cast back upon himself was a condition always full of temptation to Coleridge, and in his cheerless lodgings he took more than ordinary doses of the drug. "I am a little, and only a little better at present," he writes; "if it is possible, I shall put myself in the Hammersmith stage this evening, as I am not fit to be in lodgings by myself. In truth, I have had such a series of anxieties, cruel disappointments, and sudden shocks from the first week of my arrival in London, that any new calamity suffices to overset me." He returned to the Morgans on February 11, 1811, and spent the three years following at their house. The anxieties, disappointments, and shocks alluded to in this letter were very real and by no ineans imaginary. He had earned absolutely nothing since the beginning of 1808, when he received one hundred guineas for his second series of lectures at the Royal Institution. Every farthing of this sum must have been sunk in The Friend, and debts were still arising out of that ill-fated venture. It was now February, 1811, and after three profitless years, the unlucky man found himself confronted by two grievous misfortunes. The first of these was a bill, which in equity was as much another man's debt as his own. The second, was the withdrawal by Josiah Wedgewood of his half of the pension of £150 a year. Some amount of mystery enshrouds the former of these difficulties; the latter is said to have been Wedgewood's protest against Coleridge's neglect of his family. It is more than probable that the two difficulties are in effect one difficulty, involving one set of persons only, and that Wedgewood was prompted rather by pique at what he thought "benefits forgot," than by any impulse so illogical as that of punishing a man for neglecting his wife and children by taking the bread out of their mouths. If the alleged reason for Wedgewood's conduct is the true one, he cancelled every obligation due to him for his liberality in the past. There is now no sort of doubt that Mrs. Coleridge and her children enjoyed the full benefit of the Wedgewood pension from the first. That Coleridge did not fulfil his half of their agreement was no sufficient ground on which Wedgewood could repudiate a responsibility voluntarily undertaken, on his part, and accepted with a distinct sacrifice of other permanent emolument on the part of Coleridge. Penniless, broken-spirited, and now at forty a greyhaired man, Coleridge, the dreamer of great dreams, the author of "The Ancient Mariner" and of "Christabel," betook himself once more to his friend Stuart, the partproprietor of The Courier. Stuart knew nothing about literature, and very little about journalism, except what he could learn at the publishing counter. He had bought The Morning Post in 1790, for £600, and sold it in 1803, for something like £25,000. Coleridge was the chief writer, if not the editor, during the short crucial period of the paper's prosperity, and he always claimed to have made its fortune. When he came to write his life he said this with sufficient emphasis. Stuart was then very angry, and remonstrated privately, but Coleridge did not yield. The newspaper proprietor submitted to the grave imputation of having earned money by an editor's brains, believing in his generous soul that perhaps Coleridge wished to excuse himself to his friends for having done so little, by saying that the prime of his manhood had been wasted in journalism, or else that he wished to establish a claim against Government for a pension. But when long years afterwards Coleridge's biographer repeated the charge, Stuart wrote in wrathful protest a series of letters which were meant to show that Coleridge had done little or nothing for either of his papers, and that he had paid the poet no less a sum than £700 for his slender |
