[This chapter of Coleridge's biography focuses on both his poetry and prose. Griggs notes that Coleridge's poetry, although it falls short of the genius exhibited by his father, overflows with “human emotion.” The discussion of Coleridge's prose includes a section on Northern Worthies, the author's collection of biographies.]

I. POETRY

The poets whose names glorify English literature rise above their contemporaries because their poetry is more than a momentary effusion. It is of course a moot question whether a poet must give a philosophy in his poetry, whether he must present ideas or not; but it cannot be doubted that he must be strong enough to have a characteristic attitude towards life. Though his life and work may be marked by an utter disregard for practical problems, this very scorn in itself becomes a fixed principle; though he may agree in nearly every particular with the prevailing thought of his age, he demonstrates clearly his own reaction towards the popular tendencies; though he may present a creed especially revolting to conventional morality, he maintains with an unswerving tenacity what he believes to be true; and though he may change his opinions as he grows older, the very growth of his mind is a revelation of his greatness. Keats ignored the seething political and moral upheavals which moved his contemporaries. Tennyson found himself partially in accord with the popular religious thought of his day. Shelley preached a doctrine of free love which those about him considered blasphemous, and Wordsworth slowly rejected the beliefs of his youth and laid himself open to the criticism of the younger generation; but each of these poets took up some pervading principle which is easily discernible in his work.

Hartley Coleridge wrote to please himself, impelled by a natural poetic instinct. His verse is full of beauty, often expressive of a noble spirit; but the thoughts are all detached jewels, of such varying sizes that it is impossible to string them together. Sometimes he reaches excellence, nay perfection, but never sublimity. There are few great poets; even his illustrious father was a poet only at intervals; and though Hartley's poetry will always be cherished by lovers of beauty, it cannot be granted the highest honours. It is interesting to note, too, that Hartley was at his best in the sonnet. The reason is evident: not having any fixed scheme of things to maintain a mood, and not often being long in a poetic frame of mind, he found the brief sonnet a most fitting vehicle for a fleeting idea. He quickly mastered the technical difficulties of the form, and with very little effort was able to construct a sonnet of considerable excellence. He did not usually tire before he had written fourteen lines,—though many of his unpublished sonnets are unfinished—and the metrical restrictions curbed the unorganized impetuosity of his mutable ideas and emotions.

Though Hartley's poems lack the touch of immortal genius, or to use Samuel Taylor Coleridge's phraseology, though they are products of fancy rather than of imagination, they are remarkable manifestations of a sad and wayward spirit. In life Hartley oscillated between effort and relaxation, always with an actual realization of the weakness he could not control; in his poetry he gave expression oftenest to a dignified melancholy, as if he were always trying to redeem himself. The poems of a purely personal nature fall into two distinct groups: those written to assuage the pangs of conscience, tenderly alive with regret for a misspent life; and those written in sheer love of man or nature, bubbling over with enthusiasm, and usually composed to celebrate some event important in the lives of country-folk—a wedding, a birth, a picnic. Most of the religious poems reflect his humble devotion and faith; and good comfort they probably afforded him, in hours of self-reproach.

Those writing personal poems often mar the dignity of the verse by bitterness or by a disregard for others. Hartley withheld every poem suggestive of family discord, or likely to harm anyone else; and in the expression of his own regrets, he always remained restrained and dignified. The sonnet helped to repress any too-intrepid declarations, but more than that Hartley's own spirit held his emotions in check. One reads his poems without being profoundly moved, but with a deep feeling of sympathy with him.

There are in Hartley's poems a few ideas which are frequently repeated. There is, as we have seen, a firm conviction of his weakness, tempered only by a belief in Christian redemption. Hartley lived on, ever lapsing into the habit of intemperance, never being able to break away from his indulgence; yet he was always painfully aware of his wrong-doing, hoping to be able to make new resolutions, never able to resolve. He felt, however, that there is a mercy in God, and intermingled with his self-condemnation is his absolute faith.

Hartley's religious ideas, as they are expressed in his poetry, are simple enough. Nature never became for him an all-pervading power as she did for Wordsworth. Hartley believed in an absolute destiny over the universe—in a God Who would reward and forgive. He found meagre comfort in nature when he sought to alleviate his pain; he saw men and things happy through nature's bounty, but he did not see in her the power to still the restless longings of the soul. In his prose writings he often discussed religion at length, and the ideas naturally became more complicated; but in the poems there is very little beyond mere simple faith. Consider:

A woeful thing it is to find
No trust secure in weak mankind;
But ten-fold woe betide the elf
Who knows not how to trust himself.
.....If I am weak, yet God is strong,
If I am false, yet God is true.
Old things are past, or right or wrong,
And every day that comes is new.
To-morrow then fresh hope may bring
And rise with healing on its wing.”

Poems, 218.

In many poems Hartley shows a true appreciation of excellence, whether moral or artistic. In the beautiful sonnets to Wordsworth, or in those to Homer and to Shakespeare, we see his artistic appreciation. The purity of his spirit led him to recognize virtue, and his standard of criticism implied a moral background for the highest poetical achievements. Thus he says, for centuries after Wordsworth's death men and women will love one another, merely because they all cherish his poetry! Of Drayton he writes:

Hail to thee, Michael! true, painstaking wight,
So various that ’tis hard to praise thee right;
For driest fact and finest faery fable
Employ’d thy genius indefatigable.
What bard more zealous of our England's glory,
More deeply versed in all her antique story,
Recorded feat, tradition quaint and hoary?
What muse like thine so patiently would plod
From shire to shire in pilgrim sandal shod,
Calling to life and voice, and conscious will,
The shifting streamlet and the sluggish hill?
Great genealogist of earth and water,
The very Plutarch of insensate matter.

Poems, 320.

Hartley felt his own weakness, or supposed weakness, in poetry, and by his own standards did not judge his work to be imperishable. Seldom did he make ambitious attempts, for of his two long poems one is unfinished and the other does not pretend to be more than an idealization of love, with a hint that modern civilization lays bare the worst side of human nature. We can judge Hartley only on what he attempted to do; as he claimed to be only a casual poet, as he never o’erleapt the bounds of simple and frank humanity, he holds a leading place in his class.

We have mentioned again and again Hartley's preference for the sonnet. He usually prefers the Petrarchan form, and he is most careful to fulfil all the technical requirements, though the primary thought often runs beyond the eighth line. His sonnets are almost perfect specimens. It is often evident that they were written spontaneously, the laws of form being followed instinctively. Derwent says Hartley could write a sonnet, a good one, in ten minutes, and that he seldom corrected or even found it necessary to correct the rough draft.¹ The words flow nimbly from his pen, and though occasionally the thought is twisted to fit the rhyme, the product is excellent. And yet, though we would fain suppress it, the feeling arises that the sonnets are sometimes too spontaneous. In a poem so deliberately restrained we do not expect effervescence; and we sometimes find Hartley too much a master of the form, even to be vaguely aware of it. We see, too, the fatigue of the inspiration. In the following unpublished sonnet there is an excellent beginning; but obviously Hartley completed it without a continuance of the inspiration:

Full well I know, my Friends, ye look on me
As living spectre of my Father dead.
Had I not borne his name, had I not fed
On him, as one leaf trembling on a tree,
A woeful waste had been my minstrelsy.
Yet have I sung of maidens newly wed,
And I have wished that hearts too sharply bled
Should throb with less of pain, and heave more free
By my endeavour—still alone I sit,
Counting each thought as Miser counts a penny,
Wishing to spend my pennyworth of wit
On antique wheel of fortune like a Zany.
You love me for my sire to you unknown:
Revere me for his sake, and love me for my own.

If only Hartley had held himself firmly to the task, he might have produced more of his exquisite verse. We have already mentioned that many of the sonnets are unfinished—what true symbols they are of poor Hartley's incomplete life. We all possess a liking for finished poems; but Hartley does not seem to have realized that by earnest application he could have definitely bettered his sonnets.

Yet those sonnets of Hartley's which go into the anthologies of men's memories are nearly faultless. Like delicately cut diamonds, they glisten in the sunshine, paradisiacal emblems of the poet's divine soul. “The soul-animating sonnets of Milton,” writes Samuel Waddington in an essay on Hartley Coleridge's poetry, “are more solemn and grand, and those of Keats and Wordsworth may reach a higher level of poetic imagination, yet the fact must be recorded that after Shakespeare our sweetest English sonneteer is Hartley Coleridge.”²

It must be so,—my infant love must find
In my own breast a cradle and a grave;
Like a rich jewel hid beneath the wave,
Or rebel spirit bound within the rind
Of some old wreathed oak, or fast enshrin’d
In the cold durance of an echoing cave:—
Yea, better thus than cold disdain to brave:—
Or worse,—to taint the quiet of that mind,
That decks its temple with unearthly grace.
Together we must dwell, my dream and I,—
Unknown must live, and unlamented die,
Rather than soil the lustre of that face,
Or drive that laughing dimple from its place,
Or heave that white breast with a painful sigh.

Poems, 62.

Though the sonnet was Hartley's forte, he succeeded with other forms. With blank verse he was moderately successful. In Leonard and Susan the influence of Wordsworth's dignified verse is evident, although Hartley is able to superimpose a sad, swaying rhythm of his own. As the subject matter of the poem is neither exciting nor philosophical, and as it lends itself to satire at only one point, the artist in Hartley led him to adopt a slow and stately verse. The figures of speech spring naturally into being, and though there is a tendency on Hartley's part to make the tale sentimental, the poem is good reading for a dull evening. Turn, for example, to the passage on Susan's death:

For sorrow had become the element,
The pulse, the sustenance of Susan's soul,
And sudden joy smote like the fire of Heaven,
That, while it brightens, slays. A hectic flush,
Death's crimson banner, crossed her marble cheek—
And it was pale again.—The strife is past—
She lies, a virgin corse, in Leonard's arms.

Poems, 14.

The other poems in blank verse need not detain us—they merely indicate a liking for the underlying elements of iambic metre.

Hartley's scholarly tendencies led him to the couplet, rather the heroic couplet of the pseudoclassicists than the romantic one of his contemporaries. He did not exclude enjambement, but he did not indulge in it too often: he did not strive for continual balance and conciseness, but felt the merit of an emphatic line; moreover, he did not venture to use the couplet for lyrical expression, but rather to give vent to the vein of satire of which he was not entirely devoid. It is unfortunate that the best of Hartley's verse in heroic couplets is published only in magazines, for he excelled in this kind of verse. He himself said, “I rather think that the couplet and the elegiac quatrain are the metres I manage best.” In a poem called the Tea Table, he writes:

Behold the cups array’d, the table set,
Matrons and Spinsters, all are duly met,
The younger Belles disposed in scatter’d troops
In rows demure, or gaily whispering groups.
The female elders chat the time away—
(I often wonder what they find to say)
Or timely range the fish in painted pools
(Their light exchequers) while their coffee cools.
What various tones from female organs flow
How glibly smooth, or long wishingly slow
The pretty creatures laugh, and weep and rail
In all gradations of the vocal scale
From fell Xantippe's emphasis of brass
To the soft murmur of a melting lass!

Fraser's Magazine, January, 1857.

Hartley's sweetest poems are those lyrics, simple in form and in content, which sing of his joys and sorrows. Here pure inspiration is enough: the firmness of the emotion and the lilt of the music carry along the glowing poet. Just as some of Wordsworth's most enchanting poems (the Lucy poems) are lyrics, so are some of Hartley's. His best work was with the sonnet, no one doubts that, but perhaps only in the very best sonnets does his unalloyed spirit burst forth as in many of the lyric verses. The following beautiful poem will serve as an example:

Reply

Ay! well it is, since she is gone,
She can return no more,
To see the face so dim and wan,
That was so warm before.
Familiar things would all seem strange,
And pleasure past be woe;
A record sad of ceaseless change,
Is all the world below.
The very hills, they are not now
The hills which once they were;
They change as we are changed, or how
Could we the burden bear?
Ye deem the dead are ashy pale,
Cold denizens of gloom—
But what are ye, who live to wail,
And weep upon their tomb?
She pass’d away, like morning dew,
Before the sun was high;
So brief her time, she scarcely knew
The meaning of a sigh.
As round the rose its soft perfume,
Sweet love around her floated;
Admired she grew—while mortal doom
Crept on, unfear’d, unnoted.
Love was her guardian Angel here,
But love to death resign’d her;
Tho’ love was kind, why should we fear,
But holy death is kinder?

Poems, 72.

In concluding any discussion of Hartley Coleridge's poems, one is always tempted to compare them with those of his father. Samuel Taylor Coleridge possessed a stronger and more virile genius. In the realm of pure imagination, when the unseen glories of the supernatural stood before him, he knew no peer. Hartley Coleridge had a less powerful genius, and he never soared beyond mere fancy. Though in his youth he seems to have possessed a really romantic imagination, which created strange beasts and countries, in manhood he had no such faculty. Samuel Taylor Coleridge has well been termed the father of romantic poetry in England, for it was he who led the way; but his son, Hartley, will be remembered for a few poems, not full of untrammelled imaginative wonders, but overflowing with human emotion and tender self-revelation. And though Hartley possessed the lesser genius, it is interesting to note that there was never any falling-off of his powers, his later poems often being finer than his earlier ones. The genius of Samuel Taylor Coleridge carried him beyond the pre-romantic movement, but Hartley had not “a genius strong enough to wrest and wrench himself out of the transition stage.”³

II. PROSE: ESSAYS AND MARGINALIA

In discussing Hartley's prose work, excepting The Northern Worthies, one is at once forced into classification. There are two distinct types of essays in the two volumes of prose which Derwent published in 1851: first, the purely critical and religious essays, written as reviews of books, or of persons; and second, the familiar essays, light, witty fancies of the moment, neither instructive nor destructive, neither wise nor foolish; but the two groups often merge into each other. Sometimes it is difficult to discover at what Hartley is aiming, and a serious conclusion may follow a pleasantly meandering fancy; but the suggested classification is usually sound.

Hartley was an excellent critic. His taste was highly cultivated, and he naturally chose works of artistic value. His mind was alert and responsive, and he was able to judge with finesse. The poets and literary men of Hartley's day were not wholly romantic, and they were more moderate in their passionate outbursts than their predecessors. Hartley could not imitate Christabel, and he could not give lectures like those of his father on Shakespeare; but he could see with a remarkable lucidity many of the main currents of literature. He read a great deal, despite his statements to the contrary, and he possessed a faculty for the intelligent retention of facts; consequently, when he came to criticize, he brought with him a vast fund of information and a good number of opinions. Even better than his father, he was able to appreciate the worth of the eighteenth century poets; and his sonnets to Homer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Coleridge illustrate the keen perception he possessed.

Nevertheless, Hartley was not at his best in formal criticism; he was too conversational, too discursive for that. Though the world has never been able to decide what it wants for criticism, it generally demands that the critic should show a broad and inclusive philosophy of life, or, at least, that some great principle should underlie his work. Hartley Coleridge was a very talented man; in many respects he was a genius; but he did not possess a soul expansive enough to give him a definite grasp of things. In his criticism he is vivid and interesting; he indicates for us, very successfully indeed, the faults and virtues of a given production; he brings us round to his point of view and is often very convincing; but he does not seem to have been able to organize his thoughts into any plan. The following passage shows a keen perception and a love of strong contrast; but it is no more than a mere passing idea, to be forgotten by its author as quickly as it sprang into being:

Milton is the most ideal, Spenser the most visionary of poets. Neither of them was content with the world as he found it; but Spenser presents you with a magic picture to exclude it from your sight, Milton produces a pattern to mend it by. After labouring in vain to stamp perfection on an earthly republic, he embodied it in a new World of gods and godlike men. His boldest imaginations have the solemnity, the conscious grandeur of moral truths; his ideals seem more substantial, more real, than any actual reality. He rouses the mind to more than common wakefulness, while Spenser enchants it into an Elysian dream.⁴

Discursiveness neither makes nor unmakes literary criticism; but the permanence of the essays should not rest on digression alone. In a review of Sir Aubrey de Vere's Julian the Apostate Hartley's remarks about Shakespeare and his contemporaries⁵ are very interesting. To a certain extent they contribute to an understanding of the play being discussed; but in this case, as in others, Hartley leads us too far from the main question, and we find that it is the digression, not the essay proper, which holds our attention. It is very easy for almost any critic to be diverted from his main topic by an inviting by-path; and if Hartley followed the example of the Biographia Literaria of his father, either wilfully, or more certainly, because of the resemblance of his mind to that of his father, he had considerable authority in his favour; nevertheless, this weakness greatly interferes with the effectiveness of his criticism and destroys the reader's continuity of thought.

The religious and literary criticism in Volume Two of the Essays is not on the whole finished work, but represents the spontaneous reaction of Hartley's mind to whatever he was reading. Like his father, he was ever ready to comment or criticize, and the entire volume is scarcely more than a selection of table-talk—in writing. We see quickly the power and amazing activity of Hartley's mind. Here, perhaps, he is most natural, for no critic can be particularly artificial in miscellaneous marginalia. Often his judgment is swayed momentarily by a hidden prejudice; but the criticism as a whole betrays a fair-minded, finely woven, and delicately constructed temperament, ready to love what is good. Hartley's deep religious convictions made him demand a moral basis for his criticism, but withal we find him most appreciative of anything artistic. His love of petty distinctions, of argument for its own sake, often leads him to unnecessary comments; but with a clear understanding he usually finds something interesting to talk about. Had he worked his disconnected jottings into formal essays, he would probably have produced a considerable amount of very readable criticism. Of Richard West, Hartley writes, tempted as always to speak also of himself:

Some writers maintain a sort of dubious, twilight existence, from their connection with others of greater name. R. West, though an elegant and promising youth, is one of them. He would have been forgotten had he not been the friend of Gray. Jago would have no place among the poets had he not been a favourite of Shenstone. Kirk White will live by the kindness of Southey. If aught of mine be preserved from oblivion, it will be owing to my bearing the name of Coleridge, and having enjoyed, I fear with less profit than I ought, the acquaintance of Southey and of Wordsworth.”⁶

Hartley's light essays, in which he attempts to discuss some phase of art, of literature, or of life, and in which Charles Lamb was often his guide, are probably his best prose work; for here the field is broad and unrestricted, and positive proof or formal reasoning is unnecessary. “Pride,” says Hartley,

seems to be involved in the very essence of conscious reflective individuality; it is the peculiar self-love of a rational creature, only subdued by that faith which introduces the creatures into the presence of the Creator, and merges the finite understanding in the infinite Reason;⁷

and then by means of his nimble wit and expansive imagination he produces an essay on one phase of pride. He wrote in a clever and allusive manner, seldom exhausting his subject, always wandering, pleasing himself and his reader by unchanging good-humour, palpable exaggeration, and shrewd insight. He cared not what his subject was; his only interest being in a playful self-revelation.

Hartley's success with this species of writing is due to the fact that the informal essay needs no regularity, no conscious adherence to rule, and is, therefore, exactly compatible with his temperament; and to the fact that he revered Charles Lamb and endeavoured to employ many of his master's tricks of style. The first of these reasons demands no further comment, but it is only fair to Hartley Coleridge to demonstrate the individuality of his own essays, despite their resemblance to those of Charles Lamb. Charles Lamb's nature was, like Hartley's, a combination of melancholy and happiness, and when the circumstances of life came nearest to crushing him, the balance of these two qualities prevented a surrender to madness, or death. When he came, late in life, to write his inimitable familiar essays, he realized fully the tragic circumstances of human existence; but he had found that peace and understanding were the result of gentleness and love. His humour, his ease, and his lightheartedness, therefore, were entirely natural. Herein lies the fundamental difference in the spirit of his and Hartley's essays. Most of Hartley's essays were written when he was a young man, but when he was enduring the pangs of remorse over his unsuccessful trial at Oxford or at Ambleside. Unwilling to expose to the world the sorrow arising from the contemplation of his failures, he affected a light-heartedness. His purpose was to deceive himself, to be happy in spite of a hundred potent reasons why he should not be so. But his pose was not entirely successful, and in spite of his intentions, the marks of artificiality which the familiar essayist tries to conceal are evident. Observe, for example, the forced quality of the following passage:

I am brief myself; brief in stature, brief in discourse, short of memory and money, and far short of my wishes. In most things, too, I am an admirer of brevity; I cannot endure long dinners. All the delicate viands that sea and land, with all the points ‘on the shipman's card,’ produce, are not so irresistible a temptation to gluttony, as the ennui of a needless half-hour at table: certain motions of the jaws are undoubtedly infectious: such are laughing, yawning, and eating. Should the nightmare ‘and her nine fold,’ descend visibly upon the dishes; should indigestion, after the old fashion, assume the shape of Abernethy to admonish me, and gout appear in yet more formidable likeness of a racking toe, the mere dead weight of time would turn the balance of my resolves.⁸

Hartley's affectation goes even farther. Though comparatively young when he wrote for the London Magazine or Blackwood's Magazine, he nevertheless wrote as if he were old and settled, with a great amount of experience behind him; yet the whimsical manner in which he conversed was obviously intended as an apology for his seeming dogmatism. Elia was never dogmatic; but his humorous remarks were as unaffected as the man himself.

We have already said something about Hartley's style. Its most outstanding characteristics are clearness, rhythm, and artificiality. The clearness of the style is due to a remarkable command of English and a deliberate effort to give pleasure; the rhythm is the product of Hartley's poetical nature, and it is gained by a careful use of words and by a tendency to balance and arrange sentence structure; the artificiality of style is the direct result of a too conscious attempt to disclose the happier and more whimsical side of life. There is, however, for the reader a delight in the rise and fall of Hartley's emotion, in his deft disclosure of fanciful notions. He wrote, not as he lived; but carefully, striving to show, perhaps, the polish and conventionality, the restraint and consciousness, which his life lacked.

III. PROSE: THE NORTHERN WORTHIES

There are two purposes for biography; it may serve either as a valuable and authentic record for the historian who seeks facts, or as a pleasant literary diversion for the casual reader. The two methods, to be sure, may merge one into the other. In either case it is necessary to examine the inner life, and to discover, if possible, the spiritual forces involved. Biography goes beyond the limits of mere narrative and gives evidence of the biographer's detachment from his subject and of his imaginative sympathy.

Now Hartley Coleridge, whatever may be his merits as an author, wrote his Northern Worthies without any proper point of view. In each biography he feels that he must give the facts of the man's life, and he proceeds to do so, heaping them on each other in bewildering fashion; but his artistic instinct forces him to do more. He is fond of exploiting his own opinions and often detains us indefinitely, expounding a theory of art or of ethics. He had numerous convictions and maintained a stubborn allegiance to certain fixed dogmas; but his mind never seemed to be able to grasp a scheme for all things, whereby he could arrange in order a fluctuating mass of clever and new ideas. Thus he announces, in his life of Thomas Lord Fairfax, that he will be perfectly unbiassed in describing Fairfax's part in the Revolution; but before we have read very far we feel that Hartley is biassed, despite his unwillingness to be so. We learn of Ascham's scholarly dignity with its influence and power, of Captain Cook's peregrinations to lands afar; we discover the merits and defects of Congreve's dramatic work, the misplaced tenacity of Bentley and his classical opinions; but alas, it is all a jumble of shrewd observations, never consistently followed out! There ensues a chaos of disorder, a sad confusion of criticisms. Such a weakness led Hartley often astray; for throughout the Lives there are long digressions, interesting enough to be sure, but indicative of a false perspective. We find biography within biography, which, though not always a fault, often arises from an inability to keep to the point. Hartley's genius gave him power to enlarge suggestive opinions on the least provocation; but the power often led him to develop points of secondary importance. In a picture gallery an experienced guide will lead his audience through the maze of paintings with some logical sequence, missing perhaps a few rooms of minor importance, but covering the whole museum in orderly fashion. So we wish biography to be; better the loss of a few details than the loss of a unity of impression.

Yet in observing the general aspects of Hartley Coleridge as a biographer we must not miss his merits. He has an outstanding and characteristic enthusiasm for his subject matter. Save in one or two instances, each biography bears the stamp of this intensity of feeling. He seeks to catch the spirit of the original life, to present to us a living character. He does not content himself with a mere record of facts or with a chronological report, but he tries to fuse together his materials. Many of the details necessary to biography are dull and unimposing; the skill of the author is in the presentation of the facts. Here Hartley is a past master of the art. Just when we are becoming bored with the intricate details of Bentley's quarrels or Cook's journeys, a witty criticism or a shrewd observation carries us away. Hartley may very well have found his job a tedious one, working, as he wrote in a letter, at the rate of twelve pages a day, often with insufficient sources before him; but be it said to his credit that he very seldom shows any lassitude and that the reader very seldom finds his interest flagging.

Hartley's characteristic enthusiasm and his intensity of feeling were the result of his humanity. He loved mankind, and when he studied the life of a man who had been weak or even vicious, he felt too strongly his own aberrations to judge harshly or unsympathetically. He realized, of course, that the first duty of a biographer is to tell the truth; but he knew that judgments are often made on insufficient evidence. Men of the past were to him men of flesh and blood, whose lives were obscured by time; it was his work to present them as living characters, open to the same temptations and emotional crises as his contemporaries. It was natural, therefore, for him to be inspired by his subjects and to be perceptibly moved by their trials and vicissitudes.

The Northern Worthies is a tribute to Hartley's skill as a scholar. The book shows how much he was able to accomplish by honest effort, despite a lack of original sources. Realizing how limited his facilities for work really were, we are often amazed at the fund of information he has acquired. Working often with only one source, he is able to present a logical and readable biography.

Moreover, though Hartley constantly yields to the temptation to wander and digress, he tries to make clear his point of view in each individual case. Usually the accounts are preceded by an introduction, either dealing with the general field of the man's endeavour or of the period in which he lived. These discussions, though sometimes they become digressions, serve to make everything more intense as well as to clarify the reader's hazy ideas of men and times.

Putting aside for the moment any judgment of the merits of the Northern Worthies as biography, we find two characteristics which make this work interesting: the tendency to generalize, to expand, or to define, and the quality of the style. Improvements in machinery, Hartley says, “have indeed increased wealth, but they have tremendously increased poverty”;⁹ but he is not content with this mere statement, and proceeds to define:

not that willing poverty which weans the soul from earth, and fixes the desires on high; not that poverty which was heretofore to be found in mountain villages, in solitary dwellings mid-way up the bleak fell side, where one green speck, one garden plot, a hive of bees, and a few sheep would keep a family content; not that poverty which is the nurse of temperance and thoughtful piety—but squalid, ever-murmuring poverty, cooped in mephitic dens and sunless alleys; hopeless, purposeless, wasteful in the midst of want; a poverty which dwarfs and disfigures the body and soul, and renders the capacities and even the acquirements of intellect useless and pernicious, and multiplies a race of men without the virtues which beasts oft-times display—without fidelity, gratitude, or natural affection.¹⁰

The tendency to define or to expand gives Hartley an opportunity to throw off, as it were, odd fragments of his reflections. The remarks above reveal a tender and sympathetic nature; those in the following passage, which arose from an attempt to distinguish between an ordinary knave and a great one, reveal instead his shrewdness:

It is no doubt easy, for any man that chooses, to be a knave; knave enough to ruin himself and his friends, knave enough to lose his character and his soul, but all this a man may do without being a great knave, without realizing a fortune of half a million. The common run of small knaves, like small poets, are wretchedly poor, living from hand to mouth upon their shifts or their verses, because they are not the knaves or the poets of nature, but of vanity or necessity. They play off their tricks and their sonnets on the spur of the moment, and are incapable of forming any scheme befitting ‘a creature of large discourse, looking before and after.’ But the great knave despises all epigrams and impromptus, and fugitive pieces of knavery. As the great poet speaks plain prose to his neighbors, writes a letter of business like a man of business, and can see a rose or a pretty milk-maid without committing rhyme or blank [verse] upon either, reserving and consolidating his powers for some great and permanent object, that will rather ennoble his genius, than be ennobled by it. So the truly great knave never throws knavery away; in all but the main point he is minutely honest, and only to be distinguished from the naturally honest man, by the greater anxiety about appearances. But in one thing the great knave differs from the great poet. The poet conceives great ideas of his own, and in the production and development of these ideas his delight consists; he does not readily adopt the ideas of others, far less does he make any use of them. Now the leading faculty of the knave, and it is a faculty none can acquire who is not born with it, is a quiet apprehension of the use to be made of others' labours, others' thoughts, others' inventions.¹¹

Hartley is a master of English prose. When under stress, he constructs climactic or balanced sentences which hold the attention of the reader. Sometimes there are evident a certain pride in grammatical correctness and a deliberate attempt to make the words and constructions yield a rich harvest; but there is no obscurity or pomposity, no high-flown phraseology. Like Macaulay, Hartley loved strong contrasts, sweeping generalizations, and colourful exaggeration; and the following passage may well be compared with many similar ones in Macaulay's works:

Fifty thousand subjects of one king stood face to face on Marston Moor. The numbers on each side were not far unequal, but never were two hosts speaking one language of more dissimilar aspects. The Cavaliers, flushed with recent victory, identifying their quarrel with their honour and their love, their loose locks escaping beneath their plumed helmets, glittering in all the martial pride which makes the battle day like a pageant or a festival, and prancing forth with all the grace of gentle blood, as if they would make a jest of death, while the spirit-rousing strains of the trumpets made their blood dance, and their steeds prick up their ears: the Roundheads, arranged in thick dark masses, their steel caps and high crown hats drawn close over their brows, looking determination, expressing with furrowed foreheads and hard-closed lips, the inly-working rage which was blown up to furnace heat by the extempore effusions of their preachers, and found vent in the terrible denunciations of the Hebrew psalms and prophecies. The arms of each party were adapted to the nature of their courage: the swords, pikes, and pistols of the royalists, light and bright, were suited for swift onset and ready use; while the ponderous basket-hilted blades, long halberts, and heavy fire-arms of the parliamentarians were equally suited to resist a sharp attack, and to do execution upon a broken army. The royalists regarded their adversaries with that scorn which the gay and high-born always feel or affect for the precise and sour-mannered: the soldiers of the covenant looked on their enemies as the enemies of Israel, and considered themselves as the elect and chosen people—a creed which extinguished fear and remorse together. It would be hard to say whether there were more praying on one side or swearing on the other, or which, to a truly Christian ear, had been the most offensive. Yet both esteemed themselves the champions of the church, there was bravery and virtue in both; but with this high advantage on the parliamentary side, that while the aristocratic honour of the royalists could only inspire a certain number of gentlemen, and separated the patrician from the plebeian soldier, the religious zeal of the Puritans bound officer and man, general and pioneer, together, in a fierce and resolute sympathy, and made equality itself an argument for subordination. The captain prayed at the head of his company, and the general's oration was a sermon.¹²

Certainly with reading and study Hartley had acquired a wide knowledge of words; and the Worthies shows a careful application of that knowledge. The true literary artist prides himself on his style; and though Hartley's tendency to wander often abruptly breaks the continuity of thought and the unity of impression, his genius and power make his prose very readable.

In the last few years there has been a distinct change in taste, particularly concerning biography. The modern reader seldom has time for long books; and if a book is long it must justify itself by special qualities. The biographies which Hartley wrote could not be popular to-day; they are too long, too digressive, too crammed with observations on life and its problems, to appeal; they lack sufficient information, and there are not enough facts to justify their existence. The modern reader may read through the three volumes of the Northern Worthies and find them interesting; he may say, as Walter Bagehot says in his Literary Studies:

This Biographia is actually read; a man is glad to take it up, and slow to lay it down; it is a book which is truly valuable, for it is truly pleasing; and which a man who has once had it in his library would miss from his shelves, not in the common way, by a physical vacuum, but by a mental deprivation;¹³

but it will necessarily be in spite of his prejudices.

Notes

1. When Hartley did revise his poems, they were much improved.

2. The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, Miles, A. H., 1898, III, 136.

3. Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. XII, 107.

4. Essays, I, 4.

5. Only Shakespeare and his Contemporaries is given in the Essays, I, 353.

6. Essays, II, 110.

7. Ibid., I, 308.

8. Essays, I, 47.

9. Northern Worthies, 477.

10. Ibid., 477.

11. Northern Worthies, 464-5.

12. Northern Worthies, 199.

13. Literary Studies, 1879, 58.