Tuesday 18 February 2020

‘The Parterre’ (1836): New Coleridge Verse and Anecdotes


This seems to have been overlooked: an article in the short-lived 1830s miscellany-magazine The Parterre (1832-36) that includes a number of anecdotes about Coleridge's life, including a hitherto unnoticed (parodic) couplet by the poet. The article is written by ‘A Descendent of Oliver Cromwell’, though it's a little hard to say whether this is meant literally, or whether it's an arch allusion to some mode of revolutionary political affiliation. If the latter (or indeed, the former) it is unlikely to be the Tory De Quincey, whose Lake Reminiscences began appearing in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine in 1839 and were later collected in book form (although a Coleridge memorabilium from De Quincey is quoted in this same volume of the Parterre—p.108—and attributed to him). None of these memorabilia appear in De Quincey, nor, so far as I can tell, anywhere else either:
MEMORABILIA, BY A DESCENDANT OF OLIVER CROMWELL (For the Parterre).

I have seen and heard much through a long life. I have written my autobiography, which I intended should be published on the day a grave-stone was erected over my tomb. Too impatient, however, to await the period of my ghost flitting around my executors whilst employed correcting the proof sheets of my literary post obits, I have come to the resolution of giving the world some fragments of my memorabilia whilst l am yet alive.

I was in company with the celebrated Dr. Parr. He was then young and engaged in courtship. He related facetiously a dispute he had had with his lady-love. “If I marry,” said Parr, “I shall not approve of Jewish names for my expected children. I will not have a little tribe of Christian perfectly Jewish in nomenclature. If I had eleven daughters, I would name the first, “Amo; ” the second, “Amas; ” the third, “Amavi;” the fourth, “Amari;” the fifth, “Amandi;” the sixth, “Amando;" the seventh, “Amandum ; ” the eighth, “Amatum;” the ninth, “Amatu;” the tenth, “Amans; ” the eleventh, “Amaturus.” The translation of these latter words,” continued Parr, “would probably denote my love towards my wife, and my wife's love towards me, during the ten years necessary to give birth to the daughters to be named.”

Another time, I was with Dr. Parr at Will's coffee-house, Serle-street, London. Two Warwick attorneys were dining in the coffee-room. They did not like the port wine, and asked the waiter to change it for a tawny wine. “The wine you have got is what master calls attorney wine,” said the waiter.

The poet Coleridge was particularly fond of quaint poetry, similar to the description of a ball:
“Thin dandies in tights, weighing each one an ounce,
Young ladies befurbelowed, flounce upon flounce.”
I once went with Coleridge to visit a young lady whose father and mother were for years martyrs to the gout; when he in his eccentricity expressed their helpless situation by a parody of Byron, thus—
“They lazily mumbled their meals in bed,
Unable to crawl from the spot where they fed.”
Walking with Coleridge in the country, we saw washed linen hanging in a village church-yard. He said, “The inhabitants dry their clothes on the graves of their ancestors.” After a pause, he added, “the scene appears as if the ghosts had hung up their shrouds.”

Talking of the lunacy of poor ———, Coleridge said, “I intend writing some lines on one curious aberration of poor ———'s mind.” He declared that “kneeling was not the proper position in which a Christian ought to pray. He always prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in figure of a cross.”

I remember Coleridge laughing immoderately at a stage coachman boasting he had realized more than £50 by the retail sale of one small barrel of ale. The boaster drove a stage-coach on one of the western roads, and kept, in his wife's name, on the same road a publichouse. He invariably stopped here under pretence of “washing his horses' mouths.” The passengers would call for “glasses or pints of ale.” It was speedily brought, and paid for; but no sooner did it touch the lips of a passenger, than its acidity caused him to forbear drinking; no one ever drank more than half his order. The coach again rolled forward with its four prancing steeds: the liquor which was left in the pints and glasses was carefully poured through the bung-hole of the barrel, to be re-sold to other sets of passengers of to-morrow and to-morrow.

Coleridge described singing without music as “singing without accompaniment of any sort, except the most wonderful distortion of face.”

The crime of murdering persons by pressing on their bodies and suffocating them, is, from its first discovered offender, Burke, called “Burking.” Coleridge, when any passage of his writings on rereading did not please him, would write a new passage on a slip of paper, and paste it over the disliked passage. This he called “Burking it.”
I suppose ‘poor ———’ is Charles Lamb, with whom Coleridge was close and whose periods of insanity are well-known (though I can't find any other reference to Lamb's habit of praying standing up). The example of ‘quaint poetry’ of which STC was fond (‘Thin dandies in tights, weighing each one an ounce,/Young ladies befurbelowed, flounce upon flounce’) is from an anonymously published and, so far as I can see, never subsequently collected or acknowledged poem in The Literary Gazette (1826) called ‘A Modern Quadrille’:



I suppose the phrasing here implies that ‘A Modern Quadrille’ was a poem Coleridge admired for its quirkiness, not a poem that he himself composed, although the latter possibility is not, perhaps, entirely ruled out of court. This is the poem, at any rate:
A Modern Quadrille

Concordia discors.”—Ovid.

Thin dandies in tights, weighing each one an ounce;
Young ladies befurbelow'd, flounce upon flounce;
Fond mothers extolling their daughters so dear,
To some good-natured youth of nine hundred a-year;
A party at whist, looking grim as a cannibal,
Each at their foe, like the Romans at Hannibal;
Some prints on the table, distressingly maul’d,
And “exquisite, lovely, bewitching!” miscall'd;
Three footmen in lace, and three others without,
All brilliant as candlesticks, stalking about;
An Austrian Hussar, a Sir Patrick O'Stokes,
Of the Poyais Light-horse (but of course that's a hoax);
A crowd on the stairs, with a wind like a knife,
Coming sharp round the legs of maid, husband, or wife;
A pensive young lady, rich, fickle, but cross,
With a pensive young Irishman near her, of course;
One preacher, two poets, and three poetesses;
A critic, fantastic and tawdry whose dress is;
All these, with their talents, loquacious or still,
Make up, gentle lady, a modern Quadrille!
It would be nice to think this a late-flowering spurt of Coleridge in his comic-satiric mode, but that's not very likely. The parody couplet (‘they lazily mumbled their meals in bed,/Unable to crawl from the spot where they fed’) clearly is Coleridgean; based, of course, on the lines from Byron's Seige of Corinth (1816) where dogs are chewing the bones of the slain:
And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
Hold o'er the dead their carnival,
Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb;
They were too busy to bark at him!
From a Tartar's skull they had stripp'd the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunch'd o'er the whiter skull,
As it slipp'd through their jaws, when their edge grew dull,
As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead,
When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed.
But the most interesting things here are the anecdotes. “The inhabitants dry their clothes on the graves of their ancestors; the scene appears as if the ghosts had hung up their shrouds” is just splendid. The ‘Burking’ reference also crops-up in Anton Langerhann's record of Coleridges' Table Talk from around 1830 (and there only, I think: it is reprinted in Carl Woodring's 1990 Collected Coleridge vol 14 Table Talk edition: 2:443), although the German Langerhann, whose reminiscences were not even translated into English until the 20th-century, cannot be the ‘descendant of Oliver Cromwell’ who wrote for the Parterre.


5 comments:

  1. A postscript: it would be nice to argue that Mr Cromwellian's ‘the poet Coleridge was particularly fond of quaint poetry’ followed by the quotation from ‘the modern Quadrille’ actually meant ‘the poet Coleridge was particularly fond writing quaint poetry’ like that. But I don't think we can; although Coleridge certainly knew Jerdan, the editor of the Literary Gazette pretty well (he was a frequent visitor at STC's Highgate home in the mid-to-late 1820s and includes reminiscences about him in his Autobiography, 1852-1853), and it's not absolutely impossible that STC wrote those lines. Generally the verse published on the Gazette's front pages was selected from submissions sent in by readers, but (a) by 1826 Coleridge was certainly famous enough to merit an attribution, if he'd been the author, and (b) Mr Cromwellian's phrasing here (‘fond of quaint poetry, similar to’) makes more sense if he's citing examples of poetry C liked, rather than actual poetry he'd written.

    The thing is, this renders the anecdote rather pointless. Why record one (of hundreds of thousands!) snatch of verse that STC liked? I suppose the sense more broadly is: ‘you think Coleridge was all high seriousness and incomprehensible Kantian metaphysics? Not so: he also liked this kind of doggerel ...’ Still seems a thin kind of rationale.

    PPS: this is (some of) what Jerdan said about STC in 1852-53: "Coleridge’s facetiousness was very peculiar. It seemed like some gay flashing exotic which sprung out of, or was rather thrown out by, a dark heavy mould that seemed only calculated to bear lofty and umbrageous trees. The poem of “The Devil’s Thoughts,”

    From his brimstone bed at break of day,
    A walking the Devil is gone.

    is now assigned to him in collections; but I have heard him tell that it was a joint production in which Southey had a hand, as he had in several other things, and especially in an “Inscription on a Gravestone,” of remorseless animosity, which I cannot here repeat. It is a curious fact that an Epigram ascribed to him on Job’s Bereavements, the point of which is that Satan not having taken his spouse, it happened that when everything was restored twofold, he had shown his short-sightedness by that omission! whilst I, unaware of this jeu, had written on the same subject with the concluding line anent the doubling of blessings,

    “But we don’t hear a word of a couple of wives!”

    I remember one of his pleasant stories, told con gusto, like that of his reading “Remorse” with Mr. Kinnaird, of a school performance of a drama on the breaking-up day, in which he played a part. Unluckily the character demanded a laugh, which the juvenile actor delivered thus, “ha! ha! ha! ha!” with due pause and emphasis of indiscretion between every ha! His father called out “laugh—laugh,” upon which he repeated the ha’s more emphatically than before, when the incensed pedagogue rushed upon the stage, and, cuffing the unfortunate performer, cried, “Laugh, Sir, laugh; why don’t you laugh?” to which the only response was the “hah, hah, hah’s,” with bursts of crying between, and certainly, at last, amid the uncontrollable laughter of the audience. It was a treat to hear the old man eloquent, with his sonorous voice and glittering eye, tell and act this juvenile tale, and compare himself to the boy in the Lupercalian sacrifice who was obliged to laugh when the priest pricked his forehead with the knife reeking with the blood of the victim goat."

    That passage has long been known to scholars, though.

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  2. This is a wild find - though I'd wager it is "poor" Henderson and not Lamb. Henderson's lunacy was singular and renowned.

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    1. That's a canny suggestion! Yes ... thank you.

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    2. This from Maximus of Turin (translated by Hugo Rahner in Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, 1971):

      Wonderful is this mystery of the cross, for by this sign the whole round world is saved. A symbol of this mystery is the sail that hangs on the mast of a ship like Christ upon the cross; and when the good husbandman sets to plough his land, lo, he too can only accomplish his task with something figured according to the shape of the cross. Even the arch of heaven is formed in the shape of a cross, and when man strides forth, when he raises his arms, he also describes a cross. That is why we should always pray with outstretched arms, so that with the posture of our limbs we may imitate the sufferings of the Lord.


      Maximus of Turin was a Universalist, as was John Henderson, after George Stonehouse, along with his friend John Prior Estlin and many of those Royal Arch freemasons and Unitarians in the West Country. Coleridge had already written about "poor Henderson ..." as a drunken or opium-addled "sot" circa 1806 (from Malta?) - my friend, PC, is digging up the exact reference. Your discovery of a quote on (probably) Henderson awakens my musings! (that Monody to Henderson was well beyond Cottle's range as a poet)

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