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 More on books from The Atlantic Monthly. |
Dorothy Wordsworth: The Perfect Sister - Page 2 1 | 2 
ith Coleridge the problem was different. He and Dorothy liked each other from the moment he came running across the field and into their house at Racedown, eager, enthusiastic, unannounced. She liked him for the freedom of his talk and his boyish spirits. She liked him because he admired and encouraged her brother. He liked her for her sensitive perceptions, her ready sympathy, her natural eager demeanor —so utterly different from the shallow, contained, conventional, fussy attitude of his wife. But he did not precisely compare her with his wife; he did not think of her in those terms. She was a companion, bright, amusing, sympathetic, high-spirited, sensitive; she was a link with Wordsworth, of whom in the ardor of his admiration he stood a little in awe. She interpreted the one to the other, not consciously or deliberately, but by understanding both she realized the harmony of their thought and feeling. That was her true position, and if she could have married Coleridge, if there had been that passionate bond between them, her relationship with her brother would have been altered and there would have been no "three persons and one soul."I do not say they all three understood this at the time; I do not say that Dorothy never wished, even for a moment, that she could have been Coleridge's wife. Perhaps she did, but the physical attraction, if it existed at all, was not so strong as to make all other communion painful and impossible. She continued to love and serve Coleridge, as she loved and served her brother, and in equal measure and in the same kind they returned her love. Coleridge was not happily married. He had chosen badly, if indeed he had chosen at all; for the choice had perhaps been made as much by Southey as himself. His marriage was never a passionate romance, and of spiritual and intellectual companionship there was little. Coleridge was not in the mood at Racedown to look upon Miss Wordsworth and, feeling that he had made a bitter mistake, long for what he could not have. He was, however, surprised and delighted by a form of companionship which he had never imagined, and in the months that followed at Alfoxden and Nether Stowey he and Dorothy spent many enchanted hours alone together or in the company of Wordsworth, whom they equally honored and loved. Mrs. Coleridge was not jealous: she did not think Miss Wordsworth's charms gave her any cause. She did not believe her husband was in love in the ordinary sense, and she was right. What she resented at first and continued to resent for many years was the encouragement which she felt her husband received from the Wordsworths in his waywardness, his incompetence, his self-indulgences. There she was wrong. If the paths of Wordsworth and Coleridge had never crossed, the pitiable decline of Coleridge would have begun much earlier, there would have been no Ancient Mariner, no Christabel, and no Kubla Khan. Mrs. Coleridge can hardly be blamed for not understanding that. She was an ordinary woman, beset with family responsibilities and without the money to meet them. Her husband gave her no practical help, and during that idyllic time at Nether Stowey, while she occupied herself with the insistent demands of the infant Hartley, he roamed the countryside with the Wordsworths, with little regard to her time or her convenience. Miss Wordsworth, in her free spontaneous manner, borrowed Mrs. Coleridge's clothes if a wet walk made a change desirable, while Wordsworth, never a courteous or gallant man, paid her little attention. She felt excluded: that trinity of persons had no need of her. But she was not jealous of Dorothy in the vulgar sense. 
he unhappiness of Coleridge, his mental and physical unrest, increased as the years advanced. While Wordsworth married a woman of a placid, patient nature, self-effacing, kind and loving, Coleridge's relations with his wife grew hourly more torturing and insupportable. He must have the physical and romantic love, which he could not get at home. Dorothy neither would nor could supply it; there was never any question of that. But she can hardly have relished the passionate interest which he now began to show in Sara Hutchinson, Mrs. Wordsworth's sister. He imagined himself deeply in love, but it was a passion that could have nothing but a miserable issue. Quite apart from the conventional impediments, Coleridge was already too far gone in self-indulgence and self-pity to make any woman happy, and the Wordsworths could only grieve for Sara, whom they dearly loved.It is absorbing to play with the "ifs" of history, and the big "if" of Wordsworth and Coleridge is not "if only Coleridge had married Dorothy Wordsworth," but "if only he had married Sara Hutchinson." If there had been no pantisocracy and no Sarah Fricker, if Coleridge and Wordsworth had married Sara and Mary Hutchinson, then there might have been the equilibrium which would have preserved them from their fates and sustained their inspiration for a longer spell. Then Dorothy could still have presided with her sensitive touch over the imaginations of those two beloved men, who, contented in their married lives, would have found in her that spiritual element which transmuted into poetry the powerful feelings that worked within them. However, to disprove this agreeable fancy is the history of Wordsworth's own decline. He was a happy man, fortunate in his wife and children, fortunate in his circumstances, blessed in his sister. And yet, abruptly almost, when he was thirty-eight years old, his Muse deserted him, and Dorothy had no power to arrest the decline, to soften his hardness, to check his increasing vanity. By 1808, the year in which Wordsworth's genius had begun its dull and downward path, that great friendship of the three was stretched and strained. By 1810 it was snapped. For the last year Coleridge had lived in Wordsworth's house, apart from his wife, whom he had left for good, but the Wordsworths were now powerless to make him happy. He imprisoned himself in his own selfishness; he fed upon his morbid sensations and suspicions; he surrendered his poor aching body to opium and alcohol. He was not an easy inmate. He rose late; he was inconsiderate; he was silent and sulky with all except Sara, whom he pestered with his attentions and burdened with his demands for sympathy. He brooded on his imagined wrongs; he encouraged his "most lawless thoughts"; he accused Wordsworth, his wife, and Dorothy of turning Sara against him, of stealing her love from him, of reading her letters. His mind and body were disordered; his "shaping spirit of imagination" had forsaken him; he gave nothing now to Wordsworth and received nothing back, the well was dry. And then came the open quarrel, caused by the garrulous impertinence of Montagu, but not in itself important, because the discord was already there, because the triune spell was already broken. Dorothy never saw Coleridge again: he was dead to her and dead to most things. Wordsworth she saw every day, but a Wordsworth deprived of one part of that triple force, given over more and more to politics and domestic cares, and forging for himself an armor of self-complacency. No wonder that she drooped and failed, no wonder that her nervous powers were exhausted and that she sank into a melancholy confusion of wits. But she had done her work and fulfilled her destiny, and through the workings of her delicate spirit the world is richer by two English poets.
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Copyright © 1950 by George Mallaby. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; December 1950; Dorothy Wordsworth: The Perfect Sister - 50.12; Volume 186, No. 6; page 81-83. |
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