nightingale,” in which STC comforts hartley
by carrying him outside to the orchard:
he beheld the moon, and, hushed at once,
Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently,
Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam!
While his fair eyes, that swam with
undropped tears,
After the Coleridges moved to the Lake
District in 1800, hartley became a frequent visitor at the home of William Wordsworth, who
was soon smitten himself. In “To h. C., Six Years
old,” Wordsworth calls hartley a “faery voyager”
and a “blessed vision”; in “ode: Intimations of
Immortality from recollections of Early Childhood,” a “six years’ Darling of a pigmy size.”
Diogenes struck the father when the son swore.
—Robert Burton, 1621
A penumbra of impossible expectation be-
gan to settle around hartley’s head. Like STC’s
letter to humphry Davy, these poems describe
hartley as more spirit than mortal, a child who
did not walk so much as levitate. Furthermore,
the “faery voyager” was generally agreed to be
a prodigy. Charles Lamb called him “the small
philosopher.” Mrs. Basil Montagu, a family
friend, marveled at the continent of Ejuxria, an
imaginary land that hartley equipped with its
own senate, legal system, and language (which
he claimed to have translated). But some of the
encomiums had ominous undertones. hartley’s
uncle, the poet robert Southey, wrote, “I have
a feeling that such an intellect can never reach
maturity—the springs are of too exquisite
workmanship to last long.” STC observed, “he
is a very extraordinary creature, & if he live, will
I doubt not prove a great genius.”
“If he live”? What must it feel like to be
a child simultaneously acclaimed as a genius
and acknowledged by one’s own father to be in
mortal danger?
Jean-Paul Sartre counted himself lucky
that he was an infant when his father died.
he wrote in The Words, “had my father lived,
he would have lain on me at full length and
crushed me.” Those are harsh words. But it’s
true that parents can be crushing—particularly
fathers, particularly with eldest sons. The dici-
est role of all may be that of the son of a famous
writer who, like hartley, hopes to be a writer
himself. An 1833 review of the only book of
poetry hartley published in his lifetime praised
the verse for embodying “no trivial inheritance
of his father’s genius,” but also quoted the old
saying that “the oakling withers beneath the
shadow of the oak.”
I have long been interested in what makes
some oaklings thrive and others wither because,
in a minor way, I’m an oakling myself. My fa-
ther was a critic and essayist. My mother was
the only woman war correspondent in China
during the Second World War. The upside of
this print-smudged parentage was that I was
raised in a home with six thousand books,
plenty of literary conversation, and empirical
evidence that writing was something you could
actually do for a living. The downside was that
I knew that no matter what I did, my parents
would already have done it better. Throughout
my life I have been asked, “Was Clifton Fadi-
man your father?” Even now, in my late fifties,
I am defined by daughterhood. Well-meaning
readers still tell me that I have inherited some
of my parents’ talent.
In a poem he sent hartley as a gift, the
diarist Barclay Fox addressed him as “Scion of
genius! on whose favoured head/his wondrous mantle fell.” This, of course, was to be
taken as a compliment. It never would have
occurred to Fox that hartley might have preferred to wear a mantle of his own making.
From Samuel Taylor Coleridge to hartley Coleridge, April 3, 1807:
My dear Boy
In all human beings good and bad
Qualities are not only found together, side
by side as it were; but they actually tend
to produce each other—at least, they must
