The master on his craft
RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes William Collins £25
Richard Holmes’s multitude of admirers must be hoping he will produce another major work on the scale of his superb book-length biographies of the Romantic poets and scientists, but since he is someone who researches meticulously and minutely (fifteen years digging into Coleridge, for example), they may have to bide their time. Meanwhile, however, they can take great pleasure in this carefully assembled collection of what he calls his ‘sidetracks’ – shorter essays, articles, lectures and spin-offs.
What a companionable writer Holmes is: never pompous, strident or pretentious, always alert to ironies and oddities, his modestly unbuttoned style refreshingly free from cliché or the bleeding obvious. He doesn’t bang on; he always entertains as much as he informs. And although he likes to look beyond the library and the archive, making a point of travelling in the landscapes about which he is writing, his scholarly erudition and critical acumen are rock-solid.
Biography is something he is reluctant to theorise academically, preferring to think of it as a vocation rather than a profession and insisting that it is something suited only to the patient and empathetic. ‘A biographer is someone who waits,’ he claims, in a rare rhapsodic flight, ‘who awaits, who pays attention, who is constantly alert, who attends upon his subjects, who is at their service for a long period of faithful employment.’ This he has nobly done.
Here his subject matter is as ever largely but not exclusively focused on 1780–1830, the heroic revolutionary period of Romanticism. Aside from
one excursion into visual art (an excellent sketch of the underrated painter of Regency glamour Thomas Lawrence), he is concerned with literary figures, both poetic and philosophical in their bent.
Three topics preoccupy him: the first is the interaction of the idea of the imagination with the discoveries of physical science, as seen through the prism of Coleridge’s ‘passionate alliance’ with the chemist Humphry Davy: ‘What Davy was doing for the world of matter, Coleridge aimed to do for the world of the Mind’, is how Holmes neatly sums it up, pointing to mediating German notions of ‘a fluid, dynamic, unified Nature driven by invisible powers to which chemistry and electricity provided the key’.
The second is the role of women, fighting to be heard and heeded on the fringes of a man’s world. Even Holmes’s kindly championing cannot convince me that Margaret Cavendish, the first of her sex to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, was anything more than the quixotic ‘bird-witted’ hanger-on described by Virginia Woolf, but he makes a good case for the tiresome Germaine de Staël as ‘the first independent, freelance, female intellectual in Europe’, and offers a warm portrait of the admirable Mary Somerville, one of the great scientific popularisers of her day, nowadays sadly remembered only through the Oxford college which bears her name.
The third is the partial nature of biography and the constant need to reassess idées reçus. Holmes writes beautifully of the perils of memory and forgetting, the obfuscating activities of posthumous Keepers of the Flame with vested interests in cover-ups, and the tendency that biographers have to find what they want to find and ignore what they don’t want to see.
Yet he also pays handsome tribute to his predecessors in the field, and not just the already fêted Boswell and Carlyle. Here, too, is the fiercely honest William Godwin, determined not to gloss over the more scandalous aspects of his late wife Mary Wollstonecraft, even if the revelations temporarily destroyed her reputation. Here, even more movingly, is Anne Gilchrist, labouring after her husband Alexander’s early death to complete his pioneering life of the forgotten William Blake and refusing to take any credit for its success.
But perhaps the essay that best sums up Holmes’s endeavour is his superb explosion of the accepted account of Coleridge’s 1808 lectures to the Royal Institution ‘on the distinguished English Poets’, a series conventionally presented as an embarrassing flop. Rejecting this verdict, Holmes excavates instead ‘a triumph snatched from the jaws of disaster’ that launched Coleridge’s career as a public speaker, saw him through the worst of his addiction and set him writing again. It’s a masterly performance by – let’s not beat about the bush – the greatest literary biographer of his generation. Hatchards price: £22.50