Few Victorian biographies begin more discouragingly than John Taylor Coleridge’s Memoir of the Rev. John Keble (1869). ‘It is not without sincere misgivings that I commence this memoir’, he informed the reader on the first page. He admitted that he might seem well-qualified to write the book because of his lifelong friendship with Keble, beginning in 1811, when they had been undergraduates together at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and continuing without a break throughout their respective careers, Keble as a parish priest, Coleridge as a barrister and judge. But while he was able to write of Keble as a man and a friend, he was unable to write ‘the history of our Church for the last forty years’ or ‘the part which John Keble took in the different measures and movements of our times in Church matters’. In these aspects ‘my narrative will be deficient, and many of my readers will be disappointed’. Why, then, had he written it at all? He scarcely seemed sure himself, but explained that he had been asked to do so by Keble’s widow, at a time when ‘it was almost impossible for me to refuse’. As for those readers who had picked up the Memoir hoping for an eventful or exciting story, Coleridge’s advice was simple: they would ‘do well to close this book at once’.Footnote 1
Many readers were indeed disappointed by the Memoir. The reader of all readers best able to judge, John Henry Newman, was noticeably sparing in his praise, remarking only: ‘It is wonderful how a man of 78 or 79 could compose, i.e. put together, so many pages as he has done.’Footnote 2 Modern scholars have concurred in finding the Memoir highly unsatisfactory. Georgina Battiscombe called it a ‘rambling and discursive book, all too clearly the work of an old and sick man’.Footnote 3 Owen Chadwick’s withering verdict was that Coleridge had ‘all the virtues of the biographer’ except two: he ‘could not write a book’, and he was paralysed by ‘a delicacy so sensitive as almost to disqualify him from the task which he undertook’.Footnote 4 Stephen Prickett calls the Memoir ‘less a biography than a hagiography’ and draws attention to its highly retrospective flavour as ‘the first of a whole series of works that display the old unreformed Oxford in a golden haze of nostalgia’.Footnote 5 But there has, until now, been no full study of the writing of the Memoir and how it shaped Keble’s posthumous reputation. This article seeks to fill that gap by drawing on the abundant materials in the Coleridge family archive, particularly John Taylor Coleridge’s private diary, from which it is possible to recover the judgements, doubts and suppressions that his published text carefully obscured.
I will argue in this article that the Memoir is more artful than it appears and more influential than has often been realised in creating an image of Keble that still endures today. In writing a life of Keble, Coleridge – despite his protestations to the contrary – could not avoid reckoning with the history and legacy of the Oxford Movement. Over the Memoir loomed the long shadow of Newman’s Apologia, published only five years earlier, which depicted Keble as ‘the true and primary author’ of the movement and his assize sermon National apostasy as the start of it.Footnote 6 Coleridge alludes to this in the Memoir, though without mentioning Newman by name: ‘I have prepared my readers not to expect in this memoir the history of that movement. But one who ought to know, has said in regard of it, that John Keble was its true and primary author, and I shall therefore supply such personal and incidental mention of it as my means enable me.’Footnote 7 Those words ‘personal and incidental’ should not deceive us. The Memoir was certainly a highly personal work, but it was also a reply to Newman and a history of the Oxford Movement from an Anglican rather than a Catholic perspective, written at a time when the movement was receding into the past and starting to take shape as a historical phenomenon. That alone should justify paying it more attention than it has hitherto received.
At its core, the Memoir was a family document: shaped by Coleridge’s grief at his younger son Henry’s conversion to Rome, shadowed by his unease at his elder son John’s drift towards a more liberal and progressive form of High Churchmanship, and animated by the desire to answer them both. Like Keble himself, Coleridge had been formed in the proto-Tractarian Oxford of the 1820s, and his instinct was to shelter Keble within that tradition and present him to posterity as its representative saint. His sons belonged to a different generation and a different religious temper, and the tensions between the three of them run through the Memoir in ways that Coleridge himself only partly acknowledged. But the family drama was also a public one. The divisions within the Coleridge household replicate in microcosm the larger divisions that the Oxford Movement had opened up in English religious life. Above all, the Memoir cannot be understood without recognising that it is both biography and autobiography. The qualities that made it an inadequate record of Keble’s life – the intimacy, the delicacy, the reverence and the insistent presence of Coleridge himself – are the very ones that make it revealing as a record of how Keble’s posthumous reputation was constructed.
Planning the Memoir
On 29 March 1866 John Keble died at Bournemouth, where he and his wife Charlotte had spent the winter in the forlorn hope that the sea air might improve their health. He had suffered a stroke the previous week while reading prayers at his wife’s bedside, and gradually slipped into unconsciousness before finally succumbing to an attack of erysipelas.Footnote 8 Coleridge received the news on 31 March and penned a heartfelt note in his diary: ‘the most pure and simple Saint I have ever known – God gave him to me as a friend for more than 50 years – oh what a gift to be answerable for’. Amid his grief, he consoled himself with the reflection that Keble had not died unprepared. ‘I verily believe his life has been but a long and conscious preparation. He was indeed a holy man, a Saint. Our Church, no Church has any one more entitled to that name.’ Already the thought of writing Keble’s biography had crossed his mind, only to be dismissed as unrealistic: ‘Oh that I had strength remaining to write Keble’s life worthily – but it is a thought not to be seriously listened to for an instant.’Footnote 9
Coleridge spent the next few days writing a brief notice for the Guardian, the leading High Church newspaper of the day, in which he described Keble as ‘the simplest, humblest, and most loving-hearted man, and withal the holiest and most zealous Christian I have ever known’. He followed this with a longer obituary, also for the Guardian, in which he floated the idea of a full-length biography. Keble’s life, he wrote, had been an unusual one, ‘passed in retirement, and marked by few incidents and no adventures’, yet ‘more than commonly influential on the opinions and feelings of others’. Such a life ‘should be told in detail to be properly understood’, and ‘someone, I earnestly hope, may be found hereafter to execute properly this most difficult task’.Footnote 10 Coleridge’s verdict on the obituary was typically self-critical: ‘roughly executed throughout, and most impotently concluded’, he wrote in his diary, regretting that he lacked the time, the mental energy and, most of all, the literary skill to do full justice to Keble. But he had still not given up hope of writing a longer biography: ‘It makes me dream of executing a larger, and yet a short Memoir – a single volume, not professing to be more than popular, and not attempting to give the full narration of all the controversies he engaged in – a book that should be a manual for Christians, but not an ecclesiastical history of the time.’Footnote 11
Coleridge continued to agonise over his suitability for the task, while hoping for a request from Keble’s widow that would take the decision off his own shoulders. His hope was realised on 23 April when he received a visit from Keble’s nephew Tom ‘to bring me the request, I may say the dying request of Charlotte Keble’ that he would write her husband’s biography. He accepted without hesitation: ‘I could not say no to such a request, though I fully took into account all the labour and anxiety of it.’Footnote 12 However, his eldest son, John Duke Coleridge, was vehemently opposed to the idea and warned him in no uncertain terms that he was making a grievous mistake:
As far as any opinion of mine can influence you I do most earnestly hope you will not dream of undertaking the Life of Mr Keble. I do not blame Mrs Keble in the least for she could not know your state, but I do blame Tom Keble very heavily for extorting a promise from you … Now only think what you are undertaking: a two years work at least if not more, going through piles of papers, getting up old and difficult controversies and straining both your mind and body to an extent whch would be heavy for you if you were young and well … Of course dear Papa if you wish to do this, that is another matter and we can’t help it, but if you do not I must say I can see no reason why you should and I earnestly hope you will not.Footnote 13
Faced with the united opposition of his family, Coleridge reluctantly agreed to give up the idea of a biography. ‘I believe you were right’, he told John, ‘but yet I do not feel free from regret – the more I think of that dear saintly fellow, the more I feel the desire of doing something as well as I could to make the world know and love his goodness.’Footnote 14 He continued to toy with the idea of writing something shorter, ‘a sort of pamphlet memoir of him, with the addition of a few letters’, which he hoped might create a demand for a larger edition of Keble’s correspondence.Footnote 15
Meanwhile, the plans for a public memorial to Keble had got entangled in conflicts over church politics and university reform. In May 1866 a meeting was held at Lambeth Palace to discuss the creation of a Keble Memorial Fund to raise money for what was to become Keble College, Oxford. However, the promoters of the scheme, E. B. Pusey and H. P. Liddon, refused to invite two of the leading liberal churchmen of the day, Henry Hart Milman and A. P. Stanley, on the grounds that their religious opinions were ‘so opposed to those of Keble, and the great number of those who desire to commemorate and advance his principles’ that it would not be proper for them to take part. Coleridge was dismayed by this, believing that ‘all who feel reverently and kindly towards Keble’s memory should be allowed to come’. As he wrote in his diary, while he did not wish to give Milman and Stanley any influence in the founding of the new college, neither did he wish to ‘lay ourselves open to the imputation of narrowness, and want of charity, which would justly arise, if we were to shut them out’.Footnote 16 A division thus opened up between those of Keble’s friends and admirers who saw him primarily as a figurehead of the Oxford Movement and its principles, and those, like Coleridge, for whom his influence transcended party division. In his Guardian obituary, Coleridge indirectly expressed his disapproval of Pusey’s sectarianism when he urged all Keble’s friends to ‘suppress our private opinions’ and ‘co-operate heartily’ in a common scheme.
The writing of Keble’s biography thus became part of a quiet struggle to control Keble’s memory. Liddon wrote to Tom Keble that the question of a biography had been ‘constantly in my thoughts’, and suggested that if Coleridge was unable to do it, ‘Dr Pusey had an idea that different aspects of Mr Keble’s Life might in some larger work be written by different hands – thus one taking his pastoral & domestic life, another the characteristics of his theological writings, another those of his poetry, a fourth his opinions upon questions of the day.’Footnote 17 Coleridge’s reaction is not recorded, but it is unlikely that he would have approved of a proposal that might well have ended up with Pusey and Liddon writing some of the key chapters in the book. He was certainly aware that when it came to Keble’s ‘opinions upon questions of the day’, there was material in his writings that had to be handled with care. When Peter Young, Keble’s former curate, approached him with a proposal to publish a collection of Keble’s letters on ‘the questions which of late years have agitated the Church’, Coleridge was instantly wary. ‘JK felt strongly,’ he noted in his diary, ‘and where a matter touched doctrine or discipline however remotely, he expressed himself warmly and at once, without always clearly considering the whole question all round.’ In a biography it was ‘always possible to qualify and guard this with remarks’, but a collection of ‘mere opinions thrown out in letters’ could be highly damaging to Keble’s reputation.Footnote 18
Coleridge had more personal reasons for wanting to write Keble’s biography. By a curious chance, his younger son Henry had also taken up his pen to write about Keble, but from a very different perspective. Henry had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1852, to the lasting grief of his father, and become a Jesuit and the editor of the Catholic periodical The Month, where in April 1866 he published an anonymous article on Keble, praising him for the moral goodness of his character but arguing that he had fallen short, both as a theologian and a poet, because he could not bring himself to follow the logic of his own convictions into the Catholic Church. Keble, he wrote, had been brought up in the Church of England and his principles were ‘radically Anglican’, but in his heart he longed ‘for what Anglicanism could not give him’. He created an ideal of the Church ‘on which he had lavished all the love of his heart’, but ‘it was a poetic Church, a Church for the refined scholar in his cabinet’, not the true Catholic Church of ‘conflict and action’. Putting his faith in the ideal, he had failed to recognise the reality, for ‘the dream of a student can never be like the reality of the work of God’.Footnote 19 This article can be read as Henry’s justification of his own conversion, and, at times, seems to be addressed directly and personally to his father. ‘We sincerely hope’, he wrote, ‘that it will not be long before we see [Keble’s] Life and Correspondence announced.’ That was virtually a challenge to his father. If you disagree with my interpretation of Keble, Henry seemed to be saying, then write your own.
It was these considerations that impelled Coleridge, after much hesitation, to accept the task of writing Keble’s life. This was to be a personal memoir, the record of a lifelong friendship, ‘a full and faithful picture of his character … drawn in a reverent spirit, and with a loving hand’.Footnote 20 But it was not without an agenda. Its aim was to shelter Keble within the fold of moderate High Churchmanship and protect him both from Low Churchmen who blamed him for going too far towards Rome and from Catholics who blamed him for not going far enough. This required Coleridge to tread a careful path. It required him to play up Keble’s pastoral work, and attribute the immense popularity of The Christian Year to its ecumenical nature as a book that was not addressed to ‘any one party in the Church’. At the same time it required him to play down Keble’s involvement in religious controversy, or, where this was impossible to ignore, to portray it as the product of his deep moral earnestness and ‘the intensity and single-mindedness with which he pursued a principle’.Footnote 21 Coleridge’s insistence that he was merely writing a personal memoir – playing, as he put it, the part of Izaak Walton to Keble’s George Herbert – undoubtedly expressed his sincere conviction that he was not up to the ‘more important task’ of writing a full biography. But it also gave him a convenient excuse to gloss over some of the more rebarbative aspects of Keble’s personality.
Writing the Memoir
Coleridge began the Memoir in a burst of confidence, believing that he could finish the book in three months. In July 1866 Eliza and Mary Anne Dyson, widow and sister of his old college friend Charles Dyson, came to visit him at Ottery St Mary, bringing with them a bundle of Keble’s letters, and the three of them spent a week absorbed in reading and reminiscence, talking of Keble ‘again and again’ and ‘living over again the old times, in old associations and remembrances’. Dyson had been one of Keble’s closest friends and advisors, and a crucial influence in persuading him to publish The Christian Year in 1827, so the letters were of great biographical interest; Coleridge wrote in his diary that they had been of considerable use to him in ‘clearing and settling my view of [Keble’s] character, and arranging facts in my head’. More important, though, was the opportunity to travel back imaginatively to the past and bring his dead friends back to life; the letters, he wrote, ‘seem to make me live in the old time, and take me back to early days’, and had ‘completely revived in my mind young Keble, with all his merriment and fun’.Footnote 22
With the ‘dear Dysons’ gone, however, Coleridge found his appetite for the task diminishing. In August he lamented: ‘I have made absolutely no progress in my Keble – all my powers of composition seem at an end – I have written perhaps half a chapter, but so dully and coldly, that I must draw a pen through it all.’Footnote 23 By September he was in such despair that he wrote to Thomas Keble asking to be relieved of the whole project, but was then jolted into reconsideration by a letter from the publisher James Parker asking him to confirm the title so that the book could be advertised. This, he admitted, was a ‘startler’, but ‘a useful one’ which renewed his determination to persevere. ‘I had gone on, wavering and postponing, altering my plan, writing a new introduction, and almost giving up the whole scheme in despair. This made a decision necessary, and I have reverted to my old scheme of a short, personal and private Life, and am in better spirits about it.’Footnote 24 Parker proposed a first printing of 3,000 copies, and Coleridge was aware that the book was eagerly awaited; in his diary he dared to dream of making it a success, while confessing that ‘the expectation about it frightens me’. ‘All my life I have desired literary reputation, and never lighted on a path to it … Perhaps the opportunity comes too late – I do indeed feel my powers of expression miserably feeble.’Footnote 25
All through 1867 he toiled slowly but steadily on the book, writing for an hour or two every day. By the end of the year he was able to report that ‘my Keble advances slowly, on the whole tolerably well’, and by Easter 1868, ‘the work advances – but I am getting into the thorny parts’.Footnote 26 By this he meant the long-drawn-out crisis of the Oxford Movement in the 1840s – ‘dreary years of repeated conflict’, as he wrote in the Memoir – beginning with the publication of Tract 90 in 1841 and culminating with Newman’s conversion in 1845. In these chapters, ‘my declaration in the beginning that I did not mean to tell the History of the Church will help me a good deal – I may keep close to what is personal to JK, and so avoid some difficulties – not all’. One difficulty that could not be ignored was the conflict between Keble and his diocesan bishop, Charles Sumner, who in 1841 had refused to ordain Keble’s curate Peter Young due to doubts over his doctrinal soundness. Sumner, now in his late seventies, was still in office as bishop of Winchester in 1868, so this episode had to be handled discreetly. In his diary, Coleridge admitted that there had been faults on both sides: Keble had tried Sumner’s patience ‘very severely’, but Sumner lacked ‘that largeness of heart and superiority to sectarian prejudices which would have made him estimate Keble justly’. None of these private thoughts found their way into the Memoir, where he wrote of Sumner’s decision in highly elliptical terms: ‘there was, I am certain, nothing personal in it; the motive was a conscientious one, and however I might regret the judgement at the time, it is not for me to reflect upon it’.Footnote 27
By April 1868 his work had brought him to Tract 90. In the Memoir he made no secret of his distaste at having to rake up the embers of old controversies, writing that, regrettably, Keble’s involvement in the publication of the Tracts made it ‘unfitting for me, however much I might wish it, wholly to pass over these transactions in silence’.Footnote 28 In his diary he commented: ‘what I say, however carefully, may probably provoke discussion, and wake up again angry feelings – yet I do not see how I can avoid going into it … My judgement will not be all on one side – indeed I do not mean to pronounce any on the merits of the whole question – I limit myself to a few words on the imprudence of one side, asserting their honesty, and the sectarian unfairness and hot haste of the other’, leading to the conclusion that ‘Keble &c were more sinned against than sinning’.Footnote 29 He had already decided not to ask Pusey or Newman to share their letters from Keble, a decision he justified rather awkwardly in the preface to the Memoir, where he wrote that both men undoubtedly had ‘large numbers of important and interesting letters’, but ‘from the very intimacy which subsisted between them, combined with the extreme delicacy of the subjects to which their correspondence must have principally related’, it would be ‘improper’ to publish them. This meant, as he wrote to his son John, that he could pass lightly over the theological matters in dispute, and not go into them ‘beyond what is strictly necessary to my Biography’ – stressing, as he always did, that he was writing a biography of Keble and not a full history of the movement.Footnote 30
By July he had arrived at the long afternoon of Keble’s life, the last twenty years of parochial ministry at Hursley. In these years ‘his mind and attention were more exclusively turned to the measures then pending in the University, and to the controversies which agitated the Church’, including the 1854 Oxford University Reform Act, which abolished religious tests and threw open the university to non-Anglicans, the 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act, which for Keble was nothing more than ‘a bill for legalizing adultery’, and the theological furore ignited by the publication of Essays and Reviews (1860). In his diary Coleridge admitted that Keble had been on the losing side of almost every controversy, always contending for positions that had by now been largely abandoned, and that handling this fairly without making him appear ‘a mere narrow-minded obstructive’ would be one of the book’s most difficult challenges.Footnote 31 In the Memoir he wrote, ‘I was uneasy at what I feared in him, the growth of a controversial spirit’, and published a letter that he had written to Keble in 1858, warning him that in the eyes of the world he appeared ‘merely a controversial divine, engaged in propping up unpopular opinions in the Church’.Footnote 32 In his diary, Coleridge debated with himself how far it was worth going back over these half-forgotten battles, which, as he frankly admitted, would probably have little interest for the majority of his readers. ‘Yet if I am to tell the whole truth about him, these matters should not be passed over entirely.’Footnote 33
In one of the few direct criticisms of Keble that he permitted himself in the Memoir, Coleridge wrote that he had sometimes indulged ‘too much’ in ‘the utterances of a severe spirit against the proceedings of the authorities both in Church and State’. He was careful to stress that this was not typical of Keble’s manner in general.Footnote 34 However, John Duke Coleridge thought that his father had failed to bring out the full extent of Keble’s severity, and said as much in a brief essay giving his personal recollections and impressions of Keble, which was published as a postscript to the Memoir. He recalled an occasion when, as a young man of thirty-one, he had hesitantly expressed some of his religious doubts, only to be met with ‘that severer part of Mr Keble’s character, which appeared but rarely, but which was there, and which all who knew him well, knew to be there’:
We were walking together in London in the year 1851, and I was telling him how much I had been impressed with the difficulties as to the inspiration of Holy Scripture, which were growing stronger, and spreading more widely day by day; and that it seemed to me this would shortly become the great religious question of the time … He shewed great dislike to the discussion, and put it aside several times, and on my pressing it upon him, he answered shortly, that most of the men who had difficulties on this subject were too wicked to be reasoned with.
No doubt, John observed ruefully, ‘he thought that a young man’s forwardness and conceit needed rebuke, and he administered it accordingly’. But ‘it was an instance of that in him which would be called severity or intolerance’, and ‘I do not pretend to say that it would be wrongly called so’.Footnote 35 This led to a spirited exchange of letters between father and son, in which John stressed that he was not calling ‘either for praise or blame – why should you dole out either – but simply for truth telling and for putting the whole picture of the man as he was before the reader’. His father, unpersuaded, continued to insist that Keble’s severity was not the true measure of the man: ‘No doubt he had a severe side, for what he believed, he believed so intimately and heartily, that it was hard for him sometimes not to feel severely. But then how he melted towards the individuals.’Footnote 36
By September the book was nearly finished. One of the last things to be inserted was a letter from Newman describing his final meeting with Keble and Pusey in October 1865, less than six months before Keble’s death. This meeting – ‘so remarkable in every way’, Coleridge wrote – had almost failed to happen; Newman had written to postpone his visit, fearing that it would be ‘more than I could bear’ to meet Keble and Pusey together, but then impulsively changed his mind and arrived unannounced at the door of Hursley vicarage. He and Keble had not seen each other for twenty years and did not even recognise each other at first – ‘he did not know me, and asked my name … I did not know him, and I feared to ask who it was’ – but after an awkward moment of hesitation, Keble ‘embraced me most affectionately’ and before long they were back on their old terms of intimacy, ‘as if we had never been parted’. Afterwards Keble wrote to him with lines from Macbeth:
That, Newman concluded, ‘is all I can recollect of a visit, of which almost the sole vivid memory which remains with me is the image of Keble himself’.Footnote 37 Coleridge wisely left the letter to speak for itself, and it forms a fitting culmination to the Memoir; John rightly predicted, ‘it will be a gem in the book’.Footnote 38 After it, little remained to be written except the account of Keble’s final illness and death. By December Coleridge had finished the book and sent the last chapter to the printers. ‘It has been nearly too hard for me’, he wrote in his diary, but ‘I cannot regret what I have done – only I wish it better done.’Footnote 39 John reassured him: ‘I do not think you need fret about the book. It will be a success, never fear, and you will wear the bay amongst your white locks yet.’Footnote 40
John proved a true prophet. By the end of February, the first edition of 3,000 copies was nearly sold out, and Parker was preparing to print a second, also of 3,000 copies; the book would reach a fourth edition by 1874. Letters of congratulation flooded in. ‘The more I read of the Memoir’, Tom Keble wrote to Coleridge, ‘the more grateful I feel to you for all the tenderness and considerateness of it.’Footnote 41 But father and son viewed its success in very different ways: the older man looking back to the world of his youth that the Memoir commemorated, the younger looking forward to the world of secular unbelief that was coming into being. Writing to his father in November 1869, John was scornful of a clergy who ‘clung to old dogmas’ rather than engaging with the intellectual challenges of the age, ‘second rate and effeminate minded men’ who had done more harm than good and were hastening the very irreligion they claimed to resist. What the Church needed, he argued, was men of apostolic conviction. ‘Keble will never grow old,’ he told his father, ‘nor your book go out of fashion, because though he was a man of forms no doubt, yet he was so much more – as great, as true, as real as an old Apostle.’Footnote 42 For John, the severity that his father had tried to gloss over in the Memoir was Keble’s most precious gift to posterity: a sign that his faith was not the mild devotional warmth of The Christian Year but something harder and stronger. It was Keble’s severity that made him a saint.
Constructing Keble
Coleridge was only too conscious of his own prominence in the Memoir, and feared ‘the book will lay me open to observations that the tendency is to magnify myself’.Footnote 43 It is certainly true that the Memoir is as much the record of a friendship as it is the biography of an individual. To read it is to encounter not only Keble but Coleridge too, hovering anxiously, sometimes fussily, at the reader’s elbow and constantly interjecting his own opinions into the narrative. To some readers this personal touch was one of the great charms of the book. James Randall, another of Coleridge’s Oxford contemporaries, wrote that he had never met Keble in person, ‘but now, in reading your Book, I seem to be in Company with you and him together in some quiet Place, and that you are introducing me to him, and saying as I think you would have said, Here are two good Fellows who ought to know one another’.Footnote 44 To some extent this discursive, digressive style was a deliberate choice on Coleridge’s part. In his less fretful moments he hoped that his ‘personal peculiarities’ might even make the book more interesting ‘than it would have been, if it had been more formally correct. It must be taken as the work of a very old man, writing with the freedom, not the ability or liveliness, of Montaigne’.Footnote 45
Coleridge’s presence in the Memoir is particularly visible at moments of strain and tension in the narrative, such as his account of the bitter quarrel between Keble and Thomas Arnold. The two men had been close friends at Oxford but later fell out over theological differences, as Keble gravitated to a High Church and Arnold to a Broad Church position. In 1838 Keble wrote to Coleridge (in a letter not quoted in the Memoir) urging him to break off his friendship with Arnold, on the grounds that the latter was guilty of ‘treason towards the Holy Catholic Church’ and anyone remaining friends with him would be ‘in a certain sense partaker of his evil deeds’.Footnote 46 Coleridge resisted this demand and attempted unsuccessfully to mediate between his two friends: as he wrote in 1841, he was ‘in the case of one going cheerfully along with Keble in many particulars, and in his general spirit – withholding my assent and doubting in others – admiring the candour and zeal with which Arnold pursues the truth, but unable to be as fearless as he is in the search’.Footnote 47 He continued this mediating role in the Memoir, where he argued, not altogether convincingly, that if Arnold had lived longer, the two would have eventually have set aside their differences and resumed their old friendship. ‘If this be a piece of what Keble and Froude called the Coleridge Heresy’, he added defensively, ‘I hope it will be forgiven.’Footnote 48
Coleridge also inserted himself into the book in less visible ways. In a remarkable passage he described how, in 1851, ‘that anxious time’ when the Gorham controversy was at its height, Keble was ‘consulted by a gentleman who was meditating a very unusual step’:
The gentleman was at the time a layman, not a young man, and engaged actively in a liberal profession; circumstances had occurred in his family, which made it seem to him a sort of special duty to give as strong a testimony as he could personally to the Church of England; he thought therefore of applying for Ordination, and to be allowed to fill a vacancy that had been made in a small country cure in his neighbourhood.Footnote 49
This unnamed gentleman was Coleridge himself, who had been so upset by his son Henry’s conversion that he briefly considered resigning as a judge and taking holy orders so that he could succeed his son as curate of Alfington, a small village near Ottery St Mary which Henry had transformed into a model Tractarian parish. This quixotic idea was opposed by all his friends with the sole exception of Keble, who welcomed it with ‘joy and thankfulness’. Coleridge disguised his identity in the Memoir, but it gave him an opportunity to express some of his pain at Henry’s conversion in his remark that the secessions to Rome ‘produced in the families in which they occurred the deepest and most lasting distress’ and the converts themselves, despite the sacrifices they made, ‘were not in truth generally those who suffered the most, or the longest’.Footnote 50 This reproach, plainly intended for Henry’s eyes, illustrates yet again how the Memoir was, in many ways, a family book reflecting conflicts and disagreements between Coleridge and his sons.
To a large extent, therefore, the Memoir is precisely what its title proclaims, a work of memory, built up from Coleridge’s own recollections and punctuated with the constant refrain, ‘I remember’, associated with a strong sense of place:
I remember that we walked on my little terrace until the light failed …
I remember well on some occasion, when he and I had to talk over some serious matter, his taking me to an abandoned chalk-pit, and there we discussed our question …
Many years have passed since I stood on this spot, but I remember well.
But memory is not always reliable, and Coleridge’s account of past events does not always capture how he felt at the time. When Hurrell Froude’s Remains was published in 1838, he was horrified, writing that Froude’s father ‘must be demented to allow them to be published … I really did not think Newman and Keble could have such views as they seem to have – this work will justify all that their adversaries have said against them’.Footnote 51 Rereading it in 1867, his view had mellowed: ‘from its strangeness it is a very interesting book’, he noted, and ‘altogether I have got to love and admire him much’.Footnote 52 In the Memoir he wrote, with no apparent irony, that his opinion of the book was ‘unchanged’: it had been unwise to publish the Remains in 1838, but it was in itself ‘a deeply interesting book, not only perfectly harmless now, but capable of instructing and improving those who will read it calmly and considerately’.Footnote 53 To quote Wordsworth – next to Keble, the poet he most admired – this was emotion recollected in tranquillity.
The same tendency is apparent in his treatment of Keble’s religious position during the crisis of the 1840s. As he knew, this was a crucial part of the book and would have to withstand close scrutiny. In his diary he admitted it was not out of the question that Keble might have followed Newman’s example and gone over to Rome, and suggested he had remained an Anglican more out of personal attachment than theological conviction:
I am steering through the critical part of Keble’s Life, when he was most dissatisfied as to the English Church, and most in danger of secession. It seems almost, that after all his stay where he was, was due not so much to satisfaction with England theologically, or indeed morally (I mean as to the moral well doing of the people) as to reluctance to break all his associations with and recollections of the past – doubts still as to Rome – and some tender passages with his wife, when she seemed to him to be at the very gates of Paradise. On the whole he thought it safer to remain. My account of all this will be I hope a true one, and seem to many an unsparing one – it may give a handle to unkindly Romans, and more unkindly Low Churchmen to speak slightingly of him – but I guard it as well as I can, and I feel sure it ought to exalt rather than abase him.Footnote 54
But in the Memoir he played this down considerably. While admitting Keble’s religious difficulties and his deep and abiding grief at Newman’s conversion – ‘this was the sorrow of his life, from which I think he never wholly recovered’ – he does not give the impression that Keble ever seriously considered the path to Rome. ‘From the beginning to the end, he had a deep conviction that, let what would happen in England, there was that in Rome to which he could not reconcile his belief.’ Drawing, as he so often did, on personal reminiscence, he described two meetings with Keble in the critical year of 1845, when ‘we had of course some talk, and some differences on religious questions’ but Keble had shown no sign of ‘anything which indicated any danger of his secession from the English Church’. On both occasions ‘he parted from me leaving me in full confidence as to his loyal adherence to our Church’.Footnote 55
This is a reasonably accurate summary of Coleridge’s impressions at the time: ‘I thank God,’ he had written in his diary after seeing Keble in September 1845, ‘I saw no reason to doubt of the steadiness of his adherence to our Church in the main, or of his doubting that Rome was in many grievous errors.’Footnote 56 But it does not do full justice to Keble’s highly unsettled state of mind. In June 1845 he wrote an astonishing letter to Coleridge in which he not only repudiated The Christian Year as insufficiently Catholic, but castigated himself as a hypocrite for having written it:
May it please God to preserve me from writing as unreally and deceitfully now as I did then: and if I could tell you the whole of my shameful history you would join with all your heart in this prayer. Pray do so, dear friend, for indeed there is great need.
He went on to speak scornfully of his pastoral work as ‘the blind leading the blind’.Footnote 57
This letter gave Coleridge considerable unease. In the Memoir he published it almost in full (omitting a paragraph on Newman) but felt it necessary to add a lengthy commentary and explanation. ‘It will scarcely be supposed that I publish a letter, however deeply interesting in itself, so liable to misconstruction, without much consideration.’ Keble ‘writes indeed bitter things against himself’, but Coleridge insisted it was mere exaggeration, ‘the natural growth of remarkable purity of heart, and the most unusual humility’.Footnote 58
This was not the first time that Keble had spoken despondently about his pastoral work. In 1843 he had written to Coleridge of ‘the practical failure of the English Church, which I feel more and more deeply every day; chiefly in that I find myself more and more oppressed with the consciousness of my own ignorance, and how blindly I go around the Parish, not knowing what men are really doing’. The only remedy for this, he believed, was the revival of private confession. Without confession ‘we shall not have the due severity in our religion; and without a severe religion, I fear our Church will practically fail’.Footnote 59 Coleridge found this ‘startling’ but was reluctant to go along with Keble in supporting the revival of confession. ‘Much depends on the individual’, he remarked privately to his son Henry, and even if confession were made compulsory, ‘I very much doubt whether my dear friend would be great in the office.’ The truth, he suggested, was that Keble was ‘maladroit’ in dealing with his parishioners.Footnote 60 But no such doubts about Keble’s pastoral gifts were allowed to creep into the Memoir, where it was suggested instead that his deep humility had led him to exaggerate his difficulties. Keble’s call for more severity in pastoral discipline was blandly passed over with the remark: ‘He was not a severe man.’Footnote 61 Only an attentive reader will pick up on what Coleridge leaves largely unacknowledged here, that Keble was suffering from an acute crisis of confidence – one might almost say a nervous breakdown – precipitated by Newman’s imminent conversion.
Another section where Coleridge figures prominently in the Memoir is the discussion of Keble’s views on university reform. Coleridge had been a member of the commission tasked with drafting the Oxford University Reform Bill in 1854, and this brought him into sharp disagreement with Keble, who objected to nearly all the proposed changes, particularly the admission of Dissenters. On this subject Keble was a diehard reactionary, who, as Coleridge explained, ‘clung with the greatest earnestness to the revival and preservation in full force of what he called the Oxford ethos, which he considered to be of infinite value, and to be dying out in the new state of feeling there’.Footnote 62 While not unsympathetic to this position, Coleridge took the view that the world was changing, and that if the rising middle classes demanded a share in university education, it was right and proper to grant it to them. As he wrote in his diary: ‘Dissenters &c do not desire merely to be educated at Oxford, nor by passing examinations there, gaining Oxford Degrees. They wish to be of Oxford – socially, as well as educationally – and they are sensible in this, whether entitled to it or not.’Footnote 63 He developed this argument over thirteen pages of the Memoir, in what was virtually a short essay on university reform. Against Keble’s argument that the intentions of the founders should be respected, he responded simply: ‘England is no longer what she was when our Colleges were founded.’ The population was vastly increased, both in numbers and wealth, and it would be unreasonable for the universities to oppose the growing aspiration for higher education.Footnote 64
In making this argument, Coleridge was not simply looking back to the debates over the 1854 Reform Bill, but intervening in an ongoing controversy. His language was mild and conciliatory, but when he issued a warning to ‘excellent and earnest men’ to avoid ‘the embitterment which flows from unavailing opposition to the inevitable’, he undoubtedly had Pusey and Liddon in mind. Liddon singled this passage out for criticism in a letter to Tom Keble, where, after some perfunctory praise of the Memoir – ‘What a charming book, as a whole, is this Life!’ – he went on to argue, in combative terms, that Coleridge had completely misunderstood the state of affairs at Oxford:
The one feature of the book which I could have wished to exclude from it, is the passage on the threatened ruin of the Christian character of the University of Oxford. For that is, in plain English, what is threatened, by the irreligious section of the Liberal party … But it is, I suppose, of no use crying over what is now very nearly spilt milk: and here as always in like cases, Sir John speaks for himself, and not for Mr Keble, who would have abandoned any quantity of Colleges and endowments to the Dissenters, if only some few might be saved to the faith and discipline of the Church.Footnote 65
Coleridge was arguing for accommodation rather than resistance, as Liddon rightly perceived. His diary shows that while he regretted the loss of the old Oxford ethos of his youth, he saw it as the inevitable casualty of social change: ‘Keble laments the loss of Oxford ethos, but this and other evils are not all owing to the Oxford Reform – I believe they were beginning to exist before the Reform began, and would have existed if there had been no reform.’Footnote 66 In this respect Stephen Prickett is mistaken in seeing the Memoir as a nostalgic evocation of the old unreformed Oxford. Rather, it puts the case for university reform as a concession to the march of progress, with the foundation of Keble College as a sop to the traditionalists, an Anglican enclave within a reformed university where, as Coleridge hoped, something of the old ethos might continue to diffuse its influence.Footnote 67
The reception and afterlife of the Memoir
The publication of the Memoir in February 1869 became an occasion for reckoning with the legacy of the Oxford Movement. As was to be expected, reviewers read the book through the lens of their own ecclesiastical allegiances. High Churchmen celebrated the portrait of Keble as a figure of moral power and sanctity, Broad and Low Churchmen praised the poetry but regretted the doctrine, while secular and liberal readers seized on the evidence of Keble’s intolerance as characteristic of the movement as a whole. What is striking, though, is how clearly these first readers saw what Coleridge had tried to manage. The question of Keble’s severity – the troubling aspect of his character that Coleridge had sought to soften and contextualise – came in for particular attention. Yet the very success of the Memoir in securing Keble’s position as one of the saints of the English Church meant that the more searching questions raised by its first reviewers gradually faded from view.
The book was reviewed, respectfully and at length, by A. P. Stanley in Macmillan’s Magazine and R. W. Church in the Saturday Review. Stanley’s review was full of praise for Keble as a poet, though with a slightly condescending tone of regret that he had been unable to free himself from the ‘peculiar views’ of the Oxford Movement; it was ‘very civil to me’, Coleridge noted, ‘but I think there is a want of modesty in everything which Stanley now writes’.Footnote 68 Church’s review was a perceptive analysis which drew attention to the paradoxes in Keble’s character. ‘He attracts and he repels; and the attraction and repulsion are equally strong.’ From one point of view, ‘he is irresistible in his simplicity, humbleness, unworldliness, and ever considerate charity’, but from another, he seems ‘full of strange unreality, strained, exaggerated, morbid, bristling with a forced yet inflexible intolerance’. At one moment he seems ‘the very ideal of a Christian teacher’, yet ‘the next moment a barrier rises in the shape of some unpopular doctrine, or some display of zealous severity’. The strength of Coleridge’s biography, Church thought, was that it reconciled these contradictions by putting Keble before the reader exactly as he was, ‘perfectly real, perfectly natural, perfectly whole and uniform’, driven in everything he did by ‘the deepest and most genuine love of all that was good; the deepest and most genuine hatred of all that was believed to be evil’.Footnote 69
The most critical assessment of the Memoir came from Samuel Wilberforce in the Quarterly Review. In his view, the hallmark of Keble’s character was his natural sensitivity, which meant that, like a chameleon taking on the colours of its surroundings, he unconsciously adapted himself to the person he was corresponding or conversing with. ‘Consequently, a correct estimate of his mind could be formed only from his communication with many different friends.’ But the ‘striking fault’ of the Memoir was that it included so many extracts from Keble’s letters to Coleridge, and so few from his letters to others. The result was that ‘we have a perpetual repetition of Keble à la Coleridge, and a great lack of Keble au naturel ’. It ‘imparts to Keble throughout these pages a monotony of thought, feeling, expression and view’, and ‘a certain impression of intellectual feebleness’ arising from the fact that he was writing to a friend ‘whose moral qualities he thoroughly respected, but who was greatly his own intellectual inferior’.Footnote 70 Wilberforce, not very charitably, had put his finger on the essence of the Memoir. For better or worse, this was ‘Keble à la Coleridge’, not just because most of the letters were to Coleridge, but because a book written out of fifty years of friendship could not easily be anything other than a book about that friendship.
Wilberforce was not the only reviewer to identify this as the Memoir’s fundamental shortcoming. The Literary Churchman reached a strikingly similar conclusion from a very different standpoint. Writing with warm sympathy for both biographer and subject, the reviewer nevertheless insisted that the Memoir was in reality ‘not a Life of Mr Keble, but the history of one particular friendship in that life’. Keble’s life had ‘many facets’, and what the Memoir gave was only one: an intimate portrait of Keble in his relationship with Coleridge, but not the record of Keble as counsellor and spiritual director to the generation that had looked to him for guidance. The reviewer singled out two letters in the Memoir as the most penetrating characterisations of Keble – one from John Duke Coleridge, the other from a Cornish clergyman, Richard Tyacke – and drew particular attention to Tyacke’s observation that Keble’s severity was ‘not merely a side of his character at all, but rather its staple material’. The point was not that Coleridge had been wrong about Keble, but that his portrait, however beautiful, had been partial. Keble’s profound humility had veiled the severity from those who did not know him well, but when ‘at the approach of irreverence or unbelief, he was roused to let a little of that strength flash out, you found that you were taught something of the thunder as well as of the love of a Saint John’. The reviewer closed with a call for the publication of Keble’s letters, which would show the world the Keble the Memoir could not reach, ‘as a guide, a teacher, and a polemic’.Footnote 71
The Spectator, edited by R. H. Hutton and consistently hostile to Tractarian claims, took a contrasting view of Keble’s severity, while sharing the Literary Churchman’s sense that the Memoir had failed to capture the whole man. Where the Literary Churchman had celebrated Keble’s severity as a sign of moral power, the Spectator argued that it was not so much a personal trait as a necessity of the Oxford Movement’s position. The school had staked its claims on grounds it could not defend by rational argument; unable to enforce them intellectually, it had been forced to enforce them morally, and the result was ‘an artificial extension of conscience beyond its natural and legitimate range, so as to make it cover, if possible, the whole scope of the intellectual life’. The severity was not Keble’s alone: it was ‘the principle of the whole school, rather than of the individual man’, the product less of arrogance than of a ‘craving in humble and childlike minds’ for certainty in a position that could not be secured by rational inquiry. Its ultimate legacy, the reviewer argued, was the very secularism it had set out to resist: ‘that modern reaction which ventures as far as it can in the opposite direction – of ignoring moral obligation altogether’.Footnote 72
These first responses to the Memoir – dividing along predictable confessional lines, mingling admiration and criticism in varying proportions – all shared one perception: that Coleridge had given his readers a portrait of Keble through the eyes of a close friend, and that this was both the book’s strength and its weakness. Charlotte M. Yonge, writing to Mary Anne Dyson in February 1869, reported that the complaint was already ubiquitous: ‘in general I think people regret that it is more the history of a friendship than a life, and think there is too much about the Judge himself. It is odd to see how the remark comes in from so many quarters, but I think there is a strong Coleridge personality that must show itself in whatever any Coleridge does.’Footnote 73 John Duke Coleridge, writing to his American friend Ellis Yarnall in October 1869, acknowledged the same thing with characteristic candour:
the only fault that is found with it is that it is Keble à la Coleridge. Many people did not like to intrust their letters to anyone, as yet, for publication, and the consequence is the book is, no doubt, too much one view of Keble. I knew him well enough to be sure there was another, not inconsistent but different, and wanted to get a clear idea of the whole man. In truth, we are too near him as yet to get the true view. My father’s is very beautiful: he was all that, but he was much more.Footnote 74
That a future biography would have to go beyond the Memoir was, in other words, clear from the moment of its publication – even, privately, to Coleridge’s own son.
In the event, subsequent biographers showed little inclination to pursue these questions, preferring to confirm and consolidate the portrait Coleridge had established. The biography by Walter Lock, sub-warden of Keble College, published in 1893 to mark the centenary of Keble’s birth, was essentially a rewriting of Coleridge amplified by a few unpublished sources. Lock occasionally registered mild dissent from his predecessor, drawing, for example, on a memorandum by Newman which noted that Coleridge had ‘not attempted any sufficient explanation’ of Keble’s crisis of 1845.Footnote 75 But such moments of independence were rare. Writing as the custodian of Keble’s institutional memory, Lock could hardly be expected to place his subject under searching critical scrutiny; his concluding assessment of Keble’s character acknowledged the severity but presented it as inseparable from the sanctity that justified and redeemed it.Footnote 76 The High Church tradition continued to produce devotional lives of Keble in the same hagiographical vein: the short biography by Edward Wood (the future Lord Halifax), published in 1909, followed Lock in spiritualising Keble’s severity, presenting his ‘gentleness, susceptible at times of transformation into disapproving sternness’ as the natural expression of a holiness that admitted no compromise.Footnote 77
The first significant challenge to the Coleridgean tradition came with Geoffrey Faber’s Oxford Apostles (1933). Writing in the debunking spirit of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, Faber approached the Oxford Movement not as a chapter in ecclesiastical history but as a study in psychology. His Keble was a figure of ‘invincible obstinacy’, whose opinions, absorbed wholesale from his father, were forced on his disciples with an insistence that only his ‘peculiar sweetness of character’ made palatable. Faber drew his evidence from the same sources as his predecessors, including the Memoir itself, but read them against the grain. Where Coleridge had presented Keble’s severity as an occasional and forgivable excess, Faber made it constitutive of his entire character. Tom Mozley’s remark that ‘there was no getting on with Keble without entire agreement, that is submission’, and J. A. Froude’s that ‘if you did not agree with him, there was something morally wrong with you’, were presented as evidence of a stubborn and inflexible mind, deferential to inherited authority but utterly intolerant of disagreement. The final verdict was damning: ‘Keble, outside his scholastic attainments, was in many respects a rather stupid man.’Footnote 78 Yet for all its iconoclastic energy, Oxford Apostles did not displace Coleridge’s framework so much as invert it. The saintly simplicity became intellectual limitation, the pastoral sweetness became vapid romanticism, the severity was revalued from virtue to defect but left unexamined.
It was this inverted portrait that Georgina Battiscombe inherited in her biography of 1963, subtitled ‘a study in limitations’. She brought to the task both a deep sympathy for the Oxford Movement and a keen awareness of the cultural moment she was writing in. Published, in Larkin’s phrase, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, the biography appeared at an inauspicious time for Victorian moral earnestness. Battiscombe’s aim was not to restore the hagiographical tradition of Coleridge and Lock, which no serious reader in 1963 could be expected to accept, but to rescue Keble from Faber’s crude psychological demolition and find a more sustainable basis for his reputation. That basis, she concluded, could not be the poetry but the pastoral work. ‘The typical English saint’, she wrote, ‘is pastoral in both senses of the word; he is a good pastor to his flock and he is also a country-dweller’, and Keble fitted the bill perfectly: ‘retiring to a small country parish and remaining there quietly until his death’, he was, in Battiscombe’s opinion, a peculiarly English type of saint.Footnote 79 This was the first biography to go significantly beyond Coleridge in the range of unpublished sources it consulted, and also the first to be honest about the Memoir’s defects. But in rehabilitating Keble as pastor rather than as theologian or controversialist, Battiscombe accepted, without fully realising it, the portrait that Coleridge had constructed.
The most authoritative reassessment of the biographical tradition came in Owen Chadwick’s review essay ‘The limitations of Keble’, published in 1964. Chadwick directly challenged the testimony on which Faber had built his psychological portrait. The Mozley and Froude anecdotes, he argued, were the ‘late reminiscences of ancient decaying embittered men’ who had not known Keble except by casual acquaintance. But having dismissed Faber’s portrait of Keble as a mere caricature, assembled from the words of ‘a chorus of carcass-picking vultures’, the portrait Chadwick offered in its place was not substantially different from Battiscombe’s. Keble was self-effacing, narrow in his horizons, confined within his parish and lovable precisely because of those limitations. Those who met him found him to conform perfectly to The Christian Year: ‘modest, quaint, unpretentious, quiet, even naïve’. Chadwick was candid about the Memoir’s role in constructing this portrait: it was, he wrote, ‘a narrowed portrait of a man, a snapshot taken through a peep-hole’, produced by a biographer who, out of delicacy, never sought access to the sources that might have opened it out. Yet for all his candour about the Memoir’s shortcomings, Chadwick’s Keble remains, in the end, the Keble of the country parish, ‘neither theologian nor evangelist but a quiet stable pastor’.Footnote 80
The most recent substantial contribution to Keble scholarship, the essay collection John Keble in context, edited by Kirstie Blair, takes stock of the biographical and critical tradition and attempts to move beyond it. Where Battiscombe had offered the wistful hope that The Christian Year might yet find new readers, Blair makes the more modest claim that Keble merits greater attention from scholars of Victorian literature and religion. The volume’s essays range across his poetry and prose writings, and collectively make the case that his influence on Victorian literary and religious culture has been underestimated. Yet the volume pulls in two directions: alongside the recovery of Keble as an active participant in the controversies of his age, there is a persistent recourse to the language of quiet influence and personal presence. Recent scholarship offers examples in abundance: a Keble whose poetry ‘shuts out the world of controversy’, whose devotion to his parish expresses a ‘gentle, non-confrontational personality’.Footnote 81 These are recognisably the terms of the Memoir, and their survival illustrates, yet again, how all roads to Keble lead back through Coleridge.
It was Coleridge’s belief that Keble would ultimately be remembered as a poet. As he wrote in 1868: ‘Keble’s fame – and enduring name in the world, I use these words distinctively – will depend on his Sacred Poetry. All else that he wrote, good as it is, and useful, might have been written by many others, and would have given him the reputation only which many other writers have.’Footnote 82 This conviction was not merely a critical judgement but a deeply personal one: Coleridge cherished The Christian Year as a devotional companion, turning to it for comfort and guidance at moments of trouble, and that profound admiration shaped the whole structure of the Memoir, leading him to pay little attention to Keble the theologian and still less to Keble the controversialist. Of Keble’s involvement in ecclesiastical pressure groups like the English Church Union, he admitted quite frankly: ‘I do not set any great value on his labours in Associations, Societies, Congresses &c … I own I never took much delight in seeing how much labour and time he spent on them, nor do I feel in the least disposed to amend the book by dwelling on them.’Footnote 83
This had an impact on Keble’s reputation which Coleridge could not have foreseen. By the mid-twentieth century it was obvious that The Christian Year had not stood the test of time, either as a work of poetry or as a spiritual classic. As Battiscombe remarked, ‘no book was ever more to the liking of its own age or less to the taste of the present one’, and Chadwick spoke for many modern readers when he admitted to being mystified by its immense popularity in the Victorian era: ‘I confess that I can only understand, with a bare assent of the intellect, the influence exerted by The Christian Year.’Footnote 84 With Keble the poet dislodged from his pedestal, the Memoir lost its main raison d’être, and Keble the theologian, having been largely ignored in the Memoir, was not available to take his place. Chadwick’s verdict that ‘Keble was no theologian’ would have surprised many of Keble’s contemporaries, but it is entirely understandable given how little Coleridge had done to suggest otherwise. What remained, once the poet and the theologian had both been set aside, was the saintly vicar of Hursley: not the whole Keble, but the only Keble the biographical tradition had left to work with.
The Memoir’s title page describes Keble as ‘late Vicar of Hursley’, a plain statement of fact, but one that carried a subtle sting: a reminder that one of the most influential churchmen of the century had never been granted higher preferment. Coleridge turned this into a virtue: in his telling, Keble’s seclusion in a country parish became the secret of his influence, earned by humility, expressed in practical pastoral work and diffused by personal example. The tradition he established accepted that version of Keble without question. But there is another Keble: the severe, combative, theologically intense Keble that Coleridge’s love and delicacy obscured, and whose traces survive, for those willing to look, in the very gaps and evasions of the Memoir itself. The Memoir is not simple hagiography but something more instructive: a record of what Coleridge could bring himself to say about his closest friend, and what, with the best will in the world, he could not.
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