Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  From the cliffs above Tonsberg she wrote:

  The fishermen were calmly casting their nets, whilst the seagulls hovered over the unruffled deep. Everything seemed to harmonize into tranquillity – even the mournful call of the bittern was in cadence with the tinkling bells on the necks of the cows, that, pacing slowly one after the other along an inviting path in the vale below, were repairing to the cottages to be milked. With what ineffable pleasure have I not gazed – and gazed again, losing my breath through my eyes – my very soul diffused itself in the scene – and, seeming to become all senses, glided in the scarcely-agitated waves, melted in the freshening breeze … Imperceptibly recalling the reveries of childhood, I bowed before the awful throne of my Creator. (Letter 8)

  One may have sympathy with de la Tocnaye’s impatient ‘etc., etc., etc.’ reading such passages as these. Yet if we compare them with the kind of verse landscape description soon to be written by Wordsworth and, especially, Coleridge, one can appreciate the kind of impact they had. A masterly poem like ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’, composed by Coleridge at Stowey in 1797, seems to show an almost direct influence in places:

  … So my friend

  Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,

  Silent with swimming sense, yea, gazing round

  On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem

  Less gross than bodily, and of such hues

  As veil the Almighty

  Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his presence.

  The emotional drama of the book – the solitary, outcast woman dreaming of her faithless lover – also had its literary effect. There is some evidence to suggest that Wordsworth’s narrative poem ‘Ruth’, written in Germany in 1799, drew on the story of Imlay and Wollstonecraft, as well as on his own abandonment of Annette Vallon. Ruth’s lover is a ‘youth from Georgia’s shore’, who eventually deserts her to return to his old, wild life ‘with roving bands of Indians in the West’. Ruth ends her life as Wollstonecraft might have done, had it not been for Godwin. She lives in solitude, half maddened by her memories, ‘an innocent life, yet far astray’.

  But the strangest, and most intriguing, of these influences may have been on the composition of Coleridge’s mysterious poem ‘Kubla Khan’ in the autumn of 1797. There is probably no other short poem in the English language which has been credited, not to say over-endowed, with so many possible literary sources – from Plato, Purchas and Milton onwards. To add one more may seem like an unfriendly act. Yet the great bibliographic scholar, John Livingston Lowes, has already remarked on several explicit verbal echoes between the two works in his study, The Road to Xanadu (1927). Wollstonecraft’s description of the falls and cataracts at Frederikstad and those at Trollhattan shows close similarities to Coleridge’s hypnotic description of the sacred river in Xanadu:

  And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

  As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

  A mighty fountain momently was forced:

  Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

  Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail …

  Where Wollstonecraft wrote of ‘the impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities’, and later of ‘the various cataracts, rushing from different falls, struggling with the huge masses of rock, and rebounding from the profound cavities … (so) that fancy might easily imagine a vast fountain, throwing up its waters from the very centre of the earth’, it is hard not to believe that the great echo-chamber of Coleridge’s mind did not half-hear those Scandinavian waters amidst so many others.

  But there is also a broader, emotional resemblance between this central part of the poem and Mary Wollstonecraft’s particular situation in Scandinavia which has not previously been noticed. The misery she feels in being separated from Imlay presses hard upon the narrative during the return journey from Risor to Gothenburg, and is never far from the surface of her thoughts. In Letter 13, for example, she suddenly breaks off a formal discussion of dishonesty and stealing among the Norwegians, to exclaim passionately, ‘These are, perhaps, the vapourings of a heart ill at ease – the effusions of a sensibility wounded almost to madness. But enough of this – we will discuss the subject in another stage of existence – where truth and justice will reign. How cruel are the injuries which make us quarrel with human nature! – At present black melancholy hovers round my footsteps, and sorrow sheds a mildew over all the future prospects, which hope no longer gilds.’

  This impression of ‘a sensibility wounded almost to madness’ by Imlay’s cruelties is felt nowhere more strongly than in her meditations on the terrible but beautiful waterfalls at Frederikstad and Trollhattan. Gazing down into the rushing waters, she seems hypnotically drawn in, and her thoughts flit round the dark possibilities of suicide. ‘The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery?’ These reflections gain a grim authenticity from her subsequent attempt at watery suicide by throwing herself into the Thames from Putney Bridge in October 1795.

  Coleridge was deeply touched by this picture of the solitary woman lamenting her lost lover in such a wild and distant place. It is an image which has something of the archetypal force of the old Border ballads which so fascinated him. (He records in his Notebooks that he intended to write to her about the need for ‘religion’.) This must surely lead us to speculate whether the ‘deep Romantic chasm’ of ‘Kubla Khan’ was not imaginatively located, at least in part, in that far north country of Scandinavia, and whether Coleridge did not – at some level of poetic correspondence – have Mary Wollstonecraft in mind when he wrote those inspired and thrilling lines:

  A savage place! – as holy and enchanted

  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

  By woman wailing for her demon lover!

  There is of course no certainty in such matters, no certainty above all in a poem which was itself composed in a dream. But the ripples spread out intriguingly into the mainstream of nineteenth-century poetry.

  How far, and how strangely, that seed was sometimes scattered may be seen in one last and wholly unexpected literary tribute. In 1816 the Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University published a poem entitled ‘The Wanderer in Norway’. Dr Thomas Brown was not a scholar to whom the principles of feminism would normally have appealed, yet he was so captivated by the figure of Mary Wollstonecraft on her travels, that the whole work is inspired by her example. In the Preface to his poem, he movingly describes A Short Residence:

  It is a volume which cannot be read without interest – in some degree a picture of the country through which she passed, and of the manners of its inhabitants – but still more as a picture of her who beheld what she describes, with feelings of which no traveller before her has left a record, and which few, if it is to be trusted, are again to have the sad fortune of recording. Mary was more than a sentimental traveller, she was truly an impassioned traveller – a traveller suffering deeply, and seeing Nature in those wildly contrasted views, with which Misery looks on it, in the moments of its greatest anguish, and in those strange gleams of hope, which sometimes fling a brightness more than natural on every object, – even when Misery herself is the gazer. (The Wanderer in Norway and Other Poems, 1816, pp. 21–2)

  Here it is clear that Mary Wollstonecraft has already been almost completely transformed into a Romantic heroine, even of the Byronic type. This is fully amplified in the course of Dr Brown’s verses, which picture her arriving off the coast of Norway in a midnight storm, standing ‘dim on the prow … with bosom bare’, her ‘loose tresses’ flying in the wind, and her ‘vacant eye’ conscious only of the gusts of passion raging within her wounded heart.

  As though with passion’s fiercer swell opprest,

  She sought the tempest to her burning breast.

/>   Brown had responded to her work, like so many others, in terms of its confessional value, but she saw her whole life as a moral exemplum, with a purely tragic significance. For him, the great experiment of Romanticism was essentially a noble failure, and Mary Wollstonecraft, with her ‘sad fortune’, was one of its most tragic victims whose time had not yet come.

  But we can now see how very differently it must have spoken to William Godwin, in 1796. Mary’s revelations must have sped as directly as any arrow to the Philosopher’s heart. Originally addressed to one lover, Gilbert Imlay, the faithless, by an exquisite irony it found another, Godwin, the wise and faithful. How many passages must have seemed like letters written for him alone, holding out the promise of their great and simple experiment in living and sincerity:

  I cannot write composedly – I am every instant sinking into reveries – my heart flutters, I know not why. Fool! It is time thou were at rest.

  Friendship and domestic happiness are continually praised, yet how little is there of either in the world, because it requires more cultivation of mind to keep awake affection, even in our own hearts, than the common run of people suppose. Besides, few like to be seen as they really are, and a degree of simplicity, and of undisguised confidence, which, to uninterested observers, would almost border on weakness, is the charm, nay the essence of love or friendship: all the bewitching graces of childhood again appearing. As objects merely to exercise my taste, I therefore like to see people together who have an affection for each other, every turn of their features touches me, and remains pictured on my imagination in indelible characters. Why am I talking of friendship, after which I have had such a wild-goose chase – I thought only of telling that the crows, as well as wild-geese, are here birds of passage. (Letter 12)

  A Short Residence may be said to have entered into the literary mythology of Romanticism within a single generation. Its combination of progressive social views – Wollstonecraft’s ‘favourite subject of contemplation, the future improvement of the world’ – with melancholy self-revelation and heart-searching, came to have an almost symbolic force within that extraordinary circle of poets, travellers, philosophers and autobiographers. Mary Wollstonecraft projected herself through the book as a model of the literary woman: audacious, intelligent, independent and free-thinking, and yet, equally, one who suffers endlessly and inevitably in a society which is not yet honest and just enough to accept her for what she is. The model, and the book, were to be largely forgotten in Victorian England, and to disappear for over a hundred years, except where fleetingly recalled by such rare woman traveller-writers as Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsley. But the seed was sown, and like Shelley’s ‘Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind’, they waited to burn up bright again in a different, freer world.

  IX

  ‘The New Empire of Feeling’

  IF THE HISTORY OF human affections can be said to have its epochs and turning-points, like those of science and politics and literature, then the liaison between Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin was surely one of the most significant. Their brief union marks the beginning of a new phase of human aspirations, as certainly as any historic treaty or geographical discovery of some terra nova over the horizon.

  Their love story can itself be seen as a new kind of journey, and the long-sought treasure ship as containing a different sort of gold.

  Virginia Woolf wrote in 1932: ‘Mary’s life had been an experiment from the start, an attempt to make human conventions conform more closely to human needs. And her marriage with William Godwin was only a beginning, all sorts of things were to follow after … As we read her books and letters, and listen to her arguments and consider her experiments, above all that most fruitful experiment, her relation with Godwin, and realise the high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life, one form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living …’ (The Common Reader: Second Series, 1932, p. 163).

  Even at the time, their marriage was understood as something symbolic. To the forces of reaction, as represented by the Anti-Jacobin Magazine, and now strongly in the ascendant, it was of course an unholy alliance – atheism, anarchism, feminism, French Revolutionary politics and free love, all brought together in one unseemly bed, and now swiftly and properly punished by Divine Providence. But to the small group of beleaguered radicals, to the larger body of liberal opinion, and to many of the younger writers of the day, it was a kind of culmination: a consecration of that New Sensibility in which the rational hopes of the Enlightenment were catalysed by that element of imagination and personal rebellion which we now know as Romanticism.

  Godwin and Wollstonecraft were seen to bring together, through their books, their complementary views, their experiment in living, two most powerful strands in the tradition of progressive reform. They were seen as transitional figures, pointing towards a freer life and a more just society, and the new ‘empire of feeling’. Coleridge, with his genius for identifying the abstract principle embodied in human affairs, put his finger on this in one of his brilliant, conversational asides recorded by the young William Hazlitt as they walked together in the West Country in 1797. ‘He asked me’, recalls Hazlitt, ‘if I had ever seen Mary Wollstonecraft, and I said I had once for a few moments, and that she seemed to me to turn off Godwin’s objections to something she advanced with quite a playful, easy air. He replied, that this was only one instance of the ascendancy which people of imagination exercised over those of mere intellect’ (‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ in The Liberal, No. 3, 1823). Coleridge would alter his views on Godwin’s ‘mere’ intellect, but the point was well made. Here was a significant new marriage between Imagination and Reason.

  Both Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence and Godwin’s Memoirs are, in my view, crucial documents of this historic moment of transition and the Romantic renewal of hope and feeling, but their literary quality has never been properly recognized before. They are also records of the intense disruption it caused. They are full of pain, discontent and frustrated happiness. Though adopting different literary forms – the travel book and the biography – they are both essentially confessional. They are most intimately linked by the fact that they both give us portraits of Mary Wollstonecraft, but seen from the two distinct and opposite poles of life-writing: the autobiography and the biography, self-revelation and the objective character-study. These correspond wonderfully to the natural gifts of their authors. Yet both are alike in the urgency of their testament, swiftly composed at times of grief, when many of the barriers of reticence were down.

  The result seems to me to be nothing less than a revolution in literary genres. Originally cast within certain well-accepted eighteenth-century conventions – the topographical travelogue and the pious family memoir – they explode these at a number of significant points through sheer intensity of feeling and sincerity of emotion. Wollstonecraft does this through a new wilderness and richness of emotional rhetoric, Godwin through a new frankness and understatement. Both – paradoxically – are characteristic of Romanticism.

  For the student of literature – and we are all in some sense that – I would put my claim for these beloved and unjustly neglected works precisely. Mary Wollstonecraft’s is the most imaginative English travel book since Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768). Godwin’s is the most significant and revolutionary short biography since Johnson’s Life of Richard Savage (1744). Both mark the shift, as well as anything can, from an eighteenth-century to a modern world of feeling. Both bring the inner life of a human being significantly closer to our own experience of it.

  For the student of love, I would add in my modest role as biographer: ‘bon voyage, et bonne chance’.

  V

  Shelley’s Ghost

  INTRODUCTION

  IN THE INTERVAL, so to speak, Coleridge had arrived. His was the richest, most complicated biography I had ever at
tempted. The quiet, contemplative view of his study window overlooking the Heath was wholly illusory. One of the greatest intellectuals of the Romantic age, Coleridge led a life which also revealed itself as an emotional maelstrom: the passionate friendship with Wordsworth, the broken marriage with Sara, the unrequited love affair with Asra, the tragedy of his son Hartley, the struggles with opium addiction, the political manoeuvring with revolutionary politics, the literary plagiarism, the soul-searching and spiritual breakdowns, the dreams and the nightmares, the pain and the puns, and always the ceaseless and wonderful talk. ‘Avec Monsieur Coleridge,’ said Madame de Staël, ‘c’est tout à fait un monologue.’

  Sailing through that Ancient Mariner storm, holding course over that ‘trackless ocean’, was to occupy me for some fifteen exhausting and exhilarating years. But while travelling in the phosphorescent wake of his biography – in London, the English West Country, the Lake District, Scotland, Germany, Malta and Italy – the ghosts of past subjects would sometimes rise up and call for my attention back at home. The most powerful presence was undoubtedly that of Shelley, a curiously mischievous one too.

  Shelley never met Coleridge, although he spent the winter of 1811 waiting in a cottage outside Keswick for the great man to arrive. This non-meeting was one of the first temptations I ever had to invent a biographical scene: several local Keswick newspapers wrote about Shelley’s wild household – dancing naked round a bonfire, firing pistols in the night – and surely one file describing the historic encounter, ‘Mr Coleridge Rebukes An Atheist’, might have been overlooked? But Shelley did successfully ambush me on a number of occasions, two of which I include here.