Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  By contrast, De Quincey gleefully recalled the “philosopher’s” abject state like the scene from a comic opera. “I often saw him, picturesquely enveloped in nightcaps, surmounted by handkerchiefs indorsed upon handkerchiefs, shouting from the attics of the Courier office, down three or four flights of stairs, to a certain ‘Mrs Brainbridge’, his sole attendant, whose dwelling was in the subterranean regions of the house…until I expected to hear the Strand and distant Fleet Street, take up the echo of ‘Brainbridge!’.”37

  Besides being ill, Coleridge was intensely lonely. Throughout February and March, his letters flew out in every direction – to Asra, the Wordsworths, Lamb, De Quincey, Southey, Mrs Coleridge, and above all to the Morgans, seeking some form of solace. It was not easily to be found. To Mary Morgan he wrote of what seemed to him an inexplicably cruel reply from his wife: “from beginning to end it is in a strain of dancing, frisking high spirits – jokes about the Itch…and she notices my illness, the particulars of which and the strong & fearful suspicions entertained of the Stone, in these words – neither more nor less – ‘Lord! how often you are ill! You must be MORE careful about Colds!’”38

  When John Morgan kindly suggested he retreat again to Bristol, Coleridge felt he could not abandon his lectures. Besides, he asked, “what right have I to make your House my Hospital – how am I justified in bringing Sickness, & Sorrow, and all the disgusts and all the troublesomeness of Disease, into your quiet Dwelling. Ah! whither else can I go? – To Keswick? The sight of that Woman would destroy me. To Grasmere? – They are still in their Cottage…& they have not room scarcely for a Cat.”39

  In a wild attempt to lift his gloom, Coleridge now pursued a postal flirtation with Mary and Charlotte, with strange suggestive sallies and opium-inspired fancies. He wore locks of their hair round his neck, and carried Charlotte’s profile miniature in his pocket like a lucky charm. When he lost the “pretty Shirt Pin” Charlotte had sent him (another sign of chaos) he swore that he would never wear another one as long as he lived: “The sense of its real Absence shall make a sort of Imaginary Presence to me.”40

  He concocted an extraordinary scheme of having Mary and Charlotte purchase dresses in Bristol, measured to fit them, but intended to be sent on as presents for Asra and Mary Wordsworth in the Lake District. This was the “Two Sisters” fantasy brought alarmingly to life. Astonishingly, John Morgan allowed this to proceed, the dresses were bought and cut and posted north, while Coleridge gallantly disputed the price, pretending they had charged him too little. Coleridge’s amorous protestations were couched in nursery endearments of the most deliberately blush-making kind. “As to my lovely Mantua-makers, if a beautiful Lady with a fine form, a sweet Chin and Mouth and black eyes will tell an Eff-I-Bee, about 14 shillings instead of at least £5, and another sweet young Lady with dear meek eyes, as sweet a chin & mouth, & a general Darlingness of Tones, manners, & Person, will join with her Sister & swear to the same Fib, what can a gallant young Gentleman do but admit that his Memory is the Fibster, tho’ he should tell another Fib in so Doing?”41

  When further fuelled by opium, this coy dalliance got increasingly out of hand and confused. Coleridge in one letter imagined an alternative life in which he might have been married to Charlotte, or for that matter to Mary Morgan, or either of the Hutchinson sisters. His actual marriage was a crucifixion. “Neither wonder nor be wounded, if in this transient Infirmity of Soul I gave way in my agony, and causelessly & almost unknowing what I did: cried out from my Cross, Eli lama sabachthani! My friends! My Sisters! Why have you forsaken me!”42

  This was too much, even for the Morgans, as Coleridge quickly realized. He hastily apologized: “I intreat dear Miss Brent to think of what I wrote as the mere light-headedness of a diseased Body, and a heart sore-stricken – and fearing all things from every one.”43 Yet there is little doubt that these dreams did possess and torture him. He felt he had “played the fool, and cut the throat of my Happiness, of my genius, of my utility” in marrying Sara Coleridge.

  Underneath all this still lay the haunting, seductive image of Asra. Besides the symbolic dress, he sent her a copy of Chapman’s Homer (used in his lecture preparations), plaintively remarking that its battered jacket properly represented its sender’s state: “to quote from myself – A Man disinherited, in form & face/ By nature & mishap, of outward Grace!’44 He talked endlessly about her to Daniel Stuart – still his great confidant in this crisis – and wrote as well: “Would to God I had health & liberty! – If Sense, Sensibility, sweetness of Temper, perfect Simplicity and an unpretending Nature, joined to shrewdness & entertainingness, make a valuable Woman, Sara H. is so.” He added bitterly that in marriage he saw no middle way “between great happiness and thorough Misery”.45

  Still seeking to reach Asra’s heart, he roused himself from his sickbed to champion the cause of her sailor brother, Henry Hutchinson, who was trying to buy himself out of the navy. His story was typical of the times, and gives another view of Nelson’s service. Henry had originally been taken by a wartime press gang, nearly wrecked in the Gulf of Mexico, and imprisoned for four months in Vera Cruz. He now languished in the man-of-war Chichester, anchored off the Essex marshes, which was about to set sail on another enforced voyage.

  Coleridge organized food and clothes, and wrote an impassioned plea to Thomas Clarkson and Sir George Beaumont, begging them to intervene in the case. He dramatized Henry (whom he had never actually met) as an Ancient Mariner and even, one might think, as an alter ego. “This man’s whole Life has been one dream-like Tale of Sufferings – of repeated Imprisonments, of Famine, of Wounds – and twice he has had the Yellow Fever – & escaped each time from among a charnel-house of Corpses. He has done enough – he has suffered enough. And to me it is as if it were my own child – far more than if it were myself – for he is the Brother of the two Beings, whom of all on Earth I most highly honour, most fervently love.”46 Henry Hutchinson’s release was eventually obtained through the Admiralty the following year.

  It was now that Wordsworth came south, as Lamb had prophesied, reaching London on 24 February. He was genuinely concerned by Coleridge’s illness and mental state, and wild reports that he was dying. He had always disapproved of the lectures, and he determined to take Coleridge back to the safety of the Lakes, “to prevail on him to return” as Dorothy put it.47 He also wished to consult Coleridge about his new poem, “The White Doe of Rylstone”, and arrange for its publication by Longman. He remained in London, with several much needed relief-visits to the Clarksons at Bury, until 4 April.

  Rather to his surprise, Coleridge initially made difficulties about seeing him, and he could never get entry to his Courier rooms until four in the afternoon. But after several evenings together, he began to feel that Coleridge had simply given way to opium and could easily recover himself.48 His suspicions were deepened when Coleridge gave an animated tea-party in his rooms on 3 March, receiving his guests – Wordsworth, Godwin, Lamb and De Quincey – like an oriental potentate, swathed in blankets, and throned on his bed, thoroughly enjoying the fuss. Lamb was amused by the situation, a case of the Mountain coming to Mahomet. He joked about Wordsworth’s grand descent upon the Strand. “Wordsworth, the great poet, is coming to Town; he is to have apartments in the Mansion House. He says he does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare…Even Coleridge is a little checked by this hardihood of assertion.”49

  Wordsworth also brought news that Asra was ill, with a mysterious “broken blood vessel”; news which according to Dorothy would prevent Coleridge from brooding over his own misfortunes. Wordsworth continued to rally him: they went to see Sir Thomas Lawrence’s collection of pictures, and later dined with Longman to discuss “The White Doe”. It was a dull evening, “saving that we had some good haranguing – talk I cannot call it – from Coleridge.”50 It was now clear that Coleridge was indeed recovering, and determined to restart his lectures. Wordsworth, though gloomily apprehensive, loyally remained in London to a
ttend the third and fourth of the relaunched series, delivered on 30 March and 2 April.

  5

  When Coleridge recommenced with his third lecture on Friday, 30 March, his approach had altered. His notes had become compact, and more like a prompt script. There were no long quotations from aesthetic theory. He began with an eloquent personal apology that immediately caught up his audience in the drama of his own struggles. “I could not but be conscious to how severe a trial I had put your patience and candour in my last Lecture…still lingering bodily indisposition…my Faculties too confused…too weak to recite aloud…my mind gradually regained its buoyancy…” This appeal was immediately followed by an amusing definition of types of listeners: sponges, sand-glasses, straining-bags, “and lastly, the Great-Moguls Diamond Sieves” who retain everything that is valuable and forget the rest.51

  He then launched directly into one of his great psychological explorations of the poetic principle, as illustrated by Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Even before Shakespeare became a great dramatist, Coleridge argued, he had shown eight essential “Instances of the poetic Power of making everything present to the Imagination”. His notes number these off with effective brevity, and some indications of extempore development.

  Sense of Beauty…good sign-painter who begins with old men’s and old women’s faces –

  With things remote from his own feeling…

  Love of Natural objects – quote “The Hare”…

  Fancy, or the aggregative Power – “Full gently now she takes him by the hand,/ A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow”

  That power & energy of what a living poet has grandly & appropriately – “To flash upon the inward eye/ Which is the Bliss of solitude” – & to make everything present by a Series of Images…

  Imagination: power of modifying one image or feeling by the precedent or following one…

  The describing natural objects by clothing them appropriately with human passions “Lo, here the gentle lark”…

  Energy, depth and activity of Thought without which a man may be a pleasing and effective poet; but never a great one. Here introduce Dennis’s “The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry”…& end with Chapman’s “Homer”52

  He wound up the lecture by leaving his audience with a single, striking image of Shakespeare’s godlike creative power to transform himself into other forms of being: “to become by power of Imagination another Thing – Proteus, a river, a lion, yet still the God felt to be there”.*

  In his fourth lecture, which followed promptly on Friday, 2 April, he turned to analyse in greater detail the visionary gift and power of the Imagination. It was “the power of so carrying the eye of the Reader as to make him almost lose the consciousness of words – to make him see every thing…without any anatomy of description”. The effect was achieved by converting a series of visual details into a single, unified impression or feeling: “by a sort of fusion to force many into one”.

  Here the Imagination, “this greatest faculty of the human mind”, used language to imitate a shaping principle within the natural world itself. It created an interior landscape within the mind’s eye, with a unifying perspective. Poetry worked “even as Nature, the greatest of Poets, acts upon us when we open our eyes upon an extended prospect”. Coleridge here returned to Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis”, to give one of his most brilliant re-enactments of the imaginative process in the reader’s mind. It is based on a single couplet from the poem, an evocation of the emotions of separation and departure.

  Thus the flight of Adonis from the enamoured Goddess in the dusk of evening:

  “Look! How a bright star shooteth from the Sky

  So glides he in the night from Venus’ Eye”

  How many Images & feelings are here brought together without effort & without discord – the beauty of Adonis – the rapidity of his flight – the yearning yet hopelessness of the enamoured gazer – and a shadowy ideal character thrown over the whole – or it acts by impressing the stamp of human feeling, over inanimate Objects…53

  Wordsworth was witnessing Coleridge lecture in public for the first time, and listening to a historic declaration of the Romantic principle of the Imagination. He had also had the peculiar satisfaction of hearing Coleridge quote his own lines on “Daffodils” in the third lecture (themselves adapted from an entry in Dorothy’s Journal), as a signal illustration of that power. Yet he was dry in his praise to Sir George Beaumont, though he now seemed to accept the physical and mental struggle of Coleridge’s undertaking. “I heard Coleridge lecture twice and he seemed to give great satisfaction; but he was not in spirits, and suffered much during the course of the week both in body and mind.”54

  Nonetheless Wordsworth did not think Coleridge too ill to leave him without several important commissions, concerning his own work, to fulfil in London. He was to undertake entire charge of the “White Doe” manuscript; to show it to Lamb for comments and present it to Sir George Beaumont, and negotiate the financial terms of its publication with Longman. He also hoped that Coleridge would puff it when he came to lecture on “The Moderns”.

  Dorothy was particularly anxious that William would not change his mind about immediate publication, despite the likelihood of a hostile reception from reviewers, as they needed the money for Allan Bank – “what matter, if you get your 100 guineas in your pocket?”55 Later she wrote herself to Coleridge: “Our main reason (I speak in the name of the Females) for wishing that the Poem may be speedily published, is that William may get it out of his head; but further we think that it is of the utmost importance that it should come out before the Buzz of your Lectures is settled.”56

  Wordsworth spent the entire Saturday night after this fourth lecture in Coleridge’s rooms in the Strand. They talked over its themes, the concept of the Imagination, and the use Coleridge had made of Wordsworth’s poem “Daffodils” to illustrate the “fifth instance of poetic power”, that of producing visual images in the mind. It was quite like old times, and their friendship was much restored by this all-night vigil together on purely literary matters.

  Wordsworth left at seven o’clock on Sunday morning to catch the mail coach north from the City. It was snowing lightly, and his thoughts were very full, of Coleridge and poetry and the Imagination they both worshipped. He described his sensations in a most beautiful passage to Sir George Beaumont, which he later turned into a blank-verse poem. It can be taken as a tribute to their ancient comradeship, even as their paths and destinies were dividing; the one left to struggle in the great city, the other returning to his native stronghold.

  “You will deem it strange,” he told Beaumont “but really some of the imagery of London has since my return hither been more present to my mind, than that of this noble Vale. I will tell you how this happens to be. – I left Coleridge at 7 o’clock on Sunday morning; and walked towards the City in a very thoughtful and melancholy state of mind; I had passed through Temple Bar and by St Dunstans, noticing nothing, and entirely occupied by my own thoughts, when looking up, I saw before me the avenue of Fleet Street, silent, empty, and pure white with a sprinkling of new fallen snow, not a cart or carriage to obstruct the view…and beyond and towering above it was the huge and majestic form of St Paul’s, solemnized by a thin veil of falling snow. I cannot say how much I was affected at this un-thought of sight, in such a place and what a blessing I felt there is in habits of exalted Imagination.”57 It was precisely this gift of poetic vision that Coleridge had been analysing in his fourth lecture.

  6

  Coleridge continued lecturing twice weekly, mainly using Shakespeare and Milton, until the end of May. He rarely stuck to his programme, but noted: “Illustration of principles my main Object, am therefore not so digressive as might appear.”58 The records of the remaining sixteen lectures are very scattered, but Crabb Robinson, the newly appointed Foreign Correspondent to The Times, was particularly struck by the combination of close textual readings of English poetry, with sudden upward flights into di
zzy philosophical speculations from Kant, Schiller and Herder. He also observed that the digressions could be the most valuable and moving part of a session.59 Later Coleridge would pride himself on the risky, but electrifying effect of seeming to have no text, like a high-wire artist working without a net.

  The diarist Joseph Farrington recorded one characteristic opening gambit: “When Coleridge came into the Box there were several Books laying. He opened two or three of them silently and shut them again after a short inspection. He then paused, & leaned his head on his hand, and at last said, He had been thinking for a word to express the distinct character of Milton as a Poet, but not finding one that would express it, He should make one – ’Ideality‘. He spoke extempore.”60

  The shorthand reporter, J. P. Collier, who covered the later 1811 lecture series, recalled how Coleridge had learned his technique in 1808 by painful trial and error, finally claiming to hold his audience by complete spontaneity. “The first lecture he prepared himself and when it was finished received many high flown frigid compliments, which had evidently been before studied. For the next lecture he prepared himself less, and was much admired; for the third lecture, and for the remainder, he did not prepare himself at all, and was most enthusiastically applauded and approved, and the Theatre completely filled. The reason to his mind was obvious, for what he said came warm from the heart…”61 Of course it was certainly not as simple as that (the second lecture had been De Quincey’s memorable disaster), but it was a true reflection of Coleridge’s method as it painfully evolved.

  A twelve-year-old girl, Katherine Byerly (daughter of the manager of the Wedgwood potteries) recalled years later: “He came unprepared to lecture. The subject was a literary one, and the poet had either forgotten to write, or left what he had written at home. His locks were now trimmed, and a conscious importance gleamed in his eloquent eyes, as he turned then towards the fair and noble heads which bent to receive his apology. Every whisper (and there were some hundreds of ladies present) was hushed, and the poet began. I remember there was a stateliness in his language, and…I began to think, as Coleridge went on, that the lecture had been left at home on purpose; he was so eloquent – there was such a combination of wit and poetry in his similes…”62