Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  In fact, as Coleridge told Tom Poole and Lady Beaumont, he was now planning to produce a corrected Friend in volume form, and to add a supplement with additional materials. His reading for this included Kant and Spinoza, Gibbon and Clarendon, Harrington and Blackstone, Chillingworth, Fulke Greville and George Herbert: philosophy, history, law, politics, religion, poetry.

  Subjects sprout up with the tropical speed and variety of jungle plants: “Why is true Love like a Tree?”;20 “Essay in Defence of Punning”;21 “What was the origin of philosophy?”;22 “When did Time begin?”;23 “Just distinction between certainly knowing and clearly knowing”;24 “Had the Christians failed, a kind of Christianity would and must have prevailed”;25 “Property clearly natural to man…manifest in animals – the Swans on Hawkshead Lake”;26 “Absolute Truth is always a mystery”.27

  What links this bewildering range of enquiries seems to be Coleridge’s fascination with origins, with the grounds of knowledge and belief. His notes most frequently come back to religious questions – miracles, revelation, the origins of moral law, the notion of a personal God and a Trinity – but they perform vast circuits on the way. Their special quality resides perhaps in their psychological acuity, the way the individual mind grows and alters in its perception of truth, inevitably changed by age and experience.

  Many such entries have strong autobiographical undertones. Coleridge proposed for example that belief in a personal God did not rest in an abstract notion of “the divine”, but followed from the personal discovery of evil in the world, of failure that required forgiveness.28 For this reason young people were naturally, and almost inevitably, both materialists and idealists.

  His own experience of Pantisocracy shadows this argument. “Young men ignorant of the corruption & weakness of their own hearts, & therefore always prone to substitute the glorious Ideal of human nature for the existing reality. – This may be most affectingly shown by the fervent friendships & bitter quarrels of young men, each expecting the other to be an Angel, & taking their generous wishes in their most generous moods for Virtue. – Hence no need is felt of Redemption.’29

  Equally he felt the insistent materialism of scientific theory, by its reductive rationalism, closed off the vital sense of knowledge itself as a process of growth and exploration carried on from one generation to the next. The recognition of mystery, like the recognition of evil, was essential to progressive understanding of the world in a psychological sense.

  Thus an essay on the theory of lightning as the product of atmospheric friction begins with a characteristic qualification. “I do not like that presumptuous philosophy which in its rage of explanation allows no XYZ, no symbol representative of the vast Terra Incognita of Knowledge, for the Facts and Agencies of Mind and Matter reserved for future Explorers, while the ultimate grounds of all must remain inexplorable or Man cease to be progressive. Our Ignorance, with all the intermediates of obscurity, is the condition of our ever-increasing Knowledge.”30*

  He felt his own Notebooks should also have this open, provisional status, and that if he “should die without having destroyed this & my other Memorandum Books” they should be understood as “Hints & first Thoughts” and not as “fixed opinions”. They were “acts of obedience to the apostolic command of Try all things: hold fast to that which is good.”31

  3

  Coleridge began the remarkable group of entries concerning St Theresa of Avila at the end of June. He borrowed a two-volume edition of her Life and Works (divided as “The History of her Life”, 1671; and “The History of her Foundations”, 1675) from Southey’s library, and annotated it in great detail. “Monday June 25 1810 Keswick – Began to read the deeply interesting Life & Works of St Teresa. She was indeed framed by nature & favoured by a very hot-bed in a hot-house of Circumstance, to become a mystic Saint of the first magnitude, a mighty Mother of spiritual transports, the materia prestabilita of divine Fusions, Infusions, and Confusions.”32

  Despite his initially ironic tone – he had learned to despise the excesses of Mediterranean Catholicism in Malta – he became more and more fascinated by the mixture of spiritual and erotic mysticism in her visions. As with Luther, he accepted them as psychological fact, but sought to explain them biographically in the peculiar circumstances of her upbringing.

  He examined the influence of her parents, her early reading in the lives of saints and martyrs, her passion for “Spanish Romance and Chivalry”, and the guilt of her adolescent sexual experience. He saw her intense, romantic spirituality as formed from earliest childhood. “At about 8 years old She & her brother were engaged to run away & go to Africa in order to obtain the crown of Martyrdom. She regarded the Martyrs with more envy than Admiration: they were so very lucky in getting an eternal Heaven at so easy a price.”33 There are distant echoes here of his own childhood truancies – and Hartley’s perhaps – to a beckoning, magical river. But the conscious connection he made was with the yearning, innocent character of Christabel, who like Theresa, had the “force of suppressed Instincts stirring in the heart & bodily frame”.

  All these conditions of “Religion, Manners, Climate, Constitution” quite naturally formed her visions which she accepted with complete conviction. “You will see how almost impossible it was, that young Spanish Maiden so innocent, & so susceptible, of an imagination so lively by nature & so fever-kindled by disease, & thus so well-furnished with the requisite images and preconceptions, should not mistake, & often, the less painful and in such a frame the sometimes pleasurable approaches to bodily Deliquium, and her imperfect Fainting-fits for divine Transports, & momentary Union with God.”34

  Initially Coleridge’s biographic and psycho-pathological approach to St Theresa appears to be a sceptical one. But his tenderness towards her – an “innocent and loving Soul” – is empathetic, almost fraternal. Much of the “superstition” surrounding her is the fault of Dominican apologists writing twelve years afterwards at the height of the Inquisition.35

  Her spiritual insights struck him as profound and moving, often expressed in imagery very close to his own poems. Her “elucidation” of the four states of prayer is given in water metaphors which strongly recall the experience of the Ancient Mariner. Prayer begins as an act of “seemingly unassisted poor labouring Will”, like water drawn up painfully from a well in a bucket “by mere force of the arm”; later it is assisted “by the wheel & pulley”; thirdly it becomes easier like “the drawing off streamlets from a River & great Fountain”; and lastly it becomes the effortless pouring down of “copious rains from Heaven”.

  This is powerfully reminiscent of the wonderful description of the Mariner’s release from spiritual drought in Part V of the ballad, where “By the grace of the Holy Mother, the Ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain”:

  My lips were wet, my throat was cold,

  My garments all were dank;

  Sure I had drunken in my dreams,

  And still my body drank.36

  For all her ecstasies, St Theresa also “judiciously” counselled against hysterical emotions. “The true Love of God doth not consist in having Tears, or Tenderness, or Spiritual Gusts”; we must always remain “Lords of ourselves”.

  All this spoke with great immediacy to Coleridge in his study at Greta Hall, and his notes are intercut with further reflections on his agonized longings for Asra. “June 25 1810. Keswick. – I most commonly do not see her with my imagination – have no visual image: but she is present to me, even as two persons at some small distance in the same dark room: they know that the one is present, & act & feel under that knowledge – & a subtler kind of sigh seems to confirm & enliven the knowledge. SARA (in Greek).”37

  The image of the dark, solitary room containing some transcendent possibility of light and blissful communion, seized upon Coleridge. In some way his opium visions of Asra were connected with St Theresa in her monastic cell, and the experience of all other mystics like Luther, or St Francis de Sales, or Jakob Boehme.38 He felt such visionary p
remonitions of happiness lay at the root of all religious feeling, and were universal in all times, all societies, and “Under all forms of Religion”.39

  These “Epiphanies & Incarnations”, though they might be a mistake of “the sensuous imagination relatively to Place and to Space”, were yet truths of “the moral Being”. In a long, complex and ecstatic entry Coleridge analysed this “instinctive craving, dim & blind tho it may be, of the moral being after this unknown Bliss, or Blessedness”. Though such blessedness might only be felt by its absence, “known only & anticipated by the Hollowness where it is”, it was nevertheless a spiritual fact.

  Seeking to express his own experience of this reassuring light, glimpsed in the metaphysical dark of his study, he returned to one of his familiar images from the natural world, perfectly balanced between hope and despair. (Characteristically, he placed it in a bracket.) “The Plant in its dark Chamber turns & twists its stem & grows toward the Light-Cranny, the sensation of the want supplying the sense of the Object wanted!”40

  4

  All these entries emphasized his feeling of deepening solitude at Greta Hall, as the summer wore on. External matters occasionally intrude – conversations with Southey, worries about keeping up his life assurance payments, notes on birdsong inspired by Gilbert White (“Owls hoot in 3 different keys, G Flat (Or F sharp) in B flat & in A Flat”).41 But the prevailing note is one of loneliness, with its familiar lament: “Alas, to no one dare I speak or even look my griefs & heart-wastings! Dear Book! now my only Confidant, my only faithful Friend.”42 The term has surely taken on a certain irony.

  He was still gathering materials for the supplement to The Friend itself, but he knew that he could not put off for much longer the pressing need to publish, pay off some of his extensive debts, and earn money for his family. His thoughts turned increasingly to London, or Edinburgh, and the unavoidable necessity of topical journalism.

  One idea was to write a long review of Scott’s Lady of the Lake, which had been published in May 1810 with great success. Scott had told Jeffrey at the Edinburgh Review that it was greatly indebted to the unpublished “Christabel”, and Coleridge’s views were naturally of controversial interest.43 Perhaps for this reason a copy had lain on Coleridge’s desk “week after week till it cried shame to me for not opening it”. He finally roused himself to do so in September, putting his first thoughts in a long letter to Wordsworth, who had returned to Grasmere. They had not met since May, and Scott’s ballad provided relatively safe, neutral ground to reopen communications.

  Coleridge avoided all personal reference, except to say he was “curious” to see Mary’s new baby. Instead he adopted an easy tone to pour cheerful scorn on Scott’s ballad, whose languid progress was “between a sleeping Canter and a Marketwoman’s trot”. He felt it was clearly derivative, “not without its peccadilloes against the 8th Commandment”, with borrowings from Wordsworth’s “Ruth” and “Hart Leap Well”, as well as a “miserable copy” of Bracy the Bard from “Christabel”.

  “In short, what I felt in Marmion, I feel still more in the Lady of the Lake – viz. that a man accustomed to cast words in metre and familiar with descriptive Poets & Tourists…must be troubled with a mental Strangury, if he could not lift up his leg six times at six different Corners, and each time p – a canto.”44

  Coleridge’s jocular ribaldry disguised an acute literary perception. A new generation of poets had arrived, and were taking over the revolutionary achievements of the Lyrical Ballads and making them commercially popular. The narrative verse-romance was to prove the bestselling form of the new decade. Scott’s Lady of the Lake would sell 30,000 copies in 1810; and in 1812 Byron would double the figure on his return from Greece with The Bride of Abydos (written in a week), The Corsair, and Lara, all of which sold spectacularly well. Indeed the previous autumn of 1809, Byron had recorded in his journals his rapt reading of “The Ancient Mariner” on board ship sailing through the Mediterranean on his way to Greece.

  Faced with this rising tide of imitation and popularizing, Coleridge sought to call back Wordsworth to their old literary comradeship. He did it in the light-hearted style of the old Quantock days. “In short, my dear William! – it is time to write a Recipe for Poems of this sort – I amused myself a day or two ago on reading a Romance in Mrs Radcliffe’s style with making out a scheme, which was to serve for all romances a priori – only varying the proportions – A Baron or a Baroness ignorant of their Birth, and in some dependent situation – Castle – on a Rock – a Sepulchre – at some distance from the Rock – Deserted Rooms – Underground Passages – Pictures – a ghost, so believed – or – a written record – blood on it! – a wonderful Cut throat – etc. etc. etc. – Now I say, it is time to make out the component parts of the Scottish Minstrelsy…”

  This recipe for a bestseller would include in addition “a vast string of patronymics”, hunting, heraldry, falconry, “some pathetic moralizing on old times”; and of course a Bard (“that is absolutely necessary”).45

  Though Wordsworth had been back at Grasmere for a month (“he gives me grand accounts of Sara’s good looks”, Dorothy had noted), there is no evidence that he responded to this overture. Nor did Coleridge publish the review of Scott, though he had prepared for it extensively in his Notebooks, observing that as art criticism spoke of “schools” (“The Flemish School – The Venetian School”) there was now a tendency to do the same in literary criticism – “but now! The Southeyian School, the Wordsworthian etc.”. He did not mention a Coleridgean School.46

  The review, so eagerly awaited and so financially necessary, was prevented by two unfortunate circumstances. The first was an attack on Scott’s “imitations” from earlier authors, published in the Courier on 15 September, and inexplicably signed “STC”. In fact it was written by Edward Dubois, the editor of the Monthly Mirror who had become a critic of the original “Lake School” and wished to stir up a literary war. Coleridge was forced to publish a denial in the paper, while Southey wrote to Scott assuring him that the article had nothing to do with anyone at Greta Hall.

  Coleridge’s hands were then further tied, when Scott graciously replied with a promise to review Southey’s new ballad “The Curse of the Kehema” favourably in the Quarterly Review. As Southey was anxious that his own poem should receive good notices, he was understandably keen not to antagonize Scott any further through Coleridge. Besides, he was himself continuing to contribute to the Quarterly for handsome fees (they soon rose to £100 an article). In all these circumstances, Coleridge felt it was no longer possible to publish a critical review of Scott, and the chance to defend the true originality of “Christabel” in public was delayed for the next six years. Southey meanwhile went on to establish himself on the Quarterly, which became his main source of income for the next twenty years; and also to secure his friendship with Scott. When Scott was offered the Poet Laureateship three years later in 1813, he passed it up in favour of Southey.

  5

  By October, with his boys back at Ambleside School, and Asra as silent as ever, Coleridge became desperate to migrate for the winter from the increasingly chilly comforts of Greta Hall. He turned and twisted in his dark chamber. An income, an opium cure, a renewal of admiring company, must all be found before it was too late.

  At length a means of escape appeared with the last of the season’s visitors to the Lakes. Wordsworth’s old and loquacious admirer Basil Montagu arrived on a late tour, proudly displaying a new carriage and a new wife, a handsome and managing widow with a taste for literary celebrities. Montagu, while retaining his Rousseauist ideal of the simple life, had managed to combine this with a brilliant career as a London barrister and a fine town house at 4 Gray’s Inn Place, Holborn, where he kept a lively dinner table.47

  After spending several days at Greta Hall, and sensing the domestic tensions, he invited Coleridge to join him in London for the winter. The invitation was obviously well meant, an opportunity for Coleridge to revive his health and lit
erary prospects in the great city. For Mrs Montagu it may also have seemed something of a social catch, a decorative addition to the silverware of their soirees. Montagu evidently knew something, if not all, of Coleridge’s opium problem; but like others before him felt that it could be “managed”. He was a Unitarian, eschewed strong liquors, and believed in hard work and early rising. He was also a notorious gossip, one of the pleasures he shared with his new wife, a lady, as Coleridge observed, with a “Black eye & blue – both bright”.48

  To Coleridge the idea seemed like a godsend, both eminently practical and subtly flattering. He would travel down in Montagu’s own chaise, be an honoured guest at Montagu’s comfortable house, and be given an introduction to Mrs Montagu’s personal physician, the fashionable London doctor Anthony Carlisle, renowned for his silver tongue and bedside manner.

  Mrs Coleridge approved, though privately Southey was sceptical, writing to Rickman: “I do not know any other motive that he has for going to London, than that he becomes daily more and more uneasy at having done nothing for so long, and therefore flies away to avoid the sight of persons, who he knows must be grieved by his misconduct, tho they refrain from all remonstrance.”49 His book-box was packed, and he prepared for a dawn departure on 18 October, making first for Grasmere where the Montagus were paying a last call on Wordsworth.

  It was during this brief interval that, unknown to Coleridge, Wordsworth intervened. What exactly he said to the Montagus will never be known exactly, and would become the subject of bitter dispute over the next two years. What he had previously written to Tom Poole, and what Dorothy had written to Catherine Clarkson, certainly explains his motives and gives some idea of the severity with which he may have spoken to Montagu. But whether he mentioned Asra, as well as opium and alcohol, is not clear. At all events he felt it his duty to warn Montagu about Coleridge’s true condition as he saw it, and to advise Montagu strongly against putting up Coleridge in his house.