Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  Coleridge was unaware that any such conversation had taken place as he set out for Grasmere, and nothing was mentioned by Wordsworth as he took his place in the chaise. When he told Wordsworth he already felt better in the head, he was only surprised that Wordsworth replied with a curious joke about Schiller’s death, “that when he was opened his entrails were, as it were, eaten up, while his brain was sound”.50 But Coleridge put this down to the awkwardness of parting from his old friend; an awkwardness that they surely both felt.

  It was Dorothy who gave the first circumstantial account of what had passed, several months later in a long letter to Catherine Clarkson. Wordsworth had felt that Coleridge’s presence would be “a serious injury” to Montagu and his household, and that his “habits” would be intolerable to him. She elaborated this at some length.

  William used many arguments to persuade M. that his purpose of keeping Coleridge comfortable could not be answered by their being in the same house together – but in vain. Montagu was resolved. “He would do all that could be done for him and have him at his house.” After this William spoke out and told M. the nature of C.’s habits (nothing in fact which everybody whose house he has been in for two days has not seen of themselves) and Montagu then perceived that it would be better for C. to have lodgings near him. William intended giving C. advice to the same effect; but he had no opportunity of talking with him when C. passed through Grasmere on his way to London. Soon after they got to London Montagu wrote to William that on their road he had seen so much of C.’s habits that he was convinced he should be miserable under the same roof with him, and that he had repeated to C. what William had said to him and that C. had been very angry.51

  In fact Dorothy had not been at Allan Bank on the day of Coleridge’s departure. Her account must have been taken from William himself, and it may have omitted or softened several details. But it is enough to suggest why Coleridge was now approaching one of the great emotional crises of his life.

  By his own account, he was completely unsuspecting. As the coach rolled southwards through Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, he wrote a delighted appreciation of the grounds of Bolton Abbey, and admired a painting by Ciro Ferri at Stamford, “The Marriage of Boas and Ruth”. The tender figure of Ruth, languorously wilting in a pale blue silk dress with her mass of auburn hair tied up in a band behind her head, inevitably reminded him of Asra. (“Were Sara here, even the adored here, enjoying it with me – then, then, it would be Heaven possessed!”)52

  6

  The chaise arrived in London at 10 o’clock on the evening of Friday, 26 October. But it drew up outside No. 55 Frith Street, Soho, rather than Montagu’s own house in Gray’s Inn Place. (This appears to have been Mrs Montagu’s family address, a rather less substantial residence, among printshops and many small businesses belonging to immigrant Italians in flight from Napoleon.) At some point Coleridge was informed of the new arrangements, which understandably dismayed him.

  Then, on the following evening, there was a row over the serving of sufficient wine for dinner, when Coleridge’s old Malta friend Captain Pasley – who had recently published a book on his Mediterranean experiences – came for the evening and expected a carouse with his old mess mate. Afterwards Coleridge confronted Montagu, and the whole story of Wordsworth’s remarks came out in the open. There were “angry” words, perhaps even tears on Coleridge’s part. He remembered bursting out: “O this is cruel! This is base!”53

  In the heat of the moment Montagu said something to the effect that Wordsworth had “authorized” or even “commissioned” him to pass on his views to Coleridge. Whether this is true or not, or whether Coleridge misunderstood what the flurried Montagu was saying to cover his own embarrassment, the particular words entered into his soul with terrible conviction.

  Coleridge fled to his room, and made a series of desperate notes over the weekend, swinging wildly between grief and fury. “Of this accursed analysis or rather anatomy of a friend’s Character, as if a human Soul were made like a watch, or loved for this & that tangible and verbally expressible quality! W. authorized M. to tell me, he had no Hope of me! O God! what good reason for saying this? The very belief takes away all excuse, because all kind purpose for the declaration. W. once – was unhappy, dissatisfied, full of craving, then what Love & Friendship, now all calm & attached – and what contempt for the moral comforts of others.”54

  Coleridge strove to make sense of what had happened, and to put it in some sort of perspective. But Wordsworth’s actual words, as reported by Montagu, kept coming back to him, with a sense of overwhelming betrayal. “Sunday Night. No Hope of me! absolute Nuisance! God’s mercy it is a Dream!”55 This is what he put in his Notebook that weekend, but there were obviously many other phrases that burned into his heart, and which he later repeated to his friends.

  Montagu had said that “Wordsworth has commissioned me to tell you, first, that he has no Hope of you.”56 Wordsworth had said that “for years past [I] had been an ABSOLUTE NUISANCE in the Family”.57 Wordsworth had said he was a “rotten drunkard”, or a drunkard who was “rotting out his entrails by intemperance”. Wordsworth had said he was “in the habit of running into debt at little Pot-houses for Gin”.58 At one point, as the supreme irony, Mrs Montagu had apparently interjected in her bright-eyed way: “I thought it not friendly in Mr Wordsworth to go into such a detail.”59

  Outwardly Coleridge attempted to regain his composure. The next morning he informed Montagu, with as much calm as he could muster, that he thought it best in all the circumstances that he should remove to a hotel. Nonetheless, he would consult Dr Carlisle as had been arranged. But inwardly he felt as if his whole world had fallen apart, and out of control. “Whirled about without a centre – as in a nightmare – no gravity – a vortex without a centre.” It was his old image of the flock of starlings in screaming flight, that he had observed so long ago, when lying isolated and trapped on the remote peak of Scaffel, not knowing how to go on or go back.60

  By Wednesday, 31 October he was established in a little upper room at Hudson’s Hotel, King Street, just behind Covent Garden. It was like his lonely return from Italy, four years previously. But this time he felt the journey of his whole life had been wasted and rendered meaningless. He felt “a compressing and strangling Anguish, made up of Love, and Resentment, and Sorrow – quarrelling with all the Future & refusing to be consoled for the Past”.61

  He wandered the streets, not daring to contact any friends, beset by “faintness & universal Trembling”.62 Finally he staggered round to the Lambs at 34 Southampton Buildings, just off Chancery Lane. Charles was still out at work in East India House, but Mary welcomed him in as usual. She told him that she had suffered a return of her nervous illness, and that she and Charles had given up alcohol, and were trying to replace it with a rhubarb diet, “not pleasant to you…but good for you”.63

  Coleridge let her prattle on, and tried to conceal his news. But the “wildness & paleness” of his face soon gave him away. Mary “entreated” him to tell her what was troubling him. “In the first attempt to speak, my feelings overpowered me, an agony of weeping followed, & then…I brought out convulsively some such words as – Wordsworth – Wordsworth has given me up. He has no hope of me – I have been an absolute Nuisance in his family.”64 Mary Lamb listened silently to her old friend, and then gave him a very large brandy.

  7

  Coleridge sat alone in his upstairs room at Hudson’s Hotel for the first three wintry days of November 1810. Silently he surveyed the wreckage of his hopes – Wordsworth, Asra, The Friend – and tried to take stock of what was left. It was one of the bleakest moments of his life.

  Initially he revealed his devastated feelings to no one. The obvious course of writing directly to Wordsworth for an explanation seemed impossible to him. In one note to John Monkhouse of 1 November he mentioned “a very painful affair with which I need not trouble you”; but then quickly went on to praise Mrs Montagu’s “winning kind-heartedness�
� and to express his confidence in Dr Carlisle’s abilities.65 Indeed he had so smoothed things over with the Montagus that nothing seriously amiss was suspected at Grasmere. “We heard no more of this, or of C. in any way,” wrote Dorothy later, “except soon after his arrival in Town, by Mrs Montagu, that he was well in health, powdered etc. and talked of being busy.”66 Powdered hair and a fashionable doctor indicated all was well.

  But Coleridge was acting a part, and nothing was what it seemed. Anthony Carlisle quickly abandoned his case, evidently shocked by the extremity of his addiction. Breaking his Hippocratic oath, he then gossiped of it in London, and wrote indiscreetly to Southey at Keswick. Within a fortnight Southey was stoking the fires to his friend Charles Danvers. “Coleridge is in London – gone professedly to be cured of opium and drinking spirits by Carlisle – really because he was tired of being here, and wanted to do both more at his ease elsewhere. I have had a dismal letter about him from Carlisle. The case is utterly hopeless.”67 But of course Southey knew nothing about the Wordsworth affair either.

  At Hudson’s Hotel, Coleridge sat up late into the night making a series of long notes about his situation. “My Griefs and Sorrows passed all before my Love, and like the Birds & Beasts before Adam, receive their names – nay, their natures too – from it.”68 The large sprawling hand, the unrolling syntax and the moments of paranoia and self-pity, suggest that he was often very drunk. None the less the entries are perfectly coherent, and represent a tremendous concentrated effort to get some sort of bearings on his past life and find the grounds of his “moral being” for the future.

  There were three main notes. The first was a confirmation of his love for Asra, now expressed with religious intensity.69 The second was a “Confessio Fidei”, or statement of his Christian faith, in carefully numbered propositions and asserting the reality of a spiritual life beyond the wreckage of his physical one.70 The third was an “Ego-ana”, or psychological self-analysis of his emotional predicament.71

  The intense inwardness of these entries seems to promise a searing, unflinching examination of conscience. Yet many elements, many levels of self-awareness, are missing or suppressed. Coleridge made no attempt at this point to grapple with the fact of his opium addiction, to consider why his “habits” might have made him an “absolute nuisance” in any family he stayed with. Indeed the only specific mention of his addiction comes in an oblique, though intriguing, reference to the “Kubla Khan” autumn of 1797 in the Quantocks, and “the retirement between Linton and Porlock” which was “the first occasion of my having recourse to Opium”.72

  The love-note concerning Asra – virtually a hymn, a psalmic Song of Songs – is so idealized as to leave the actual figure of Sara Hutchinson far below in some mundane sphere. The woman in distant Radnorshire, even the tender auburn-haired Ruth in her Italian landscape, these have been subsumed and transformed into a divine presence. “My love of Asra is not so much in my Soul, as my Soul in it. It is my whole Being wrapt up in one Desire, all the Hopes & Fears, Joys & Sorrows, all the Powers, Vigour & Faculties of my Spirit abridged into one perpetual Inclination. To bid me not to love you were to bid me to annihilate myself – for to love you is all I know of Life, as far as my Life is an object of my Consciousness or my free Will.”

  Dorothy Wordsworth would instantly have identified this as Coleridge’s opium fantasy, careless of all living relations and responsibilities. In any real, domestic world, this vision itself would have been an “absolute nuisance”, an impossible demand. Yet for Coleridge alone in London, barely clinging to his own identity, drifting amidst the inner storms, drunk and weeping and hopeless, Asra still represented the spiritual force that he needed, the duty to exist, and the right to be happy. If his note is understood as a prayer as much as a vision, it represents courage in extremity, as much as delusion in despair.

  God is our Being, but thro his works alone doth he reveal himself…I hold it therefore neither Impiety on the one hand, nor Superstition on the other, that you are the God within me, even as the best & most religious of men have called their Conscience the God within them…In what form, with what voice, under what modification can I imagine God to work upon me, in which you have not worked? – All evil has kept aloof – you have worked ceaselessly every where, at all times – and the sum of your influence & Benignant Grace has been, Horror of whatever is base…fervent aspirations after good, & great, honourable & beautiful things – and the unconquerable necessity of making myself worthy of being happy as the one indispensable condition of possessing the one only happiness – your Love, your Esteem, and You.73

  The exalted tone of all this is considerably modified in Coleridge’s “Confessio Fidei”. He states his belief in God, in free will, in the life to come, and the “Spiritual State of Being”. Yet none of these is susceptible of “Scientific Demonstration” or can be proved by “Understanding or discursive Faculty”. They are simply the universal assumptions of “Natural Religion” which all men, “all finite rational Beings”, have a duty to believe. But his specifically Christian faith has a much darker ground, which effectively challenges the notion of free will or any inherent goodness in the natural human condition.

  The doctrine of the “fallen state” or “Original Sin” was of course perfectly orthodox Christian teaching, based on Adam’s disobedience as described in the Book of Genesis. Coleridge had restated it in the opening of The Friend. But now it seemed to be taking on an increasingly personal intensity, which clearly reflected the terrors of his addiction and the sense of powerlessness to control his own life. To him the “Fall” had become a recognizable event in his own autobiography. “I believe, and hold it as the fundamental article of Christianity, that I am a fallen creature; that I am myself capable of moral evil, but not of myself capable of moral good, and that Guilt is justly imputable to me prior to any given act, or assignable moment of time, in my Consciousness. I am born a child of Wrath. This fearful Mystery I pretend not to understand…but I know that it is so!”74 Thus Coleridge struggled to come to terms with his guilt and dependency as a spiritual fact, an inescapable part of the human condition.

  Coleridge’s mood altered again with his self-analysis or “Egoana”. Here, suddenly and startlingly, he saw himself as blameless, innocent and betrayed. He wrote about his marriage, his friendship for Wordsworth, and once again his love for Asra. In each case he felt he had offered unconditional love, which had never really been returned. For twenty-five years he had confused “two things essentially different” – the first, being “beloved by a person”; the second “a person’s being highly pleased with being loved and admired by me”.

  Mrs Coleridge had never been a wife “in the purest, holiest sense of the word”. His fourteen years of “consummate Friendship” for Wordsworth, “a man whose welfare never ceased to be far dearer to me than my own, and for whose Fame I have been enthusiastically watchful, even at the price of alienating the affections of my Benefactors”, had always been based on a “reverential admiration” that was never truly reciprocated. Likewise his ten years of love for Asra, such as “I should feel no shame to describe to an Angel”, had never really been understood. “One human Being, entirely loving me (this, of course must have been a Woman)” would have satisfied “all my Hopes”. Everything was now clear to him. “The events of last year, and emphatically of the last month, have now forced me to perceive – No one on earth has ever LOVED me.”

  Whatever truths this might contain, it was hardly an objective self-analysis. It was an accusation, angry and self-pitying, in the voice of a hurt child – “turbulent, with an outcry at the heart” – as he had written in the poem “To William Wordsworth” at Coleorton. Coleridge’s one attempt to impose an adult voice, to ask in what way he might be to blame for these failings, was sulky and unconvincing. “Doubtless, the fault must have been partly, perhaps chiefly, in myself. The want of reliability in little things, the infliction of little pains, the trifling with hope, in short, all that renders th
e idea of a person recall more pains than pleasures – these would account for the loss of Friendship.” Perhaps, he mused, his one true fault was his “voluntary self-humiliation, my habitual abasement of my self & my talents”.75

  Yet for all this, the “Ego-ana” is a curiously spirited document. In the mournful recitation of wrongs and rejections, there is a stirring of self-assertion, a confused feeling of facing up to the worst. If Coleridge was cruelly, crazily, unjust to all the patience and years of loving support he had received at Grasmere and Keswick, he was also courageous in accepting the reality of his rejection from that world. If they had “no Hope” of him, very well then, he would have no hope of them.

  Somehow he would recover his own sources of hope, and once again find his own independence in London. At Hudson’s Hotel, the prospect appeared suicidally bleak and confused. He felt he was “looking forward upon Life, & down into the grave (on the brink of which I am now probably tottering)”.76 But the very fact that he could examine and describe his feelings and his beliefs held out some possibility of a future. It was some time now that he wrote one of his darkest and most unflinching poems, “The Visionary Hope”. In it he described his sensation of his whole life being trapped, as if he were “some captive guest, some royal prisoner at his conqueror’s feast”.

  That Hope, which was his inward bliss and boast,