He was desperately worried by money, and still trying to scrape together outstanding subscriptions from The Friend. He begged them to send “all my Books & Papers with such of my Linen as may be clean, in my Box, by the errand Cart…a couple of Nails & a Rope will sufficiently secure the Box.”17 And by implication, his coffin. In the event, Morgan tracked him down again and took him home to Hammersmith at the end of January 1811, the purgatory of Dr Abernethie’s “fiery Trial” apparently having been postponed till the soul was better prepared.
The Notebooks continue to be full of grotesque nightmares: a “great pig” leaping on his legs; a “claw-like talon-nailed hand” coming through the bed-curtains and grasping his stomach; and “dreadful Trembling of my whole body” which led him to wake with “piercing out-cries”. Typically these terrors are followed by careful, daylight “elucidations”. He thought that they were not strictly speaking “dreams”, but forms of half-directed “Reveries”, very close to the state in which poetry is composed. Physical pain in the stomach, arm or leg became objectified as Monsters and Apparitions. “The Imagination therefore, the true inward Creatrix, instantly out of the chaos or shattered fragments of Memory puts together some form to fit it…”*
His analysis is very close to modern theories of “hypnagogic images”, which have been identified as occurring between the conditions of drowsiness and full dream-sleep. Coleridge felt just such a theory was required, which would emphasize the active symbolmaking productions of the brain in “reverie”, as opposed to its purely passive, associative functions in dream-sleep. “To explain & classify these strange sensations, the organic material Analogons (Ideas, materiales as the Cartesians say) of Fear, Hope, Rage, Shame, & strongest of all Remorse, forms at present the most difficult & at the same time the most interesting Problem of Psychology…The solution of this Problem would, perhaps, throw great doubt on this present dogma, that the Forms & Feelings of Sleep are always the reflections & confused Echoes of our waking Thoughts, & Experiences.”18
Thus Coleridge continued to use his analytic powers to cling to his sanity, though he later described these weeks as “a frenzy of the heart” which produced “some of the effects of a derangement of the brain”.19 Through it all, the Morgans coped with him and also paid for him.
No news reached Keswick directly, and in January 1811 Southey wrote three upbraiding letters which he suspected were left unopened. If Coleridge opened the first, it is not surprising that he left the others closed. Southey wished to prevent him from “the ultimate shame of his applying to Abernethie”. He urged him to return to the Lakes, “beseeching him to let me be his taskmaster for three months in which time, if he would only submit to the performance of as much daily work as I should require (and I would require but little) I would engage that he should lie down at night with a heart at ease…Something too I said about his children.”20
Southey’s attempts to organize Coleridge’s life, as if he could be disciplined like a child, had one curiously tragic outcome. It concerned the fate of their old Pantisocratic friend George Burnett, who was also adrift in London this winter, even deeper in debt and opium than Coleridge. Burnett wrote to Coleridge for help, proposing “some schemes of authorship which C.’s name would enable him to effect with the booksellers”. But the letter was sent to Keswick, and instead of forwarding it, Southey opened it himself. Only when he next wrote to Coleridge did he mention it, suggesting that Coleridge should persuade Burnett to find “a situation in the army or navy” and he would then “willingly contribute £20 towards equipping him for it”.
As Coleridge was not opening Southey’s letters, he learned nothing of Burnett’s fate until too late. Burnett “died wretchedly in a workhouse” at the Marylebone Infirmary in February, believing himself abandoned by all his friends. Coleridge was the one person who would have understood George Burnett’s predicament, and would undoubtedly have tried to help. When he heard the news in March at Lamb’s he burst into tears. Southey dryly remarked that Coleridge’s “wretched practice” of not opening letters made him “deaf and dumb to all who have any claims either of affection and duty upon him”. He himself had often given Burnett good advice, and had he listened “he might at this hour have been alive and happy, a useful and a worthy member of society”. Southey had “nothing” for which to blame himself in the affair.21
In fact Coleridge was far from incommunicado at Hammersmith, but the only letters he answered now were from London friends. In February he embarked on a detailed correspondence with the young writer Mary Russell Mitford, and meticulously revised the proof-sheets of her poem “Christina, The Maid of the South Seas”. Her father, George Mitford, thanked him with the present of a jugged hare.22
Crabb Robinson sent him a copy of his translation of a German fairy-tale, Amatonda, which Coleridge reviewed at length in a letter of six pages, leading on to a discussion of Jean-Paul Richter’s Geist and German theories of romantic love. Here Coleridge’s private meditations on Asra were transformed into a philosophic essay on the universal nature of “true human Love”. It contained many terms that he would later use in his lecture on Romeo and Juliet. He likened love to the positioning of two hearts, “like two correspondent concave mirrors, having a common focus, while each reflects and magnifies the other”.
He insisted that love was a primary element, in the chemical sense, and not a compound of other emotions like friendship or sexual attraction. “There is such a passion, as Love – which is no more a compound, than Oxygen; tho’ like Oxygen, it has an almost universal affinity, and a long & finely graduated Scale of elective Attractions. It combines with Lust – but how? – Does Lust call forth or occasion Love? – Just as much as the reek of the marsh calls up the Sun.” However, he believed that “long & deep Affection” could sometimes, in a single moment, be “flash-transmuted into Love”. These images of fire and sunlight produced a magnificently extended simile on the experience of falling in love.
In short, I believe that Love…is always the abrupt creation of a moment – tho’ years of Dawning may have preceded. I said, Dawning – for often as I have watched the Sun-rising, from the thinning, diluting Blue to the Whitening, to the fawn-coloured, the pink, the crimson, the glory, yet still the Sun itself has always started up, out of the Horizon – ! between the brightest Hues of the Dawn and the first Rim of the Sun itself there is a chasm – all before were Differences of Degrees, passing & dissolving into each other – but this is a difference of Kind – a chasm of Kind in a continuity of Time. – And as no man who has never watched for the rise of the Sun, could understand what I mean, so can no man who has not been in Love, understand what Love is – tho’ he will be sure to imagine & believe, that he does.23
Here was Coleridge deliberately writing like one of the young, impassioned authors of the Romantic sturm und drang. This passage was a bid for Robinson’s sympathy and a prelude to many intimacies to come. Coleridge, as so often, had set out to enchant his new friend with a revelation of his inner feelings, and to gather him into the fold of his admirers. He instinctively cast himself in the role that Robinson would respond to most immediately: the solitary man of intense feeling, the Germanic idealist of Naturphilosophie, the lonely watcher of the dawn skies alone at his study window.
Robinson could now see him like a figure in a landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. (“It has just come into my head”, he prompted, “that this Scrawl is very much in the Style of Jean-Paul.”) He was simultaneously the poet who had enumerated the colour-gradations of the dawn sky, and the philosopher who had distinguished “a chasm of Kind in a continuity of Time”. This could hardly fail to fascinate the man who was also drawn to William Blake.
He also seems to have wanted Robinson to distinguish between his own Romantic sensibility, and that of Wordsworth. This accounts for the sudden, rather surprising, direction in which Coleridge’s meditation on love finally turned. “Thus, Wordsworth is by nature incapable of being in Love, tho’ no man more tenderly attach
ed – hence he ridicules the existence of any other passion, than a compound of Lust with Esteem & Friendship, confined to one Object…Now this will do very well – it will suffice to make a good Husband…but still it is not Love.”24
Later he would speak approvingly of Wordsworth’s “brotherly love” for Dorothy, saying he envied it and that “his own character had suffered from the want of a sister”.25 But it is suggestive that Coleridge had no inkling of the real depth of marital love that Wordsworth would later reveal in passionate, private letters to Mary in 1812.26 Coleridge wanted Robinson to prefer the figure adrift in London, lonely and undomesticated, with his unappeased longings of the heart.
4
By mid-March Coleridge was sufficiently recovered to be visiting Southampton Buildings again, and staying for several days at a time with the Lambs. Mary Lamb had one of her periodic breakdowns, and had to be taken by Charles to the asylum. Before she collapsed she wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth saying that she knew there was “a coldness” between Coleridge and her brother. She exhorted Wordsworth to come to London, and told Dorothy that Coleridge’s mind was “seriously unhinged” by the affair. Lamb tried to prevent this letter being sent, although Coleridge may have been glad of it. But even so it produced no words of comfort from Grasmere.27
In May, Coleridge himself wrote to his wife saying he had been “injured unprovoked” by Wordsworth, and that Montagu’s revelations had burst upon him like “a thunder clap”. He asked for all his manuscripts to be packed and sent to London.28 This letter was also passed on to Grasmere, and for first time there was some realization of the seriousness of the breach. But the Wordsworths’ attitude had hardened: they could not understand why Coleridge did not write directly, if he was so hurt, and they felt he was exaggerating and making mischief against them in London. Dorothy put it down to “his miserable weakness”, his opium-taking and his desire to attract sympathy.
On 12 May she wrote angrily to Catherine Clarkson: “when I read all this my soul burned with indignation that William should thus (by implication) be charged with having caused disarrangement in his friend’s mind. A pretty story to be told. ‘Coleridge has been driven to madness by Wordsworth’s cruel or unjust conduct towards him.’ Would not anybody suppose that he had been guilty of the most atrocious treachery or cruelty? but what is the sum of all he did? he privately warned a common friend disposed to serve C. with all his might, that C. had one or two habits which might disturb his tranquillity…”29
Wordsworth wrote an explanation to Mrs Coleridge, and asked her to “transcribe” it for her husband; but Sara Coleridge in turn refused to embroil herself with the deepening quarrel. There the matter was left in the spring of 1811, with Dorothy hopefully supposing that Coleridge’s “fancies will die away of themselves”.
But they did not do so. Evidently there were now gulfs of misunderstanding on both sides, and the stubborn refusal of both men to communicate with each other directly told its own story of longstanding resentment, wounded pride and subtle jealousies. Perhaps too it suggested that at some level both were glad, or at least relieved, by the breach. Wordsworth had become exhausted by Coleridge’s emotional demands; Coleridge had finally rebelled against Wordsworth’s emotional domination of all those dependent on him. As writers, both were moving apart on separate paths. If the quarrel was tragic, it was also probably necessary.
But as in all divorces it was the rejected partner, Coleridge, who suffered the most and had to cope with the overwhelming sense of failure. While Wordsworth drew back into his domestic kingdom and calmly began work, as Dorothy noted, “on his great poem” “The Excursion”, Coleridge cast around London for new forms of existence and hope. Wandering down the Strand amidst the rumble of coaches, he felt himself being swept out into the open sea:
As when the new or full moon urges
The high, long, large, unbreaking surges
Of the Pacific Main.30
Watching the twilight settle over the rooftops of Fleet Street, and the stars come out behind the church spires along the Strand, he thought of the sunsets of the Lake District, and was carried back to his earliest memories of summer evenings at Christ’s Hospital school when he had played truant to go bathing in the New River beyond Clerkenwell.
“I have never seen the evening Star set behind the mountains but it was as if I had lost a Hope out of my Soul – as if a Love were gone & a sad memory only remained. – O it was my earliest affection, the Evening Star. – One of my first utterances in verse was an address to it as I was returning from the New River, and it looked newly-bathed as well as I. – I remember the substance of the Sonnet was that the woman whom I could ever love, would surely have been emblemed in the pensive serene brightness of that Planet – that we were both constellated to it, & would after death return thither.”31 His memory was of a poem of 1790, “To the Evening Star”, inspired by the “loveliest, ‘mid the daughters of the night”. It was never published in his lifetime.32
In coming back to London he wondered if his life had come full circle, his star was setting, he had no future and he was being swept away into the dark. His Notebooks show that he thought a lot about death. Sometimes they were apocalyptic visions. “Suppose the Earth gradually to approach nearer the Sun or to be scorcht by a close Comet – & still rolling on – with Cities menless – Channels riverless – 5 mile deep.”33 Sometimes they were uneasy dreams, half-awakened by the sounds of the city at night: “A low dead Thunder muttered thro’ the Night,/ As twere a Giant angry in his Sleep.”34 Sometimes they were childlike longings for a kindly, tender parent to take away all his pains. “Nature! sweet Nurse! O take me in thy Lap – And tell me of my Father yet unseen Sweet Tales & True, that lull me into Sleep, & leave me dreaming.”35
Sometimes they took the explicit form of suicidal urgings, which he addressed in a grim, self-lacerating little poem later entitled “The Suicide’s Argument”. The first, broken stanza describes his bleak misery with a life forced upon him, with “no question” ever asked whether he accepted its conditions in the first place, “if I wished it or no”. Now he only wants to refuse it, throwing it back in Nature’s face like a worthless gift.
Coleridge imagines Nature responding to this gesture of despair, not with sympathy but with anger. Here she is neither benign nor understanding. She is severe and impatient, like many of Coleridge’s friends. She addresses him curtly, as if life was not a gift at all, but a commercial transaction in which he has failed to abide by the business terms. She accuses him of breach of contract and bad faith:
Nature’s Answer
Is’t returned as ‘twas sent? Is it no worse for the wear!
Think first, what you are! Recollect, what you were!
I gave you Innocence, I gave you Hope,
Gave Power, and genius, and ample Scope;
Send you me back Guilt, Lethargy, Despair!
First, make out th’ Invent’ry! Inspect! Compare!
Then die, if die you dare!
Be thy own heart our common arbiter.36
Assailed by these voices and visions, Coleridge struggled on at Southampton Buildings, trying to find new purpose and order, and the courage to start again. The Morgans begged him to return to Hammersmith, but for the time being he preferred to face his own demons, living from hand to mouth. He listed his expenses for “Tea, Sugar, Candles, Milk, Dinners, Fruit”, and gave the maid a tip of 5s. 6d. “for encouragement”.37
He dined out as often as he could, frequently with Lamb, Hazlitt and Crabb Robinson; sometimes with William Godwin at Skinner Street where he met the radical Irish statesman Henry Grattan and listened to arguments in favour of Catholic Emancipation; and once with Lady Jerningham where he sat in agony through a long piano recital. On one occasion he was delighted by the prima donna Angelica Catalana. She reminded him of Cecilia Bertozzi, for he noted afterwards, “What has all my Existence been since then but an Amo te Solo…”38
Often he got very drunk at these evenings, burst into we
eping fits – which he explained as grief for George Burnett’s death and Mary Lamb’s madness – and returned to his lodgings to spend several days in bed, sunk in opium.39 The painter Matilda Betham made several attempts to get him to sit for a portrait, but each time he failed to appear – apparently delayed at a party, lost in a coach, walking in the moonlight “with Mrs Morgan & her Sister to meet Mr Morgan”, or suddenly back again at his lodgings sick in bed. “The more I force away my attention from my inward distress,” he confided in Miss Betham, “the worse it becomes after – & what I keep out of my mind or rather keep down in a state of under-consciousness, is sure to act meanwhile with its whole power of poison on my Body.”40
5
Gradually, through it all, new schemes were slowly forming: for journalism, for lecturing, for continuing The Friend. At the end of April he wrote decisively to Daniel Stuart, after an evening of cathartic drunkenness at his old editor’s house in Brompton. (He vowed never to drink another glass of wine at dinner, except “as a medicine”, but this was a liberal prescription.)
Would Stuart recommend him to T. J. Street, the managing editor, as a salaried journalist at the Courier? He proposed a six-month contract as a “political Writer”, with a month’s trial to prove his “steadiness”, in case Street had doubts. He was very specific about his duties and timetable. “I could be at the office every morning by 1/2 past 9, to read over all the Morning Papers etc., & point out whatever seemed noticeable to Mr Street.” He could then write the “leading Paragraph” [leader] if Street was called to the City on business, as well as supplying a series of two-column articles on foreign affairs, and “small paragraphs, poems etc.” to accumulate as space-fillers for less busy times. He would also be prepared to work as a simple “assistant” and proof-reader.
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 28