Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  On 10 February 1812, he bundled into the northern night mail coach from the City, scrawling off a last-minute letter of optimistic plans from the shop-counter of the Brent family business in Bishopsgate Street. He thought he could reimburse all his travel expenses with “a couple of Lectures” given en route at Liverpool. Further letters sped back to the Morgans from various coaching inns at Slough, Birmingham and Kendal, and his spirits were high.

  He was pursued, he said, by fleas and fumigated them with his “Snuff Cannister”. (He discovered the Liverpool Mail was nicknamed the “Lousy Liverpool”.) A fellow passenger, a “handy Gentleman” heaped straw round his legs and unsuccessfully tried to pick his fob-watch.5 He did his Devonshire voices, made appalling puns about his companions, and teased Charlotte in little footnotes. “I know you are fond of Letters in general, from A to Z, Charlotte, with the exception of three; but yet don’t throw it into the fire, when you find it from S.T.C.”6 (Charlotte may not have noticed that it rhymed.)

  Passing through Birmingham he observed the huge new factories from his carriage window, “a cluster of enormous Furnaces, with columns of flame instead of Smoke from their chimneys”, and alongside the great slag-heaps of the coal mines with “pools and puddles of water smoking” between them.7 This new infernal landscape, the product of wartime industry, fascinated him as a vision of England’s future industrial might. He made notes on production and transport costs (“£1.7.0 for the double Cart-load, weighing 35 Cwt.” by canal) but also had strange dreams, “Sleep-adventures” which involved travelling through an underground Hell of “Brimstone”. (Forty years later these same infernal cityscapes at Birmingham and Preston would inspire Dickens’s vision of Coketown in Hard Times.)

  He soothed himself by talking knowledgeably through the night with a Dutch jeweller about the symbolism of precious stones, and before long the amiable Hollander was promising to make him a pair of seals in red cornelian, “gratis”. Coleridge sketched out two designs: one a heraldic riddle based on Charlotte’s name; the other his own initials STC entwined decoratively by CB and MM.8

  By the time he reached Liverpool he was so travel-sore and flea-bitten that he postponed all thoughts of lecturing, and retired for several days to the country residence of his old friend Dr Peter Crompton, where he sampled another industrial product, the delicious thick ale from Crompton’s “enormous Brewery in Liverpool”. Dr Crompton, in turn, was soon promising to send half a hogshead for the housewarming at Berners Street. Coleridge thought it so fine that he would never need to taste another drop of hard spirits “in secula seculorum”.9

  But as he drew nearer to the Lakes, his mood sobered. He arrived in Kendal at midnight on 17 February, and the following morning called in to collect the unbound copies of The Friend for the new London edition, only to find his faithful printer Brown was mysteriously absent. It emerged that he had “absconded” to Scotland a fortnight previously, taking with him all Coleridge’s remaining stamped paper worth £20 or £30, and the special typeface worth another £36.10 Trying to dismiss this ill omen, Coleridge suddenly decided to collect his children instead, and hired a chaise for 5 a.m. on Wednesday, 19 February.

  That morning he rode directly over Kirkstone Pass, scene of many heroic delivery-runs, down to the boys’ school at Ambleside. The headmaster Mr Dawes called them out of class in the middle of first lesson. The unheralded arrival of their father, dramatically announcing that he had come to take them home for a surprise holiday, produced markedly different reactions in his two sons. The chubby, open-hearted little Derwent (now eleven years old) “came in dancing for Joy”; while Hartley (now rising sixteen and recognized as the cleverest boy in the school) was overcome with embarrassment and anxiety at the sight of his beaming father and the presentiment of family turmoil to come: “he turned pale & trembled all over – then after he had taken some cold water instantly asked me some questions about the connection of the Greek with the Latin…”11

  Coleridge tried to respond tenderly to each in turn, petting Derwent on the drive home (“he can’t help crying when he is scolded…he ain’t such a genius as Hartley”). But when they rattled through Grasmere without stopping at the Wordsworths’ new house, both boys were stunned into silence, as Mrs Coleridge later heard. “Poor Hartley sat in speechless astonishment as the Chaise passed the turning to the Vicarage where Wordsworth lives, but he dared not hazard one remark and Derwent fixed his eyes full of tears upon his father, who turned his head away to conceal his own emotions.” When she tried to explain to the boys about the quarrel (typically, Coleridge had said nothing to them) Hartley turned “as white as lime”.12

  This set the tone for much of the visit: great bursts of family excitement and cheerful plans, repeatedly punctured by awkward truths and sad realities. Worst of all for the children was the slow realization that their father had not really come home at all, but was making plans for a new life in London far away. In the event Coleridge remained for six weeks, and the Morgans were kept in suspense about his return until mid-April. Coleridge stayed on partly because of the children, partly because he hoped until the very last minute for a reconciliation with Wordsworth and a meeting with Asra. If this had occurred it is not clear whether he would have abandoned London once again, even at so late a date.

  After all the high-spirited letters on his journey, there was an ominous break in correspondence with the Morgans for a month. At last, on 24 March, they received a brief note, still dated from Keswick. “Nothing can justify my not writing to you; but in very truth I have been dreadfully bewildered – first of all, I was trifled with most egregiously, off and on, about the Liverpool Lectures – secondly, the Grasmere business has kept me in a fever of agitation – and will end in complete alienation – I have refused to go over, and Wordsworth has refused to apologize…and to omit less matters, lastly, Brown, the Printer of the Friend…has absconded.”13

  He still promised, “if everything else fail”, to send a draft of £50; but the growing confusion in his feelings is evident. “I have been in such a state of fever and irritation about the Wordsworths, my reason deciding one way, and my heart pulling me the contrary – scarcely, daring to set off without seeing them, especially Miss Hutchinson who has done nothing to offend me…I have suffered so much that I wish I had not left London.”14

  According to Coleridge, Greta Hall had taken his own side in the Wordsworth affair. Southey thought Montagu had acted with an “absolutely incredible” degree of folly, and that Wordsworth had been “blamable” in his indiscretion: “I do not wonder at Coleridge’s resentment.”15 Both Mrs Coleridge and Mrs Southey had twice confronted Wordsworth and Dorothy over the matter, and Mrs Southey had so far “overcome her natural timidity” as to shout at Wordsworth: “it is you Sir! you – not the things said, true or false!”16

  That at any rate is what he told the Morgans, but matters may have been less clear cut, especially among the women. In fact, Dorothy had tried secretly to effect a reconciliation, sending “innumerable” private letters and messages to Mrs Coleridge, urging that Coleridge should be encouraged “to write to her and not to leave the country without seeing them”. But both men remained immovable on their points of honour. As Mrs Coleridge put it philosophically: “he would not go to them and they would not come to him”.17

  Curiously it was Asra who now took the hardest line against Coleridge, writing to her cousin John Monkhouse at the end of March: “he is offended with William, or fancies himself so – and expected William to make some advances to him which as he did not he was miserable the whole time he was in Keswick, & Mrs C. was right glad to get him off again, for she had no satisfaction in him – and would have given the world, I dare say, to have had him well again with William.”18 Yet Coleridge still thought Asra was his greatest supporter in the Grasmere household. As for Wordsworth himself, he merely observed that since Coleridge was lecturing and “wearing Powder” on his hair, it was “all pretence”.19 He still confidently expected that Colerid
ge would eventually appear at his door.

  2

  Another poet had also been awaiting Coleridge’s arrival in the Lake District, but for different reasons. The young Percy Bysshe Shelley and his sixteen-year-old wife Harriet had rented a tiny cottage on the hill outside Keswick in December, anxious to discuss politics and metaphysics with the author of “The Ancient Mariner”. The Cumberland Packet reported strange goings-on at Chestnut Cottage throughout the winter: extensive postal deliveries, the printing of political pamphlets, and dancing round a bonfire in the garden at night. What the newspaper did not know was that one of Mr Shelley’s printings was a broadsheet ballad called “The Devil’s Walk”, designed to be distributed to unemployed workers in Dublin, and directly based on Coleridge’s famous newspaper ballad of 1799, “The Devil’s Thoughts”.20

  Shelley frequently visited Greta Hall, but found only Southey in residence, and fell asleep under the tea-table when Southey tried to convince him that his belief in atheism and revolutionary politics was really an adolescent form of Pantheism, from which he had once suffered himself. (“He is just what I was in 1794…I have put him upon a course of Berkeley.”) When Coleridge still did not appear, Shelley wrote to introduce himself to William Godwin instead, a shift in ideological direction that altered his whole life.

  In the end they only missed each other by a fortnight. Shelley became known locally in Keswick as a radical agitator and his sudden departure was precipitated by a mysterious attack by patriotic “ruffians” one night at his door, which he repelled with drawn pistols. He hurried off with his pamphlets to carry on the struggle in Dublin, catching the boat from Whitehaven on 3 February. Coleridge ever after regretted this lost meeting, while Shelley’s admiration for Coleridge’s ballads – especially “Christabel” – invested the elder poet with legendary status.21

  3

  Coleridge did make one unexpected and wholly delightful discovery at Greta Hall: the growing brilliance of his third child, little Sara. It was she who had inherited the more academic side of the Coleridge character, and promised to be even cleverer than Hartley. At ten, she was astonishingly widely read, had pursued her Italian, and could even read French “and Latin”. She was becoming extremely pretty, and yet her character had none of the self-consciousness or eccentricity that was increasingly evident in Hartley. “She is such a sweet-tempered, meek, blue-eyed Fairy, & so affectionate, trustworthy and really serviceable!”22

  Coleridge was amazed by her clear thinking, her studious habits, and her linguistic sophistication. One evening reading together by the fire, the word “hostile” came up, and Coleridge casually asked her what exactly it meant. Sara answered without hesitation: “why! inimical: only that inimical is more often used for things and measures, and not, as hostile is, to persons and nations.” This perfect dictionary response, a true presentiment of Sara’s future scholarship, enchanted him.

  Coleridge half-hoped to take her back to London with him “for 4 or 5 months” to oversee her education, but acknowledged that his wife was managing her exceptionally well, and that it would be rather too much to ask the Morgans.23 Instead he urged that Charlotte should make a special bonnet for “little Sariola”, as a mark of his favour. From now on there was a third Sara in his life, who would slowly become of increasing importance. He also began planning to set aside money to send Hartley and Derwent to university.23 His pride in all his children shines out of these letters to the Morgans; each one is appreciated for his or her particular talents.

  But this growing sense of his family life and responsibilities, at the very moment that he was deciding to settle permanently in London, suggests a tragic complication of feelings and divided loyalties. It seemed that he was fated to be a father in absentia. It was really the promise of successful London work (he talked of making £800 a year from lecturing) which eased his relations with Mrs Coleridge, together with renewed reassurances over the Wedgwood annuity and the life assurance policy. (The receipt for the 1812 payment was to be meticulously posted to her in May, while he also discovered that she had saved £100 in her own bank account opened at Keswick.)24

  He told Morgan (discreetly in Latin) that any idea of resumed sexual relations filled him with “horror”, but that “thank God! that is neither wished or desired”. At the same time he praised his wife as “modest, prudent and the best of mothers”, and said that in many ways he found her “more beautiful than when I first met her”.25 Mrs Coleridge for her part, despite the Wordsworth affair, found him “cheerful & good-natured & full of fair promises”.

  She had no pressing desire, now, to join him in London, and found contentment in the bustling, well-ordered household at Greta Hall with Southey and her sisters. She listened to his optimistic plans, as she later told Tom Poole, with detached but kindly scepticism. “He talked of our settling finally in London, that is, when he had gone on for a year or so giving me, and all his friends satisfaction as to the possibility of making a livelihood by writing so as to enable us to live in great credit there – I listened, I own, with incredulous ears, while he was building these ‘airy castles’ and calmly told him that I thought it was much better that I and the children should remain in the country until the Boys had finished their School-education and then, if he found himself in circumstances that would admit of it, would cheerfully take leave of our dear Keswick, and follow his amended fortunes…”

  Meanwhile she approved of his living with the Morgans, was pleased about “the Lectures at Willis’ rooms”, but had no particular confidence that his literary work would ever amount to anything compared to Wordsworth’s or Southey’s. It was this lack of respect for his professional abilities, what Coleridge called painfully her inability to appreciate his “sensibilities”, which made the marriage so intolerable to him.26

  Yet the quarrel with Wordsworth, and the break with Asra so intricately enmeshed with it, brought out a curious loyalty in Mrs Coleridge. She may not have told Coleridge that she had seen Sara Hutchinson several times before his arrival at Greta Hall. On these occasions she had defended her husband with spirit. More than that, she had even criticized Asra for the way she had betrayed the man who had so obviously loved her. This was an extraordinary reproach to the woman that Mrs Coleridge might reasonably have regarded as her bitter rival in the affections of her husband. It emerged in a subsequent note that Asra sent to Wordsworth from Greta Hall sometime that winter, and throws unexpected light on both women.

  “Mrs C. and I have many a battle”, Asra wrote confidentially to Wordsworth, “but we do not quarrel – she wonders how I could ever love any one of whom I think so ill; and thinks he [Coleridge] ought to know what I do think of him. – Why, I say, every thing that I say to you have I said to himself – and all that I believe of him now I believed formerly (except that he should ever have behaved as he has done to you) [Wordsworth]…she is angry and thinks I speak resentfully…She is sure that we think far worse of him than ever she did, and is now on his side quite.”27

  Coleridge hung on for a last few days at Greta Hall, still hoping for some sign from Grasmere, but finally decided that he would return to London for Easter. The boys were dispatched back to Ambleside, he took an “affectionate” farewell from his wife, and rode over to Penrith to catch the mail coach south, promising regular letters and money from his lectures. But Wordsworth obviously controlled the winter elements in the Lake District, and he was not to be allowed to escape so easily.

  Heavy snow fell on the eastern passes, and by Good Friday evening Coleridge found himself marooned alone in the inn at Penrith, with the roads closed by twelve-foot drifts.28 He was stuck there for fifteen days. Only one solitary traveller got through on a horse from Carlisle, with “a most tremendous account of his adventures”, having cut a single narrow “horse-path” through the snow which closed up behind him. Ironically, the one means of reaching London was to go back, in a hired post-chaise, via Keswick and Grasmere, to pick up the coach from Kendal. It was as if the very weather had co
nspired against Coleridge to force him back to Wordsworth’s door.

  Several letters also reached him from Wordsworth’s friends, demanding that he should not leave without calling at Grasmere, including “a most impassioned one” from Catherine Clarkson. Mrs Clarkson had also written to Crabb Robinson, saying that there was “a complete hue & cry” after Coleridge, and that if he did not meet with Wordsworth he might as well “put a pistol to his brains”.29

  How Coleridge withstood this wintry siege is not known. He once wrote frantically to Morgan, “O would to Heaven! I were but once more at your fireside!”, but added that he could not accept the humiliation of going back to Grasmere. It is just possible that he wrote secretly to Asra, asking her to join him at Penrith as in the old days, one last time. His Notebooks contain two entries which may date from this grim, lonely fortnight: one a tiny love-poem, the other a heavily deleted paragraph in Greek and German cipher.

  The coded entry has been tentatively deciphered as follows. “I don’t mean that you have no regard or friendship for me. I know and am grateful for the contrary. But I ere long suspected and now am convinced that it was her personal bondage of usableness…from me…wholly with any person…if with a marked repulsion…This had been always so – but at first I was far otherwise. Now I know this clearly – and even now feel myself less and less pained – and dare promise myself that I shall become perfectly indifferent.”30 The poem is quite clear, a perfect lyric stanza, struck out with a single pen-stroke and not published until 1912, under the anonymous heading “Metrical Experiment”. Its imagery goes back to the love-trysts of Gallow Hill:

  Once again, sweet Willow, wave thee!

  Why stays my Love?