Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  But privately Coleridge knew that Wordsworth, in some irretrievable way, had rejected him. He had closed down that dialogue of intense emotions which had animated their work and friendship, in sickness and in health, for some fifteen years. He would write later to Tom Poole with an expressive mixture of grief and anger: “a Reconciliation has taken place – but the Feeling which I had previous to that moment, when the 3/4ths Calumny burst like a Thunder-storm from a blue Sky on my Soul – after 15 years of such religious, almost superstitious, Idolatry & Self-sacrifice – O no! no! that I fear, never can return. All outward actions, all inward Wishes, all Thoughts & Admirations, will be the same – are the same – but – aye there remains an immedicable But.” It was a loss that “cut to the Heart-core of STC”.

  As Mrs Coleridge put it in her best, laconic manner: “I may venture to say, there will never be that between them which was in days of yore – but it has taught C. one useful lesson; that even his dearest & most indulgent friends…are as clear-sighted to his failings, & much less delicate in speaking of them, than his Wife…”61

  For Wordsworth, one suspects, it was precisely the feeling that had become the problem. His “loss of hopes” in Coleridge, his knowledge of his opium addiction, his experience of endless prevarications and domestic impracticalities, his derelictions of duty and professional disasters, were all accepted now as an inevitable part of what he still considered as matchless gifts and potential “under favourable influences”. But Coleridge’s emotional turmoil, his insatiable claims on the whole Grasmere household through Asra, had become too much, too oppressive, too dangerous. As Crabb Robinson saw, with almost feline acuity, it was the emotional confrontation that Wordsworth flinched from, and indeed perhaps feared.

  In rejecting Coleridge, Wordsworth was in his own way defending his own domestic life in the Lake District. He was saying goodbye to the claims of his youth. He was stabilizing his affairs, both financial and emotional, within a more conventional framework. During these weeks in London he was waiting upon Lord Lonsdale, and negotiating for the post as Distributor of Stamps for Cumberland that would assure his family income for the next decades.62 He was also writing his wife Mary a series of passionate love-letters, which confirmed all his domestic loyalties to her, to their children, and to his extended household at Grasmere.

  These letters are unique in his correspondence, an expression of marital fidelity and explicitly sexual happiness, which runs in close alternation with his detailed accounts of “this ugly affair of Coleridge”.63 They surprised and delighted Mary, who answered them in kind, while hoping the “unpleasant business of Coleridge” would soon be concluded. Something was evidently released in Wordsworth during this whole episode, even to the point of rapture. He wrote to Mary on 7 May: “My sweetest darling…I love thee so deeply and tenderly and constantly, and with such perfect satisfaction, delight & happiness to my soul, that I scarcely can bring my pen to write of anything else.”64

  On one occasion he found he had carried his “tender and overflowing expressions of Love” unwittingly on to the outside of the franked envelope, and had much trouble in making them illegible with blottings-out so they should not be read by strangers, but only the one person “that I absolutely pant to behold”.65

  In one of his most moving and voluptuous passages, written over the same weekend that he was drafting the reconciliation document to Coleridge, his thoughts were carried back to Gallow Hill exactly as Coleridge’s had been in his last love-lyric to Asra. But what Wordsworth remembered was not Asra but Mary, his true wife. “Oh could I but see thee again…[as] thou wert when thou came down the lane to meet at Gallow Hill on my return with Dorothy from France. Never shall I forget thy rich & flourishing and genial mien & appearance. Nature had dressed thee out as if expressly I might receive thee to my arms in the full blow of health and happiness.”66

  This was a memory from the time of their courtship in 1802. But now Wordsworth also expressed a sense of a secured and completed domestic circle, which included Asra as well as his children. “O my Mary, what a heavenly thing is pure & ever growing Love; such do I feel for thee, and Dorothy and Sara and all our dear family. Write thou to me long and tenderly…”67 But of course it no longer included Coleridge, who was cast out from that circle of tenderness, just as he had feared for so long.

  The carefully negotiated peace-treaty with Coleridge had secured the new boundaries. Wordsworth was now willing enough to call upon him and attend his lectures. But public violence suddenly burst upon them all and swept private affairs aside. At 5 p.m. on Monday, 11 May 1812, just two hours after Coleridge had dispatched his note of acceptance to Wordsworth, the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, was shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons.

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  The assassin was John Bellingham, a bankrupt businessman from Liverpool, who blamed the government’s wartime policies for the widespread unemployment and civil unrest in the industrial cities of the North and Midlands. Coleridge had seen some of these conditions on his coach trip in February, and for months the newspapers had been full of reports of Luddite frame-breaking and rioting. Now the violence had come south.

  No such political assassination had taken place in Britain since the time of the Civil War, and a general feeling of crisis quickly spread across the whole country. There was talk of mass demonstrations in the Midlands, of the radical MP Sir Francis Burdett leading a parliamentary coup in London, and a written threat against the Prince Regent’s life received by The Times. Ballads celebrating Bellingham were openly on sale in the streets. There was a widely reported fear of “a general uprising in the manufacturing districts”. The unrest was fuelled by general economic hardship: wartime taxes, inflation, high unemployment, appalling working conditions in the factories – as well as a feeling that the war had gone on too long, the government was corrupt, the monarchy unpopular, and the House of Commons increasingly unrepresentative. For the Romantic radicals of the 1790s – for men like Coleridge and Wordsworth – the Prime Minister’s assassination was a watershed in their perception of public affairs. It no longer seemed possible to identify with the disillusion and violence of the popular cause.68

  Yet their reactions were subtly different. Wordsworth stood back from events in shock and alarm; while Coleridge, all of his journalistic instincts aroused, hurried out into the streets to see for himself. Wordsworth wrote grimly to his wife: “the lower orders of the People in London cry out ‘Burdett for ever’ in the Pot houses, deeming him their champion…The country is no doubt in a most alarming situation; and if much firmness be not displayed by the Government confusion & havoc & murder will break out and spread terribly.”69 He later booked a place to witness Bellingham’s execution from the tower of Westminster Abbey. (In the event it took place on 18 May outside Newgate Prison, and Wordsworth missed it.)

  But when he hurried over to Berners Street at 8 o’clock on the morning of 12 May, he found that Coleridge had already left for the offices of the Courier in Fleet Street, offering to write whatever leader or obituary Stuart might require. His article appeared two days later, deploring “this atrocious assassination”, praising Perceval as a statesman, and contrasting the military despotism in France with the constitutional government in England. He acknowledged “the distresses” of the people, but argued that this was part of “the perturbed state of the civilized world”. Nonetheless, he concluded, “our country demands the voice of alarm and warning”: a hint that reforms as well as repressive measures were required.70

  Coleridge then postponed his lectures at Willis’s Rooms, and set off to take his own soundings in the large public houses around Oxford Street. He was shaken by what he heard. “Nothing but exultation – Burdett’s Health drank with a Clatter of Pots – & a Sentiment given to at least 50 men & women – ‘May Burdett soon be the man to have Sway over us!’ – These were the very words. ‘This is but the beginning’ – ‘More of these damned Scoundrels must go the same way – & then poor people may live�
� – ‘Every man might maintain his family decent & comfortable if the money were not picked out of our pockets by them damned Placemen’…‘They won’t hear Burdett – No! he is a Christian man & speaks for the Poor’ – etc. etc. – I do not think, I have altered a word.”71

  Coleridge was not able to publish such inflammatory reportage in the daily press, but he sent it verbatim to Southey, and urged him to use it in the Quarterly. He felt no one had appreciated the “true gigantic magnitude” of the event and its social implications. Nobody in power had recognized the forces that drove it: “I mean, the sinking down of Jacobinism below the middle & tolerably educated Classes into the Readers & all-swallowing Auditors in Taprooms etc. of the Statesman, Examiner, Cobbett etc.”72

  Coleridge reflected a good deal on this political sea-change coming over Britain, both frightened and fascinated by it. Later in the summer, when the initial panic had died down, he wrote to John Rickman at Westminster saying that The Friend (then just republished) had foreseen, but not clearly enough, these “momentous” issues. He now felt “perplexed & darkling & dissatisfied”, seeing that something must be done to make the constitution more representative, but uncertain how this could be achieved without making the House of Lords “a Puppet-shew”, and the Commons into a French-style National Convention. “The Subject is the Constitution of our Country & the Expediency? and (if expedient) the practicability? of an Improvement (for Reform is either a misnomer or a Lie to all our History) of the House of Commons.”

  He was struck by the weakness of the ministries and party factions within parliament; and outside it by “the rapid Increase both of unorganized and of self-organizing Power & Action throughout the Kingdom”. This was a shrewd intuition of the age of reform clubs and trade unions (first legally recognized in 1825) which was dawning. All this made a “deep impression” on him as far as “the wish for some Improvement goes”. But there was as yet no “grand outline” for change, no “true virile productive strong-Sense” in the government, and the landed and propertied MPs were “cowardly”. He felt it was a hopeless business until “some fortunate Giant-mind starts up & revolutionizes all the present notions concerning the education of both Gentry & Middle Classes”.73

  It was to this idea of a revolutionized national education that Coleridge’s later political thinking would steadily turn.74 It was not democratic in the fullest sense, indeed it was in many ways essentially elitist, but it offered a way out of the impasse of reactionary Toryism, into which many of his contemporaries like Wordsworth and Southey were now to be forced. Their position suggested to him “the Image of the Irishman on the Bough with his face toward the Trunk sawing himself off”.75 What he feared most was not popular passion, but popular ignorance. As he put it in his Notebooks in May: “that thin & meagre Knowledge, which spreads over the people at large, in taking away their errors takes away too those feelings, those magnificent Truths implied in those errors or consequent from them which are the offspring of the human Heart, the god-like Idea, breathed into Man as Man”.76

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  The political crisis had one most immediate effect on Coleridge’s fortunes. There was a complete collapse of attendance at Willis’s Rooms. When his postponed lectures opened on 19 May, the day after Bellingham’s execution, the expected audience of 500 had dwindled to fifty. Though Lady Beaumont had distributed thirty tickets among her Mayfair friends, and the publishers John Murray and Gale and Curtis had made small group bookings, the sense of major literary occasion had dissipated, and was never recovered.

  The Morning Chronicle optimistically advertised all six lectures of the first series up to 5 June under the rubric “The Mirror of Fashion”. It noted the Beaumonts, Sir James Mackintosh, Samuel Rogers, William Sotheby, “Mr Wordsworth and other literary men” in attendance. But in fact the series was now entirely unfashionable. This was clearly indicated by the signal absence of Lord Byron, who was now the true “glass of fashion and mould of form”, having taken the literary world by storm with the publication of the first two Cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in March. (“All the world is talking of it,” said Coleridge in one of his most wonderfully rueful asides, “…but from what I hear, it is exactly on the plan that I myself had not only conceived six years ago, but have the whole Scheme drawn out in one of my old Memorandum Books.”)77

  The Sun newspaper recorded “an admirable display of profound research conveyed in an extraordinary proof of extemporaneous eloquence”, but in reality Coleridge was quite disheartened and attempted nothing new. He fell back on a learned discussion of ancient Greek and classical French drama, developed point by point from Schlegel and Schelling. Crabb Robinson described them as “excellent and very German”, but was evidently rather bored.78 When the second series of six began on 9 June, the season was very late, fashionable London was departing for the country, and the newspapers stopped reporting them altogether.79

  Far from securing his new aristocratic audience, Coleridge had barely covered his costs. He wrote wryly to Murray: “I dreamt, that a great Lord had made me a most splendid Promise; awoke, and found it as much a delusion, as if the great Lord had really made me a Promise.”80 He broke off his second series on 16 June, attempting a final flourish with his great set-piece lecture on Hamlet, but there were barely a score of people to hear him in the huge echoing lecture-room. Crabb Robinson (who had not attended) “felt degraded” to hear that “a great man” had been reduced to collecting 5/6d tickets at the door of Willis’s Rooms.81

  Wordsworth had decided, as a gesture of goodwill, to attend all the first series before leaving London on 6 June. He also attended, unusually for him, a number of smart literary salons, meeting Lord Byron, the recently knighted Sir Humphry and Lady Davy, the Scottish playwright Joanna Baillie, the poetess Mrs Barbauld, an unnamed duchess with “a native bosom so huge and tremendous” that it trembled over him “like two great hay-cocks”, and the Princess Regent with her permanent expression of “hilarity”.82 For the first time in his life he was lionized, and felt clearly the position he had established. Crabb Robinson basked in the reflected glow of “the homage involuntarily paid him” on these occasions. “Everybody was anxious to get near him”, and several young ladies were “ludicrously fidgety” to catch Wordsworth’s attention.83

  By contrast, Wordsworth felt that Coleridge’s social stock had fallen low. He made no comment on the lectures, except to observe that he did not think “they will bring him much profit”. He noted with something suspiciously like satisfaction that Coleridge was much criticized in smart circles. “He has a world of bitter enemies, and is deplorably unpopular. – Besides people of rank are very shabby for the most part, and will never pay their five shillings when they can avoid it…But you cannot form a notion to what degree Coleridge is disliked or despised not withstanding his great talents, his genius & vast attainments.”

  Wordsworth did not explain the cause of this hostility, but implied that the world now thought as he did, that Coleridge was a hopeless case, unreliable in all his dealings, with his daily actions “as little under his own power as at any period of his life”. It was true that he now got up in the mornings “between 8 & 9 or earlier”; but he was still chaotic by any conventional standards. When the young Lord Thurlow had sent him a first volume of his poems, privately published and “superbly bound”, Wordsworth had heard that Coleridge had not even bothered to reply.84

  He himself felt at ease in society, except on one occasion when he gave his opinion that Sir Francis Burdett was indirectly responsible for the assassination, by inflammatory speeches about soldiers “murdering the people”. To his surprise, all the young men in the room immediately turned on him “in a rude offensive manner”.85

  Wordsworth was, nonetheless, very curious to see Coleridge’s new household with the Morgans, and especially the two Morgan women. Though he met Coleridge in company several times, as a public token of their reconciliation, and once walked with him before lunch as far as Hampstead, he conti
nued to call round at Berners Street unannounced until he found the whole family at home after one of the lectures, and dined with them. He wrote to Mary that he liked the two women “much”, and would describe them in more detail; while he referred to John as “that good Creature Morgan”.

  He went round again the morning before he left London on 8 June. “Mrs Morgan I think, I once described as a handsome woman, but she is not so. – She has a round face, dark eyes, an upturned or a pug nose, nevertheless as her complexion is good, her eye bright, and her countenance animated & good-natured and she has the appearance of being in redundant health, she is, what would be called, a desirable woman…”

  He was similarly intrigued by Charlotte. “The other Sister has a smaller round face, an upturned nose also, and is thinner & more delicate in appearance, and of more still & gentle manners.” It is odd that Wordsworth did not remark on Charlotte’s physical likeness to the young Asra, which Charles Lamb thought so striking as to be uncanny.86 But he did hint to Mary that the Morgan women were very much city people, the daughters of trade, with a certain brashness and vulgarity about them. If Charlotte was comparatively shy and quiet, Mary Morgan’s “carriage” – by which he meant her dress as well as her physical deportment and manner – was what he called “unwary, luxuriant & joyous”.

  Wordsworth knew very well that he was looking at Coleridge’s chosen substitute for the Grasmere household, and his reactions were guarded. He thought Coleridge in much better health at Berners Street, well looked after, and living “far more rationally than he did with us, so that he has changed for the better assuredly”. He added, dryly: “I think his present situation & employments upon the whole quite eligible for him.”87