Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  He felt he was on a “not dishonourable road to competence”, and would soon have “heart & spirits (still more necessary than time) to bring into shape the fruits of 20 years Study & observation”. If he had been “cruelly” calumniated for his faults, he hoped only that Josiah would soon have reason to think better of him. He ended on what was, in every way, a high note: “I declare that to have an annuity settled on me of three times or thrice three times the amount, would not afford me such pleasure, as the restoration of your Esteem & Friendship – for your deeply obliged S. T. Coleridge.”121

  Josiah might have been forgiven for half-suspecting that Coleridge, having resigned the £75 with such a noble flourish, was mildly wondering if £225 might one happy day replace it. Josiah, however, made good his escape from his incorrigible client. In a prompt and measured reply, he thanked Coleridge, praised his genius and the “tender and deep feelings” of their former intimacy, but added that he could not hope that “we can again feel towards each other as we have done”, as their pursuits and characters were now “so dissimilar”. He wished him all success with his play. It was an honourable exchange, yet a sad one. Coleridge was left with the bitter knowledge that another of his oldest friends and supporters had stepped aside.122

  13

  All Coleridge’s hopes were now centred on Drury Lane. While the weekly lectures continued on Tuesday nights, he began attending regular rehearsals at the Theatre Royal as Christmas rapidly approached. Despite the vaunted new technology the huge, empty auditorium was freezing cold and the actors wandered about in rugs and army greatcoats. There was much cutting and rewriting to be done, a Prologue and Epilogue to be composed, and a great need to soothe the hysterical outbursts of Miss Smith, the actress playing Dona Teresa – the romantic lead – who approached every dramatic incident, both on stage and off, as an occasion for tragic greatness. (The Satirist magazine would later remark that Miss Smith was “considerably unfit for the delivery of anything pretending to be humorous”.)123

  Coleridge began “labouring with much vexation & little success” to improve Miss Smith’s part. But he was enchanted by the stage equipment which responded to his commands by conjuring forth (with much creaking and hissing) the glimmering likeness of a stormy seashore, an echoing cavern, mountains by moonlight, a dungeon, and a mystic firelit chamber of music and sorcery. He felt like Prospero, and found the emotional storms and crises of his thespians curiously familiar and reassuring. The “alterations & alterations” were sometimes tedious, but he found he could supply new lines quickly, “somewhat unlicked”, and only the “bowel-griping Cold from the Stage Floor & Weariness from cutting Blocks with a Razor” would send him “packing home” to Berners Street.124 He had told Mrs Coleridge the bad news about the annuity – “Poor woman! she is sadly out of heart” – but he promised that his play would save them yet.125

  As the rehearsals continued through December, with the première now scheduled for 23 January, the managers grew steadily “more sanguine” of the play’s success. Coleridge hardly dared hope for a more than ordinary run of eight or ten days, but even this might bring salvation. In sending out complimentary tickets to friends, he pointed out that at least their children might come and enjoy the pantomime which traditionally preceded it at that season.126

  The plotting now had “simplicity and unity”, and like the spokes in a turning wheel “every ray in the Tragedy converges to Ordonio”.127 He would like to have cut further descriptive passages, but Arnold would not let him do so. The actors were not quite how he had once imagined Kemble and Sarah Siddons playing the parts, but they could be enthusiastic and hardworking. Alexander Rae (playing Ordonio) was physically unimposing and lacked “depth” of voice, but he could be subtle in his interpretation of evil and malice. Robert Elliston (Alvar) relied on shouting, bombast and “self-Conceit”, though he could be dazzling at moments of high drama. Miss Smith remained her usual tragic self. Oddly it was Mrs Glover (Alhadra), previously renowned for comedy, who brought the most varied life and energy to her part. What Coleridge always looked for in great acting was what he had once seen Dorothea Jordan achieve: to hold an entire audience so that “their very breath was suspended”.128

  Yet if no individual performance achieved this height, there was one piece of ensemble playing which did promise magically to transcend the limitations of melodrama. This was the sorcery scene in Act III, for which Remorse eventually became famous. The management concentrated its entire range of resources on preparing this episode, rightly identifying it as a theatrical climax. Coleridge skilfully recast the dialogue and stage directions to achieve the desired effect.

  In the original version, the ghost – a “wandering shape” – produces a small picture of Albert’s assassination hoping to startle Osorio into an admission of his guilt. Coleridge realized this device was “miserably undramatic” as a scene of magic. It merely confused the audience who cannot see the picture or fully understand the reactions of those on stage. “All, though in different ways, think or know it to be a trick.”129

  In Remorse the magic was to be made palpable and genuinely uncanny, and both Ordonio and Teresa were directed to play the scene in terror. A huge illuminated picture of Alvar’s assassination was flown down through “ascending flames”, a choir of monks appeared in a medieval chapel, and a chorus of boatmen floated across the stage. Special music was composed by the Irish singer Michael Kelly for the beautiful “Incantation” which was to accompany the summoning up of Alvar’s ghost beneath the picture. Coleridge had based this dirge on the Latin Mass for the Dead. Far from masking the poetry, these special effects heightened its intensity, and threw a spell over the whole theatre. The “Incantation”, originally written in 1797 but never previously published, was revealed as one of Coleridge’s supreme pieces of verbal magic.

  Hear, sweet Spirit, hear the spell,

  Lest a blacker charm compel!

  So small midnight breezes swell

  With thy deep long-lingering knell.

  And at evening evermore,

  In a chapel on the shore,

  Shall the chaunter, sad and saintly,

  Yellow tapers burning faintly,

  Doleful masses chaunt for thee,

  Miserere Domine!

  Hush! the cadence dies away

  On the quiet moonlight sea:

  The boatmen rest their oars and say,

  Miserere Domine!130

  Michael Kelly long afterwards recalled its hypnotic effect in the darkened auditorium at Drury Lane when it was eventually staged. “The poetry of the incantation was highly animating…The chorus of the boatmen chaunting on the water under the convent walls, and the distant peal of the organ, accompanying the monks while singing within the convent chapel, seemed to overcome and soothe the audience; a thrilling sensation appeared to pervade the great mass of congregated humanity…and at the conclusion the applause was loud and protracted.”131 Here was an attempt to embody the “witchery” of Coleridge’s poetry in a form of ritualized, orchestrated psycho-drama intended to hold a mass audience spellbound.

  14

  With stage effects such as these, the theatre was investing a great deal of money in the production. Throughout December Coleridge came under increasing pressure to attend rehearsals, cutting and reworking the script for the actors, while simultaneously continuing his Surrey Institution lectures. It was at this moment of maximum effort that he received a wholly unexpected and desperate summons to Grasmere. At the beginning of the month, the Wordsworths’ second son, their adored little boy Tom, had suddenly died from measles at the age of six. Both Wordsworth and Mary were distraught, and Dorothy wrote urging Coleridge to come north for Christmas to console them.

  Coleridge had genuinely loved little Tom, who was “nearest his heart” among Wordsworth’s children. He recalled how the “affectionate little fellow” had often crept into his study at Allan Bank, during the memorable struggles with The Friend, sitting silently on a little stool at hi
s side, gazing up at him and stroking his arm.132 He was also haunted by the whole idea of the death of children, ever since the loss of his own baby Berkeley during his absence in Germany. Any childhood death reminded him of his own sons. It filled him with “the sense of uncertainty, the fear in enjoyment, the pale & deathly Gleam thrown over the countenances of the Living, whom we love…” Thinking of poor little Tom lying “in his Coffin”, he had an awful, guilty vision of “Derwent lying beside him”.133 When the Morgans came in, they found him weeping uncontrollably over Dorothy’s letter.

  But what should he do, should he go north? (De Quincey, who had received the same summons, announced he was departing the following day.) Coleridge was presented with an acute dilemma. It was not merely that he was being asked to abandon his professional commitments in London at such a crucial moment (perhaps they had forgotten those). It was more the assumption that, once again, he was willing to take on the role of Wordsworth’s unquestioning friend and supporter, as if nothing had happened between them. After a first quick, grief-struck note, sent care of De Quincey, he hesitated.

  For three days he struggled with his conscience, and at last poured all his feelings into a long private letter to Wordsworth on 7 December. From the start it was full of passionate sympathies and unresolved contradictions. “Write? My Dearest Friend! O that it were in my power to be with you myself instead of my Letter. The Lectures I could give up; but the Rehearsal of my Play commences this week – & upon this depends my best Hopes of leaving Town after Christmas & living among you as long as I live.”134 This last wild suggestion was no doubt as startling to read at Grasmere as to write from Berners Street.

  Coleridge believed that Wordsworth, in his own unspoken and unbending way, was putting forth an olive branch from his sorrows. Every instinct in Coleridge’s expressive nature drove him to grasp it. To share their mourning at Grasmere would prove that nothing had really changed between them. But for Coleridge it had changed, irrevocably, and as he wrote the complication of his feelings overtook him. He could not pretend that they were merely discussing poor little Tom. He knew they were discussing the mourning for a friendship, as well as the mourning for a child. His letter became both a declaration of complete love (which still included Asra), and a declaration of complete loss.

  O dearest Friend! what comfort can I afford you? What comfort ought I not to afford, who have given you so much pain? Sympathy deep, of my whole being, & a necessity of my Being – that, so help me God at my last hour! has never been other than what it is, substantially! In Grief, and in joy, in the anguish of perplexity & in the fullness & overflow of Confidence, it has been ever what it is. – There is a sense of the word, Love, in which I never felt it but to you & one of your Household – I am distant from you some hundred miles, but glad I am that I am no longer distant in spirit, & have faith, that as it has happened but once, so it never can happen again. An awful Truth it seems to me, & prophetic of our future, as well as declarative of our present real, nature, that one mere Thought, one feeling of Suspicion or Jealousy or resentment can remove two human Beings farther from each other, than winds or seas can separate their Bodies.135

  Dorothy read this letter with her “wonted affection”. She felt that their sorrow had “sunk into him”, and saw none of its painful ambiguities. She still confidently expected Coleridge’s arrival after Remorse had been produced. But Wordsworth remained silent, and did not respond directly, overwhelmed by the loss of Tom, “who was the hope, delight, and pride, of us all”.136 Domestic grief engulfed him, and to cope with Coleridge’s wounded feelings among these accumulated family sorrows was beyond his emotional resources.

  He grew thin, and Dorothy thought he looked ten years older. He could not bear the thought of remaining at the Grasmere Parsonage, so near the graveyard with its little tombs. He busied himself with finding a new house, two miles away at Rydal Mount, where they moved in May 1813, and grappled with his duties as Distributor of Stamps.137 Like Dorothy, he still hoped that Coleridge would eventually reappear in the Lakes, and he continued to keep a fatherly eye on Hartley. For the rest, he sank himself in a renewed attempt to finish his long poem “The Excursion”.

  So Coleridge and the Wordsworths continued to drift apart in 1813, borne on the “winds and seas” of their separate struggles. Mary suffered from depression for many months. Asra became an ever more devoted guardian of the three remaining Wordsworth children, teaching and nursing them like a second mother. Dorothy continued to chronicle their domestic routines in longer and longer letters to Catherine Clarkson and other friends. Coleridge’s name appeared less and less frequently in the Wordsworths’ correspondence. Perhaps it was only Hartley who reminded them of what had been, and what might yet be.

  15

  The première of Remorse took place as planned on the night of Saturday, 23 January 1813. The Theatre Royal was packed, and the Christian Monitor noted the large number of well-dressed prostitutes doing business in the foyer, a sure sign of a fashionable occasion.138 Coleridge and the Morgans slipped into a private box in the circle, and tried to keep well back in the shadows. But to their alarm, Coleridge was soon “discovered by the Pit”, and he sat through the opening Acts in an agony of authorial doubts.

  To his amazement, the play was greeted with “unexampled APPLAUSE” from all sections of the house. After the closing scene “they all turned their faces towards our Box, & gave a treble cheer of Claps”. Back at Berners Street an “endless Rat a Tat Tat” of congratulatory visits began, which continued over the whole weekend. The same thing happened at the Surrey Institution. When he went down to give his last lecture the following Monday, he was greeted with “loud, long, & enthusiastic applause at my entrance, & ditto in yet fuller Chorus…for some minutes after I had retired”.139

  Crabb Robinson, who attended both the opening night with the Godwins and other friends, and the last lecture, reported the same impression of a popular triumph. He did not quite understand it, as he thought the play was full of “clumsy contrivance” and dramatic improbabilities. It had too much poetry and not enough action, and “owes its success rather to its faults than its beauties”. It was extraordinary that such a “metaphysical” and psychological theme should have caught the public’s imagination. “His two great characters are philosophers of Coleridge’s own school, the one (Alvar) a sentimental moralist, the other (Ordonio) a sophisticated villain; both are dreamers.” But that, paradoxically, seemed to be the great appeal of the play, which had caught something of the introspective, self-questioning mood of its audience. It was received “with great and almost unmixed applause, and was announced for repetition without any opposition”.140

  After the third night, Coleridge wrote a full account to his wife, boisterous with excitement, and triumphantly enclosing a draft for £100, which more than made up for the lost annuity. “In the course of a month I have no hesitation in promising you another £100 – & I hope likewise before Midsummer, if God grant me Life, to repay whatever you have expended for the Children.” He was anxious to have Southey’s reaction, but made no mention of Wordsworth.

  He was scathing about the early press – the “infernal Lies” of The Times (who had claimed it lasted five hours), and the “dirty malice” of the Morning Herald. But he was amused and amazed at the stir he had caused. “One of the malignant Papers asserted, that I had collected all the Saints from Mile End Turnpike to Tyburn Bar.”141 If the piece did not run (and he was still doubtful), it would be from bad acting and “from the want of vulgar Pathos in the Play itself”.142

  He was now full of other theatrical schemes, including surely one of his wildest fancies, “a German Musical Play” based on the Genesis story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Once again he felt the tide was turning back in his favour. “I must try to imitate W. Scott…in making Hay while the Sun shines.”143

  Over a dozen other reviews quickly appeared in newspapers and periodicals, and though many were unfavourable, fashionable talk about the play
quickly spread, and the management booked it for a fortnight with a possible extension. By convention, dramatic authors were paid for the third, sixth and ninth nights of any production, and this guaranteed Coleridge at least £200. There remained the tantalizing chance of reaching a twentieth night, when traditionally the fee was then doubled. “That Coleridge should ever become a popular man,” remarked Crabb Robinson wonderingly, “would once have been thought a very idle speculation.”144

  Almost every critic who reviewed the play – even the unfavourable ones – agreed that the sorcery scene from Act III was the dramatic high-point. Here stagecraft, music and poetry had combined to produce a piece of theatrical magic which was far beyond the conventions of Regency melodrama.

  The 27-year-old Thomas Barnes (who within five years would become editor of The Times) contributed a long critique to the radical Examiner, a paper almost invariably hostile to Coleridge. He greeted the play with something close to astonishment. Mr Coleridge had “excelled” in a “very poor story, well-conducted”; he had transformed the “picturesque” elements of German drama with the skill of “a veteran dramatist”. Barnes enthused: “we never saw more interest excited in a theatre than was expressed in the scorcery-scene in the third act. The altar flaming in the distance, the solemn invocation, the pealing music of the mystic song, altogether produced a combination so awful, as nearly to overpower reality, and make one half believe the enchantment which delighted our senses.”145

  By the middle of February Remorse had earned Coleridge £300, and the script had been published by the bookseller Pople in Chancery Lane at three shillings a copy.146 A second edition appeared on 17 February, and a third in May. The theatre management told Coleridge that the play would make them profits of between eight and ten thousand pounds, the equivalent of a quarter of a million in modern currency.147 It was adopted as part of their regular spring repertoire, playing at first three times a week, and then apparently weekly on Saturday nights from late February. It seems to have reached its twentieth performance early in May, when Crabb Robinson noted that Coleridge was now “certain” to earn £400.148