Remorse entered the provincial repertory, and was widely performed over the next two years in cities like Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester, though Coleridge received no royalties as performing rights were not established for half a century in England. Oddly, Coleridge never went back to see it after that first, rapturous night at Drury Lane. But he was proud of his offspring: “the Remorse has succeeded in spite of bad Scenes, execrable Acting, & Newspaper Calumny,” he told Tom Poole. “I shall get more than all my literary Labors put together, nay, thrice as much, subtracting my heavy Losses in the Watchman & the Friend – £400: including the Copyright.”149 He was not displeased with its metaphysical reputation – he felt it had “purified” the stage. Mr Arnold had shown magnificently what stagecraft could add to “a Dramatic Poem”; and although “not fully developed”, in the figures of Dona Teresa and Alhadra he had altered the insipid stereotype of the Romantic heroine. “I succeed for others as well as for myself.”150
There was much truth in this. Leigh Hunt, who wrote regular dramatic criticism in the Examiner, later called Remorse “the only tragedy touched with real poetry for the last fifty years”.151 With Coleridge’s success many new plays began to be submitted, money was invested, and within two years even Byron thought it worthwhile to serve on the Drury Lane Committee.
Southey was particularly impressed and generous about Coleridge’s achievement, asking Murray to review the script for the Quarterly, and only regretting that it had not been staged in 1797. He thought Coleridge might have had a career in the theatre, “to the amendment of the existing stage and the permanent honour of English literature”.152 As it was, he was delighted about Coleridge’s new popularity. “There is no man upon whom the applause of pit box and gallery would produce more effect. Better late than never, and the success is in a seasonable time for his family.”153
16
Coleridge’s sun appeared to be shining brightly in the spring of 1813. His finances were in order, his work was in demand, and he was comfortably established with the Morgans at Berners Street. This was the moment to bring some of his many projects to fruition: a new play for Drury Lane, the publication of his lectures, maybe a second series of The Friend, even a new collection of his poetry. It was also a time when he could have visited his children at Keswick, and called upon the Wordsworths at Rydal Mount to express his sympathies in person. (Dorothy was still telling Mrs Clarkson that he was expected in March, now that his play had proved so successful.)154
But none of these things were done. If Coleridge was making hay, as he told his wife, there was no sign of a harvest. On the contrary, Coleridge almost dropped from view for the next six months, and the absence of letters or Notebook entries is one of the most inexplicable of his later career. Even the indefatigable Crabb Robinson rather lost touch. At the end of February he had noted that Coleridge seemed strangely unmoved by his theatrical triumph, a thing not to be expected from a man of “so highly nervous” a sensibility. When he called round at the Morgans, Coleridge was frequently “not at home (or rather not visible)”.155
In March Mrs Clarkson corralled him into several fruitless missions to urge Coleridge, yet again, to go north to see Wordsworth. She had, she said, been receiving “very distressing letters from the Lakes”, and could not understand his cruel inaction. Mrs Clarkson also bombarded Berners Street with notes taken round by her footman, and when Coleridge steadfastly refused to reply her curiosity became voracious. “I would give a great deal to know how he manages himself – and whether some one measures out to him the abominable drug,” she admitted to Crabb Robinson, and urged him to investigate further. “Do go to Berners Street & fish out what you can for me.”156 But there were no further revelations, and finally on 2 May he noted blankly: “A call on Morgan. Coleridge, I see, will not go to the Lakes. Of course, I did not press the subject any further.”157
On one rare occasion he recorded Coleridge discussing music and reciting Mignon’s song, “Kennst du das Land” from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, with tears in his eyes. Coleridge’s exquisite translation of Mignon’s song, a single stanza of dreamy longing for distant heartlands, seems almost the only thing he wrote during these lost months. It was perhaps intended as part of his “German musical” (there is evidence that he was in touch with Thomas Harris, the stage-manager of Covent Garden); or it may have been an oblique expression of some more private mood.
Know’st thou the land where the pale citrons grow,
The golden fruits in darkest foliage glow?
Soft blows the wind that breathes from that blue sky!
Still stands the myrtle and the laurel high!
Know’st thou it well, that land, belovéd friend?
Thither with thee, O, thither would I wend!158
Various odd rumours spread about Coleridge’s disappearance from circulation. Once the morning papers solved it by reporting that the author of the renowned tragedy Remorse had just committed suicide in Regent’s Park. A “stout and well-dressed man” had been found hanging from a tree: he carried no personal papers by which he could be identified, “but his shirt was marked S. T. Coleridge at full length,” and by this he had been identified. The gardener at Greta Hall read the same news item in Keswick, and nearly collapsed before – “ashen-faced” – he could gasp out the news to Southey. The explanation lay of course in the long and scattered history of Coleridge’s lecture shirts, which had migrated widely between his lodgings and his laundry over the past five years. It was Morgan, not Coleridge, who sent a reassuring note to Keswick, though adding Coleridge’s whimsical comment that he was probably the first man “to hear of a lost shirt in this way”.159
Much of this suggests a kind of retreat into himself, a period of nervous reaction after the months of publicity, and a continuing process of mourning and depression over the break with Wordsworth. Now that success had come, he found himself temperamentally incapable of capitalizing on it. There were a few social fixtures, gallery visits, quiet suppers with friends like the Aders, and the occasion he dined with Madame De Staël, who afterwards delivered herself of the memorable verdict: – “avec M. Coleridge, c’est tout à fait un monologue.”160 He also kept up with Allston, but the painter’s young wife was ill, and these were sickbed visitations and nostalgic talks about Italy.
Perhaps his refreshed finances made him feel less guilty about spending money on his old indulgences, opium and brandy. There is no definite evidence that he ever sent the second instalment of his £400 to Keswick. Yet by September 1813 he was almost penniless again. Where had all the money gone, if not to his wife and children? Had Coleridge simply swilled it away, in a long sabbatical summer of literary dreams and therapeutic opiates?
It was certainly what Southey and the Wordsworths came to believe. Dorothy wrote that she expected no good of him, “especially as I hear from all quarters so much of his confident announcement of plans for this musical drama, that comedy, the other essay. Let him doubt, and his powers will revive. Till then they must sleep.” Hartley’s stock had also slipped in sympathy. The boy was “as odd as ever, and in the weak points of his character resembles his father very much; but he is not prone to sensual indulgence – quite the contrary – and has not one expensive habit.” She now found Derwent “a much more interesting Boy”.161
But there may be another explanation for Coleridge’s mysterious eclipse. All that spring of 1813 a quite different crisis had been gathering pace at Berners Street. The first sign of it was a sudden illness that struck down John Morgan in March. He was “so dreadfully sick” that Coleridge hurried him off in a coach for a fortnight’s convalescence at Bexhill. He dosed Morgan on “good roast Beef very well drest – boiled Slices of Plum Pudding, & an apple Pie”, and marched him along the sea front. A rare glimpse of careful financial accounting also suggests that Coleridge paid for this whole trip, including the untoward luxury of a post-chaise. He also appeared anxious that Morgan should settle a pressing bill due on the Brent family business at 103
Bishopsgate by the end of the month.162
Coleridge worked hard to be cheerful and reassuring in holiday notes sent back to Mary and Charlotte. He emphasized Morgan’s recovery, and teased them with the tale that he himself was growing a nautical beard of Ancient Mariner proportions. “I mean to shave infant-smooth the very last Stage, before we reach London.”163 They were safely back by 20 March, and spending “at least 5 evenings out of 7” quietly at home.164
Mrs Clarkson later confidently reported that this whole seaside trip was just another excuse for Coleridge to avoid seeing Wordsworth. But the anxiety over Morgan’s health and affairs was genuine enough. Like Josiah Wedgwood, his business investments were in deep trouble because of wartime inflation, and they proceeded to collapse that summer with appalling rapidity. In May there were mounting bills; in June the whole Brent business was threatened by creditors; in August their bank foreclosed; and by October 1813 Morgan had lost all his invested capital and fled to Ireland to avoid arrest. The Berners Street house was let; the furniture was sold; and Mary and Charlotte moved into cheap lodgings at 19 London Street, Fitzroy Square. Quite suddenly Coleridge was shipwrecked again.165
Rumours of Morgan’s losses had been reaching Keswick since July, and in August Dorothy reported bluntly that “the Morgans have smashed”. She assumed that Coleridge, rudely awakened from his haze of opium and theatricals, would now come creeping home to Greta Hall. Worse still, he would probably have two destitute Morgan women in tow. Dorothy passed on Mrs Clarkson’s latest illuminations to Asra. “Mary says that she doubts not Coleridge has given them to understand there was room enough a G. Hall; but Mrs C. has taken lodgings for them. Where will the poet’s home be now? Dear Sara, it is altogether a melancholy business – coming with them and would not come to see his children! No plans laid for Hartley! I foresee nothing but Jealousies and discomfort. Happy we in being 15 miles off!”166
As usual, Mrs Clarkson’s interesting speculations were acute but inaccurate. The poet revealed more worldly plans. He was going to save the Morgans by his own efforts. From the start of John Morgan’s difficulties in the spring, it looks very much as if Coleridge had been channelling more and more of his theatrical earnings into helping his adopted household. Certainly they had been absorbed at an alarming rate, which nothing else can quite explain. By 25 September he was so short of funds that he pawned forty books, his watch and his beloved snuffbox for the paltry sum of £6. He had even dug out half a dozen of his books that he remembered leaving at the Courier offices, to make up the amount.167
He knew that much of this money should really have been sent as promised to Greta Hall. But his loyalty to the Morgans, for good or ill, prevailed. He knew this would be held against him as a dereliction of parental duty, particularly in the case of Hartley, although the expenses of university were still one year away. But he simply felt unable to abandon the Morgans, who had so recently saved him in his own terrible distress. Looking back at this desperate time he later wrote: “the successive Losses and increasing Distress of poor Morgan and his family while I was domesticated with them…scarcely left me the power of asking myself the Right or Wrong…”168
17
The story of Coleridge as financial knight errant, riding to the rescue of the Morgans, is one of the most unlikely of his whole career. Yet it emerges in an astonishingly punctual (if chaotic) series of business letters running unbroken from the beginning of October till the end of November 1813. The man who had been Sir Alexander Ball’s First Secretary, and the editor who had launched The Friend against every obstacle, resurfaced at this moment of peril.
Coleridge first took advice in the City, assessed the business debts and main creditors, and began to negotiate loans, raising an initial promise of £100 on 15 October.169 The rescue plan was remarkably sophisticated. They would save the retail silverware business in Bishopsgate, transfer the legal ownership to Charlotte Brent (thereby making it immune to bankruptcy proceedings against Morgan himself) and sell off the Brent trading company to raise capital against the remaining debts. To do this, a breathing-space had to be secured against the most pressing creditor, Lloyd’s Bank, who were threatening to institute proceedings and make the whole family destitute.
After a day’s reflection, Coleridge proposed to go to Bristol, where John Morgan had many family friends among the Unitarian merchants. Here he would raise further loans, and at the same time give a new series of lectures to provide further money. By this means he believed he could “preserve for Miss Brent the unembarrassed Business of Bishopsgate Street, with every favourable presumption of considerable Increase, as soon as it shall be rescued from Lloyd’s Tyranny”.170
So instead of creeping north, Coleridge was actually posting west. By 24 October he had set up his headquarters at the White Lion Inn, Bristol. From there he wrote briskly to Charlotte at Fitzroy Square. “I will not trouble you with the Detail of my operations, or of the difficulties I have met with…Suffice it, that I have no doubts of succeeding so far as to secure the B. St. Business for the nonce. – The proposed Scheme of Lecturing has met with such support, that I have resolved on it – and shall give the first at the White Lion, on Thursday Evening at 7 o’clock.” He thought he could send a first instalment of money “within a week”.171
Next he set up a series of meetings with a list of wealthy well-wishers – Mr Michael Castle, Mr William Hood, Mr Hart Davies and Mr Kiddle are mentioned – and two Bristol members of parliament. He also traded unashamedly on his own literary connections, calling on friends of Sir Humphry Davy, and even contacting local celebrities, including rather appropriately a man who had recently made a famous ascent from Clifton in a Montgolfier balloon.172
There was a sense in which Coleridge himself became airborne during these weeks at Bristol. The feeling of urgency, of knight-errantry, lifted him up over every obstacle. He dined, negotiated, drank and lectured on behalf of his “ dear Loves” with extraordinary energy and buoyancy. The six lectures began as promised on Thursday, 28 October, and continued twice a week until 24 November, finally expanding to eight in all by popular demand. They were widely and enthusiastically reported in the local press. He launched straight into his most dramatic subjects – Hamlet and then Macbeth – and the Bristol Gazette noted that by the second lecture the candlelit upper room at the White Lion “overflowed”.173 Felix Farley’s Journal, the most literary of the local papers, spoke of his “power of philosophical analysis”, his “luminous and reflecting mind”, and – rather acutely – of his “peculiar faculty” of expressing complex ideas in vivid and “appropriate imagery”.174 Subscriptions for the lectures were charged at a guinea for the course, or five shillings at the door, and went on “with a steady Breeze”.175
He had sent for his old lecture notebooks and his copy of Schlegel, but when these did not arrive in time, he seems to have lectured quite comfortably from half-a-dozen headings jotted down on the back of a letter addressed to him at his inn.176 Later he would walk into the room carrying the relevant volume of Joseph Rann’s Oxford edition of Shakespeare (1794), a volume of Schlegel, and a single sheet of notes – and frequently look at none of them for the entire course of the lecture.177 He was unusually full of sudden critical insights and innovations: Lady Macbeth proved herself a woman “in the very moment of dark and bloody imagination”; Hamlet’s abstraction was like a man looking at “a waterfall”; Macbeth became a tyrant like Napoleon, “both indifferent to means”.178
His old publisher Joseph Cottle was among the crowded audience, and was impressed by a sense of Coleridge’s ease and mastery. They were not the “polished compositions”, painstakingly written out and read, that the provincial lecture-goers still expected. They were “conversational”, indulging in “harangues” and asides, treating his audience like friends, seemingly effortless so “he might have lectured continuously”. Every so often came “racy and felicitous passages, indicating deep thought, and indicative of a man of genius”. The attention of his listener
s “never flagged, and his large dark eyes, and his countenance, in an excited state, glowing with intellect, predisposed his audience in his favour”.179
The glow may also have been the result of relentless socializing. Every financial discussion involved a bibulous evening, and Coleridge was “seldom out of his bedroom” until eleven the next morning.180 “Lectures are nothing, were they every day,” he told Mary and Charlotte heroically, “it is dinnering, dinnering that is the Devil.”181
But steadily he put the financial rescue-package together. “After frequent, & long Discussions however I have succeeded in convincing them that the BG St Bss may be saved, ought to be saved, & can only be saved by making some immediate satisfactory settlement with Lloyd.”182 The debt had now mounted to £290, and there were also the Morgans’ household bills. Coleridge held himself responsible for all, and soon the money began, miraculously, to arrive in his letters. Money from his lectures came in banknotes, money from Bristol friends came in banker’s drafts. There were delays, confusions, missed posts and postponed meetings (when he got up too late). There were agonized apologies for instalments missed – “that the £100 was not sent on Monday, was not my fault…I think, I can now command £80 more…”183 There were confused promises: “but perhaps, I shall be able to raise £130…”184
Sometimes it seemed nothing would actually materialize. But it did. The correspondence is tangled, often cut short by last minute dashes to the post and to lectures, and may have failed to mention several payments slipped in at the last moment. But on close inspection a skeleton account of Coleridge’s fund-raising emerges. It is clear that at least six payments were definitely sent to the desperate Morgan women. On Sunday, 31 October, there was a bank note for £20; on Wednesday, 3 November a banker’s draft for £100; on Sunday, 14 November another banknote for £10; on the following Wednesday, 17 November a further £20; and on Friday, 19 November a second large draft for £100.185 Finally on Saturday, 20 November came a promise to “settle Lloyd” – the balance was about £50 allowing for household bills – within four days.186 This was evidently done, because the business was saved by December, and the Morgans were able to leave London. In total Coleridge had managed to raise through donations, and his own lecture fees, a sum not less than £250 – and probably as much as £300 – in less than six weeks: about twice his own annual income.
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 41