Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  The strain, and the excitement, of these weeks swept over Coleridge. What he could not achieve for his own family, he was inspired to do for the Morgans, in one of those bursts of energy which took him back to his youth. For most of November he was living like a man possessed, giving a second set of lectures at Clifton, getting drunk every evening, scrawling intimate letters till dawn, and the next day looking forward “with Terror” to the expected public performance.187 When he did not receive daily replies from Mary and Charlotte, he was “tormented” with doubts about their affection for him, writing desperately: “you never believed that I loved you & Morgan, as (God knows!) I have done”.188

  When they did write, expressing their gratitude, he was overcome by idealized visions of their life together in the future. Sailing on his midnight fantasies, he came perilously close to proposing a ménage à trois in secret lodgings at Clifton: “we all three might lodge and board, and have two bedrooms, and one sitting-room private to ourselves. I can feel & understand your Objections; but I am certain, that the getting them over would greatly smooth the way to Morgan’s comfortable Return & Settlement.”189 That Coleridge was partly inspired by romantic feelings for Charlotte, as well as his genuine sense of indebtedness to John Morgan, is clear from his more drunken and less guarded letters.

  A late-night missive on 17 November begins rapturously: “Well, my dear Loves! I have made a famous Lecture to a crowded Room – & all the better because…I had not prepared one single word or thought, till ten minutes before the Lecture commenced.” He goes on with his knight-errant promise to look after them, and “accompany” them anywhere in England, “till I re-deliver the goods to the rightful owner, J. J. Morgan Esquire”, and then begs for a letter from Charlotte personally.

  This is followed by one of his teasing, suggestive, imaginings of Charlotte’s prettily blushing refusals of such an advance. ‘O la! no! Write to a man, tho’ old enough to be my father –! – my neck-and-breast kerchief is downright scorched & iron-moulded with the intensity of my expansive Blush.” Continuing the game, he traces the blush from the roots of Charlotte’s “beautiful Hair” down to “a little beyond the lowermost end of her tiny pretty Bird’s Neck”. He tells Mary this is only his “sky-larking”, but it is a flirtatious flight.190

  Three days later, he is teasing Charlotte again for her bad spelling, but praises her for womanly “Understanding” and her lack of “Bluestockingism”. The implication is that for “Love and Friendship” the Morgan women are quite as valuable to him as the Grasmere woman once were. “You yourselves cannot write half as sweetly & heart-touchingly, as with your thoughts & feelings you would have done, if you had never heard of Grammar, Spelling etc. – O curse them – at least as far as Women are concerned. The longer I live, the more do I loathe in stomach, & deprecate in Judgement, all, all Bluestockingism.” He urges Charlotte to have “confidence” in him, and promises to burn every letter from her the moment he has read it.191 If Charlotte did respond to these overtures during November, then Coleridge kept his word, for no letters from her have survived.

  Unwittingly, the two women were slipping into a difficult position. Coleridge was saving them financially, but also trapping them emotionally. They responded gratefully to the idea of joining him in the West Country, until Morgan returned from his Irish exile. But perhaps they did not realize the full extent of his secret dreams and demands on their affection. Even when he once suggested that they settle together in a “comfortable Dwelling” near Tom Poole’s at Stowey, it is possible that they did not recognize his fantasy of recapturing the domestic happiness of 1797.192 Or perhaps all three of them were simply whirled along by desperation and euphoria.

  Certainly, the last few days at Bristol seemed like a triumph. Coleridge had been invited to stay at his old friend Josiah Wade’s, in the luxurious house at 2 Queen’s Square, and he was fêted at dinners and soirees. He was enchanted one evening when the businessman Michael Castle solemnly presented him with an expensive snuffbox during a game of whist. It seemed a symbol of acceptance, a sign that the local worthies recognized his achievements and celebrity. He reported the incident proudly to the Morgans.

  Castle rose from the card table, and announced in the hearing of the assembled company: “‘I have wished a Keep sake of yours – let us exchange Boxes – I assure you, I shall preserve yours as a Relic’”. Coleridge gave up his ten pence tin box (a replacement for the one he had pawned), and received in return “one of the most elegant boxes of richest Tortoise shell mounted in Gold”. When he turned it in the candlelight, it glowed like a piece of jet.193 It was as if he had received a decoration from the city, a medal for services rendered.

  Two days later he was on the night mail coach for London, determined to settle the last of the Morgans’ affairs and sweep them back with him to some idyllic haven in the West Country. He now considered them, he told Wade, his family and his “Protégées”. On the journey, he talked rapturously all night with two serving Officers from Malta and Sicily, of battles and courage and sticking to one’s post. One of them had had half his jaw blown off by a blunderbuss, yet “conversed intelligibly” when confronted by Coleridge’s conversational firepower.194

  He was received like a hero at Fitzroy Square, and whatever doubts remained were silenced. Within a week he had Mary and Charlotte packed up, and had reduced his own worldly baggage to a small library of German lecture texts – Fichte, Schelling and Jean-Paul Richter – largely borrowed from Crabb Robinson. He explained to the startled Robinson that his sudden migration to the West was a matter of simple duty. “If the health & circumstances of two virtuous, pure-hearted, & kind-hearted Women, the Wife & the Sister of a Man, I call my Friend – & whom, in his Prosperity, I found a Friend – can constitute Duty.”195 No message was sent to Keswick or to Grasmere. Coleridge was driven with the impetuosity of a man eloping to a happier world. It was as if the Pantisocrat had come to life again and everything could be renewed.

  18

  Coleridge, Mary and Charlotte left London on Monday, 29 November 1813. They spent four days on the road, travelling by hired post-chaise, and stopping off at Reading, Chippenham and Bath. All three seem to have become ill on the journey, with Coleridge resorting more and more heavily to opium and brandy at each inn. Quite suddenly the atmosphere of romantic escapade began to dissipate.

  Coleridge had found them secluded lodgings in the tiny hamlet of Ashley, near Box, some five miles east of Bath on a wooded hillside above the Great West Road. It was little more than an isolated cluster of stone cottages, straggling up a steep track with a farm and an ancient manor house at the top. Their cottage belonged to a grocer from Box, a Mrs Smith, who let rooms cheaply and discreetly without enquiring too closely about her tenants (though she was later to hear all about Coleridge’s children). Southwards the rolling countryside stretched away towards the bare hills of the Marlborough Downs. Below them in the valley stood Box church, surrounded by graves. Twice a day the mail coach rattled through the fields of somnolent cattle towards London. It was beautiful but very remote, especially in winter.

  Coleridge had planned to begin a new series of lectures at Bristol on Tuesday, 7 December, and to return to his “dear Loves” each weekend. But the whole plan collapsed before the first week was out. Instead of a rural idyll Coleridge found himself sunk in one of the loneliest and most desperate periods of his entire existence.196 Exactly what went wrong is difficult to reconstruct from his correspondence which again becomes very broken. The Bristol Gazette simply reported that he had been “surprised and confined by sudden and severe illness at his arrival at Bath, six days before the promised commencement of his second course, 7 December 1813”, and that new lectures would begin in January 1814. But in the event he was unable to undertake these either.197

  In a confused note to Josiah Wade, written from Bath on 8 December, Coleridge hints at some sort of confrontation and crisis at Ashley within three days of their arrival. He had left the lodgings precipito
usly on the evening of Sunday, 5 December, in a rainstorm and with a “violent cold”, and had missed the last scheduled stage-coach. He was obliged to walk with his bag of books the five miles into Bath, slipping and stumbling through “Mud or Mire, the whole way”.198

  Parts of this note are heavily inked out, but clearly refer to Mary and Charlotte. The surviving passage reads: “…I can only answer sorrowfully, – the passions & pride of Women, even of in most respects good & amiable Women: – passions that thwart all I do to serve them…”199 It seems likely that “passions” were raised on both sides, and Coleridge was in a fury of opium and making outrageous demands. Months later, in one of an agonized series of confessions about his opium addiction, he spoke of his “excess of cruelty to Mary and Charlotte, when at Box, and both ill – (a vision of Hell to me when I think of it!)…”200

  Having stumbled into Bath that Sunday night, he staggered to the first coaching inn, the Grey Hound, and crawled up to an attic bedroom. Here he lay prostrated for nearly a fortnight. He was suffering from the most acute opium overdose of his life. After those last weeks of heroic effort, the knight errant had utterly collapsed into a nightmare of hallucinations, sweating, agonizing muscular pains, and a burning fever that left him unable to sleep, eat or talk coherently. The landlady of the Grey Hound, Mrs May, was convinced that the battered traveller was dying. She called in a local doctor, as Coleridge was “too wild with suffering” to do anything for himself.

  By sheer good luck this doctor recognized him and instantly identified his symptoms. It was Caleb Parry, the father of Coleridge’s friends the Parry brothers whom he had known at Göttingen. Mrs May later told Coleridge that Dr Parry took charge of him with “parental kindness”. He called several times a day, sat by his bedside for two or three hours at a time, and acted like a nurse (an unheard of thing for a doctor, observed Mrs May), sponging his face and talking him through the worst of his hallucinations. Dr Parry also noted that Coleridge, after his weeks of manic activity, was now severely “deprest in spirit”, and needed company to draw him away from his own “Thoughts”. He suspected suicidal tendencies, and indeed Coleridge was to suffer from these for several months, even more badly than he had on leaving Italy. It was to Parry, said Coleridge later, “under God’s Mercy I owe that I am at present alive”.201

  In a way, Coleridge had been sinking towards this crisis ever since he left Grasmere in the autumn of 1810. The success of his lectures, and then his play in London, had postponed it; and his new household with the Morgans had sometimes promised that he might escape it altogether. But the contradictions in his life were still largely unresolved, or at least unaccepted. Guilt for his many failings – opium, Asra, his unhappy marriage, his abandoned children – had put him in a condition of perpetual flight from inner realities. He was destroying himself, destroying his capacity for work, destroying the love of all those around him.

  Somehow he had to make a stand, to face up to the worst. Otherwise, one way or another, he would commit suicide. The dream of recreating the cottage life with Mary and Charlotte was really a last desperate fantasy attempt to go back to the Wordsworth household, to re-enter what now seemed a Paradise Lost, “before the Fall”. But in reality, he had to make a different kind of accommodation with existence, if he was to survive at all.

  Lying on his sweat-soaked bed in the Grey Hound Inn, Bath, as homeless now as he had ever been in his life, a man with a bag of old clothes and some borrowed books, addicted to opium, incapable of work, clutching a tortoiseshell snuffbox as the only proof that he had ever achieved anything, Coleridge looked into his own dark night of the soul. “O I have seen far, far deeper and clearer than I ever saw before the ground of pernicious errors! O I have seen, I have felt that the worst offences are those against our own souls!…Should I recover I will – no – no may God grant me power to struggle to become not another but a better man…O God save me – from myself.”202

  On 19 December he crawled out of bed, wrapped in a blanket, to write to Mary Morgan. The tone of his letter was utterly changed, fearful and contrite, with a looming sense of sufferings yet to come. “The Terrors of the Almighty have been around & against me – and tho’ driven up and down for seven dreadful Days by restless Pain, like a Leopard in a Den, yet the anguish & remorse of Mind was worse than the pain of the whole Body. – O I have had a new world opened to me, in the infinity of my own Spirit! – Woe be to me, if this last Warning be not taken. – Amidst all my anguish you and Charlotte were present to me – & formed a part of it.”203

  19

  It was this experience of December 1813 that inspired perhaps the darkest of all Coleridge’s poems, “Human Life: On the Denial of Immortality”. It opens with a vision of the utter spiritual bleakness to which he had now been reduced:

  If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom

  Swallow up life’s brief flash for aye, we fare

  As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom…

  It is a Hamlet-like soliloquy of the “shadowy self”, facing total extinction. The echoing, abstract language suggests a state of vacuous horror, on the very edge of personal collapse. Yet the poem is severely controlled (it takes the form of a double sonnet), and is driven forward by a series of relentless metaphysical speculations (rather in the style of the Jacobean poet Fulke Greville), which flinch at nothing.

  Perhaps the self is “rootless” and “substanceless”. Perhaps laughter and tears “mean but themselves”. Perhaps the heart is filled with “hollow joy for hollow good”. Perhaps Man faces a world without spiritual meaning or the possibility of redemption. “Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices…That such a thing as thou feel’st warm or cold?”

  At a philosophical level, Coleridge was grappling with Schelling’s notion of Nature as a vast “unconscious” force, an impersonal universe of busy fruitless “activity”. Perhaps Man was never created by God, but is merely an evolutionary “accident” without divine “purpose” or future. All his efforts may mean nothing in the scheme of things.

  O Man! Thou vessel purposeless, unmeant,

  Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes!

  Surplus of Nature’s dread activity.

  Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finished vase,

  Retreating slow, with meditative pause,

  She formed with restless hands unconsciously.

  Blank accident! nothing’s anomaly!

  But at a personal level, this “Nothing” was the dark chasm that Coleridge now saw beneath him in “the Infinity” of his own spirit. All his efforts, all his suffering might be part of a meaningless, cosmic accident. The terrible, slow, booming poem ends in a kind of hopeless mutter, as if even Coleridge’s wonderful gift with words had finally failed him. The very syllables close up upon themselves, and groan to a halt:

  Be sad! be glad! be neither! seek, or shun!

  Thou hast no reason why! Thou canst have none;

  Thy being’s being is contradiction.204

  What life remained for him now in such a world?

  EIGHT

  TRUE CONFESSIONS

  1

  But the world had not finished with Coleridge. Just before Christmas 1813, a carriage appeared at the Grey Hound Inn, and Coleridge was bundled off to 2 Queen’s Square, Bristol and installed in a large guest-room. This time it was Josiah Wade who had come to his rescue, and Wade’s personal physician, Dr Daniel, who began treating him for addiction and suicidal depression. A burly manservant was employed to sleep on a truckle bed in his room to restrain him from violence or secret opium-dosing. Once, when Coleridge “skulked out” at night to obtain laudanum, he came back begging to be sent to a lunatic asylum.1 Razors, penknives and “every possible instrument of Suicide” had to be removed from his room, as he later recalled “with horror”.2

  Here Coleridge remained for the next nine months, until September 1814, fluctuating between the status of house-guest, medical patient and in the early weeks almost that of a prisoner under res
traint. There were periods of remission – in April Coleridge managed to give a series of seven lectures on Milton and Cervantes – but his condition was far worse than he had ever experienced. He continually relapsed, and at times it seemed that he would never recover his mental balance.

  He wrote to the Morgans, begging their forgiveness. Charlotte herself wrote back, and there was talk of his coming to convalesce at Ashley.3 But Coleridge’s physical and mental condition was too unstable, and even when John Morgan returned from Ireland in May 1814, there was no immediate plan for such a move. Morgan was grateful to Coleridge, but evidently wary of taking him back after everything that had happened in his absence.

  Coleridge had tearful confrontations with his “faithful, inexhaustibly patient Friend” Wade, exclaiming “in agony” that he had destroyed himself and ruined his family. “Had I but a few hundred pounds, but £200, half to send to Mrs Coleridge, & half to place myself in a private madhouse, where I could procure nothing but what a Physician thought proper, & where a medical attendant could be constantly with me for two or three months (in less than that time Life or Death would be determined) then there might be Hope. Now there is none!”4