All this time Dr Daniel worked doggedly at reducing Coleridge’s laudanum dose, teaspoonful by teaspoonful, week by week. Coleridge now admitted he had been in the habit of taking up to a pint each day, “besides great quantities of liquor”. With many backslidings, this was gradually reduced to a minutely controlled dose of “four teaspoonfuls in the 24 hours”.5 It is doubtful if this low dose was regularly sustained at first, and Cottle recalled “from an undoubted source” that during 1814 Coleridge had been known to consume “in twenty-four hours, a whole quart of laudanum!” (two pints).6*
Modern knowledge of addiction would suggest that psychologically, a far more significant advance was made in April when Coleridge began writing a series of long, detailed, confessional letters to his friend publicly admitting that he had been an opium addict for well over a decade. He had acknowledged this before, in 1808, but never with such a degree of self-exposure.
Significantly, these letters did not go to his family, but to longstanding friends in Bristol. Coleridge wrote to John Prior Estlin, to his old publisher Joseph Cottle, to John Morgan, and even to Wade (though they were under the same roof). These confessions are strikingly similar in tone – bitterly self-accusing and humiliated, yet also shrewdly self-analytical and to some extent self-exculpating. They reveal a strong philosophical or religious dimension, based on the notion of the corrupted human will – Coleridge’s version of original sin – which is so prominent in all his later writing. What he had explored so brilliantly in his Hamlet lectures – the idea of imaginative power destroyed by moral paralysis – was now brought to bear on his own case, and seen as part of a universal human condition. Opium of course was his own particular sin, but it arose out of the fallen condition of mankind. In this way he could acknowledge his own guilt, but also begin to accept it, and beg his friends likewise to accept the terrible truth about his fallen and divided nature.
A letter to John Morgan, written from Queen’s Square on 14 May, is representative. Morgan knew as well as any friend, better even than the Wordsworths, the real state of Coleridge’s addiction; and for this reason Coleridge’s profound need to confess, to admit the worst, to beg for understanding, is revealed most starkly on its own terms. Of the many other letters and Notebook entries he had written about addiction – in Malta, at Coleorton, at Allan Bank, at Stowey – this stands as perhaps the most frank and the most terrible. But it was also, perhaps, the most courageous and healing.
I know, it will be vain to attempt to persuade Mrs Morgan or Charlotte that a man, whose moral feelings, reason, understanding, and sense are perfectly sane and vigorous, may yet have been mad – And yet nothing is more true. By the long Habit of the accursed Poison my Volition (by which I mean the faculty instrumental to the Will, and by which alone the Will can realize itself – its Hands, Legs, & Feet, as it were) was completely deranged, at times frenzied, dissevered itself from the Will, & became an independent faculty: so that I was perpetually in the state, in which you may have seen paralytic Persons, who attempting to push a step forward in one direction are violently forced round to the opposite. I was sure that no ease, much less pleasure, would ensue: nay, was certain of an accumulation of pain. But tho’ there was no prospect, no gleam of Light before, an indefinite indescribable Terror as with a scourge of ever restless, ever coiling and uncoiling Serpents, drove me on from behind.
Coleridge emphasized the moral as well as the physical state of his addiction. It had led him to neglect every family duty and “most barbarously” to mistreat his friends “by silence, absence, or breach of promise.” He was unsparing now in the acknowledgement of his guilt.
I used to think St James’s Text, “He who offended in one point of the Law, offendeth in all”, was very harsh; but my own sad experience has taught me its awful, dreadful Truth. – What crime is there scarcely which has not been included in or followed from the one guilt of taking opium? Not to speak of ingratitude to my maker for the wasted Talents; of ingratitude to so many friends who have loved me I know not why; of barbarous neglect of my family; excess of cruelty to Mary & Charlotte, when at Box, and both ill – (a vision of Hell to me when I think of it!) I have in this one dirty business of Laudanum a hundred times deceived, tricked, nay, actually & consciously LIED.7
In fact his physical symptoms had been more terrible than ever. Besides the “intolerable aching, weakness, & feverish restlessness” which filled his whole body, his knees swelled so painfully he could sometimes barely walk, and his bowels and stomach were twisted with the acute discomfort of constipation (dosing) and diarrhoea (withdrawal). In May he wrote to London for a brass “Clyster Machine” to be purchased at Everall and Wilson’s of St James’s Street, so that he could administer his own enemas, a process that had become a daily humiliation. All the time his nights were disturbed by the return of the nightmares which accompanied the withdrawal phase, and he sent to Dr Daniel a rewritten fragment of “the Pains of Sleep”:
My waking thoughts with scorn repell
Loveless Lust, Revenge[ful] spell: –
O why should Sleep be made my Hell.8
To both Morgan and Charles Lamb, he wrote that he could say “with little appearance of profaneness” that he had been “crucified, dead, and buried, descended into Hell, and am now, I humbly trust, rising again, tho’ slowly and gradually”. Lamb, though shocked by Coleridge’s reports (“I think I never read anything more moving, more pathetic”), still had his own way of expressing sympathy, and wrote back a letter beginning characteristically, “Dear Resuscitate”, and asking how that “frank-hearted circle, Morgan and his coslettuces” were coping with his promised resurrection.9
2
News of Coleridge’s illness filtered back to Keswick, but was not received in quite the same spirit. When Joseph Cottle wrote to Southey in April, asking him to join in an annuity to help Coleridge back on his feet, he received a biting refusal. Unsparingly, Southey enumerated Coleridge’s failings. He had wasted the Wedgwood annuity; he never wrote to his wife or children; he had abandoned himself to “most culpable habits of sloth and self-indulgence”; it was “a wonder” that he was still alive.10 All Coleridge had to do was give up opium and his “frightful consumption of spirits”, and start lecturing again. If he now wrote letters acknowledging the guilt of his habit, “he imputes it still to morbid bodily causes, whereas after every possible allowance is made for these, every person who has witnessed his habits, knows that for the greater – infinitely the greater part – inclination and indulgence are the motives.” Coleridge suffered from “an insanity of that species which none but the Soul’s physician can cure”.11
When Cottle passed these views on to Coleridge (but without mentioning the annuity plan) the latter replied, “You have poured oil in the raw and festering Wound of an old friend’s Conscience, Cottle! but it is oil of Vitriol!”12 Again he pleaded that he had been “seduced into the ACCURSED Habit ignorantly”; and later sent a long letter on prayer and his renewed belief in the Trinity and the healing powers of Christ. It was this letter that recalled the pit of “total darkness” he had gazed down into, from the summit of Mount Etna in 1804.13
Coleridge also wrote to Cottle about the “Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body”, but this time with great earnestness. He thought it contained a profound spiritual truth, if not a literal one. He could not accept it in its “grosser form”. But he supposed the body might be subjected to “a sublimating process, so as to be rendered compatible with spiritual association”. He found this “an exhilarating belief, with many remote analogies in nature”.14 What he did not say was that he was also haunted by the opposite possibility, that his life was “a summer-gust”: brief, turbulent and futile.
If Southey was ignorant of the physiology of Coleridge’s addiction, and cruelly impatient of his struggles, his practical generosity towards Coleridge’s children was admirable. More and more he took on the role of substitute father. He set about organizing a subscription to send Hartley to Me
rton College, Oxford, the following spring. During the course of 1814, he established an annual fund of some £90, drawing on the Beaumonts, Poole, Cottle and Basil Montagu. He even achieved the feat of obtaining money from Colonel James Coleridge at Ottery. The Colonel drily observed: “Southey seems to have behaved most kindly and generously whilst their Mad Father is at Bristol, or God knows where, living on the bounty of his friends…unless Opium or something removed him to another World. What a humbling lesson to all men is Samuel Coleridge.”15
This rather seems to have been Coleridge’s own view, as his health gradually improved in June. It is true that he grew weary of the pious exhortations of Cottle, who told him he was possessed not by opium but by the Devil (“God bless him! he is a well-meaning Creature; but a great Fool”).16 But he wrote formally to Wade to thank him for all his care. “Dear Sir, For I am unworthy to call any good man friend – much less you, whose hospitality and love I have abused; accept, however, my intreaties for your forgiveness, and for your prayers…After my death, I earnestly entreat, that a full and unqualified narration of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made public, that at least some little good may be effected by the direful example. May God Almighty bless you, and have mercy on your still affectionate, and in his heart, grateful – S. T. Coleridge.”17
In the event it was not Wade, but the pious Cottle who took him at his word, and dutifully published many of these confessional opium letters in his Early Recollections (1837), just three years after Coleridge’s death, causing endless grief and embarrassment to the surviving family.
Coleridge was still being attended by his keeper (now tactfully his “Valet”), the strong-bodied Mr Haberfield, but Dr Daniel encouraged a careful return to social life in Bristol. On one memorable evening in mid-June, he took him out to dinner until 11.30 p.m. and toasted his recovery in “a jorum of Hollands & Water”. Gin and good humour suddenly united the doctor and the patient after all their trials. “The Conversation was mantling like Champagne – & Laughter, as I have often observed, is the most potent Producer of Forgetfulness, of the whole Pharmacopeia, moral or medical.”18
Coleridge held morning “Levees” in his bedroom, and began making little weekend trips to the Morgans at Ashley in late June and July. They were impressed by the carefully measured doses of laudanum he brought with him, and the old, teasing relations crept back into his thank-you letters. “My best Love to Mary & Charlotte…In Bristol they will have it, that Mary is handsomer than Charlotte – how provokingly obstinate!”19
3
Slowly Coleridge began to write again, first of all turning his hand to help his old friend Washington Allston. Allston’s hopes had been disappointed at the Royal Academy in London, his young wife had died, and for much of the winter he too had been very ill at Clifton. With the peace of 1814 (Napoleon had abdicated to Elba in April) Bristol was in celebratory mood. Among the planned festivities was a grand retrospective exhibition of Allston’s paintings at the Merchant Taylor’s Hall. Accordingly, Coleridge agreed to puff these in a series of five articles published in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal through August and September.20
Much of what he wrote was actually a popularization of Kant’s art criticism in the Critique of Judgement (1790), a surprising but significant journalistic use of German sources. Coleridge’s aim was to distinguish an absolute notion of Beauty, as an aesthetic or generative principle universal in the arts, as distinct from what was loosely described as “Agreeable”, “Grand” or “Sublime” by reviewers. He began with the image of “an old coach-wheel” lying covered with dirt in a yard, and ended with “the fundamental doctrines of colour, ideal form, and grouping” in Renaissance painting. If this was not quite what was expected in a provincial paper, it gave Allston’s work a highly sophisticated context. It also gave Coleridge an opportunity to continue applying philosophical principles to artistic practice. The essays were entitled “On the Principles of Genial Criticism”, not in the sense of “pleasing” but of “generative” power.21
But they were pleasing, especially in their autobiographical charm, with many memories of his and Allston’s visits to the Roman art galleries in 1806. Together they had stood before a canvas showing “Diana and Her Nymphs” in a Swiss landscape, and “felt the breeze blowing out of it”.22 Together they had admired the “sportive wildness of the component figures” in Raphael’s “Galatea”, the famous fresco at the Villa Farnesi. And together they had discovered Raphael’s principle of harmony, a monumental circular structure within the central group (the old coach wheel), geometrically controlled by a “multiplicity of rays and cords”.
Coleridge used a striking scientific analogy to sum up the harmonious beauty of Raphael’s composition, in one of his most original pieces of art criticism. He praised the “balance, the perfect reconciliation, effected between these two conflicting principles of the FREE LIFE, and of the confining FORM! How entirely is the stiffness that would have resulted from the obvious regularity of the latter, fused and (if I may hazard so bold a metaphor) almost volatilized by the interpretation and electrical flashes of the former.”23
The chemical image was recalled from Davy’s method of isolating primary elements with charges from a voltaic battery. It emphasized the dynamic, almost explosive, concept that Coleridge had of Beauty; or rather Beauty as an explosion of energy perfectly contained. Moreover he linked this dynamic aesthetic with the moral nature of mankind: happiness required that we had the individual sense of “free will” and “spontaneous action”, balanced and reconciled with “regular forms” of duty and obligation.
In the circumstances, it was no coincidence that Coleridge chose Allston’s large canvas “The Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha” for his most detailed commentary. He tenderly described the cluster of figures surrounding “the reviving body” – the faithful Slave, the wife, the daughter, and “the exquisitely graceful girl who is bending downward, and whose hand nearly touches the thumb of the slave”. They were subtly structured, so as to produce “what you had not suspected”, a circular group. The perception of this stately, platonic, underlying form, “concealed by the action and passion” of the human participants, generated the sense of Beauty in a moment of revelation.24
Coleridge summed up his whole position in a formula that he was to use frequently in his later criticism: Beauty was the intuition of the one in the many. “Thus the Philosopher of the later Platonic, or Alexandrine, School named the triangle the first-born of beauty, it being the first and simplest symbol of multeity in unity.”25
Despite the erudite, not to say recherché nature of these essays – they began with a long citation from Giordano Bruno, and ended with another from Plotinus – Coleridge did not forget that he was writing for a Bristol audience in the midst of victory celebrations. Among his more topical remarks was the observation that an Englishman might instinctively use the term “beautiful” to describe “a mass of cloud rich with the rays of the sunrise”; while a Frenchman was more likely to call “the flavour of a leg of mutton a beautiful taste”. He was never above such popular chauvinism where the French were concerned.26
Besides visiting Allston’s exhibition to make his notes, Coleridge was also well enough to share in the more patriotic festivities celebrating Napoleon’s departure. He visited the triumphal arch erected in Corn Street, inspected the flambaux burning on the battlements of St Mary Redcliffe church (where he had been married all those years ago), and saw from afar the huge bonfire lit on Brandon Hill. The wealthier households hung out illuminated signs or “transparencies” from their upper windows, and Coleridge sat up half the night with Wade guarding “the abominable lamps” of their own creation, which constantly threatened to catch fire in the wind.
Now an expert in theatrical effects, he had designed the transparency himself, “a Vulture with the Head of Napoleon chained to a Rock”, and a busty Britannia flourishing a pair of shears inscribed with Nelson’s name.27 The
rhyming motto he attached was curiously prophetic of Napoleon’s escape from Elba, and the Hundred Days leading to Waterloo the following June. “Britons, rejoice! and yet be wary too! – The Chain may break, the Clipt Wing sprout anew.”
He sent fresh salmon, and a turtle, to the Morgans at Ashley for their victory feast, and made jokes about “old Blacky, alias Opium”.28 The amorous asides to Charlotte were also renewed. In one humorous fantasy he supposed himself “married to little Megrim” (his new pet-name meant “little Headache”) and producing a famous son, “Brentus Coleridge”, who would invent a steamship and discover the North West Passage, and so become “Baronet, Sir Brentus Coleridge, of Coleridge Hall & Hundred”.29 He did not speculate what Hartley would have made of this imaginary sibling.
4
Allston was deeply grateful for Coleridge’s articles, the last of which ran on 24 September. He proposed in exchange to celebrate his friend’s recovery with a grand, three-quarter-length oil painting of Coleridge, dramatically posed in the shadowy solemnity of the Merchant Taylor’s Hall. The result is probably the finest portrait from life that Allston ever executed, and it now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London. It was completed in a series of studio sessions during August, with Coleridge dressed entirely in black except for a white silk cravat tied formally high under his chin.
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 43