His friendship with the Gillmans was at first rather formal, shadowed by struggles over the opium regime, and with none of the chaotic intimacies of the Morgan household. Initially Gillman had to assert his medical authority, and Coleridge described him to Stuart as “a man of strong, fervid and agile Intellect”, with “a master passion for Truth”. Ann Gillman had a great “feminine Fineness of Character”. But by September, when it was clear that his stay would be extended, they had become “my medical friend and his excellent wife, who has been a most affectionate and sisterly nurse to me”.22
The friendship deepened when Coleridge, with his extraordinary intellectual adaptability, began to help Gillman with his own theoretical work, providing him with two chapters for An Essay on Scrofula which Gillman intended to submit for the Royal College of Surgeons’ Jacksonian Prize in December 1816, as a follow-up to his work on hydrophobia.23 This would soon draw both men even more closely together in a contribution to the Royal College’s great debate on Vitalism, in a combined paper begun in the autumn, A Theory of Life.24 In it Coleridge would sketch a metaphysical theory of evolution.
Coleridge’s growing sense of security at Highgate emerged in the unparalleled harvest of literary work which was published over the next three years. At no other time in his life was Coleridge so consistent or productive in bringing finished work into print. His literary career had an extraordinary second-birth, and he became a national figure of great controversy. He was the subject of over forty-five major reviews, and numerous articles and parodies in the daily press. He was the target of an astonishingly bitter and sustained campaign by his old protégé, William Hazlitt, in the liberal press which almost fatally damaged his reputation but ended by making him famous among the younger generation. His name appeared regularly in the private correspondence of Byron, Shelley and Keats. And, in that peculiar tribute with which the English recognize their leading intellectual figures, he became the subject of satire and mockery, making an annual appearance in three comic novels by the young Thomas Love Peacock (a junior clerk under Charles Lamb in India House).
This transformation could never have taken place without the support of the Gillmans. (Indeed they could be considered the unacknowledged patron saints of the modern detox clinics for media celebrities making a come-back.) But their remarkable success was achieved at a certain, and perhaps incalculable, cost. Coleridge was never entirely weaned off the drug. There were to be relapses, periods of subterfuge dosing, and times of tense confrontation. (The alkaloid morphine had been isolated by French and German pharmacologists in 1804, but its addictive mechanism was still obscure.)25
If Coleridge became a more sober and better regulated citizen, he also rapidly became a much older-seeming man, reliant on his creature comforts, much cosseted by disciples, and gratefully adapting to the role of stately, shuffling sage. Something of what Byron would call that “wild originality” was certainly lost over the next few years. With one exception, no major work was published after 1819. His Notebooks, increasingly filled with intricate technical speculations on science and theology, lose much of their intimacy. But, at least until 1820, they are also far less painful and unhappy, apart from the occasional visitation of the ghosts and wolves of memory and loss. In December 1816, after a long metaphysical speculation on “the three Protoplasms, or primary Forms” of Gravity, Light and Water, he suddenly stopped short and wrote: “ASRA. Written as of yore. Christmas 1816. ASRA. Does the Past live with me alone? Coleridge.”26
Privately, his friends questioned the retreat to Highgate. Morgan never reproached him directly, working away to conclude the tortuous negotiations with Gutch over the Biographia until they were completed in summer 1817. But others did, among them Dr Brabant who wrote an “angry” and “unkind” letter in September 1816, accusing Coleridge of having “hypocritically” abandoned his old friends from Calne to disappear into the comforts of Highgate. Coleridge gently defended himself. Gillman’s restrictions were his only hope: “If I was to live, an absolute seclusion became necessary”. Morgan’s own financial “Circumstances” had become impossible, and after he had helped him with the “Christabel” money there was little more he could do. “O Brabant! Indeed, indeed, you ought not to have suspected my heart.”27
Southey put his own enlightened interpretation of events in a malicious letter full of gossip to Wordsworth. Gillman had not at all been “bewitched” by Coleridge’s tongue, but was “speculating upon him, and hoping to ride his reputation with notoriety and practice”. He had deliberately got Coleridge “largely in debt to him”, and if Coleridge attempted to leave “the Apothecary will arrest him”. Gillman was sustaining Coleridge’s “habits of opium”, which were as bad as ever, and isolating him from his friends. Morgan had suffered most of all. “He has turned his back upon the Morgans – after all the unexampled sacrifices personal and pecuniary they have made for him – and this has manifestly cut Morgan to the heart.”28 But Southey misunderstood the solidity of the Gillmans’ friendship. It was to be proved in a time of trial and adversity which gradually engulfed Coleridge as his return to London became public knowledge.
5
The “Christabel” volume was published on 25 May 1816. Initially the omens were set fair. Byron had trailed the poem in a long, admiring footnote to The Siege of Corinth, which Murray’s advertisements proudly quoted, calling it “a work of wild and original genius”. Then Hazlitt entered the lists, with a prominent article in the Examiner, on 2 June. It saluted Coleridge’s return with a fierce attack on his “dishonesty” and laziness in publishing unfinished work. “The fault of Mr Coleridge is, that he comes to no conclusion…from an excess of capacity, he does little or nothing.” But he seized on the essentially dream-like nature of the poem, and (alone among contemporary critics) identified the sexual confrontation hidden within it. Praise and condemnation were lethally balanced, in a high-handed and provoking style that became characteristic of everything he wrote about Coleridge over the next years.
In parts of “Christabel” there is a great deal of beauty, both of thought, imagery, and versification; but the effect of the general story is dim, obscure, and visionary. It is more like a dream than a reality. The mind, in reading it, is spell-bound. The sorceress seems to act without power – Christabel to yield without resistance. The faculties are thrown into a state of metaphysical suspense and theoretical imbecility. The poet, like the witch in Spenser, is evidently “Busied about some wicked gin.” But we do not foresee what he will make of it. There is something disgusting at the bottom of his subject, which is but ill glossed over by a veil of Della Cruscan sentiment and fine writing – like moon-beams playing on a charnel-house, or flowers strewed on a dead body.29
Then he added that the Conclusion to “Christabel” was “absolutely incomprehensible”, and that “Kubla Khan” merely proved that “Mr Coleridge can write better nonsense verses than any man in England.” “Kubla Khan” was not a poem, but a musical composition. Yet, “we could repeat these lines to ourselves not the less often for not knowing the meaning of them”.30
Further long if mixed reviews appeared in the Critical Review, the Eclectic Review, the Literary Panorama and elsewhere during the summer. The poems were extensively quoted, parodies appeared (one by James Hogg) and some amused discussion of the circumstances of the opium “revery” in which “Kubla Khan” was composed. The Eclectic observed: “We could have informed Mr Coleridge of a reverend friend of ours, who actually wrote down two sermons on a passage in the Apocalypse, from the recollection of the spontaneous exercise of his faculties in sleep.”31
However, no contemporary critic saw the larger possible significance of Coleridge’s Preface to “Kubla Khan”, although it eventually became one of the most celebrated, and disputed, accounts of poetic composition ever written. Like the letter from the fictional “friend” in the Biographia, it brilliantly suggests how a compressed fragment came to represent a much larger (and even more mysterious) act of creation.<
br />
After taking “an anodyne” (opium) at his lonely Exmoor farmhouse,
The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines…On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!32
The account is teasingly circumstantial, particularly about the number of elapsed hours and missing lines involved, and with the famously mundane detail of the “person on business from Porlock”. Yet the effect is to produce a much larger allegory of creativity and its fatal interruption. Here might be a model for the whole problem of fragmented or unfinished work in Coleridge’s oeuvre. The striking water imagery of the broken “stream” of poetic concentration also clearly links it with the many similar parables of the imaginative process in the Biographia.
But who was the person from Porlock? Wordsworth himself, Mrs Coleridge, John Thelwall, even the publisher Cottle have all been suggested. Alternatively, he (or she) may simply have been a convenient fiction. But the symbolic identity is clear, and marvellously effective. At one level, the Porlock figure represents the humdrum world (the world of business, money, domestic affairs) breaking into the fine, solitary, detached world of artistic creation. It is, if one likes, the world of social duties bursting upon the supreme, lonely egotism of the Romantic poet. At a more subtle level, the figure may be a psychological personification of the inhibiting factors which haunted so much of Coleridge’s unfinished poetry: “the faculty of reason as a censor of the imaginative faculty”.33 Like the “judicious friend” of the Biographia, he may be Coleridge’s escape device.*
Equally, the mysterious impact of “Christabel” never reached the public reviews either, but was registered privately by the younger poets. The earliest to respond were Byron and Shelley, when they came to read the poem aloud one stormy night at the Villa Diodati, Lake Geneva, on 18 July. It was the aspect of dangerous sexual mystery that fascinated them, as Dr William Polidori recorded in his diary. “Twelve o’clock really began to talk ghostly. Lord Byron repeated some verses of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with the candle.” Shelley later told Mary that the poem had conjured a vision of a woman “who had eyes instead of nipples”. From the discussions of sexuality and horror which followed (lamias, werewolves, night monsters) Mary Shelley began to write Frankenstein, and Polidori began his tale The Vampyre.34 Byron himself never wavered in his high opinion of the “fine, wild” poem.
6
Coleridge and Murray must have been reasonably satisfied at the initial stir caused by so small a volume. After the first May edition of 500 copies, Murray quickly printed a second and a third in the course of the summer. (Murray later told Byron that he lost money on these, though in fact his financial outlay was comparatively small. At this period, for example, he was paying Southey £100 for a single article, and offering 1,000 guineas each for a book-length poem and a History of the Peninsular War.) In July he was still considering a contract for the Biographia and Sibylline Leaves, and Coleridge was cheerfully inviting him up “to sun and air yourself on Highgate Hill”.35
Coleridge now felt confident enough to plunge back into public affairs and deliver his views on the political and moral state of post-war England. This was to be his first appearance in his new role as sage. He proposed to write his first Lay Sermon on what he saw, correctly, as the national crisis for the small publisher Gale and Fenner, without even agreeing a fee. He also proposed a monthly newsletter on German literature to the bookseller Thomas Boosey. In this he would expound the “new system” of Kant and Schelling, examining its impact not only on imaginative writing, but also on “Medicine, Chemistry, Magnetismus, and the Naturphilosophie”.36 It would take up where the Biographia had left off. On 31 August he confidently told both Boosey and Murray that at last he was in the state of mind and health “to finish my Christabel”.37
7
But in September “Christabel” was effectively destroyed by a single review. It came precisely from the poet whom Byron had specially enlisted to help Coleridge relaunch his career. In a long and immensely detailed article in the Edinburgh Review, Thomas Moore (writing anonymously) carefully pulled the whole publication to pieces, virtually line by line. The poems were a tissue of absurdities, exhibiting nothing but “incoherence”, “extravagance” and “incongruity”.
Upon the whole, we look upon this publication as one of the most notable pieces of impertinence of which the press has lately been guilty…The thing now before us, is utterly destitute of value. It exhibits from beginning to end not a ray of genius; and we defy any man to point out a passage of poetical merit in any of the three pieces it contains…There is literally not one couplet which would be reckoned poetry, or even sense, were it found in the corner of a newspaper or upon the window of an inn.
As for Lord Byron’s recommendation of a work of “wild and original genius”, this had obviously been a mere “courtesy” from a brother poet, for in truth “Christabel” was simply “a mixture of raving and driv’ling”. It was time for Coleridge to seek a place and a pension.38
Few other reviews of the period, except for the notorious attacks on Keats’s “cockney” “Endymion” (1818), had such a damaging effect. For the next three years, all other reviews of Coleridge were almost universally hostile, and Hazlitt in particular felt free to lead the hounds. Murray, the shrewdest of all publishers when it came to business, sensed the way the tide had turned. He slowly withdrew his interest during the autumn. By the winter of 1816 Coleridge had become fatally entangled with the much lesser house of Gale and Fenner (partly owned by Thomas Curtis), which was to prove both dilatory and dishonest.
In retrospect, the unhappy chain of events was very clear to him. “The Sale of the Christabel sadly disappointed Mr Murray. It was abused & ridiculed by the Edinburgh Review; & the Quarterly refused even to notice it…In this mood Mr Murray expressed himself in such words, as led me, nervous and imperfectly recovered as I was, to suppose that he had no pleasure in this connection – at least, that he would have nothing to do with what he called my Metaphysics – which were in truth my all. At this time and under this impression I was found out by that consummated Integrity of Scoundrelism, the REVEREND Mr Curtis.”39
Another blow soon fell. Moore’s attack in the Edinburgh Review was followed on 8 September by a long, jeering assault from Hazlitt in the Examiner. Hazlitt had seen the advertisement for Coleridge’s Lay Sermon, and invented a new form of journalism for the occasion. What he wrote was a pre-emptive review, in which he excoriated the monograph before it was even published (in fact, had he known, before it was even written). He claimed that the advertisement alone, announcing Coleridge’s “spiritual appearance for the next week”, was sufficient grounds to “guess at the design” and ridicule the inevitable contents.
Like The Friend it would be “an endless Preface to an imaginary work”, full of religious obscurantism and political apostasy advocating “despotism, superstition and oppression”.40 Coleridge had become a sophist and a charlatan. “Truth is to him a ceaseless round of contradictions: he lives in the belief of a perpetual lie, and in affecting to think what he pretends to say. His mind is in a constant state of flux and reflux: he is li
ke the Sea-horse in the Ocean; he is the man in the Moon, the Wandering Jew…His mind has infinite activity, which only leads him into numberless chimeras…He belongs to all parties and is of service to none.”41
The motive for this all-out attack, as the last phrase suggests, was ostensibly political. But beneath it were layers of personal animus, furies and disappointments with Coleridge, which probably had at their base Hazlitt’s old sense of youthful idealism betrayed. “We lose our patience when we think of the powers he has wasted…” If Coleridge had had the single intellectual virtue of sincerity, “he would have been a great man; nor hardly, as it is, appears to us – ‘Less than arch-angel ruined, and the excess/Of glory obscur’d.’” It was doubly bitter that this traduced the very words of praise that he must have heard from Lamb.42
Coleridge was profoundly shaken by this “brutal attack”. Here was the young man he had befriended in the Stowey days, had helped at Keswick when Hazlitt was accused of beating a local girl, and had encouraged in his earliest journalistic writing at Southampton Buildings.43 He did not see that political differences could justify such savagery. With these two articles, his professional confidence – so recently restored by Byron – began to ebb away, and other difficulties came crowding in.
Gutch had written from Bristol, unexpectedly announcing that the second volume of the Biographia was 150 pages short. If Coleridge did not provide new copy by Christmas, he threatened to publish it unfinished, “in the state in which it was placed in my hands”, simply in order to recoup his costs. When Coleridge demurred, Gutch sent him an enormous bill of accumulated expenses: £284.18s.4d. for printing costs, and a further £107.5s.6d. representing the personal advances made by Hood in the spring of 1815.44
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