Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  Southey praised the work in private, but did nothing. Another copy inscribed to Wordsworth remained uncut and unread.73 Hazlitt simply ignored it, saving his fire for the Biographia. Crabb Robinson, who was again visiting Coleridge at Highgate, managed to place a short, judicious appreciation in the Critical Review, but betrayed some nervousness at Coleridge’s “intemperance of expression” on matters of “party politics and polemical divinity”. It is not clear if he thought the tract too radical, or too conservative: possibly both at the same time.74

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  What in fact was Coleridge’s political position in the turmoil of these post-war years? It was, in reality, a very isolated one, and his retirement to Highgate and medical regime had removed him from the immediate pressure of events. One of the problems of the Lay Sermons was a confusion about his style and readership: he moved uneasily between topical journalism, political philosophy and religious exhortation. Whom was he addressing? He could identify with neither the government nor any opposition faction, and as Hazlitt pointed out he belonged to no party. The radicals, loosely grouped round Hunt’s Examiner, had hoped the poet and journalist of the Watchman days would re-emerge in all his fiery splendour. But the older Coleridge, while clearly distinct from the establishment figures that Wordsworth and Southey had become, no longer showed democratic enthusiasm. Instead he wrote provokingly of social “Duties”, universal “Education”, and the “human Soul”.

  In private he could speak very bitterly of the “Jeffries, Cobbetts, Hunts, Hazlitts and Co.” whom he believed would provoke a new period of Tory repression, “the suspension of Freedom of all kind”. In his worst moments he thought of them as “vipers” and “Liberticides”.75 He was also nervous of the new movement for parliamentary reform, which he thought at first would reawaken a French spirit of Jacobinism. For the younger generation all this was, of course, “apostasy”.

  Yet Coleridge still recognized the urgent need for social change in England, and for political action to direct it. He thought society was increasingly polarized between rich and poor, an “Anti-magnet of social Disorganization” as he called it in a vivid metaphor, with the labouring classes as the “positive Pole” demanding change, and the landowners and merchantry as the “negative Pole” inhibiting it.76 He thought the Clergy, a class he would later expand to include all teachers, writers and intellectuals, were criminally asleep – “Sleeping with their eyes half-open!”77

  The experience of the Lay Sermons gradually disenchanted him with the idea of any further direct, political engagement as a writer. That had to be left to younger men. What he eventually found instead was a way of addressing the younger men themselves, the elite, “the Few in all ages”, whom he believed would shape the national destiny.78

  There were signs that this audience was already coming into existence. One of the most interesting responses to the Lay Sermons appeared in March 1817 not as a review, but as a novel, Melincourt. Thomas Love Peacock, Shelley’s close friend, then aged thirty-two, already saw Coleridge emerging as one of the representative intellectual figures of the new age. He was, to be sure, a figure to be satirized, but also one to be reckoned with. Peacock’s first, tentative, broadly comic sketch had appeared as Mr Panscope, the indefatigable polymath (“who had run through the whole circle of sciences, and understood them all equally well”) in Headlong Hall (1816).79

  Now Coleridge, as Mr Mystic, was given an entire chapter in Melincourt, which recounts a chaotic visit to Mr Mystic’s shadowy abode, Cimmerian Lodge, situated on a small prominence on “the Island of Pure Intelligence” (an obvious reference to Highgate). On their arrival, the visitors are immediately engulfed in an impenetrable and metaphysical fog. This is described in a parody of lines from “The Ancient Mariner”: “the fog was here, the fog was there, the fog was all around”.80 Mr Mystic, quoting directly from the first Lay Sermon, then observes that he can easily find his way about with his eyes closed, since “Experience was a Cyclops, with his eye in the back of his head”.81 He leads them safely through the “darkness Visible” with the aid of a “synthetical torch”, which sheds around it rays of “transcendental illumination”. They end up with an exceptionally good dinner.

  This light-hearted caricature of Coleridge leaves a mixed impression of eccentricity, humbug and genuine power. It is his first appearance as the sage of Highgate, a figure to be made famous by Thomas Carlyle. But the fictional form suggests the early crystallization of a myth which was to make Coleridge steadily larger than life, larger than criticism. Slowly he would become aware of this himself.

  Other groups began to form round Coleridge this spring. His idea for a German newsletter led to the formation of “the Friends of German Literature”, whose first guest was the German poet Ludwig Tieck whom Coleridge had last seen in Rome. Their reunion took place in early June at the house of J. H. Green, splendidly situated in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Green, a wealthy young surgeon in his mid-twenties, was a friend of Gillman’s and also, as it would turn out, Keats’s supervisor at Guy’s Hospital. Green had philosophical interests and a ranging mind that moved far beyond his expertise as an eye-surgeon. He would eventually become President of the Royal College of Surgeons.

  Tieck and Green, with Crabb Robinson, made an expedition to Highgate of the sort that would become famous over the next decade. First they all took a brisk drive in Gillman’s gig to Caen Wood, then embarked on a contemplative amble through the “delicious Groves and Alley” along the top of Hampstead Heath, and lingered under the “grand Cathedral Aisle of giant Lime-trees” above the lake (where Pope had composed his verse Epistles). Then indeed back to Moreton House for a good dinner. All the while Coleridge was talking and speculating.82 This was an actual visit to Cimmerian Lodge.

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  The Biographia and the Sibylline Leaves were now scheduled for July 1817. Curtis had put much pressure on Coleridge to fill out the second of the prose volumes with miscellaneous materials, without any regard to its unity. His manipulative manner was further revealed when he offered to increase the general contract to £500, if Coleridge would take over the overall editorship of the part-work Encyclopaedia. This sounded generous, until he revealed the stipulation that Coleridge would have to abandon Highgate and go to live close to the publisher’s offices in Camberwell, where he would be in effect Curtis’s employee.

  Haunted by his debts, Coleridge entertained the plan for some weeks, though he saw the way he would be trapped and harassed. For a moment he even considered fleeing England altogether, and going to live in solitary lodgings in Berlin where, he told Tieck, he might study animal magnetism.83 Once again, the kindly Gillman intervened in these wild flights, and insisted that he must remain at Highgate, free to write at his own pace, expanding his circle of friends, and continuing his medical treatment.84

  Gillman also invited Hartley to spend his third university vacation with his father, free of expenses, to bring him company and some measure of paternal solace. It was a happy visit, Coleridge finding his son “very much improved” by Oxford, though still eccentric in his manners, and not very “systematic in his studies and in the employment of his Time”. Perhaps there was too much wild talk and fondness for drinking in the evening, a symptom of Hartley’s curious, childlike, unappeasable loneliness. But he struck up a surprising friendship with Coleridge’s sophisticated nephews, Henry and John, who were now in London. They were “very good and affectionate” towards Hartley, and to Coleridge it was a great comfort “to see the chasm of the first generation healing up in the second”.85

  Hartley also knitted up another old friendship, when Tom Poole came up from Stowey and met Coleridge and his son after a lapse of nearly a decade. Many fond memories were rekindled, and Coleridge asked Poole if Hartley might visit him in the West Country: “he is very desirous to visit the place of his Infancy, poor fellow!” Poole, who was still contributing to Hartley’s university fees, extended the invitation in a touching and heartfelt letter, which showed great understan
ding of both son and father. “I will introduce him to all your acquaintance, and, among the most interesting, to every Brook, Hill and Dale, and all which they furnish; not forgetting my own devious Paths, nor the Orchard and the now classic old Apple tree bent earthward.”86

  Hartley indeed was destined, perhaps doomed, to relive this idyllic childhood from which he never entirely escaped. Widely known as the poet’s son in Stowey, he tried to pay court to the local girls under the moonlight. But they recognized his melancholy and strangeness, emphasised by his dark undergraduate’s beard, and behind his back they called him “the Black Dwarf”.87

  Poole continued to correspond confidentially with Mrs Coleridge about the children and their father. He had no doubts at all about the value and good sense of the Highgate arrangement, and had none of Southey’s scornful suspicions. “I think no circumstances should induce you to leave your present residence,” he wrote to Coleridge in his old, avuncular manner. “You are happy in your friends near you. Mr Gillman is an invaluable treasure. He gives you himself; and I respect, I had almost said revere, him for it, and for the feelings which prompt the conduct. Remember me to him with great kindness…”88

  The Rest Fenner contract enabled Coleridge to make some satisfactory financial offerings. From the first £25 of his advance, he bought Hartley new boots and clothes at Highgate and gave him pocket money to the tune of £18.89 The next £50, paid in October, was all given to Mrs Coleridge through a banker’s draft drawn directly on the publisher. From the remaining £225 due in January 1818, he authorized his wife to buy Derwent “a proper fit out” of new clothes, and promised to start a fund to send him to Cambridge in three years’ time.

  His remaining worry was his daughter, whom he longed to see – “Would to God! I could but hit on a possibility of seeing my dear Sara.” But there was as yet no money for her travel, or proper accommodation at Moreton House. She remained continually in his mind. He sent his “love to all” at Greta Hall, and promised he was working hard for them.90

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  The reviews of Coleridge’s new books began to appear in the autumn of 1817. They were as bad as he feared, or rather worse. Hazlitt immediately set about the Biographia in an enormous, 10,000-word assault in the August issue of the Edinburgh Review, calling it a “garrulous” production from “the maggots of his brain”. Hazlitt concentrated his fire on what he regarded as Coleridge’s well-established weaknesses: obscurity of style, shifts of political opinion, “maudlin egotism”, “garrulous” reminiscences, and above all the passion for metaphysics which “have been a dead weight on the wings of his imagination”.91

  Hazlitt simply did not engage with the great strengths of the Biographia. The story of the philosophical pilgrimage was a “longwinding metaphysical march”. The emerging theory of the Imagination was “unintelligible”. The superb critical dialogue with Wordsworth was “not very remarkable either for clearness or candour”. The memorable psychological accounts of how a poet’s mind works, and how poetry is actually composed (with all its arresting imagery) were “mawkish spleen in fulsome eulogies of his own virtues”.

  It was the most unrelenting of Hazlitt’s attacks, giving no quarter, and returning again and again to the charge of intellectual charlatanism and political apostasy. His old mentor was now “a disappointed demagogue” who kept up, in vain, “that pleasurable poetic fervour which has been the cordial and the bane of his existence”. “Till he can do something better, we would rather hear no more of him.”92

  This funeral bouquet was closely followed in October by a majestic damnation from Blackwood’s Magazine, written under the pseudonym of “Christopher North”. Its author was another old friend from Keswick days, the minor poet John Wilson, who would soon be elected to the appropriate position of Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. “We cannot see in what the state of literature would have been different, had [Coleridge] been cut off in childhood, or had he never been born…” Professor Wilson mounted a general attack on what he deemed to be the “miserable arrogance” of the “original members of the Lake School”, and the “Quackery” of Coleridge’s “pretended account of the Metaphysical Systems of Kant, of which he knows less than nothing”.93 He wrote “in the cause of Morality and Religion”.94

  Other long reviews – in the British Critic, the Literary Gazette, the Monthly Review – were tepid (“on the whole, an entertaining performance”). They were somewhat kinder to the accumulated poetry of Sibylline Leaves, though it is extraordinary to see “The Ancient Mariner” still denounced as a farrago of German “horrors”, from which many passages were too terrible to quote.95 But there was growing appreciation of the group that became the Conversation Poems (“very pleasing in thought and…very powerful in realizing those visions of retirement”). Too much, however, was vitiated by Mr Coleridge’s “cold metaphysical abstractions”. Alone among the poems, it was the ballad “Love”, inspired long ago by Asra, which received almost universal praise.96

  On the evidence of his letters, Coleridge was now largely resigned to this reception in the public press, except when Professor Wilson accused him, as a finer point of literary criticism, of betraying his family at Greta Hall. “A man who abandons his wife and children is undoubtedly both a wicked and pernicious member of society…” He considered suing Blackwood’s in the courts, but was finally persuaded by Crabb Robinson and Gillman that though it was an “atrocious Calumny”, it was beneath notice.97

  It was again the young writers, in their work and private letters, who represented the real response to Coleridge, rather than the professional critics. Shelley and Mary had repeatedly read the “Christabel” volume in Switzerland, and when they settled at Great Marlow in the summer of 1817 they read the Biographia, discussing it with Peacock, who was in the process of creating Mr Flosky, the Germanic metaphysician of Nightmare Abbey. Significantly, Mr Flosky with his “inspired gaze” and “his eye in a fine frenzy rolling” is made the “dearest friend” of the Shelley-figure in the novel, Scythrop Glowry, with his mystical “passion for reforming the world”.98

  When Shelley dined at Leigh Hunt’s in Hampstead, his future friend Horace Smith observed him across the table, radiating a Coleridgean mystique. “My companion, who…talked much and eagerly, seemed to me a psychological curiosity, infinitely more curious than Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, to which strange vision he made reference.”99 Shelley agreed with Hazlitt about Coleridge’s politics, and would satirize him accordingly in his poem “Peter Bell the Third” (1819). But unlike Hazlitt, he could easily separate this from Coleridge’s poetic vision (a thing he could never manage with Wordsworth).

  After he had gone to Italy in 1818, Shelley constantly quoted the “Mariner” (parts of which he seemed to have known by heart) and its form partly inspired his political ballad, “The Mask of Anarchy” (1819). Shelley’s great essay, The Defence of Poetry (1821), written as a dialogue with Peacock, reflects many of the ideas and images of the Biographia, particularly on the mysterious nature of the Imagination, its fluid form, and its transient existence “like a fading coal”. Coleridge became for him a partly mythic figure, when he looked back on his memories of London, precisely perhaps because he had never met him in the flesh, but saw him so well in his writings:

  You will see Coleridge – he who sits obscure

  In the exceeding lustre and the pure

  Intense irradiation of a mind,

  Which, with its own internal lightning blind,

  Flags wearily through darkness and despair –

  A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,

  A hooded eagle among blinking owls.100

  This mixture of inner power and external weakness, of brightness and blindness combined, is part of what Coleridge came to represent. To be called an “eagle” by Shelley, even if a hooded one, was no small compliment. When Mary returned to London after his death in 1822, she was anxious to meet Coleridge personally, regarding him in some strange way as the spiritual link with her drowned hu
sband. It was the disasters and aberrations of Coleridge’s life which authenticated him and linked him to the Shelleys.*

  John Keats was also reading Coleridge at his lodgings in Well Walk, Hampstead, and discussing him with the Hunt circle. He too initially took Hazlitt’s line on the politics. “I would not for 40 shillings be Coleridge’s Lays in your way,” he joked to Benjamin Bailey.101 But he was fascinated by the Sibylline Leaves which were to have a direct influence on his mature poetry in 1819, and when he began to read the Biographia in December 1817 his whole intellectual being was engaged. He was drawn in especially by Coleridge’s account of Shakespeare’s “protean” imaginative power and the idea of poetry demanding “a willing suspension of disbelief” (Chapter 4).

  He had also evidently read Coleridge’s extended similes of the imaginative process (like the water insect in Chapter 7) with great appreciation. Characteristically he found them more powerfully suggestive in themselves than the critical theory expounded from them. “Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penatralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.”102

  Already far away in Italy, Lord Byron was also reading Coleridge. The Biographia reached him in Venice in autumn 1817, and greatly irritated him both by its “metaphysics” and by what he saw as an ungentlemanly attack (in Chapter 23) on Bertram, the gothic melodrama that had finally been produced in place of Zapolya at Drury Lane. “He is a shabby fellow, and I wash my hands of him,” he complained to Murray.103 In verse he mocked Coleridge for being “drunk” on visions, and flying blind with ideas.”