Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,

  But like a hawk encumber’d with his hood,–

  Explaining metaphysics to the nation–

  I wish he would explain his Explanation.

  But privately he too recognized Coleridge’s strange power and was perhaps more influenced by his work than he would consciously admit. He never went back on his admiration for “Christabel” – “I won’t have you sneer at Christabel,” he corrected Murray, “it is a fine wild poem”; and he frequently quoted it in his letters, referring to Coleridge as a genuinely prophetic writer, a “vates”.104

  He was intrigued by Coleridge’s remarks on the effect of reciting poetry aloud (as he had done with “Kubla Khan” at Piccadilly). Coleridge had written that recitation threw a spell over the audience, quite different from the effect of reading it on the page. “For this is really a species of Animal Magnetism, in which the enkindling Reciter, by perpetual comment of looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive faculty to his Auditors. They live for the time within the dilated sphere of his intellectual Being.”105 Both Byron and Coleridge were conscious of this hypnotic power, and proud of it.

  Most intriguing of all, it is possible that Coleridge gave Byron the subject, or rather the persona, of his last great poem, Don Juan, not begun until 1818. In Chapter 23 of the Biographia, he suggested that such a poem would draw, like “Christabel”, on the “mysteries”, on the polar attraction between good and evil, on “the dark groundwork of our nature”. Coleridge even summoned up the inner voice of Don Juan, in a kind of Byronic monologue. “To possess such a power of captivating and enchanting the affections of the other sex! to be capable of inspiring in a charming and even a virtuous woman, a love so deep, and so entirely to me! that even my worst vices, (if I were vicious) even my cruelty and perfidy, (if I were cruel and perfidious) could not eradicate the passion!”106

  And what of Wordsworth at Rydal Mount? He never wrote a word to Coleridge on the subject. In June he remarked to a friend, R. P. Gillies: “I have not read Mr Coleridge’s ‘Biographia’, having contented myself with skimming parts of it…Indeed I am heartily sick of even the best criticism…”107 But he had read it closely, because he later confided to Crabb Robinson that he had taken “no pleasure” in the volume, especially in the parts that concerned himself. “The praise is extravagant and the censure inconsiderate.” Of the Sibylline Leaves, of the “Mariner” with its new gloss, of “Christabel”, of “Kubla Khan” and its extraordinary Preface, he said nothing at all.108

  15

  In September 1817 the Gillmans again spirited Coleridge away to the seaside, this time to lodgings on the promenade at Littlehampton, in Sussex. Here he remained until the end of November, working hard on the Introduction to the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, for which Rest Fenner (“my malignant Taskmaster”) was pressing him. But he made time for regular morning and evening patrols along the sandy shingle. He often walked long after dusk, until his old friend the moon rose over the sea, and had various poetical encounters on the windy front.

  Once a tall man came crunching over the pebbles towards him, reciting Homer aloud to a small boy at his side. Coleridge was intrigued, and immediately introduced himself with a flourish. “Sir, yours is a face I should know; I am Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” It turned out to be Henry Francis Cary, the first great English translator of Dante, whose version of the Divina Commedia had been published in an obscure private edition in 1814. His son Henry (the small boy then aged 13) remembered how this first meeting effortlessly extended into a dinner party the same evening, and Coleridge went off bearing a copy of Cary’s Inferno to peruse.

  Both father and son were amazed the following morning when Coleridge reappeared on the beach, miraculously able to recite long passages from the translation by heart, and what was more, recalling the parallel sections of the Italian original.109 Coleridge then wrote to Cary, praising the accuracy and the “learned Simplicity” of the blank verse – “the most varied and harmonious to my ear of any since Milton” – and subsequently arranged for it to be reissued in a popular edition by Keats’s publisher, Taylor and Hessey, the following year. This became the standard version for Victorian readers over the next fifty years. Cary became a devotee of the Biographia, and circulated copies among his friends.110

  It was this meeting that also sparked off Coleridge’s sonnet – the first for more than a decade – “Fancy in Nubibus, or The Poet in the Clouds”. It opens with a dreamy evocation of his seaside walks, “Just after Sunset or by moon light skies”, his eye travelling out across the shifting waters with their “flow of Gold”, and then upwards “From Mount to Mount, through Cloudland” above the English Channel. Then, in a transposition to be used years later by Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach”, the English sea becomes the Greek Aegean. The poet, “listening to the Tide, with closed sight”, changes from Coleridge to Homer, whose outward blindness becomes a surging image of inner, imaginative vision:

  …that blind Bard, who on the Chian Strand,

  By the deep sounds inform’d with inward Light,

  Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee

  Rise to the swelling of the voiceful Sea!111

  Ann Gillman was particularly delighted with this new poem, which Coleridge described as “a first Resumption” of what he called his “rhyming Idleness” at Littlehampton, and a proof of his health. He added a touching comment that recalls his early theories of the sonnet, as essentially a single “lonely thought”. It has the character of a Sonnet – that it is like something that we let escape from us – a Sigh, for instance.”112

  16

  On his return to Highgate in November, Coleridge found the reputation of the Biographia was spreading, and the attack in Blackwood’s had rallied old friends and new ones to his side. Joseph Green rode up from Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and gave him a standing invitation to dinner whenever he could manage.113 A young lawyer, Charles Augustus Tulk, began to correspond enthusiastically about the Naturphilosophie in the Biographia and pressed Coleridge to expound his metaphysics further.

  Tulk was also a Littlehampton acquaintance, having first met Coleridge on a wet and unpromising afternoon in the Public Reading Room, when they exchanged newspapers. “If I had met a friend & a Brother in the Desart of Arabia,” exclaimed Coleridge afterwards, “I could scarcely have been more delighted.”114 Tulk turned out to be the heir to a large fortune, who owned Marble Hill House in Twickenham and was also a founder member of the Swedenborg Society (1810).

  His father had known William Blake and Flaxman, as members of the New Jerusalem Church. Young Tulk, then in his thirties, had a lively interest in poetry, music, design and social reform, all inspired by the unworldly and philanthropic creed of Swedenborg; and was also a hospitable family man. He was later to be an independent MP, and founding proprietor of the new London University.

  He was puzzled but gratified to receive an enormous, sixteen-page letter on Coleridge’s “Dynamic Philosophy” – from Heraclitus to Schelling, via Magnetism and symbolic Geometry – a “slight sketch” of what had been omitted from the Biographia. There were two fundamental points of contact between their views, wrote Coleridge in his most winning manner: first, that all matter consisted in “the interpretation of opposite energies”; and second, that there was “no matter without Spirit”.

  The letter, of a metaphysical complexity that would have driven Hazlitt mad, also shows Coleridge beginning consciously to adopt his new Highgate role of mentor and sage. “I teach,” he informed Tulk, “a real existence of a Spiritual World without a material. – But this belongs to a higher science – and requires something of a Pythagorean Discipline.”115

  Among other admirers of an unorthodox kind was Hyman Hurwitz, the gifted director of the private Hebrew Academy for Jews at Highgate. Hurwitz was a poet and Hebrew scholar, a distinguished man of Coleridge’s age, whose race and culture had isolated him from the intellectual life of London. Coleridge, who never forgot t
he anti-Semitism he had witnessed in Germany in 1799,116 responded warmly to Hurwitz’s approaches and quickly found common ground in biblical scholarship, linguistics and learned discussions of religious symbolism.

  The friendship with Hurwitz grew steadily over the next decade, and led Coleridge to visit several synagogues both in London and later Ramsgate, where he formed unusually close contacts with other Jewish scholars. In 1820 he and Hurwitz collaborated on a public poem, on the death of George III; and in 1828 Coleridge was instrumental in obtaining for Hurwitz the first professorship in Hebrew at London University. Hurwitz quoted Coleridge’s work in his lectures, and Coleridge always argued for the integral role of the Jewish intellectual in the national culture. His later letters suggest a particular delight in Jewish humour, with its irony and self-mockery. “I happen,” he wrote in the very last year of his life, “to be a favourite among the Descendants of Abraham…I therefore intend to be at the Synagogue on Friday.”117

  17

  All this time Coleridge was working on his Introduction to the Encyclopaedia, which was finally rushed into print by Rest Fenner in January 1818. They had designed it to compete commercially with the fifth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (twenty volumes, 1817). Frustrated with Coleridge’s demands for more time and more revisions, they cut and edited the text themselves and did not allow him to see the proofs. He had planned it as a “Preliminary Treatise on Method”, a grand tour of the intellectual horizon of knowledge, to rival Bacon’s Novum Organum. It encompassed both arts and sciences in a single exemplary schema, unified by the notion of the moral function of all human knowledge in society.

  “The first pre-conception, or master-thought, on which our plan rests, is the moral origin and tendency of all true science; in other words, our great objects are to exhibit the Arts and Sciences in their philosophical harmony; to teach Philosophy in union with Morals; and to sustain Morality by Revealed Religion.”118 This was in direct opposition to the Benthamite or utilitarian concept of knowledge as an empirical gathering of value-free data.

  In fact Coleridge’s conception was quite different from that of his publishers. For him it was not really a conventional encyclopaedia at all, but a kind of general university course which would teach the reader “intellectual Method” in every sphere. Its final aim was cultural in the largest sense, and had “national application”. It aimed at “the education of the mind, first in the man and the citizen, and then, inclusively in the State itself”.119

  Coleridge saw it as a political statement in the widest sense. It promoted the liberal ideal of the “diffusion of knowledge” as the essential channel of social progress. But it insisted that knowledge involved moral judgements, and the sense of historical continuity. Knowledge produced the “historic sense” which evaluated all social advance and political revolutions against the past. In this it opposed the writers of the European Enlightenment (who had invented the very idea of the encyclopaedia) and demonstrated that the concept of “universal Reason” in human affairs was dangerously insufficient.

  Without advocating the exploded doctrine of perfectibility, we cannot but regard all that is human in human nature, and all that in nature is above herself, as together working toward that far deeper and more permanent revolution in the moral world, of which the recent changes in the political world may be regarded as the pioneering whirlwind and storm. But woe to that revolution which is not guided by the historic sense; by the pure and unsophisticated knowledge of the past: and to convey this methodically, so as to aid the progress of the future, has been already announced as the distinguishing claim of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.120*

  Coleridge never got the chance to clarify these ideas further in a popular format. Rest Fenner abandoned the entire Encyclopaedia the following year, having published only five part-volumes out of twenty-eight. The whole project was, Coleridge thought, “a Humbug”.121

  Yet the first volume, dominated by his 10,000-word essay, had a larger print-run than any other work published in his lifetime. His proposed arrangements of the material, with their structured hierarchy and historical framework (as opposed to mere alphabetical ordering) were eventually recognized as an epoch in the genre. Many years later his commercial rival, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, made amends with this fine compliment from the fifteenth edition of 1974, in its article on the history of encylopaedias: Coleridge’s Introduction “was the most notable contribution to the philosophy of encyclopaedia-making since Bacon”.

  18

  The Christmas season was sociable, with several dinner parties in town. Hartley came down from Oxford, and there were two meetings with Wordsworth which went off as well as could be expected. Though he had journeyed from Rydal Mount to London, Wordsworth was not prepared to go as far as Highgate, still fearing some emotional outburst.122 But he consented to meet Coleridge in company, first at a supper party at Tom Monkhouse’s house in Queen Anne Street, and later at an unusually subdued dinner given by Lamb.

  Their mutual friends observed the reunion with interest, especially as Sara Hutchinson was with Wordsworth’s party. It was the first time Coleridge and Asra had met for nearly seven years, and he took along Hartley for support. The Monkhouse evening was rather awkward, according to Crabb Robinson. “I was for the first time in my life not pleased with Wordsworth, and Coleridge appeared to advantage in his presence. Coleridge spoke of painting in that style of mysticism which is now his habit of feeling. Wordsworth met this with dry, unfeeling contradiction.”

  There was a particularly awkward moment when Coleridge was praising the “divinity” of Raphael’s Madonnas, and Wordsworth interjected that “the subject of a mother and child” was not “a field for high intellect”, an oblique suggestion that Coleridge was no authority on parental affections. He asked if Coleridge would have discerned such “beauties”, had he not known that Raphael was the painter. “When Coleridge said that was an unkind question, Wordsworth made no apology.” Both Lamb and Crabb Robinson thought Wordsworth harsh in his manner and “substantially wrong” in his argument.123

  At Lamb’s soirée, there was a kind of stand-off. Wordsworth sat gravely at one end of the table, talking tête-à-tête with the literary lawyer Sergeant Talfourd; while Coleridge sprawled genially at the other end, surrounded by “the larger body” of the guests. The ladies, no doubt sensing a “polarity of forces”, gathered quietly round Mary Lamb in a corner. Crabb Robinson observed one moment of exemplary comedy, when both of the poets could be heard quoting verses to their listeners. Moving surreptitiously between the two groups, Robinson found Coleridge quoting Wordsworth’s poetry by heart; and Wordsworth quoting “ – not Coleridge’s, but his own”. It needed no comment.124

  As for Asra, she carefully avoided any moment of intimacy, and was rather caught off-guard when Coleridge openly called her “my dear” and asked for an address where he could write to her privately.

  Once she had safely escaped to the country in January, she wrote to Monkhouse with some wry praise of Coleridge’s Highgate reformation – “indeed he has exhibited many wonders lately”. She could not forebear to ask, in turn, if he had said anything about her: “pray have you any conversation with him? And did he enquire after ‘my dear’ or his other friends?”125 But Coleridge was silent, even in his Notebooks.

  These meetings convinced him of what he already knew in his heart, that his old life was over, and what future he had lay in London. He wrote a kindly letter to the Morgans, setting out his plans, and wishing them a Happy New Year for 1818 – “if the word ‘happy’ did not sound like Arabic Diabolic for ‘wretched’ from my mouth – However, there is that within, thank God! Which is at Peace – So may God bless you and your sincere and faithful Friend, S. T. Coleridge.”126

  Another pair of eyes had watched the Wordsworths and Sara Hutchinson in London this December. John Keats had called on them in Mortimer Street, and the very day after the awkward Monkhouse evening with Raphael’s Madonna, he had joined Wordsworth and
Lamb for the “Immortal Dinner” at the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon’s studio at Lisson Grove. (This was the famous dinner party when Lamb got wonderfully drunk and insulted Wordsworth’s foolish superior from the Stamp Office – “Do let me have another look at that gentleman’s organs.”)

  Keats was very proud to be admitted into Wordsworth’s London circle. He thought his poetry “one of the three superior things in the modern world” (the others being Haydon’s painting and Hazlitt’s “depth of Taste”).127 Wordsworth was “a great Poet if not a Philosopher”. Yet he also found him stiff and self-important, dressing up in a high collar, knee breeches and silk stockings; and expecting deference from everyone, especially from the women. Keats was amazed when he tried to put a question, and Mrs Wordsworth pulled his arm with the hasty aside, “Mr Wordsworth is never interrupted.” He thought that wherever Wordsworth went in London he left a personal impression of “egotism, Vanity and bigotry”.128 He found Sara Hutchinson “enchanting”, but from her manner at first thought she was Wordsworth’s daughter.129

  19

  Among the “many wonders” that Asra had remarked on was Coleridge’s return to lecturing in 1818. His old patrons at the Philosophical Society, in Fleur de Luce Court, invited him to give a new series on European literature to begin in the New Year. These were his first lectures since Bristol, four years previously, and marked a growing sense of his return to the heart of a national debate about culture and education. What Coleridge offered was in effect a pioneering course in comparative literature: a lifting of the English intellectual horizon after years of wartime insularity. The course was also conceived in direct competition to Hazlitt, who was simultaneously lecturing at the Surrey Institution on “The English Poets”.