Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  This concept is brilliantly ramified through a short history of the European arts and sciences, as only Coleridge could manage. The illustrations he chose were a conscious and dazzling display of his own polymathic virtuosity, but were also intended to appeal to the broadest possible range of readers. He began with Shakespeare, “our myriad-minded Bard”, and laid out his central argument in a fine piece of literary criticism. He took two speeches – one by Mistress Quickly from Henry IV Part I, the other by Hamlet – and contrasted their logical structures and linking images. Mistress Quickly’s was dominated by “mere events and images”; Hamlet’s, on the other hand, was dominated by “meditative excess” and obsessive “digressions and enlargements”. “If overlooking the different value of the matter in each, we considered the form alone, we should find both immethodical; Hamlet from the excess, Mrs Quickly from the want, of reflection and generalization; and that Method, therefore, must result from the due mean or balance between our passive impressions and the mind’s own reaction to the same.”180

  Coleridge then launched into an extraordinary tour d’horizon of intellectual endeavour. The idealism of Plato and the empiricism of Aristotle, are followed by the scientific method of Linnaeus and Sir Humphry Davy. A crucial distinction is established between the mere “classification” of observations (as in contemporary botany) and the discovery of scientific “laws” which unify and explain them (as in contemporary chemistry).181

  Coleridge moved on next to Galileo, Kepler and Bacon, Here he argues that a scientific law is universal, in the same sense that a Platonic Idea is eternal.182 Both are expressions of that true method, in either science or art, which expresses an “originating” impulse in the human intellect. “Hence too, it will not surprise us, that Plato so often calls ideas LIVING LAWS, in which the mind has its whole true being and permanence; or that Bacon, vice versa, names the laws of nature, ideas; and represents what we have, in a former part of this disquisition, called facts of science and central phenomena, as signatures, impressions, and symbols of ideas.”183

  By this stage the argument, as in sections of the Biographia, is in danger of slipping away into abstraction. But Coleridge leaves one memorably vivid demonstration of his notion of the way underlying “law” supports (literally in this case) the theory of “progressive transition”. He ingeniously reverts to his opening image of the “man of superior mind” standing under an archway.

  In this case the arch was the brass model of a bridge, actually constructed by George Atwood FRS, a distinguished mathematician at the Royal Observatory. “Mr Atwood’s arch” was intended to prove “the compound action of simple wedges”. It was constructed of polished brass sections; mounted on “a skeleton arch of wood”. The brass sections were slotted into shape, but not otherwise attached to each other. When the wooden scaffolding was removed, the brass arch stood perfectly firm. Thus the self-supporting properties of the wedges were apparently proved.

  But Coleridge neatly reversed this conclusion. What was proved was “the property of the arch”. For the wooden skeleton came first, and “presumed the figure”. The brass wedges would hold up in no other shape, except as an arch. Even when the skeleton of the arch was removed, the physical “law” of the arch, the “idea” of the arch remained. It was that, ultimately, that sustained the visible brass construction. “The whole is of necessity prior to its parts; nor can we conceive a more apt illustration of the scientific principles we have already laid down.”184

  Coleridge’s idea of the truly “educated mind” depended on an analogous principle. It was the Platonic arch of “Method”, not the brass wedges of knowledge, that structured and defined human intelligence. He rose finally to a prophetic passage that would echo down to the Victorian educationalists, to men like Matthew Arnold and Newman. “Alas! how many examples are now present to our memory, of young men the most anxiously and expensively be-schoolmastered, be-tutored, be-lectured, any thing but educated; who have received arms and ammunition, instead of skill, strength and courage; varnished rather than polished; perilously over-civilized, and most pitiably uncultivated! And all from inattention to the method dictated by nature herself, to the simple truth, that as the forms in all organized existence, so must all true and living knowledge proceed from within; that it may be trained, supported, fed, excited, but can never be infused or impressed.”185

  Coleridge believed that The Friend had no impact at all. Yet gradually some of his ideas drifted down, like blown seeds, upon fertile ground. In 1822, Julius Hare, now a newly appointed tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge, began to spread news of The Friend to a circle of young undergraduates. These included John Sterling, who became one of the founder members of the Cambridge Apostles.186 Sterling later came to visit Coleridge at Highgate, bringing with him the young philosopher J. S. Mill. Both were deeply dissatisfied with what they saw as the “mechanistic” nature of contemporary Benthamite philosophy, and Mill greeted The Friend as the first step in the foundation of a Coleridgean movement quite distinct from “all Tory and Royalist writers”.187*

  A year later, the young John Ruskin was writing in his diary that The Friend “gives one a higher notion of [Coleridge] than even his poetry”.188 In 1842, F. D. Maurice, the inspiration of the Christian Socialists, also referred specifically to The Friend in his Preface to The Kingdom of Christ, adopting Coleridge as the posthumous prophet of their movement towards a spiritual renewal in Victorian society. Maurice did not believe that Coleridge’s philosophy was “complete and satisfactory”; or ever painted a clear path to social reform. Yet “the power it has exerted” was by the 1840s an historical fact: “he shows us what we have to seek for”.

  The mystery was how to account for Coleridge’s subtle but pervasive influence on a whole climate of opinion: “to explain how a book, which is said to be utterly impractical, has wrought a change in men’s minds upon the most practical subjects; how a book, which is said to have no sympathy with the moving spirit of this age, should have affected the most thoughtful of our young men…”189

  26

  Coleridge’s pervasive presence now filtered, like some wondrous philosophic protoplasm, into the third of Peacock’s satirical novels, Nightmare Abbey (1818). He bubbles into life as Mr Ferdinando Flosky, the interminable and inimitable transcendental talker. It was certainly fame to be given such a position among contemporary figures and fashionables. Mr Flosky holds centre stage with the misanthropic poet Mr Cypress (Lord Byron), with the revolutionary idealist Scythrop Glowry (Shelley), with the modish novel-reader Mr Listless, and the full-lipped, hazel-eyed romantic heroine Marionetta Celestina O’Carroll.

  Peacock caricatured the Highgate Coleridge with a curiously affectionate mixture of respect and ridicule. He mocked, but he celebrated Flosky’s genius. For Flosky, eighteenth-century rationalism had been proved abortive.190 “Mystery is the very key-stone of all that is beautiful in poetry, all that is sacred in faith, and all that is recondite in transcendental psychology. I am writing a ballad which is all mystery; it is ‘such stuff as dreams are made of,’ and is, indeed, stuff made of a dream; for, last night I fell asleep as usual over my book, and had a vision of pure reason. I composed five hundred lines in my sleep…and am making a ballad of my dream and it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it has no bottom.”191

  In fact Peacock, like Shelley, had become a great admirer of both “The Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel”. Mr Flosky’s dramatic role is really as a foil to Scythrop’s dreams of pure, rational, social progress. In pictorial terms, it is the image of Flosky in his crepuscular study, receiving his young and enthusiastic disciples behind closed shutters and Delphic curtains, which is Peacock’s imaginative triumph and greatest tribute to Coleridge.

  Mr Flosky “had ceased to be visible in the morning”, but is discovered in the throes of composition by the breathless Marionetta. “He was sitting at his table by the light of a solitary candle, with a pen in one hand, and a muffiner in the other, with which he oc
casionally sprinkled salt on the wick to make it burn blue. He sat with ‘his eyes in a fine frenzy rolling’, and turned his inspired gaze on Marionetta as if she had been the ghastly ladie of a magical vision; then placed his hand before his eyes, with an appearance of manifest pain – shook his head – withdrew his hand – rubbed his eyes, like a waking man – and said, in a tone of ruefulness most jeremitaylorically pathetic, ‘To what am I to attribute this very unexpected pleasure, my dear Miss O’Carroll?’”

  Flosky answers all Marionetta’s questions with incomprehensible metaphysics, including a short dissertation on Fancy and Imagination (“seven hundred pages of promise to elucidate”). He finally concludes with disarming candour: “if any person living could make report of having obtained any information on any subject from Ferdinando Flosky, my transcendental reputation would be ruined forever.” The divine Marionetta retires in disarray, determined to declare her love for Scythrop Glowry.192

  27

  At Highgate Coleridge was also visited this winter by a mysterious and beautiful young woman. She arrived in the form of a portrait, brought up for his inspection by the young American painter C. R. Leslie. Her name, on the canvas, was simply “The Highland Girl”. A slim, pensive figure in a dark dress, she sat beneath a solitary tree on a wild moorland, holding a tiny basket of flowers in her lap. Her exquisite, rather melancholy face with huge downcast eyes was surrounded by soft ringlets of dark brown hair. Coleridge was entranced: “the most beautiful Fancy-figure, I ever saw”, he exclaimed.193 Leslie then asked if, perhaps, she reminded Coleridge of anyone? After some hesitation, Coleridge at last said wistfully that he had never seen any such woman, but he might have imagined “that little Sara Coleridge would have grown into such a Lass”.

  It was indeed his daughter, whom he had last seen when he left Keswick in 1812. The mystification surrounding the painting was later explained by Mrs Coleridge. William Collins had been commissioned to do a picture of the eighteen-year-old Sara at Keswick by Sir George Beamont, but “in the character of Wordsworth’s ‘Highland Girl’”, for showing at the Royal Academy. Mrs Coleridge thought her husband might be offended by having his daughter used as an illustration to a Wordsworth poem. (Wordsworth had thought “she might do for a Sylph”.) Leslie had been chosen as the emissary for the delicate presentation, as “good Mr Collins” did not understand “the extreme eccentricity of Coleridge’s character” in such a matter.

  Coleridge was overwhelmed, and later wrote to Collins himself: “your exquisite picture of Sara Coleridge…has quite haunted my eye ever since.”194 The painting formed a new bond between father and daughter, and Coleridge was increasingly anxious that she should be brought to London. Sara too was “very uneasy about not seeing her father”. Her love of books knew no bounds, and she had just finished reading Don Quixote in the original Spanish. Mrs Coleridge held out the promise of bringing her south the following year, for a “re-introduction” to her father. As for the picture, it was given to Coleridge after the Academy exhibition and hung over his desk at Highgate for the remaining years of his life.195 It came to symbolize Hope, and the future which the third Sara and her generation helped to give him so fully.

  28

  By the spring of 1819 more and more visitors were being drawn up the hill to Highgate. Over Coleridge’s last decade it would gradually become a place of pilgrimage.* Under Gillman’s assiduous care, Coleridge’s intellectual reputation was altering just as his physical health was stabilizing. The wild figure whom the Wordsworths and the Morgans had known, was being replaced (in part at least) by a sedate and genial sage who looked much older than a man in his late forties.

  Two Highgate portraits of this period, one by Thomas Phillips, and another by C. R. Leslie, show the physical change. An enigmatic inward smile animates Phillips’s avuncular subject, the silver hair grown long again, the symbolic snuffbox held between first and second finger with a gesture of easy sociability. A growing heaviness of the jowl proclaims the comforts of Ann Gillman’s cuisine. Already Coleridge has the brooding weight and gravitas of a man of sixty.

  In Leslie’s penetrating study (a drawing of the head and shoulders alone), this impression is even sharper, the body hunched beneath the fleshy neck, dragging him towards earth. The large eyes alone seem to recall his youth, still raised upwards towards some visionary horizon. There is, too, a certain self-consciousness in the pose, as if Coleridge had at last become aware of the gaze of posterity. He looks beyond the immediate viewer, but knows he holds his attention anyway.

  Imperceptibly, Coleridge was growing into his own legend. The original inner group of disciples – Tulk, Cary, Thomas Allsop, Hookham Frere and the increasingly indispensable J. H. Green – were still his confidants, drawn by his philosophical speculations as much as by his poetry. But already his public reputation was becoming something larger and more magnetic. The young Thomas Carlyle did not reach Highgate until 1824 (and was strangely disconcerted when he did so), but in those five years possibilities presented by Mr Flosky had enlarged and solidified into a palpable myth:

  Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life’s battle; attracting towards him the thoughts of innumerable brave souls still engaged there. His express contributions to poetry, philosophy, or any specific province of human literature or enlightenment, had been small and sadly intermittent; but he had, especially among young enquiring men, a higher than literary, a kind of prophetic or magician character. He was thought to hold, he alone in England, the key of German and other Transcendentalisms…The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr Gillman’s house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon.196

  To all appearances, the sage was at last secure on his leafy hilltop.

  TEN

  MAGIC CHILDREN

  1

  He determined on one last descent into the smoke-tumult below. Wearied by the unbroken sequence of publications since 1816, and confident of the profits now accruing with Rest Fenner – he put them at over £1,000 – Coleridge indulged the idea of his swan-song on the public platform.

  He proposed a double series of lectures “On Shakespeare” and “On the History of Philosophy”. The series was accepted by the committee of the “Crown and Anchor” at Seven Dials, off the Strand. This was one of the biggest and most popular venues in London, with a long tradition of public meetings and events, and in the 1790s had been associated with radical and controversial causes. Fourteen weekly lectures were booked, to run between 14 December 1818 and 29 March 1819.1

  When Hookham Frere discovered this, he privately commissioned a shorthand writer to cover the Philosophical series at heavy expense. (“I was astonished to learn thro’ Mr Gillman from the Scribe himself, at how heavy an expense!” mused Coleridge.)2

  From henceforth, he told Thomas Allsop, after the ill success of his literary toils – “and Toils they have been, tho’ not undelightful Toils” – he hoped to be free from “the anxieties of the To Day” to complete the Opus Maximum contemplated for twenty years and now destined for posterity.3 To have continued his public appearances, begun more than a decade ago at the Royal Institution in 1808, “would have turned my Lecture into an Auctioneer’s Pulpit, and with Hammer suspended over me have cried out, Going! Going! Going! – Three Pound three only! – Gentlemen of the Dissecting Rooms – A curious Case! A rare Subject – rather fat indeed – but remarkable as a fine specimen of a broken Heart – etc. etc.”4

  The sense of premature ageing, which came to him frequently now, was a complicated thing. He wrote a hopeful entry at the beginning of his lecture notes. “Trees in winter neither dead nor inactive – nor, tho’ the sap may not flow, are they sapless
– but they are forming new radicles underground for an additional supply for Spring & Summer – not merely to supply the same as last year, but more – to be progressive.”5 He also rejoiced that Hartley was again with him, having gained a respectable second-class degree at Oxford, and with some hopes of obtaining a Fellowship in the spring.

  2

  There was no weariness in his preparations for the Philosophical Lectures, which filled 123 pages of a brown leather-bound notebook, and covered the entire history of Western philosophy. From Plato and Aristotle in Lectures 1 to 5, he advanced to the medieval Christian Schoolmen (with some interesting asides on the “despised” contribution of Jewish philosophers) in Lectures 6 to 9; then through the Reformation and Enlightenment in Lectures 10 to 12; and concluded with a highly compressed account of Kant and Schelling in Lectures 13 to 14. He even supplied a printed outline. He told Green that this overview would lead directly to his work on the Opus Maximum.

  Coleridge’s final aim was to make philosophy a living subject for his listeners, of immediate relevance to their lives. “What, and for what am I made? What can I, and what ought I to, make of myself? And in what relations do I stand to the world and to my fellow men?…”6 He used biographical details to bring his subjects alive, and constantly sought contemporary analogies. Thus in Lecture 6, while apparently submerged in the remote “dead low water” of the Greek Sceptics, he read with great emotion his own poem of 1814, “On the Denial of Immortality”: