Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

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  In October 1819 Blackwood’s Magazine, which had carried the devastating attack on the Biographia three years previously, recanted in the handsomest manner possible. The youngest member of their editorial board, the 25-year-old J. G. Lockhart – the future son-in-law and biographer of Walter Scott – wrote a 7,000-word essay of brilliant appreciation, expressing the judgement of the new generation in the broadest terms. “The reading public of England (speaking largely) have not understood Mr Coleridge’s poems as they should have done.” No English poet “since the age of Elizabeth” had used language with such a delicate sense of beauty and “with so much exquisite subtlety of metaphysical perception”.

  Lockhart analysed the “Ancient Mariner” at length, and also praised “Christabel”: “he is the prince of superstitious Poets”. He remarked too on the “wonderful translation, or rather improvement of the Wallenstein”. He characterized all his work as “poetry of the senses strung to the imagination”, a fine image of Coleridge’s stretching and tuning of the ballad line. What Coleridge evoked best was “a romantic and spiritual movement of wonder”.

  Lockhart made no mention of the prose, and turned some gentle asides about “indolence”. He also shrewdly questioned Coleridge’s presentation of himself as a poet of pure and instinctive inspiration, rather than as a master craftsman of refinement and revision. “In many respects Mr Coleridge seems too anxious to enjoy the advantages of an inspired writer, and to produce his poetry at once in its perfect form, like the palaces which spring out of the desert in complete splendour at a single rubbing of the lamp in the Arabian Tale.”

  But the article championed Coleridge as a poet virtually without reservation, and clearly prophesied what Victorian readers would draw from him. “In his mixture of all the awful and all the gentle graces of conception, in his sway of wild, solitary, dreamy phantasies, in his music of words and magic of numbers, we think he stands absolutely alone among all the poets of the most poetical age.”58

  Coleridge never forgot this fanfare, which heralded a new era of critical assessment. He tangled with Blackwood’s subsequently, when articles and letters of his own were mischievously mishandled, and was shocked when Lockhart – still very much the young Turk – involved another critic in a duel with pistols in 1821. Yet Lockhart remained one of his earliest acknowledged champions. They eventually met and became friends at Ramsgate, and Coleridge sent teasing letters and poems to Lockhart’s young wife. He played out his role as the poet of “Kubla Khan”, ending one poetic fragment: “Meant to have been finished, but somebody came in, or something fell out – & tomorrow – alas! Tomorrow!”59

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  Coleridge might have been poised on an Indian summer of writing in 1820. But this was delayed for another two years – and perhaps forever – by an altogether different kind of collapse, far closer to home and far closer to his heart. As he told Thomas Allsop, “a heavy, a very heavy Affliction came upon me, with all the aggravations of surprise – sudden as a Peal of Thunder from a cloudless Sky.”60

  One of the great benefits of Coleridge’s life at Highgate was the growing sense of closeness to his sons, and the feeling that he was at last helping to launch their careers. Hartley visited every vacation from Oriel, and joined in his philosophic work. Coleridge had suggested he compose a dissertation on Greek mythology, and father and son exchanged learned disquisitions on the subject. Hartley intended to publish a prose translation of Aeschylus, and “begin with Prometheus, which will serve as a sort of text, for some observations on the sacerdotal religion of Greece, and on the sources and spirit of mythology.” This he planned to submit for the Oxford Prize Essay in the autumn of 1820. All this was music to his father’s ears.61

  Derwent was now preparing for Cambridge, and in April 1820 it was agreed that he too should join his father at Highgate. He was rapturously excited at the prospect. The sense of family optimism even caught up Mrs Coleridge, who had written cheerfully to Tom Poole that winter of both boys. Hartley was “most sanguine in his hopes of success in tutorship” at Oriel; and thought “his fellowship and exertions” would help Derwent both intellectually and financially. As for Derwent, Poole should see “the flush of hope & joy” that spread over his face at the idea of seeing his father again. “C. will be quite overpowered, and the boy too, I conjecture, at their meeting.” Derwent was now nineteen and had not seen Coleridge for eight years. Hartley was twenty-three, “some days older than his father was on the day of our marriage. I think H. is as eccentric as his father to the full.” Mrs Coleridge added wistfully, “May he be happier!”62

  The April vacation was a great success, and the Gillmans paid for all the young men’s expenses. Derwent was awarded an Exhibition at St John’s College, Cambridge. Father and sons ambled round Highgate, an instantly recognizable threesome: Coleridge stately, smiling, white-haired; Hartley small and darting, with his strange black “turkish” beard and mercurial laughter; Derwent plump and good-natured, with the round, innocent Coleridge face, happy to listen and enjoy whatever company he was in. They were tenderly introduced to Coleridge’s friends: Allsop, Hookham Frere, and a new neighbour, the comic actor Charles Mathews.

  Coleridge was immensely proud of his two sons, delighted with their “affectionate attachment” to each other, and their “boyish high spirits with manly independence of intellect”. He loved the lively contrast of their characters (“for no two can be more distinct”) and the way they bounced off each other in conversation. They were like two footballers passing a ball, who “shoot & play” across a common ground. He only wished the seventeen-year-old Sara could complete the group – “the cup of paternal Joy would be full to the Brim”. Ann Gillman was particularly struck by the “rapture” with which the two brothers talked of their sister.63

  Gillman was still a little anxious at Hartley’s evident eccentricity of appearance and manner: unreliable at mealtimes and sometimes inclined to drink too much wine. But this did not prevent him keeping open house for the boys. In May, Robert Burton, a double first and like Hartley a junior fellow (at Exeter College), came to stay. Young ladies from Highgate – Miss Chisholm, Miss Kelley (an actress relation of the Mathews’) – were invited to tea. The Coleridge cousins, William Hart Coleridge, and John Taylor Coleridge, dropped in.64 Coleridge senior (he began to feel like that) basked in a benign glow of paterfamilial satisfaction.

  In this happy mood, Coleridge planned a light work of summer fiction. It would draw on the French romances of D’Urfé and the German “Faery Work” of Tieck. The title alone inspired him, as he told Allsop: “The Weather-Bound Travellers: or, Histories, Lays, Legends, Incidents, Anecdotes and Remarks contributed during a detention in one of the Hebrides”. He mused: “in whatever laid firm hold of us in early Life there lurks an interest and a charm for our maturest years…” Perhaps his philosophy could finally be expressed in fairy tales, legends and children’s stories. His anthology would create an enchanted solitude, and he imagined his reader “by the parlour Fireside of a rustic Inn, with the Fire & the Candle for his only Companions”. He would “remove the childish, yet leave the childlike untouched”.65

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  All this was shattered at the end of June 1820. News arrived at Highgate that Hartley Coleridge was not to have his Fellowship renewed, and that Edward Copleston, the Provost of Oriel, was dismissing him for drunkenness, irregular behaviour, and keeping low company. This was the “peal of Thunder” which burst upon Coleridge, and whose rumblings were really to continue for the remainder of his life.

  It was not mere academic failure. Coleridge could have coped with this, better than most fathers, given his own experience at Cambridge. It was the social stigma of “intemperance”, so chillingly close to his own reputation for opium addiction. But far worse than either of these, it was the cause of an ever-deepening emotional rift between a father and his favourite son. Both of them tried very hard to heal it, but within two years it was permanent, and the tragic consequences con
tinued until Hartley’s own premature death in 1849. It also had its effects on Derwent (though he remained devoted to his increasingly wayward elder brother), and the happy family circle of spring 1820 was never re-established. It became what Coleridge was to call in 1822 one of “the four grasping and griping Sorrows” of his entire life.

  The events unfolded with a kind of fatality. The original news was not broken by Hartley himself, but came in a sombre letter from John Taylor Coleridge (who maintained his Oxford connections after beginning his career as a distinguished lawyer on the Western Circuit). He wrote confidentially to Gillman on 29 June 1820. “The charges against [Hartley] are very painful ones to repeat…they are ‘sottishness, a love of low company, and generally inattention to college rules. Coupled with this I am informed…that he has contracted an attachment for a young person, the daughter I think of an architect…It is a case of a most afflicting nature; what to advise in it I really do not know.”

  It then emerged that Hartley had completely disappeared. When Derwent was despatched by Coleridge to Oxford, there were wild rumours that he had gone to Liverpool looking for a ship to America. It immediately struck Coleridge that poor Hartley was doomed to live out his own early misadventures at Cambridge. His agonized letters – sent posting after Derwent – are full of this foreboding. “I have this moment received your heart-wringing intelligence…the same Dread struck at once on Mr G’s mind and on mine – that [Hartley] is wandering on some wild scheme, in no dissimilar mood or chaos of thoughts and feelings to that which possessed his unhappy father at an earlier age during the month that ended in the Armyfreak – & that he may even be scheming to take passage from Liverpool to America.”66

  Initially, Coleridge expressed very little blame towards his son’s conduct, and instinctively took Hartley’s part against the Oriel dons. What weakness he did suspect, he immediately transferred to his own shortcomings as a father. “Woe is me! – the Root of all Hartley’s faults is Self-willedness – this was the Sin of his nature, and this has been fostered by culpable indulgence, at least, noninterference on my part…”67 Yet here already was a curious paternal blindness, for it was obvious to all outsiders (such as the Gillmans) that Hartley’s downfall was the result precisely of a lack of self-will – expressed by his drinking, his unreliable social behaviour, and his intellectual oddity. It was these traits that he had inherited from his father’s character. Coleridge always found this difficult to accept, most of all, perhaps, because it suggested an almost biblical guilt: that the sins of the father, especially in the matter of addiction, should be visited on the son.

  What caused Coleridge the most pain was Hartley’s refusal to turn immediately to his father for help in such a crisis. He had not even dared to write from Oxford. This humiliated him far more than the academic scandal. The note is repeated pathetically again and again to Derwent: “So surely if Hartley knew or believed that I love him & linger after him as I do & ever have done, he would have come to me…Oh! if he knew how much I feel with him as well as how much I suffer for him, he could not so forget that he has a most affectionate Friend as well as Father in – S. T. Coleridge.”68

  Derwent himself later recalled he had “never seen any human being, before or since, so deeply afflicted”.69 Ann Gillman told Allsop that Coleridge “was convulsed with agony, though at first he was calm”.70 She took him out for walks on the Heath, and Gillman stood by at night to wake him when he began screaming in his dreams. Coleridge only screamed in the first hours of sleep; after that he only wept, so that when he woke at dawn his pillow was soaking with tears.71

  His reaction was so extreme that it is clear that he was reliving his own experiences through Hartley. At night he had become again the lost and rejected child. “While I am awake & retain my reasoning powers, the pang is gnawing but I am – except for a fitful moment or two – tranquil. It is the howling Wilderness of Sleep that I dread.”72 This feeling would both propel, and hinder, everything he tried to do for his son subsequently.

  In fact Hartley had not gone to Liverpool (or to his mother at Greta Hall), but had gone to ground with friends in Oxford. Derwent found him and persuaded him to return to Highgate by mid-July. He would not remain with his father, but agreed to stay with mutual friends in London, and continue with his Prometheus project. Ironically, the friends who took him in were the Montagus, now living in Bedford Square, and no doubt anxious to succeed better than they had done in the comparable situation of 1810.

  Coleridge spent the rest of the year trying to get Hartley reinstated, using every diplomatic channel in his power, and doing much painful soul-searching in the process. He subjected Hartley to a well-meaning, but over-intense and probably humiliating interrogation, forcing him to give not one, but three, written statements of “all his transactions” at Oriel. He also wrote to individual Fellows at the college, and compiled a complete dossier of character witnesses.73 The ostensible aim of all this was to prepare for a grand personal confrontation with the Provost, Edward Copleston, in October and to seek justice and reinstatement for his son.

  All the time the college authorities offered an urbane, Oxford solution. Hartley Coleridge could simply resign, the matter would be smoothed over, and a compensation of £300 would be tendered. Most fathers would have settled for this, and it seems to have been what Hartley secretly wanted.

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  Oxford was not generally renowned for its temperance, or even its scholarship at this period – though reforms were in the wind. Hartley’s previous college, Merton, was celebrated for its laxities. But Oriel was a special case: its tone was tea-drinking and austere, its Fellows’ Common Room spartan and intellectually formidable, and its membership included John Keble and J. H. Newman (future founders of the Oxford Movement) and Thomas Arnold, soon to become the charismatic headmaster of Rugby school. Hartley had fallen among saints, and they were unsparing in their righteousness.

  As Coleridge discovered, it was Keble who had outlined the original charges against Hartley: “habits of such continued irregularity, & frequent sottishness, with all their degrading accompaniments of low company”. It was the Dean, Richard Whately, who had advised Hartley to emigrate to Canada, and to seek forgiveness from the “All-Seeing Judge”. It was a third Fellow, Edward Hawkins, who informed Hartley that his continued fellowship would be “an indulgence [not] at all consistent with the spirit of our Foundation”.74 All these letters found their way into Coleridge’s dossier, together with the bitter intelligence that Southey and Wordsworth had been appraised of the disaster before he had.

  Hartley’s own statements of “all his transactions” to his father were tortuously detailed: a curious mixture of disarming frankness and agonized dissembling. Indeed they recalled Coleridge’s own letters to his elder brother George after his flight from Cambridge nearly thirty years before. He denied absolutely an amorous intrigue with Mary Harris (the architect’s daughter), though much later he admitted to Derwent he was passionately in love though (again like his father with Mary Evans) unrequitedly so. He admitted being drunk on at least three occasions, and once alarming his lodginghouse keeper that he would set the rooms on fire with his candle. But he was never “frequently drunk”.75

  In the Common Room he claimed that he “measured my expressions by the strictest standards”; though again he afterwards admitted to Derwent that he considered his superiors tyrannical “Bigots”, and at least once was induced “to vent my chagrin in certain impotent, but I dare not say forgotten, threats” concerning the overdue reformation of the college system.76 He agreed he had shown “no little eccentricity”, but omitted to mention that one Fellow claimed to have found him lying “dead drunk in the streets”.77 He informed his father that he had given him “a plain statement of facts, which may prevent you committing yourself by defending me on untenable points”.78

  Coleridge surveyed the evidence and committed himself absolutely to defending his son. In October he drafted a long letter of point by point refutation, wh
ich Hartley copied out and sent to the Provost.79 He then fixed an interview with Copleston at Oxford for Sunday, 15 October, and sat down to compose his own letter of personal appeal. It caused him immense difficulties, and the extended fragments of at least four drafts have survived, although the final document has disappeared forever in the Oriel archives.

  Coleridge had no clear strategy, but his general approach was to appeal to Dr Copleston’s better feelings and ask him to take a broad and generous view of the case. He began by emphasizing his immense personal pride in Hartley’s original appointment at Oriel, and his respect for the college. His feeling was, that “whatever I am, my Hartley is a Fellow of Oriel! It was & had so long been the prayer of my Heart to see my Sons in that profession, for which I was myself best fitted both by my studies and my inclinations…” He added that the terrible news had, by “a cruel kindness” been withheld from him by his friends for several weeks.

  Here, for a moment, the poet in him rose up. The news “burst upon me at once and irrevocably like a Squall from a Fogbank in which the secure Mariner had been fancying images of shore and Coastland, all calm and not a sail in reef”. But then he crossed this passage out, as too obvious a reference to his own most famous poem.80

  Next he turned to the question of Hartley’s general character. Here he decided to pull rank and drop names, which at Oxford was perhaps a risk worth taking. He cited Sir George and Lady Beaumont, William Wordsworth and Robert Southey (Poet Laureate) as people who had known Hartley intimately from childhood and thought highly of his talents. He also touchingly added Tom Poole, who was now a local magistrate. Sir Walter Scott and the poet Samuel Rogers were also somehow introduced as character witnesses.81