Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  Coleridge felt he would be extending and formalizing the talks he was already holding with young friends like Allsop, Watson and Stutfield.113 The courses would run for two years, and payment would be voluntary. These classes, although interrupted in the summer of 1822, do seem to have run regularly thereafter until Coleridge’s health declined in 1827. In the year after Coleridge’s death, an anonymous member published two long extracts from his class notes in Fraser’s Magazine, “beautiful fragments…taken down from his own lips”. One, “On Life”, reflects his scientific work with Gillman and Green; the other “The Science and System of Logic”, reflects an early phase of the Opus Maximum.114 They seem to have been memorable occasions.

  Coleridge also began to think in terms of publishing an inspirational work for young men, a sort of spiritual guidebook for those setting out in life. Turning back to the seventeenth-century divine, Archbishop Leighton, whose sermons and meditations he had first discovered, he now revealed, in his own crisis years of 1813–14, he proposed “an interesting Pocket Volume” to John Murray. He did not feel capable of writing a wholly original book, but suggested it take the form of a selection from Leighton’s works, with a critical and biographical commentary.115 Initially it was to be little more than an anthology – “The Beauties of Archbishop Leighton”.

  As a worthy volume of Christian apologetics for earnest youth, it sounded like the least promising of all Coleridge’s late projects. But working on it over the next three years, he transformed it into one of the most idiosyncratic and influential productions, which found an astonishing range of readers, from the philosopher J. S. Mill to the sublime poet of the Victorian nonsense-world, Lewis Carroll.116*

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  These plans advanced so slowly because of his own sons. Throughout 1822 Hartley’s drinking and chaotic life became more and more evident. Coleridge wrote to his wife that he was at his wit’s end to know how to handle Hartley, loving him so much and feeling so responsible for him. He blamed himself “for the extreme delicacy with which I speak to him of his follies, and my terror of giving him pain”.117

  He felt the London journalism was doomed, and in May he wrote a long and desperate letter to John Dawes, Hartley’s old headmaster at Ambleside, begging him to offer Hartley a place as an assistant teacher. “Whatever else is to be done or prevented, London he must not live in – the number of young men who will seek his company to be amused, his own want of pride, & the opportunity of living or imagining rather that he can live from hand to mouth by writing for Magazines etc. – these are Ruin for him.”

  His assessment of his son was much sharper since the Oriel débâcle. He praised Hartley’s natural innocence, and his good temper “in the management & instruction of Children”. These exceeded those of any young man he had ever known. But he also filled his wine-glass “too often”, and he could be “as selfish as a Beast”. Since the days at Calne, Coleridge had consistently tried to improve him by “admonition, persuasion, intreaty, warning”. Yet he knew that he had failed, and failed in that very point in which Hartley was most like himself. Like his father, he lacked moral willpower. This was an agonizing admission, couched in painful contradictions.

  “But let it be, that I am rightly reproached for my negligence in withstanding and taming his Self-will – is this the main Root of the Evil? I could almost say – Would to God, it were! For then I should have more Hope. But alas! it is the absence of a Self, it is the want or torpor of a Will, that is the mortal Sickness of Hartley’s Being, and has been, for good & for evil, his character – his moral idiocy – from his earliest Childhood.”

  He apologized to Dawes for having written with a father’s “wounded Spirit”, and indeed it was a strange letter of recommendation to a future employer. But the wise old headmaster knew both father and son well, and the teaching position was held open. It took Coleridge a further six months to persuade Hartley to leave London, and in the end it was Gillman who carried the day.118

  At the end of June Derwent came down from Cambridge with a fever, which rapidly developed into typhus. For six weeks Coleridge and the Gillmans nursed him night and day, in a tiny top room hired next door to Moreton House.119 Several times he was thought to be dying, and news came that seven other undergraduates at St John’s had been fatally struck down by the epidemic. It was a terrible summer.

  From the wild time at Henley Pest House in 1794 (when he had heroically nursed a fellow-dragoon with smallpox), Coleridge had proved himself fearless and dedicated at a sickbed, and he did not fail his son now.120 Night after night, he kept vigil in Derwent’s bedroom, sponging his face and making him drink water. Sitting by the bedside he made desultory entries in his Notebook by candlelight, “harassed with Hartley’s idiocies” and tortured by the idea of losing his second son. “Tuesday July 1822 – 23rd day of Derwent’s Fever! – God be merciful to me. – Turned a poor (very large & beautiful) Moth out of the Window in a hard Shower of Rain to save it from the Flames!”121

  It seemed to him that both sons were now in mortal danger. He wrote to Hartley urging him to give up the “experiment of trying to maintain yourself by writing for the Press”. He begged him to assert himself in an adult way, and accept the schoolmastership. “To Mr Dawes exclusively you must look and apply yourself. – God bless you! While you live, I will do what I can – what and whether I can, must in the main depend on yourself not on your affectionate father.”122

  Surely one practical thing that Hartley could do, was to come to Highgate and help care for his beloved brother. Hartley did so, for some days, but his vagaries antagonized the Gillmans and the tension between father and son became unbearable. One July afternoon, when Derwent’s fever “trembled in the scales whether he should live or die”, Coleridge and Hartley hurried into London on some errands together.123 What then occurred remained frozen in Coleridge’s mind for the rest of his life.

  Hartley suddenly said he had a debt to pay, borrowed some money from his father, and arranged to meet him again at six o’clock at a shop in York Street. Coleridge called after him, as he later told Allsop, “Hartley! – Six!” Hartley turned back for a moment, and Coleridge had a terrible premonition, “And tho’ he was not three yards from me, I only saw the colour of his face thro’ my Tears!” Then Hartley’s small figure disappeared into the busy crowd. Hartley had run away forever.

  Coleridge and his son never met face to face again. By October 1822 only Hartley’s publisher, Taylor and Hessey, knew where he was (“safe in his friend Mr Jameson’s care”) in London; and by November Hartley had appeared unannounced at Ambleside where John Dawes took him in. Meanwhile Derwent had recovered, and Gillman despatched the exhausted Coleridge to Ramsgate once more.

  From there he wrote to Gillman, still griefstruck and confused, but trying to see his way ahead. “I am still too much under the cloud of past Misgivings, too much of the Stun & Stupor from the recent Peals and Thunder crash still remains, to permit me to anticipate, other than by wishes & prayers, what the effect of your unweariable Kindness may be on poor Hartley’s Mind and Conduct. I pray fervently…that on my own mind and spring of action it will be proved not to have been wasted. I do inwardly believe, that I shall yet do something to thank you, my dear Gillman, in the way in which you would wish to be thanked – by doing myself honour.”124

  Broken images of this terrible loss gradually took the form of a poem, restlessly drafted over many scattered sheets. It is bleakly entitled “The Pang More Sharp Than All: An Allegory”. To Copleston, Coleridge had referred to his son as “a blossom whirling in a May-gale”, a picture of delight that went back to the happiest days at Greta Hall. Now that blossom had blown away: “Like a loose blossom on a gusty night/ He flitted from me…”

  The opening stanza (it has various forms) mourns the experience of paternal loss.

  He too has flitted from his secret nest,

  Hope’s last and dearest child without a name! –

  Has flitted from me, like a warmthless flame,
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  That makes false promise of a place of rest

  To the tired Pilgrim’s still-believing mind; –

  Or like some Elfin Knight in kingly court,

  Who having won all guerdons in his sport,

  Glides out of view, and whither none can find!

  Coleridge explores these images in four further verses, using the Spenserian stanza (with its archaisms) which are characteristic of his later poetry. (“Guerdons” are rewards, or prizes.) Initially they read as if he were holding emotion at arms’ length, using the formal “Allegory” to suppress intense personal feelings. But as with Hamlet, “suppression leads to overflow”. The poem rises to a stanza of great symbolic power and pathos, in which Hartley the “Magic Child” is finally seen to be something within Coleridge himself, some irreducible element of his own imagination, which is still present and alive, though “languishing” and unfulfilled.

  Ah! he is gone, and yet will not depart! –

  Is with me still, yet I from him exiled!

  For still there lives within my secret heart

  The magic image of the Magic Child,

  Which there he made up-grow by his strong art,

  As in that crystal orb – wise Merlin’s feat, –

  The wonderous “World of Glass”, wherein inisled

  All long’d-for things their beings did repeat; –

  And there he left it, like a Sylph beguiled,

  To live and yearn and languish incomplete!125

  ELEVEN

  GLIDE, RICH STREAMS, AWAY!

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  At fifty, prematurely aged but still praeternaturally alive, Coleridge entered a last autumnal period of stock-taking, self-examination and sombre looking back at the “circuitous paths” of his life. Where once he might have written to his son, he now wrote to his “substitute son” Thomas Allsop, in a series of highly emotional and confessional letters. They show the syntactical flood and self-exposure of late-night opium-taking. For the first time since his youthful letters to Tom Poole and John Thelwall written at Stowey in 1797, a quarter of a century before, he described the lack of control in his life, the outpourings of “sensibility” (which he compared to Garrick’s acting), and the “species of Histrionism” which had always driven his friendships. He thought that this had produced his “Eloquence”, his famous unstoppable talk. But sometimes it was not a genuine means of self-expression, but a way of disguising his own feelings from himself. Paradoxically, his talk was – in psychological terms a form of flight and self-escape.

  These self-observations were acute, and gave rise to a memorable Dante-esque image of Purgatorial circles or Piranesi-like labyrinths. “My eloquence was most commonly excited by the desire of running away and hiding myself from my personal and inward feelings, and not for expression of them…I fled in a circle still overtaken by the Feelings, from which I was evermore fleeing, with my back turned toward them…” Here Coleridge’s “Feelings”, with their personalized capital letter, are given very much the role of pursuing “Furies”.1

  He returned to the subject after a long series of walks by the beach. He looked back at a pattern of emotional disasters that, as it seemed to him at this bleak time, had shaped much of his life. He told Allsop that in his past life he counted “four griping and grasping Sorrows, each of which seemed to have my very heart in his hands, compressing or wringing”.

  The first was his alienation from Mrs Coleridge, in the early years at Greta Hall, when “the Vision of a Happy Home sunk for ever”, and he came to realize that he would never achieve domestic happiness at least “under the name of Husband”. The second was his quarrel with Wordsworth in 1810–11. He still evidently felt the bitterness of this, an “idolatrous Fancy” which had filled “the fifteen bright and ripe years, the strong summer of my Life”, and then burst “like a Bubble”.

  The third was the loss of Asra, though she is not specifically named. “What the former (Wordsworth) was to Friendship, the latter was to a yet more intimate Bond – the former spread a wider gloom over the world around me, the latter left a darkness within myself…a Self emptied.”

  The fourth and last sorrow began with Hartley’s loss of Oriel, and the slow revelation of the deceptions and moral weakness of his son. They spread out to the gloomy feeling that he himself had failed as a father, “with the sad conviction that neither of my children thought of or felt towards me as a FATHER, or attributed any thing done for them, to me”. These were painful, profoundly undermining revelations.2

  Yet in a sense they were not new. They had already been faced in his Notebooks, and they had been imaginatively described in his poetry. For this is the dark, autobiographical stratum of pain which glimmers through the “Dejection” ode (1802), “To William Wordsworth” (1807), “Constancy to an Ideal Object” (1805), “Limbo” (1811) and “The Pang More Sharp Than All”. What was new was Coleridge’s capacity to expose them to a young friend like Allsop. Perhaps it meant that they were no longer paralysing, no longer capable of reducing him to real despair. By admitting them, he was in his own way coming to terms with them. Or perhaps it meant that he was growing old.

  To James Gillman, in the calmer letters he wrote at midday, he spoke of the inspiriting fragrance of pine on the sea-breezes, his conquest of snuff, and the prayers he made for Hartley. He was pleased when Lord Liverpool recognized him as he emerged like a Triton, with streaming white locks, from the Ramsgate bathing machine. The Prime Minister accompanied the amphibious poet arm in arm along the East Pier.3

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  But if one sorrow never released Coleridge from its grip, it was surely the fate of his eldest son. Hartley was like his own spirit, a little ghost of himself, his lost youth as a poet, wandering in the hills unappeased. He never wrote to his father, and Coleridge was doomed only to hear of him indirectly through family letters, vague rumours, or heartless literary gossip. By Christmas 1822, Hartley appeared to be settled at Ambleside, though Coleridge was angry that neither Wordsworth in his grand establishment at Rydal Mount, nor Southey in his full occupation of Greta Hall, would consider giving Hartley houseroom during the holidays. Southey had written crisply to Wordsworth: “I think you had better write to Mr Gillman…and remind him, which he seems to have forgotten, that Mrs C. has no establishment in which Hartley can be received.”4 Hartley eventually rented a room at the little Red Lion Inn in Grasmere, and told Derwent that he considered Greta Hall “a House of Bondage”.5

  His schoolmastering continued with some success for the next five years, though he always had trouble maintaining discipline among the younger boys. When John Dawes retired, Hartley became co-partner in a larger teaching establishment at Ambleside, and this venture continued until 1827. But his private life remained solitary and increasingly melancholic: he did not find the wife he hoped for among the farmers’ daughters of the Lake District (as De Quincey had done), and he sought solace in his drinking and his exquisite sonnet-writing, many of them written late at night and addressed to imaginary lovers or girls he had glimpsed on their summer tours. Once he called in at Rydal Mount and “vexed” Dorothy by talking “about suicide in a lax way – said he could not find it prohibited in scripture”. He talked too “in a wild way about destiny, signifying that a man’s actions are not in his own power”.6

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  In as far as he worked at all, Coleridge spent the next two years on preparing his anthology from Leighton, which was eventually published as Aids to Reflection in 1825. But the leisurely round at Highgate did bring other forms of domestic happiness, new family ties, and satisfactory moments of professional recognition. He dined out with an increasingly wide circle of wealthy friends – the Greens, the Tulks, the Aders, the Wranghams – and the reputation of his weekly classes spread among the universities, especially Cambridge.

  Among the flow of young visitors to his parlour at Highgate was his nephew Henry Nelson Coleridge. A tall, florid, intense youth, he was even more in awe of his uncle since the famous weekend at Richmond i
n 1811. In his last year at Eton, Henry had published a long and ecstatic article in the school magazine, “On Coleridge’s Poetry”. He described his uncle, with due solemnity, as “the greatest Genius, in every respect, of the present day”; and concluded that together with Wordsworth, Coleridge had revolutionized “the poetry, the philosophy and the criticism” of English literature over the last thirty years.7 He added that no one should miss the chance of hearing his “extraordinary” conversation, or his sudden magical recitations of his own verse.

  As with many schoolboy articles, this reflected what was already being said in the more advanced sections of the popular press. Even the Examiner had forgotten most of its political quarrels with Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt himself evoked Coleridge as the poet who now spoke most directly to the aspirations of young readers everywhere, of whatever social standing or political persuasion. “Every lover of books, scholar or not, who knows what it is to have his quarto open against a loaf at his tea, to carry his duo-decimo about in his pocket, to read along country roads or even in streets and to scrawl his favourite author with notes…ought to be in possession of Coleridge’s poems…”

  What had once been dismissed by Hazlitt in the same paper as the musical “nonsense” of “Kubla Khan”, was now hailed as the peculiar signature tune of Coleridge’s genius. “‘Kubla Khan’ is a voice and a vision, an everlasting tune in our mouths, a dream fit for Cambuscan and all his poets, a dance of pictures such as Giotto or Cimabue, revived and re-inspired, would have made for a Storie of Old Tartarie, a piece of the invisible world made visible by a sun at midnight and sliding before our eyes. ‘Beware, beware,/His flashing eyes, his floating hair!/ Weave a circle round him thrice…’”8