4
It was now, at last, a propitious time for Coleridge to meet his daughter. After much bustle and preparation at Greta Hall, and an extended coach-journey south, a flustered Mrs Coleridge presented the nineteen-year-old Sara to her father at Highgate in January 1823. She also showed her off to the Beaumonts, and various relations, so it became Sara’s coming-out season in London. She was a striking success. Sara dazzled everyone by her sylph-like beauty – “the little sylph of Ullswater” – and astonished them with her bookishness.
She delighted Coleridge by shyly presenting him with a copy of her first publication. It was a work of alarming scholarship, translated in three volumes from the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer, describing the “Equestrian People of Paraguay”, and issued by Murray. Charles Lamb wondered admiringly how the beauteous and frail-looking Sara had “Dobrizhoffered it all out…thro’ that rugged Paraguay mine”.9
Coleridge found her “a sweet and delightful Girl”, but he was much restrained by his wife’s presence. He took every opportunity to peer into Sara’s book, and retreat to his bedroom. The day was saved by handsome Henry Coleridge, who made a dashing walk across the Heath in a rainstorm to greet them, arriving soaked and glamorous on the Highgate doorstep (much as his uncle used to do in the old days at Grasmere). Henry was excessively charming to his provincial aunt, and quietly amusing to his clever cousin. A flurry of operas, exhibitions and dinner parties followed with the other young Coleridges.
Henry had fallen beneath a double spell at Highgate. He began making notes of his uncle’s conversation, and these would grow into an entire volume of Table Talk, eventually published in 1835. The earliest entries from 1823 remind one of Keats’s experience of Coleridge’s “thousand subjects”, from philosophical topics to excruciating puns. Henry noted talk of Shakespeare’s Othello and Hamlet – the House of Commons – Plato – Byron – ghost stories – the Book of Genesis – and the tale of a tinker’s boy calling at Moreton House asking for “any old poets” (it turned out that he meant “any old pots”), Coleridge’s Delphic humour including the observation that “Snuff was the final cause of the human nose”.10
But this enchantment was accompanied by another, “the “sufficiently tempting” lips of that “lovely creature” Sara. Within a few days Henry had fallen deeply in love, and he soon suspected that his passion was returned. How far the unworldly glow of his uncle’s reputation had lit up his daughter’s “perfectly proportioned figure” is not clear. But unlike so many Coleridgean affairs of the heart, this one was destined to be genuine, requited and enduring. By March, when Sara and her mother left to visit the Ottery Coleridges, Henry was certain of her affections. They exchanged a secret and solemn vow of engagement, and Henry recorded quietly in his diary that Sara had given him two ringlets of her hair. On their last morning together, Sara made the heart-stopping gesture of taking a coral necklace warm from her neck and placing it in Henry’s hands.11
The literary lovers were not to be united for another six years, but from now on Henry’s sense of himself as Coleridge’s disciple and future son-in-law never wavered. In 1825 he would even go abroad to the West Indies, and write his own book about his travels, to prove his worth and the enduring nature of his commitment. (He disguised his romance with Sara as a folktale.) Coleridge himself took some time to realize what passions had been started under his own roof. “You will wonder at my simplicity”, he remarked to Ann Gillman in 1826. She, of course, had long been au courant.12
His only regret was that he had not been let into the secret earlier. He worried whether first cousins could respectably marry, and that he had “no fortune” to leave them as a dowry. “As a friend, I was ready to give them my best advice…but as a Father, I had only my Prayers and my Blessings to give.” Like all fathers, too, he felt that no man, not even Henry, was really quite worthy of his daughter. But his soul shrank from “the thought of my only Daughter – & such a daughter – condemned to a miserable Heart-wasting”.13 In return, Coleridge was given the most faithful editors and defenders of his work in the next generation.*
In many ways Sara was more like her father, and understood him far better, than either of his sons. When she later embarked on his massive and disorderly collection of papers, she wrote that she was rediscovering him in her own heart. “I feel the most complete sympathy with my father in his account of his literary difficulties. Whatever subject I commence, I feel discontent unless I could pursue it in every direction to the farthest bounds of thought, and then, when some scheme is to be executed, my energies are paralysed with the very notion of the indefinite vastness which I long to fill. This was the reason my father wrote by snatches. He could not bear to complete incompletely, which everybody else does.”15
5
Coleridge found himself increasingly lionized among his old friends in London. In April 1823, John Monkhouse gave a splendid dinner party which Crabb Robinson and Lamb attended, with a few other luminaries. Lamb recorded the occasion in his best style. “I dined in Parnassus, with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Rogers, and Tom Moore – half the poetry of England constellated and clustered in Gloucester Place! It was a delightful evening. Coleridge was in his finest vein of talk, had all the talk, and let ‘em talk as evilly as they do of the envy of the Poets, I am sure not one there but was content to be nothing but a listener. The Muses were dumb, while Apollo lectured on his and their fine Art.”16
Crabb Robinson noted that “the five wandering bards” got on splendidly round the table, and that now Coleridge “chiefly talked to” Wordsworth, and was not inhibited by Sara Hutchinson’s presence. He had not seen him in “such excellent health and spirits” for years. Lamb whispered that Coleridge “ought not to have a wife or children; he should have a sort of diocesan care of the world, no parish duty”. Later, in his cups, he said that he wanted to take Coleridge and Asra away on a little trip together to the seaside, but he was sure Gillman would not allow it. “I have a malicious knack of cutting of apron strings.”17
6
In the autumn, still working on the Aids to Reflection, Coleridge was back in Ramsgate, and completed his poem “Youth and Age”. As if to hold time back, he carefully dated the manuscript in his Notebook, “Wednesday Morning, 10 o’clock, 10 Sept. 1823”.18 He recorded how the “air” of the poem had come to him like a sudden gift, which recalled a walk thirty years before over the Quantocks. On that occasion he had stopped to listen to a skylark, and a bumblebee had unexpectedly “whizzed’ close by his ear, “at once sharp and burry, right over the Summit of Quantock, at earliest Dawn”. That was how the tune of the poem had come to him now.
Skilfully he fitted the image of the bee, of the steamboats effortlessly plying in the Thames estuary, and of his own clumsy steps and white hair in old age, together into a kind of halting dance movement or minuet. Some of his rejected phrases are as moving as the final ones: his body was “This snail-like House, not built with hands”; and the bee tune was originally tried out as, “Hope’s a Breeze that robs the Blossoms/ Fancy feeds on…”19 The dance plays poignantly, and with great psychological acuity, with the idea of age as a form of charade, dressing-up, or grotesque fancy-dress:
O Youth! For years so many and sweet,
’Tis known, that Thou and I were one,
I’ll think it but a fond conceit –
It cannot be that Thou art gone!
Thy vesper bell has not yet toll’d: –
And thou wert aye a masker bold!
What strange disguise hast now put on,
To make believe, that thou art gone?
I see these locks in silvery slips,
This drooping gait, this altered size:
But Spring-tide blossoms on thy lips,
And tears take sunshine from thine eyes!
Life is but thought: so think I will
That Youth and I are housemates still.20
On his fifty-first birthday, he noted: “Were I free to do so, I feel as if I could compose the th
ird part of Christabel; or the Song of her Desolation.”21
7
John Murray rejected a first version of the Aids to Reflection manuscript, but it was immediately taken on by Taylor and Hessey. They did not press him for a deadline, but encouraged him to expand his own Commentaries on Archbishop Leighton.22 The effect was immediately apparent when, after a delightful “Swimlet Bath”, he wrote what was to become for Victorian readers one of the crucial “Aphorisms” concerning intellectual doubt and religious truth.
Leighton had written: “Men that know nothing in sciences, have no doubts…Never be afraid to doubt, if only you have the disposition to believe, and doubt in order that you may end in believing the Truth.” Coleridge interpreted this as follows. “He, who begins by loving Christianity better than the Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.”23 J. S. Mill would later cite this as central to his notion of liberalism, adding his own aphorism to Coleridge’s. “Imputations of horrid consequence ought not to bias the judgement of any person capable of independent thought.”24
This accumulating structure of short, linked commentaries (to which the reader was invited to add his own, in a kind of intellectual chain-letter) became the highly unusual form of the Aids to Reflection. It was one more variation of the Coleridgean idea of the “friendly” conversation: an exchange that passed continually back and forth between Leighton, Coleridge and his reader.
His central concern now was the validity of religious belief within the context of early nineteenth-century scientific thought. He believed passionately that the two could co-exist. Coleridge wanted his readers to reject the scepticism of the Enlightenment. But he urged that calm and serious reflection on man’s place in nature led logically to a belief in the divine which was wholly compatible with scientific rationalism. It included it, but necessarily moved beyond it. His full title – Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion – was representative of this position.
The word “Manly” struck a deliberate chord. It would be easy to link this with the later Victorian developments of “muscular” Christianity, with its emphasis on revivalism, philanthropy, robust ethical simplicities and virtuous cold baths. But this was hardly Coleridge’s style. He emerged from this sportive sea bathing with a wholly different emphasis. For him a “manly” outlook was absolutely opposed to “the pugnacious dogmatism of partial Reflection”. To be manly was to be fully aware of the mysteries of the human condition, to avoid intellectual cowardice and spiritual blindness, to look on all things with “a patient, manly, and impartial perusal”.25
He arranged the anthology in three parts, rather like The Friend, but without “Amusements” interposed. These were: one, “Prudential Aphorisms”; two, “Moral and Religious Aphorisms”; and three, “Aphorisms on Spiritual Religion”. Despite the forbidding titles, it was far from being a pious handbook, and contained little discussion of strictly theological issues or any defence of Trinitarian Christianity. Instead there was a good deal of scientific reference, arising from his work with Green and Gillman; and a prolonged examination of the distinction between animal instincts, “rational” understanding, and the higher or “intuitive” reason which culminated in religious faith.
Aphorism 36 from the “Moral” section deals beautifully with Coleridge’s favoured theme of “the Ascent of Powers” in nature. It grapples prophetically with the idea of evolution, understood as a spiritual force of expanding moral consciousness. “And who that hath watched their ways with an understanding heart, could, as the vision evolving, still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal Bee; the home-building, wedded, and divorceless Swallow; and above all the manifoldly intelligent Ant tribes, with their Commonwealths and Confederacies…and not to say himself, Behold the shadow of approaching Humanity, the Sun rising from behind, in the kindling Morn of Creation? Thus all lower Natures find their highest Good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher and better. All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. And shall man alone stoop?”26
A parallel entry, Aphorism 9 of the final “Spiritual” section, begins with the notion of “wonder” as central to all philosophical thought, and continues with an examination of instinct in dogs and the dawning of moral values in the natural kingdom. Why will a dog defend, and even avenge, its master? “Here the Adaptive power co-exists with a purpose apparently voluntary, and the action seems neither predetermined by the organization of the Animal, nor in any direct reference to his own preservation, or to the continuance of his race. It is united with an imposing semblance of Gratitude, Fidelity, and disinterested Love. We not only value the faithful Brute: we attribute worth to him.”27*
The poet and the enthusiast of Naturphilosophie are both evident in these entries, driven by the uplifting rhetoric of Coleridge’s late style of benign sermonizing. A highly original book was emerging, whose open speculative manner – the sage at his most genial and relaxed – would have great and unexpected appeal.
8
While Coleridge was away at Ramsgate during the autumn of 1823 James Gillman moved house to No. 3 the Grove, in Highgate. It was a fine three-storey brick Georgian residence, set back from a gravelled alley of chestnut trees on the eastern flank of Hampstead Heath. The move indicated that his medical practice was flourishing, and that the ménage with Coleridge was secure. Gillman gave him the finest upper room, a large attic bedroom, to which he later added an extension looking westwards across the Heath to Caen Wood. Reached by a fine oak staircase, this became his final home, an airy retreat fitted out with a long wall of bookshelves and decorated with portraits of his family and friends, the picture of Sara having pride of place. On his working table he kept pots of plants, especially a myrtle which he had described in a poem as the symbol of love lost and found.28
When he had moved to Greta Hall, so long ago in 1800, he had been delighted to discover that the building once housed an astronomical observatory, and he described himself gazing from the roof as “S. T. Coleridge Esq., Gentleman-poet and philosopher-in a-mist”.29 Now again, when he stood at his high west-facing window, he had the same feeling of transcendence. He often called the Gillmans’ sons up to the window, “if he found some uncommon glory in the evening sky”.30 In the spring of 1824, he was elected to one of the small band of Fellowships at the Royal Society of Literature, with an annuity of 100 guineas. He gave his inaugural lecture on the Prometheus myth.
9
Nonetheless, the move provoked a number of stressful incidents. Ann Gillman came up to say goodnight to Coleridge one evening, and on leaving fell down the stairs and broke her right arm.31 Gillman cut himself while performing an anatomical dissection.32 Coleridge began drawing more heavily on the medical supplies of T. H. Dunn, and in March 1824 settled a large opium bill with the postscript: “I entreat you, be careful not to have any note delivered to me unless I am alone and passing your door.”33
Somehow this alternative supply was now discovered, for unusually Coleridge spent a week away with Thomas Allsop and his young wife and sister, until entreated to return by Mrs Gillman. With her customary acuteness, Ann Gillman may have glimpsed Coleridge about to fly to a new nest. But she called him back with heartfelt feeling: “G. loves you so much, I am sure if things are well arranged matters may be adjusted. And I feel confident that the happiness, perhaps well doing, of all three is concerned, so do not let us two suffer pride or temper to interfere in such a serious affair where there exists so much love.”34
From later remarks of Dunn’s assistant, Seymour Porter, it seems that Ann Gillman went round to remonstrate personally with the obliging Highgate chemist.35 But the enquiry was allowed to drop, and it is clear that, from 1824 onwards, Gillman adopted a policy of deliberately allowing Coleridge a small illicit supply of opium, to be surreptitiously added to the prescribed medical dose. This was an extremely acute method
of dealing with the psychology of Coleridge’s addiction. It allowed him the guilty release of obtaining his own secret supply – an almost unconquerable instinct in the confirmed addict – while in practice restricting the overall dose within reasonable bounds.
Certainly Seymour Porter remained much in favour. When in July 1824 he stood watching Byron’s funeral cortège passing slowly up Highgate Hill, on the long journey from Missolonghi to Nottinghamshire, he found Coleridge standing beside him at the chemist’s door. Porter never forgot the spontaneous funeral oration that Coleridge suddenly poured forth in the middle of the pavement. It was “a strain of marvellous eloquence”, lasting not less than a quarter of an hour, starting with “Byron’s unhappy youth” and going on with great generosity over his whole career up to his climactic death in Greece. Porter was moved by Coleridge’s sense of Byron’s greatness, and his view that the “satanic” reputation was ephemeral. “Byron’s literary merits would seem continually to rise, while his personal errors, if not denied, or altogether forgotten, would be little noticed, & would be treated with ever softening gentleness.”36
10
Coleridge’s popularity in Highgate, now the well-known, white-haired, shuffling sage, spread through the neighbourhood. He was followed by squalls of small boys, and greeted by distinguished matrons. He cultivated a certain eccentricity. When he was caught pulling down branches of blossoms from a neighbour’s garden (an escapade he had favoured as a schoolboy at Christ’s Hospital), he made friends for life with the outraged proprietor, Mrs Chisholm, by sending her an apology in verse, entitled “The Reproof and Reply”.
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 64