by Will Durant
To the Grasmere idyl belong some of Wordsworth’s finest lyrics (”To a Butterfly”); the powerful sonnet to Milton; the ode “Resolution and Independence,” chiding his own melancholy; and (between 1803 and 1806) the most famous of all his compositions—”Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Seldom has a philosophic fantasy been so beautifully expressed.
It begins on a somber note about his dimming eyesight: “Turn wheresoe’er I may, / By night or day, / The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” He makes this a symbol of our idealistic visions vanishing with our youth—”Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”—and he wonders may not the helpless miracles that we are at birth have come from a heavenly home whose memory brightens our childhood and fades as we grow:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home;
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;…
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Therefore the poet hails the child as
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage,…
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day…
But even we adults have some dim consciousness of that lost horizon—
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized…
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling ever more.
This is anthropology theologized: the child, still an animal, rejoicing in its animal motions, limbs, and freedom; resenting every garment, prohibition, and restraint; inwardly longing for the freedom of animal life and movement in fields or woods, in seas or the air, and slowly, resentfully losing those liberties as the child becomes adult and the youth submits to civilization. But Wordsworth would have none of this; he was recalling Pythagoras, and hoping to find in him some bridge back to his childhood creed. The aging man seeks the womb of his feelings as of his life.
X. LOVE, LABOR, AND OPIUM: 1800–10
In April, 1800, having completed his assignment with the Morning Post, Coleridge came to Grasmere for a three-week stay with the Wordsworths. Dorothy told him that she had found a pleasant haven for him and his family in a large house called Greta Hall, some three miles out of Keswick. Coleridge went, saw the place in the glory of summer, found in one room a library of five hundred volumes, many of them grist to his mill, and enthusiastically signed the lease. In August, 1800, he took his wife Sara and son Hartley from Nether Stowey to their new home. There, on September 14, Sara gave birth to another boy, whom they named Derwent from a nearby lake and stream. Soon the winter revealed to them their mistake: the cold and rain aggravated Coleridge’s tendencies to asthma and rheumatic fever, and the geographical separation from her relatives deepened the melancholy of his wife, so often left alone by her husband’s wanderings of body and mind.
Frequently he left her to walk the three plus thirteen miles to Keswick and Grasmere to enjoy the stimulus of Wordsworth’s conversation and Dorothy’s affectionate attentions; and only less frequently Wordsworth and Dorothy walked north to brighten Coleridge’s day. In November, 1800, Sara Hutchinson came down from Gallow Hill for a stay of several months with Mary, William, and Dorothy at Dove Cottage; and there Coleridge resumed his pursuit of her. With unintentionally cruel simplicity, he confessed to his wife his love for the second Sara, and asked for permission to love them both. Day by day she retreated from him into motherly cares, and he into his brooding and his books.
He tried to complete the ballad-story “Christabel,” which he had begun in 1797; but he found no “fine frenzy” in him, and left the tale unfinished. Scott and Byron praised it in its manuscript form, and may have taken some hints from it in theme, meter, and mood; finally (1816), at Byron’s urging, Murray printed it. It is a haunting relic of a vanished charm.
After a year at Greta Hall, Coleridge, his health and funds exhausted, felt that he could not survive another winter at the Lakes. He was glad to receive an invitation to join the staff of the Morning Post as an editorial writer. On October 6, 1801, he went to Grasmere to say goodbye; on the 9th Dorothy and Mary walked with him to Greta Hall; on the 10th he left for London, and Mary and Dorothy walked back to Grasmere. Dorothy wrote in her journal: “C. had a sweet day for his ride. Every sight and every sound reminded me of him, dear dear fellow … I was melancholy and could not talk, but at last I eased my heart by weeping—nervous blubbering, says William. It is not so. O how many, many reasons I have to be anxious for him.”53
Arrived in London, Coleridge worked hard writing “leaders,” in which his growing conservatism went well with the policy of the Post, the chief organ of the semiliberal Whigs—anti-ministry but pro-property. He condemned slavery and the “rotten boroughs” (which regularly sent Tories to Parliament), denounced the government for rejecting Napoleon’s offer of peace (1800), and almost ruined Pitt with a merciless analysis of the Prime Minister as a statesman and as a man. However, he defended private property as the necessary base of a progressive but orderly society, and argued that that government is best which makes “each man’s power proportionate to his property.”54 He wrote vigorously and effectively; the circulation of the Post rose substantially during his stay.55 But that year of hectic work contributed to the breakdown of his health. When he returned to Greta Hall (1802) he was physically and morally exhausted—the body ailing, the husband alienated, the lover rejected, the will a slave to opium.
He had begun to take the drug as early as 1791, aged nineteen.56 He used it to quiet his nerves, to reduce pain, to induce sleep, to retard—or conceal from himself—the deterioration of his heart and lungs, perhaps to resign himself to defeat. And when elusive sleep came at last, it became a host to frightening dreams, which he hinted at in “The Pains of Sleep” (1803):
the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me;…
Desire with loathing strangely mixed,
On wild or hateful objects fixed;
Fantastic passions, maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all.57
His notebooks tell of an imaginary people on the moon “exactly like the people of this world in everything except indeed that they eat with their Backsides, and stool in their mouths;… they do not kiss much.”58 Like most of us he had dreams of fear, but in his case so vivid that sometimes he wakened the household with his screams.59
Perhaps his ailments and drugs, though sometimes confusing his thought and weakening his will, opened to him areas and vistas of perception and imagination closed to normal minds. In any case his range of knowledge was unsurpassed in his generation, leaving Wordsworth, in this respect, far behind. He humbled himself before Wordsworth, but Wordsworth could seldom talk about anything but his poems, while Coleridge’s conversation, even in his decay, had a range, vivacity, and interest that impressed Carlyle, and might even have silenced Mme. de Staël. What awed him in Wordsworth was the older man’s concentration of purpose and steadiness of will; Coleridge was more and more substituting the wish for the will and imagination for reality.
He marveled at his modesty, but he was intensely self-conscious, found himself (but in this like Wordsworth and ourselves) the most interesting of all subjects, and was secr
etly and aggressively proud. He called attention to his honesty, his austere moral code, his indifference to money or fame; but he longed for honors, plagiarized happily,60 borrowed money forgetfully, left his wife and children, and allowed his friends to support them. Perhaps opium weakened his sexual capacity, and allowed him to mistake fancy for performance.
In April, 1804, seeking to reduce his asthma and rheumatic fever with the Mediterranean air and sun, he accepted a loan of a hundred pounds from Wordsworth,61 and sailed to Malta, then a crucial but disputed bastion of British power. He took with him an ounce of crude opium and nine ounces of laudanum. On the voyage, May 13, he wrote in his notebook a desperate prayer:
O dear God! give me strength of soul to make one thorough Trial—if I land at Malta / spite of all horrors to go through one month of unstimulated Nature…. I am loving and kind-hearted and cannot do wrong with impunity, but O! I am very, very weak—from my infancy have been so—and I exist for the moment!—Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, Father and God!62
For almost a year he seemed to recover his self-control. In July he was appointed private secretary to Sir Alexander Ball, governor of Malta, and in January, 1805, he was advanced to the more responsible post of public secretary. He worked hard, and revealed surprising powers of judgment and application. Then, after a year of service, he was so exhausted that he relapsed into drug addiction. He left Malta, traveled in Sicily and Italy, and returned to England (1806). By that time he was more than ever dependent upon opium, checking its soporific action with brandy.
On October 26, 1806, he met the Wordsworths at an inn in Kendal. “Never,” wrote Dorothy under that date, “did I feel such a shock as at first sight of him”; so fat that “his eyes are lost” in his swollen face, and only a momentary gleam appeared of the former “divine expression of his countenance.”63 He went on to Keswick, and asked his wife for a separation. She refused. He left her, taking with him son Derwent, six years old. He transferred to his wife his Wedgwood annuity,64 but Josiah Wedgwood withdrew his share of this in 1813. Southey, established in Greta Hall since 1803, took over the care of his sister-in-law. Coleridge was tided over the crisis by a gift of a hundred pounds sent anonymously by his fellow addict De Quincey, and by the lectures that he gave at the Royal Institution in 1808, 1809, and 1810.
In that year the great friendship ended. Its basis had been mutual inspiration to poetry; that ceased when the font of poesy dried up in Coleridge after 1800 through physical weakening, soporific opiates, marital alienation, and enthrallment by philosophy. Wordsworth had encouraged the exchange of Muses by suggesting to Coleridge that his genius favored prose. Coleridge had been offended by learning that all three Wordsworths had cautioned Sara Hutchinson against encouraging his advances. The divergence became a chasm when, in a letter of May 31, 1809, Wordsworth warned Poole not to involve himself too heavily in Coleridge’s new magazine (1809–10), The Friend. “As one of Coleridge’s nearest and dearest friends,” Wordsworth wrote:
I give it to you as my deliberate opinion, formed upon proofs that had been strengthening for years, that Coleridge neither will nor can execute anything of important benefit either to himself, his family, or mankind. Neither his talents nor his genius, mighty as they are, nor his vast information, will avail him anything; they are all frustrated by a derangement of his intellectual and moral constitution. In fact he has no voluntary power of mind whatsoever, nor is he capable of acting under any constraint of duty or moral obligation.65
This is merciless and extreme, but Wordsworth had told Coleridge as much in a letter a few weeks before.66 The matter was made worse when, according to Coleridge, Basil Montagu told him that Wordsworth had advised him not to let Coleridge lodge with him, since Coleridge, by heavy drinking and otherwise, had made himself “a nuisance” at Grasmere.67 Wordsworth later (1812) assured Coleridge that Montagu had misquoted him. Coleridge pretended to accept the explanation, but the broken strings could not be repaired, and the historic friendship died.
XI. COLERIDGE PHILOSOPHER: 1808–17
Perhaps we have exaggerated Coleridge’s collapse; we must note that between 1808 and 1815 he delivered lectures—at Bristol and at the Royal Institution in London—which suffered somewhat from confusion of thought and expression, but impressed such auditors as Charles Lamb, Lord Byron, Samuel Rogers, Thomas Moore, and Leigh Hunt; as if by some spontaneous esprit de corps, these and other scribes came to the support of their maimed compeer. Henry Crabb Robinson, who numbered a dozen English or German notables among his friends, described the third of the London lectures as “excellent and very German.” “In the fourth,” he reported, “the mode of treating the subject was very German, and much too abstract for his audience, which was thin.”68 Coleridge’s accumulation of facts, ideas, and prejudices was too abundant to let him cleave to his announced subject; he wandered wildly but inspired. Charles Lamb, who summarized him in a famous phrase as an “archangel, a little damaged,”69 concluded that it was “enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet.”70
During the years 1815–17, when Coleridge was again nearing a breakdown, he poured his aging conclusions into print. In Theory of Life (1815) he showed a surprising knowledge of science, especially of chemistry, which he knew through friendship with Humphry Davy; but he rejected all attempts to explain mind in physicochemical terms. He called “absurd the notion of [Erasmus] Darwin,… of man’s having progressed from an orang-outang state.”71
In The Statesman’s Manual (1816) he offered the Bible as “the best guide to political thought and foresight.”
The historian finds that great events, even the most important changes in the commercial relations of the world,… had their origin not in the combinations of statesmen, or in the practical insights of men of business, but in the closets of uninterested theorists, in the visions of recluse geniuses…. All the epochforming revolutions of the Christian world, the revolutions of religion, and with them the civil, social, and domestic habits of the nations concerned, have coincided with the rise and fall of metaphysical systems.72
(He may have been thinking of the results of the thoughts of Christ, Copernicus, Gutenberg, Newton, Voltaire, Rousseau.) After a fair summary of the factors that led to the French Revolution, Coleridge concluded that the voice of the people is not the voice of God; that the people think in passionate absolutes, and cannot be trusted with power;73 and that the best road to reform is through the conscience and action of an educated and propertied minority.74 Generally the best guide to right action, in politics as elsewhere, is the Bible, for this contains all the important truths of history and philosophy. “Of the laboring classes more than this is not demanded,” and “not perhaps generally desirable…. But you,… as men moving in the higher classes of society,” should also know history, philosophy, and theology. The antidote to false statesmanship is history, as “the collation of the present with the past, and the habit of thoughtfully assimilating the events of our own age to those of the time before.”75
A Lay Sermon (1817) continued this appeal to the “higher and middle classes” as the best vehicles of sane reform, and as guards against the “sophists and incendiaries of the revolutionary school.”76 But the book recognized some current evils: the reckless swelling of the national debt, a peasantry sinking into pauperism, the labor of children in the factories. Coleridge noted “the folly, presumption, and extravagance that followed our late unprecedented prosperity; the blind practices and blinding passions of speculation in the commercial world, with the shoal of ostentatious fooleries and sensual vices.” He mourned the liability of the new business economy to periodical exaltations and depressions, leading to breakdowns and general suffering.77
He recommended some basic reforms. “Our manufacturers must consent to regulation,”78 especially of child labor. The state should recognize as its “positive ends: 1. To make the means of subsistence more easy to each individual. 2. To secure to each of its member
s the hope of bettering his own condition and that of his children. 3. The development of those faculties which are essential to his humanity; i.e., to his rational and moral being.”79 He called for an organization of the leaders in every profession to study the social problem in the perspective of philosophy, and to offer recommendations to the community; and this “national church should be financed by the state.”80
Coleridge ended his Lay Sermon by conceding to the theologians that no purely lay or secular wisdom can solve the problems of mankind; only a supernatural religion and a God-given moral code can check the inherent cupidity of men.81 Evil is so inborn in us that “human intelligence… alone” is “inadequate to the office of restoring health to the will.”82 He called for a humble return to religion, and to full faith in Christ as God dying to redeem mankind.83
In 1815–16 Coleridge composed or dictated certain “Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions” for use in a projected autobiography. That volume was never completed, and Coleridge published the sketches in 1817 as Biographia Literaria, which is now our most manageable source for Coleridge’s thought in philosophy and literature. It is remarkably coherent and clear, considering that most of it was produced during despondency about his addiction to opium, his accumulating debts, and his inability to provide for the education of his sons.
He began by repudiating the associationist psychology that had once fascinated him; he rejected the notion that all thought is the mechanical product of sensations; these, he now held, give us merely the raw materials which the self—the remembering, comparing, continuing personality—remolds into creative imagination, purposive thought, and conscious action. All our experience, conscious or not, is recorded in the memory, which becomes the storehouse from which the mind—consciously or not—draws up material for the interpretation of present experience and for the illumination of present choices. Here, of course, Coleridge was following Kant. His ten months in Germany had transformed him not only from a poet into a philosopher but from a determinist Spinozist into a free-will Kantian. Here he fully acknowledged his debt. “The writings of the illustrious sage of Königsberg,… more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding.”84
