Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  In the end it was Mary Lamb who convinced Coleridge that he must write to his wife. She believed a separation was inevitable, but she sounded exhausted with the discussions and delays. “You must write here, that I may know you write, or you must come and dictate a letter for me to write to her…but yet a letter from me or you shall go today.” Yet she never regretted his presence, and reminded him that “a few cheerful evenings spent with you serves to bear up our spirits many a long & weary year”.12

  In the event, Coleridge’s letter was subdued and suspiciously practical. He did not speak of a separation as such, but proposed a schedule of work commitments which would quickly bring him back to London. His wife and Hartley could join him if they wished. “On Friday Sennight, please God! I shall quit Town, and trust to be at Keswick on Monday, Sept. 29th. If I finally accept the Lectures, I must return by the midst of November; but propose to take you and Hartley with me, as we may be sure of Rooms either in Mr Stuart’s House at Knightsbridge, or in the Strand. – My purpose is to divide my time steadily between my ‘Reflections Moral and Political grounded on Information obtained during two years Resident in Italy and the Mediterranean’; and the Lectures on the Principles common to all the Fine Arts.” He reminded her of the £110 sent from Malta, spoke of his tenderness to his “dear children” and assured her of his “deep tho’ sad affection” towards her.13

  In the event, Coleridge did not set out for Keswick until 12 October, but from now on he kept his wife regularly informed of his movements, emphasizing the financial importance to both of them of the lecture scheme. One further possibility was a combined series of winter lectures, at both the Royal Institution and the London Institution, which would make “a respectable annuity of perhaps £400 a year”. When he heard that Southey “strongly disapproved” of the scheme, he added indignantly: “Something (he knows) I must do, & that immediately, to get money…And if I should die, as soon as I feel probable, it seems the most likely mode of distinguishing myself so as to leave Patrons for you & my Children.”14

  Perhaps it should have been clear to Sara Coleridge that her husband had come back from the Mediterranean with a new vision of his future. That future lay essentially in London, where he could find work as a writer and some help for his opium addiction. He was not prepared to live permanently with her again at Keswick, but he wanted to see his children, help with their education, and support the whole family with the Wedgwood annuity and his own literary earnings. He wanted the two boys, especially Hartley who had just turned ten years old, to spend time with him and perhaps attend London schools for part of the year. “The opportunity of giving Hartley opportunities of Instruction, he would not otherwise have, weighed a great deal with me.”15 Given the “unconquerable Difference of Temper” which he referred to both in his letters and private Notebooks, it did not seem an unreasonable compromise.16

  The lecture scheme, which both Southey and soon Wordsworth would discourage, was a perfectly realistic one. Public lectures had begun to flourish in the city (itself a wartime phenomenon, like increased newspaper reading) and several new lecture institutions had been founded. Humphry Davy had achieved an extraordinary popular following at the Royal Institution, making Albemarle Street notorious for its traffic jams. The first of his great Bakerian lectures also began at the Royal Society in November 1806. Indeed it was Davy, with his passionate belief in Coleridge’s potential as a public educator, who now sought him out and introduced him to Thomas Bernard, the Committee Member and secretary of the Royal Institution, who was commissioning lecture series on a wide range of arts and science subjects.

  As Coleridge informed his wife on 3 October: “Davy has been for many days urging me, with an eagerness and importunity not common to him, to go with him to Mr Bernard’s at Roehampton…the business is really important.”17 Davy, backed by Stuart, would persist with his encouragement for the whole of the next year, finally bringing Coleridge to the lecture dais in the winter of 1807–8. From then on, public lectures would provide Coleridge with an income, and sometimes even a raison d’être, for more than a decade. Indeed it was lecturing, and the sense of a continuing audience, that may partly have saved Coleridge’s life in the dark years to come.

  4

  Coleridge’s last weeks before the dreaded marital confrontation at Keswick were not entirely spent in prevarication. Sara’s wayward brother, young George Fricker, had turned to Methodism in a crisis of nerves and unemployment after his disastrous adventures at sea. Coleridge introduced him to the kindly Lambs, and wrote him long soothing letters about his faith, and had many patient talks with him. Coleridge was at his best and most tender with lost young men of this kind (as he had shown years before with Hazlitt). He opened his own heart with directness and sympathy. “I am far from surprised that, having seen what you have seen, and suffered what you have suffered, you should have opened your soul to a sense of our fallen nature; and the incapability of man to heal himself. My opinions may not be in all points the same as yours; but I have experienced a similar alteration.”

  His Mediterranean journeys had forced him to “look into himself” in a new way. “Ill health, and disappointment in the only deep wish I ever cherished” had led him to reread the New Testament in a new light. He felt that the proof of God from the design of the natural world, as argued by Paley and other eighteenth-century theologians, was producing “infidels” in the new mechanistic culture. Thinking men needed habitually “to look into their own souls, instead of always looking out, both of themselves and of their nature”.18

  He discussed the Trinitarian view of Christianity, but felt that his own “living Faith” was still uncertain on such questions. “Alas! my moral being is too untranquil, too deeply possessed by one lingering passion after earthly good withheld…to be capable of being that, which its own ‘still small voice’ tells me, even in my dreams, that it ought to be…”19

  His grief over his marriage, and his impossible love for Asra, is evidently referred to in these asides; as well as his guilt over opium. Philosophically it marked the continuation of a long path of religious self-enquiry which would culminate in the Aids to Reflection twenty years later. George Fricker responded by joining in the search for his sea-box at Wapping.

  The time was also used to renew his contacts with Thomas Clarkson, the evangelical who was writing a history of the slave trade. This, too, produced some striking reflections on religious matters. When Coleridge finally set out for Keswick, he immediately broke his journey at Clarkson’s house at Bury St Edmund’s, and wrote for Clarkson a brilliant 3,000-word essay on the nature of theological belief. Clarkson had set him three fundamental questions: what is God? what is the Soul? and what is the difference between Kantian higher “Reason” (Vernunft) and logical, scientific thought or “Understanding” (Verstandt)?

  Once again, he argued against mechanistic conceptions. God must be considered as a Platonic idea, “the Archetype” of all living things, expressed in a personal trinity whose presence had direct impact on each individual. Otherwise, “God becomes a mere power in darkness, even as Gravitation, and instead of a moral Religion of practical Influence we shall have only a physical Theory to gratify ideal curiosity.” Similarly, the soul must be conceived not as a mechanistic entity, but as a progression “of reflex consciousness” arising through the hierarchy of Nature.

  This idea, clearly developed from his reading in Schelling, would profoundly affect Coleridge’s later grapplings with the scientific theory of evolution. The human soul differed from all other levels of animal consciousness, first by its ability to reflect upon itself, thereby producing a “continuous” moral conscience; but second by its power to be “modified” by other human beings and to move towards some greater unity or spiritual identity. This ultimately mystical idea could be seen as an intensification of his earlier poetic conception of “the One Life”, so beautifully set out in his Conversation Poems and his letters to Sotheby of 1802. It is a vivid mixture of his old Pantheism,
now combined with the traditional Christian doctrine of spiritual unity in the body of Christ.

  Coleridge formulated this in a strikingly untheological way. “A male & female Tiger is neither more or less whether you suppose them only existing in their appropriate wilderness, or whether you suppose a thousand Pairs. But man is truly altered by the co-existence of other men; his faculties cannot be developed in himself alone, & only himself. Therefore the human race not by a bold metaphor, but in sublime reality, approach to, & might become, one body whose Head is Christ (the Logos)”.20 In anthropological language, “the whole Species is capable of being regarded as one Individual”.*

  The essay contained much else, speculative and self-questioning. It was not least remarkable for demonstrating Coleridge’s ability to withdraw into his cave of metaphysics with Olympian calm at the very moment when the crisis of his marriage pressed upon him. Perhaps the image of paired tigers alone betrayed his worldly terrors.

  During Coleridge’s absence in Malta, Clarkson had published his Portraiture of Quakerism, and resumed his campaigning work on the Abolition Committee which sponsored a series of successful bills against the slave trade in 1805–6 championed by Wilberforce. His wife Catherine had become intimate with Dorothy Wordsworth, and now Coleridge also opened his heart to Catherine, remaining with her at Bury St Edmund’s for nearly a week. One result of this stop-over was that Catherine and Dorothy now began a confidential correspondence about Coleridge’s health and marriage which provided an inexhaustible topic for gossip over the next four years.

  Coleridge’s anxieties did not preclude a flying visit to the Newmarket races, where he was particularly struck by the mahoganytopped dicing tables, deeply indented by the circular heels of dice-boxes banged down by the players in their excitement or disappointment, so that the imprinted table-tops were “truly a written History of the fiendish Passions of Gambling”.21 Another expedition took him to Cambridge, the first return since undergraduate days twelve years previously, where the young men all looked just the same in the university pubs and “the only alteration” was in himself. He dropped into Trinity College library, where he found his old Professor of Greek, Richard Porson, who failed to recognize him, though this could have been because Porson was in a “pitiable State” of drunkenness. These visions of excess were not reassuring, and he wondered gloomily what impression he himself would make at Keswick under the penetrating gaze of Southey and Mrs Coleridge.

  5

  On 26 October he finally committed himself to the Carlisle stagecoach. But on the way he formed a plan to find Sara Hutchinson where she was staying at Penrith, before going on to his family at Greta Hall. His legs and face swelled during the journey, as he blanketed himself in opium and brandy. At Penrith, he found that Wordsworth had forestalled him. Sara had left half an hour previously with the whole Grasmere household, who had at last set out for their winter stay at Coleorton. They were now stopping over with friends at Kendal. Notes flew between Penrith and Kendal, Coleridge refusing to go on, and the Wordsworths refusing to go back, hampered by their trunks and three small children. It was a chaotic reunion. In the end Coleridge appeared at Kendal at seven in the evening, but took rooms at an inn in a curious gesture of independence, bidding William to join him for supper. Of course they all came hurrying round at once.

  They had been apart for nearly three years. Coleridge the Romantic traveller, Coleridge the imagined confidant of the Prelude, Coleridge the tragic exile, had grown to mythical proportions in their minds. But it was far from the emotional reunion they had all imagined. He was physically unrecognizable: pallid, overweight, ill at ease, his mind still drifting somewhere in the Mediterranean.

  It was Dorothy who recorded their dismay at the strange, distracted wanderer whom they found in place of their old, long-lost friend. She wrote to Mrs Clarkson: “We all went thither to him and never did I feel such a shock as the first in sight of him. We all felt in the same way…He is utterly changed; and yet sometimes, when he was in animated conversation concerning things removed from him, I saw something of his former self. But never when we were alone with him. He then scarcely ever spoke of anything that concerned him, or us, or our common friends nearly, except we forced him to it; and immediately he changed the conversation to Malta, Sir Alexander Ball, the corruptions of government, anything but what we were yearning after…that he is ill I am well assured, and must sink if he does not grow more happy.” Only once or twice did Dorothy catch a shadow, a transitory gleam, of that “divine expression of his countenance” they all remembered.22

  They remained with him from Sunday evening till Tuesday morning; “his misery has made him so weak”. They supported his plan to separate from Mrs Coleridge, though fearing he would never have the resolution to go through with it. Wordsworth criticized the London lecture scheme, and offered instead to cancel the whole Coleorton plan and rent a large house near Hawkshead so they could all winter together again in the Lakes. Coleridge in turn rejected this, as compromising all hope of financial independence. Finally Wordsworth sent his whole party on to Leicestershire, and remained behind for a third night at the inn alone with Coleridge.

  Alone, that is, except for Sara Hutchinson, who also stayed behind unchaperoned with the two men. This was an unconventional move, with some risk of scandal. There is no record of what the three of them discussed or decided on that momentous night of 29 October 1806 at Kendal, but it was to affect Coleridge’s life for the next four years. One immediate result was that, despite all his resolutions and reflections in Italy, Coleridge found that he was still desperately in love with Asra, and he believed the feeling was reciprocated.

  He later entered in his Notebook what was perhaps his most open declaration of love for Asra; and not merely love, but undeniable sexual passion: “I know, you love me! – My reason knows it, my heart feels it; yet still let your eyes, your hands tell me; still say, O often & often say, ‘My Beloved! I love you’; indeed I love you: for why should not my ears, and all my outward Being share in the Joy – the fuller my inner Being is of the sense, the more my outward organs yearn & crave for it. O bring my whole nature into balance and harmony.”23

  Wordsworth’s role as friend and confidant, and go-between with Asra, is not entirely easy to understand. His private letters (as well as Dorothy’s) certainly show that he believed Coleridge’s marriage was already wrecked, and that he alone could provide the stable household that could bring Coleridge’s drinking and opium-taking under control. “If anything good is to be done for him, it must be done by me.”24 But he also wanted Coleridge’s help and advice with The Prelude, and perhaps unconsciously did everything he could to forestall Coleridge’s embarking on a new literary career in London.

  Sara Hutchinson thus became crucial to the future life Wordsworth envisioned for Coleridge, as the one woman, besides his own sister Dorothy, who could respond to Coleridge’s emotional needs. But was Wordsworth prepared for Sara to become Coleridge’s mistress under his own roof at Coleorton? Or did he believe that Sara herself really wished this? It is very hard to tell. Certainly Coleridge himself would soon be agonizing over his friend’s ambiguity in these matters.

  Sara Hutchinson’s own feelings remain as mysterious as ever, though there are some clues. She would write to Coleridge from Coleorton, but these letters have all been destroyed. She evidently shared Dorothy’s sense of shock at Coleridge’s physical appearance and emotional disarray. It seems that she was still deeply attached to him, admired him, and wished to help him as far as possible. But it would gradually emerge that his physical passion was not requited. During Coleridge’s long absence in the Mediterranean, she had settled into an increasingly domestic role in Wordsworth’s household, caring for the Wordsworth children, and sharing with Dorothy the arduous role of Wordsworth’s secretary and amanuensis. As Coleridge would soon discover, she had become less of a free spirit and more of a universal aunt, relied on for her wit and practicality, and dedicated to Wordsworth himself. The
death of John Wordsworth had not freed her as Coleridge supposed, but drawn her more tightly into the family circle. His “Moorish maid” – like his Abyssinian maid – had disappeared.

  Perhaps they all felt, in their genuine anxiety to help their old friend, that they could “manage” his passion as they could manage his brandy-drinking and opium-taking. This at any rate was what Dorothy seemed to imply in a long, circumspect letter to Lady Beaumont, describing in great detail the breakdown of his health and his marriage: “if he is not inclined to manage himself, we can manage him…”25 The repeated emphasis on “managing” did not bode well. Yet all agreed that the great object was to get Coleridge safely to Coleorton, and it was with this promise that Wordsworth and Asra continued south, and Coleridge turned his face, if not his heart, towards Keswick again.

  6

  Coleridge arrived at Greta Hall on 30 October 1806. He had been away for very nearly three years, but the children at least – Hartley, Derwent and little Sara – greeted him with raptures. Derwent, then six, remembered years later the excitement, and how he had surrendered his pillow to make his father’s bed comfortable: “I would lie on a straw for my father”.26 Sara Coleridge seemed welcoming, and bustled around him as though he were an invalid. Southey greeted him with cordiality, but very much as the master of the house. For a few days there was something like harmony, and long talks about his adventures in the Mediterranean. But the moment Coleridge raised the question of separation, all the old antagonisms burst out, and for night after night there were scenes of “outrageous passions”, exactly as Coleridge had feared, and indeed as he must have expected.