This, like many of De Quincey’s colourful reconstructions (which he first published in Tait’s Magazine in the year of Coleridge’s death), has been largely doubted. But it seems quite possible, given the confessional tone of Coleridge’s Notebooks at Coleorton and Stowey, and the openness with which he increasingly talked to the younger generation, far less censorious than his own contemporaries. Certainly, after his return to Bristol, De Quincey soon put in hand two schemes which were of immense practical aid to Coleridge. The first was to use £500 of his family inheritance as an “anonymous” long-term loan to Coleridge through Joseph Cottle. The second was to offer himself in Coleridge’s stead as an escort to Mrs Coleridge and the children when they eventually returned, as now planned, to Keswick.
In retrospect one might accuse De Quincey of “buying” his way into the Lake District circle. Yet he was only twenty-two, and the awed tone of his letters at this date (especially to Wordsworth) suggest genuine and idealistic hero-worship. He spoke of himself as one “who bends the knee” before them. “And I will add that, to no man on earth except yourself,” he wrote to Wordsworth, “and one other (a friend of yours), would I thus lowly and suppliantly prostrate myself.”97 After that first meeting at Bridgwater, De Quincey rode back the same night to Bristol, forty miles along the turnpike road under the stars, thinking rapturously of “the greatest man that has ever appeared”.98
13
By August, Coleridge was blessedly alone with Poole at Stowey, and a note of bucolic and unaccustomed content crept into his difficult convalescence. “The Hayfield in the close hard by the Farm House: babe, and totterer little more; old cat with her eyes blinking in the Sun, & little kittens leaping and frisking over the Hay-lines.”99
Coleridge made long notes on the planting of oak trees for the new generation, on the cultivation of sunflowers, and the predicting of weather. He walked with Poole to see the Cruikshanks at Enmore, to see Brice at Aisholt, and the fishermen at Combwich. He dined with Lord Egremont, and drank mead all night with Brice, explaining that “the second bottle became associated with the idea, & afterwards with the body, of S.T.C. – by necessity of metaphysical Law”.100
He attended the opening of the Female Friendly Society of Stowey (another of Poole’s philanthropic foundations, like the Stowey Bank) and unblushingly supplied the motto for its banner: “Foresight and Union, linked by Christian Love”.101 He wrote comic verses on their “georgo-episcopal Meanderings” (a combination of Virgilian nature-rambling and stately pilgrimage) which were so slow and digressive under Poole’s guidance, stopping at every field-gate and hill-top, that Coleridge claimed they would avoid Purgatory because “the Last Day will have come” before they arrived anywhere. Their circuitous routes would require “a new road Map of the country” between Stowey and the sea.102
Coleridge even imagined settling in some perfect farmhouse in the Quantocks, which would contain among other things “two Staircases” at each end of the building to aid domestic harmony, and a brewhouse, a dairy, a cellar, a pigsty, and a “Palace of meditation” for his poetry.103 “We set Spies and Watches on the Sun,” he wrote thoughtfully. “We make Time give an account of itself, & shall we not give an account of Time?”104
All this while the opium struggle continued. Coleridge listed medical compounds for enema injections, and invented a new dilute laudanum solution using five pounds of quince juice to a quarter of a pound of opium, infused with a spice cocktail of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and saffron to aid digestion. “When in Malta, I might easily have tried it with Lemon Juice, instead of Quinces.”105
There were of course moments of strain, even with Tom Poole: on one occasion a row about Coleridge’s “unreasonable expectation” of being supplied with pen and ink; on another a “warm conversation” about miracles.106 No doubt opium lay behind these. When urged by Poole to “exert himself”, Coleridge replied with his old image of the eagle bidding the “Tortoise sunward soar”, which Poole meticulously noted and filed without comment.107
But in fact Coleridge was secretly writing poetry again. One fragment, “A Dark Sky” (Coeali Ennarant) suggests agonizing religious doubts, as he sat one night in Poole’s garden watching the stars overcome by racing storm-clouds. Those stars, once so friendly and companionable in the days of “Frost at Midnight”, now seemed like a “conven’d conspiracy of spies” winking out some message of doubt and betrayal. The book of Heaven, in which he had promised Hartley one could read God’s message of comfort and benevolence, now seemed blank and cruel:
No constellations alphabet the sky:
The Heavens one large Black Letter only shew,
And as a child beneath its master’s blow
Shrills out at once its task and its affright –
The groaning world now learns to read aright,
And with its Voice of Voices cries out, O!”108
The harsh, metaphysical nature of this poem (drawing its image from the old Black Letter Bible which Coleridge recalled from his own painful schooldays under Bowyer) set the tone for much confessional poetry to come. But another more tender piece, “Recollections of Love” also took Coleridge back to more soothing memories of the early Quantock days, now infused with thoughts of Asra which haunted him like half-heard music.
Eight springs have flown, since last I lay
On Quantock’s healthy hills,
Where quiet sounds from hidden rills
Float here and there, like things astray,
And high o’er head the sky-lark shrills.
No voice as yet had made the air
Be music with your name; yet why
That asking look? that yearning sigh?
That sense of promise every where?
Belovéd! flew your spirit by?109
The song-like beauty and simplicity of this poem also hides a complex metaphysical speculation about the nature of time in matters of the heart. It is entitled “Recollections”, but it is equally about anticipations of love. For Coleridge, Asra’s “spirit” already inhabited the hills and streams of the Quantocks in 1799. Emotional time stretched and flowed and doubled-back, fluid like a river, linking spots of happiness in a mysterious present-tense of place and season. “My Felicity”, Coleridge wrote in another Notebook fragment, was “Like Milk that…in its easy stream Flows ever…in the Babe’s murmuring Mouth”.110
In returning to his old rambles over the Quantocks, crossing and recrossing the familiar tracks and combs, he was almost physically re-weaving the network of his youthful happiness, like a spider re-making a web of sights, sounds and associations:
…Time drew out his subtle
Threads so quick, That the long
Summer’s Eve was one whole web,
A Space on which I lay commensurate –
For Memory & all undoubting Hope
Sang the same note & in the selfsame
Voice…111
The richness of the Quantocks’ earth at harvest-time made him grateful to “magna mater, Diana multimammalia” – the great Mother, Diana the many-breasted.112 Yet Time was still fleeting, a perilous river on which all human achievements of outward form were swept away. The counter-speculation, as old as Heraclitus, produced a series of “Kubla Khan”-like prose fragments which answered the lyric poetry in a grander, more openly philosophical manner. “Our mortal existence a stoppage in the blood of Life – a brief eddy in the everflowing Ocean of pure Activity…who beholds Pyramids, yea, Alps and Andes (giant Pyramids the work of Fire) raising monuments like a generous Victor, o’er its own conquests, tombstones of a world destroyed – yet, these too float adown the Sea of Time, & melt away, Mountains of floating ice.”113
Lying on his back in the Quantocks’ heather, gazing up at the English sky, Coleridge recalled his Malta meditations on the eternal blue of the Mediterranean, and reached towards some answering impulse in himself. “O I could annihilate in a deep moment all possibility of the needlepoint pinshead System of the Atomists by one submissive G
aze!…Thought formed not fixed, – the molten Being never cooled into a Thing, tho’ begotten into the vast adequate Thought.”114 All these meditations on Time and Form, Love and Perception, would gradually be brought to bear on the nature of the poet’s Imagination – “whose essence is passionate order” – which he would explore in the long-planned lectures of 1808.
If Poole thought Coleridge was not “exerting” himself this summer, one might ask how much hard work a writer may do lying on a hill in the sun.
THREE
THE LECTURE SHIRT
1
Coleridge did not lie undisturbed for very long. At the end of August 1807, Poole received an urgent letter from Davy on the subject of the lectures in London. “The Managers of the Royal Institution are very anxious to engage him; and I think he might be of material service to the public, and of benefit to his own mind, to say nothing of the benefit his purse might receive. In the present condition of society, his opinions in matters of taste, literature, and metaphysics must have a healthy influence; and unless he soon becomes an actual member of the living world, he must expect to be brought to judgment ‘for hiding his light’…”1
This time there was no Wordsworth to dissuade him, and no Asra to distract him (though both had been the subject of painful Notebook entries at Stowey, one of them about the bedroom incident, ending “Awakened from a dream of Tears, & anguish of involuntary Jealousy, 1/2 past 2…”).2
Coleridge wrote back to Davy with surprising promptitude on 9 September, accepting the proposal on a revised plan. After helpful discussions with Poole, he had decided to abandon the visual art aspect of the lectures (his Mediterranean materials still lying marooned with Stoddart at Malta) and to concentrate purely on the literary side. His subject would be “the Principles of Poetry”. He would try to do something largely new in English criticism: to isolate and define the psychology of the creative imagination on systematic, philosophical grounds.
He would illustrate his theory with a grand sweep through the history of English literature: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope and the Moderns. Everything would be subordinated to his central concept, elaborated over many years, of the dynamic connection between the structure of poetry and the structure of the human mind. “In the course of these I shall have said, all I know, the whole result of many years’ continued reflection on the subjects of Taste, Imagination, Fancy, Passion, the source of our pleasures in the fine Arts in the antithetical balance-loving nature of man, & the connections with moral excellence.”3
At the heart of Coleridge’s thesis would emerge a concept of the poetic imagination which acted as a single unifying force within all creative acts. This idea, which was to become a defining doctrine of Romanticism, may well have been partly triggered by Davy’s own scientific theories about the nature of energy and matter, which he too was exploring that autumn at the Royal Society in a series of brilliant lectures and demonstrations. Coleridge wrote later that Davy’s “own great discovery, of the identity of electricity and chemical attraction”, had opened the way to a unified theory of energy in the universe. “Davy supposes that there is only one power in the world of the senses; which in particles acts as chemical attractions, in specific masses as electricity, & on matter in general, as planetary Gravitation…When this has been proved, it will then only remain to resolve this into some Law of vital Intellect – and all human Knowledge will be Science and Metaphysics the only Science.”4
This was an early premonition of the modern physicist’s search for a “Grand Unified Theory” applicable to the entire cosmos. Coleridge’s fascination with the idea of “the one power in the world of the senses”, led him to seek for an equivalent unifying dynamic within the human mind, the “one power” of Imagination. Certainly it encouraged him to believe that his “experimental” knowledge of poetry, and his endless private reflections in the Notebooks on his own mental processes, were no longer to be lost or wasted, but could be mounted into a general body of critical theory. This belief that all was not lost, that he still had a role to play as a poet and thinker, and that his light might not in the end be hidden, proved one of the most sustaining visions of his life. Out of all his dark sufferings and failures, some brightness might still be salvaged. As he observed of a battered peacock picking quietly around Tom Poole’s yard: “The molting Peacock with only two of his long tail-feathers remaining, & those sadly in tatters, yet proudly as ever spreading out his ruined fan in the Sun & Breeze.”5
Much of the rest of Coleridge’s long and grateful letter to Davy was, of course, a lament over his troubles – among which Mrs Coleridge and the Ottery family débâcle featured in “wearying Detail”, and his own “bodily derangement” with a medical exactitude that nonetheless excluded opium. The decision to send his wife and children back to Keswick is given without regret, and one wonders how Coleridge had explained this to Hartley, the abrupt end to his “annus mirabilis” with his father. Perhaps this was one of the “far crueller Calamities” that he did not explain to Davy either.
But in general Coleridge felt his time in the Quantocks had been immensely restoring. He had received “such manifest benefit from horse exercise, a gradual abandonment of fermented & total abstinence from spirituous liquors, & by being alone with Poole & the renewal of old times by wandering about among my dear old walks, of Quantock & Alfoxden, that I have now seriously set about composition…”6
Work in hand still included the Mediterranean “Travels”, though the Longman two-volume edition of “all my poetic scraps” would be held over – as it turned out for nearly a decade. It was his serious determination “not to give a single Lecture till I have in fair writing at least one half of the whole course”. Either at Stowey, or at Bristol, he began a new Notebook7 which sketched out his preliminary themes, especially with reference to Shakespeare’s “endless activity of Thought” as the primary example of “poetic Power” exercised through language.8
Coleridge returned to Bristol in late September, hoping to be with Davy in London by the end of the month, where concentrated work could begin. But first he had to arrange for his family’s departure north, which instantly revived all the old frictions. Here young De Quincey’s reappearance as willing acolyte at College Street smoothed Coleridge’s passage. Sara Coleridge, writing privately to Poole (as she would do increasingly in coming years), gave her own wifely account of Coleridge’s exasperating behaviour. “When he at length joined us in Bristol in such excellent health and improved looks, I thought of days ‘lang syne’ and hoped and prayed it might continue. Alas! in three or four days it was all over. He said he must go to town immediately about the Lectures, yet he stayed three weeks without another word about removing, and I durst not speak lest it should disarrange him. Mr De Quincey, who was a frequent visitor to C. in College Street, proposed accompanying me and the children into Cumberland, as he wished much to pay Wordsworth and Southey a visit. This was a pleasant scheme to me…”9
Sara’s brisk practicality, which affords no mention of Coleridge’s profound professional doubts or deep anxieties about the future of those children, suggests the gulf of misunderstanding which now divided husband and wife. Yet her impatience at Coleridge’s apparent vagaries – was it really the husband or the wife who “durst not speak” about the departure? – also suggests at a deeper level some abiding, loyal affection. For her it is evident that the “separation” could not easily be acknowledged, and this too was to remain a source of pain and resentment.
Coleridge’s delay in Bristol was partly caused by the delicate negotiations, undertaken through Cottle, over De Quincey’s anonymous loan, which continued through October. Coleridge was concerned that his “unknown Benefactor” should not “transgress” his other duties; and also wanted his identity revealed “at the expiration of one year”. De Quincey told Cottle that he was drawing on an expected inheritance of £2,600, at which Cottle urged a lower sum of £300.10 This figure was eventually made over on 12 November.11
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Coleridge was immediately able to pay off his debts to Wordsworth and Sotheby, and for the first time since returning from Italy to look with some calm at his future finances. He was immensely grateful, especially as Cottle had led him to believe that the benefactor was a man of suitable wealth and standing, not an undergraduate mortgaging his prospects. “I must tell you,” Cottle assured him, “that there is not a man in the Kingdom of whom you would rather accept a favour…”12 De Quincey meanwhile delivered Mrs Coleridge to Keswick, and became an immediate favourite with Hartley, Derwent and the Wordsworth children.
The other reason for delay was medical. Coleridge was again suffering from chronic stomach problems – the symptoms, “acrimony in the bowels”, sounds like Irritable Bowel Syndrome brought on by a mixture of stress and opium-taking. On 13 October he walked over to Clifton to consult Dr Beddoes. However, he still did not have the courage to make the full confession of his addiction, as he had determined with Poole at Stowey. The following February he was still resolving “instantly to put myself under Dr Beddoes, & to open to him the whole of my case”.13
In late October, on the very eve of departure, he was taken violently ill with vomiting and diarrhoea, while dining out with friends. “I was therefore a prisoner to the House, which was luckily Mr Morgan’s; where had I been a child or favourite Brother, I could not have received more affectionate attentions and indulgences.”14 Coleridge took up residence on the Morgans’ spare sofa for the next four weeks, where he was deliciously nursed and cosseted. No one outside Bristol – Poole, Davy, Mrs Coleridge, or Wordsworth – heard from him until the end of November.
2
Coleridge’s abrupt disappearance into the bosom of the Morgan household in autumn 1807 was as significant as his descent upon the Wordsworths at Grasmere in 1800. He had discovered a new adoptive family, and all his cuckoo-like propensities were at once aroused. John Morgan was a Bristol lawyer in his early thirties, a one-time pupil of Christ’s Hospital, and a friend of Charles Lamb’s. After practising briefly in the City of London (he seems to have worked at the Blackfriars office of Coleridge’s life assurance company), he had recently married a Miss Mary Brent, the wealthy daughter of a Hatton Garden silversmith. Together the young couple had moved back to an elegant house in St James’s Square, Bristol, where they were joined by Mary’s very attractive younger sister, Charlotte Brent.
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 13
