Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  The family was vivacious, fun-loving and, as events were to show, improvident. They were also childless, and had much time for books, theatre and pets (one of their favourites being a dog called “Vision”). John Morgan was a sensitive and intelligent man, having been brought up as a Unitarian, and frequently subject to relapses into religious gloom, which Coleridge was able to alleviate. He was to write of Coleridge’s first, momentous residence: “Amongst other obligations to you I feel strongly that of making me able to defend at least in my own mind the Orthodox religion against the Unitarian philosophy.”15

  In return, Morgan had an unshakable admiration for Coleridge’s literary gifts, a deep sympathy for his marital predicament, and an unusual understanding of his opium addiction which seems to have been revealed from the outset of their friendship. Less organizing than Tom Poole, less censorious than George Coleridge, and far less demanding than Wordsworth, John Morgan slipped unconsciously into the role of Coleridge’s ideal and long-sought brother. Loyal, generous and naive, he became Coleridge’s unfailing anchorpoint in the dark years ahead.

  Morgan’s naivety extended from financial to emotional matters. It was never clear quite how far he realized the extraordinary mirror-image that Coleridge projected on to his triangular household. John, Mary and Charlotte became youthful substitutes for Wordsworth, Mary and Asra; and Coleridge orchestrated them into this sentimental pattern with alarming rapidity. When he eventually arrived in London, he wrote immediately to Dorothy Wordsworth of this fateful revelation, sounding both excited and guilty. “I never knew two pairs of human beings so alike, as Mrs Morgan & her Sister, Charlotte Brent, and Mary and Sara. I was reminded afresh of the resemblance every hour – & at times felt a self-reproach, that I could not love two such amiable, pure & affectionate Beings for their own sakes. But there is a time in Life, when the Heart stops growing.”16

  But Coleridge’s heart, and his fantasies, were actually in a most active state. He had started a poem on the subject, and he was already recalling a host of tender moments at St James’s Square: gifts, keepsakes, pet-names and shared jokes. In his mirror-universe, even the famous sofa scene with Mary and Asra at Gallow Hill (the subject of his Keswick poem, “A Day-Dream”) had been re-enacted in Bristol. He would recall it fondly to Mary Morgan, as a token of their new-found intimacy: “that evening, when dear Morgan was asleep in the Parlour, and you and beloved Caroletta asleep at opposite Corners of the Sopha in the Drawing Room, of which I occupied the centre in a state of blessed half-consciousness, as a drowsy Guardian of your Slumbers…”17

  3

  Coleridge finally roused himself from these dreamy delights on 22 November, riding up on the night mail to London, sustained by a wing of chicken and a flask of rum laid in with his lecture papers. “If very, very affectionate thoughts, wishes, recollections, anticipations, can serve instead of Grace before & after meat, mine was a very religious Meal.”18 Daniel Stuart gave him a set of rooms above the Courier offices at No. 348, the Strand.

  His mood was now buoyant. “My Lectures will be profitable – and I have rewritten my play [Osorio] – & about doubled the length of Christabel – 2 thirds are finished.” This latter claim, which seems so definite (especially when added to similar statements of progress at Coleorton) remains one of the great mysteries of Coleridge’s bibliography. No Part III of “Christabel” has ever been found among his papers, except for a possible eleven-line fragment, “The Knight’s Tomb”. Could it have been dreamt in an opium “reverie”, like the missing 250 lines of “Kubla Khan”? or could it – as Osorio so nearly was – have been lost in some “lumber-room” or newspaper wastebin? The possibilities are tantalizing.

  The lectures were due to begin in a fortnight, after Davy’s were complete; but now it was Davy who fell dangerously ill after six weeks of brilliant but exhausting demonstrations, his “March of Glory” as Coleridge called it. (The illness was gaol fever, contracted while inspecting the ventilation problems at Newgate Prison.) The Literary Series was put back to January 1808, and Coleridge beguiled the time by taking Stuart back to Bristol to meet his new supporters, the Morgans, and by publishing his poem in their honour in the Courier.

  The poem was entitled “To Two Sisters, A Wanderer’s Farewell”, and appeared on 10 December under the pen-name “Siesti” (an expressive amalgam of “STC” and “Siesta”). It is openly and even brazenly confessional, describing his longing “for some abiding place of love”, and the Morgans’ soothing tenderness as like the unexpected glow of winter sun “on unthaw’d ice”. It casts himself as a homeless exile, and comes very close to admitting the “poison” of his opium addiction:

  Me disinherited in form and face

  By nature, and mishap of outward grace;

  Who, soul and body, through one guiltless fault

  Waste daily with the poison of sad thought…19

  Coleridge goes on through fifty lines to explore the unsettling comparison between the two sets of women that he had pointed out to Dorothy: “Two dear, dear Sisters, prized all price above,/ Sisters, like you, with more than sisters’ love…” In the younger Morgan household, “My best-beloved regain’d their youth in you”. He ends by imagining all four sitting together round the same peaceful firelit hearth, while he remains apart “in solitude” content to dream of them – “ah: dream and pine!” in proud renunciation of all worldly happiness.

  The sentimentality of the poem, flooded with pain and self-pity, is so powerful that it almost disguises its strange metaphysical argument about the nature of love. The two pairs of sisters are presented as almost literal reincarnations of each other, in “statures, tempers, looks, and mien”. The memory of the one imposes itself, physically, on the vision of the other:

  Sight seem’d a sort of memory, and amaze

  Mingled a trouble with affection’s gaze.

  For Coleridge at this moment, all hopes of love and acceptance seem caught up in a fatal cycle of repetition, the past doomed to re-enact itself in the present.* This pattern, both soothing and imprisoning, suggests some original childlike state of emotional dependence from which he cannot escape. So the undertone of the poem is fretful, reproachful, even angry. One wonders, most of all, what Asra would have made of it, for her love still seems Coleridge’s hidden theme. As he confided to his Notebooks at this time: “It is not the Wordsworths’ knowledge of my frailties that prevents my entire Love of them: No! it is their Ignorance of the Deep place of my Being – and O! the cruel misconception of that which is purest in me, which alone is indeed pure – My Love of Asra…”20

  If this publication was intended as a signal of reproach, or even defiance, to those in the Lake District, it did not go unnoticed. Mrs Coleridge and Southey (who knew Morgan) were indignant; while Dorothy was resigned to his “very unsteady” behaviour in all things.21 The Wordsworths at this very moment were planning their move to Allan Bank, a larger house west of Grasmere around the margins of the lake, partly so Coleridge and his children could be accommodated. But Dorothy did not now think he would have “the resolution” to come north again. Yet she still recognized his incalculable powers of self-renewal: “how Coleridge does rise up, as it were, almost from the dead!”. She hoped his lectures would be of service to him, “especially as his exertions for the cause of human nature (such I may call them) will be animated by his strong sentiments of friendship and veneration for my Brother”.22

  4

  Coleridge was due to begin his weekly lectures on Friday 15 January 1808. He made one more dash to Bristol, came back to attend the noisy celebrations of “a sort of Glee or Catch Club, composed wholly of professional singers – and was much delighted”, and sailed into the Royal Institution the following afternoon at 2 p.m. But there was some bravado in this.

  The Royal Institution, founded by private subscription in 1799, had quickly achieved a prestige second only to the Royal Society’s. Its splendid buildings, with a frontage of fourteen Doric columns, dominated the top end of Albemarle
Street with John Murray’s publishing house at the other (Piccadilly end). Its lecture programmes, originally dedicated to both arts and sciences, achieved international status when Davy began his demonstrations there in 1802, with an increasingly spectacular series of chemical experiments. “The globules often burnt at the moment of their formation, and sometimes violently exploded and separated into smaller globules, which flew with great velocity through the air in a state of vivid combustion, producing a beautiful effect of continued jets of fire.”23 Coleridge hoped to do something similar with verbal pyrotechnics.

  The popularity of the Institution’s lectures so often jammed Albemarle Street with carriages that it eventually became the first one-way thoroughfare in London. The programme of 1808 included Davy on chemistry, Coleridge on poetry, and other experts on botany, architecture, German music, mechanics, and Persian literature.24

  Though dogged by financial difficulties, the Institution’s founder Count Rumford had entirely refurbished the Great Lecture Room in 1802, to become “the most beautiful and convenient in Europe”, with superb acoustics so that even “a whisper may be distinctly heard”. It held up to 500 people in a hemisphere of steeply tiered seats, with a gallery above and a circle of gas lamps, creating an atmosphere both intimate and intensely theatrical. It was a setting that demanded the speakers not merely to lecture, but to perform. (When Sydney Smith lectured on moral philosophy the previous year, it was said that the laughter could be heard outside in the street.) The attention of the audience was sustained by various creature comforts: green cushioned seating, green baize floor coverings, and the latest in central heating systems using copper pipes.

  Albemarle Street was crowded with carriages, and the seats were packed. Coleridge launched into the concept of “Taste” in poetry before a large and attentive audience: “What is there in the primary sense of the word, which may give to its metaphorical meaning an import different from that of Sight or Hearing on the one hand, and of Touch or Feeling on the other?”25 It went well, Coleridge felt, and “made an impression far beyond its worth or my expectation”.

  But on returning to his lodgings in the Strand, he immediately collapsed with sickness and continuous agonizing pain “of Stomach & Bowels”. He postponed the next two lectures – “I disappoint hundreds” – and tried again on Friday, 5 February, but again collapsed with “acrid scalding evacuations, and if possible worse Vomitings”.26

  It was this lecture that De Quincey witnessed, when he came down to London on business for Wordsworth. He reported that Mr Coleridge was “exceedingly ill” and gave only “one extempore illustration” in his talk. But twenty years later his memories of Coleridge at the dais had ripened. “His appearance was generally that of a person struggling with pain and overmastering illness. His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and, in spite of water which he continued drinking through the whole course of the lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower.”

  There was “no heart, no soul” in anything he said. When he failed to appear for any of the remaining lectures in February, Albemarle Street was blocked each Friday with smart carriages and scurrying footmen, as the news of his continued illness first excited “concern” and then increasing “disgust”. The whole series, concluded De Quincey, was an inevitable disaster: ill-prepared, badly illustrated with quotations (except for “two or three, which I put ready marked into his hands”) and unevenly delivered. He later thought no written record of it survived, and implied that Coleridge had offended the Institution managers and did not fulfil his contract.27

  The original contract had specified twenty-five lectures, twice weekly in the winter season, from January to March, for a fee of £140 with a £60 advance. In fact Coleridge eventually delivered twenty lectures, largely postponed to the spring season from 30 March to 30 May, and these De Quincey did not attend. The disaster lay at the beginning, as was perhaps inevitable, for Coleridge had to establish a form of public address which was appropriate to his gifts.

  Coleridge treated the management with great respect and always tried to warn them of impending disruptions to his series through illness. At least one unpublished letter survives in the Institution’s archives, informing the Secretary of his imminent collapse in February – being “unable to stand in a public room” and “most cheerfully” offering to pay for the cost of informing subscribers and advertising the postponement. He also obtained a proper medical opinion of his state. “I have sent for [Dr] Abernethie, & shall learn from him whether this be only an interruption or a final farewell. Either myself or my medical attendant will write to Mr Bernard.”28 A first advance of £40 was given in late February, with an addition of £20 in late April. But the outstanding balance was not settled for over a year, and it was reduced at Coleridge’s own suggestion to a further £60.29

  Coleridge’s collapse into opium at the outset of his lectures suggests that the strain and anxiety of performing in public was much greater than any of his friends had supposed. As he was already famed for his private talk, and had youthful experience of lecturing and preaching in Bristol in the 1790s, Davy and Bernard imagined he would quickly find his feet in front of the Royal Institution audience. But this was not the case. The Royal Institution was not a provincial meeting hall: its large mixed audience from the City and the West End was fashionable, sophisticated and easily bored. Tickets were expensive, expectations were high, and the Institution management required a fully written text to be declaimed in a formal manner.

  Coleridge was alarmed by these requirements, which inhibited his natural lecture style. Far from being unprepared, his notes (for years scattered in the British Library and the New York Public Library) show that he had written out his texts for the two early lectures in numbing detail. He had chosen to begin with relatively conventional eighteenth-century theoretical topics: the aesthetics of Taste and the theory of Imitation, with a complex background of reading in Johnson, Blair, Herder, Dennis, Schlegel and Erasmus Darwin.30 The first lecture, for example, included a 2,000-word citation from Richard Payne Knight’s An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste (1806), which evidently exhausted both lecturer and audience.

  Coleridge only slowly realized he needed to be much more innovative and intimate – to be much more himself. Herein lay the terror of self-exposure which took him weeks to surmount. He needed in effect to create a new style of lecturing, dramatic and largely extempore, which took risks, changed moods, digressed and doubled back, and played with his own eccentricities. He needed, above all, to enact the imaginative process of the poet in his own person, to demonstrate a poet at work in the laboratory of his ideas.

  Coleridge’s efforts to face up to the demands of his lectures cost him almost two months of continuous illness and opium excess. From the middle of February till the end of March 1808 his life was suspended, much as it had been at Keswick in the terrible winter of 1801. His stomach problems were so severe that he sometimes thought he would die, and he wildly added doses of hensbane, rhubarb and magnesia to his laudanum. In his worst moments he thought he had kidney stones or bladder cancer.31

  His rooms at the Courier office, immediately above the printing press which started at four each morning, were thunderously noisy and chaotic.32 He stayed in bed most mornings, and was so disorganized he could not even muster a clean shirt for lecturing. On one occasion he started with six shirts, lost three in the laundry, found he had been sleeping in the fourth, and had inadvertently used the fifth as a floormat while washing. The sixth and last shirt, when he put it on, had no draw-strings to do up at the neck.33 His landlady, Mrs Brainbridge, was old and deaf and could not cope with his visitors. She turned away one, the distinguished painter John Landseer, with the explanation to Coleridge that he was “a sort of a Methody Preacher at that Unstitution, where you goes to spout, Sir”. Coleridge counted this as a rare compliment.34

  Charles Lamb wrote to his friend Mannin
g in mid-February: “Coleridge has delivered two Lectures at the Royal Institution; two more were attended, but he did not come. It is thought he has gone sick upon them. He ain’t well that’s certain – Wordsworth is coming to see him. He sits up in a two pair of stairs room at the Courier Office, & receives visitors on his close-stool [commode].”35

  Davy, himself recovering from the near lethal dose of gaol fever, was appalled by what he had witnessed from the gallery of the Great Lecture Room. He felt he had observed a great mind in operation, but undergoing a process of self-destruction. Using imagery that Coleridge had himself used of Shakespeare’s mind, he saw his friend being overwhelmed by a jungle of disorder. “He has suffered greatly from Excessive Sensibility – the disease of genius. His mind is a wilderness in which the cedar & oak which might aspire to the skies are stunted in their growth by underwood, thorns, briars and parasitical plants. With the most exalted genius, enlarged views, sensitive heart & enlightened mind, he will be the victim of want of order, precision and regularity. I cannot think of him without experiencing mingled feelings of admiration, regard & pity.”36