The Committee, headed by Thomas Bernard, refused to accept Coleridge’s gallant offer to return the £40 advance, but instead voted to make “a proportional payment” for the twenty lectures actually given, a sum calculated at £60. It was unfortunate that owing to the Institution’s own financial difficulties, this was not made until ten months later in April 1809. Coleridge remained in friendly touch with Bernard, who clearly admired his work, and later advised him on a journalistic scheme. But later literary lectures were thereafter placed in more conventional hands (the Reverend Mr Dibdin and John Campbell, otherwise unknown to fame).
It was not till long after that the Institution came to regard Coleridge’s series as one of the most remarkable it had ever sponsored, and commissioned retrospective lectures to celebrate it in the same theatre. It came to be seen as a historic linkage between philosophies of poetry and science, as essentially experimental disciplines “performed with the passion of Hope”. It was the series that launched Coleridge into a new career as lecturer over the next decade, and always connected him in the public mind with the star scientific performer of the age, Humphry Davy. Indeed Davy, after his grim forebodings of February, was inspired to write a celebratory poem on the subject.*
But the puzzle of Coleridge’s collapse in June 1808 remains. The real explanation seems to have been personal unhappiness, increased to the pitch of paranoia by opium-taking. In these weeks he wrote a series of dangerously emotional letters, not only to Wordsworth, but to his brother George Coleridge, reproaching them for their behaviour over the past months. To Wordsworth he wrote of Asra, and to George of the unfeeling cruelty of the Ottery Coleridges. To both he was bitter in his reproaches with an intensity he had never previously expressed.
To George he said it was his last ever communication: “when Brothers can exert themselves against an Orphan Brother, the latter must be either a mere monster, or the former must be warped by some improper Passion.” He now asked merely for a copy of his birth certificate, so he could increase his life assurance policy so that all his family debts could be paid off on his death.90
What exactly he wrote to Wordsworth is not known, because Wordsworth destroyed the letter. Coleridge’s feelings are, however, partly revealed in his Notebooks. He was overwhelmed with anger and self-pity; he felt that none of his friends or family understood the efforts he had made, or the loneliness of his situation in London. He felt isolated, rejected and disapproved of, by people who were far happier and better established than he would ever be.
Driven on, no doubt by opium dosing late at night, he surrendered to lament and wild accusation. “In short, I have summoned courage sfogarmi to give vent to my poor stifled Heart – to let in air upon it: Cruelly have I been treated by almost everyone – by T. Poole, all my Brothers, by the Wedgwoods, by Southey…but above all by [the Fates] and by Wordsworth…A blessed Marriage for him & for her it has been! But O! wedded Happiness is the intensest sort of Prosperity, & all Prosperity, I find, hardens the Heart – and happy people become so very prudent & far-sighted…O human Nature! – I tremble, lest my own tenderness of Heart, my own disinterested enthusiasm for others, and eager Spirit of Self-sacrifice, should be owing almost wholly to my being & ever having been an unfortunate unhappy Man.”91
Coleridge’s complaints were hysterical and self-pitying, and could easily be dismissed as wholly unjustified, the paranoia of opium addiction. (It is difficult to see what he could have held against the faithful T. Poole.) But the envious cry against Wordsworth had its meaning, and probably lay at the root of his outburst. It was triggered by a strictly practical matter. After all his efforts over the “White Doe”, Longman suddenly informed him that Wordsworth had withdrawn the poem and that Coleridge had “misunderstood” his commission to negotiate its publication. Coleridge was “painfully surprised”, having heard nothing direct from Wordsworth about it, only Dorothy’s urgings to forward the sale of the work with the “buzz” of his last lectures on contemporary poetry.92
In a first letter he pointed all this out, remarking that neither Wordsworth’s nor Dorothy’s judgement should be warped by “money-motives”. He should publish without regard to criticism or financial disadvantage, considering only the “steady establishment of your classical Rank”. Indeed Coleridge had written “a little preface” to help sell the poem if required, and even planned a publishing scheme which would bring in regular money to support Wordsworth if he needed it.
This last, apparently quixotic plan, was mentioned in terms that might have alerted Wordsworth to the coming explosion. “Indeed before my Fall etc. etc. etc. I had indulged the Hope, that by a division of Labour you would have no occasion to think about [money] – as if I had been to live, with very warm & zealous patronage, I was fast ripening a plan, which secures from 12 to 20£ a week – (the Prospectus indeed going to the Press, as soon as Mr Sotheby and Sir G. Beaumont has read it).”93 This was Coleridge’s first reference to his newspaper The Friend, originally conceived in the flush of his lecturing success, as a plan partly to help Wordsworth.
All these offers were swept aside, and Wordsworth did not publish “The White Doe” until 1815. He may have had his own sound literary reasons (Coleridge had himself suggested some 200 lines of rewriting), but his peremptory treatment of Coleridge’s efforts and advice was humiliating. He now received a second letter, of shaking intensity, “an outcry at the heart” going back over months of frustration and suppressed hostility, but concentrating on the struggle over Asra’s affections. This had become the symbol of their threatened friendship. It was, noted Wordsworth in his draft reply, “the keystone of our offences viz. our cruelty, a hope in infusing into Sara’s mind the notion that your attachment to her has been the curse of all your happiness”.94
Wordsworth tried to refute Coleridge’s accusations point by point, and thus some idea of what Coleridge had actually written to him emerges. It is a series of most intimate reproaches: they had supervised Asra’s letters; they had regarded his influence as “poison entering into her mind”; they had told Asra that she was “the cause” of all his misery.
It is clear that Wordsworth was shocked. The draft of his reply is several pages long, laborious and unusually rambling, its tone veering between outrage and pained rebuttal. Coleridge’s accusations were made “in a lamentably insane state of mind”. His obsession with Asra, and suspicions over Wordsworth’s own conduct towards her, his “transports of passion”, were all “unmanly and ungentlemanly” and the product of a perverted sexual imagination. It seems clear that Coleridge had mentioned, among other things, the bedroom vision at Coleorton.
There is more than one sentence in your letter which I blushed to read, and which you yourself would have been unable to write, could never have thought of writing, nay, the matter of which could never even have passed through your mind, had you not acquired a habit, which I think a very pernicious one, of giving by voice and pen to your most lawless thoughts, and to your wildest fancies, an external existence…and finding by insensible reconcilement fair and attractive bosom-inmates in productions from which you ought to have recoiled as monsters.95*
It is revealing that Wordsworth did not question his own behaviour, or accept that Coleridge’s feelings might have been genuinely wounded. Perhaps it was more than he could afford to do. Instead he is fiercely dismissive, and loftily confident in the purity of his own motives. “[Sara] is 34 years of age and what have I to do with overlooking her letters: It is indeed my business to prevent poison entering into her mind and body from any quarter, but it would be an extreme case in which I should solicit permission to explore her letters to know whether such poison were contained in them.”96 The implication of the word “body” seems deliberate.
Equally, there is no consideration of the obvious effect of opium on Coleridge’s outburst, though if there was “the possibility of some matter of truth” in Coleridge’s deplorable letter then it was the sort of truth conjured up in “the phrenzy of wine”. For Wor
dsworth it served to show Coleridge’s weakness of temperament by comparison with his own. “I am not fond of making myself hastily beloved and admired, you take more delight in it than a wise man ought. I am naturally slow to love and to cease loving, you promptitude. Here lies the inconsistency.”
It is the sort of exchange of letters that could have ended their friendship forever. But Wordsworth’s great strength, and indeed loyalty, is shown in the fact that having unburdened himself, he did not send his reply. No doubt with Dorothy’s help, the matter was somehow smoothed over, and the invitation for Coleridge to join them later in the summer at Allan Bank still stood. But the whole episode is more than enough to explain Coleridge’s collapse in London. Moreover the emotional hostilities, tacit at Coleorton, now rumbled perilously just beneath the surface of their literary relations, and were almost bound – sooner or later – to explode.
8
Meanwhile Coleridge was rescued from his Strand rooms once again by Daniel Stuart, who summoned him from his sickbed to convalesce at Margate. The sea air blew away some of his self-absorbed miseries. Relieved from the strain of lecturing and the tortuous solitude of his thoughts, he recovered steadily, and in early July went to join the Clarksons in Essex to talk over some of the knottier points of an Edinburgh Review article. At the end of May he had taken the surprising step of writing to Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, offering to undertake a major review of Thomas Clarkson’s History of the campaign against the slave trade. The Edinburgh, with its Whiggish views and polemical style, was badly disposed towards both Coleridge and Clarkson, and for this very reason Coleridge – rather in the spirit of his education lecture – sought to engage the enemy on their own ground.
Coleridge had already praised the book to Clarkson when he first saw the proofs in March, though he regretted the absence of his own name from the famous illustrated “map” of the English reformers who had contributed to the passing of the Abolition Bill in 1807. “By the bye, your book, and your little map were the only publication I ever wished to see my name in…my first public Effort was a Greek Ode against the Slave Trade…and [I] published a long Essay in the Watchman against the Trade in general…”97
Coleridge still felt passionately committed to the campaign, and threw down the gauntlet to Jeffrey with a clever mixture of challenge and apology. “I write to you now merely to intreat – for the sake of mankind – an honourable review of Mr Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade – I know the man – and if you knew him, you, I am sure, would revere him…It would be presumptuous in me to offer to write the Review of his Work – yet I should be glad were I permitted to submit to you the many thoughts, which occurred to me during its perusal.”98 Jeffrey was too astute an editor to let this chance of controversy pass, and commissioned the piece for £20. The essay went off promptly to Jeffrey on 16 July.
Charles Lamb was relieved by Coleridge’s resurrection, and did not believe executors would really be required. Though Mary Lamb felt that Coleridge “in a manner gave us up when he was in Town”, Charles took his usual genial line on his old friend’s vagaries and disappearances. “It is true that he is Bury’d, though not dead; to understand this quibble, you must know that he is at Bury St Edmund’s, relaxing, after the fatigues of lecturing and Londonizing.”99
But at Allan Bank they heard nothing, until Mrs Clarkson sent news of his recovery. Dorothy returned a message obviously intended to reassure him that the explosion over Asra was, in her mind at least, all forgotten. “Give my fondest love to dear Coleridge – Tell him that we have anxiously expected to hear from him, and were very uneasy till we heard from you that his health was tolerable. Whether he be with you or not, pray tell him all that I have told you respecting Sara…persuade Coleridge to write if you can…”100
But for the time being Coleridge contented himself with writing to Francis Jeffrey about the slave trade. He accepted some alterations in his essay, but insisted that Clarkson’s flat, unliterary style – “a sort of scriptural simplicity” – should not be held against him. “He, if ever human Being did it, listened exclusively to his Conscience, and obeyed its voice at the price of all his Youth & manhood, at the price of his Health, his private Fortune, and the fairest prospects of honourable ambition. Such a man I cannot regard as a mere author. I cannot read or criticize such a work as a mere literary production.”
The essay draws particular attention to the kind of “conversion experience” that Clarkson had undergone as a young man just down from Cambridge, when a Latin prize essay on the slave trade, written originally for academic honours, had come to possess his mind as the spiritual summons to a personal crusade. Coleridge was deeply interested in the psychology of this conversion, characteristic of the best elements of the Quaker culture from which it sprang.101 It led to Clarkson’s incredible perseverance in procuring evidence” against the trade, in one instance interviewing sailors “from above a hundred and sixty vessels of war” to obtain a single eyewitness account of slavery in the Calabar.102 It also led to Clarkson’s mental breakdown, from which he was saved by his marriage to Catherine.
All this was of intense personal significance to Coleridge, especially since his Malta experiences, illustrating the motivation and drive of the man of action whom nothing will deflect from his goal. He later described Clarkson to Stuart as “the Moral Steam-Engine, or the Giant with one Idea”.103 It was, of course, the very opposite of his own psychological make-up, and for that very reason of the greatest analytic interest. He wrote with passion, and Jeffrey later insisted on modulating his “too rapturous style”.104
The other changes that Jeffrey made, though without Coleridge’s permission, were politically slanted against the Ministry. But he accepted the alterations, and the £20 fee, with some murmuring and denied that the article could be described as “shamefully mutilated”.105 Yet it left an impression of political trimming which embarrassed him; and he never again risked writing for the Edinburgh Review. Instead he turned back to his idea for The Friend, his own paper in which he hoped to be free of party politics and editorial interference.
Clarkson expressed his gratitude by turning his steam engine powers on to Coleridge’s professional problems, and allowing his wife Catherine to administer to the emotional ones. Catherine, now partially an invalid, had already entered sympathetically into Coleridge’s most private difficulties, corresponding with Dorothy, having had Asra to stay in the summer of 1807, and having encouraged Henry Crabb Robinson to report on the lectures. She had also consulted Dr Beddoes about her own illness, and seems to have had a shrewd estimate of Coleridge’s troubles. He told Robinson that he had grown to love Catherine “even as my very own Sister, whose Love for me with that of Wordsworth’s Sister, Wife, & Wife’s Sister, form almost the only Happiness I have on earth”.108 Perhaps this was an example of what Wordsworth termed his “promptitude” to love; or perhaps it was simple gratitude.
The large, comfortable, yellow-brick house at St Mary’s Square became his base for the next month. Discussions centred on the setting up of The Friend, and Coleridge’s long-delayed plan to seek an opium cure under a doctor. Both were put in hand. Coleridge also corresponded with John Morgan, who was at Hatton Garden winding up his mother’s estate, and had some £1,500 of capital to invest. But if this was offered to underwrite The Friend, Coleridge took Clarkson’s and Stuart’s advice to launch his paper by subscription.107 Clarkson also suggested that Longman should be the publisher, while Davy and Thomas Bernard negotiated with the Royal Institution’s printer, Savage, on Coleridge’s behalf. The first task would be to define the aims and scope of the paper, and issue a prospectus.108
Coleridge embarked on his opium cure with equal vigour. It is not known what doctor he consulted, since Beddoes had died in December 1808, causing Coleridge temporarily to despair of ever finding a physician he could trust – “Beddoes’s Departure has taken more hope out of my Life than any former Event except perhaps T. Wedgwood’s
”.109 But it seems that Clarkson found a Quaker doctor to begin treatment, starting with some attempt to regulate the daily laudanum doses. The process was slow and painful, continuing with relapses into September.
One immediate result was the new openness with which Coleridge admitted his addiction, writing to many friends in the autumn of the struggles he had undergone. This public admission of addiction is now regarded as the first, and indispensable step, of any real cure in cases of either alcoholism or drug dependency.110 Coleridge seems to have understood this intuitively, and confessed himself with almost religious extravagance. Many of these confessions would be written, with deliberately dramatic effect, on the back of printed copies of his prospectus, as if sin and restitution were being offered in the same package.
With the opium cure, and the plans for The Friend, underway by August 1808, everything suggested that Coleridge would now settle in London, where all the professional help he required was easily available. In particular, the logistics of a weekly paper – in terms of research, printing and circulation – demanded the resources of the capital city. Coleridge now made one of the most critical decisions of his career. He determined once more to return to the Lake District, and to try once again to make his home and relaunch his writing in the North. He went back to the Wordsworths and Asra and his children, drawn by a power far greater than literary ambition. He entered in his Notebook one phrase: “Plucked up my Soul from its Root.”111
FOUR
THE FRIEND IN NEED
1
When Coleridge left Bury St Edmund’s in August 1808, he performed one of his characteristic disappearing acts, and did not arrive at Grasmere for a month. This time it seems that he went on a kind of “retreat”, part religious and part medical, before embarking on the great gamble of his newspaper enterprise. His Notebooks suggest that he went to ground at Leeds, staying with some of Clarkson’s Quaker friends. Here he underwent the worst pains of an opium-withdrawal regime. Clarkson wrote to him secretly at the Golden Sun Inn; and John Broadhead, a Quaker bookseller, furnished him with grocery supplies and more spiritual nourishment.1
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 17
