Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  Coleridge talked at length with the Friends (the title of his paper may have been inspired partly by their unworldly sympathy) and even visited one of their schools at nearby Ackworth, noting that the “Girls’ Playground” was grassed but the Boys’ worn “perfectly bare”, a sign of their different capacities for play and aggression.2 He discussed the inward spirituality of the great Quaker teachers William Law and George Fox, and envied the Quakers’ simple confidence in prayer, so unlike his own.

  “The habit of psychological Analysis makes additionally difficult the act of true Prayer. Yet as being a good Gift of God it may be employed as a guard against Self-delusion, tho’ used creaturely it is too often the means of Self-delusion…O those who speak of Prayer, of deep, inward, sincere Prayer, as sweet and easy, if they have the Right to speak thus, O how enviable in their Lot!”3 The struggle to renew his religious faith went hand in hand with the struggle against opium, each relapse felt like a “Savage Stab” piercing both “Health and Conscience”.4 He experienced as never before a sense of personal sin, of the “Fall” he had mentioned to Wordsworth, but now as an absolute condition of his life. The idea of redemption, both as religious and psychological need, came to possess his thinking “O for the power to cry out for mercy from the inmost: That would be Redemption!”5

  Philosophically this placed the concept of Evil, as a fundamental and inescapable fact of nature, back at the centre of all his thought. Poetically, it had been there since the days of “The Ancient Mariner”. But now it had returned as a personal conviction, connecting his religious views with those on art and politics. When he came to write the opening number of The Friend, he startled his readers with the declaration of this as an a priori truth of experience. “I give it merely as an article of my own faith, closely connected with all my hopes of amelioration in man…that there is Evil distinct from Error and from Pain, an Evil in human nature which is not wholly grounded in the limitations of our understandings. And this too I believe to operate equally in the subjects of Taste, as in the higher concerns of Morality.”6 It was a dark reflection, born out of personal sufferings, and articulating the spiritual “witness” that the anonymous Quakers had encouraged during this phase of his regeneration.

  2

  By the time Coleridge reached Grasmere on 1 September 1808, much of his old physical energy was miraculously returning. He made one of his spectacular arrivals at 11.30 at night, waking the whole household, booming down the tall, newly painted corridors of Allan Bank, admiring and greeting. Wordsworth thought him “in tolerable health and better spirits than I have known him to possess for some time”.7 Southey, when he saw him, declared him offensively noisy and fat, “about half as big as the house”.8

  But Coleridge’s feelings were delicate and silent. The sight of Asra filled him with secret, trembling delight. “For Love, passionate in its deepest tranquillity, Love unutterable fills my whole Spirit, so that every fibre of my Heart, nay, of my whole frame seems to tremble under its perpetual touch and sweet pressure, like the string of a Lute…O well may I be grateful – She loves me.”9

  Domestic matters quickly engulfed him. Mary Wordsworth was about to give birth to her fourth child, rooms were still being decorated, De Quincey was expected, the Coleridge children were longing to see their father. Coleridge marched over Dunmail Raise with Wordsworth, and stayed a week with Mrs Coleridge, a visit that passed off with unexpected goodwill on all sides. Southey had now moved into Coleridge’s old rooms at the front of Greta Hall, and plans were agreed to send Hartley and Derwent to the local school at Ambleside. Coleridge felt the Keswick household was running smoothly in his absence, and was pleased and not a little astonished when his wife tranquilly gave permission for his daughter, little six-year-old Sara, to stay with him for a month at Allan Bank, and the boys to visit at weekends. A degree of reconciliation was in the autumn air.

  “Be assured, my dear Sara!” Coleridge told his wife gently, “that your kind behaviour has made a deep impression on my mind – Would to God, it had been always so on both sides – but the Past is past – & my business now is to recover the Tone of my Constitution if possible & to get money for you and our Children.”10 Mrs Coleridge expressed her approval by sorting out his shirts and making “a pair or two of Drawers for the thighs and seat” of her husband, which had mysteriously expanded under his new health regime.11

  Allan Bank was large, with tall windows looking north, and east over Grasmere lake, and the towering shape of Silver Howe Fell enclosing it to the south. It had none of the charm of Dove Cottage (which Dorothy always regretted), or the comforts of Greta Hall. Bleak and exposed, the down-winds from the fell filled it with draughts in summer, and chimney-smoke in the winter, so that food and books were often dusted with soot. Coleridge had a large study and separate bedroom on the first floor, but there was little sense of peace or space. Wordsworth was determined to be self-sufficient, and the three women were endlessly busied with cooking, laundry, vegetable-gardening, baking, and looking after the children – as well as a cow and two piglets.12 Visitors were frequent, including Hartley and Derwent, De Quincey and his friend John Wilson, and Dorothy records that there were often more than a dozen round the table at meals.

  Little Sara’s visit to Allan Bank with her father remained one of her earliest memories: a mixture of awkwardness, enchantment and homesickness. She felt overshadowed by the Wordsworth children, especially the angelic Dora, her blonde locks dressed with paper curlers, and all of whom seemed able to play with Coleridge much more freely than herself, making “enough racket for twenty”. Though she slept in her father’s bedroom, she felt lonely and inhibited at first. “My father reproached me, and contrasted my coldness with the childish caresses of the little Wordsworths. I slunk away, and hid myself.”13

  But Coleridge was delighted with his daughter, and understood her fears as he had understood Hartley’s. He told her stories, kept a candle burning in the bedroom, took her for walks to make her “rosier and hardier”, and encouraged her childish romance with little John Wordsworth. He also realized that she was extremely bright and bookish, in a quieter less fantastical way than Hartley, and had inherited the extraordinary Coleridge eyes. “Verily, Sara is a deal cleverer than I supposed. She is indeed a very sweet unblameable Darling. And what elegance of Form and Motion – her dear Eyes too! as I was telling a most wild Story to her & John, her large eyes grew almost as large again with wonderment.”14

  Sara remembered those stories ever after. “I slept with him, and he would tell me fairy stories when he came to bed at twelve and one o’clock. I remember his telling me a wild tale, too, in his study, and my trying to repeat it to the maids afterwards.”

  Sara was also aware, in the acute way of a child, of the mysterious bond between her father and Asra. But, like Hartley, she felt uneasy with it and could not understand the attraction. She saw Asra through her mother’s disapproving eyes. “My father used to talk to me with much admiration and affection of Sara Hutchinson…She had fine, long, light brown hair, I think her only beauty, except a fair skin, for her features were plain and contracted, her figure dumpy, and devoid of grace and dignity. She was a plump woman, of little more than five feet. I remember my father talking to me admiringly of her long light locks, and saying how mildly she bore it when the baby pulled them hard.”15

  This tiny observation of Asra’s willingness to suffer, perhaps out of a frustrated maternal instinct, and Coleridge’s curious, almost erotic fascination with it, shows little Sara’s perception. She also saw, at least in retrospect, that Coleridge wanted to beguile her affections away from Greta Hall. “I think my dear father was anxious that I should learn to love him and the Wordsworths and their children, and not cling so exclusively to my mother, and all around me at home.” Like many children from a divided family she was to feel torn and guilty about this long into adulthood.

  Coleridge himself was both excited and troubled by his new domestic arrangements. His outward family lif
e, apparently now stabilized between Allan Bank and Greta Hall, brought a new sense of purpose which he would pour into The Friend. But his proximity to Asra, living and sleeping in the same house, always on the other side of a door or a wall, and always under Wordsworth’s commanding eye, haunted him as it had done at Coleorton. He entered a tense, anxious little love-lyric in his Notebooks:

  Two wedded hearts, if e’er were such,

  Imprisoned in adjoining cells,

  Across whose thin partition-wall

  The Builder left one narrow rent,

  And where, most content in discontent,

  A joy with itself at strife –

  Die into an intenser Life.16

  Wordsworth was obviously keen to avoid any such “intenser life”, but chose an unexpected way to defuse the situation. In mid-September he took Coleridge and Asra on a week’s walking tour along the river Duddon, just the three of them together, striding over the fells and staying at local inns. At Seathwaite Vale, Coleridge noted with a shiver of delight: “W. Wordsworth, Sara, & I – the Cottage, Hollinghouse!! all, all…”17 But there is no further record of what was discussed, or what decided. Amid the landscape observations – the ferns changing from green to gold, “harbinger of our autumnal splendours”, and the dark valley mists below Capel Crag (‘Sara’s most appropriate phrase at the Head of Wastdale: how DEEP it is!”) – there was a strange silence on all matters of the heart. But there were stray glimpses, which suggest that once again Coleridge was being forced to renounce all expression of his love.

  There was “something incomprehensible in Sara’s feelings concerning [Wordsworth]”. If she still felt “a real preference of Love” for himself, how could he explain “her evidently greater pleasure in gazing on” his friend?18 Why was she now so uneasy in his physical company? “You never sat with me or near me ten minutes in your life without showing a restlessness, & a thought of going, etc., for at least five minutes out of the ten.”19 Why did she dart away from any expression of warmth or feeling: “she shines and is cold, as the tropic Firefly”?

  The terrible thought again came to Coleridge that Asra’s love might have become mere loyalty to him, out of pity for his sufferings. “But how much of her Love is Pity? Humane dread of inflicting Anguish? Dignified sense of Consistency & Faith?”20 Yet he still saw her beauty burning in everything around him, even an autumn rose on the table at the inn. “How have I looked at a full-blown Rose, bending or drooping from its own weight over the edge of the Glass or Flower Pot, and seeming to spy Sara and at last even a countenance.”21

  Back at Allan Bank in October, Asra took to covering the long hair that Coleridge so admired with a cotton mob-cap. It took away the youthful softness of her face, and emphasized her bony nose and prominent chin. Coleridge was shocked by the transformation: “astonishing effect of an unbecoming Cap on Sara. It in the strictest sense of the word frightened me…producing a painful startle whenever she turned her face suddenly round on me…” He urged her not to “play these tricks with her angel countenance”, but she refused to take it off. It was a clear assertion of her new domestic role and independence.

  Coleridge wrote sorrowfully of the “heavenly Vision of her Face” which had saved him from Cecilia Bertozzi in Syracuse. Now he felt Asra was deliberately breaking the sacred chain of his memories and associations. It was “morally culpable”, and cruel; but might one day make the subject for a poem. “What if on my Death-bed her Face, which had hovered before me as my soothing and beckoning Seraph, should all at once flash into that new face…?” Over twenty years later the “distressing”, dreamlike image of love’s metamorphosis did indeed appear in his poem, “Phantom or Fact”.22

  Yet it seems likely from Asra’s behaviour that the proximity that was so tantalizing to him was for her largely oppressive. Asra sought distance and homely practicality in their relations, reflecting the Wordsworths’ own fears of Coleridge’s emotional claims on the entire household. She would support him with his children, with his struggles against opium, above all with his work on The Friend. But she no longer wanted to be the object of his dreams, his love, his tortuous secret passion. If this was indeed her attitude (and if the heart can ever be quite steady in such circumstances), it was a not unreasonable or unkindly one. But of course it would have been a profound rejection of the very impulse that had brought Coleridge north again in the first place.

  3

  Coleridge’s initial response was to embrace the practical, and to plunge headlong into the business of The Friend. For the next three months he worked with furious energy on every detail of the proposed paper: prospectus, subscriptions, printing arrangements, distribution, financing, and the provision of stamped paper (which was required by government regulations for weekly publications). Letters flew out to all his friends: Humphry Davy, Tom Poole, Daniel Stuart, Sir George Beaumont, Basil Montagu, John Monkhouse, and even brother George at Ottery and slippery Francis Jeffrey at the Edinburgh Review.

  His rousing letter to Poole was typical of the rest:

  My dear Poole, I will make a covenant with you. Begin to count my Life, as a Friend of yours, from January 1809…I promise you on my honour, that The Friend shall be the main Pipe thro’ which I shall play off the whole reservoir of my collected Knowledge and of what you are pleased to believe Genius. It is indeed Time to be doing something for myself. Hitherto I have layed my Eggs with Ostrich carelessness & Ostrich oblivion – most indeed have been crushed under foot – yet not a few have crawled forth into Light to furnish Feathers for the Caps of others, and some too to plume the shafts in the Quivers of my Enemies. My first essay (and what will be at the BOTTOM of all the rest) is on the nature and importance of Principles.23

  Coleridge’s plan to produce a weekly paper was extraordinarily ambitious in itself. But to write, edit and publish it single-handedly from Grasmere seemed almost crazily so. Most of his friends, with the signal exception of his old Fleet Street editor Daniel Stuart, thought it could never succeed. Charles Lamb voiced the general view when he wrote wryly to Hazlitt in December: “There came this morning a printed Prospectus from S. T. Coleridge, Grasmere, of a Weekly Paper to be called The Friend. A flaming Prospectus, I have no time to give the heads of it. To commence first Saturday in January [1809]. There came also Notice of a Turkey from Mr Clarkson, which I am more sanguine in expecting the accomplishment of than I am of Coleridge’s prophesy.”24

  Wordsworth, Southey and Tom Poole were all secretly of the same opinion. Coleridge’s disorganization, his unbusinesslike routine, his legendary prevarication over deadlines, his philosophical introspection, and above all his ill-health and opium addiction would surely destroy any chance of journalistic success. Only a man as optimistically naive as John Morgan could possibly write: “I think this plan of yours most admirably calculated for your habits of thinking…with a trifling effort you must succeed.”25

  Moreover Coleridge was not planning a conventional paper, with topical or polemical appeal. He distinguished his aims sharply from the regular pro-government papers, the fashionable radicalism of the newly-launched Examiner, the brilliant literary partisanship of the Edinburgh Review, or the racy political populism of William Cobbett’s Weekly Register (his nearest rival as a one-man operation, but of “undigested passionate Monologues”).

  Coleridge intended to eschew all current affairs, literary novelties, personalities or political scandals. Indeed he rejected the very idea of journalistic appeal and popularity itself, even though Jeffrey and Cobbett had discovered a huge new readership for such material in an angry and discontented wartime England, disillusioned with its leadership and restless with economic deprivations. Coleridge wanted to challenge and provoke in a far deeper, more thoughtful way, and his readership would be deliberately restricted.

  “My Purposes are widely different,” he wrote to Humphry Davy. “I do not write in this Work for the Multitude; but for those who by Rank, or Fortune, or official Situation, or Talents or Habits of Reflection
, are to influence the Multitude. I write to found true PRINCIPLES, to oppose false PRINCIPLES, in Criticism, Legislation, Philosophy, Morals, and International Law.”26

  These great “principles” were supposed to emerge as the work unfolded: there was no declaration of an initial ideology or campaign motto. But Coleridge wanted to write as an opinion-former, to create a philosophical intelligentsia in a new way. His work was to be deliberately elitist: exclusive and intellectually demanding. He made no apology for this. He was not producing a set of “Labourers’ pocket knifes” for cutting bread and cheese, but a “Case of Lancets” for dissecting the anatomy of a national condition.27 His target was what he came to call the “Heresy” of expediency, of short-term aims, superficial thinking; it was also the intellectual partisanship of British journalism itself.

  4

  There were various versions of his Prospectus, the first two printed at Kendal, and a third in London. They were circulated also as commercial advertisements by friends and booksellers in Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Bath, York and Leeds, with the initial intention of securing one thousand subscribers.

  This relatively high circulation target was crucial to the financial viability of the project. Yet the tone of the Prospectus was far from commercial. It deliberately called attention to Coleridge’s working habits, his reputation for “unrealized schemes”, his vast and eccentric reading, and most significantly of all, the existence of his private Notebooks. This decision to make the paper a personal testament from the outset, with strong elements of intellectual autobiography, was the key to Coleridge’s journalistic approach. Like the whole venture, it was a high-risk strategy, and the one that most alarmed his friends. But in the Prospectus he committed himself from the start, with all the perilous promises of self-exposure.