Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  13

  Coleridge’s coat-trailing into controversy (which Southey interpreted as coat-turning) was partly a response to widespread criticism of the undoubted obscurity of many of the early numbers. He was convinced that he had to do more to appeal to his readers. In late September, The Friend had reached another crisis point in its production. Stuart thought he was not holding his subscribers, and made it clear that he would not supply stamped paper after the first ten issues, when Coleridge had originally hoped for the first twenty.

  He wrote in desperation to Stuart on 27 September: “I have waited & hoped till my heart is sick for a Letter from you – I print weekly 644…& there is now only enough remaining for another number. For God’s sake do not abandon me now – need I say that one of my great Objects in carrying on this work is to enable me to repay by degrees what I owe you –?…Do pray let me hear from you. I am fully aware that the Numbers hitherto are in too bad and laborious a style; but I trust you will find Nos 7, 8, 9, & 10 greatly improved & that every No. after these will become more and more entertaining.”73

  Stuart had in fact supplied over £130 worth of paper, for which Coleridge had only been able to advance his £60 lecture fees.74 It appeared that no more was forthcoming, and much of October was spent looking for alternative backers. The Ottery Coleridges again turned him down, but eventually City money came from Richard Sharp (£46), business money from Tom Poole (£36), and farming money from Asra’s brother Thomas Hutchinson (£53). This was a good indication of the broad spectrum of support that The Friend had found. The total investment was substantial: £137.16s.5d; with Thomas Hutchinson, perhaps significantly, providing the most generous share. Stuart also finally relented, and sent a last free batch of paper in November, to show that he still admired Coleridge’s efforts.75

  None of this eased the immense impracticality of printing at Penrith, where Coleridge had to carry copy often on foot, over the increasingly wintry hills. The opening of No. 9 was eaten by rats at the printers.

  While struggling with these production problems, Coleridge was also seeking to broaden the appeal of The Friend by a shift in editorial approach. He decided that the philosophical sections must be “lighter and shorter”; that stories, poems and “amusements” should be more frequent; and that he should use letters and contributions from his readers.76

  Surprisingly, there had been few objections to the political content of his essays, except from Southey and Wordsworth. Southey could not understand why he should risk bringing up the perilous topic of their youthful Jacobinism. And ironically, Wordsworth had suddenly grown extremely sensitive about political subjects, having been “haunted” for several weeks by the fear of being prosecuted for seditious libel over his Cintra pamphlet. (There was a rare glimpse of Asra here, when she remarked mockingly to De Quincey of this: “We females…have not the least fear of Newgate – if there was but a garden to walk in, we think we should do very nicely.”)77

  The objections to The Friend were largely stylistic: long, involved sentences; disorganized topics; and much “obscurity” of thought and references. As John Morgan wrote from London in October: “Many people are complaining of its obscurity…But ‘tis easier to fool than to think.”78 Poole’s friend Samuel Purkis (a self-educated tanner) thought it “caviar to the Multitude”. Dorothy summed it up well when she praised many “beautiful passages”, and found that “everywhere the power of thought and the originality of a great mind are visible, but there is wanting a happiness of manner”. In general, she too thought it “certainly very obscure”.79

  This word “obscurity” would settle on Coleridge like an albatross. The question of a “difficult” style was crucial to him, for he believed that the brief, punchy, short-sentenced and epigrammatic style of journalism was itself a form of superficiality. It lacked what he called “the cement of thought”, and – in a vivid phrase – “the hooks-and-eyes of memory”.80 But he wanted The Friend to be demanding, and this was central to his editorial position. He wrote to Southey on 20 October that he suspected that ordinary readers had an “aversion to all energy of thinking”; in consequence, “I am like a physician who, for a patient paralytic in both arms, prescribes as the only possible cure, the use of dumb-bells.”81

  As part of his new editorial policy, he decided to present this problem of style directly to his readers, in the form of a letter in No. 11. Initially he asked Southey to write it: “chiefly urging, in a humorous manner, my Don Quixotism in expecting that the public will ever pretend to understand my lucubrations…”82 He would then answer this with an editorial “on the nature of obscurity etc.”

  Southey agreed, impressed by what Coleridge had already achieved against all expectation: ”The Friend is faulty in nothing but its mode of publication…it would be better to intersperse numbers of amusement…give them sugar plums so that they may be ready to swallow a tonic bolus every now & then before they are aware of what is coming.” Reading over the last eight numbers, Southey was unexpectedly moved: “they left me in no heart for jesting or for irony. In time they will do their work…Insert a few more poems…and [show] the people what grounds they have for hope. God bless you!”83

  14

  Coleridge’s shift in editorial approach, with its more varied and controversial touch, is immediately evident from No. 11, which appeared on 26 October, onwards. His revisionist account of Pantisocracy was followed by a strikingly well chosen extract from Wordsworth’s unpublished Prelude, also describing youthful responses to the French Revolution, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!…”, a passage that has subsequently become famous.

  Next came the editorial letter on prose style and intellectual difficulty, but written by Coleridge himself (not Southey after all) and turned into a clarion declaration rather than an apologia: “I must of necessity require the attention of my Reader to become my fellow-labourer…to retire into themselves and make their own minds the objects of their steadfast attention…No real information can be conveyed, no important errors rectified, no widely injurious prejudices rooted up, without requiring some effort of thought on the part of the Reader. But the obstinate (and towards a contemporary Writer, the contemptuous) aversion to all intellectual effort is the mother evil of which I had proposed to war against, the Queen Bee in the Hive of our errors and misfortunes, both private and national.”84

  No. 11 closed with two “Specimens of Rabbinical Wisdom”, proverbial tales from the Jewish tradition; and Coleridge’s own poem, “Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouny”, adapted from the German of Fredericka Brun. It could be described as an international issue.

  A tonic bolus of a more patriotic kind followed in No. 12, “On the Vulgar Errors Respecting Taxes”, in which Coleridge ingenuously argued that the National Debt had become, in time of war, an instrument of “political Strength and circumstantial Prosperity”, unifying all classes. Even this found its supporters, notably Daniel Stuart who considered it “a most brilliant one”, and reprinted extracts in both the Courier and the Morning Post.85

  Then in No. 13 came a plum of sorts, though without much sugar, the grotesque “Tale of Maria Eleonora Schöning”. This was a case of rape and infanticide, which had occurred in Nuremberg at the time of Coleridge’s visit to Germany. He skilfully combined a number of newspaper accounts he had gathered, dramatically retold the story, and centred it on the passionate friendship of the teenage Maria with her sole friend and confidante Anna, which ends in an attempted suicide pact between the two young women. The narrative has the tragic inevitability of a folk-tale, and takes them first to prison and then to the scaffold. Coleridge linked it to his own ballad of witchcraft and possession, “The Three Graves”, and the theme of friendship under extreme duress, even to the point of madness.

  Further travellers’ tales from Germany enlivened the next seven issues, together with more poetry and verse translations from Wordsworth. So as winter 1809 drew on, Coleridge steered The Friend on its mor
e open editorial course; but he was still aware that the full statement of his “Principles” was not yet achieved. He was working more than ever from week to week, and from hand to mouth, with no guarantee that his 600 readers would ever pay off his debts, when subscriptions fell due at the twentieth issue, early in January 1810.

  15

  One purpose of the travel letters (which evidently drew on materials abandoned at Coleorton) was to give Coleridge a second, and more humorous, editorial voice. To do this he invented an eccentric “friend”, the talkative companion of his early voyages in Germany, whom he introduced in No. 14 as “Satyrane”. Named after the knight-errant in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Satyrane was a deliberately quixotic figure who tilted at the windmills of received opinion wherever he went, mixing shrewd observation of foreign customs with comic adventures and mishaps. He was clearly intended as a self-portrait, using a style of broad caricature familiar from the Spectator columns. Voluble, “sufficiently paradoxical”, learned but faintly ludicrous, he is a revealing projection of what Coleridge felt was the more acceptable side of his public persona.

  His extensive erudition, his energetic and all too subtle intellect, the opulence of his imagination, and above all his inexhaustible store of anecdotism which always appeared to us the most interesting when of himself, and his passionate love of mountain scenery…will for ever endear the remembrance of that Tour to the survivors.

  The tone of self-mockery was set by an early encounter with a foolish Danish merchant on the boat to Hamburg, who drunkenly perceives that Satyrane is “un Philosophe”. Addressing him in “the most magnific style”, he announces: “Vat Imagination! vat Language! vat vast Science! and vat Eyes! vat a milk-vite Forehead! – O my Heafen! vy, you’re a Got!”86 This was indeed how many enthusiasts had spoken of Coleridge in his youth (not least, Dorothy, Davy and Hazlitt); and it curiously foreshadows the more cutting caricatures of Coleridge in the novels of Peacock a decade later.

  But Satyrane is also intended as a figure of pathos, for though “the sun never shone on a more joyous being”, Coleridge says that he later fell into despondency in his middle years. “When he was at length compelled to see and acknowledge the true state of the morals and intellect of his contemporaries, his disappointment was severe, and his mind, always thoughtful, became pensive and gloomy: for to love and sympathize with mankind was a necessity of his nature.”87 Indeed Satyrane is now dead, killed off in his prime by some unexplained sickness or grief, against which he had struggled bravely but to no avail. This is described in a long verse epitaph, which Coleridge carefully adapted from one of the famous “Epitafi” of the seventeenth-century Italian poet Chiabrera:

  …Sickness, ‘tis true,

  Whole years of weary days, besieg’d him close

  Even to the gates and inlets of his life!

  But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm,

  And with a natural gladness, he maintained

  The Citadel unconquer’d, and in joy

  Was strong to follow the delightful Muse.

  Coleridge also added one particular image, not in his Italian original, which took Satyrane right back to the sacred caves of “Kubla Khan”, and even further, to the mysterious “Pixies’ parlour” by the river Otter into which he had climbed as a child. This poignant memory of his boyhood was now invested with high, retrospective symbolism, as if his whole life (or rather, Satyrane’s) had been a lonely process of subterranean exploration, of clambering into caverns, and potholing deep into the mysteries of knowledge.

  …Yea oft alone

  Piercing the long-neglected holy cave,

  The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,

  He bade with lifted torch its starry walls.

  Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame

  Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage.88

  So the figure of Satyrane, Coleridge’s tragi-comic double, was offered up to appease the readers of The Friend.

  16

  By this stage Coleridge was dictating every issue directly to Sara Hutchinson, closeted in his study, so that if the mouth was his then the hand was Asra’s. Work went on usually at night, and frequently up to the last possible moment for the printer’s deadline. Dorothy was alarmed by the way he would appear to be doing nothing for most of the week, and then suddenly rush off a whole essay in twenty-four hours.89 But this has always been time-honoured journalistic practice, and the very pressure of the deadline was what Coleridge needed, especially to keep opium at bay.

  By mid-November Allan Bank was sunk in snow, but still Coleridge ploughed over to Keswick (sixteen miles) or Penrith (twenty-eight miles by Kirkstone Pass) to deliver copy, using farmer’s gig or grocer’s cart where he could. Up to Christmas, only one issue was delayed. Dorothy was astonished, and sometimes even a little frightened by Coleridge’s intensity and self-absorption in his imaginative world. “Coleridge is pretty well, as you will judge by the regularity of his work. The tale of Maria Schöning is beautifully told; but I wish it had not been the first tale in The Friend, for there is something so horrid in it that I cannot bear to think of the story. Sarah [H] is grown quite strong…Frost and snow we have had, but now the weather is milder. Coleridge goes on with his work briskly. How do you like William’s sonnets?”90

  Coleridge now had that daily, and even nightly, intimacy with Asra that he had so long and so passionately desired. But it was not easy for either of them. The shared pressure, and even excitement, of the literary work (often witnessed by Asra’s breathless notes to Brown the printer, reporting on progress) hid far deeper emotions and conflicts. Initially Asra had doubted, like Wordsworth, Coleridge’s ability to sustain the essays, and her agreement to act as his amanuensis – itself rather puzzling – was taken with a certain scepticism. In August she had reported to her friend Mary Monkhouse that she had “some hopes” of Coleridge as he had materials prepared and was “quite in a writing cue”, but that he liked to write “any thing but what he ought, & yet he always pretends he is doing his duty”.91 The scolding tone makes him sound almost like Hartley.

  But Asra’s governessy side was a help to Coleridge, not least in the matter of opium, which he resolved to limit to a single dose taken at midnight. “O then for her sake, Coleridge, the sake so dear above all other, & for which all others are chiefly dear – O do resolve on 12–12 – none between…OPIUM at night only – no morning – wine nor Spirits: no.”92

  As he fell into the pattern of working with her, this resolution held good into the winter, though privately he had no illusions about the addiction he was trying to control. “Chained by a darling passion or tyrannic Vice,” he confided to his Notebooks, “Opium in Hell, yet with the Telescope of an unperverted Understanding descrying and describing Heaven and the Road thereto to my companions, the Damn’d! O fearful fate!”93

  But the darling passion was also his love for Asra, and this was no easier to control. His Notebooks ranged back obsessively to memories of Coleorton in 1807, and even further back to the Sockburn drawing-room of 1799 where he had first met her. He thought of inserting an essay “On Love” in The Friend; trying to distinguish between the “irresistible” impulse of falling in love (as described by Sterne) and his own notion of love as “an act of the will”, a “primary” expression of our highest nature. If it was not this, he observed bleakly, “Love itself is all a romantic Hum, a mere connection of Desire with a form appropriated to that form by accident, or the mere repetition of a Day-dream.”94 But he could not dictate such an essay to Asra, and it was only written long after.

  Indeed, perhaps because of their very physical proximity, Coleridge could never speak openly to Asra of his feelings at Allan Bank. Closeted together for hours in his study, Coleridge – the great talker – was tortured by his own silence on this single, most vital subject. He could only speak to her in his Notebooks. “I appear cheerful to my acquaintance, on them bestow my life & my lively powers – to you, my friend! am dull & despondent? – O it is too
true! but why? – because with those others I can forget myself, what I have been, am, might have been – but with you I cannot do this – You are my better Self.”95

  Instead he secretly harboured his fantasies, telling himself that if The Friend was a success, if his opium addiction was truly cured, somehow he would make Asra his wife and they would have children. In agonized entries, much of them written in his Greek cipher, he played guiltily with the tantalizing schemes, always promising himself that they were free of sexual impurity, that they were acts of will not of impulse.

  Again: as Mother of my children – how utterly improbable dared I hope it: How impossible for me (most pure indeed are my heart & fancy from such a thought) even to think of it, much less desire it! And yet at the encouraging prospect of emancipation from narcotics, of health & activity of mind & body, at the heavenly hope of becoming, as much as is possible, worthy of the unutterably Dear One, it is felt within me like an ordinance of adamantine Destiny!

  He identified them too, with childlike dreams of innocence, as if he were indeed like Hartley beneath Asra’s gaze. “Sweet Hartley! What did he say, speaking of some Tale & wild Fancy of his Brain? – ‘It is not yet, but it will be – for it is – & it cannot stay always in here (pressing one hand on his forehead…) – and then it will be because it is not nothing.’ O wife thou art! O wife thou wilt be!”96

  But the idea that these fantasies might come into being, by the sheer power of their existing in his head, because they were “not nothing”, may itself have been the product of opium, as much as childishness. Coleridge’s awareness of his own uncontrollable fantasy-life, working at many levels, also fed directly into his psychological theorizing in The Friend. So there was an unbroken line between his observations of Hartley, his dreams of Asra, and his analysis of Luther and Maria Schöning.