Deception, hollowness, sloth, silence and aloofness: it is a terrible indictment, and Dorothy evidently intended it as such. But it is also a description of a depressed and lonely man at the end of his tether: facing professional disaster, opium addiction, financial debts, and unrequited love in middle age. Dorothy ended her letter by remarking that “William goes on writing industriously”.
But the following morning she opened the letter again, puzzled and exasperated. “Coleridge is just come down stairs, 1/2 past 12 o’clock. He is in great spirits and says to me that he is going to work in good earnest. I replied, it [The Friend] cannot be out this week. ‘No’ said he, ‘but we will get it out as fast as possible.’” She did not remark on his use of the word “we”, but she turned once more to the subject of Sara Hutchinson, which evidently haunted and perplexed her.
Now finally she wrote with great bitterness, refusing to accept that Coleridge’s “love” had – or had ever had – any reality. To her it all seemed, after ten years’ intimacy, something that could be dismissed as a selfish, obsessive fantasy. “With respect to Coleridge, do not think it is his love for Sara which has stopped his work – do not believe it: his love for her is no more than a fanciful dream – otherwise he would prove it by a desire to make her happy. No! He likes to have her about him as his own, as one devoted to him, but when she stood in the way of other gratifications it was all over. I speak this very unwillingly, and again I beg, burn this letter. I need not add, keep its contents to yourself alone.”137
That Dorothy wrote what she believed can barely be doubted (though what exactly she meant by “other gratifications” – opium, alcohol, sexual tenderness – is not clear, as perhaps she intended). That she was in many ways still the most perceptive and generous human observer in the Allan Bank household also remains true. Yet there now stands a gulf between what she perceived, and what Coleridge actually experienced and recorded in his Notebooks and poetry. To conclude in some common-sense way, that she was right and he was wrong, is to deny the infinite involutions of the human heart.
It is also to refuse to face what Coleridge himself came to see as the profound philosophic problem posed by the nature of human love itself; and by extension, of all intensely subjective experience. Was love a self-created, self-referring illusion? Or was it “some dear embodied Good”? Was Asra in the end nothing more than “a fanciful dream”, or was she genuinely a projection of his own best self, his conscience, his sense of beauty and power and hope?
This was the problem he faced again and again in his Notebooks in the succeeding months and years, and gradually in the slow accretions of his Confessional Poems, like “Constancy to an Ideal Object”. This was the questioning poem he had begun in Malta, but it may well have been now that he added the stanza that best answers Dorothy’s sad but memorable accusations, though he knew nothing of them at the time. It is, ironically, one of the most beautiful verses he ever wrote.
…And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when The woodsman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head; So the enamoured rustic worships its fair hues, Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!138
FIVE
IN THE DARK CHAMBER
1
What Coleridge did know is that he was no longer a welcome guest at Allan Bank in 1810. His thoughts turned briefly to London, from where he had received a kindly letter from John Morgan. “You ought to have had 4 or 500 pounds capital before you began to Work. I wish to God you would come to Town, if the Friend does not succeed, I am confident your Talents would here find satisfactory Employment – by Satisfactory I mean in point of money; as to comfort, somewhat of that must be sacrificed to Duty. – When you come, if not better provided for, you are [to be] with us.”1 Coleridge kept this offer in the back of his mind.
In the first week of May, he walked over as he had promised to Greta Hall on a short visit, ostensibly to see the children. It was not, to begin with, an official departure, but Dorothy’s relief was palpable as she wrote in her next news report to Catherine Clarkson. “Coleridge went to Keswick about a week ago. As he said, to stay about ten days, but as he did not intend to return till our bustle with Mary should be over, it might probably be much longer, if his own irresolute habits had no influence in keeping him there, or preventing his return.”2 As the summer wore on, the books and manuscripts connected with The Friend followed in a desultory series of hay carts, making his removal a fact by accumulation.
Mrs Coleridge, sensing the crisis that had occurred at Allan Bank, as she had long predicted, was inclined to be magnanimous, and let him bury himself away in a study overlooking Bassenthwaite lake that she had kept prepared for the eventuality. “The last No. of The Friend lies on his Desk, the sight of which fills my heart with grief, and my eyes with tears; but I am obliged to conceal my trouble as much as possible, as the slightest expression of regret never fails to excite resentment – Poor Man! – I have not the least doubt but he is the most unhappy of the two; and the reason is too obvious to need any explanation.”3
Southey, now completing his great History of Brazil, and reviewing hard for the Quarterly, was also in an equitable mood. He perhaps of all Coleridge’s circle best understood the strain of working to journalistic deadlines, and felt that The Friend had been an honourable and productive effort: “there is so much got out of him which would never otherwise have come out”.4
Both Dorothy, and now Mrs Coleridge, were convinced that Coleridge spent all his time reading and day-dreaming, and his “repeated assurances” that he was still writing for The Friend were mere camouflage. Certainly nothing further was published at this time. But in fact Coleridge’s Notebooks contain over 250 pages of material – sketches of subjects, short essays, memoranda, timetables, reading-notes, philosophic reflections – intended for a continuation of the paper, and all written in the six months between March and August 1810.
These included the outline for an essay on the British constitution, a study of education, a defence of Christianity, and a long philosophic disquisition on the distinction between love and lust. Most striking was the beginnings of a detailed examination of the psychology of religious mysticism, as revealed in the life of St Theresa of Avila. He would continue this throughout the summer, clearly intending to develop some of the themes from his admired “Luther” issue of No. 8.
He also returned to his project of publishing a new collection of all his poems. He clung to some idea of steady, organized effort. One early timetable reads: “The Friend – 3 days, Sat. Sun. Mon. The Poems till finished – Tues. Wed. Thurs. Courier – Friday.”5 Asra’s loss also seems to have strangely rekindled the idea of completing “Christabel”, and he wrote one of his most suggestive fragments for her “lament” in the unknown Part III of the poem. “Christabel – My first cries mingled with my Mother’s death-groan – and she beheld the vision of Glory ere I the earthly Sun – when I first looked up to Heaven, consciously, it was to look up after or for my Mother – etc. etc.” This was also connected in his mind with St Theresa’s experiences.6
At the same time he began to take new pleasure and interest in his children. Remarking on little Sara’s early gift for languages – he delighted in “Sariola’s kalligraphical Initiations” – he began to give her regular lessons in Italian, which Mrs Coleridge joined in the parlour. He wrote them a “Dialogue on the Italian Language”, headed “Sara and her Mama”, and by the following year the nine-year-old girl was reading “French tolerably and Italian fluently”.7
He also spent more time with the two boys, especially after the Ambleside school broke up for the summer. Hartley, now aged thirteen, was growing up fast and inclined to quarrel with “Lil’ Darran” (or “Stumpy Canary”) and Coleridge thought it was high time to consider his “profession or trade” for the future.8 He was more brilliant and eccentric than
ever (father and son discussed Eichhorn’s critique of the Old Testament together), and his headmaster Mr Dawes offered to take him for free extra tuition with an eye to Cambridge. Coleridge had no idea how university could be paid for, but he looked upon his eldest with a fond and partial gaze, and thought him “really handsome, at least, as handsome as a face so original & intellectual can be”.
He regarded little Derwent, plain and puddingey, and struggling fruitlessly with his Greek, with a different kind of protective tenderness. He rejoiced in Stumpy Canary’s enthusiasm for drawing triangles, and took pleasure in his less sophisticated view of the Bible. When talking about the animals in Noah’s ark, Derwent gravely corrected his father about the insects missing from the role call. “‘O yes, indeed, Father! – there were – there was a Grasshopper in the Ark – I saw it myself very often – I remember it very well.’”9 Coleridge delighted in such anecdotes, and retold them to Mrs Coleridge as part of a normal family life which they could still share.
Indeed whenever Coleridge emerged from his study, his wife was astonished at his friendliness and good humour, and by August was giving Poole an account that differs so markedly from Dorothy’s in the spring that one might easily conclude that she had been right, after all, about the relief of Asra’s departure to him. She told Poole that he had been “in almost uniform kind disposition towards us all during his residence here; and all Southey’s friends who have been here this Summer have thought his presence a great addition to the society here; and have all been uniformly great admirers of his conversation.” She thought his spirits far happier than she had known them “for years”, and was only puzzled that he was still publishing nothing. (What would happen to “these Lads” – fast approaching manhood – if he did not exert himself?)10
Southey reported the same to John Rickman – “better health than usual, and excellent spirits, and reading very hard and to no purpose”. He added that Coleridge occasionally talked of going to London to start work again, but he would believe this when he saw it.11 Meanwhile the Wordsworths had slipped gratefully away to Coleorton, going on in June to visit the Clarksons. Here Dorothy stayed for some weeks, while Wordsworth – as Coleridge later discovered – went on alone to see Tom Hutchinson, John Monkhouse and Asra at the farm in Radnorshire. So Coleridge gave every appearance of tranquillity at Greta Hall in the summer of 1810.
2
Yet all these appearances were painfully deceptive. Release from the weekly deadline of The Friend made him calmer and more sociable, and the presence of his children soothed and comforted him. Outwardly life seemed more normal, but inwardly his turmoil was as great as ever. His Notebooks, at first sight packed with reading-notes and sketches for The Friend, reveal on closer inspection terrible moments of rage and despair. His thoughts turned to suicide with an intensity not recorded since his last months in Italy in 1806, their power driving him towards poetry. Sometime in late May or June he wrote two entries which show how little either his wife or Southey understood his state of mind. The first struggles into blank verse of ghastly bleakness, and turns on his loss of Asra, but does not dare to name her:
…I have experienced
The worst, the World can wreak on me; the worst
That can make Life indifferent, yet disturb
With whisper’d discontents the dying prayer.
I have beheld the whole of all, wherein
My Heart had any interest in this Life,
To be disrent and torn from off my Hopes,
That nothing now is left. Why then live on?12
The clumsiness of the verse has its own peculiar horror, as if Coleridge could no longer find his own voice. In the intimacy of his own Notebook, he rants and postures like a bad actor on an empty stage. No one is listening so he shouts and rages against himself, threatening the deed which he will not really perform:
…“Well may I break this Pact, this League, of Blood That ties me to myself – and break I shall”
This last sentence is placed in inverted commas, like a speech given to someone else, his other self, his opium-self perhaps.
The second entry tries a different voice, no longer grandiose, but low and small and oddly compulsive. Though taking the form of a lyric, it is written out as prose, (which led all Coleridge’s subsequent editors to overlook it for his collected poems). Yet it is clearly a poem, and begins with an arresting, though apparently inexplicable, phrase: “When I was white…” What it records is indeed a physical compulsion, closely connected with the guilt of his opium-taking, which required him repeatedly to wash himself during the day, and to feel disgust at the slightest sensation of dirt anywhere on his body.
This repeated, obsessive washing had begun in Malta, no doubt in response to the sweat and heat of Mediterranean life. He had noted in April 1805: “I cannot endure the least atom or imagination of dirt on my person; but wash my body all over 20 times, where 8 or 9 years I washed half of it once.”13 But now it had become ritualized, a symbolic form of reassurance, which proved that he had not entirely lost control of his body, and somehow guaranteed the purity of his love for Asra. To wash and to weep for her had become forms of spiritual discipline.
It combined both voluptuous comfort and humiliating penance. This at any rate is what the strange and touching little poem (here printed as verse) seems to suggest.
When I was white…
Care had I to feel and know
That all my body high and low
Even parts that never met men’s Eye
Were pure of stain as new-fallen Snow.
When absent soon to meet again
That morning & that last Employ
Had only so much Pain
As the fears of Hope detract from certain Joy.
And now – O then I am least opprest
When with the cleansing Stream
I mix my tears –
And oft I’d fain neglect myself
Such anguish & such sinking down of Heart
Comes over me – yet never can I.
For neither death, nor absence, nor demerit
Can free the love-enchanted spirit –
And I seem always in her eye,
And she will never more appear to mine.14
The central parts of this poem are still unformed; but the morning of “that last Employ” seems to refer to the last issue of The Friend and Asra’s departure; while the temptation to “neglect myself” indicates Coleridge’s subsequent struggle with personal hygiene at Greta Hall.
Certainly Mrs Coleridge had a long battle with filthy shirts and spilt snuff throughout the summer, and sometimes Coleridge could see the funny side of this as well. “Sarah Coleridge says, on telling me of the universal Sneeze produced in the Lasses while shaking my Carpet, that she wishes my Snuff would grow: as I sow it so plentifully.”15
As Coleridge received no letters from Asra in Wales, his sense of being abandoned and betrayed by her grew. The more he reflected on it, the more he blamed the Wordsworths, never once considering that his own demands and fantasies might have driven her away. He began to suspect that there was a secret plan for her to marry John Monkhouse, and when he heard of Wordsworth’s trip to Radnorshire in June, he had a terrible dream “that W.W. and M. were going down to Wales to give her away”. He awoke sweating and screaming at this “prophetic” thought. “O no! no! no! let me die – in the rack of the [kidney] Stone – only let me die before I suspect it, broad-awake! Yet, the too, too! evident, the undeniable joining in the conspiracy with W. and D. to deceive me, & her cruel neglect & contemptuous silence ever since!”16
All these dreams, demons and compulsions threatened to turn the night-life of his study into a mere madhouse, a pure opium-den of malignant fantasies and hysterical obsessions. Yet Coleridge battled through to emerge each morning – or rather, early afternoon – to be charming to his guests, cheerful with his children, and to spar gently with his wife. Sometimes there were jokes about a particularly bad night, Mrs Coleridge asking qui
zzically as he made his dishevelled appearance, “Have you taken too much or too little Opium?”17 Sometimes Coleridge burst upon the children in the parlour with some outrageous doggerel:
The little Birds shoot out their gushes round
Mellow the shrill, an Oxymel of Sound:
As if with sweet confusion sway’d,
The thirsty Ear drank Lemonade.18
(While Hartley might just be able to identify the Greek roots of “Oxymel” as bitter-sweet music, Stumpy Canary would certainly recognize the properties of Lemonade – even if taken aurally rather than orally.)
Always the Notebooks continued to fill with his vast reading and scholarly reflections. Even Southey was impressed, and began to siphon off sketches and scraps that Coleridge brought him for an annual anthology, Omniana (first published in 1812). But what haunted Southey was that all would be wasted, and neither money for his family nor reputation for himself would ever be gained. Coleridge was producing “an accumulation of knowledge equal to that of any man living and a body of sound philosophy superior to what any man either of this or any former age has possessed – all of which will perish with him”.19
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 24
