Which waned and died, yet ever near him stood,
Though changed in nature, wander where he would –
For Love’s Despair is but Hope’s pining Ghost! –
For this one Hope he makes his hourly moan,
He wishes and can wish for this alone!…77
8
It was John Morgan who came to his rescue, appearing unannounced at the door of his room on Sunday night. Morgan had heard something from a friend of the Montagus, and quickly grasped the gravity of the situation. He hurried Coleridge away in a carriage to his own house at No. 7 Portland Place, Hammersmith (now Addison Bridge Place). Here he was fed, soothed and put to bed. Coleridge entered the names of Mary Morgan and Charlotte Brent in large ciphered letters in his Notebook, and later wrote with profound gratitude: “He came to me instantly, told me that I had enemies at work against my character, & pressed me to leave the Hotel & come home with him…If it be allowed to call anyone on earth Saviour, Morgan & his Family have been my Saviours, Body and Soul.”78
SIX
HAMLET IN FLEET STREET
1
John Morgan’s house at Hammersmith, then a leafy village on the western turnpike road out of London, became Coleridge’s base and beloved haven for the next eighteen months. His stay there was not always tranquil: there were drunken scenes, periods of extreme depression, and a return of his nightmares and screaming fits. Several times Coleridge fled away to temporary lodgings around Fleet Street, fearful that he was “depressing” their spirits by his behaviour, “and in spite of myself gradually alienating your esteem & chilling your affection toward me”. He was particularly worried that in these desperate, opium-confused nights at Hammersmith he had offended “dear dear Mary! dearest Charlotte!”, with behaviour that was “unlike” himself.1
What exactly he may have done or said at these times is not clear, but entries in his Notebook suggest ghastly outbursts, troubling sexual fantasies, paranoid intervals and nightmare experiences in his bedroom. One note, heavily crossed out and ciphered in Greek, reads frantically: “The painful Disgust felt by every good mind, male or female, at certain things & Images (semen compared to urine) is itself a proof and effect of the natural union of Love and Lust, Thoughts and Sensations being so exceedingly dissimilar from the vehicle – As if a beloved Woman vanishing in our arms should leave a huge Toad – or worse.”2
But the Morgans – kindhearted, unshockable, deeply convinced of Coleridge’s fundamental genius, and themselves rather chaotic in domestic matters – were proof against these “habits” and aberrations. In every case Morgan hurried back into London, tracked Coleridge down, and prevailed upon him to return. Coleridge never forgot these flights and rescues by Morgan, “Intervals when from the bitter consciousness of my own infirmities & increasing inequality of Temper I took lodgings against his will, & was always by his zealous friendship brought back again.”3
While these private dramas unfolded at Hammersmith, Coleridge eased himself back into London social life and the literary circle of his old friends, hoping to appear as much like his old self as possible. He did this with extraordinary effect, so that sometimes he appears to be two quite different men leading two quite different lives. Few had any idea of the performance he was putting on. A fortnight after leaving the Montagus, he was visiting Lamb regularly at Southampton Buildings, arguing with Hazlitt, dining with William Godwin in Skinner Street, planning political articles with Stuart at the Courier offices in the Strand, and dazzling Henry Crabb Robinson with his philosophical talk.
Charles Lamb sent one of his deliberately mischievous reports to Grasmere on 13 November. “Coleridge has powdered his head, and looks like Bacchus, Bacchus ever sleek and young. He is going to turn sober, but his Clock has not struck yet, meantime he pours down goblet after goblet, the 2d to see where the 1st is gone, the 3d to see no harm happens to the second, a fourth to say there’s another coming, and a 5th to say he’s not sure he’s the last.” Mary contented herself with saying that if she had not known “how ill” Coleridge was, she would have “no idea of it, for he has been very cheerful”.4 She did not think he had begun his “course of medicine & regimen” under Dr Carlisle; and she made no mention of his outburst about Wordsworth.
If these reports reassured the Wordsworths, they continued to exasperate Southey, as he wrote to Grosvenor Bedford. “When he is tired of his London and Hammersmith friends he will come back again as if he has done nothing amiss or absurd…he will destroy himself with self-indulgence…O Grosvenor what a mind is here overthrown!”5 The last phrase was from Hamlet.
2
Henry Crabb Robinson had rather a different impression of Coleridge’s mind in November 1810. Robinson had first heard Coleridge in the lectures of 1808, but he had never met him personally, until introduced this winter by Lamb. In the interval he had been abroad again, acting as The Times’s special correspondent in the Peninsular War. He had returned with a considerable reputation as a war reporter, and at the age of thirty-six was settling down to practise at the Bar.
His early studies at the University of Jena had given him an unusual appreciation of German Romanticism, and an abiding fascination with literary personalities. In his spare time, he had set himself to report on London society in his diary, meeting everyone he could, gathering gossip, estimating reputations, and analysing movements on the literary battlefield.
These Diaries, not fully published until after his death in 1867, contain vivid accounts of Blake, Southey, Hazlitt, Godwin, Shelley, Lamb, Sydney Smith, Mrs Barbauld and Walter Scott. But, like Lamb, he already considered that Wordsworth and Coleridge were the master-spirits of the age, though his preference was for Wordsworth. “We spoke of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lamb, to my surprise, asserted Coleridge to be the greater man. He preferred the Mariner to anything Wordsworth had written. Wordsworth, he thought, is narrow and confined in his views compared with him.”6
On meeting Coleridge “for the first time in private” on 14 November, he was greatly impressed, writing to his brother of an epic encounter. “He kept me on the stretch of attention and admiration from half-past three till twelve o’clock. On politics, metaphysics and poetry, more especially on the Regency, Kant and Shakespeare, he was astonishingly eloquent.”
There was no mention of drunkenness or confusion, only an unexpected inability to sustain his arguments. “Though he practises all sorts of delightful tricks and shows admirable skill in riding his hobbies, he may be easily unsaddled. I was surprised to find how easy it is to obtain from him concessions which lead to gross inconsistencies.” Though Coleridge could hold a drawing-room entranced, as “an incomparable declaimer”, Crabb Robinson thought he “would never have succeeded at the Bar”. He lacked logical clarity and intellectual aggression, despite all his learning.
Yet Robinson warmed to this quality, which made Coleridge unusually accessible and irresistibly stimulating. He concluded with a shrewd distinction, contrasting his manner with Dr Johnson’s reputation as a fearsome talker: though he felt “a sense of inferiority that makes me humble in his presence, I do not feel in the least afraid of him”.7
Coleridge evidently found these social engagements at Lamb’s an enormous relief to his private feelings. He could expand and perform, in admiring company, unbottling his ideas and kite-flying his theories, in a way that had been denied him for two long years in the Lakes. Old friends and new acquaintances were gradually drawn into the convivial circle at Southampton Buildings – John Rickman from the House of Commons, Sergeant Rough from the Bar, Godwin from his publishing house in Skinner Street, John Collier (with whom Robinson lodged in Hatton Garden) from The Times, William Hazlitt (also lodging in Southampton Buildings) with his increasingly radical views, and of course the Lambs themselves (still clinging with decreasing conviction to their water regime).
In their genial, though not uncritical, company Coleridge unfolded like some huge exotic plant, rustling and unbending in the unaccustomed light and warmth. Ch
aracteristically he was aware of this effect on himself, and simultaneously its effect on those around him, and captured it in a delightful paragraph in his Notebooks back at Hammersmith, a startling contrast to the grief-stricken entries that surround it.
Man of genius places things in a new light – this trivial phrase better expresses the appropriate efforts of Genius than Pope’s celebrated Distich – What oft was thought but ne’er so well exprest. It had been thought DISTINCTLY, but only possessed, as it were, unpacked & unsorted – the poet not only displays what tho often seen in its unfolded mass had never been opened out, but he likewise adds something, namely, Lights & Relations. – who has not seen a Rose, or a sprig of Jasmine, of Myrtle, etc. etc.? – But behold these same flowers in a posy or flowerpot, painted by a man of genius – or assorted by the hand of a woman of fine Taste & instinctive sense of Beauty?8
In December Robinson recorded how they compared their experiences of Germany and the Mediterranean. They talked widely of warfare, politics and religious beliefs, and particularly of German authors: of Tieck (whom Coleridge had met in Rome), of Schiller and Goethe (whom Robinson had met at Jena); of Kant’s philosophy and its recent developments by Fichte and Schelling. Robinson was struck by how Coleridge’s wide reading was constantly modulated by his own personal experiences, without any touch of the academic, but as matters deeply lived through and felt. The most obscure German metaphysics were continuously subjected to imaginative testing.
One of Coleridge’s favoured methods was to “unpack” a philosophical proposition in terms of its psychological or religious truth. Discussing Kant’s theory of the “categorical imperative”, he thought it inadequate as a motive for moral action in daily life. “Mere knowledge of the right, we find by experience, does not suffice to ensure the performance of the Right – for mankind in general.” Men were inevitably “sick & weak in their moral Being”. The recognition of “Duty exclusively” was not a sufficient “motive to the performance”. “Much less shall we be led to our Duty by calculation of pleasant or harmful consequences.”
A wealth of personal suffering lay behind that remark, but Coleridge made it universal. “Selfish Promises & Threats” were the very grounds that destroyed true altruism. To behave altruistically towards someone else, one must first behave generously towards oneself. In a striking imaginative leap, Coleridge combined the two. “The more the selfish principle is set into fermentation, the more imperious & despotic does the Present Moment become – till at length to love our future Self is almost as hard as to love our Neighbour – it is indeed only a difference of Space & Time. My Neighbour is my other Self, othered by Space – my old age is to my youth and other Self, othered by Time.”
Coleridge concluded that there must be a psychological “medium” between “mere conviction & resolve”, and “suitable action”. Since there was no medium in nature, it must be found in the spiritual world. “This medium is found in Prayer, & religious Intercommunion between Man & his Maker. – Hence the necessity of Prayer.”9
Throughout these early encounters at Lamb’s, Robinson was struck by Coleridge’s fantastic range of intellectual reference – they talked of Kant, Goethe, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Newton, Voltaire, Locke, Hartley, Milton, Bentham, Jeremy Taylor, Fuseli and Wordsworth (“warm praise”). But he was also surprised by the originality of his views, when once they were unfolded.
In a discussion of religion, Coleridge “was apparently arguing in favour of Christianity” in a perfectly orthodox way, but when further prompted revealed the most challenging, metaphysical opinion. Christ was “a Platonic philosopher”, miracles were not “essential” to the Christian system, “historic evidence” could never prove a religious faith, and religious belief was “an act not of the understanding but of the will”. Yet despite what Robinson saw as “the sceptical tendency of such opinions”, Coleridge affirmed passionate belief in the spirit of Christianity “in conformity with his own philosophy”.10
In politics, Robinson also found strange contradictions between Coleridge’s liberal instincts and his sudden, irrational prejudices. Coleridge hated the slave trade, but was “vehement” against Irish civil rights. “The catholic spirit, said C., is incorrigible.” Yet though he abused the Irish, he had “no dislike to Jews or Turks”. Coleridge criticized government corruption and the handling of the war in Spain, yet he was contemptuous of the Whig opposition, and despised Cobbett and the populist radicals. He admired Hazlitt’s writing, but mocked “his morbid views of society, & his Jacobin character”.11
On one notable occasion, 23 December, the discussion of moral action took a significantly literary turn. Robinson was fascinated by Goethe’s theory of Hamlet, which had become one of the great cruxes of German Romantic criticism. In the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796), in a famous scene among a group of actors, Goethe put forward the idea that Hamlet’s failure to avenge his father’s death was the consequence of the weakness of youthful idealism. Hamlet was too young, too romantically self-obsessed, to grapple with political realities.
Questioned by Robinson, Coleridge put forward a darker, more intensely psychological interpretation. It was clearly the fruit of years of reflection in his Notebooks, the paralysing problem of his opium addiction, and the long train of thought that connected the inner visionary worlds of Luther and St Theresa with his own. It would become, the following year, one of the great set-pieces of his lectures, expanded and minutely filled out to encompass the entire dramatic unfolding of the play, its soliloquies, its image-patterns and even its stage directions.
“Hamlet, said C., is one whose internal images (ideas) are so vivid, that all actual objects are faint & dead to him; hence his soliloquies on the nature of man, his disregard of life & hence his vacillations & convulsive energies.” For Coleridge, it was not Hamlet’s youth, but his introverted nature and intense inwardness of imagination (a type of the Romantic artist) which defined his character and also dictated the subtle series of prevarications in the play’s plot structure.
Robinson, shrewdly guessing the autobiographical force of this interpretation, then remarked that it was “unaccountable why Shakespeare did not make Hamlet destroy himself”. Coleridge shook his head and observed that even suicide could be considered as a form of decisive moral action of which Hamlet was incapable. “C. said that Shakespeare meant to show that even such a character was forced to be the slave of chance – a salutary moral lesson. He remained to the last inept & immovable; not even the spirit of his father could rouse him to action.”12
3
While Coleridge could hold forth freely in this largely sympathetic circle, his arrival in London caused less friendly ripples in the wider world. Both his poetry and his politics were becoming subjects of debate, and his opium addiction had become a satisfactory scandal. From September to November, the Monthly Mirror had run a popular series ridiculing, stanza by stanza, the ballad of “The Three Graves” which he had published in The Friend. Leigh Hunt’s radical opposition paper the Examiner, reflecting the increasingly polarized state of British politics and journalism, greeted Coleridge’s proposed return to the columns of the Courier with an ironic fanfare.
Mr Coleridge, once a republican and a follower of Tom Paine, is now a courtier and a follower of Spencer Perceval. Not succeeding in persuading the public to read the crampt and courtly metaphysics of his lately deceased paper The Friend, he takes his revenge by writing against the popular judgement in hireling daily prints. – But here he is as harmless as ever; for what with the general distaste for such writings, and what with the difficulty of getting at Mr Coleridge’s meaning, he obtains but very few readers.13
In fact the Courier, London’s main evening newspaper, under the new management of Stuart’s hard-headed partner T. G. Street, had gained the largest circulation in the country after The Times (estimated at 7,000 copies daily, with perhaps ten times that readership). Hunt had good reason to believe that it had become closely identified with the governme
nt under Spencer Perceval, and suffered personally from its attacks when he was tried for political libel in February 1811.14 That Coleridge, the erstwhile firebrand of Bristol days, should apparently throw in his lot with this establishment, gave the younger generation of editorial writers a fine opportunity for sarcasm. “Extremes Meet”, the Examiner announced jubilantly.
In fact the Examiner’s article was a pre-emptive strike. Coleridge did not begin writing regularly for the Courier until the following spring of 1811, and then with grave doubts about its political impartiality. But such attacks as these (soon to be followed by Cobbett in the Political Register) indicated that he was now stepping back on to the public stage as a figure of controversy. Over the next two years he was to become a recognized “lion” of Regency London, an object of unceasing curiosity, his doings and sayings widely recorded in diaries, memoirs, letters and newspaper articles. Adrift in his private life, he proved surprisingly resilient and stubborn in this public role, facing down criticism and personal hostility that would have destroyed many men. At some level controversy sustained him.
Nevertheless, Coleridge’s return to public affairs in London was painful and uncertain. At Christmas time, overcome with family memories, he collapsed further into opium and deep depression over the Wordsworth “betrayal”. For a month there is no record of him at the Lambs, or with Crabb Robinson; nor was he with the Morgans in Hammersmith. They had received a note saying that he was putting his case under the celebrated Dr John Abernethie, an “old bear” of a physician renowned for his severe methods and curt manner.15 He would walk over from his new Fleet Street lodgings to spend a few days with them before he entered on this dread ordeal – “as some kind-hearted Catholics have taught, that the Soul is carried slowly along close by the walls of Paradise on its way to Purgatory”.16
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 27
