John Taylor Coleridge was a brilliant boy, of great intellectual capacity and considerable social sophistication. After Eton and Oxford, where he took a first in Classics (he was an almost exact contemporary of Shelley’s), he went on to read for the Bar, to contribute to the powerful Quarterly Review, and become a High Court judge. He wrote a life of his friend Keble, was appointed a privy councillor, and was knighted – though he always preferred to be known as Mr Justice Coleridge.67 In his first encounter with his uncle, he listened and watched with judicial care, and later wrote a detailed account which Henry – to be even more closely associated with his uncle – published in an influential volume to be entitled Table Talk (1836).68 Unlike so many later, spellbound listeners, John remembered and recorded what Coleridge actually said, and gave the most vivid impression of his huge range and revolving conversational style, as understood by an undergraduate.
The weekend began with talk of politics, Perceval’s relations with the Prince Regent, the war in the Peninsula, and General Sir John Moore’s courage on the battlefield contrasted with his fearfulness of political opinion at home. These were evidently subjects drawn from Coleridge’s Courier journalism. Then without apparent transition, he was suddenly racing into “German topics”: Luther, High and Low German, Klopstock, Wieland and the German Romantic sense of the Sublime.
This dauntingly obscure subject was made vivid with a single illustration: German sublimity was produced by comparing something very great with something very small, and thereby “elevating” it. “Thus, for example, Klopstock says, – ‘As the gardener goes forth, and scatters from his basket seed into the garden; so does the Creator scatter worlds with his right hand.’ Here worlds, a large object, are made small in the hands of the Creator; consequently, the Creator is very great.” But Coleridge regarded this technique as mechanical – he contrasted it with Edward Young’s Night Thoughts – and therefore not poetical “in the very highest sense”, which required an imaginative transformation of scale and feeling.
Yet the Germans were good metaphysicians and critics: “they criticized on principles previously laid down; thus, though they might be wrong, they were in no danger of being self-contradictory, which was too often the case with English critics.” From there Coleridge spun on to the new German Biblical criticism – “he found professors in the universities lecturing against the most material points in the Gospel” – with an amusing aside about Catholic superstition and the “worship of saints” in Sicily. So “glancing off to Aristotle”, he was on to Francis Bacon and Locke’s attacks on the medieval Schoolmen, and the concepts of “quality”, “quantity” and “quiddity” which he regarded as valuable counters to Locke’s “sneering” materialism.
For John Coleridge this intellectual tour d’horizon would have much the same impact as for an English undergraduate in the 1850s first hearing of Hegelianism, or in the 1950s of French Existentialism. Coleridge added that he would be writing a “History of Speculative Philosophy” in due course, and then went on without pause to praise Southey’s new poem “The Curse of the Kehema”, which was the talk of the literary season, and “the art displayed in the employment of Hindu monstrosities”. In the evening John walked Coleridge home to his inn, and was advised about his Oxford essay which he thought might be on the corruption of prose style, contrasting modern journalism with Apuleius and Cicero.69
The next morning, a Sunday, Coleridge appeared before breakfast, and was found in Mr May’s “delightful bookroom”, surrounded by open volumes, and gazing out in “silent admiration” at the beautiful garden. They all went to church, and Coleridge observed that tombstones in a peaceful Sunday churchyard always reminded him of re-birth rather than death: “it struck him as if God had given to man fifty-two springs in every year”. But he was impatient of the sermon which was conventionally pious, “and invidious in its tone towards the poor”.
Walking out through the meadows towards Twickenham, he talked about Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Church Yard”, and contrasted the sententiousness of Gray and Johnson as poets, with Milton and Dryden. “He thought Collins had more genius than Gray, who was a singular instance of a man of taste, poetic feeling, and fancy, without imagination.” Surprisingly, he did not mention Wordsworth at this point. Instead he veered off on to his Mediterranean adventures again, talked of Nelson and Ball, criticized British foreign policy and “lamented the haughtiness with which Englishmen treated all foreigners abroad, and the facility with which our government had always given up any people which had allied itself to us, at the end of a war…These two things, he said, made us universally disliked on the Continent; though, as a people, most respected.”
Then he talked of the United States, which he admired, though fearing the American Declaration of Independence had been “premature” and might lead to war with Britain (which it did in 1812). He felt America lacked a European social structure, a landed middle class who could give stability and tradition, and an intelligentsia or “learned class” which would provide political progress and regulate “the feelings of the people”.70*
At dinner in the mid-afternoon, Coleridge became wrapped in scientific conversation with another guest, Professor Stephen Rigaud, who was Director of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. But when the Mays’ little children were allowed in to join the adults, he instantly broke off. To John’s amusement, “he was in raptures with them, and descanted upon the delightful mode of treating them now, in comparison with what he had experienced in childhood” at Ottery and Christ’s Hospital. John was greatly struck by Coleridge’s quick rapport with the children, becoming noisy and playful, even to the point of embarrassment.
But the most extraordinary effect was produced afterwards at tea in the parlour. Coleridge and Professor Rigaud launched into a “discussion of Kant’s System of Metaphysics”. Respectful silence fell over the “little knots of company”, the tea things were removed, and John expected to see the women slipping away from such abstruse and exclusively male talk, as “Mr C.’s voice grew louder”. But something about Coleridge’s voice held them back – it was “so ready, so energetic and so eloquent” – and his explanations of the famous “subjective” and “objective” became “so very neat and apposite”, that they were gradually drawn in, engaged, and finally transfixed, hovering behind his chair and settling at his feet.
The Oxford undergraduate could scarcely believe it: “they were really entertained with Kant’s Metaphysics!” In retrospect it seemed almost the most memorable moment of the whole weekend, particularly as there were several pretty young women among them, these ladies “loitering most attentively, and being really uncommonly entertained with a long discussion of two hours on the deepest metaphysics…”
When finally the candles were being lit, John pulled one of the ladies to the pianoforte, and as she was “a very sweet singer”, whispered to her to end the evening with some Italian airs in Coleridge’s honour. He was obviously delighted, the Italian music touching off memories and emotions that his nephew could not have guessed. The young woman was happy to charm the great metaphysician in her turn. “She was anxious to please him, and he was enraptured. His frame quivered with emotion, and there was a titter of uncommon delight on his countenance. When it was over, he praised the singer warmly, and prayed she might finish those strains in heaven!”71
The word “titter” did not carry the mockery that it would indicate nowadays. Yet there is a clear and interesting suggestion here, as earlier, that young John Coleridge sometimes found his extraordinary uncle to be embarrassingly expressive and emotional. Nonetheless, the family weekend was counted a great success, and most signally with the younger generation. Coleridge noted wistfully: “O what wisdom I could talk to a YOUTH of Genius & genial-heartedness! O how little could I teach!…especially if a woman…”72
7
At Hammersmith, some sort of calm gradually settled over Coleridge’s nightly meditations. The daily regularity of the Courier work checked the opium-ta
king, and the agonizing over Wordsworth and Asra became less frequent for a while, though in August he noted briefly: “Why SARA alone? – Coleridge is no more!”73
Recalling Hamlet on the battlements of Elsinore at dawn, he wrote, “Every mere Passion, like Spirits, and Apparitions, have their hour of Cock-crow, in which they must vanish. But pure Love is therefore no mere Passion: & it is a test of its being Love, that no reason can be assigned why it should disappear. Shall we not always in this Life at least, remain Animae dimidiatae [Souls divided in two]?”74
The terrible nightmares also diminished, though Coleridge often could not sleep at all. He pulled back his bedroom curtains to watch anxiously for the summer sunrise to slide over the City rooftops in the east: “The sick and sleepless Man after the Dawn of the fresh Day watching the Smoke now from this, & then from the other chimney of the Town from his Bedchamber”. The sight of so many ordinary households waking up was strangely soothing, allowing him “to borrow from others that sense of a new Day, of a discontinuity between the Yesterday and the ToDay”.75
But sometimes those summer nights seemed endless, a purgatorial place of continuous twilight, in which his whole life seemed suspended outside time. He turned for consolation to his old friend the Moon, and it was now he began one of the most haunting and enigmatic of all his later poems, which he eventually entitled “Limbo”:
‘Tis a strange place, this Limbo! – not a Place,
Yet name it so; – where Time and weary Space
Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing,
Strive for their last crepuscular half-being, –
Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands
Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
Not mark’d by flit of Shades, – unmeaning they
As moonlight on the dial of the day!…
The flitting, insubstantial figures of Time and Space (in a first version Time has “scytheless hands”) could be seen as conventional personifications. But they also carry a metaphysical weight, being the two Kantian categories by which the human mind normally structures reality. Without them, Coleridge’s normal world dissolves into a “crepuscular” half-reality, the limbo described by both Christian theologians and mystics like Jakob Boehme.
But a third figure survives. Old, worn, blind, and yet mysteriously heroic, he stands beneath the attendant moon, which for Coleridge is always the symbol of the Imagination. Some healing impulse, some promise of salvation, seems to pass between the two: “His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light!” But what this might be, or how a blind man might see it, is left as a riddle.
But that is lovely – looks like Human Time, –
An Old Man with a steady look sublime,
That stops his earthly task to watch the skies;
But he is blind – a statue hath such eyes; –
Yet having moonward turn’d his face by chance,
Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance,
With scant white hairs, with foretop bald and high,
He gazes still, – his eyeless face all eye; –
As ‘twere an organ full of silent sight,
His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light! –
Lip touching lip, all moveless, bust and limb –
He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him!76
8
Coleridge drew much consolation from a curious German book of spiritual meditations which Crabb Robinson had given him, Jean-Paul Richter’s Geist, oder Chrestomathie. Later translated into English as Spirit, it had originally been published in Leipzig in 1801. Jean-Paul (1763–1825), as his name became familiarized in England and France, was one of the finest introspective writers of German Romanticism. He was a man obsessed by the fragile, melancholy beauty of the natural world. His master-theme was that of God’s reluctant departure from his Creation: the abandoning of modern man to intimations of a lost Paradise of faith. Writing equally in prose and verse, he became the great lyricist of spiritual loss, of autumnal emotions, and half-glimpsed revelations of ancient splendours.77
He would remain untranslated and unknown in England until taken up by De Quincey and Thomas Carlyle in the 1820s. But through Crabb Robinson, Coleridge discovered in him a spiritual brother, perfectly apt to his mood in 1811. He drew comfort from Jean-Paul’s aphorisms and meditations in a particular way. He did not merely read and reflect on them, but incorporated them into his Notebooks in various forms of translation, imitation and reworked versions.
“The giant Shadows sleeping amid the wan yellow Light of the December morning like Wrecks & scattered Ruins of the long, long Night.” So reads one particularly haunting Notebook fragment, which seems peculiarly Coleridgean, with its suggestion of dreams and shipwrecks.78 In fact this is a condensed translation, or intensification, of aphorism No. 386 from Jean-Paul’s Geist. “The December Sun, which hangs at Midday as low as the June Sun at Eventide, spreads its Deathly yellow light like burning methylated Spirits over the pale withered Meadows; and everywhere the long gigantic Shadows, like the Ruins and Ashes of the equally long Night, lie stretched out and slumbering in the Eventide of Nature and the Year.”79
This method of privately translating and anthologizing Jean-Paul throws some light on the psychology of Coleridge’s later plagiarisms. He had consciously used adapted translations in some of his earlier poetry, such as the “Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni” (from Fredericka Brun) in 1802; and more recently “A Tombless Epitaph” (from Chiabrera) in 1809. But his prose translations from Jean-Paul suggest a less deliberate, more internalized process at work in his private Notebooks. It was almost as if, in “the long, long Nights” of his study-bedroom at Hammersmith, he was holding a silent conversation with his confrere or brother-spirit in Leipzig.
Like Coleridge, Jean-Paul had thought a lot about worldly hope and spiritual despair. (One of his novels – Palingenesien (1798) – studies three kinds of unhappy marriage.) He had turned towards a poetic evocation of the immortal longings which seize upon unhappy people. Thus another aphorism from Geist (No. 4) spoke particularly to Coleridge, and is marked in the copy he borrowed from Robinson. “Strangers born in the Mountains are consumed in the Lowlands by an incurable homesickness. We are made for a Higher Place, and that is why we are gnawed by an Eternal Longing, and all the music we hear is the Cowbell that reminds us of our Alpine Home…”80
Coleridge clearly recognized himself in this, its poignant imagery reminding him of his own experience of leaving the Lake District. So his translation takes up the theme, expanding it with his own imagery, and developing it with a botanical analogy which comes from his poem “Psyche” (and which has no equivalent in Jean-Paul’s text). “We are born in the mountains, in the Alps – and when we hire ourselves out to the Princes of the Lower Lands, sooner or later we feel an incurable Home-sickness – & every Tune that recalls our native Heights, brings on a relapse of that Sickness. – I seem to myself like a Butterfly who having foolishly torn or bedaubed his wings, is obliged to crawl like a Caterpillar with all the restless Instincts of the Butterfly.”81
The “conversation” between Coleridge and Jean-Paul does not end here. The German author goes on to ask, what is the true significance of these “Eternal Longings”? He writes: “And what are we to conclude from this? Not that we are Unhappy, but that we are Immortal, and that the second world within us demands and demonstrates a second world outside us.”82 Coleridge takes up this idea in his translation (the “world within” clearly relating to his interpretation of Hamlet), but now moves away to follow his own completely original botanical analogy to explain the intimations of a “second” spiritual world.
In short, all the organs of Sense are framed for a corresponding World of Sense: and we have it. All the organs of Spirit are framed for a corresponding World of Spirit: & we cannot but believe it. The Infidel proves only that the latter organs are not yet developed in him…And what is Faith? – it is to the Spirit of Man the
same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to build its involucrum as long again as itself to make room for the Antennae, which are to come, tho’ they never yet have been. – O the Potential works in us even as the Present mood works on us!83
This notion of the spiritual world, and spiritual longing, being somehow programmed into Nature in an evolutionary sense, was to become of central importance to Coleridge. He had already written about it in April. “Just as much reason for affirming the future State as for denying that Nature ever tells a Lie generically – never makes animals have milk, when they are never to have sucklings etc.”84 But reading and translating Jean-Paul had concentrated and refined his own thoughts.
Yet he did not accept Jean-Paul uncritically. Praising him to Crabb Robinson, he also questioned Jean-Paul’s florid use of analogies: “You admire, not the things combined, but the act of combination.”85 Annotating the passage from Geist, he identified its philosophical weakness as an actual logical proof of any spiritual “second world” beyond the physical. His own metaphor is characteristically vivid and forceful. “All these poetico-philosophical Arguments strike and shatter themselves into froth against that stubborn rock, the fact of Consciousness, or rather its dependence on the body.”86
It would be absurd to describe Coleridge’s entries as any kind of plagiarism. But at the same time it is easy to see how, in other circumstances, use of such “adapted” material could open him to such a charge. Coleridge was soon to find other German authors – notably A. W. Schlegel and Schelling – with whom he developed the same brotherly or symbiotic relationship. He read, translated, refined and expanded in his own way. But when he left the privacy of his study and published or lectured on the resulting text (without acknowledging his source) he inevitably opened himself to the charge of plagiarism.
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 30
