The Morgans themselves left little record of their stewardship. There are no journals like Dorothy’s, no memoirs like Crabb Robinson’s, no essays like Lamb’s, no gossip like Mrs Clarkson’s. John Morgan’s letters are few and punctilious, Mary’s are lost, and Charlotte’s were so inexpressive that Coleridge sometimes hinted that she had abjured the burden of literacy altogether. (“I hope, Charlotte was not offended at my Joke,” he once wrote to Morgan, “in directing my Letter to her, as the great philo-letterist.”)106
Charles Lamb innocently suggested that they fed Coleridge very well. Once in 1811 he conjured up a prospective Sunday lunch at Hammersmith: there would be no “expensive luxuries” such as green peas, but merely “a plate of plain Turtle, another of Turbot, with good roast Beef in the rear”.107 Southey, more gravely, acknowledged that they handled Coleridge’s opium-taking with more practical kindness and effect, than any previous household, including his own. They continually battled to reduce it, but never held his lapses against him.108 One concludes that the Morgans were simply and essentially kind; while Coleridge was still capable of exercising his ancient powers of enchantment. Amidst the chaos and disarray, the bewitching light still shone.
Most elusive of all the elements which held them together, was what Coleridge fleetingly described as “jests, puns & sportive nonsense”. Coleridge simply had fun with the Morgans, in a way not really evident since his days with the undergraduates at Göttingen. (Indeed a certain adolescent or bohemian atmosphere always surrounds the Morgan household like a faint whiff of patchouli.) Coleridge could make them laugh at life. His later letters reveal their private world of ludicrous pet names, deliberately appalling puns (the worse he could make them, the better they were rated), imitated voices, imaginary household characters, running gag-lines, and messages in doggerel.
One of the main characters he adopted for their benefit was a Devonshire yokel, garrulous and fantastical, who held forth at metaphysical length on such significant subjects as snuff or fleas. On one occasion a long diatribe about lice in a stage-coach ended, in rustic persona and accent, with an exquisitely bad pun on telling lies and speaking sense. “Don’t spake to henny wun, if u plaze, about them thare two Lousses, as I caut [on] my nek – becaze they may take the License to zay, has h[ow] I has more of the first sillybull in my ‘ed, than the last.”109
On another occasion he asked Morgan to buy a learned German tome for his lectures, J. J. W. Heinse’s Ardinghello (1787), from a bookshop at 201 Piccadilly, in the following rhyming note:
My dear Morgan
I wish you would be my Organ
And when you pass down Piccadilly
To call in at Escher’s, who sells books wise and silly.
But chiefly in a Lingo by the Learned called German,
And who himself looks less like a Man than a Mer-man–
Ask him if he still has a work called Ardinghello,
It was in his Catalogue, I am sure, and of course to sell o–
And if it is, to buy it for me. Don’t forget it, my dear
Fellow!110
Pretty bad, of course, though that was the point. Such absurdities could co-exist with the serious business of life.
Indeed Morgan would eventually prove his organ powers in the most vital way as Coleridge’s amanuensis, taking over where Asra had left off. Already he was helping to draw up the Prospectus to the lectures, and on 29 October accompanied Coleridge to a business meeting with John Rickman about setting up subscription tickets and finding a suitable venue in the City.
Morgan helped Coleridge organize his lecture notes, supplied Shakespeare texts for quotation marked with red cards, and most vital of all packed up and delivered Coleridge by coach punctually on time for every single lecture from the end of November till the end of January. With this unlikely combination of frivolity and practicality, the Morgans transformed Coleridge’s life and perhaps even saved it.
12
Unlike the 1808 series, the lectures of winter 1810–11 were arranged with great speed and efficiency. They were first advertised on 11 November, begun a week later on Monday, 18 November, and continued twice weekly for seventeen sessions, starting promptly at 7.30 each evening. They were sponsored by the newly founded Philosophical Institution which had taken over the old premises of the Royal Society at the Scot’s Corporation Hall off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street. This was an area of London back-alleys and courtyards long associated with Dr Johnson. It was a location, observed Coleridge innocently, “renowned exclusively for pork and sausages”.111
Passing the ancient Cheshire Cheese Inn in Fleet Street, it was approached down a narrow, insalubrious covered passageway, which debouched into Fleur de Luce Court. But the Institution was distinguished – set up by a group of City doctors and lawyers, with the Dukes of Kent and Sussex as its patrons. The Hall itself had, to Coleridge’s eye, an almost comical splendour. “A spacious handsome room with an academical Stair-case & the Lecture room itself fitted up in a very grave authentic poetico-philosophical Style with Busts of Newton, Milton, Shakespeare, Pope & Locke behind the Lecturer’s Cathedra.”112 These marbled worthies seemed to gaze down on him with pleasing expectation.112
The Prospectus announced succinctly “A Course of Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry”, given by Mr Coleridge. It was more organized and sharply focused than the 1808 series. There would be an opening lecture on “False Criticism”. This would be followed by a twofold exegesis of the plays in terms of dramatic psychology, and then aesthetic structure. First, “a philosophic Analysis and Explanation of the principal Characters of our great Dramatist” (Othello, Richard III, Falstaff and Hamlet were specified); and second “a critical Comparison of Shakespeare, in respect of Diction, Imagery, management of the Passions, Judgement in the construction of his Dramas…with his contemporaries”. The whole would reveal what was “peculiar to his own Genius”.113 It was Coleridge back on track.
Tickets were sold in Fleet Street, Chancery Lane, Hatchard’s Piccadilly, and Godwin’s bookshop, at two guineas for the series or three guineas for gentlemen accompanied by a female guest – clearly aiming at a mixed audience. Each forthcoming lecture was advertised in The Times, and reporters from the Morning Chronicle, the Sun (then a literary broadsheet), and various smaller journals attended regularly. Most important of all, at least half the lectures were covered by shorthand reporters organized and apparently paid for by Morgan and Crabb Robinson, with encouragement from Southey who had urged that Coleridge should at last be recorded for posterity, “as a duty which he owes to himself, his friends and his family and the world”.114
Robinson co-opted the young John Payne Collier from his lodgings at Hatton Garden who covered seven lectures, and a certain J. Tomalin covered a further eight. Everything was done to make the series a permanent landmark in Coleridge’s new career.*
He was intensely nervous, and worked hard on his notes (scores of pages of which have survived quite separate from the transcripts) while determining to speak extempore as far as he could. Twelve days before the start, he wrote urgently to Robinson begging him to find a copy of A. W. Schlegel’s three-volume set of newly published lectures, Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur, Vorlesungen (Heidelberg, 1809–1811), On Dramatic Art and Literature.115 These covered the Greek sources of Western drama, and gave a critical overview of Shakespeare’s plays.
Nine days before the start his bowels seized up (the usual indication of increased opium), and he lay about his room in a dressinggown with his trousers off, hoping to encourage an instant explosion with “strong aperient medicines”.116
Four days before the start, still undetonated, he sent out a last flurry of complimentary tickets, including one to Godwin and extending the invitation to Godwin’s children – especially the fourteen-year-old Mary (future author of Frankenstein) – who might “receive amusement”.
Two days before the start, now altogether prone on his sofa and feeling like “a t
runk which Nature had first locked, and then thrown away the Key”, he received a supportive visit from Stuart and promise of newspaper coverage. Crabb Robinson also assured him that The Times would carry an article, though Walter did this grudgingly.117
Finally, on the last day before the start, Coleridge took the dread step of summoning an ancient nurse with a stomach pump. The effect was better than instantaneous, and produced an operatic result which Coleridge orchestrated gleefully for Crabb Robinson’s benefit.
The reality of an old Woman added to the idea of a Clyster proved so vehement a stimulus to my morbid delicacy, that flash! like lightning, and roar & rumble! like thunder, it (i.e. the proximate cause) plunged down thro’ me – & to the Music loud and visceral and cataractic I sang out, “I do not want the old Lady! – Give her half a crown & send her away!” – just as I heard her aged feet’s plump and tardy echoes from the Stairs.118
He thought the psychology of this treatment, a pure case of mind over matter, extremely interesting: “marvellous Beings are we!”118 The symbolism of the episode did not escape him either: physically unblocked he was now mentally freed for the flow of metaphysical inspiration. The “Music loud and visceral” had been a conscious echo of “Kubla Khan” with its “music loud and long”.
The Corporation Hall was packed with some hundred and fifty people for the first two lectures, on Monday, 18th and Thursday, 21st November. Despite later assaults of “fog and snow”, they remained well attended throughout the winter. The Courier noted “several Fashionables” from the Royal Institution series, but the audience was now mainly from the London literary world – “the young men of the City”, as the newspaper put it, come “to hear a Poet discuss the principles of his art”.
They included at various times (besides the faithful inner circle of Morgan, Lamb, Crabb Robinson and Godwin), Hazlitt, Rickman, Campbell, Humphry Davy and his smart young wife, George Dyer, Miss Mitford, Mrs Inchbald, and on at least two occasions the young Lord Byron recently returned from Greece. The two most noticeable absentees (from a modern viewpoint) were the seventeen-year-old John Keats, who had just begun attending surgical lectures at St Thomas’s Hospital, across the river by Westminster Bridge; and the nineteen-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had just eloped with his first wife Harriet to Edinburgh.
The first lecture on “False Criticism” was judged eccentric and disappointing. The second, on “true definitions” of poetry, was thought brilliant and provocative. Subsequent lectures, with their numerous unannounced digressions, fluctuated between these two assessments, but always seemed to hold their audience. The general impression was that Coleridge got better and better as he proceeded.
Crabb Robinson’s first report in The Times, which Walter had insisted should not be a puff but “dry and cold”, caught the uncertain opening very well. Coleridge’s initial targets, the rage for literary gossip and politicized reviewing, as epitomized by the Edinburgh and the Quarterly Review, seemed to Robinson rather odd and contentious: “viz. the excessive stimulus produced by the wonderful political events of the age; – the facilities afforded to general and indiscriminate reading; – the rage for public speaking, and the habit consequently induced of requiring instant intelligibility; – periodical criticism, which teaches those to fancy they can judge who ought to be content to learn; – the increase of cities, which has put an end to the old-fashioned village gossiping, and substituted literary small-talk in its place…From such topics it will be seen that Mr Coleridge is original in his views.”119
J. P. Collier made it sound slightly more lively: “he contended that the present was ‘an age of personality & political gossip’ where insects, as in Egypt, were worshipped and valued in proportion to their sting”. Yet he too thought the delivery was “not dazzling” as he expected, and the Sun urged Coleridge “to speak as much, and to read as little as possible”.120
But by the second lecture, expectation was fulfilled. Young Collier thought it “not only beyond my praise but beyond the praise of any man, but himself…All others seem so contemptible in comparison. I…blessed my stars that I could comprehend what he had the power to invent.”121
Coleridge opened with his witty definition of the four classes of poetry readers, went on to speak of true poetry as “a representation of Nature and the human affections”. He insisted on its ancient origins in man’s universal need for heightened perceptions and “pleasurable excitement”, and found its beginnings in “the celebrations of the feasts of Bacchus”. It was therefore a product of liberated natural energies rather than disciplined cultural forms.
He attacked the narrow, polite moralism of eighteenth-century Augustan criticism, the formal correctness of French theory and the earthbound limitations of Johnsonian common-sense. Such critics reminded Coleridge of “frogs croaking in a ditch or bog involved in darkness, but the moment a lantern was brought near the scene of their disputing society they ceased their discordant harangues”.122 They had not seen the light: that true poetry was never a formal game (metrical rules, dramatic unities, didactic, ideas dressed “in silks & satins”) but always an imaginative expression of inward knowledge: “nor would it be otherwise until the idea were exploded that knowledge can be easily taught, & until we learnt the first great truth that to conquer ourselves is the only true knowledge”.123 He illustrated this theme with a spectacular array of references, from Gulliver’s Travels, Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden and Pope’s Epistles, to Catullus’s love poetry, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, and Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hamlet.
Finally he promised to champion Shakespeare and Milton, with detailed readings from their works, as the great masters of imaginative power against which all “Young Poets” must match their desire for “glorious immortality”. He ended with a characteristically challenging image of King Lear on the wild heath in his agony, “complaining to the Elements” in the highest poetical language that tragedy could afford, while simultaneously “mocked by the mimicry of the Fool” in the lowest language common to men, the “only attendant in his calamity”. This was the richness of Nature that great poetry brought forth.124 It was the first of his many oblique self-dramatizations. The audience left in a buzz of excitement.
Crabb Robinson approved: “a vast improvement on the first. It was delivered with ease, was popular, and contained interesting matter on that which his audience wished to hear about.”125 He went down to Hammersmith to congratulate Coleridge, and found him still “not quite well, but very eloquent”, talking of Schelling’s theory of the opposition between Art (as Consciousness) and Nature (as the Unconscious). He also compared Shakespeare and Calderon as imaginative poets, but there was no mention of Schlegel’s Lectures at this point. “He observed of poetry that it united passion with order, and he very beautifully illustrated the nature of the human mind, which seeks to gratify contrary propensities (as sloth and the horror of vacancy) at the same time…” He rejoiced to find him safely “mounted on his hobby horse”, and hurried away before he fell off.126
The third and fourth lectures took place, as advertised in The Times, punctually on 25 and 27 November. Coleridge was now more confident, and consequently more digressive and speculative. He worked back over his definitions of poetry, constantly throwing out provocations and new analogies. “Poetry is a species of composition opposed to Science, as having intellectual pleasure for its Object, and not Truth.”127 “Physicians asserted that each Passion has its proper pulse – So it is with metre when rightly used.”128 In writing of human affections, the poet “shall bring within the bounds of pleasure that which otherwise would be painful”.129
The first (prose) chapter of the Book of Isaiah could be “reduced to complete hexameters” with only minor shifts in word-order, “so true it is that wherever Passion was, the language became a sort of metre”.130 Poetry responded to our “yearnings” to be something, or someone, other than ourselves: “we wish to have a shadow, a sort of prophetic existence present to us, which tells us what w
e are not…”131
Shakespeare was the great imaginative creator of this otherness, not “like a Dutch painter” in external details, but in a sort of passionate transmigration of the soul. “In the meanest character it was still Shakespeare, it was not the mere Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, or the blundering Constable in Measure for Measure, but it was this great & mighty Being changing himself into the Nurse or the blundering Constable that gave delight…He might compare it to Proteus who now flowed, a river; now raged, a fire; now roared; a lion – he assumed all changes, but still in the stream, in the fire, in the beast…it was the Divinity that appeared in it, & assumed the character.”132
On and on Coleridge poured, spun and cataracted over his audience. References, asides and illustrations broke over them like foam: Newton, Milton, Handel, Michelangelo. Analogies of literary form might be found in a single American maple leaf, a wax doll, a mirror-image, or “a low lazy Mist on a Lake”. They might consider Pope’s Essay on Man, the Psalms, Homer’s Odyssey, Richardson’s novels, Burns’s Tam O’Shanter, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 113, “Venus and Adonis”, and “The Rape of Lucrece” (all quoted from the passages marked with Morgan’s red cards).
The great idols of eighteenth-century criticism – poetry as imitation, the dramatic unities of time and place, the belief in stage-illusion, the idea of Shakespeare as a “Child of Nature” – were all swept away like so much antiquarian flotsam. Again and again Coleridge reverted to his central theme with wave-like repetition: the principle of poetry was an imaginative force, a power of the mind that generated its own forms and linguistic energies, a primordial “excitement”, passion united with order.
At the end of the fourth lecture, he calmly dismissed a century of learned scholastic debate over the order of composition of Shakespeare’s plays. “In examining the dramatic works of Shakespeare, Mr Coleridge said he should rather pursue the psychological, than the chronological order which had been so warmly disputed.”133
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 32
