With that Wordsworth left London, to go walking with his brother Christopher in Kent. All further thoughts of Coleridge were shortly after swept from his mind by the terrible news from Dorothy that his little daughter Catherine had unexpectedly died at Grasmere. At the very moment that he and Mary had been rejoicing in their family happiness and security, it was shaken by this death; and six months later the blow was to be repeated in the death of their little boy Tom. For Wordsworth the year 1812 was to be one of loss and bereavement, and the loss of Coleridge came to seem in retrospect part of a tragic pattern, and the end of the most hopeful part of his life.
As Dorothy later wrote of Coleridge in sombre, reflective mood: “God bless him. He little knows with what tenderness we have lately thought of him, nor how entirely we are softened to all sense of injury.’88
9
For Coleridge, the bustle and drama of spring 1812 gave way to a drear and directionless summer. Despite the comforts of Berners Street, he could settle to no clear plan. He wrote few letters – none at all to Keswick – and his Notebooks were almost silent. In the new political situation he felt discouraged with the idea of continuing The Friend, though he still worked intermittently on his play.
In August he wrote to Stuart offering a series of political essays on general themes: the disturbed state of parliament, the war with America, the feeling of “Disorganization” throughout the country, the political role of the Church, and the principle of toleration.89 To John Murray he also offered a curious anthology, to be culled from his “Memorandum & common-place Books”, of anecdotes and epigrams from German, Spanish and Italian authors “of which no translation exists”, and to be entitled Exotics Naturalized.
But he felt ill and dispirited, and none of this was done. Opiumdosing increased, his digestion was bad, his chest painful, and his right leg swelled up with a kind of “Erypsypelatous Inflammation”. He consulted a new physician, Dr Robert Gooch, who bluntly diagnosed all his symptoms as “evils produced by the use of narcotics”. He prescribed mercury in the form of Corbyn’s Blue Pills, nitric acid in water, and “a known & measured quantity of Stimulant, with an attempt to diminish the Opiate part of it little by little, if it were only a single Drop in two days”. But Coleridge felt the sickness was in his heart, and the best part of the cure lay simply in talking to the doctor and trying to put him “in possession of the whole of my Case with all its symptoms, and all its known, probable and suspected Causes.”90
He thought much of these “symptoms and causes”. Inevitably, he was turning increasingly to Mary and Charlotte for sympathy, and perhaps something more. But beyond a certain point, here he felt obscurely rejected. Their very closeness as sisters, which he had once celebrated in his poem of 1807, now tantalized him with an inner circle of affection he could not enter. Ironically, in this too they seemed very like Mary Wordsworth and Asra. They were “beautiful, feminine, attractive, without affectation – add to this amusing and…of excellent Good Sense”. Yet with all this they were not “permanently lovely or loveable”, in the way that he had hoped.
He puzzled over this harsh verdict. “How can this be? They are loveless – if any trait of the Lover appear, it is to each other. To each other I have noticed a soft, soothing, caressing character. But to men, however intimate…they will do indeed everything that can be wished – but they will look nothing, say (attune) nothing.” If this revealed something of the Brent sisters’ closeness, it revealed even more of Coleridge’s continuing, greedy hunger for feeling and tenderness – still cuckoo-like, still unappeased, still demanding nesting-rights within his companions’ hearts. It was almost as if he expected the same conjugal treatment as John Morgan. Indeed he wanted so much – “the flush, the overflow, the rapture” – but who now could give him all this?91
Sometimes he still thought of Asra, but now he tried to tell himself bitterly that this was his own weakness. In September he came across a passage from Schiller’s Don Carlos which he carefully copied down (editing and improving as he went) as a dramatization of what his feelings should be. If his life had been a play, then this is how his character should respond. “O! this terrible love has swept away all the early burgeoning of my spirit, never to return…I have been sunk in a long, heavy dream – that I loved! – Now I am awake! Let the past be forgotten. At last I see there is a greater, more desirable good than to possess you. – Here are your letters back. Destroy mine. Do not fear any more outbursts. It is past. A pure fire has burnt clean my spirit!”
But Coleridge could not sustain such noble renunciation. He listed all the places of their love as a litany of regret “Sockburn, Middleham, Gallow-Hill, Keswick, Grasmere!” For him, such memories could never be burnt away. He could act as if they could, “but to feel, to be it. O weak of heart, never! Asra, Asra…” Yet slowly he thought the intensity of his longing was fading into the past.92
He thought too of his own children, as well he might. Here the case was different. The very fact of their existence brought him hope, and altered the sense of his own identity. Whereas his life had once contained a single continuous Self, like a single advancing line, there was now a divided Self like two paths, separated by the past and the future. At certain moments he could be conscious of the two trajectories simultaneously, like the pagan god with two faces, “Janus, capable of both”.
He valued “that much-suggesting Mood, with which we look back on our own youth with a feeling strictly analogous to that with which we regard our offspring: as if the line on each side of the central point representing the Present…were different only by an arbitrary relation like that of Right & Left.” It was as if he moved forward over a great flat plain, and “by an arbitrary accident of my turning North or South”, could see these two Selves travelling parallel in the past and in the future. He drew a little compass diagram in his Notebook, with a zero at the centre, and “Past Self, in Childhood Youth etc.” fanned out to the left; and “Future Self in others, children, Sons etc.” fanned out to the right.93
It was a conception similar to his poem “Hope and Time”. This may have been first drafted at Stowey in 1807, but he seems to have worked on it throughout these years and it was not published until 1817. It is both an image of his own childhood in “ancient days”, and of his own children in the future. It has the same mysterious movement across a symbolic landscape, “some Elfish Place”, and the same mysterious division between two identities, past and future. But it can also be seen as a simple memory of Hartley and little Sara playing, and it is this which makes it so strange and compelling:
Two winged Children run an endless Race –
A Sister and a Brother!
But HOPE outruns the other –
Yet ever flies she with reverted Face,
And looks and listens for the Boy behind;
TIME is his Name – and he, alas! is blind,
With regular Step o’er rough and smooth he passed,
And knows not whether he is first or last.94
But the diagram in his Notebook of 1812 is not a poem. It is a retreat from a fully imagined world into one of pure symbolic abstraction. Abstraction seemed to soothe Coleridge at this time, like a navigator at sea in a storm quietly drawing course-bearings at his chart-table.
He drew another one on the back of a letter enquiring if he intended to lecture again at the Royal Institution. This diagram consisted of pairs of back-to-back triangles, and was headed “True Love Illustrated Geometrically”. Its proposition was that the ideally matched couple were held together by their differences as much as their similarities: “i.e. Opposites & yet Correspondences”. The long shared base-line of “Love’s compound triangles” represented a common nature, the foundation of a relationship. But they were drawn together by the “opposite poles” of character which only met at the apex of the triangle. Perfect love was essentially “reciprocal”. The man and the woman took “spiritual Possession” of each other, precisely through the qualities each lacked.
His
triangles no longer had the old beloved Grasmere initials attached, as in earlier Notebooks; they were marked blankly A, B and C. When Coleridge put this geometry of human passion into explanatory notes, the images that came to him were equally impersonal and mechanical, though none the less vivid and sexual for that. “Thus the wards of a Lock are at once opposite and yet correspondent to the Turns of its Key – so the Cup and Ball, as in the moveable Bones of the Knee – thus too the sexes throughout all Nature.” One exception struck him, from one of Blumenbach’s learned botanical volumes he had read long ago in Göttingen: the bisexual earth-worm, which was “at once Male & Female”. Yet even with the earth-worm, he surmised, “the species is continued in pairs, so each is Male & Female to the other, and not to itself”.95 So Coleridge continued to dwell on the mystery of love, even though it had slipped away from him in so many forms, and perhaps for that very reason.
In his withdrawn mood Coleridge had no communication with Keswick throughout the summer and autumn, hoping he would have better financial tidings before the year was out. Mrs Coleridge had learned of the “reconciliation” directly from Wordsworth, and was kept in mind of her husband by Hartley, who was growing up more and more like his father – deeply absorbed in his classical reading, maddening and procrastinatory in his habits, and quite astonishing in his talk. When the educational expert Dr Bell visited Greta Hall, he described Hartley as “a Genius by the manner of opening his Mouth”.
Mrs Coleridge took a more down to earth view: perhaps Hartley would make his fortune in the Law. “He has the ‘Gift of the Gab’ – in no small degree, and, notwithstanding what he says of fears and tremblings, a great confidence in speaking. – He is a great favourite in the neighbourhood of his School, and perhaps a little spoilt by being often in the company of people of fashion, where he is not only permitted, but expected to talk.” Like father, like son. She told Poole that she had now approached both Wordsworth and Southey about getting her sons into university, as she openly doubted Coleridge would ever be able to finance them. She was touched that Wordsworth showed “a most friendly regard for these Boys, and an ardent interest in their future well-doing”.96
10
In fact Coleridge had roused himself, and planned a return to lecturing. By September he had proposed an immensely ambitious new course to Richard Saumarez, the director of the Surrey Institution in Blackfriars Road. He set out a programme which would look at the development of Romantic poetry within European culture as a whole. He would begin with the “Origination” of all the arts within civilization: “Dress…Dances, gymnastic Sports…Architecture, Eloquence, Music, Poetry, Statuary, Painting, Gardening”. He would then continue with the impact of Greek mythology, religion and republican institutions on classical art forms, and contrast these with “the Establishment of Christendom” and the development of “Gothic, Celtic, or Moorish” cultures and the Romance languages and forms.97 From this essentially “mixed” European inheritance he would derive the root meaning of the word “Romantic”, and proceed to demonstrate “the true Origin of the Romantic Drama in Shakespeare”.98 The course would end with a detailed “philosophical analysis” of four Shakespeare plays: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello.
This greatly expanded programme, with its new emphasis on the religious and cultural forces that had created Romanticism as a European movement, was something quite new in English criticism. It was inspired both by Coleridge’s increasingly detailed annotations of Schlegel’s lectures, and also by the kind of attentive audience he expected.
The Surrey Institution had been founded in 1808 on the site of a converted museum on the Blackfriars Road in Southwark, south of the Thames. The entrance to the building was colonnaded like a Greek temple, with life-size bronze statues of eminent scientists and literary men – Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Locke and Newton – standing loftily between the Corinthian columns. It was designed as a secular temple to self-improvement, included a library, a laboratory and a reading room, and was financed largely by wealthy dissenters and Quaker businessmen.
Lectures were given by candlelight at seven o’clock in the evening, strictly after working hours. The south London audience were all voluntary subscribers to the Institution; eager, attentive, anxious to learn, they looked for instruction rather than entertainment. Crabb Robinson dubbed them “the Saints”. Coleridge had to make special application for free seats for the Morgans, describing them as “members of my own Family”.99 It was not at all a glamorous venue like Willis’s Rooms, and the proposed fee was a mere £50; but it was in many ways the kind of earnest audience he most needed.
The lectures were scheduled to begin on 3 November 1812. Coleridge made no secret of the fact that he was interpreting the latest developments in German cultural criticism, and openly carried his three volumes of Schlegel’s Vorlesungen in their pink paper covers up to the lecture dais. (He later recalled to the Morgans that the Shakespeare volume was “more dirtied than the other two” from constant use.)100
He seems to have started each lecture with a section of Schlegel’s argument, and then improvised along his own line of criticism, freely using the materials he knew so well from previous lectures. Crabb Robinson, still a faithful attendant at every lecture, noted the use of “Kantian theory”, the “rhapsodic” digressions, and the religious dimension which Coleridge gave to the Romantic outlook. Sometimes he felt this verged on “pious – cant, I fear”, designed for the evangelical element in the audience; and once, having drunk too much wine to fortify himself against the wilderness of the Blackfriars Road, he fell asleep.101 But gradually he too was gripped by the lectures, and considered the last five of the series had wholly won over the audience.102
It is impossible to know most of what was actually said at the Surrey Institution this winter, for the simple reason that Coleridge decided that he would make virtually no notes. The only newspaper account which appeared, in the Morning Chronicle, gives a tantalizing glimpse of the first lecture opening with a firework display of verbal definitions. How could we know precisely what the word “Beauty” means, when every schoolboy knew how the simplest adjective might have “nine or ten meanings”? He took the Greek liparos, which Homer used to mean shining, or flashing or radiant. But, asked Coleridge in the candlelight, how many bright different things in nature this might apply to: “the moon reflected on a lake, a storm at sea, the teeth of a lion discovered through the foliage…”103
Coleridge later claimed that the Surrey Institution series “On Belles Lettres” was the most spontaneously improvised he had yet given: “I never once thought of the Lecture, till I had entered the Lecture Box.”104 This almost reckless willingness to perform without the safety-net of scripted preparation suggests a curious mixture of confidence and carelessness. If his emotional life lay temporarily in ruins, his intellectual identity struggled to rise into some larger, more commanding sphere. Like many brilliant public performers, he seems to have sought a rapport with his audience which replaced the reassurance and appreciation he could not find in his personal relations. More and more he invested himself in his public persona, and seized every chance – in the lecture hall, in the literary salon, and soon in the theatre – to assert himself in this self-dramatizing and often mesmeric way. To be the central, hypnotic figure in a circle of candlelight was to demonstrate that he was still alive.
Two of the fragmentary notes which have survived give a precise, focused snapshot of the way he worked. In Lecture 7, on the distinction between Classical and Romantic forms, Coleridge used a single sheet of prompt notes which are little more than a verbatim summary of Schlegel’s first lecture. But they end with his own brilliantly compact conclusions, which he evidently used for free, spoken elaboration.
It would be difficult to define the complex aesthetic distinction more succinctly than in these few, carefully weighted and balanced terms. The classicism of the Ancients implied above all a sense of the Finite: “Grace, Elegance, Proportion, Fancy, Dignity, Majesty, wh
atever is capable of being definitely conveyed by defined Forms or Thoughts.” By contrast Romanticism, and the spirit of the Modern age, implied a restless Expansion: “the infinite, & indefinite as the vehicle of the Infinite – hence more to the Passions, the obscure Hopes and Fears – the wandering through Infinite – grander moral Feelings – more august conception of man as man – the Future rather than the Present – Sublimity.”105 For Coleridge’s audience the building they sat in beneath its Greek cupola represented the former, while the speaker in front of them weaving and gesticulating in the candlelight was a living embodiment of the latter.
In Lecture 8, on the organic nature of Romantic form, Coleridge again used a single sheet of prompt notes, this time based on Schlegel’s twelfth lecture. But this time he took specific sentences or short paragraphs from the German text, translated them literally, and then developed them with his own wholly characteristic images and arguments.
Thus Schlegel wrote in a central passage: “The poetic spirit required to be limited, that it may move within its range with a becoming liberty, as has been felt by all nations on the first invention of metre; it must act according to laws derivable from its own essence, otherwise its strength will be evaporated in boundless vacuity.”106 This is typical of Schlegel: dry, logical and relentlessly abstract. The argument is philosophically so generalized that many of its characteristic terms (such as “essence” and “vacuity”) retain very little meaning in English.
Coleridge brought it to life, in his prompt notes, as follows: “The Spirit of Poetry like all other living Powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by Rules, were it only to unite Power with Beauty. It must embody in order to reveal itself; but a living body is of necessity an organized one – & what is organization, but the connection of Parts to a whole, so that each Part is at once End & Means! This is no discovery of criticism – it is a necessity of the human mind – & all nations have felt and obeyed it, in the invention of metre, & measured Sounds, as the vehicle & Involucrum of Poetry itself, a fellow-growth from the same Life, even as the Bark is to a living Tree.”107
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 38
