Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  At first sight, it is the conventional picture of a solemn, heavy, middle-aged professional man. He might be a banker, a tutor, a non-conformist clergyman (or just possibly an exiled revolutionary). But Allston has also captured something visionary, a disturbing other-worldly radiance, a sense of distance and disaster. It is as if Coleridge had disguised himself for the occasion, and beneath the respectable clothes stood someone quite different: the Ancient Mariner immobilized under the uneasy glow of a full moon.

  The dark background is emphasized by the glimmering half-light from a tall gothic window behind his right shoulder, with the carved figure of a medieval knight standing sentinel in a niche. Coleridge’s face glows out of the darkness, round and full. His hair is almost entirely white, his eyes large and abstracted, his full mouth closed and slightly downturned, with an expression suggesting both suffering and determination. In his left hand he carries what looks like a small book, but turns out to be his snuffbox, the precious one given him by his admirer Michael Castle.

  Years before Coleridge had humorously mocked his portrait, also painted in Bristol (in 1796), by Peter Vandycke. It was “a mere carcass of a face, fat, flabby and expressive chiefly of inexpression”. Now, nearly twenty years later, he mourned it, both for its weakness and what seemed to him its lifeless immobility. “Of my own portrait I am no judge – Allston is highly gratified with it…I am not mortified, though I own I should better like it to be otherwise…The face itself is a FEEBLE, unmanly face…The exceeding Weakness, Strengthlessness, in my face was ever painful to me.” Yet Coleridge also saw that Allston had suggested something fleeting and magical, the power that he could still summon if he began to speak. “Whatever is impressive, is part fugitive, part existent only in the imagination of persons impressed strongly by my conversation.”30

  Allston himself thought the picture among his best, but some years later he reflected on the technical difficulties of rendering his subject. What he picked out was not the weakness or suffering in Coleridge’s face, but the hidden energy and animation he had found impossible to capture. It led him into a rapturous flight of praise, a memory of Coleridge’s undiminished fascination even at this most troubled time.

  “So far as I can judge of my own production the likeness of Coleridge is a true one, but it is Coleridge in repose; and, though not unstirred by the perpetual ground-swell of his ever-working intellect, and shadowing forth something of the deep philosopher, it is not Coleridge in his highest mood, the poetic state, when the divine afflatus of the poet possessed him. When in that state, no face that I ever saw was like his; it seemed almost spirit made visible without the shadow of the physical upon it. Could I then have fixed it upon canvas! but it was beyond the reach of my art.”31 Long after Coleridge’s death, Wordsworth saw it in Wade’s drawing room and called it the “finest” image of his friend; adding with a certain irony that it was “the only likeness that ever gave him any pleasure”.32

  5

  Coleridge was now set on returning to the Morgans at Ashley, and in mid August sent down a single box of books and clothes by the canal to Bath, containing all his worldly possessions. He still had some anxieties about his reception, writing to John Morgan; “God grant that with a quiet Conscience I could never be out of the sight of green Field, or out of company with you, Mary & Charlotte – tho’ the two latter quarrel with me in a very inexplicable way.” He did not expect “anything like praise, or sugar comfits” from them; but perhaps he would write out a few sheets “full of the soothing, handsome speeches” with exact rules and directions “for the time & place of administering them”.33

  He was also anxious about his slow return to health, wondering what permanent damage his appalling excess of opium might have caused. He suffered from a bout of erysipelas inflammation on his legs, and had Dr Daniel examine him for a catalogue of suspected complaints: stricture of the urethra, cirrhosis of the liver, kidney stone, gout, “angry Itching”. He grew familiar with a huge tome on “Cutaneous Complaints”. On some days he still felt “thoroughly be-belzebubbed”.34

  Nevertheless, his hypochondria had its limits. (“I tell Dr Daniel, that I have a schirrous Liver: & he laughs at me for my Information.”) It was a good sign that his appetite was modestly returning – “I have dined out at York Place…Turbot, Lobster Sauce, Boiled Fowl, Turtle, Ham, a quarter of Lamb, Tatas & Cauliflower etc. – then Duck, green Peas, a gooseberry & a currant Pie, and a soft Pudding.”35 On other evenings he spoke wistfully of confining himself “rigorously to the Pint of Madeira prescribed”.36

  Coleridge was most anxious about what direction his work should now take. He was reading widely from Cervantes and Goethe, but several attempts to restart his lecturing on these subjects had been broken off during the summer. The strain was too much, and he would not lecture again for four years. What he wanted was work he could do quietly and steadily at Ashley. At the end of August, on a hint from Lamb, he wrote to the publisher John Murray at Albemarle Street, proposing a verse-translation of Goethe’s Faust, to be prefaced with a short critical biography.

  Murray was now the most fashionable and commercially successful publisher in London. The poetry of Byron, Scott and Rogers had made his fortune. Coleridge hoped that his own work might be re-launched among these glittering names, but he was very uncertain of his standing. Had he already been forgotten or dismissed in London? In writing, he was reduced to giving an awkward curriculum vitae. He reminded Murray of Remorse (recently re-staged at Bristol) and of Wallenstein (his Schiller translation of 1800), though not of “The Ancient Mariner”. He admitted that his own work had never sold, but pointed out that Goethe’s Faust was “characteristic of a new & peculiar sort of Thinking and Imagining” in Germany, and that he was uniquely qualified to translate it. Faust should be rendered “in wild lyrical metres”; and though it was “odious” to attempt a literary work from “any motive of pecuniary advantage” he was prepared to bring his “Intellect to the Market”. Murray replied that the market was prepared to commission the work for £100.37

  In fact Murray, with his shrewd appreciation of literary tastes and fashion, was keen to publish Faust. Byron admired it, and Crabb Robinson (having heard “Christabel” recited) had advised him that Coleridge was the man “most likely to execute the work adequately”.38 But he was discouraged by Coleridge’s manner (both humble and high-handed), and puzzled by his further stipulation about terms. “1. That on the delivery of the last Mss sheet you remit a 100 guineas to Mrs Coleridge, or Mr Robert Southey, at a bill of five weeks. – 2. that I, or my Widow or Family, may any time after two years from the first publication have the privilege of reprinting it in any collection of all my poetical writings, or of my Works in general – which set off with a Life of me might perhaps be made profitable to my Widow.”39

  In reality, Coleridge was hoping for some general contract with Murray, and some way of guaranteeing a source of income for his family at Greta Hall. But to the shrewd publisher, the vague suggestion of posthumous publications and collected works had an ominous ring. He must also have wondered exactly what revelations Coleridge’s “Life of me” might entail. When he hesitated, Coleridge wrote again on 12 September, now casting himself as Goethe’s champion in England.

  “I cannot persuade myself, that I can have offended you by my openness. I think ‘Faust’ a work of genius, of genuine and original Genius. The Scenes in the Cathedral and in the Prison must delight and affect all Readers not pre-determined to dislike. But the Scenes of Witchery and that astounding Witch-gallop up the Brocken will be denounced as fantastic and absurd. Fantastic they are, and were meant to be; but I need not tell you, how many will detect the supposed fault for one, who can enter into the philosophy of that imaginative Superstition, which justifies it.” Not discounting these difficulties, Coleridge compared Goethe to Shakespeare, and described him as one of “the living Stars, that are now culminant on the German Parnassus”.40

  This second letter was a much more direct challeng
e to Murray to take the risk of publishing a controversial work. Coleridge’s memories of his own trip to the Brocken in 1799 were mixed with his perennial fascination with “imaginative Superstition” and the poetic world of “witchery”. But Murray was unmoved. When Coleridge added, with a touch of desperation, that he was also prepared to translate Cervantes or Boccaccio instead for “any moderate price”, the exchange lapsed.41*

  Though still without commissioned work, Coleridge moved back to Ashley in the second week of September 1814. His return to the countryside was to be as momentous as his departure from Bristol to Stowey almost twenty years before in the winter of 1796. His literary schemes – as then – were fluid, but a second great period of writing lay ahead. He had survived a time when he had struggled “against the immoral Wish to have died at the commencement of my Sufferings”.42 As he rode out, he greeted a large white sea-bird heading southwards for the Bristol Channel:

  Seaward, white-gleaming thro’ the busy Scud

  With arching Wings the Sea-mew o’er my head

  Posts on, as bent on speed; now passaging

  Edges the stiffer Breeze, now yielding drifts

  Now floats upon the Air, and sends from far

  A wildly wailing Note.43

  He arrived at Ashley as the autumn rains began, and it seemed like the end of a long dry season. His Notebooks flooded slowly back into life. One evening he stood at the window for two hours, listening to the sounds of “a steady soaking Rain”. When the sky cleared, he walked out and stood beneath a “full uncurtainment of sprinkled Stars and milky Stream and dark blue Interspaces…so deep was the silence of the Night, that the Drip from the Leaves of the Garden Trees copied a steady shower.”44

  6

  As far as the literary world was concerned, Coleridge’s retreat to Ashley in the autumn of 1814 marked the final disastrous collapse of a once-brilliant career. Among family, friends and professional colleagues, his opium addiction was an open secret. Nothing more was heard of him at Keswick, and very little at Bristol except through Joseph Cottle, who continued to urge repentance (prompting Coleridge to repeat philosophically, “sooner or later my Case will be published”).45 He had no plans to lecture, and no publisher either in Bristol or in London. The Quarterly Review ran a long, retrospective article (by his nephew John Taylor Coleridge) placing him high among “the Lake Poets” – one of the earliest uses of the term – but regretting his failure to publish any mature work, suffering “the fruits of his labour to perish”, and accusing him of having dissipated his life “in alternations of desultory application, and nervous indolence”.46

  News of Coleridge’s fate spread rapidly among the younger generation, who bewailed his loss to literature. Keats’s friend, the young poet J. H. Reynolds, who had been corresponding with Wordsworth, recorded the tragedy. “Poor Coleridge! I understand he is out of his Mind! – or at least in that state of dejectedness that is akin to it. – Good God! What a genius is lost! What a mind is overthrown! Did you ever read his Poems of ‘Love’ and ‘The Nightingale’ in the Lyrical Ballads or his sublime translation of Schiller’s Plays of Wallenstein & Piccolomini? – if not – Pray read them & you will see how delicately he can write & how strongly. It has been hinted that a Subscription will be started – I hope there will.”47

  From Greta Hall, Mrs Coleridge wrote in real despair to Tom Poole at Stowey. She recognized the “great kindness and solicitude” of Southey, Wordsworth and the Ottery Coleridges in providing for her children, but she was humiliated and terrified by the “unfortunate situation” in which Coleridge had abandoned her. The literary success of his friends – Southey’s Roderick was running to a second edition, Wordsworth’s great philosophic poem The Excursion was published – made his failure more public, and had now begun to affect Hartley and the other children as they grew conscious of their position in the world. “You will be shocked to hear that I never hear from C. I dare not dwell upon the painful consequences of his desertion but if in the Spring he does not exert himself to pay some of my debts here – I really do not know what will be the result. – The poor children, are miserable if their father is mentioned for fear they should hear anything like blame attached to it, but I believe I mentioned to you before their great sensibility on this unhappy subject.”48 But there was no mention of what Coleridge might have suffered.

  In return, Coleridge maintained his perverse but self-protective silence for many months. In his darker moments, his guilt burst from him with all the knowledge of what worldly duty required, both for himself and for his family. He must write, he must earn, he must be responsible like Southey. But he could never give up the idea of some major oeuvre that, against all the odds, still lay within him. “O God! it is very easy to say, why does not Coleridge do this work & that work? – I declare to God, there is nothing I would not do consistent with my Conscience which was regular Labour for a regular Revenue – But to write such poetry or such philosophy as I would wish to write or not write at all, cannot be done amid distraction & anxiety for the day.”49 He jotted in his Notebook a “plaintive” verse, adapted from two lines of Phineas Fletcher, addressed to his Muse as a Shepherd’s pipe that was slipping from his fingers:

  Go, little Pipe! for ever I must leave thee, Ah vainly true!

  Never ah never! must I more receive thee? Adieu! adieu!

  Well, thou art gone! and what remains behind Soothing the soul to Hope? The moaning wind

  Hide with sear leaves my Grave’s undaisied Slope!50

  Yet this was not his dominant mood at Ashley, for now if ever his extraordinary powers of resilience were indeed flooding back to save him. Within two days of unpacking his solitary book chest, he wrote to his old stand-by Daniel Stuart in London proposing a whole range of political articles for the Courier, as a way of raising immediate money. Suggested topics for this tour d’horizon included France, America and Ireland. When the latter was accepted, he at once began a vigorous defence of the rights of the Protestant Orangemen against an upsurge of Catholic persecutions (which John Morgan witnessed during his flight to Ireland). These immediately began to appear in the paper, running as “Six Letters To Mr Justice Fletcher” from 20 September to 10 December. They were startling proof of Coleridge’s ability to re-engage with public affairs on apparently so remote a topic, as well as his recovered industry. A manuscript copy made by Morgan, and later emended by Coleridge, ran to seventy-two pages of a quarto notebook.51 For this he was paid the princely sum of £20.

  During the autumn Coleridge also wrote several confidential letters to Stuart, describing his battle with addiction and the professional challenge that now confronted him. His tone was never hopeless, and often combative. “I am abused, & insolently reproved, as a man, with reference to my supposed private Habits, for not publishing…but I could rebut the charge, & not merely say but prove – that there is not a man in England, whose Thoughts, Images, Words, & Erudition have been published in larger quantities than mine – tho’, I must admit, not by or for myself.”52

  He rejoiced in the “increased and increasing” reputation of Southey and Wordsworth, though he felt he was grievously misunderstood by them, and found it hard “to bear their neglect, and even detraction – as if I had done nothing at all”. Terrible though his illness at Bristol had been, he felt he had survived and learned from it, “having escaped with my intellectual Powers, if less elastic, yet not less vigorous, and with ampler and far more solid materials to exert them on”.53

  He drew a tranquil, not to say bucolic, picture of his well-ordered regime with the Morgans. “I am now joint-tenant with Mr Morgan of a sweet little cottage at Ashley, half a mile from Box, on the Bath Road. I breakfast every morning before nine – work till one – & walk or read till 3 – thence till Tea time, chat or read some lounge-book – or correct what I have written – from 6 to 8, work again – from 8 to Bed time play whist, or the little mock-billiard, called Bagatelle, & then sup & go to bed.”54

  He was catching up with top
ical matters by reading a year’s back-numbers of both the Quarterly and the Edinburgh reviews and making notes on them every day, admittedly a “painful & disgusting task”, but one which he completed by November.55 The opium-taking was also for the moment strictly controlled: one dose each day at four in the afternoon, which he held back till half-past six, if the “pain proper as distinguished from haunting” did not become too great.56 Now he was trying to write without stimulants in that part of the day when his head was still clear.

  This humdrum, convalescent existence freed his mind for greater things. His Notebooks and letters suggest a return to intense philosophical reading – Spinoza, Fichte, Schelling – and the problem of reconciling his renewed Christian faith with German idealism. This was his “most important Work”, for which he kept his morning hours “sacred”. Coleridge now conceived, or rather resurrected, the great philosophical book which would sum up the whole structure of his thought and experience. His working title was the Logosophia, and in one form or another it would haunt the remaining twenty years of his life.

  In an early reference he described it as a study of “the communicative intelligence in nature and in man”. Sometimes it was a “single large volume”, at others a series of five or six linked “Treatises”.57 Usually it began with a purely secular work on logic, advanced through Kantian metaphysics and natural theology, and ended with an inspired poetic commentary on the Gospel of St John, which opens with the great declaration which gave Coleridge his master-theme: “In the Beginning was the Word.”

  The Logosophia (“Wisdom of the Word”), or Opus Maximum (“The Great Work”) as it eventually became, was never to be completed in Coleridge’s lifetime. But paradoxically it became one of his most fruitful failures, and his determination to confirm it as his ultimate literary goal, after the crushing experiences of 1814, salvaged his literary self-respect and saved him from a dwindling career in miscellaneous journalism. The fundamental structure it proposed – of a philosophical argument advancing from the secular to the sacred – underlies almost all his later work, and became central to Romantic doctrine and epistemology.