Whether interpreted through science, art, philosophy or theology, Coleridge believed that the world presented a dynamic unity, which was ultimately divine. In an unbroken progression, from rational perception (“Understanding”) through artistic vision (“Imagination”) to the highest forms of intuition (“Reason”), all human experience moved towards a transcendent meaning. For Coleridge, the challenge to articulate this faith in a single apocalyptic work was never met. But by seeing each of his future books as a necessary preface or prelude to the final achievement, he was able to continue productively.
It was, in a uniquely Coleridgean way, an art of prevarication. Many, like Hazlitt, would soon mock him for it. But it meant that, in a psychological pattern originated years before with the poetic fragment of “Kubla Khan”, the unfinished work generated the finished with surprising and brilliant effect. So to Daniel Stuart he wrote of the Logosophia as ready for “printing at Bristol” that autumn. “The Title is: Christianity the one true Philosophy – or 5 Treatises on the Logos, or communicative Intelligence, Natural, Human, and Divine: – to which is prefixed a Prefactory Essay…illustrated by fragments of Auto-biography.”
Beneath that grand, sheltering claim – his shield against futility and despair – it was the small “prefactory” idea of a literary autobiography that now sprang into life.58 Tentatively, Coleridge began to dictate notes to Morgan. It would, of course, be merely a fragment and the dictation process had its old companionable charm. A dull phrase like “officious for equivalents” could enliven a whole morning’s work. “This my Amanuensis wrote – ‘Fishing for Elephants’ – which as I at the time observed could hardly have occurred except at the commencement of the Deluge.”59
7
As Coleridge’s confidence and good humour returned, the regime at Ashley seemed a little restricted. Social visits spread out into the neighbourhood. A day was spent with the poet William Bowles, embowered in his country parsonage at Bremhill, a “sweet place” with church bells tolling which reminded Coleridge of his childhood. An expedition to see the famous private collection of pictures at Corsham House, seat of the MP for Wiltshire, produced an invitation to dine with the Marquis of Lansdowne at Bowood House. This in turn led to Coleridge being offered the run of the Bowood House library, where Priestley had once conducted his experiments in a special laboratory set up under Lord Lansdowne’s patronage. The great house, with its splendid terraces and idyllic lake, spoke of aristocratic douceur and soothing recognition of intellectual genius. (“A servant begged to know whether I was the Mr Coleridge, the great Author.”)60
They decided to move from Ashley to the market town of Calne, fifteen miles up the Great West Road, and conveniently situated just over the hill from Bowood House. Lying between Marlborough and Devizes, and close to the ancient stone-circle of Avebury, Calne epitomized the sleepy magic of Wiltshire life. Surrounded by large farms and rich estates, its traditional cattle market and local brewery (largely controlled by the Lansdowne family) had quietly flourished for centuries.
It was Coleridge’s network of friendly doctors who had found these new lodgings at Calne. Through Dr Daniel, Coleridge had become intimate with Dr R. H. Brabant and his family at nearby Devizes, and frequently rode over with Morgan to spend the day there. It was Brabant in turn who recommended them to Dr George Page, a surgeon who lived in the centre of Calne in Church Street.61 Dr Page was a man of some standing in the district, and after the Reform Act of 1832, he became an alderman and then mayor.62
In fact Dr Page owned two houses side by side in Church Street, part of an elegant little terrace of three-storey buildings running down the west side of the hill. His properties stood in a prime position, just opposite the parish church of St Mary’s, with its fine colonnade of ancient yew trees. Page lived in the larger house, with its “offices, garden and stable”, and rented out the smaller one with a little courtyard to Coleridge and Morgan.63*
Coleridge seemed to be moving instinctively back to his provincial roots, to a country town very like Ottery St Mary, where he had been born. Even the position of his lodgings was curiously reminiscent of his father’s house, opposite St Mary’s church in Ottery, with the churchyard where he had played as a child. Calne also had a river, the Marden, a tributary of the Avon, which ran under the wooden bridge at the bottom of Church Street where he walked each day to collect letters from the Catherine Wheel coaching inn. (The old Wheel Barometer, from which the inn took its name, is still mounted in the exterior wall.) All these things recalled his past.
Coleridge also established good relations with the Calne chemist, Mr Bishop, who supplied his opium. He found pleasant rambles along the banks of the Marden to the lake at Bowood, and up the hill to the Green (where Priestley had lived). Most spectacular of all, a mile outside the town on Oldbury Hill was one of the famous White Horses of Wiltshire, which had been cut into the chalk hillside in 1780. It hung there above the coaching road, permanently galloping eastwards towards London, its glittering eye formed from a small round pit filled with the broken glass of innumerable wine and brandy bottles. Local legend also supplied the tale of a naked highwayman, who was supposed to accost benighted travellers as they set out on the long journey from Calne across the Marlborough downs to the distant capital.64
Coleridge and the Morgans spent most of the early spring of 1815 quietly settling into the local society, continuing their visits to Lord Lansdowne at Bowood, Dr Brabant at Devizes, and Bowles at Bremhill (from whom they often borrowed a horse). With Dr Brabant, Coleridge was soon exchanging letters on local politics, German metaphysics and the comparative quality of Rapee and Maccabau snuff which they both enjoyed. Lord Lansdowne’s beer, however, did not pass muster. “I am requested to ask, whether there is a public Brewer at Devizes, & whether we can be served from thence with good Table Beer? – Excuse this liberty – but Calne is a sepulchre in a Desart – & the Ale here from the Public Houses is either Syrup or Vinegar.”65
A rare local excitement was provided by agitation against the Corn Law Bill. Post-war unemployment threatened many poor families with starvation, and the huge increases in the price of bread found Coleridge firmly on the side of the “pale-faced Consumers” against the government. Sending Brabant a copy of his Quantocks poem of 1798, “Fears in Solitude”, the ghosts of his old political radicalism stirred uneasily. “You cannot conceive how this Corn Bill haunts me – and so it would you, if you had seen the pale faces and heard the conversation of the hundred poor Creatures, who came to sign the Petition.” He calculated that the Bill would increase the old 8d loaf to 15 or 16d.66
Coleridge was moved to a quixotic gesture, identifying with the unemployed at Calne, and causing some satisfactory scandal among the squires. “So much for theological Metaphysics! – On Wednesday we had a public meeting in the market-place at Calne to petition Parliament against the Corn Bill. I drew it up for Mr Wait, and afterwards mounted on a Butcher’s Table made a butcherly sort of Speech of an hour long to a very ragged but not butcherly audience: for by their pale faces few of them seemed to have had more than a very occasional acquaintance with Butcher’s Meat.” Coleridge’s speech was a success – “Loud were the Huzzas!” – and he briefly toyed with a new career. “If it depended on the Inhabitants at large, I believe they would send me up to Parliament.”67 However, despite his personal intervention, the Corn Law was passed on 10 March 1815.
Though working on his collection of poems, and making desultory attempts to draft a Preface, Coleridge felt both unemployed and oddly exiled from the centre of things. Money was a growing anxiety, and through March he wrote a series of increasingly desperate letters to his old publisher Cottle. Would Cottle consider advancing £40 on all his poems, including those in “scattered” publications and those still in manuscript? He was already £25 in debt to the Morgans, even though he had pared his expenses to the bone, spending no more than £2.10s a week. “You will say, I ought to live for less – and doubtless, I might, if I were to alienate myse
lf from all social affectations, and from all conversation with persons of the same education.”
He had now heard of the subscription scheme which Southey had prevented. “But I would die, after my recent experience of the cruel and insolent Spirit of Calumny, rather than subject myself as a slave to a Club of Subscribers to my Poverty.”68 He would try anything to get the poems properly published: sell outright the copyright on The Friend, write a treatise on the Corn Laws, or even start a day school for twenty pupils at £15 a year each. “To this I am certain I could attend with strictest regularity; or indeed to anything mechanical. But Composition is no voluntary business: the very necessity of doing it robs me of the power of doing it. Had I been possessed of a tolerable Competence, I should have been a voluminous Writer – but I cannot, as is feigned of the Nightingale, sing with my Breast against a Thorn. – God bless you!”69
But Joseph Cottle had heard of this tune too often, and like so many others he had abandoned hope of Coleridge ever doing anything. He sent £5, and broke off the correspondence. “Knowing that whatever monies he received would, assuredly, be expended in opium, Compassion stayed my hand.”70
Coleridge stubbornly persisted. He now turned to the proprietors of Felix Farley’s Journal, Hood and Gutch, who had published his Allston Essays. He made the same proposal for an advance, promising a manuscript of 250 to 300 pages to be ready by mid-June. To his delight in April they agreed not only to provide £45 towards the work, but also to pay the next instalment of his life assurance premium of £27.5s.6d.71
With this secured, he took a deep breath and wrote a long letter to Lord Byron in London. He began with awkward solemnity – “anxiety makes us all ceremonious” but not without a certain wry humour. They were both labourers in the same poetical vineyard, “your Lordship’s ampler Lot is on the sunny side, while mine has laid upon the North, my growing Vines gnawed down by Asses, and my richest and raciest clusters carried off and spoilt by the plundering Fox.” But he was also businesslike, in a way that both appealed to Byron and flattered him.
Coleridge enumerated the works he had in hand – the poems, a new edition of Remorse, perhaps some translations – and explained both his débâcle with Longman of 1807 and the more recent difficulties with Murray. If Byron personally should think well of any “MSS volumes” he should send him, “as soon as they are fit for your perusal”, would he recommend them to some respectable publisher in London? “Your weight in society and the splendour of your name would, I am convinced, (and so is Mr Bowles, who in truth suggested this application…) treble the amount of their offer…”72
He knew that he was widely attacked in the reviews. He had even been subject to “the Lash of your Lordship’s Satire” in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (a shrewd admission). Worst of all, he had been lumped together with Southey and Wordsworth as a Lake Poet, a very watery injustice. “The cataracts of anonymous criticism never fell on them, but I was wet thro’ with the Spray…” But now he wished to publish and take a stand on his own account. He gave a first sketch of the Biographia, still describing it as “a general Preface” to his collected poems “on the Principles of philosophic and genial criticism relative to the Fine Arts in general; but especially to Poetry”. It would now, however, include a “Particular Preface” to the “Ancient Mariner” and on “the employment of the Supernatural in Poetry”…All would be ready for the press “by the first week in June”.73
It was an apt moment to contact Byron, who was now living at Piccadilly Terrace, married, and flushed with the succes of his Corsair (1814) and Hebrew Melodies (1815) – 10,000 copies sold in the first week – in high favour with Murray, and on friendly terms with Walter Scott. He replied immediately, saying it would be “a great pleasure” to comply with Coleridge’s request, warmly praising his work – especially Remorse – and assuring him that indeed he was very far from forgotten.
With his gracious and timely touch, Byron lifted Coleridge’s thoughts from “the sordid trade” to the eternal values of their art. “I trust you do not permit yourself to be depressed by the temporary partiality of what is called ‘the public’ for the favourites of the moment; all experience is against the permanency of such impressions. You must have lived to see many of these pass away, and will survive many more – I mean personally, for poetically, I would not insult you by a comparison.”
In a charming postscript, he also laughed away the “Satire or lampoon”. It was written when Byron was “very young and very angry” and he now regarded it as “pert, petulant, and shallow enough”. He was sure that Coleridge was proceeding in “a career which could not but be successful”, and he had the honour to be his “obliged and very obedient servant”.74 So Coleridge had secured a powerful ally, and the prospect of a triumphant return to London under such noble patronage subtly sustained him in the months ahead. Everything now turned on a simple question: buried away in his Wiltshire retreat, gone to ground beneath the sign of the White Horse, could he ever get the promised work done?
8
The writing of the Biographia, between April and September 1815, became the decisive creative struggle of Coleridge’s later career. It is, in many ways, astonishing that he ever produced it at all. After the opium collapse of 1813–14, the possibility of sustained composition – maintained in the event, at an ever-increasing pace over six months – must have seemed very remote. The baroque involutions of its final structure, which have maddened scholars ever since,75 are largely explained by the particular ways in which he found it possible to keep going.
In the first place, Coleridge continued his habit of dictating to John Morgan (as Asra had once acted as the amanuensis and midwife to The Friend). Coleridge talked the Biographia into life, and the pattern of an extended conversation (with its good days and bad, its moments of inspired intensity and its interludes of rambling and reflection) give the book both its companionable atmosphere and its sense of intermittence. In a Freudian sense, one may think of it as a “talking cure”, an attempt to come to terms with his own achievements and failures, to re-edit his “literary life and opinions” (its final subtitle) into a retrospective form – part fact, part fiction, part theory – which had both meaning and justification.
Its extraordinary shifts in tone, from mournful apologia (very evident at the outset) through sprightly reminiscence and passionate philosophizing, to the steady, measured, brilliantly authoritative note of the critical sections, evidently reflect this. Nowhere is this extreme shift between the subjective and the objective voice more striking than in the metaphysical section (the last to be written, at a point of near-exhaustion) whose Olympian discourse hides a desperate resort to wholesale plagiarism from German sources, while at the same time making a generous and winning disclaimer of originality. In all this the Biographia has an acute psychological interest, and its shape-shifting and paradoxes, its intimacy and disguises, its frankness and its fraudulence, make up a genuine literary self-portrait. Anything less complicated, less fascinating and less maddening, would really not be Coleridge at all.
In the second place, Coleridge’s concept of the book altered and expanded as he worked, virtually week by week. He began with the idea of the simple personal preface to his collected poems, the Sibylline Leaves. Then he moved on to an “Autobiographia” (his next working title), and then to a critical history of the Romantic Imagination from Shakespeare to Wordsworth. Finally, he wanted to write something like a complete history of modern philosophy from Locke to Kant. Elements of all these ideas crowd into the final version, though not exactly in that order, or with that logic.
In the third place, the form of publication did not reflect the original sequence of composition. The middle (philosophical) section of the book was written last, and the end of the book was filled out with extraneous materials when it finally came to be published, after tortuous complications and in two volumes, in July 1817. So the broad three-part structure that emerged – Autobiography in Chapters 1–4, Philosophy in Chapt
ers 5–13, Criticism in Chapters 14– 22 – was full of extreme oddities and digressions. Not the least of these was the superb and humorous account of life at Stowey and Bristol in the 1790s, which was placed in Chapter 10, and succinctly titled “A chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the nature of the Imagination or plastic power – On pedantry and pedantic expressions – Advice to young authors respecting publication – Various anecdotes of the author’s literary life, and the progress of his Opinion in religion and politics.”76
No doubt, as with The Friend, the disordered internal structure of the book (with these many narrative loops, and unfulfilled promises, coming to an extraordinary climax in Chapter 13, “On the Imagination, or esemplastic power”) was also partly the result of a failure of steady architectural control so characteristic of Coleridge’s opium state. Yet disorder in the larger design also freed Coleridge at a local level. The genius of the Biographia lies in local passages, individual paragraphs and short sequences, chambers within the crazy edifice, of unsurpassed clarity and power. Many of these are defined by the use of extended metaphors and similes, and show Coleridge’s essentially poetic mode of thought and explanation still ascendant within a prose argument. Similarly, much of the autobiographical material is told through carefully shaped, humorous anecdotes, which have the quality of poetic fables of his life and times, rather than a strict historical account of the period.
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 45
