Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  This was the kind of recognition from the younger generation (Byron was still only twenty-seven) that Coleridge had long dreamed of. When Byron engagingly admitted, in a second letter, that he thought he had unconsciously plagiarized from “Christabel” in his own poem “The Maid of Corinth” Coleridge was overcome with gratitude at this acknowledgement of his poetic influence. Greatly emboldened, he sent Byron a copy of the poem. (It is extraordinary that he only possessed two copies of “Christabel”: the first made long ago by Asra in the Lakes, the second very recently by Charlotte at Calne. Coleridge sent Asra’s and retained Charlotte’s.)

  Then he poured forth a long recital of his professional troubles into his Lordship’s receptive ear. His poetic influence on others – on Wordsworth, on Scott – had indeed been unrecognized. The reviews had universally mocked him with failure to fulfil his literary promise. What he had published was described as “over elaborate, obscure, paradoxical, over subtle etc.”. Ever since the Lyrical Ballads he had been “forced in bitterness of Soul” to turn off from the chosen path of serious work, “to earn the week’s food by the week’s Labour for the Newspapers & the like”. Since 1800, in fact, there had not been “any three months” that he could devote “exclusively” to the poetry and metaphysics that delighted him. Only his new publications might justify fifteen years of long pilgrimage through this desert.166

  Needless to say, it was a highly partial account. (He made no mention, among other things, of the Wedgwood annuity; of Stuart’s loans or Southey’s support of his family; and no mention of opium.) But Byron, with his flamboyant sense of noblesse oblige, was touched and also intrigued. He could be suspected, in his charming way, of flattering Coleridge in their courtly correspondence. But he had a low opinion of Wordsworth – The Excursion was “rain upon rocks where it stands and stagnates” – and a genuine sense that Coleridge was the undiscovered genius of the partnership.167

  There was no mistaking the excitement with which he immediately wrote to his old friend, the poet Tom Moore, on 28 October. To relaunch Coleridge would be a good deed in a naughty world. “By the way, if C[oleridge] – who is a man of wonderful talent, and in distress, and about to publish two vols. of Poesy and Biography, and who has been worse used by the critics than ever we were – will you, if he comes out, promise me to review him favourably in the Edinburgh Review? Praise him, I think you must, but you will also praise him well, – of all things the most difficult. It will be the making of him. This must be a secret between you and me, as Jeffrey might not like such a project; nor, indeed, might C[oleridge] himself like it. But I do think he only wants a pioneer and a sparkle or two to explode most gloriously.”168

  The game was now afoot. A week later Byron secretly sent the copy of “Christabel” to his publisher. Byron was confident of its value, and did not stand on ceremony, even with Murray: “in fact I have no authority to let it out of my hands. – I think most highly of it – & feel anxious that you should be the publisher – but if you are not – I do not despair of finding those that will.”169

  Coleridge did not learn immediately of these manoeuvres on his behalf. But the very fact of his resumed contact with Byron in the autumn of 1815 was immeasurably heartening. For the first time he had the sense that a long exile might be ending. His thoughts turned increasingly towards London. He pledged his “Honour & Existence” on completing a new tragedy by December (“if I live”), and then added a little discovery of his own. He recommended to his Lordship a young provincial actress, Miss Hudson from the Calne travelling company, who in his opinion performed Shakespeare better than any actress since the famous Dorothea Jordan. She would grace Drury Lane and its new programme admirably, provided that she had her teeth fixed by “the London Dentists”, which would cost £10.170

  23

  Printing of the Biographia and Sibylline Leaves in two companion volumes began in Bristol promptly in October, under Gutch’s supervision. Coleridge also wrote to Wade and Washington Allston with plans for a simultaneous American edition, which eventually appeared in New York in 1817.171 But it soon became apparent that the printer, accustomed to newsprint, was slow and unfitted for such a demanding text (poetry, footnotes, Latin, Greek, glosses, epigraphs). Proofs arrived in more than fifteen separate signatures through the autumn and winter, and were still being dispatched to Calne the following February.

  Of course the printer was not solely to blame. After all the effort and excitement, Coleridge had collapsed again into opium in November 1815, and he continued to be intermittently ill until the spring. On his forty-third birthday in October, he had written ominously to Allston: “in all but the Brain I am an old man! Such ravages do anxiety & mismanagement make.”172

  Secret notes began to fly off to a number of chemists in Calne and Devizes. “Mr Coleridge…requests, that there may be sent by the Bearer three ounces of Laudanum – (in the accompanying bottle – or whatever quantity it may hold) half an oz. of crude opium (if there be none purified) – & two ounces of the Tincture of Cardamum. As soon as the weather relaxes, Mr Coleridge will call…and settle his general account.”173 There were stormy scenes at Church Street (much alarming Charlotte and Mary), and drunken embarrassments at the houses of friends in Calne.

  On one occasion in December, at the home of the Rev. William Money (with whom Coleridge had been corresponding about the doctrine of salvation) there was a scandal over a pile of brandy bottles found in the bedroom. Coleridge later explained patiently to his confidant Dr Brabant that these were merely bottles of medicine that he had sent a servant to collect from the “Calne Druggist”, and had inadvertently left behind after his visit. There was no brandy among them – merely tinctures of rhubarb, cardamom, laudanum, “with a half-pint flat bottle of British Gin”. He could not conceive why the Reverend William Money should be shocked.174

  Throughout December and January 1816, work on the proofs progressed ever more slowly, and the tragedy for Byron at Drury Lane came to a complete halt. Morgan became depressed at the opportunities that were slipping through their fingers, when success had seemed within their grasp. Coleridge would disappear into his bedroom, leaving him pathetic little notes. “Tomorrow morning, I doubt not, I shall be of clear and collected Spirits; but to night I feel that I should do nothing to any purpose, but and excepting Thinking, Planning, and Resolving to resolve – & praying to be able to execute.”175 Morgan – still his “faithful, zealous, & disinterested Friend” – jotted sadly on the back of this missive a revised version of the opening stanza from the Mariner:

  There is an ancient Mariner

  And he stoppeth one of three

  By thy grey beard and glittering eye

  Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

  The old guilts and sense of moral paralysis came creeping back into Coleridge’s Notebooks, with their brilliant touches of painful poetry. “Vain Prayer to Heaven (repentance with amendment or abandonment of the Vice) = huge mass of ignited Rock flung perpendicular upward to an immense Height by the volcano, still falling back.”176 Sometimes the old sense of futility returned. “We all look up to the Sky for comfort, but nothing appears there – nothing comforts, nothing answers us – & so we die.”177

  Mary and Charlotte, irritated and alarmed, grew less patient with his gloomy relapses and tearful retreats. They made him dream of escaping the household altogether, leaving Morgan as his literary executor. He entered a bitter note in his Latin and Greek code. “Calne: and if it please God, the last month of my being with the Morgans – for his Wife and his Wife’s Sister exult so despotically in the scope of their Woman’s domain.”178

  Later, more calmly, he thought of turning the whole experience into a novel, “Men and Women”. Its theme would be ingratitude, and the failure of sympathy between the sexes. “That which I have to strive for now in the discipline of my own mind is independence of female Society.” He thought Morgan would sympathize. “Mem. To write out the Story: that if I die, my friend M. may make use of it.”179 It m
ay also have been prompted by the fact that Charlotte was now being invited out to dances by young men of her own age.180 For the first time Coleridge, in his mid-forties, felt old as well as unloved. At Christmas time he wrote bleakly to Dr Brabant of looking back at “the years before I began to take the Death…” Brabant tactfully consoled him with a plump and seasonable pheasant.181

  Yet even in these bitter, alienated months of relapse, he was visited by moments of transcendence, and hope for the work he had achieved. It was while slowly editing the proofs of Sibylline Leaves that he caught up a consoling remark of Jean-Paul’s and turned it into one of his most haunting and magical formulations. “If a man could pass through Paradise in a Dream, & have a Flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & found that Flower in his hand when he awoke – Aye! and what then?”182 He never published it, but it came to seem like one version of his entire life, the whole of the Biographia in a single sentence.

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  Despite everything, the Calne household held together though the early months of 1816. Gradually Coleridge did more work on his proofs, and walked about on windy days under Oldbury Hill. “All things are, that though their substance dissolve into the Universal, yet their Figures or Shadows remain – like Rainbows on fast-sailing Clouds.”183 The White Horse, with its glittering eye of broken brandy bottles, still galloped towards London.

  One of the most striking things he did was to finalize the beautiful prose gloss, or marginal commentary, to the “Mariner”. For this he had invented another voice, standing outside his own creation, and so adding another frame or level of meaning as he looked back on it. (It was the device he used in his “metafictional” letter in the Biographia.) This time he adopted the voice of a learned antiquarian, a Christian commentator from the seventeenth century, who seeks to interpret the ballad like some mystical allegory of punishment and redemption.

  It was as if the older, philosophical Coleridge was now writing about the younger Pantheist Coleridge of the Quantock days. He speaks of the “crime” of shooting the Albatross, followed by a supernatural “curse”, a “horrible penance”, and a final “expiation”. This could be taken as a conventional Christian interpretation, with the older Coleridge’s new emphasis on a Fall (“in some sense”) followed by a religious Redemption. Yet Coleridge’s commentator is clearly a mystic, who speaks out of a less orthodox, Gnostic tradition. “A Spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.”184

  He also recognizes a more ancient, pagan theme of “vengeance” in the ballad. He points out that the Mariner is subjected to a female supernatural power, the “Spectre Woman” Life-in-Death, who has no place in traditional theology. He suggests that Nature herself has become conscious of the offence that the Mariner has committed against her own laws of “hospitality”. He draws attention to those moments of beautiful Nature imagery – “No twilight in the courts of the Sun” – which invest the natural world with elements of sacred, almost aristocratic power, far older than Christian cosmology.

  The gloss became one of Coleridge’s most remarkable pieces of “ventriloquism”. One might almost catch, behind the stately seventeenth-century phrasing, a hint of Germanic accent and oracular inversion. The swift, bare stanzas of the poem are given a kind of rainbow shimmer of the transcendental about their edges. This effect was emphasized visually by marginal print-settings (very difficult even for a modern typesetter to achieve) that Coleridge insisted upon at the proof stage. So, the plain astronomical beauty of the Moon stanza from Part Four (the image partly inspired by the star-clock at Ottery) was now encircled by a halo or Brocken-spectre of retrospective and mystical commentary:

  The moving Moon went up the sky.

  And no where did abide:

  Softly she was going up,

  And a star or two beside –185

  In his loneliness and fixedness, he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country, and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, yet there is silent joy at their arrival.”

  On the other hand the commentator also speaks with an autobiographical voice, a confessional voice that is recognizable from passages in the Biographia. It is impossible not to think of Coleridge’s own life – his addiction, his restless exiles, his compulsive and spellbinding talk – when reading the final gloss on the penultimate stanzas of the ballad:

  And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to travel from land to land; And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God made and loveth.

  Since then, at an uncertain hour,

  That agony returns:

  And till my ghastly tale is told,

  This heart within me burns.

  I pass, like night, from land to land;

  I have strange power of speech;

  That moment that his face I see,

  To know the man that must hear me:

  To him my tale I teach186

  When the gloss was completed, and many fine adjustments made to the verse, Coleridge decided to place the “Mariner” at the opening of Sibylline Leaves. He also grouped several of the Asra poems in a section of “Love Poems”; and for the first time gathered a number of the Conversation Poems together (including “Frost at Midnight”, “This Lime-Tree Bower”, and “The Eolian Harp”) under a heading “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”. In direct contradiction of its subject’s wishes, he finally decided to print “To William Wordsworth” as well. It was, after fifteen long years, his declaration of poetic independence.

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  The corrected proofs accumulated with frustrating slowness at Bristol. At the end of January 1816, he sent one back to Gutch with the comment: “useless to pluck single thorns from a Thorn-bush. I groan in spirit under this whole Sheet; and but that every Hour is precious…I would cancel [it].”187 Coleridge began to think more and more longingly of his return to London. If he did not seize the opportunity this spring, he felt he might never live to see another one. Opium was barely back under his control, and he confided to Dr Brabant that he was trying not to exceed “the smallest dose of Poison that will suffice to keep me tranquil and capable of literary labour”.188 He went on “pretty well” and was “decently industrious”, but one more relapse might finish him.

  He now had three works to present in London. Though he had abandoned the tragedy for Drury Lane, he had somehow managed to put together a lighter “verse Entertainment” to present to his Lordship. It was to be entitled Zapolya – a chivalric romance set in the imaginary mountains of “Illyria” – with several beautiful short songs to be set to music.

  However, none of the works in hand – the play, the prose, the poems – would supply him with immediate money to finance his return. On 10 February he wrote gloomily to Gutch of the “dead water” of his finances.189 He despaired of ever leaving Calne, and thought desperately of which old friends might still help him – William Sotheby, Sir Humphry Davy, Daniel Stuart.190 But who had not given him up for lost?

  Yet there were still homes for lost causes. Sotheby applied on his behalf to the Literary Fund in London, an august institution of anonymous philanthropists, whose statutes allowed them to help “men of genius in poverty and distress”. Sotheby also spoke in confidence, and without Coleridge’s knowledge, to Lord Byron.191

  On St Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1816, the Fund noted in its minutes: “The Case of Mr Coleridge, Author of various Poems and Dramatic Works of merit, was taken into consideration, and it was Resolved that Thirty Pounds be voted to the above Applicant…”192 On the very same day, with splendid generosity,
Byron despatched one of his heavily crested and franked envelopes containing a kindly letter and a £100 banknote.193

  At Church Street, Coleridge was found by a breathless Charlotte – “You have had a letter franked by Lord Byron?” – sitting up in bed, silent and immobile, with the letters open before him, “completely lost…in thinking of the thing itself and the manner in which it was done”.194 Within little more than a month, Coleridge was galloping up to London, leaving the Morgans to tidy up the “chaos of loose manuscripts” in his study, after the plunging hoofs were gone.195

  NINE

  CLIMBING HIGHGATE HILL

  1

  On 25 March 1816 Coleridge tumbled out of the night mail, ordered up the newspapers, and put himself to bed at the Gloucester Coffee House in Piccadilly. He had been absent from London for nearly two and a half years – as long as he had been away in the Mediterranean – and he awoke with the same sense of a strange city which had largely forgotten him. The news was of bread riots, unemployment and demands for parliamentary reform. When the Edinburgh Review eventually reported his return, it treated him like a premonition of Rip Van Winkle: “forth steps Mr Coleridge, like a giant refreshed from sleep…as if to redeem his character after so long a silence…”1

  He had of course arranged nowhere to stay, but eventually found lodgings, with inspired economy of means, above the shop of an apothecary, Moore & James of 42 Norfolk Street, behind Covent Garden. Then he hurried off to make his ritual visit to the Lambs.