Coleridge planned to cover the literary developments of the Dark Ages, medieval Europe and the Renaissance in a broad perspective; then focus on Dante, Cervantes, Rabelais and Shakespeare; and finally make a selection of his favourite special topics – the role of education, the psychology of the supernatural, and the philosophic appreciation of the fine arts. After the financial disappointments of the Rest Fenner contract, Coleridge hoped the lectures would be profitable, and advance his plan “to lay by £200, little by little, in the course of the next year” exclusively for sending Derwent to Cambridge.130 He sent out invitations to his nephews and many old friends, the Godwins, the Lambs, the Morgans, John Payne Collier and several newspaper editors, including John Thelwall at The Champion. Crabb Robinson faithfully attended, and he and J. H. Green took notes.
Coleridge’s fourteen lectures began on 27 January 1818, and continued regularly each Tuesday and Friday evening at 8.15 p.m. “precisely”, until 13 March. With Hazlitt lecturing (at 7 p.m.) just a few minutes walk away down Fleet Street, at the Surrey Institution in Blackfriars, Coleridge was particularly anxious about his audience. He wrote to several newspapers asking for free advertising and, if possible, friendly notices – and most responded, including the Courier, the Morning Chronicle, the New Times, and even the radical Champion where Thelwall wrote a leader saying that few men in England were better qualified to talk about European literature.131
He also openly raised the question of his indebtedness to A. W. Schlegel, vigorously defending his position, and warning editors that both Hazlitt and even Wordsworth had denied his originality. (Hazlitt had done so in the Edinburgh Review, February 1816, while reviewing a translation of Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Literature; Wordsworth in his “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” of his 1815 Poems.) Writing to William Mudford at the Courier, he was particularly reproachful about Wordsworth’s slight. “Mr Wordsworth for whose fame I had felt and fought with an ardour that amounted to absolute Self Oblivion, and to which I owe mainly the rancour of the Edinburgh clan…has affirmed in print that a German Critic first taught us to think correctly concerning Shakespeare.”132
His nerves, as in the days of the Royal Institution, produced a sudden physical collapse on the eve of the first lecture. He had a heavy head-cold and “hoarseness” so bad he could barely speak. Gillman forbade him to leave Moreton House, with an oblique reference to his opium treatment. “With such a cold on you it would be dangerous – under the influence of the medicine, madness. Excuse plain speaking from yours faithfully, J. Gillman.”133 Gillman also wrote officially to the organizers, as Coleridge’s physician.
But Gillman’s grasp of Coleridge’s psychology was growing ever more acute. This “peremptory Veto”, on medical grounds actually convinced Coleridge that he could fulfil the engagement by an act of willpower alone. Though the first lecture lacked animation and Coleridge’s voice was, according to Robinson, rendered “scarcely audible” by his “exceeding bad cold”, he carried it off successfully. (Coleridge called it “a battle between the croaks and squeaks”.) For the rest of the series he never faltered.
Fleur de Luce Court was continuously full, with “a large and respectable audience – generally of very superior looking persons”, as Robinson put it. The subscription was better than any other lectures he had given. Unlike Hazlitt’s, it was a largely middle-aged audience now, with distinguished figures like Sir James Mackintosh and Mrs Barbauld. But there were several younger men from the City and university. Among these was Thomas Allsop, a young businessman, who was to become one of Coleridge’s most intimate confidants; and a young don from Cambridge, Julius Hare. Coleridge’s nephews, William Hart and John Taylor Coleridge, also came.
Surprising reports were posted back to Ottery St Mary. His brother George marvelled at these “excellent” accounts, and wondered “what sort of a Balance sheet he is likely to make of it”. He suspected that fame was “coming rather too late to fill his pockets”, but was gratified to hear that his disreputable brother (“Poor Fellow!”) was now behaving “in a manner more consentaneous with reason and commonsense”. He surmised that sound “Theology” had done the trick, where all else had failed.134
Coleridge’s lectures have been described as “the first English attempt at a comparative history of literature in the modern sense”.135 What is remarkable about them is their entirely new emphasis on the influence on English poetry of the Italian Romance writers, especially through translation and imitation. Thus Coleridge linked Boccaccio and Petrarch to Chaucer and Spenser; and Dante to Milton and John Donne. In some of his lecture notes which have survived, he insisted that his object “in adverting to the Italian Poets, is not so much for their own sakes…but for the elucidation of the merits of our Countrymen, as to what extent we must consider them as fortunate Imitators of their Italian Predecessors, and in which points they have the higher claims of original genius”.136
Coleridge was responding to the interests of the younger generation of writers who, with the publication of Leigh Hunt’s The Story of Rimini (1816), based on Dante’s account of the lovers Paolo and Francesca di Rimini, were turning back to Italian models. There was growing interest in such tales of southern passion and an elaborate, highly visual style of poetic narration. It was no coincidence that Keats began his tale from Boccaccio, “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil” in April 1818. Coleridge spoke of “the wild and imaginative character” of Boccaccio’s “happy art of narration”, his elaborate mythology and “incongruous paganisms”, and his astonishing “licentiousness”.137
Coleridge’s tenth lecture, on 27 February, was largely given up to a comparison of particular images in Dante and Milton, and to praise of Cary’s translation of the Commedia. He had already convinced the publishers Taylor and Hessey to bring out the new, three-volume pocket version of the translation, and he urged Cary to have some copies of the book ready by that date, even perhaps on sale after the lecture.138
Cary’s son wrote later: “the effect of his commendation was no other than might have been expected. The work, which had been published four years, but had remained in utter obscurity, was at once eagerly sought after. About a thousand copies of the first edition, that remained on hand, were immediately disposed of; in less than three months a new edition was called for. The Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews re-echoed the praises that had been sounded by Coleridge, and henceforth the claims of the translator of Dante to literary distinction were universally admitted.”139 One of the eager purchasers was Keats, who carried the pocket edition in his knapsack on a three-month walking tour of Scotland that summer, the only book he took with him.
20
All the time that Coleridge was lecturing in Fleur de Luce Court, Hazlitt was lecturing in Blackfriars, and soon their rivalry became open. The two courses converged as Hazlitt began to speak of contemporary poets. Nothing could have been more contrasted than their styles. Hazlitt was perfectly in tune with his young audience: clever, witty, iconoclastic, brilliantly incorporating well-prepared passages from his critical journalism, and fearlessly mocking the great names of the day like Byron and Wordsworth in the very act of praising them. He was also responsive to his listeners, so that when in one lecture he spoke too dismissively of Chatterton, and found afterwards that Keats was disappointed, he thoughtfully corrected his views in the next lecture.140
Coleridge by contrast was his usual, rambling, magnificent, highly metaphysical self, appearing to speak without proper notes, circling through his subjects, and suddenly producing great passages and long philosophical perspectives of dazzling power and suggestion.
Crabb Robinson shuttled doggedly between the two, sometimes keeping a carriage waiting to whisk him from one lecture hall to the other, and frequently reduced to utter confusion by the contrasts in style and approach. Coleridge was slow, repetitious, but full of “splendid irregularities throughout”. Hazlitt was “bitter, sprightly, and full of personal allusions”; and sometimes “almost obscene”.141 It str
uck him as wholly characteristic that while Hazlitt’s lectures were collected and carefully published (by Taylor and Hessey) by the end of the year, Coleridge’s went as usual totally unrecorded, except for a few scattered notes made by friends like J. H. Green.
On one particular evening, 24 February, Crabb Robinson found to his alarm that he had first completely lost his temper at Hazlitt’s lecture, standing up and “hissing” at contemptuous remarks about Wordsworth; and then, having walked out, leaped into his coach, and dashed over to Coleridge’s lecture, he found himself virtually lulled to exhausted slumber by the “obscurity and metaphysics” of Coleridge’s learned analysis of “the great writers of wit and humour” from Rabelais to Sterne.142 He may have missed the wonderful aside that “Swift was the Soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place”.143
It was Hazlitt who finally acknowledged the historic confrontation. In March he dedicated the final part of his last lecture “On the Living Poets” to Coleridge himself. Hazlitt was wholly conscious of the ironies of the situation. The brilliant protégé at the height of his critical power and fashion, was now facing down his old, embattled master and mentor. With his sure, sardonic touch, he presented it as a Roman tragedy worthy of Shakespeare.
“It remains that I should say a few words of Mr Coleridge; and there is no one who has a better right to say what he thinks of him than I have. ‘Is there here any dear friend of Caesar? To him I say, that Brutus’s love to Caesar was no less than his.’ But no matter…” Like Brutus, the great republican, he would stab his erstwhile poetical master out of love for the greater good, a political good.
Hazlitt pushed in the blade, dramatically and repeatedly. All Coleridge’s journalism, from the Watchman to The Friend, was “dreary trash”. His plays, apart from a few poetical passages, were “drawling sentiment and metaphysical jargon”. He had “no genuine dramatic talent”. His Biographia was not worth mentioning, since Hazlitt had already destroyed it elsewhere. Of his poetry, there was one fine early sonnet to Schiller which gave an idea of Coleridge’s “youthful enthusiasm”; and there was the Jacobin polemic against the government of 1799, “Fire, Famine and Slaughter”, which Coleridge had republished in Sibylline Leaves with a long “Apologetic Preface”. This indeed showed “strong political feeling”, though – as Hazlitt added with a conspiratorial grin at his audience – “it might seem insidious if I were to praise it”.
What remained? Well – “Christabel” and “The Ancient Mariner”. As for the “Mariner”, it was Coleridge’s most remarkable performance” and the only thing from his entire oeuvre that gave “an adequate idea of his great natural powers”. Yet it was Germanic in manner, and seemed to conceive of poetry “as a drunken dream, reckless, careless and headless, of past, present and to come”. As for “Christabel”, there was indeed one memorable passage as it seemed to Hazlitt, about the quarrel between two men who had been “friends in youth”. Here Hazlitt, for the first time and with great feeling, quoted Coleridge to his young listeners:
Alas! they had been friends in youth,
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain:
And thus it chanced, as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Hazlitt did not need to substitute the names. At this point he paused to survey the literary reputation he had laid waste for his breathless audience. Then abruptly, and wholly unexpectedly, he delivered a panegyric straight from the heart. It was the most dramatic and the most personal moment in his whole lecture series.
But I may say of him here, that he is the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius. He is the only person from whom I ever learnt anything. There is only one thing he could learn from me in return, but that he has not. He was the first poet I ever knew. His genius at that time had angelic wings, and fed on manna. He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort; but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him from off his feet. His voice rolled on the ear like the pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music of thought. His mind was clothed with wings; and raised on them, he lifted philosophy to heaven. In his descriptions, you then saw the progress of human happiness and liberty in bright and neverending succession, like the steps of Jacob’s ladder, with airy shapes ascending and descending, and with the voice of God at the top of the ladder…
This was, almost literally, an apotheosis: Coleridge as the “undamaged Archangel”, divinely inspired, the only true “genius” of English Romanticism. Nothing Hazlitt had said of Wordsworth, “the most original poet now living”, had approached this degree of personal intensity. It is impossible to know what inflexions of “sprightly” irony Hazlitt gave to his valedictory lecture that night. One can, however, guess at the “one thing” that Coleridge could have learned from Hazlitt: loyalty to his youthful radical beliefs. But he referred to Coleridge’s talk, not his writing; and he used the past tense, as a form of funeral oration. Hazlitt intended to bury Coleridge, by praising him. In his closing phrases, he covered Coleridge’s genius with a kind of rhetorical shroud, in a final dismissal. Up there, in Fleur de Luce Court, Hazlitt implied, there was nothing to be heard, just the voice of a ghost. “And shall I, who heard him then, listen to him now? Not I!…That spell is broke; that time is gone for ever; that voice is heard no more: but still the recollection comes rushing by with thoughts of long-past years, and rings in my ears with never-dying sound.”
Hazlitt closed this brilliant and deadly performance with a few more lines of verse. They were not from Coleridge, but from Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode”: “What though the radiance which was once so bright/ Be now forever taken from my sight…”144*
21
In his Notebooks that spring, Coleridge scribbled down a few lines of verse on his old Quantock friend the nightingale, who he now found had faithfully followed him to the woods of Hampstead Heath. This nightingale’s situation, as he imagined it, was curiously like his own as a lecturer. The bird sat on the slim branch of an ash tree above a waterfall, half hidden in the leaves that “Shook in the Gale and glittered in the Spray”, singing its heart out. But the roar of the waterfall made its song inaudible to any listener. Only the nightingale itself could tell that it was singing.
The lines were quickly sketched out, not finding their metre until the last couplet. But in a tell-tale shift in gender – from she to he – Coleridge became the bird.
…I saw a Nightingale.
And by the heaving plumage of her Throat
And busy Bill that seemed to cut the Air,
I saw he sang –
And sure he heard not his own Song
Or did but inly hear –
With such a loud confuséd sound
The Cataract spread wide around.145
22
Yet Coleridge’s retired life at Highgate did not isolate him from the cataract of public affairs, however much Hazlitt wished to confine him to a posthumous existence. Throughout spring 1818 he had been corresponding with C. A. Tulk on Swedenborgian matters, and at the end of April this led unexpectedly to his last and most direct intervention in political controversy since the Watchman days over twenty years before. They had been exchanging apparently remote and hermetic concepts of the “two great Laws” of identity and polarity, which produced the human soul. “The two great Ends (& inclusively, the processes) of Nature would be – Individualization, or apparent detachment from Nature = Progressive Organization and Spirit, or the re-union with Nature as the apex of Individualization – the birth of the Soul, the Ego or conscious Self, into the Spirit.”146
These ideas also produced reflections on the unconscious self, in a long twelve-point note on the “Language of Dreams”. Coleridge suggested
that there was a universal dream symbolism, which like poetic symbolism was common to all peoples. “It is a (Night) language of Images and Sensations, the various dialects of which are far less different from each other, than the various (Day) Languages of Nations. Proved even by the Dream Books of different Countries and ages.”147 Such symbolism might be grounded on analogy (“deep water = Death”), or “seemingly arbitrary” (“the signification of Colours”) or “frequently ironical” (“Dung = Gold etc”). The Soul was in this sense a combination of the conscious and the unconscious self: “the Unity of Day and Night – Query: Are there two Consciences, the earthly and the Spiritual?”148
Encouraged by the sweep and poetical mysticism of these speculations, Tulk carried up to Highgate in February one of the very rare copies of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1795). At this time the ageing Blake was living in great poverty and almost total obscurity, with his wife Catherine, in two cramped rooms in Fountain Court, The Strand. A few young artists like Samuel Palmer, and a scattering of Swedenborgians like Tulk, were his only supporters. Tulk clearly hoped that the mystical doctrine of “Opposites” underlying the Songs, and the startling originality of their symbolism, would appeal to Coleridge. Blake’s notions of childhood, of the soul driven from Innocence to Experience, might also strike some deep chord in the author of “Christabel”.
Coleridge- Darker Reflections Page 56
