Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  If dead we cease to be; if total gloom

  Swallow up life’s brief flash for aye, we fare

  As summer gusts, of sudden birth and doom…

  He too had “at one time felt within himself” the black terror of such a philosophy.7

  In a similar way he related the conditions of medieval vassalage to the contemporary struggle over the West Indian slave trade, and the cotton children in British factories. “True notion of Slavery – Hopelessness”.8 And when speaking of Descartes’s mind–body dualism, he related it to the contemporary debate over John Hunter’s theories of Vitalism.9

  He had lost none of his ability to illuminate intellectual arguments with the reflections of a poet. Speaking of Erasmus and the transition between the Reformation and the Enlightenment, he summed up the complex exchange of ideas in a sudden, musical analogy. “If we listen to a symphony of Cimarosa, the present strain still seems not only to recall, but almost to renew, some past movement, and yet present the same! Each present movement bringing back, as it were, and embodying the spirit of some melody that had gone before, anticipates and seems sometimes trying to overtake something that is to come…The events and characters of one age, like the strains in music, recall those of another.”10

  Coleridge wanted these lectures “to be permanently useful to Auditors of both Sexes”, and he intended much more than an academic history of philosophy.11 He presented ideas as living “powers”, which evolved in a continuous chain-reaction in the human mind: “a living movement in the progress of human philosophy”.12 Central to the course was the notion that the three powers of Science, Magic and Religion had battled for supremacy in the development of European thought since the Greeks.

  Here Coleridge raised an issue that still haunts modern thinkers in connection with the Holocaust. How can a period of great humanist achievement coincide with a time of barbarism and persecution? How can the mind simultaneously countenance enlightenment and savagery? The illustration he used was the co-existence of science and witch-hunting in the seventeenth century, when tremendous advances in “experimental physics” coincided with widespread and totally irrational fears of the powers of witches.

  How ought it to humble us when we reflect that it was not in the Dark Ages, that it was not in countries struggling only out of barbarism, but in the very morning, in the brightness of reviving letters, in the age of a Kepler and a Galileo, when every department of human intellect was felt and supported in greatest splendour, – it was then that the dreadful contagion of witchcraft and persecution of witches raged, not in one country but passed like a postillion through all Europe, till it died in North America among the Puritans of New England…I mention this as a proof that it is not by learning merely, no, nor even by the knowledge of experimental physics, that the most disgraceful enthusiasm can at all times be prevented. The sole prevention, in reality, is the recurrence to the highest philosophy – know thyself: study thy own nature, but above all do no evil under the impression that you are serving God thereby.13

  Coleridge suggested that the history of all philosophy was really that of “the same mind in different modes or at different periods of growth”.14 This led to the master-thesis of the course, that the Aristotelian and the Platonic approaches represented a permanent polarity in the human intellect. Once again Coleridge put this with historic clarity and immediacy.

  The difference between Aristotle and Plato is that which will remain as long as we are men and there is any difference between man and man in point of opinion. Plato, with Pythagoras before him, had conceived that the phenomenon or outward appearance, all that we call thing or matter, is but as it were a language by which the invisible (that which is not the object of our senses) communicates its existence to our finite beings…Aristotle, on the contrary, affirmed that all our knowledge had begun in experience, had begun through the senses, and that from the senses only we could take our notions of reality…It was the first way in which, plainly and distinctly, two opposite systems were placed before the mind of the world.15*

  3

  From mid-March both The Times and the Courier were dramatically announcing in headline type that “MR COLERIDGE WILL DELIVER HIS LAST ADDRESS AS A PUBLIC LECTURER” on the 29th of the month. To his Notebooks Coleridge confided: “O pray Heaven, that it may indeed be the Last”, and added in Latin: “May this not be an omen of another death to follow: as for the first, it will be enough if only after death there is peace.”16

  The Crown and Anchor was crowded with Highgate friends, as well as the young men of the city like Allsop, Abernethy’s medical students from Guy’s Hospital, and painters from the Academy. He summarized the course, and brought back his theme to “the two great domains” of Plato and Aristotle.17 But then he climbed towards the horizon, to the meeting-place of philosophy and religion, and the paramount need for self-knowledge.

  He had praised the new spirit of science, and argued that it was not incompatible with the higher Reason of religion. But he urged his listeners to reject the philosophy of materialism, the reductive and mechanistic thinking that had arisen in France, “with the loss of the life and the spirit of Nature”.18 The great spirits of Europe (he named the Italian Cosimo de’ Medici, the Dutchman Erasmus, the German Luther, the Englishman Sir Philip Sidney) had always “delighted in the study of human nature”, had “loved metaphysics” and instinctively turned to philosophy. “We are peculiarly called upon to this study. Are we, in the unceasing change of all sublunary things, to imagine that the soul…is alone in the world, and without a sympathizing feeling throughout Nature? If self-knowledge prevent this unmeaning blank, is it not a delightful, desirable object?”19

  The great aim of philosophy, he repeated, was the largeness and generosity of mind that came from self-knowledge. To what particular faith it might bring a man, was not the question. It was the rejection of the “little unthinking contemptible self” that mattered, the independent awareness of a greater life. “To have genius is to live in the universal.”20 Coleridge took his bow on a smiling, gentle, English note. Let his listeners go away and read the author who brought philosophy and poetry into “delightful harmony” and reconciled “all the powers of our nature” – William Shakespeare.21

  4

  In the exhausted aftermath of these lectures, while wandering over Hampstead Heath in the first days of spring, Coleridge wrote one of his late sonnets, “To Nature”. It dwells half-humorously and half-anxiously on that “life and spirit of Nature” he had been attempting to champion for his listeners in his final address. Perhaps he would be “mocked” for his beliefs (as Hazlitt had mocked him). Perhaps in the emotion of the moment his closing lecture had veered back to the Pantheism of his early philosophy of the Stowey days. If so, with a poignant impulse and a kind of defiance, he accepted this in the privacy of the poem:

  It may indeed be phantasy, when I

  Essay to draw from all created things

  Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings;

  And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie

  Lessons of love and earnest piety.

  So let it be; and if the wide world rings

  In mock of this belief, it brings

  Not fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity.

  So will I build my altar in the fields,

  And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,

  And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields

  Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee,

  Thee only God! and thou shalt not despise

  Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice.22

  Coleridge had not thought of himself as Nature’s “priest” for twenty years. But now, as age closed prematurely around him, the need for religious affirmation and comfort increasingly filled his innermost thoughts.

  5

  But so too did the needs of the younger generation. This spring he wrote a long letter of advice to Allsop on the question of marriage. How far should love overcome
“prudential” motives? Many memories of his own unhappy marriage shadowed his thoughtful reply – above all to avoid “the wretchedness of having your heart starved by selfishness and frost-bitten by moral frigidity!” There was much emphasis on the duties and sympathies of a prospective wife.23 But a young man must not mistake “the sexual impulse” for enduring love – “what are called Love-matches are so proverbially unhappy”. He remarked that his own daughter, Sara, with “her Beauty, winning manners, and attractive gentleness”, was sure to have many young men “fall in Love (as the striplings phrase it)” with her in mere “intoxication of mind”.24

  Yet true love was the goal of marriage and was achievable, and again and again Coleridge urged both parties to look into themselves and ask, “do I really love?” His final advice, born of experience, was both tender and curiously down-to-earth. “We must not expect Angels…If the one pouts, the other must kiss, & both make it up.”25*

  Many young people would come to Coleridge for this kind of advice at Highgate, not least the members of Gillman’s own growing family. There formed around him a circle of substitute sons, many of whom he could counsel better than his own. Yet he tried hard with Hartley and Derwent too. University plans and reading lists went out to Derwent, from his “loving father”. When in April Coleridge learned that Hartley had been elected a Probationary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, he was overflowing in his praise.

  The news delighted him more than any family event since leaving Keswick. He was bursting with “Fatherly Pride”, wrote round to his friends, and unblushingly circulated the examiners’ opinion that Hartley was palpably superior to all other candidates, with a “display of original Talent, and self-formed Views”. Any anxiety about Hartley’s increasing drinking and eccentricity were temporarily swept away. His absentee fatherhood had, in the end it seemed, been justified.

  At Ambleside Hartley’s old schoolmaster, Mr Dawes, declared a public holiday and there were cheering and huzzas for Coleridge’s son. The child of “Frost at Midnight” had proved their finest alumnus. Hartley himself would never forget this time of triumph, or how for one moment he had lived out his father’s poetic prophecy. He hurried back from a holiday in the Isle of Wight to celebrate at Highgate.

  6

  Another gifted young man crossed Coleridge’s path in April 1819. John Keats was back from his Scottish tour reading Dante, and was beginning to write “Hyperion”. He was also deeply depressed from the terrible experience of nursing his brother Tom, who had died from tuberculosis at Well Walk, Hampstead, the previous December. Keats was himself suffering from the first symptoms of the disease – a persistent sore throat and cough – and was profoundly uncertain of his future or the direction of his poetry. “My passions are all asleep,” he wrote at the end of March. “Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me: they seem rather like three figures on a Greek vase…”26

  In this dreamy, suspended state of mind, Keats took a lonely Sunday afternoon walk across the Heath on 11 April, pulling on an old coat and scarf to protect his throat, crossing over Parliament Hill and cutting across Highgate Ponds till he reached Millfield Lane where it begins to climb towards Highgate Village. This, as it happened, was Coleridge’s “favourite Walk”,27 and down the hill by happy chance came the familiar white-haired figure deep in conversation with J. H. Green. Coleridge did not recognize Keats, but Green, having taught him at Guy’s Hospital, did so, and kindly made the introductions.

  What Coleridge remembered was not the meeting but the parting. “A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and staid a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back and said: ‘Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!’ – ‘There is death in that hand,’ I said to Green when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.”28

  What Keats remembered was Coleridge’s talk. Coleridge’s “minute or so” obviously lasted more like an hour, which Keats recalled with great relish and obvious amusement. He described the miniature lecture, in a famous letter to his brother George in America, just four days after.

  In the lane that winds by the side of Lord Mansfield’s park I met Mr Green our Demonstrator at Guy’s in conversation with Coleridge. – I joined them, after enquiring by a look whether it would be agreeable. – I walked with him at his alderman-after dinner pace for near two miles I suppose. In these two miles he broached a thousand things. – let me see if I can give you a list. – Nightingales, Poetry – on Poetical sensation – Metaphysics – Different genera and species of Dreams – Nightmare – a dream accompanied by a sense of Touch – single and double Touch – A dream related – First and Second Consciousness – the difference explained between Will and Volition – so many metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second Consciousness – Monsters – the Kraken – Mermaids – Southey believes in them – Southey’s belief too much diluted – A Ghost Story – Good morning. – I heard his voice as he came towards me – I heard it as he moved away – I heard it all the interval – if it may be called so. He was civil enough to ask me to call on him at Highgate. Goodnight!29

  Keats never took up that invitation to visit Highgate (though he wrote a comic verse about Coleridge’s hypnotic drone in his ear). But perhaps it was because he was too busy. The impact of meeting Coleridge, as with young Hazlitt long ago in the spring of 1798, seems to have galvanized him into life. A few nights later he had an experience curiously resembling Coleridge’s with “Kubla Khan”. He took opium (for his throat) while reading a book, the description of the lovers Paolo and Francesca, from Dante’s Inferno. He fell asleep and had an extraordinary dream. “The dream was one of the most delightful enjoyments I ever had in my life – I floated about the whirling atmosphere, as it is described, with a beautiful figure to whose lips mine were joined as it seemed for an age…”30

  The first result was a haunting sonnet, his first for months, “A Dream”, which ended: “Pale were the lips I kiss’d and fair the form/ I floated with about that melancholy storm.”31

  Almost immediately after, he composed “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, which appears four pages later in his letter to George, dated 21 April. This was his vision of the mysterious “knight-at-arms”, wandering about the bleak heathland, “alone and palely loitering”. Its ballad form and demon-lover theme are also clearly influenced by Coleridge’s poem “Love” which he had read in Sibylline Leaves: the tale of the “bold and lovely Knight” who is “crazed” and driven to death by a “beautiful” Fiend:

  There came and looked him in the face

  An angel beautiful and bright;

  And that he knew it was a Fiend,

  This miserable Knight!32

  In May and June Keats went on to write his great odes, which have many half-conscious echoes of Coleridge’s Stowey poems. Indeed both poets, in curious synchronicity, were listening to the nightingales around Hampstead Heath. Coleridge ironically complained that they were as numerous and “incessant with song” as frogs that May, and combined with indigestion to keep him awake. “Ah! (I groaned forth a few nights ago, when qualmy and twitchy from the effects of an Aperient) Ah! Philomel! Ill do thy strains accord with those of Calomel!”33 But Keats sat out under a tree, and composed his “Ode to a Nightingale”.

  7

  Did Coleridge really feel “death” in Keats’s hand in 1819? Or was this an example of Highgate myth-making? Years later he told exactly the same story about another young man, Adam Steinmetz, who died from consumption in August 1832. “After he had shaken hands with me on leaving us, I have turned round with a tear on my cheek, and whispered to Mrs Gillman – Alas! there is Death in that dear hand!”34 In fact the two reminiscences date from exactly the same time, August 1832. So the Keats’ story seems retrospectively inspired by Steinmetz’s death, rather than an act of prophe
sy at the time.

  Yet Coleridge was extraordinarily responsive to gifted young people, and his preternatural sensitivity to Keats’s state may have been perfectly genuine. Two years earlier, long before Steinmetz’s illness, he told another version of the same story to Hookham Frere in December 1830.

  Poor Keats, I saw him once. Mr Green…and I were walking out in these parts, and we were overtaken by a young man of very striking countenance whom Mr Green recognized and shook hands with, mentioning my name; I wish Mr Green had introduced me, for I did not know who it was. He passed on, but in a few moments sprung back and said, “Mr Coleridge, allow me the honour of shaking your hand.” I was struck by the energy of his manner, and gave him my hand. He passed on and we stood looking after him, when Mr Green said, “Do you know who that is? That is Keats, the poet.” “Heavens,” I said, “when I shook him by the hand there was death!” That was about two years before he died.

  Frere himself doubted this account, and quizzed Coleridge more closely: “But what was it?” – expecting the old man to evade the question. But Coleridge surprisingly insisted. What he felt was not necessarily the physical consumption, the disease itself, but a psychic impression of Keats’s anxiety about himself and his threatened future.