Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  Then he gave his own assessment of Hartley. Here was a young man of great gifts but admitted eccentricity, who would “never be the man of the world” that his brother Derwent would become. He moved from “whirling activity” to sudden fits of abstraction. He loved paradox and fantastical talk, but he was essentially honest and almost childlike in manner, of “unregarding Openness”. His indulgence in drink was a sort of absentmindedness. He took drink “in the eagerness of conversation”, he seized whatever was set before him, “utterly unconscious of what he was doing”. This was a trait he had displayed since childhood.

  Hartley was certainly not a solitary drinker, nor was he an alcoholic. At Highgate he had left off wine and spirits at table, on his father’s advice, without a moment’ hesitation. (There was of course table beer, and one glass of wine during dinner, and perhaps one more after it…but this showed “more self-command than an entire rejection at all times”.) The charge that he had formed “a habit of intemperance” was cruel and utterly untrue.82

  All these explanations have the shadow of Coleridge’s own experience of addiction barely concealed behind them. Yet there can be little doubt that Coleridge essentially believed them at the time. Or at least, he suspended disbelief. Yet thus far, Coleridge’s letter was one that any father might have written in similar circumstances: loyal, anxious, to some degree self-deluding.

  But then he did something unique. He conjured up for the donnish, dusty, bachelor Copleston, a vision of Hartley as the Magic Child. Hartley was the fruit of all his hopes – and of his best poetry. This was the highest risk strategy of all, a naked appeal to the Provost’s emotions. It is all the more extraordinary when one recalls (what is easy to forget), that Hartley was now a young man of twenty-four. But for Coleridge he was still, in some essential sense, a boy and even a baby.

  Hartley, wrote Coleridge, had always been a free spirit, a creature of the natural world. “From his earliest childhood he had an absence of any contra-distinguished Self, any conscious ‘I’.” His intellectual brilliance arose from an unselfconscious natural joy, and it was that youthful spirit which the college should foster. “Never can I read De la Motte Fouqué’s beautiful Faery Tale…of Undina, the Winter-Fay, before she had a Soul, beloved by all whether they would or no, & as indifferent to all, herself included, as a blossom whirling in a May-gale, without having Hartley recalled to me, as he appeared from infancy to his boyhood – never, without reflecting on the prophesy, written by me long before I had either thought or prospect of settling in Cumberland, addressed to him then but a few months old in my Poem, entitled Frost at Midnight –

  Dear Babe! that slumber’st cradled at my side,

  Whose gentle Breathings heard in this deep Calm

  Fill up the interspersed vacancies

  And momentary intervals of Thought –

  My Babe so beautiful!…”83

  It is doubtful if the Provost of Oriel had ever received an appeal like this in the course of his long career.

  On Friday, 13 October 1820 Coleridge set off in the Oxford mail to plead for his son in person. Fearing the worst, Gillman insisted that Allsop accompany him. “Of this journey to Oxford,” Allsop wrote much later, “I have very painful recollections; perhaps the most painful recollection (one excepted) connected with the memory of Coleridge.”84

  Copleston received him graciously, “talked in a very smooth strain” of Hartley’s great talents and acquirements, and did not give an inch. The possibility that Hartley might continue as a non-residential Fellow was held out as a diplomatic offering; but was rejected three days later at the college meeting. Copleston suggested that they meet again in London at the end of the month, but at this second conference, additional evidence of drunkenness was produced and the appeal was closed. Copleston’s final gesture was to offer Hartley the compensation of £300 from college funds, but this was unofficial. The verdict of dismissal from Oriel was confirmed. Crushed and humiliated, Coleridge refused the money on his son’s behalf. A year later Hartley secretly accepted it, through the intermediary of John Taylor Coleridge.85

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  Even now, Coleridge would not accept the accusations against his son. Hartley swore to him on the Bible that they were false.86 Coleridge insisted that Hartley should write individually to each of the friends who had financed him at Oxford – the Beaumonts, Tom Poole, and Edward Coleridge – enclosing copies of the dossier in his defence which he had compiled. He also wrote to the warden of his old college, Merton.87

  With many misgivings, Coleridge then allowed Hartley to settle with the Montagus, and spend the next year trying his hand at journalism. He placed a few small pieces with the London Magazine (probably through Lamb’s influence), and continued to write poetry; but he was not productive. He frequently disappeared from Bedford Square to spend days with London friends, other journalists or young lawyers, who loved his company and joined him in heavy drinking. He would turn up unannounced at Highgate, throwing Ann Gillman’s domestic arrangements into chaos.

  Gillman exerted the best influence he could, and Coleridge wrote a long description of finding him and Hartley one evening in the garden, gravely discussing the problem of Hamlet and why everyone identified with him and his intense self-consciousness. Coleridge threw in the suggestion that Hamlet was like a young man flying in a balloon, for whom the world seemed to move around him, disconnected and uncontrolled.88 Privately he was sick with worry, “with great depression of Spirits, loss of Appetite…and a harassing pain in my left knee”.89

  His own work, though continuing with Green on the Opus Maximum, was desultory during these months. He abandoned his “Faery Work” anthology, and began to assemble a dry book on grammar and logic.90 One of the few cheering events of the winter was an Elia essay by Lamb, entitled “Christ’s Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago’. In it Lamb drew the touching and famous picture of Coleridge as “the inspired Charity-boy” holding forth on neo-Platonic philosophy in the school cloisters.91 Lamb recalled how much he had been isolated in London, cut off from parents and friends “far in the west” at Ottery. Coleridge did not forget this as he struggled with his own son.

  He remained endlessly indulgent towards “poor Hartley’s” irregular life and “procrastination” with work. “Indolence it is not,” he told Allsop hopefully, “for he is busy enough in his own way, & rapidly bringing together materials for this future credit, as a man of letters & a poet; but shrinking from all things connected with painful associations, and of that morbid temperament, which I too well understand, that renders what would be motives for men in general, narcotics for him in exact proportion to their strength.”92

  He still held out great hopes for the “Prometheus” poem. By the spring of 1821 he had supplied Hartley with “a small volume almost…containing all the materials and comments on the full import of this most pregnant and sublime Mythos”. Sometimes he even wanted to write it for Hartley, but reassured Derwent that he restrained his paternal interference. He had “simply brought together such Stuff, as the Poet must have sought for in Books, & therefore could not subtract an atom from his Poetic Originality. I know, that in work of this kind a man must wait for genial hours and cannot sit down to it mechanically.” Yet he saw the plan becoming too “large and circular”, and feared Hartley’s enthusiasm for the subject had cooled.93

  Still he closed his eyes to his son’s drinking. But Hartley had become thin and ill, his eyes inflamed in “a woeful condition”. When he tottered into Highgate one day in May, the Gillmans simply put him to bed.94 On the night of 11 June, a pitiful small cart of books, papers and old clothes arrived at the door of Moreton House. The Montagus had thrown Hartley out of Bedford Square, and refused to have anything more to do with him. Again, it was as if the events of 1810 were repeating themselves. It emerged that for several weeks Ann Gillman had been writing to Mrs Montagu, begging her not to execute this threat. Her greatest fear was the effect it would have on Coleridge’s health.95 But of course the Gillman
s took him in, along with Derwent, who had just come down from Cambridge for the summer vacation.

  Once again, everyone rallied round Hartley. His relations with Derwent were especially close (they communicated through endless bad puns), and the Gillmans paid his bills and showed “parental kindness”.96 Once Hartley had recovered, Coleridge agreed that he could share lodgings with an old school-friend, Robert Jameson, at Gray’s Inn Square near Fleet Street, and continue trying his hand at poetry and journalism. Coleridge also seems to have arranged a book contract with Taylor and Hessey.

  Hartley’s letters to Derwent show he was capable of writing a fine, whimsical prose, rather in the manner of Lamb. He also began to compose the tender, melancholy sonnets on which his literary reputation would eventually rest. Now, if ever, Hartley had a chance to make his own career in London; and this arrangement held together – despite drinking bouts and disappearances – for the next year. He told Derwent he was reasonably happy, but desperate at his inability to attract women: he felt his diminutive size and eccentricity would always prevent him from being taken seriously, and negated the prestige of his name.97 Nor could he maintain the essential discipline of a freelance writer; to find his own writing routine, and deliver work to a deadline. In the event it took Hartley ten years to complete his first book.

  Coleridge was exhausted with coping with Hartley. In July 1821 he told Tom Poole that he longed to “fly to the Sea Shore at Porlock & Lynmouth, making a good Halt at dear ever fondly remembered Stowey”.98 Yet other young people increasingly turned to him for support and advice. Allsop’s sister consulted with him about a marriage proposal. (“You must have a Soul-mate as well as a House- or Yoke-mate!”)99 Gillman’s sons sought help with their schoolwork. Gillman’s laboratory assistants, John Watson and Charles Stutfield, came to him about their future careers. They all became what he called his “substitute children”, and their numbers would increase as his own sons grew away from him.

  It was not easy being a prophet in his own family. When his brother George came up to London that summer, Coleridge was astonished and hurt that he refused to visit him in Highgate, despite invitations and long conciliatory letters.100 George took fright at Hartley’s situation, seeing the recurrence of his young brother’s life of “mismanagement”, and terrified at being involved once more. George died in 1828, without ever having seen Coleridge again. Coleridge told George’s own son that, nevertheless, he had loved George as “Father and Brother in one”.101

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  All the strains of these disastrous years had another insidious effect. They were driving Coleridge back towards secret opium-taking, outside Gillman’s regime. He eventually established a compliant and sympathetic supplier in the chemist at the top of Highgate Hill, T. H. Dunn. From 1821 there are Notebook entries of various disguised medicaments infused with “Tinct. of Opium”, including fennel water, nitric ether, and a rather delicious-sounding “syrup of Marshmallow”.102

  By 1824 he had a regular account at Dunn’s shop, then situated ten doors down from the present chemists, on the corner with Townshend Yard. While the shop front (now an estate agents) opened directly on to the busy thoroughfare of Highgate Hill, there was a discreet side-door on to the yard with its own bell-pull and gas-lamp. This is where Coleridge came to collect his supplies, perhaps after dark, partly hidden from inquisitive eyes. There can be no doubt that this was, initially, without Gillman’s knowledge. His first surviving note to Dunn dates from May 1824, but clearly refers to a well-established account dating back some time, on which a large sum is long overdue. Coleridge had not been able to pay “without imprudent exposures”, but promised to pay the “£25 Account” within seven days, and marks his note “Destroy this instantly”.103

  Dunn’s young assistant, Seymour Porter, the teenage son of the Independent Minister of Highgate, left a long and sympathetic account of these transactions, after he had retired.104 Coleridge always called in at the “Back Shop”, and brought his own flat half-pint bottle to be filled at the laboratory table rather than at the front counter. A certain “talk, gossip, buzz” grew up about these visits. “So the old gentleman comes still for his dose!” “What does such a good-looking old fellow want with so much physic!” “Can’t Gillman give him all the medicine he wants without sending him to you?”

  Porter always defended his distinguished old client – “I liked the very sight of him” – and it seems a certain conspiracy grew up between them. “Mr Dunn, too, was very deaf; so that he could not hear Mr Coleridge’s soft & mellifluous speech unless circumstances allowed this to become unnaturally strong.” And of course Coleridge soon cast his spell over young Porter, who on his afternoons off used to track Coleridge down “in the green lane nearly parallel to the West Hill as it descended from Highgate to Kentish Town…a favourite resort of Mr Coleridge’s”. Whether “reading or making notes”, Coleridge always broke off to talk to the apothecary’s assistant and “gratify him with a few minutes’ dissertation” on some totally unexpected subject.

  Porter also left an interesting account of Mr Coleridge’s consumption and expenses. “In those days the ordinary retail price of good laudanum, the ‘Tinct. Opii’ of the Pharmacopeia, was eight pence an ounce; but Dunn had undertaken to supply Mr Coleridge for five pence, that is, to fill his bottle for five shillings. The money was tendered usually in the form of a £5 note; & if this had not been handed in at the usual time, a few words were said…Of course Mr Dunn gained little by such a sale…the entire affair, indeed, was one of honourable neighbourliness rather than of trade.” Porter reckoned that Coleridge was dosing himself with “a wineglass” a day, and replenishing his bottle about once every five days. (This would have amounted to an annual cost of some £18 or £20, but no doubt Porter’s retrospective accounting was rather kindly – double the sum seems nearer the figure.)

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  Yet there was no collapse, and if Coleridge could not work, he remained busy. He was corresponding with Tulk about Swedenborgian matters, and at the same time lending support to the governors of the Highgate Free Grammar School in a dispute with the government Charity Commission.105 When in October he went with the Gillmans to Ramsgate, he found them slightly better sited lodgings at 7 Wellington Crescent, on the “good” end of the East Cliff, and encouraged Ann to take up sea-bathing for her own health, “a Sea-nymph in Amphitrite’s Train” as he put it.

  He discovered for himself the pleasures of the new bathing machines, which could be wheeled into surf (they were built rather like gypsy caravans) so as to provide a sort of mobile diving-board from the wooden steps at the seaward end. “It was glorious! I watched each time from the top-step for a high Wave coming, and then with my utmost power of projection shot myself off into it, for all the world like a Congreve Rocket into a Whale.”106 It was with these marine explosions that he celebrated his forty-ninth birthday.

  They brought him back refreshed to Highgate, but by the end of the year the Logic textbook was still “interrupted”, and a valuable invitation to lecture on Shakespeare in Dublin had been rejected as “out of the Question”. There was still no advance of the Opus Maximum.107 Steadily his life was turning back on itself, eddying, slowing down, dissipating like foam on the pebbles. Or it was going out again to join “the swelling of the voiceful sea”.108

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  Now Coleridge’s thoughts turned continually on all his children, whoever they were, whoever they might be. His dearest, Hartley, showed some signs of settling into his career, and in February 1822 published a learned article in the London Magazine, “On the Poetical Use of Heathen Mythology”, a subject to delight his father. He made perceptive reference to the work of Keats and Shelley, and showed that he had now read Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820). But he also realized that his own epic poem on the subject had been anticipated, and he secretly and miserably abandoned it. The fragments show that Hartley’s Prometheus reflected his creator’s temperament: he capitulates to Jupiter, gives way to the seductions o
f Ocean, and merges with the great blind forces of Nature.109

  Now it was Derwent who was causing Coleridge anxiety, becoming secretary of clubs and societies at Cambridge, making mocking references to religion, and neglecting his mathematical studies. Coleridge feared “accursed Coxcombry” and stern letters of advice flew out; though in fact Derwent was just being his easy sociable self.110

  Coleridge found a much surer touch in encouraging Gillman’s assistant John Watson (who soon became another youthful disciple), and writing yet more marital advice to Thomas Allsop, whose love-life seems to have been star-crossed. Coleridge confided to Ann Gillman that Allsop was “more than a Son to me”. He was relieved to hear he had finally fallen in love “at first sight”, which had now become “an article of my philosophic Creed’ in matters of the heart. “Only remember,” he told Allsop tenderly, “that what is dear to you, becomes dear to me.”111

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  Coleridge felt all the accumulated experiences of these years, now spiritual as much as purely intellectual, should be put to work while there was still time. On 25 February 1822 he placed a formal advertisement in the Courier, offering to hold a weekly seminar or tutorial for young men between nineteen and twenty-five, “for the purpose of assisting them in the formation of their minds, and the regulation of their studies”.112

  His aim was to attract the highest calibre of pupils, in a sort of postgraduate seminar. He did not want academics, but those who would have some impact on the outside world: ideally men intending to go into the Church, the law, or parliament. He told Daniel Stuart that sessions would be held between midday and four o’clock, at Green’s fine reception room in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The first two hours would consist of a lecture or dictation, drawn from the various branches of the Logic and Opus Maximum; the second two of “conversation, questions, discussions etc.” on general subjects of the day. Philosophy would be applied to life.