Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  The bleak garden of “Limbo” here reappears as a verdant, North London Eden where he wanders like a child, innocently stealing forbidden fruit:

  Thus, long-accustomed on the twy-fork’d hill,

  To pluck both flower and floweret at my will;

  The garden’s maze, like No-man’s-land, I tread,

  Nor common law, nor statute in my head;

  For my own proper smell, sight, fancy, feeling,

  With autocratic hand at once repealing

  Five Acts of Parliament ‘gainst private stealing…37

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  One summer evening, when Gillman was prostrated by a fever, Coleridge deputized for him as an emergency physician, panting down Highgate Hill to soothe a distraught mother whose new-born baby had suddenly died. He poured out his sympathies to the woman, and secretly wished he could become a faith-healer. “I felt a vehement impulse to try Zoo-magnetism, i.e. to try my hand at resurrection. I felt or fancied a power in me to concentre my will that I have never felt or fancied before.”38

  He reported back to Gillman, and then sat up writing a learned letter to Tulk about the possibilities of Magnetism revealed in the latest research papers: “A Berlin Physician discovered a power in himself to fling long sparks from his fingers by pure Force of his Will…”39

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  When the young Thomas Carlyle made his first pilgrimage to Highgate in June 1824, his initial impression was of a great “curiosity”, with an extraordinary and somewhat alarming physical presence. “Figure a fat, flabby, incurvated personage, at once short, rotund, and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange, brown, timid, yet earnest looking eyes, a high tapering brow, and a great bush of grey hair; and you have some faint idea of Coleridge. He is a kind good soul, full of religion and affection and poetry and animal magnetism. His cardinal sin is that he wants will. He has no resolution.”

  They walked up and down the garden together, Carlyle rather impatient with Coleridge’s shuffling gait and drifting conversation. “He wanders like a man sailing on many currents.” But they parted “very good friends”, and Carlyle sent him a book.40 It was this figure of “great and useless genius”, whom Carlyle finally transformed some twenty-seven years later into the “Magus” sage of Highgate. Like Hazlitt, he could not escape writing about him, and the more irritably and brilliantly he pricked and punctured Coleridge (with his “logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear”) the more Coleridge’s caricature seems to balloon and sway overhead, smiling and moon-like above Carlyle’s pages.41 When Carlyle moved to London, his whole career as social prophet and champion of German literature became an echo of Coleridge’s, and he ended as “the Sage of Chelsea”.

  Another more grateful visitor was Gabriel Rossetti, who had just arrived penniless in London, forced to flee after taking part in an uprising in Naples, friendless and barely able to speak English. Coleridge received him as “a gentleman, a scholar, and a man of talents”, and wrote a long letter of recommendation to Cary. “He is a poet who has been driven into exile for the high morale of his writings.” Rossetti gradually established himself, and seven years later was appointed Professor of Italian at the newly founded King’s College, London.42

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  Throughout the autumn at Ramsgate, Coleridge was correcting and adding unstoppably to the proofs of the Aids to Reflection. He wrote long letters to Gillman, assuring him how much his and Ann’s friendship had come to mean to him. He also described, with intense feeling, the wreck of an East Indiaman which ran aground in a storm at the harbour mouth, in the very sight of safety.43

  He watched in an agony of suspense as the “poor sailors” tried to leap from the bowsprit on to the huge granite blocks of the harbour wall. The next day his friend, Mr Philpot the bathing-machinist, accounted it “a good Wreck” with an explanation that much struck Coleridge. Surveying the piles of coffee bags, brandy barrels, wine casks and telescopes washing up in the surf, Mr Philpot defined the wreck as “a diffusion of Property…a providential multiplication of Properties…It is a loss to the Underwriters…but it is a great thing for the Poor Folks and for our town of Ramsgate”.44 Coleridge mused on the symbolism of this, and reflected how a drama that began as “a deep Tragedy” could end as an instructive “Entertainment”.45

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  The Aids to Reflection was now due to be published in May 1825. There was considerable tension at No. 3 The Grove, which spread from Coleridge to the Gillmans. Ann was restless, with “a care-worn countenance”, affectionately but anxiously worrying at him, as he reported to Allsop. “Mrs G.’s restless and interrogatory anxieties…put the whole working Hive of my Thoughts in a Whirl and a Buzz…Are you going on? – what are you doing now? – is this for the Book? Etc. etc., precisely as if I were Henry at his Lesson.”46

  Another note sped out to T. H. Dunn, Chemist: “I must interest your patience for another ten days. The last sheet of my work is going to the Press – and be assured that for every week since Autumn I will consider the sum as out of interest.”47

  William Hazlitt, with inspired foresight, chose exactly this moment to publish his brilliant and damaging portrait of “Mr Coleridge” in The Spirit of the Age. The note struck was the familiar one of elegiac satire: “If Mr Coleridge had not been the most impressive talker of his age, he would probably have been the finest writer…” Hazlitt ran through the cruel critique of Coleridge’s career which he had fixed a decade before, but now brought it to a crushing conclusion in which opium is for the first time explicitly mentioned. “Alas! ‘Frailty, thy name is Genius!’”

  Little had changed in Hazlitt’s line of attack, although he himself was much changed, and deeply embittered by the personal disappointments of his own life and unhappy love affairs. He had separated from his wife, and published his Liber Amoris, the tale of unrequited passion for a teazing, teenage servant girl, two years previously.

  But one concession was now made. Coleridge had sounded the political retreat for his fellow Lake Poets, Wordsworth and Southey, “by the help of casuistry and a musical voice”, until they settled in the safe fortress of the Establishment. But he himself had remained, at the last, independent. “They are safely inclosed there. Mr Coleridge did not enter with them; pitching his tent upon the barren waste without, and having no abiding place nor city of refuge!”

  Coleridge could perhaps laugh at this from his garden watchtower at Highgate. Yet one phrase still touched him painfully, probing an old wound, the failure to complete “Christabel” and so much other poetry. He was one of those, according to Hazlitt, who should have gathered “fruits and flowers, immortal fruits and amaranthine flowers”, but had been swept away by “the pelting of the pitiless storm”.48

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  On 21 February 1825 Coleridge wrote a thoughtful letter to Ann Gillman, his “dear Friend”, on the subject of work and old age. Highly compressed and poetical, it begins by exploring one of his most curious natural images, that of a spider. “Have you ever noticed the Vault or snug little Apartment which the Spider spins and weaves for itself, by spiral threads round and round, and sometimes with strait lines, so that its Lurking-parlour or withdrawing-room is an oblong square?…As we advance in years, the World, that spidery Witch, spins its threads narrower and narrower, still closing in on us, till at last it shuts us up without four walls, walls of flues and films, windowless – and well if there be sky-lights, and a small opening left for the Light from above.”49

  Perhaps there was something in that spider that Coleridge saw in himself: an image of self-revulsion that he found in his own attic retreat. But he then summoned up a series of other creatures, all to be found outside in the Highgate garden, which he unexpectedly gathered round him in the most beautiful and poignant of his late sonnets. It was “Work Without Hope”:

  All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair;

  The Bees are stirring – Birds are on the wing –

  A
nd Winter slumbering in the open air,

  Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!

  And I, the while, the sole unbusy Thing,

  Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

  Coleridge’s vision of himself as the “sole unbusy thing” at Highgate – a touching echo of the “sole unquiet thing” long ago at Stowey in “Frost at Midnight” – has an infinite irony. In the second part of the sonnet, the octet, Coleridge introduced the phrase from Hazlitt:

  Yet well I ken the banks, where Amaranths blow,

  Have traced the fount whence streams of Nectar flow.

  Bloom, o ye Amaranths! bloom for whom ye may –

  For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams! away!

  With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:

  And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?

  Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,

  And Hope without an object cannot live.50

  Amaranths are the immortal flowers which, in Greek mythology, bloom in paradise for successful poets and artists. The poem is rich with associations going right back to “Kubla Khan”, and the paradise flower he dreamed of at Calne. Yet for all its sense of grief and loss and exclusion, and even the references to opium (“the spells that drowse my soul”), it somehow magically remains a poem of springtime, a poem of renewal in a garden. Having completed the sonnet, Coleridge wrote several more lines of verse which became “The World that Spidery Witch”. This too ends on a note of suspended Hope: “But cease the prelude and resume the lay.”51

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  The Aids to Reflection received almost no immediate notices, except for a long and perplexed analysis in the British Critic for 1826. But the book slowly gathered a wide and influential readership. In 1829 it was published in America, with a long introductory essay by James Marsh, the president of the University of Vermont. In 1831 a second English edition was called for, and it began to be read in Cambridge.

  Coleridge’s attack on the “vaunted Mechanico-corpuscular Philosophy” still holds many surprises. In an extraordinary passage, inspired by Green’s work at the Royal College of Surgeons, he described a human body on the dissecting slab, and a detached eyeball. “Behold it, handle it…Tendon, Ligament, Membrane, Blood-vessel, Gland, Humors; its Nerves of Sense, of Sensation, and of Motion…” He then asked why such language was inadequate to define the true nature of the living eye, or its symbolic meaning as a faculty of vision.

  Alas! all these names, like that of the Organ itself, are so many Anachronisms, figures of Speech, to express what has been: as when the Guide points with his finger to a Heap of Stones, and tells the Traveller, “That is Babylon, or Persepolis”. – Is this cold Jelly “the Light of the Body”? Is this the Micranthropos in the marvellous Microcosm? Is this what you mean when you well define the Eye as the Telescope and the Mirror of the Soul, and Seat and Agent of an almost magical power?52

  The old language of eighteenth-century materialism was restricted to the human senses, what was fixed and solid to perception. But the new language of “dynamic science” had returned to the notion of energy, force fields, invisible powers and constant transformation. “It is to the coarseness of our Senses…that the visible Object appears the same even for a moment…But the particles that constitute the size, the visibility of an organic structure are in perpetual flux.”53 The new science had shown that the human body itself was no more fixed or permanent, from moment to moment, than the sound of a voice, than “pulses of air”.

  As the column of blue smoke from a cottage chimney in the breathless Summer Noon, or the steadfast-seeming Cloud on the edge-point of a Hill in the driving air-current, which momently condensed and recomposed is the common phantom of a thousand successors; – such is the flesh, which our bodily eyes transmit to us; which our Palates taste; which our Hands touch.54

  The new science in effect demanded a return to spiritual perceptions, a “recalling of the drowsed soul from the dreams and phantom world of sensuality to actual Reality”.55 Without this realization of the validity of the religious vision, renewed by science, the spiritual world would dwindle to “mere Metaphors, Figures of Speech, Oriental Hyperboles!”56

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  John Sterling’s reaction to this kind of oracular writing gives some clue to its impact. Sterling was then twenty years old, and promising to be one of the great intellectual lights of his generation at Cambridge. In his first enthusiasm, he wrote to a friend in November 1829: “I scarcely hold fast by anything but Shakespeare, Milton, and Coleridge and have nothing to say to any one but to read the ‘Aids to Reflection on the formation of a Manly Character’ – a book the more necessary now to us all because except in England I do not see that there is a chance of any men being produced any where.”57

  When he came down to visit Coleridge at Highgate in 1828, sometimes accompanied by J. S. Mill, his impressions took on yet more apocalyptic tones. Coleridge looked “as if he belonged not so much to this, or to any other age, as to history”. They talked of everything, from landscape gardening to Pantheism to the missionary preaching of Edward Irving. But what remained with Sterling was something more unsettling, the sense of a man who had been through some great personal and historical storm.

  It is painful to observe in Coleridge, that, with all the kindness and glorious far-seeing intelligence of his eye, there is a glare in it, a light half earthly, half morbid. It is the glittering eye of the Ancient Mariner. His cheek too shows a flush of over-excitement, the red of a storm-cloud at sunset. When he dies, another, and one of the greatest of their race, will join the few Immortals, the ill understood and ill requited, who have walked the earth.58

  Two years after Coleridge’s death, Sterling told Julius Hare: “To Coleridge I owe education. He taught me to believe that an empirical philosophy is none, that Faith is the highest Reason, that all criticism, whether of literature, laws, or manners, is blind without the power of discerning the organic unity of the object.”59*

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  The Aids to Reflection was Coleridge’s last major publication. In his final years at Highgate he continued to work with Green on the Opus Maximum, and fill his Notebooks with science and philosophy. The sense of his retreating into himself, of talking an increasingly private language, half mystical and half poetic, is strong. “The Will of the Chaos – its dark disactualizing, clinging Self-Contrariety suspended, and forced asunder to become actual as opposites – Light and Gravity. Yes! This supplies the link that was missing. Now the Life of the living Thing opens on me – what it is – and its necessary union with Mass – The clinging wrestle, the old war-embrace of Light and Gravity renewed…These are but Glimmer – the Skyblink…And now the living Soul – what was the Life of the Adam? This is still below the Horizon for me.”61

  Yet little of his old humour was lost. In 1826 he wrote that he had “difficulty in making my own thoughts sufficiently distinct and clear to communicate them, connectedly and consecutively, in writing. They are mature enough to climb up & chirp on the edge of their Birth-nest; but not fledged enough to fly away, tho’ it were but to perch on the next branch.”62

  He accepted the changes that wracked and bent his body, and weakened his heart, confident that the spirit still burned strongly within. “For in this bleak World of Mutabilities, & where what is not changed, is chilled, and in this winter-time of my own Being, I resemble a Bottle of Brandy in Spitzbergen – a Dram of alcoholic Fire in the centre of a Cake of Ice.”63

  Writing to Stuart in 1827, Coleridge added a postscript: “Excuse paper – I did not observe I had taken a sheet on which Mr Green had drawn the digestive system of an Oyster.”64 Green became Professor of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1825, and was elected to the first Chair of Surgery at King’s College London, in 1831.

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  The life of friends, family, and visitors continued vigorously around him. Gillman arranged that Coleridge’s callers at Highgate should be organized into regular Thursday
evening soirées. On a typical day they would include “Merchant, Manufacturer, Physician, Member of Parliament & keen politician, chemist, Clergymen, poetic Ladies, Painters, Musical Men, Barristers & Political Economist”, to each of whom Coleridge would talk “in his own way”.65

  He maintained a huge correspondence, notable among which are a series of letters on “the Ascent of Powers” to his nephew Edward Coleridge, then a master at Eton;66 and a further dissertation on the role of education to Gillman’s eldest son, James. These were familiar, but nevertheless delightful, saws. “And what is a liberal Education? That which draws forth and trains up the germ of free-agency in the Individual…For believe me, my dear young Friend! It is no musty old Saw but a Maxim of Life, a medicinal Herb from the Garden of Experience that grows amid Sage, Thyme and Heart’s Ease, (– This word reminds me of an Ode to Punning which I wrote at School, when I was your age –) that He alone is free & entitled to the name of a Gentleman, who knows himself and walks in the light of his own consciousness.”67

  Old friends – Lamb, Crabb Robinson, the Aders, the Montagus (now back in favour) – visited him constantly. “Leigh Hunt stepped in sometimes, and Coleridge took him into the garden, and talked to him of some favourite flower as an emblem and miniature of the Universe.”68