Coleridge- Darker Reflections

by Richard Holmes

  20

  There was a new vogue for annual magazines, and rival editors of the Bijou and the Amulet, competed for Coleridge’s poems, encouraging him to write several fresh ones and finish old. In 1827 he completed “The Garden of Boccaccio” for Ann Gillman, first sketched out on the beach at Ramsgate five years before. It describes a familiar relapse into one of his opium-induced depressions: “when life seems emptied of all genial powers”. Then it rises to a rare evocation of the remembered landscapes of “star-bright Italy”, inspired by an illustrated edition of Boccaccio’s Tales which Ann had brought him, to “soothe by silence what words cannot heal”. It was less the Italy that Coleridge had known himself, but more a kind of tranquil, tapestried Byzantium:

  O Florence! with the Tuscan fields and hills

  And famous Arno, fed with all their rills;

  Thou brightest star of star-bright Italy!

  Rich, ornate, populous, – all treasures thine,

  The golden corn, the olive, and the vine…”69

  He also wrote, or completed, a last full-length ballad, “Alice Du Clos”.

  Coleridge set no great store by these verses. In March 1828 he wrote to Lady Beaumont that he could never “resume Poetry”. But in the very act of denying it, he gave one of his most moving and suggestive descriptions of inspiration at work. “Is the power extinct? No! No! As in a still Summer Noon, when the lulled Air at irregular intervals wakes up with a startled Hush-st, that seems to re-demand the silence which it breaks, or heaves a long profound Sigh in its Sleep, and an Aeolian Harp has been left in the chink of the not quite shut Casement – even so – how often! – scarce a week of my Life shuffles by, that does not at some moment feel the spur of the old genial impulse – even so do there fall on my inward Ear swells, and broken snatches of sweet Melody, reminding me that I still have within me which is both Harp and Breeze.”70

  21

  There was a final reconciliation with Wordsworth, which took the form of a six-week tour to Germany, and down the Rhine into Holland, in the summer of 1828. They were accompanied by Dora Wordsworth, and played out the parts of two eccentric English gentlemen revisiting the scenes of their youth. Each complained vigorously of the other’s habits. Wordsworth was parsimonious and taciturn and got up too early in the mornings; Coleridge was garrulous and disorganized and constantly criticized the bad German wine and appalling medieval plumbing. But they rubbed along easily enough.

  A satirical English clergyman, Julian Young, observed them at a house-party near Bonn. Coleridge shuffled round distractedly in “well-worn slippers, much trodden down at heel”, clutching a ponderous tome to his side, “musing and muttering to himself”. Wordsworth paced imperiously across the room, holding an alpenstock in one hand, and “a sprig of apple-blossom overgrown with lichen” in the other. They were then joined by Schlegel, who coquettishly adjusted a “brown scratch wig” in the mirror, and made provoking remarks about Scott and Byron. Finally Coleridge could stand this no longer, and caught the eye of his old friend. “Ah,” said he, “Byron is a meteor. Wordsworth there (pointing to him) is a fixed star.”71

  As a result of this tour Coleridge wrote a minor comic masterpiece, “The Delinquent Travellers” in rollicking, wittily rhymed verse which made fun of the whole modern vogue for tourism.

  Keep moving! Steam, or Gas, or Stage,

  Hold, cabin, steerage, hencoop’s cage –

  Tour, Journey, Voyage, Lounge, Ride, Walk,

  Skim, Sketch, Excursion, Travel-talk –

  For move you must! ‘Tis now the rage,

  The law and fashion of the Age.

  It concludes with a vision, not unrelated to the “Ancient Mariner”, of another great voyage south. But now Coleridge imagined himself near his magical Ramsgate cavern, “beneath the cliffs of Dumpton Bay”, captured by a party of “smock-clad smugglers” and finally setting out on a last search for Pantisocracy across the ocean – all the way to Australia:

  …Receive me, Lads! I’ll go with you

  Hunt the black swan and kangaroo,

  And that New Holland we’ll presume

  Old England with some elbow-room.

  Across the mountains we will roam,

  And each man make himself a home:

  Or, if old habits ne’er forsaking,

  Like clock-work of the Devil’s making,

  Ourselves inveterate rogues should be,

  We’ll have a virtuous progeny;

  And on the dunghill of our vices

  Raise human pine-apples and spices.72

  22

  Coleridge could still enjoy a romp nearer to home. One evening Lockhart and several other friends took him out to a bachelor dinner party in the City, where after many rounds of claret and punch, the literary guests began throwing crockery through the window. Coleridge benignly observed these proceedings, until a large silver fork was placed in his hand, and a wine-glass balanced on a punchtumbler was set up as a suitable target at the other end of the long dining-table.

  Lockhart never forgot “the roseate face of Coleridge, lit up with animation, his large grey eyes beaming, his white hair floating, and his whole frame, as it were, radiating with intense interest, as he poised the fork in his hand, and launched it at the fragile object”.73

  23

  But from 1829, Coleridge was more and more frequently ill, suffering from progressive heart disease, and much confined to his bedroom. From afar he blessed the marriage of Henry and Sara, which took place in Keswick, and then formally received the new family when they came to settle (with Mrs Coleridge), at a prudent distance across the Heath in Hampstead. Henry continued his assiduous walks across the Heath, helping to organize a completely new edition of Coleridge’s Poetical Works, much enlarged and corrected. It was issued by Pickering, whom Coleridge referred to darkly as “my poetical publisher, Mr Pickle-Herring”.74 Henry also took down his uncle’s Table Talk almost daily, while the completion of the Opus Maximum was officially confided to Green.*

  24

  In December 1829 Coleridge published his last work, a monograph On the Constitution of the Church and State. He proposed a Platonic “Idea” of both institutions, which distinguished them from their temporal shortcomings. He then argued for a political balance between the forces of “Progress” and “Permanence” – partly inspired by the urgent public debate surrounding the Great Reform Bill, over which he was greatly divided. The little volume also contained his influential concept of “the Clerisy”. He appealed for the formation of an intelligentsia in England, which would include writers, artists and scientists, as well as actual clergymen and teachers.75 In a characteristic way, he saw this ideal body as a force for “reconciliation”, permanently committed to “National Education” and the free flow of liberal ideas in society. Beneath the tangle of topical arguments, his impressive idea of a continuous cultural “evolution” still holds its ground.

  25

  Coleridge was preparing for death, but he did it in his own way. In May 1830 he collapsed in his bedroom, and the crash of his falling body brought the Gillmans hurrying up the stairs. Seeing him unconscious on the floor, they assumed that all was finally over. But Coleridge was merely practising for his resurrection, and to their astonishment and relief soon burst back to life. He gave a wonderful, mocking account of his experience to William Blackwood.

  All my faculties returned entire, and in the first instance exactly as from ordinary sleep. Indeed, before I had opened my eyes, I merely found that my medical friends and Mrs Gillman were flustering over me: my first words were, “What a mystery we are! What a problem is presented in the strange contrast between the imperishability of our thoughts and the perishable fugacious nature of our consciousness…”

  He was then gratified by Gillman, hearing the familiar unstoppable eloquence once more in full flood, exclaiming with unconscious humour, “Thank God!…there is nothing of apoplexy in this seizure.”76

  26

  Coleridge wrote his own epit
aph, and discussed the design of his tombstone with the greatest interest. He wavered long over a tender, voluptuous Muse figure; and then a broken harp; but finally decided that an old man under an ancient “yew tree” was more suitable.77 He wrote two last poems, one on the subject of meeting his younger self, “Phantom or Fact”, who gazes down at him with a “weary, wandering, disavowing look!”

  The other, “Love’s Apparition and Evanishment”, is a subtle, lyrical interweaving of his traditional themes of Love and Hope. Like many of his late poems it is set in the garden at Highgate, where the old poet sits musing on a bank of scented camomile grass. But it recalls many earlier images, from “Limbo” to “Kubla Khan”. It opens with the idea of the long, desert journey that so much of his life had been, in search of the shining oasis of inspiration:

  Like a lone Arab, old and blind,

  Some caravan had left behind,

  Who sits beside a ruin’d well

  Where the shy sand-asps bask and swell;

  And now he hangs his aged head aslant,

  And listens for a human sound – in vain!

  And now the aid which Heaven alone can grant,

  Upturns his eyeless face from Heaven to gain…78

  It ends with the visitation of “Love, a sylph in bridal train”; perhaps the last retreating glimpse of Asra.*

  27

  For all his self-doubts, Coleridge had some confidence that his work would now endure. Many of his family affairs were also settled. Mrs Coleridge was peacefully domesticated with Henry and Sara at Downshire Hill, Hampstead. If husband and wife were not exactly reunited, they were largely reconciled. In 1832 Mrs Coleridge wrote to Tom Poole with some pride that Coleridge had “talked incessantly for full five hours” at his granddaughter’s christening.79

  Derwent had emerged from his period of Oxford high-life and fashionable atheism, married happily, and settled as vicar of Helston in Cornwall. Later, he would live out part of his father’s legacy as an educator, becoming the principal of St Mark’s College in Chelsea, and a founding figure in the movement for working men’s colleges. His son, Ernest, edited the great Oxford edition of Coleridge’s poetry (1912).

  28

  The figure who still haunted Coleridge was Hartley, a reproachful ghost of his own lost youth. The schoolmastering had failed, a second attempt at journalism in Leeds had been abandoned, and from 1829 he was again adrift in the Lake District, living mainly with a kindly family of farmers outside Grasmere. He had faithfully promised to attend his beloved sister’s wedding at Keswick. “I will be present at the celebration – if I walk all night, and all night again.” But in the event he never appeared, missing the last chance he would ever have to gather with his family in their old northern haunts.

  Just before this last exile, he wrote one of his most tranquil, terrible letters to his mother. “My Brother gets a Wife – well – my Sister is to have a Husband – well – I remain alone, bare and barren and blasted, ill-omen’d and unsightly as Wordsworth’s melancholy thorn on the bleak hill-top. So hath it been ordain’d, and it is well.”80

  Coleridge sent him a £50 bequest he had been left by Lady Beaumont, but he heard nothing directly from his son in all these years. In 1833 he was surprised by the gift of Hartley’s first and only book of Poems, which he found was dedicated to himself. The opening sonnet called back, with exquisite pathos, the child he had loved and nursed at Stowey, and celebrated all those years ago in “Frost at Midnight”:

  Father, and Bard revered! to whom I owe,

  Whate’er it be, my little art of numbers,

  Thou, in thy night-watch o’er my cradled slumbers,

  Didst meditate the verse that lives to show,

  (And long shall live, when all alike are low)

  Thy prayer how ardent, and thy hope how strong,

  That I should learn of Nature’s self the song,

  The lore which none but Nature’s pupils know.

  The prayer was heard: I “wander’d like a breeze”,

  By mountain brooks and solitary meres,

  And gather’d there the shapes and phantasies

  Which, mixt with passions of my sadder years,

  Compose this book. If good therein there be,

  That good, my sire, I dedicate to thee.81

  This was the last greeting that Hartley sent his father, and it was in its own way also an epitaph.

  29

  Coleridge never stopped his pursuit of knowledge and its mysteries. His last important expedition from Highgate was to a conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at Cambridge in the summer of 1833. He was accompanied by Gillman and Green, and showed them round the college scenes of his undergraduate triumphs and disasters. He met Sir Humphry Davy’s pupil Michael Faraday; he discussed the evolutionary implications of new discoveries in geology published by Charles Lyell; and he went to contemplate Titian’s “Venus” at the Fitzwilliam Museum. “That glorious picture of the Venus – so perfectly beautiful and perfectly innocent – as if Beauty and Innocence could not be dissociated.”82

  30

  By the spring of 1834 he was very ill, his heart was failing, his breathing difficult. Gillman’s final and miraculously intelligent handling of the opium problem was to administer laudanum by hypodermic injection (still a very rare procedure) and increase the dose until it performed its original function: as a pure analgesic. In his will, Coleridge left “small, plain gold mourning rings” to those who had been closest to his heart: Charles Lamb, Tom Poole, Josiah Wade and Sara Hutchinson. Green and Gillman were made his executors, his estate was left to his wife, a trust was set up for Hartley.

  On 5 July 1834 he made a last, painful walk across his room with a stick, to gaze out at “the glorious landscape” of Hampstead Heath from his window. It seemed to hover below him like the magic world, “the sunny spot of greenery”, that he had spent a lifetime finding and losing and finding again. He said he felt joy and thankfulness at this “apparent Dawn of Convalescence”.83

  On 10 July, Henry made a final entry in the Table Talk. But what he recorded was actually something his uncle had already written in a letter, several years before. Perhaps it was what Coleridge now repeated to him. Or perhaps it was what Coleridge’s legend was meant to say afterwards. Who could tell what point Coleridge had reached in his wonderful story, whether he was still voyaging outwards, or already coming back?

  I am dying, but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently by-gone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope – those twin realities of this phantom world! I do not add Love – for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and so seen as one? I say realities; for reality is a thing of degrees, from the Iliad to a dream…’84

  At 6.30 a.m. on 25 July 1834 he slipped into the dark. He was talking almost up to the end. As he closed those extraordinary eyes, he told Green that his mind was clear and “quite unclouded”. Then he added with growing interest, “I could even be witty…”85

  AFTERWORD

  So he sets sail again, expecting to die but half-hoping to be re-born. There is much to be said about those who remained behind (for example that Lamb died the same year, and Asra the following one, and Wordsworth lived to climb Helvellyn at the age of seventy). But there is a particular kind of silence which falls after a life like Coleridge’s and perhaps it should be observed.

  It is an expectant and companionable silence, I think; the silence before the questions begin, and the reckonings are made. It is like the silence in a concert hall when a symphony has just been played. The music has ended, but it hasn’t in any conceivable way finished. Coleridge’s life continues in one’s head, and mixes with the sounds of one’s own existence, and starts up again somewhere else in other hands with a different interpretation.

  This is the peculiar music of biography, haunting and uniquely life-like for a moment, but always incomplete
and unsatisfactory and sending out many echoes into the future. I think this is particularly true of Coleridge’s unfinished voyage, with its black storms and glittering sunlit spells, forever chasing each other over the horizon. Perhaps Goethe had this in mind when he said that one proof of genius was posthumous productivity. Once you have heard Coleridge (as I suggested at the opening of Early Visions) there is no stopping his sound, his voice, his ideas, his poetry, his pains, his puns.

  Charles Lamb, his great and faithful friend, wrote this: “When I heard of the death of Coleridge, it was without grief. It seemed to me he had long been on the confines of the next world, that he had a hunger for Eternity. I grieved that I could not grieve! But since I feel how great a part he was of me, his great and dear Spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism of men and books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him. He was the proof and touchstone of all my cogitations…Never saw I his likeness, nor probably can the world see it again.”

  After fifteen years in Coleridge’s extraordinary presence, I know that feeling.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  As in my first volume Early Visions, 1989, sources for this Life of Coleridge will be found in the Reference Notes that follow, with major materials listed under “Abbreviations”. The emphasis falls increasingly on the great Bollingen Series of the Collected Coleridge, a superb work of twentieth-century scholarship under the general editorship and particular inspiration of the late Kathleen Coburn, which will eventually conclude with complete editions of the poetry and the elusive “Opus Maximum”, as well as the remaining Notebooks.