Читать книгу Coleridge: Darker Reflections - Richard Holmes - Страница 24

Stuart was not an intimate friend, but he was a man of the world, and a newspaperman who understood writers, even writers like Coleridge. They would talk of his marriage, of his career, of his prospects. Over the next two years, Coleridge would try to reestablish himself as a professional man of letters, with a steady determination that was often disguised by the lurid chaos of his emotional entanglements and the regular descents into opium. His struggles to separate from his wife, to look after his children, to resolve his relationship with Asra, and above all to find a way of living, or not living, within the overpowering sphere of Wordsworth’s magnetic influence, would consume much of his energies. Frequently they would appear to reduce him to a kind of passive despair, a mere hulk upon the stream of circumstance, “rudderless and hopeless” as he so often said himself, washed from one temporary harbour to the next. But in reality the struggle and the determination always continued. The record of it still bursts out of his Notebooks, letters and poetry.

He was living out what many people experience, in the dark disorder of their hidden lives, but living it on the surface and with astonishing, even alarming candour that many of his friends found unendurable or simply ludicrous. Moreover he continued to write about it, to witness it, in a way that makes him irreplaceable among the great Romantic visionaries. His greatness lies in the understanding of these struggles, not (like Wordsworth perhaps) in their solution. So it was, talking to Stuart in these first weeks back in England (as he later recalled), that he first glimpsed the crisis that would close round him in these middle years. With his peculiar mixture of comedy and pathos, he projected out of his private chaos an universal dilemma. He was only thirty-four that October, but he felt that somewhere in the Mediterranean he had imperceptibly crossed a shadowline into darker waters.

Stuart had made the “important remark” that there was a middle period in a man’s life, “varying in various men, from 35 to 45”, when for no evident reason he began to feel the “vanity of his pursuits” and to ask “what is all this for?”. Coleridge felt this sudden undermining of the self, this panicky self-questioning of the grounds of life, was especially acute in lonely men – in bachelors, widowers or “Unhappy Husbands”. Such a man “becomes half-melancholy, gives in to wild dissipation, or self-regardless Drinking” and might even deliberately destroy himself. He would leave his “ingenious female, or female-minded friends, to fish out some motive for an act which…would have acted even without a motive even as the Terror in Nightmairs”.²

Such a crisis would burst upon a man from whatever casual cause, as surely as “gunpowder in a Smithy” would eventually be ignited by some chance spark or other. “I had felt this Truth; but never saw it before so clearly; it came upon me at Malta, under the melancholy dreadful feeling of finding myself to be a Man, by a distinct division from Boyhood, Youth, and ‘Young Man’ – Dreadful was the feeling – before that Life had flown on so that I had always been a Boy, as it were – and this sensation had blended in all my conduct…” If men survived this period, “they commonly become cheerful again – that is a comfort – for mankind – not for me!”³ It was this sense of crisis, the entry into Dante’s “dark wood” of middle age, that haunted Coleridge quite as much as opium in these restless years.