Читать книгу Coleridge: Darker Reflections - Richard Holmes - Страница 25

Some practical prospects slowly took shape in London during September. The Royal Institution proposed a series of Lectures on the Fine Arts for the autumn. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Howick, agreed to an interview about a possible civil service post, in response to Sir Alexander Ball’s recommendations to Downing Street. Charles and Mary Lamb fed him with meat and porter and puns, and discussed his marriage. He and Charles tried smoking “segars”. Very gradually things fell into place. He even grappled with the opium problem, making an analytic list of the repeated pattern of his relapses. “1. Uncomfortable [feelings]. 2. Opium + Brandy. 3. Increased N.E. [Nervous Energy]. 4. Positive body pain. 5. Remorse & Despondency…Try little by little…”⁴

He sketched a beautiful, haunting new stanza for the Mariner, a sort of nightmare souvenir of his time on the Gosport:

…And stifled words & groans of pain

Mix’d on each murmuring lip,

We look’d round & we look’d up

And Fear at our hearts as at a Cup

The Life-blood seem’d to sip.

The Sky was dull & dark the Night

The Helmsman’s face by his lamp gleam’d bright,

From the Sails the Dews did drip –

Till clomb above the eastern bar

The horned Moon, with one bright Star

Within its nether tip.’⁵

So these early weeks of autumn 1806 became a time of stocktaking and confidences about his life. Ostensibly Coleridge was delayed by an absurd series of confusions about his book box, which was lost at Wapping, with its precious cargo of books, papers, old shirts, Roman pearls and attar of roses perfume. Coleridge suspected Captain Derkheim of purloining the latter (the Captain had suddenly married and even more suddenly returned to sea, an object-lesson in American promptitude) and he spent days frantically combing the warehouses around Tower Hill in the rain.⁶ It was not till October that everything was found safely packed away in a box labelled “Thomas Russell”. Similar confusion attended his attempts to wait on Lord Howick, who finally dismissed him in the best bureaucratic manner, with a non-committal message left with the doorman. But by this time another government posting was far from Coleridge’s mind.⁷

He wrote to Stuart a measured reflection on his Mediterranean adventures. “Though no emolument could ever force me again to the business, intrigue, form and pomp of a public situation, yet beyond all doubt I have acquired a great variety of useful knowledge, quickness in discovering men’s characters, and adroitness in dealing with them. I have learnt the inside character of many eminent living men…In short, if I recover a steady tho’ imperfect Health, I perhaps should have no reason to regret my long Absence, not even my perilous detention in Italy.” He thought that his friendship with Allston and other “Artists of acknowledged highest reputation” had done more for his insight into the fine arts, in three months in Rome, than had twenty years in England.⁸

He also wrote, in less measured tones, about his marriage. Stuart later destroyed most of this confession, marking the gap grimly “Coleridge 1806 wife”. What has remained is a memorable passage of special pleading, heightened by the vivid imagery of his “Dejection” ode to Sara Hutchinson. Coleridge claimed that his unhappy marriage was the source of all his difficulties. “This, this perpetual Struggle, and endless heart-wasting, was at the bottom of all my irresolution, procrastination, languor, and former detestable habit of poison-taking –: this turned me away so long from political and moral disquisition, poetry, and all the flowers & herbs that grow in the Light and Sunshine, to be meanwhile a Delver in the unwholesome quick-silver mines of abstruse Metaphysics…”⁹

He had said it before, and he would say it again, endlessly, and with great poetic conviction. Certainly he believed now that his marriage had always been ill-destined, and it had long been beyond his powers to save it. Every divorce lawyer is familiar with such retrospective statements. Yet the strangest claim was not that his “former” opium habit was the product of his marriage; or that his wife had “turned him away” from a literary career. Even their mutual friends (even Southey) saw that they had long been unable to live on productive, or even tranquil terms. It was the claim that metaphysics, which in reality he loved passionately and to which he would dedicate so much of his later life, was somehow shameful and “unwholesome”. For these “quick-silver mines” were also his magic caverns “measureless to man”, the dimension that gave his poetry and all his writing its unique resonance. Why should he deny these to Stuart, unless they were inextricably associated in his mind with the guilt and deception of his opium underworld?

While Coleridge lurked in London, anxious messages beamed out from Grasmere. Dorothy wrote to Mary Lamb, and Wordsworth to Sir George Beaumont. The planned autumn move to Beaumont’s estate at Coleorton was in suspense, until Coleridge had decided on his “settled rational plan” and this seemed less and less forthcoming. A single sonnet appeared in the pages of the Courier of 27 September, like a distant distress flare. It was entitled “Farewell to Love”, a beautiful adaptation of a piece by Fulke Greville. But to whom was it addressed – to which Sara? To Asra or to Mrs Coleridge? (And did it contain a reproach to Wordsworth in its seventh line?)

Farewell, sweet Love! Yet blame you not my truth;

More fondly ne’er did mother eye her child

Than I your form: yours were my hopes of youth,

And as you shaped my thoughts I sighed or smiled.

While most were wooing wealth, or gaily swerving

To pleasure’s secret haunts, and some apart

Stood strong in pride, self-conscious of deserving,

To you I gave my whole weak wishing heart.

And when I met the maid that realised

Your fair creations, and had won her kindness,

Say, but for her if aught on earth I prized!

Your dreams alone I dreamt, and caught your blindness.

O grief! – but farewell, Love! I will go play me

With thoughts that please me less, and less betray me.¹⁰

Wordsworth wrote impatiently to Beaumont: “What shall I say of Coleridge?…he dare not go home, he recoils so much from the thought of domesticating with Mrs Coleridge…he is so miserable that he dare not encounter it. What a deplorable thing! I have written to him to say that if he does not come down immediately I must insist on seeing him somewhere. If he appoints London, I shall go.”¹¹

In the end it was Mary Lamb who convinced Coleridge that he must write to his wife. She believed a separation was inevitable, but she sounded exhausted with the discussions and delays. “You must write here, that I may know you write, or you must come and dictate a letter for me to write to her…but yet a letter from me or you shall go today.” Yet she never regretted his presence, and reminded him that “a few cheerful evenings spent with you serves to bear up our spirits many a long & weary year”.¹²

In the event, Coleridge’s letter was subdued and suspiciously practical. He did not speak of a separation as such, but proposed a schedule of work commitments which would quickly bring him back to London. His wife and Hartley could join him if they wished. “On Friday Sennight, please God! I shall quit Town, and trust to be at Keswick on Monday, Sept. 29th. If I finally accept the Lectures, I must return by the midst of November; but propose to take you and Hartley with me, as we may be sure of Rooms either in Mr Stuart’s House at Knightsbridge, or in the Strand. – My purpose is to divide my time steadily between my ‘Reflections Moral and Political grounded on Information obtained during two years Resident in Italy and the Mediterranean’; and the Lectures on the Principles common to all the Fine Arts.” He reminded her of the £110 sent from Malta, spoke of his tenderness to his “dear children” and assured her of his “deep tho’ sad affection” towards her.¹³

In the event, Coleridge did not set out for Keswick until 12 October, but from now on he kept his wife regularly informed of his movements, emphasizing the financial importance to both of them of the lecture scheme. One further possibility was a combined series of winter lectures, at both the Royal Institution and the London Institution, which would make “a respectable annuity of perhaps £400 a year”. When he heard that Southey “strongly disapproved” of the scheme, he added indignantly: “Something (he knows) I must do, & that immediately, to get money…And if I should die, as soon as I feel probable, it seems the most likely mode of distinguishing myself so as to leave Patrons for you & my Children.”¹⁴

Perhaps it should have been clear to Sara Coleridge that her husband had come back from the Mediterranean with a new vision of his future. That future lay essentially in London, where he could find work as a writer and some help for his opium addiction. He was not prepared to live permanently with her again at Keswick, but he wanted to see his children, help with their education, and support the whole family with the Wedgwood annuity and his own literary earnings. He wanted the two boys, especially Hartley who had just turned ten years old, to spend time with him and perhaps attend London schools for part of the year. “The opportunity of giving Hartley opportunities of Instruction, he would not otherwise have, weighed a great deal with me.”¹⁵ Given the “unconquerable Difference of Temper” which he referred to both in his letters and private Notebooks, it did not seem an unreasonable compromise.¹⁶

The lecture scheme, which both Southey and soon Wordsworth would discourage, was a perfectly realistic one. Public lectures had begun to flourish in the city (itself a wartime phenomenon, like increased newspaper reading) and several new lecture institutions had been founded. Humphry Davy had achieved an extraordinary popular following at the Royal Institution, making Albemarle Street notorious for its traffic jams. The first of his great Bakerian lectures also began at the Royal Society in November 1806. Indeed it was Davy, with his passionate belief in Coleridge’s potential as a public educator, who now sought him out and introduced him to Thomas Bernard, the Committee Member and secretary of the Royal Institution, who was commissioning lecture series on a wide range of arts and science subjects.

As Coleridge informed his wife on 3 October: “Davy has been for many days urging me, with an eagerness and importunity not common to him, to go with him to Mr Bernard’s at Roehampton…the business is really important.”¹⁷ Davy, backed by Stuart, would persist with his encouragement for the whole of the next year, finally bringing Coleridge to the lecture dais in the winter of 1807–8. From then on, public lectures would provide Coleridge with an income, and sometimes even a raison d’être, for more than a decade. Indeed it was lecturing, and the sense of a continuing audience, that may partly have saved Coleridge’s life in the dark years to come.