Читать книгу Coleridge: Darker Reflections - Richard Holmes - Страница 26

Coleridge’s last weeks before the dreaded marital confrontation at Keswick were not entirely spent in prevarication. Sara’s wayward brother, young George Fricker, had turned to Methodism in a crisis of nerves and unemployment after his disastrous adventures at sea. Coleridge introduced him to the kindly Lambs, and wrote him long soothing letters about his faith, and had many patient talks with him. Coleridge was at his best and most tender with lost young men of this kind (as he had shown years before with Hazlitt). He opened his own heart with directness and sympathy. “I am far from surprised that, having seen what you have seen, and suffered what you have suffered, you should have opened your soul to a sense of our fallen nature; and the incapability of man to heal himself. My opinions may not be in all points the same as yours; but I have experienced a similar alteration.”

His Mediterranean journeys had forced him to “look into himself” in a new way. “Ill health, and disappointment in the only deep wish I ever cherished” had led him to reread the New Testament in a new light. He felt that the proof of God from the design of the natural world, as argued by Paley and other eighteenth-century theologians, was producing “infidels” in the new mechanistic culture. Thinking men needed habitually “to look into their own souls, instead of always looking out, both of themselves and of their nature”.¹⁸

He discussed the Trinitarian view of Christianity, but felt that his own “living Faith” was still uncertain on such questions. “Alas! my moral being is too untranquil, too deeply possessed by one lingering passion after earthly good withheld…to be capable of being that, which its own ‘still small voice’ tells me, even in my dreams, that it ought to be…”¹⁹

His grief over his marriage, and his impossible love for Asra, is evidently referred to in these asides; as well as his guilt over opium. Philosophically it marked the continuation of a long path of religious self-enquiry which would culminate in the Aids to Reflection twenty years later. George Fricker responded by joining in the search for his sea-box at Wapping.

The time was also used to renew his contacts with Thomas Clarkson, the evangelical who was writing a history of the slave trade. This, too, produced some striking reflections on religious matters. When Coleridge finally set out for Keswick, he immediately broke his journey at Clarkson’s house at Bury St Edmund’s, and wrote for Clarkson a brilliant 3,000-word essay on the nature of theological belief. Clarkson had set him three fundamental questions: what is God? what is the Soul? and what is the difference between Kantian higher “Reason” (Vernunft) and logical, scientific thought or “Understanding” (Verstandt)?

Once again, he argued against mechanistic conceptions. God must be considered as a Platonic idea, “the Archetype” of all living things, expressed in a personal trinity whose presence had direct impact on each individual. Otherwise, “God becomes a mere power in darkness, even as Gravitation, and instead of a moral Religion of practical Influence we shall have only a physical Theory to gratify ideal curiosity.” Similarly, the soul must be conceived not as a mechanistic entity, but as a progression “of reflex consciousness” arising through the hierarchy of Nature.

This idea, clearly developed from his reading in Schelling, would profoundly affect Coleridge’s later grapplings with the scientific theory of evolution. The human soul differed from all other levels of animal consciousness, first by its ability to reflect upon itself, thereby producing a “continuous” moral conscience; but second by its power to be “modified” by other human beings and to move towards some greater unity or spiritual identity. This ultimately mystical idea could be seen as an intensification of his earlier poetic conception of “the One Life”, so beautifully set out in his Conversation Poems and his letters to Sotheby of 1802. It is a vivid mixture of his old Pantheism, now combined with the traditional Christian doctrine of spiritual unity in the body of Christ.

Coleridge formulated this in a strikingly untheological way. “A male & female Tiger is neither more or less whether you suppose them only existing in their appropriate wilderness, or whether you suppose a thousand Pairs. But man is truly altered by the co-existence of other men; his faculties cannot be developed in himself alone, & only himself. Therefore the human race not by a bold metaphor, but in sublime reality, approach to, & might become, one body whose Head is Christ (the Logos)”.²⁰ In anthropological language, “the whole Species is capable of being regarded as one Individual”.^*

The essay contained much else, speculative and self-questioning. It was not least remarkable for demonstrating Coleridge’s ability to withdraw into his cave of metaphysics with Olympian calm at the very moment when the crisis of his marriage pressed upon him. Perhaps the image of paired tigers alone betrayed his worldly terrors.

During Coleridge’s absence in Malta, Clarkson had published his Portraiture of Quakerism, and resumed his campaigning work on the Abolition Committee which sponsored a series of successful bills against the slave trade in 1805–6 championed by Wilberforce. His wife Catherine had become intimate with Dorothy Wordsworth, and now Coleridge also opened his heart to Catherine, remaining with her at Bury St Edmund’s for nearly a week. One result of this stop-over was that Catherine and Dorothy now began a confidential correspondence about Coleridge’s health and marriage which provided an inexhaustible topic for gossip over the next four years.

Coleridge’s anxieties did not preclude a flying visit to the Newmarket races, where he was particularly struck by the mahoganytopped dicing tables, deeply indented by the circular heels of dice-boxes banged down by the players in their excitement or disappointment, so that the imprinted table-tops were “truly a written History of the fiendish Passions of Gambling”.²¹ Another expedition took him to Cambridge, the first return since undergraduate days twelve years previously, where the young men all looked just the same in the university pubs and “the only alteration” was in himself. He dropped into Trinity College library, where he found his old Professor of Greek, Richard Porson, who failed to recognize him, though this could have been because Porson was in a “pitiable State” of drunkenness. These visions of excess were not reassuring, and he wondered gloomily what impression he himself would make at Keswick under the penetrating gaze of Southey and Mrs Coleridge.