Читать книгу Coleridge: Darker Reflections - Richard Holmes - Страница 33

The trip to London was planned for a week, but lasted a month. They stayed with the Montagus, met up with Walter Scott, and took Hartley to visit the great sights of the capital. He was deliriously happy and excited. They saw the animals in the Tower of London, Humphry Davy’s laboratories at the Royal Institution, and a pantomime at Covent Garden. In one of his earliest memories, Hartley recalled “the tiered boxes, the almost stupendous galleries, and the novelty of the sliding-scenes” which caught his young poet’s imagination. He also remembered an oddly deflating remark of Sara Hutchinson’s, who laughed at his astonishment at the wonderful stage-moon descending on a wire and compared it dismissively “to a copper warming-pan”.⁷²

Coleridge enjoyed showing off his son, but was much concerned with finances for the year ahead. He borrowed £50 from Wordsworth to pay his life assurance, and a further £50 from his old friend Sotheby to pay for the West Country expedition. He talked again with Davy about lecturing, and wrote to Godwin in search of the manuscript of his play Osorio which he suddenly thought of reviving for the new generation of actor-managers who seemed much taken with elaborate staging and exotic tales. Amazingly – but typically – he had kept no copy.

He wondered if Godwin “would take the trouble of rescuing it from any chance rubbish-corner, in which it may have been preserved. It is not merely a work which employed 8 months of my life from 23 to 24, it is interesting to me in the history of my own mind.” Godwin did indeed find the manuscript in his meticulous filing system, and much later it would bring Coleridge the greatest financial success he had ever known.

He invited Godwin to the unlikely event of a Coleridgean breakfast at half past nine in the morning, but added that he was ill and much abed. “I am so unwell & so languid from – no matter what – other’s follies and my own – from hopelessness without rest, & restlessness without hope – that I dare scarcely promise to go any where.”⁷³ He also saw Stuart at the Courier office, discussed articles, and promised to repay his debts “by regular instalments” from the fees he happily assumed he would earn at Ottery. As a last quixotic throw (and no doubt encouraged by Wordsworth’s example) he contracted with Longman for 100 guineas on a two-volume collection of poems – “these are all ready, but two” – to be delivered in two months provided “death & sickness” did not intervene.

The continuing dream of finishing “Christabel”, and filling out the new volume with his Asra poems (dating right back to the “Dejection” ode) obviously inspired this idea. But it would involve a degree of literary self-exposure from which he shrank more than ever. Against this was the provoking fact that Walter Scott had achieved a resounding success with his “Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805), which had now sold 15,000 copies, cleverly imitating the free syllabic metre of “Christabel”, copying its gothic themes, and openly plagiarizing some of its most memorable phrasing. Coleridge was aware of this though he would not refer to it in print for many years.⁷⁴ In the event, the collection was not assembled for another decade, and Longman’s guineas never materialized at any time. How far Coleridge’s reputation would have altered, had he seriously tried to match Wordsworth’s two volumes in 1807, is a subject he himself bitterly thought about in later years.

Coleridge hung on in London till the first week in May, when he and Hartley saw Asra off on the stagecoach to the Clarksons’. There is no record of their parting. But the following day Coleridge nearly collapsed in a Bedford Street on the way to visit Sotheby, and fled back in a horse-cab to the Lambs. Mary Lamb, one of the shrewdest and kindest of Coleridge’s nurses, dosed him with brandy and strong broth, and stiffened his resolution for the next encounter with Mrs Coleridge.⁷⁵ Father and son departed on the Bristol mail about 10 May 1807 – “No procrastination – no self-delusion”. Ahead of them lay an angry woman and an unpalatable letter, neither of which baleful objects should have been kept waiting in a well-ordered and rational universe.

Coleridge remained in the West Country for the next six months, and the Wordsworths did not hear from him again until November. But Asra secretly kept in touch from Bury St Edmund’s, though all her letters have been destroyed. The first indication of Coleridge’s arrival in Bristol – where he stayed with Josiah Wade in Queen’s Square, while Mrs Coleridge remained at her sister Martha’s – was the use of Greek cipher in his Notebooks.

An entry of 22 May, written in a curious pale red ink, which might be his “gout medicine” or even laudanum, suggests the marital rows over money and the children which now engulfed him. “As usual even the epoch of a pocket book must be marked with agitation…Mrs Coleridge this morning first planted in Hartley’s mind the pang of divided duty: & left me stormy & miserable – The same day received the second letter from Sara [Asra].”⁷⁶

Other Greek entries mention anger and jealousy, the hope of “reconciliation”, and the continuing obsession of his unfulfilled love. “My love blazeth in presence: in absence it glows with a deep melancholy consuming flame. The walls, the window panes, the chair, the very air seems to sympathize with it!”⁷⁷ These almost hallucinatory sensations would be later transmuted into a tender, Platonic poem, “Recollections of Love”.

But all the other work which he had so hopefully planned – the play, the collected poems, the Mediterranean travels – slid into oblivion. Even the letter from George remained unopened. As he wrote to another old Bristol friend, the publisher Joseph Cottle: “I will certainly give you the right hand of old-fellowship: but, alas! You will find me, rolling rudderless…Pain I have enough of, but that is indeed to me, a mere trifle, but the almost unceasing, overpowering sensations of wretchedness: aching in my limbs, with an indescribable restlessness, that makes action to any available purpose, almost impossible…”⁷⁸ But this was surely the effect of opium, as much as Mrs Coleridge.

It was Tom Poole, still a great favourite of both husband and wife, who now came to Coleridge’s aid, inviting the whole family down to stay at Nether Stowey for the summer. They moved in early June. The children had the run of the large garden, the fun of haymaking, and the pungent fascination of the tanning yard. Mrs Coleridge had many old friends in the village, and Coleridge the hallowed retreat of Poole’s now famous bookroom (it had been used by Wordsworth, Davy, Hazlitt, and Lamb), with its discreet external staircase providing an escape into the orchard. Poole’s avuncular kindness and methodical efficiency were now directed briskly at Coleridge’s ill-health, taking him out on long walks, encouraging him to write to friends, and helping him analyse his own feelings.

On one evening Coleridge noted with simple pleasure: “Blue Sky through the glimmering interspaces of the dark Elms at Twilight rendered a lovely deep yellow green.”⁷⁹ On another he recorded Poole’s characteristic and “affecting” remark, “How much the feelings of happy Childhood, when summer days appeared 20 times as long as now, may be produced by effective Industry – monuments of Time well spent.”⁸⁰ Coleridge read agricultural textbooks, studies of astronomy (he had a brief fantasy of setting up his own observatory), and the poetry of the seventeenth-century religious mystic Richard Crashaw, whose Edenic images he compressed into tiny mottoes of hope: “Sunrise – As all the Trees of Paradise reblossoming in the East.”⁸¹

Poole also began the painful task, pursued throughout the summer, of substituting country ale for brandy, and trying to wean Coleridge off his high level of opium intake. Coleridge’s Notebooks become more and more explicit about actual physiological addiction – “all my Vitals are possessed by an unremitting Poison” – and now for the first time contain medically accurate descriptions of withdrawal symptoms. They produced pain in all his joints, especially the thighs and knees. But “the evil seems rather in the exceeding Unquiet, than in the pain – a cruel sweat on the brow, & on the chest – windy sickness at the Stomach – and in the mind a strong Temptation to…a reprobate Despair, that snatches at the known Poison…” He described the moment before succumbing to the next dose unforgettably, as “like the pause in the balancing of the Javelin”.⁸²

Even the act of analytical introspection itself became destructive. “Meanwhile the habit of inward Brooding daily makes it harder to confess the Thing, I am, to any one – least of all to those, whom I most love & who most love me – & thereby introduces and fosters a habit of negative falsehood, & multiplies the Temptations to positive Insincerity.” Again for the first time, he acknowledged the need for professional help and made the first of innumerable resolutions to seek a medical cure, in this instance from his old friend Dr Beddoes of the Bristol Pneumatic Institute: “O God! let me bare my whole Heart to Dr B. or some other Medical Philosopher – if I could know there was no Relief; I might then resolve on something.”⁸³

While Coleridge battled these mental coils, Poole brought him round to face other, practical duties. Coleridge’s patron Tom Wedgwood, upon whom half his annuity depended, had died during Coleridge’s absence in Malta. Tom’s brother, Josiah, had written asking for a memorial essay but Coleridge had simply failed to reply, leaving this letter too not merely unanswered but unopened for many weeks. Poole forced Coleridge to write a long, explanatory letter to Josiah from Stowey on 25 June, first smoothing the way with his own tactful missive.

“I admire and pity him more than ever,” he wrote to Josiah. “His information is much extended, the great qualities of his mind heightened and better disciplined; but alas: his health is weaker, and his great failing, procrastination, or the incapability of acting agreeably to his wish and will, much increased.”⁸⁴ This was the nearest that the loyal Poole would get to opium.

Coleridge’s own explanation to Josiah mentioned “Ill-health, Despondency, domestic Distractions”, adding that he had indeed previously written a paper on Tom Wedgwood’s system of philosophy and “opinions in psychology” and had drawn at full “a portrait of my friend’s mind & character”, but this manuscript had been lost with his other Malta papers.⁸⁵

As Sir James Mackintosh – now Josiah’s son-in-law – was editing Tom Wedgwood’s unpublished work, Coleridge did not offer to resurrect this paper from memory: “too great pain has baffled my attempts in going over again the detail of past times”. In the event Mackintosh did not fulfil his promise either, and it was left to Coleridge to insert a short but beautiful tribute to Tom in a footnote to The Friend in 1809. “He is gone, my Friend! my munificent Co-patron, and not less the Benefactor of my Intellect! – He who beyond all other men known to me, added a fine and ever-wakeful sense of Beauty to the most patient Accuracy in experimental Philosophy…”⁸⁶

Coleridge particularly credited Tom with a “Theory of Perception” based on self-analytic notes of his own abnormal mental states and hallucinations, calmly and empirically pursued, “even during the wretched nights of sickness, in watching and instantly recording these experiences of the world within us…” Tom’s theory emphasized, in a new way, the subjective influence of memory and imagination on apparently inexplicable phenomena like ghosts and hallucinations. It was evidently of great importance to Coleridge, and his awkward protestations to Josiah – “O Sir! if you knew, what I suffer, and am this moment suffering, in thinking of him” – were heartfelt. Yet there was also a degree of calculation, since Coleridge “suspected & feared” his annuity would be discontinued.⁸⁷

But Josiah Wedgwood, a large-minded man who had much experience of literary “hypochondria” was prepared to be mollified. “I was truly glad to hear from him,” he confided to Poole. “His letter removed all those feelings of anger which occasionally, but not permanently, existed in my mind towards him. I am very sorry for him.”⁸⁸ It might also have calmed Coleridge to know that half the annuity was actually secured by the terms of Tom Wedgwood’s will, and in practice Josiah could not touch it; but this only became clear later.

Not even Tom Poole’s diplomacy could resolve the misunderstanding with George Coleridge. His letter of 6 April was still unopened at the end of June, when Coleridge was intending to go down to Ottery in less than a week, “from a sense of Duty as it affects myself, & from a promise made to Mrs Coleridge, as far as it affects her”.⁸⁹ His folly in leaving it so long would be incredible if he had not openly admitted such procrastination to Josiah Wedgwood: “I have sunk under such a strange cowardice of Pain, that I have not unfrequently kept Letters from persons dear to me for weeks together unopened.”⁹⁰ Southey would later observe that, in practical terms, this was perhaps the most damaging of all the symptoms of Coleridge’s opium addiction, leading to endless business confusions, personal affronts and family chaos for over a decade. But it is also a revealing one, for it suggests that Coleridge knew instinctively where “Pain” and censure would come from, and unconsciously sought to protect himself by refusing to conform to civilized norms of behaviour. If the real world promised to be too harsh, he simply ignored it as long as possible, and tried to live in the breathing space. One is tempted to believe that he knew very well that George’s letter would bring bad news. If so, Coleridge was not disappointed when he finally opened it in July.

George was overwhelmed with his own family difficulties – illness at the school, the frailty of their “poor aged mother”, the “hereditary” despondency of Mrs James Coleridge – and could not possibly receive them. “To come to Ottery for such a purpose would be to create a fresh expense for yourself and to load my feelings with what they could not bear without endangering my life – I pray you therefore do not do so.” He could not take on the children at the school, though he might be able to help financially. He thought Mrs Coleridge’s friends might make “a settlement”, but he strongly disapproved of the separation. (Later he would say it was “an irreligious act…which the New Testament forbids”.) He upbraided Coleridge in the old paternal tones of his Cambridge days: “For God’s sake strive to put on some fortitude and do nothing rashly.”⁹¹ The whole Ottery plan thus collapsed in a storm of mutual reproaches. Mrs Coleridge not unnaturally blamed her husband. Coleridge with far less reason blamed not only George but all his Ottery brothers. Coleridge’s anger was surprising and curiously refreshing to him. Though so largely unjustified, it left him free to dramatize himself as an outcast in a cruel world. Paradoxically, it made him feel better about himself, by embracing the worst that the respectable world could do to him. He wrote to Josiah Wade in a kind of satisfied fury at the ruin of his reputation and prospects. George had betrayed him.

His pride & notion of character took alarm and he made public to all my Brothers, & even to their Children, [my] most confidential Letter, & so cruelly that while I was ignorant of all this Brewing, Colonel Coleridge’s eldest son (a mere youth) had informed Mr King that he should not call on me (his Uncle) for that “The Family” had resolved not to receive me. These people are rioting in Wealth & without the least feeling add another £100 to my already most embarrassed circumstance…So that at the age of 35 I am to be penniless, resourceless, in heavy debt – my health & spirits absolutely broken down – & with scarce a friend in the world.⁹²

Coleridge’s sustaining anger against George would rumble on for another two years, when after a further outburst (which George described as “your downright red hot letter”), it was abruptly dispelled. But from July 1807 he began to feel steadily stronger, to write and plan, and cultivate his circle of friends, both old and new. Mrs Coleridge had announced that she would return to Bristol, much to Coleridge’s relief, but first some social visits were to be paid in Bridgwater. Coleridge meekly accompanied her, noting laconically: “All the Linen at the Bridgwater Arms mark’d ‘Stolen from the Bridgwater Arms.’”⁹³