Читать книгу Coleridge: Darker Reflections - Richard Holmes - Страница 39

Coleridge was due to begin his weekly lectures on Friday 15 January 1808. He made one more dash to Bristol, came back to attend the noisy celebrations of “a sort of Glee or Catch Club, composed wholly of professional singers – and was much delighted”, and sailed into the Royal Institution the following afternoon at 2 p.m. But there was some bravado in this.

The Royal Institution, founded by private subscription in 1799, had quickly achieved a prestige second only to the Royal Society’s. Its splendid buildings, with a frontage of fourteen Doric columns, dominated the top end of Albemarle Street with John Murray’s publishing house at the other (Piccadilly end). Its lecture programmes, originally dedicated to both arts and sciences, achieved international status when Davy began his demonstrations there in 1802, with an increasingly spectacular series of chemical experiments. “The globules often burnt at the moment of their formation, and sometimes violently exploded and separated into smaller globules, which flew with great velocity through the air in a state of vivid combustion, producing a beautiful effect of continued jets of fire.”²³ Coleridge hoped to do something similar with verbal pyrotechnics.

The popularity of the Institution’s lectures so often jammed Albemarle Street with carriages that it eventually became the first one-way thoroughfare in London. The programme of 1808 included Davy on chemistry, Coleridge on poetry, and other experts on botany, architecture, German music, mechanics, and Persian literature.²⁴

Though dogged by financial difficulties, the Institution’s founder Count Rumford had entirely refurbished the Great Lecture Room in 1802, to become “the most beautiful and convenient in Europe”, with superb acoustics so that even “a whisper may be distinctly heard”. It held up to 500 people in a hemisphere of steeply tiered seats, with a gallery above and a circle of gas lamps, creating an atmosphere both intimate and intensely theatrical. It was a setting that demanded the speakers not merely to lecture, but to perform. (When Sydney Smith lectured on moral philosophy the previous year, it was said that the laughter could be heard outside in the street.) The attention of the audience was sustained by various creature comforts: green cushioned seating, green baize floor coverings, and the latest in central heating systems using copper pipes.

Albemarle Street was crowded with carriages, and the seats were packed. Coleridge launched into the concept of “Taste” in poetry before a large and attentive audience: “What is there in the primary sense of the word, which may give to its metaphorical meaning an import different from that of Sight or Hearing on the one hand, and of Touch or Feeling on the other?”²⁵ It went well, Coleridge felt, and “made an impression far beyond its worth or my expectation”.

But on returning to his lodgings in the Strand, he immediately collapsed with sickness and continuous agonizing pain “of Stomach & Bowels”. He postponed the next two lectures – “I disappoint hundreds” – and tried again on Friday, 5 February, but again collapsed with “acrid scalding evacuations, and if possible worse Vomitings”.²⁶

It was this lecture that De Quincey witnessed, when he came down to London on business for Wordsworth. He reported that Mr Coleridge was “exceedingly ill” and gave only “one extempore illustration” in his talk. But twenty years later his memories of Coleridge at the dais had ripened. “His appearance was generally that of a person struggling with pain and overmastering illness. His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and, in spite of water which he continued drinking through the whole course of the lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower.”

There was “no heart, no soul” in anything he said. When he failed to appear for any of the remaining lectures in February, Albemarle Street was blocked each Friday with smart carriages and scurrying footmen, as the news of his continued illness first excited “concern” and then increasing “disgust”. The whole series, concluded De Quincey, was an inevitable disaster: ill-prepared, badly illustrated with quotations (except for “two or three, which I put ready marked into his hands”) and unevenly delivered. He later thought no written record of it survived, and implied that Coleridge had offended the Institution managers and did not fulfil his contract.²⁷

The original contract had specified twenty-five lectures, twice weekly in the winter season, from January to March, for a fee of £140 with a £60 advance. In fact Coleridge eventually delivered twenty lectures, largely postponed to the spring season from 30 March to 30 May, and these De Quincey did not attend. The disaster lay at the beginning, as was perhaps inevitable, for Coleridge had to establish a form of public address which was appropriate to his gifts.

Coleridge treated the management with great respect and always tried to warn them of impending disruptions to his series through illness. At least one unpublished letter survives in the Institution’s archives, informing the Secretary of his imminent collapse in February – being “unable to stand in a public room” and “most cheerfully” offering to pay for the cost of informing subscribers and advertising the postponement. He also obtained a proper medical opinion of his state. “I have sent for [Dr] Abernethie, & shall learn from him whether this be only an interruption or a final farewell. Either myself or my medical attendant will write to Mr Bernard.”²⁸ A first advance of £40 was given in late February, with an addition of £20 in late April. But the outstanding balance was not settled for over a year, and it was reduced at Coleridge’s own suggestion to a further £60.²⁹

Coleridge’s collapse into opium at the outset of his lectures suggests that the strain and anxiety of performing in public was much greater than any of his friends had supposed. As he was already famed for his private talk, and had youthful experience of lecturing and preaching in Bristol in the 1790s, Davy and Bernard imagined he would quickly find his feet in front of the Royal Institution audience. But this was not the case. The Royal Institution was not a provincial meeting hall: its large mixed audience from the City and the West End was fashionable, sophisticated and easily bored. Tickets were expensive, expectations were high, and the Institution management required a fully written text to be declaimed in a formal manner.

Coleridge was alarmed by these requirements, which inhibited his natural lecture style. Far from being unprepared, his notes (for years scattered in the British Library and the New York Public Library) show that he had written out his texts for the two early lectures in numbing detail. He had chosen to begin with relatively conventional eighteenth-century theoretical topics: the aesthetics of Taste and the theory of Imitation, with a complex background of reading in Johnson, Blair, Herder, Dennis, Schlegel and Erasmus Darwin.³⁰ The first lecture, for example, included a 2,000-word citation from Richard Payne Knight’s An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste (1806), which evidently exhausted both lecturer and audience.

Coleridge only slowly realized he needed to be much more innovative and intimate – to be much more himself. Herein lay the terror of self-exposure which took him weeks to surmount. He needed in effect to create a new style of lecturing, dramatic and largely extempore, which took risks, changed moods, digressed and doubled back, and played with his own eccentricities. He needed, above all, to enact the imaginative process of the poet in his own person, to demonstrate a poet at work in the laboratory of his ideas.

Coleridge’s efforts to face up to the demands of his lectures cost him almost two months of continuous illness and opium excess. From the middle of February till the end of March 1808 his life was suspended, much as it had been at Keswick in the terrible winter of 1801. His stomach problems were so severe that he sometimes thought he would die, and he wildly added doses of hensbane, rhubarb and magnesia to his laudanum. In his worst moments he thought he had kidney stones or bladder cancer.³¹

His rooms at the Courier office, immediately above the printing press which started at four each morning, were thunderously noisy and chaotic.³² He stayed in bed most mornings, and was so disorganized he could not even muster a clean shirt for lecturing. On one occasion he started with six shirts, lost three in the laundry, found he had been sleeping in the fourth, and had inadvertently used the fifth as a floormat while washing. The sixth and last shirt, when he put it on, had no draw-strings to do up at the neck.³³ His landlady, Mrs Brainbridge, was old and deaf and could not cope with his visitors. She turned away one, the distinguished painter John Landseer, with the explanation to Coleridge that he was “a sort of a Methody Preacher at that Unstitution, where you goes to spout, Sir”. Coleridge counted this as a rare compliment.³⁴

Charles Lamb wrote to his friend Manning in mid-February: “Coleridge has delivered two Lectures at the Royal Institution; two more were attended, but he did not come. It is thought he has gone sick upon them. He ain’t well that’s certain – Wordsworth is coming to see him. He sits up in a two pair of stairs room at the Courier Office, & receives visitors on his close-stool [commode].”³⁵

Davy, himself recovering from the near lethal dose of gaol fever, was appalled by what he had witnessed from the gallery of the Great Lecture Room. He felt he had observed a great mind in operation, but undergoing a process of self-destruction. Using imagery that Coleridge had himself used of Shakespeare’s mind, he saw his friend being overwhelmed by a jungle of disorder. “He has suffered greatly from Excessive Sensibility – the disease of genius. His mind is a wilderness in which the cedar & oak which might aspire to the skies are stunted in their growth by underwood, thorns, briars and parasitical plants. With the most exalted genius, enlarged views, sensitive heart & enlightened mind, he will be the victim of want of order, precision and regularity. I cannot think of him without experiencing mingled feelings of admiration, regard & pity.”³⁶

By contrast, De Quincey gleefully recalled the “philosopher’s” abject state like the scene from a comic opera. “I often saw him, picturesquely enveloped in nightcaps, surmounted by handkerchiefs indorsed upon handkerchiefs, shouting from the attics of the Courier office, down three or four flights of stairs, to a certain ‘Mrs Brainbridge’, his sole attendant, whose dwelling was in the subterranean regions of the house…until I expected to hear the Strand and distant Fleet Street, take up the echo of ‘Brainbridge!’.”³⁷

Besides being ill, Coleridge was intensely lonely. Throughout February and March, his letters flew out in every direction – to Asra, the Wordsworths, Lamb, De Quincey, Southey, Mrs Coleridge, and above all to the Morgans, seeking some form of solace. It was not easily to be found. To Mary Morgan he wrote of what seemed to him an inexplicably cruel reply from his wife: “from beginning to end it is in a strain of dancing, frisking high spirits – jokes about the Itch…and she notices my illness, the particulars of which and the strong & fearful suspicions entertained of the Stone, in these words – neither more nor less – ‘Lord! how often you are ill! You must be MORE careful about Colds!’”³⁸

When John Morgan kindly suggested he retreat again to Bristol, Coleridge felt he could not abandon his lectures. Besides, he asked, “what right have I to make your House my Hospital – how am I justified in bringing Sickness, & Sorrow, and all the disgusts and all the troublesomeness of Disease, into your quiet Dwelling. Ah! whither else can I go? – To Keswick? The sight of that Woman would destroy me. To Grasmere? – They are still in their Cottage…& they have not room scarcely for a Cat.”³⁹

In a wild attempt to lift his gloom, Coleridge now pursued a postal flirtation with Mary and Charlotte, with strange suggestive sallies and opium-inspired fancies. He wore locks of their hair round his neck, and carried Charlotte’s profile miniature in his pocket like a lucky charm. When he lost the “pretty Shirt Pin” Charlotte had sent him (another sign of chaos) he swore that he would never wear another one as long as he lived: “The sense of its real Absence shall make a sort of Imaginary Presence to me.”⁴⁰

He concocted an extraordinary scheme of having Mary and Charlotte purchase dresses in Bristol, measured to fit them, but intended to be sent on as presents for Asra and Mary Wordsworth in the Lake District. This was the “Two Sisters” fantasy brought alarmingly to life. Astonishingly, John Morgan allowed this to proceed, the dresses were bought and cut and posted north, while Coleridge gallantly disputed the price, pretending they had charged him too little. Coleridge’s amorous protestations were couched in nursery endearments of the most deliberately blush-making kind. “As to my lovely Mantua-makers, if a beautiful Lady with a fine form, a sweet Chin and Mouth and black eyes will tell an Eff-I-Bee, about 14 shillings instead of at least £5, and another sweet young Lady with dear meek eyes, as sweet a chin & mouth, & a general Darlingness of Tones, manners, & Person, will join with her Sister & swear to the same Fib, what can a gallant young Gentleman do but admit that his Memory is the Fibster, tho’ he should tell another Fib in so Doing?”⁴¹

When further fuelled by opium, this coy dalliance got increasingly out of hand and confused. Coleridge in one letter imagined an alternative life in which he might have been married to Charlotte, or for that matter to Mary Morgan, or either of the Hutchinson sisters. His actual marriage was a crucifixion. “Neither wonder nor be wounded, if in this transient Infirmity of Soul I gave way in my agony, and causelessly & almost unknowing what I did: cried out from my Cross, Eli lama sabachthani! My friends! My Sisters! Why have you forsaken me!”⁴²

This was too much, even for the Morgans, as Coleridge quickly realized. He hastily apologized: “I intreat dear Miss Brent to think of what I wrote as the mere light-headedness of a diseased Body, and a heart sore-stricken – and fearing all things from every one.”⁴³ Yet there is little doubt that these dreams did possess and torture him. He felt he had “played the fool, and cut the throat of my Happiness, of my genius, of my utility” in marrying Sara Coleridge.

Underneath all this still lay the haunting, seductive image of Asra. Besides the symbolic dress, he sent her a copy of Chapman’s Homer (used in his lecture preparations), plaintively remarking that its battered jacket properly represented its sender’s state: “to quote from myself – A Man disinherited, in form & face/ By nature & mishap, of outward Grace!’⁴⁴ He talked endlessly about her to Daniel Stuart – still his great confidant in this crisis – and wrote as well: “Would to God I had health & liberty! – If Sense, Sensibility, sweetness of Temper, perfect Simplicity and an unpretending Nature, joined to shrewdness & entertainingness, make a valuable Woman, Sara H. is so.” He added bitterly that in marriage he saw no middle way “between great happiness and thorough Misery”.⁴⁵

Still seeking to reach Asra’s heart, he roused himself from his sickbed to champion the cause of her sailor brother, Henry Hutchinson, who was trying to buy himself out of the navy. His story was typical of the times, and gives another view of Nelson’s service. Henry had originally been taken by a wartime press gang, nearly wrecked in the Gulf of Mexico, and imprisoned for four months in Vera Cruz. He now languished in the man-of-war Chichester, anchored off the Essex marshes, which was about to set sail on another enforced voyage.

Coleridge organized food and clothes, and wrote an impassioned plea to Thomas Clarkson and Sir George Beaumont, begging them to intervene in the case. He dramatized Henry (whom he had never actually met) as an Ancient Mariner and even, one might think, as an alter ego. “This man’s whole Life has been one dream-like Tale of Sufferings – of repeated Imprisonments, of Famine, of Wounds – and twice he has had the Yellow Fever – & escaped each time from among a charnel-house of Corpses. He has done enough – he has suffered enough. And to me it is as if it were my own child – far more than if it were myself – for he is the Brother of the two Beings, whom of all on Earth I most highly honour, most fervently love.”⁴⁶ Henry Hutchinson’s release was eventually obtained through the Admiralty the following year.

It was now that Wordsworth came south, as Lamb had prophesied, reaching London on 24 February. He was genuinely concerned by Coleridge’s illness and mental state, and wild reports that he was dying. He had always disapproved of the lectures, and he determined to take Coleridge back to the safety of the Lakes, “to prevail on him to return” as Dorothy put it.⁴⁷ He also wished to consult Coleridge about his new poem, “The White Doe of Rylstone”, and arrange for its publication by Longman. He remained in London, with several much needed relief-visits to the Clarksons at Bury, until 4 April.

Rather to his surprise, Coleridge initially made difficulties about seeing him, and he could never get entry to his Courier rooms until four in the afternoon. But after several evenings together, he began to feel that Coleridge had simply given way to opium and could easily recover himself.⁴⁸ His suspicions were deepened when Coleridge gave an animated tea-party in his rooms on 3 March, receiving his guests – Wordsworth, Godwin, Lamb and De Quincey – like an oriental potentate, swathed in blankets, and throned on his bed, thoroughly enjoying the fuss. Lamb was amused by the situation, a case of the Mountain coming to Mahomet. He joked about Wordsworth’s grand descent upon the Strand. “Wordsworth, the great poet, is coming to Town; he is to have apartments in the Mansion House. He says he does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare…Even Coleridge is a little checked by this hardihood of assertion.”⁴⁹

Wordsworth also brought news that Asra was ill, with a mysterious “broken blood vessel”; news which according to Dorothy would prevent Coleridge from brooding over his own misfortunes. Wordsworth continued to rally him: they went to see Sir Thomas Lawrence’s collection of pictures, and later dined with Longman to discuss “The White Doe”. It was a dull evening, “saving that we had some good haranguing – talk I cannot call it – from Coleridge.”⁵⁰ It was now clear that Coleridge was indeed recovering, and determined to restart his lectures. Wordsworth, though gloomily apprehensive, loyally remained in London to attend the third and fourth of the relaunched series, delivered on 30 March and 2 April.