Life at Keswick--Second part of _Christabel_--Failing health--Resort to
opium--The _Ode to Dejection_--Increasing restlessness--Visit to Malta.
[1800-1804.]
We are now approaching the turning-point, moral and physical, of
Coleridge's career. The next few years determined not only his destiny
as a writer but his life as a man. Between his arrival at Keswick in
the summer of 1800 and his departure for Malta in the spring of 1804
that fatal change of constitution, temperament, and habits which
governed the whole of his subsequent history had fully established
itself. Between these two dates he was transformed from the Coleridge
of whom his young fellow-students in Germany have left us so pleasing a
picture into the Coleridge whom distressed kinsmen, alienated friends,
and a disappointed public were to have before them for the remainder of
his days. Here, then, at Keswick, and in these first two or three years
of the century--here or nowhere is the key to the melancholy mystery to
be found.
It is probable that only those who have gone with some minuteness into
the facts of this singular life are aware how great was the change
effected during this very short period of time. When Coleridge left
London for the Lake country he had not completed his
eight-and-twentieth year. Before he was thirty he wrote that _Ode to
Dejection_ in which his spiritual and moral losses are so pathetically
bewailed. His health and spirits, his will and habits, may not have
taken any unalterable bent for the worse until 1804, the year of his
departure for Malta--the date which I have thought it safest to assign
as the definitive close of the earlier and happier period of his life;
but undoubtedly the change had fully manifested itself more than two
years before. And a very great and painful one it assuredly was. We
know from the recorded evidence of Dr. Carrlyon and others that
Coleridge was full of hope and gaiety, full of confidence in himself
and of interest in life during his few months' residence in Germany.
The _annus mirabilis_ of his poetic life was but two years behind him,
and his achievements of 1797-98 seemed to him but a mere earnest of
what he was destined to accomplish. His powers of mental concentration
were undiminished, as his student days at Göttingen sufficiently
proved; his conjugal and family affections, as Dr. Carrlyon notes for
us, were still unimpaired; his own verse gives signs of a home-sickness
and a yearning for his own fireside which were in melancholy contrast
with the restlessness of his later years. Nay, even after his return to
England, and during the six months of his regular work on the _Morning
Post_, the vigour of his political articles entirely negatives the idea
that any relaxation of intellectual energy had as yet set in. Yet
within six months of his leaving London for Keswick there begins a
progressive decline in Coleridge's literary activity in every form. The
second part of _Christabel_, beautiful but inferior to the first, was
composed in the autumn of 1800, and for the next two years, so far as
the higher forms of literature are concerned, "the rest is silence."
The author of the prefatory memoir in the edition of Coleridge's
_Poetical and Dramatic Works_ (1880), enumerates some half-dozen slight
pieces contributed to the _Morning Post_ in 1801, but declares that
Coleridge's poetical contributions to this paper during 1802 were "very
rich and varied, and included the magnificent ode entitled
_Dejection_." Only the latter clause of this statement is entitled, I
think, to command our assent. Varied though the list may be, it is
hardly to be described as "rich." It covers only about seven weeks in
the autumn of 1802, and, with the exception of the _Lovers' Resolution_
and the "magnificent ode" referred to, the pieces are of the shortest
and slightest kind. Nor is it accurate to say that the "political
articles of the same period were also numerous and important." On the
contrary, it would appear from an examination of Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's
collection that her father's contributions to the _Post_ between his
departure from London and the autumn of 1802 were few and intermittent,
and in August 1803 the proprietorship of that journal passed out of Mr.
Stuart's hands. It is, in short, I think, impossible to doubt that very
shortly after his migration to the Lake country he practically ceased
not only to write poetry but to produce any mentionable quantity of
_complete_ work in the prose form. His mind, no doubt, was incessantly
active throughout the whole of the deplorable period upon which we are
now entering; but it seems pretty certain that its activity was not
poetic nor even critical, but purely philosophical, and that the
products of that activity went exclusively to _marginalia_ and the
pages of note-books.
Yet unfortunately we have almost no evidence, personal or other, from
which we can with any certainty construct the psychological--if one
should not rather say the physiological, or better still, perhaps, the
pathological--history of this cardinal epoch in Coleridge's life. Miss
Wordsworth's diary is nearly silent about him for the next few years;
he was living indeed some dozen miles from her brother at Grasmere, and
they could not therefore have been in daily intercourse. Southey did
not come to the Lakes till 1803, and the records of his correspondence
only begin therefore from that date. Mr. Cottle's _Reminiscences_ are
here a blank; Charles Lamb's correspondence yields little; and though
De Quincey has plenty to say about this period in his characteristic
fashion, it must have been based upon pure gossip, as he cites no
authorities, and did not himself make Coleridge's acquaintance till six
years afterwards. This, however, is at least certain, that his gloomy
accounts of his own health begin from a period at which his
satisfaction with his new abode was still as fresh as ever. The house
which he had taken, now historic as the residence of two famous
Englishmen, enjoyed a truly beautiful situation and the command of a
most noble view. It stood in the vale of Derwentwater, on the bank of
the river Greta, and about a mile from the lake. When Coleridge first
entered it, it was uncompleted, and an arrangement was made by which,
after completion, it was to be divided between the tenant and the
landlord, a Mr. Jackson. As it turned out, however, the then completed
portion was shared by them in common, the other portion, and eventually
the whole, being afterwards occupied by Southey. In April 1801, some
eight or nine months after his taking possession of Greta Hall,
Coleridge thus describes it to its future occupant:--
"Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of which is one field
and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery garden.
Behind the house is an orchard and a small wood on a steep slope, at
the foot of which is the river Greta, which winds round and catches the
evening's light in the front of the house. In front we have a giant
camp--an encamped army of tent-like mountains which, by an inverted
arch, gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely vale and
the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left Derwentwater
and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrowdale.
Behind is the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two chasms and a
tent-like ridge in the larger. A fairer scene you have not seen in all
your wanderings."
There is here no note of discontent with the writer's surroundings; and
yet, adds Mr. Cuthbert Southey in his _Life and Correspondence_ of his
father, the remainder of this letter was filled by Coleridge with "a
most gloomy account of his health." Southey writes him in reply that he
is convinced that his friend's "complaint is gouty, that good living is
necessary and a good climate." In July of the same year he received a
visit from Southey at Greta Hall, and one from Charles and Mary Lamb in
the following summer, and it is probable that during such intervals of
pleasurable excitement his health and spirits might temporarily rally.
But henceforward and until his departure for Malta we gather nothing
from any source as to Coleridge's _normal_ condition of body and mind
which is not unfavourable, and it is quite certain that he had long
before 1804 enslaved himself to that fatal drug which was to remain his
tyrant for the rest of his days.
When, then, and how did this slavery begin? What was the precise date
of Coleridge's first experiences of opium, and what the original cause
of his taking it? Within what time did its use become habitual? To what
extent was the decline of his health the effect of the evil habit, and
to what, if any, extent its cause? And how far, if at all, can the
deterioration of his character and powers be attributed to a decay of
physical constitution, brought about by influences beyond the
sufferer's own control?
Could every one of these questions be completely answered, we should be
in a position to solve the very obscure and painful problem before us;
but though some of them can be answered with more or less approach to
completeness, there is only one of them which can be finally disposed
of. It is certain, and it is no doubt matter for melancholy
satisfaction to have ascertained it, that Coleridge first had recourse
to opium as an anodyne. It was Nature's revolt from pain, and not her
appetite for pleasure, which drove him to the drug; and though De
Quincey, with his almost comical malice, remarks that, though Coleridge
began in the desire to obtain relief "there is no proof that he did not
end in voluptuousness," there is on the other hand no proof whatever
that he did so end--_until the habit was formed_. It is quite
consistent with probability, and only accords with Coleridge's own
express affirmations, to believe that it was the medicinal efficacy of
opium, and this quality of it alone, which induced him to resort to it
again and again until his senses contracted that well-known and
insatiable craving for the peculiar excitement, "voluptuous" only to
the initiated, which opium-intoxication creates. But let Coleridge
speak on this point for himself. Writing in April 1826 he says:--
"I wrote a few stanzas three-and-twenty years ago, soon after my eyes
had been opened to the true nature of the habit into which I had been
ignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium, in the sudden
removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended with swellings in
my knees and palpitation of the heart and pains all over me, by which I
had been bed-ridden for nearly six months. Unhappily among my
neighbours' and landlord's books were a large number of medical reviews
and magazines. I had always a fondness (a common case, but most
mischievous turn with reading men who are at all dyspeptic) for
dabbling in medical writings; and in one of these reviews I met a case
which I fancied very like my own, in which a cure had been effected by
the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour I procured it: it worked
miracles--the swellings disappeared, the pains vanished. I was all
alive, and all around me being as ignorant as myself, nothing could
exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing else, prescribed the
newly-discovered panacea for all complaints, and carried a little about
with me not to lose any opportunity of administering 'instant relief
and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentle or
simple. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and
bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and how
I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to which I
was drawing, just when the current was beyond my strength to stem. The
state of my mind is truly portrayed in the following effusion, for God
knows! that from that time I was the victim of pain and terror, nor had
I at any time taken the flattering poison as a stimulus or for any
craving after pleasurable sensation."
The "effusion" in question has parted company with the autobiographical
note, and the author of the prefatory memoir above quoted conjectures
it to have been a little poem entitled the _Visionary Hope_; but I am
myself of opinion, after a careful study of both pieces, that it is
more probably the _Pains of Sleep_, which moreover is known to have
been written in 1803. But whichever it be, its date is fixed in that
year by the statement in the autobiographical note of 1826 that the
stanzas referred to in it were written "twenty-three years ago." Thus,
then, we have the two facts established, that the opium-taking habit
had its origin in a bodily ailment, and that at some time in 1803 that
habit had become confirmed. The disastrous experiment in amateur
therapeutics, which was the means of implanting it, could not have
taken place, according to the autobiographical note, until at least six
months after Coleridge's arrival at Keswick, and perhaps not for some
months later yet. At any rate, it seems tolerably certain that it was
not till the spring of 1801, when the climate of the Lake country first
began to tell unfavourably on his health, that the "Kendal Black Drop"
was taken. Possibly it may have been about the time (April 1801) when
he wrote the letter to Southey which has been quoted above, and which,
it will be remembered, contained "so gloomy an account of his health."
How painfully ailing he was at this time we know from a variety of
sources, from some of which we also gather that he must have been a
sufferer in more or less serious forms from his boyhood upwards. Mr.
Gillman, for instance, who speaks on this point with the twofold
authority of confidant and medical expert, records a statement of
Coleridge's to the effect that, as a result of such schoolboy
imprudences as "swimming over the New River in my clothes and remaining
in them, full half the time from seventeen to eighteen was passed by me
in the sick ward of Christ's Hospital, afflicted with jaundice and
rheumatic fever." From these indiscretions and their consequences "may
be dated," Mr. Gillman thinks, "all his bodily sufferings in future
life." That he was a martyr to periodical attacks of rheumatism for
some years before his migration to Keswick is a conclusion resting upon
something more than conjecture. The _Ode to the Departing Year_ (1796)
was written, as he has himself told us, under a severe attack of
rheumatism in the head. In 1797 he describes himself in ill health, and
as forced to retire on that account to the "lonely farmhouse between
Porlock and London on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire,"
where _Kubla Khan_ was written. [1]
Thus much is, moreover, certain, that whatever were Coleridge's health
and habits during the first two years of his residence at Keswick, his
career as a poet--that is to say, as a poet of the first order--was
closed some months before that period had expired. The ode entitled
_Dejection_, to which reference has so often been made, was written on
the 4th of April 1802, and the evidential importance which attaches, in
connection with the point under inquiry, to this singularly pathetic
utterance has been almost universally recognised. Coleridge has himself
cited its most significant passage in the _Biographia Literaria_ as
supplying the best description of his mental state at the time when it
was written. De Quincey quotes it with appropriate comments in his
_Coleridge and Opium-Eating_. Its testimony is reverently invoked by
the poet's son in the introductory essay prefixed by him to his edition
of his father's works. The earlier stanzas are, however, so necessary
to the comprehension of Coleridge's mood at this time that a somewhat
long extract must be made. In the opening stanza he expresses a longing
that the storm which certain atmospheric signs of a delusively calm
evening appear to promise might break forth, so that
"Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed,
And sent my soul abroad,
Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give,
Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live."
And thus, with ever-deepening sadness, the poem proceeds:
"A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear--
O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow green:
And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars, that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel how beautiful they are!
"My genial spirits fail,
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
"O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth,
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth--
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
"O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me
What this strong music in the soul may be!
What, and wherein it doth exist,
This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making power.
Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given,
Save to the pure, and in their purest hour,
Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower,
Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power,
Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower
A new Earth and new Heaven,
Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud--
Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud--
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light."
And then follows the much quoted, profoundly touching, deeply
significant stanza to which we have referred:--
"There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions how me down to earth:
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth,
But O! each visitation
Suspends what nature gave me at my birth,
My shaping spirit of Imagination.
For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can;
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural Man--
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul."
Sadder lines than these were never perhaps written by any poet in
description of his own feelings. And what gives them their peculiar
sadness--as also, of course, their special biographical value--is that
they are not, like Shelley's similarly entitled stanzas, the mere
expression of a passing mood. They are the record of a life change, a
veritable threnody over a spiritual death. For there can be no
doubt--his whole subsequent history goes to show it--that Coleridge's
"shaping spirit of Imagination" was in fact dead when these lines were
written. To a man of stronger moral fibre a renascence of the poetical
instinct in other forms might, as I have suggested above, been
possible; but the poet of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_ was
dead. The metaphysician had taken his place, and was striving, in
abstruse research, to live in forgetfulness of the loss. Little more,
that is to say, than a twelvemonth after the composition of the second
part of _Christabel_ the impulse which gave birth to it had passed away
for ever. Opium-taking had doubtless begun by this time--may
conceivably indeed have begun nearly a year before--and the mere _mood_
of the poem, the temporary phase of feeling which directed his mind
inwards into deeper reflections on its permanent state, is no doubt
strongly suggestive, in its excessive depression, of the terrible
reaction which is known to follow upon opium-excitement. But, I
confess, it seems to me improbable that even the habitual use of the
stimulant for so comparatively short a time as twelve months could have
produced so profound a change in Coleridge's intellectual nature. I
cannot but think that De Quincey overstates the case in declaring that
"opium killed Coleridge as a poet," though it may well be that, after
the collapse of health, which appears to me to have been the real
_causa causans_ in the matter, had killed the poet as we know him,
opium prevented his resurrection in another and it may be but little
inferior form. On the whole, in fact, the most probable account of this
all-important era in Coleridge's life appears to me to be this: that in
the course of 1801, as he was approaching his thirtieth year, a
distinct change for the worse--precipitated possibly, as Mr. Gillman
thinks, by the climate of his new place of abode--took place in his
constitution; that his rheumatic habit of body, and the dyspeptic
trouble by which it was accompanied became confirmed; and that the
severe attacks of the acute form of the malady which he underwent
produced such a permanent lowering of his vitality and animal spirits
as, _first_, to extinguish the creative impulse, and _then_ to drive
him to the physical anodyne of opium and to the mental stimulant of
metaphysics.
From the summer of 1801, at any rate, his _malaise_, both of mind and
body, appears to have grown apace. Repeated letters from Southey allow
us to see how deeply concerned he was at this time about his friend's
condition. Plans of foreign travel are discussed between them, and
Southey endeavours in vain to spur his suffering and depressed
correspondent to "the assertion of his supremacy" in some new literary
work. But, with the exception of his occasional contributions to the
press, whatever he committed to paper during these years exists only,
if at all, in a fragmentary form. And his restlessness, continually on
the increase, appears by the end of 1802 to have become ungovernable.
In November of that year he eagerly accepted an offer from Thomas
Wedgwood to become his companion on a tour, and he spent this and the
greater part of the following month in South Wales with some temporary
advantage, it would seem, to his health and spirits. "Coleridge,"
writes Mr. Wedgwood to a friend, "is all kindness to me, and in
prodigious favour here. He is quite easy, cheerful, and takes great
pains to make himself pleasant. He is willing, indeed desirous, to
accompany me to any part of the globe." "Coll and I," he writes on
another occasion, the abbreviation of name having been suggested to him
by Coleridge himself, "harmonise amazingly," and adds that his
companion "takes long rambles, and writes a great deal." But the fact
that such changes of air and scene produced no permanent effect upon
the invalid after his return to his own home appears to show that now,
at any rate, his fatal habit had obtained a firm hold upon him. And his
"writing a great deal resulted" only in the filling of many note-books,
and perhaps the sketching out of many of those vast schemes of literary
labour of which he was destined to leave so remarkable a collection at
his death. One such we find him forwarding to Southey in the August of
1803--the plan of a Bibliotheca Britannica, or "History of British
Literature, bibliographical, biographical, and critical," in eight
volumes. The first volume was to contain a "complete history of all
Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books that are not translations, but the native
growth of Britain;" to accomplish which, writes Coleridge, "I will with
great pleasure join you in learning Welsh and Erse." The second volume
was to contain the history of English poetry and poets, including "all
prose truly poetical." The third volume "English prose, considered as
to style, as to eloquence, as to general impressiveness; a history of
styles and manners, their causes, their birthplace and parentage, their
analysis." The fourth volume would take up "the history of metaphysics,
theology, medicine, alchemy; common, canon, and Roman law from Alfred
to Henry VII." The fifth would "carry on metaphysics and ethics to the
present day in the first half, and comprise in the second half the
theology of all the reformers." In the sixth and seventh volumes were
to be included "all the articles you (Southey) can get on all the
separate arts and sciences that have been treated of in books since the
Reformation; and by this time," concludes the enthusiastic projector,
"the book, if it answered at all, would have gained so high a
reputation that you need not fear having whom you liked to write the
different articles--medicine, surgery, chemistry, etc.; navigation,
travellers' voyages, etc., etc." There is certainly a melancholy humour
in the formulation of so portentous a scheme by a man who was at this
moment wandering aimlessly among the lakes and mountains, unable to
settle down to any definite piece of literary work, or even to throw
off a fatal habit, which could not fail, if persevered in, to destroy
all power of steady application in the future. That neither the comic
nor the pathetic element in the situation was lost upon Southey is
evident from his half-sad, half-satirical, wholly winning reply. "Your
plan," he writes, "is too good, too gigantic, quite beyond my powers.
If you had my tolerable state of health and that love of steady and
productive employment which is now grown into a necessary habit with
me, if you were to execute and would execute it, it would be beyond all
doubt the most valuable work of any age or any country; but I cannot
fill up such an outline. No man can better feel where he fails than I
do, and to rely upon you for whole quartos! Dear Coleridge, the smile
that comes with that thought is a very melancholy one; and if Edith saw
me now she would think my eyes were weak again, when in truth the
humour that covers them springs from another cause." A few weeks after
this interchange of correspondence Coleridge was once again to prove
how far he was from possessing Southey's "tolerable state of health."
Throughout the whole of this year he had been more restless than ever.
In January 1803 we find him staying with Southey at Bristol, "suffering
terribly from the climate, and talking of going abroad." A week later
he is at Stowey, planning schemes, not destined to be realised, of
foreign travel with Wedgwood. Returning again to Keswick, he started,
after a few months' quiescence, on 15th August, in company with
Wordsworth and his sister, for a tour in Scotland, but after a
fortnight he found himself too ill to proceed. The autumn rains set in,
and "poor Coleridge," writes Miss Wordsworth, "being very unwell,
determined to send his clothes to Edinburgh, and make the best of his
way thither, being afraid to face much wet weather in an open
carriage." It is possible, however, that his return to Keswick may have
been hastened by the circumstance that Southey, who had paid a brief
visit to the Lake country two years before, was expected in a few days
at the house which was destined to be his abode for the longest portion
of his life. He arrived at Greta Hall on 7th September 1803, and from
time to time during the next six months his correspondence gives us
occasional glimpses of Coleridge's melancholy state. At the end of
December, his health growing steadily worse, he conceived the project
of a voyage to Madeira, and quitted Keswick with the intention, after
paying a short visit to the Wordsworths, of betaking himself to London
to make preparations. His stay at Grasmere, however, was longer than he
had counted on. "He was detained for a month by a severe attack of
illness, induced, if his description is to be relied on, by the use of
narcotics. [2] Unsuspicious of the cause, Mrs. and Miss Wordsworth
nursed him with the tenderest affection, while the poet himself,
usually a parsimonious man, forced upon him, to use Coleridge's own
words, a hundred pounds in the event of his going to Madeira, and his
friend Stuart offered to befriend him." From Grasmere he went to
Liverpool, where he spent a pleasant week with his old Unitarian
friend, Dr. Crompton, and arrived in London at the close of 1803. Here,
however, his plans were changed. Malta was substituted for Madeira, in
response to an invitation from his friend Mr., afterwards Sir John,
Stoddart, then resident as judge in the Mediterranean island. By 12th
March, as we gather from the Southey correspondence, the change of
arrangements had been made. Two days afterwards he receives a letter of
valediction from his "old friend and brother" at Greta Hall, and on 2d
April 1804, he sailed from England in the _Speedwell_, dropping anchor
sixteen days later in Valetta harbour.
FOOTNOTES
1. Were it not for Coleridge's express statement that he first took
opium at Keswick, one would be inclined to attribute the gorgeous but
formless imagery of that poem to the effects of the stimulant. It is
certainly very like a metrical version of one of the pleasant variety
of opium-dreams described in De Quincey's poetic prose.
2. See Miss Meteyard (_A Group of Englishmen_, p. 223). Her evidence,
however, on any point otherwise doubtful in Coleridge's history should
be received with caution, as her estimate of the poet certainly errs
somewhat on the side of excessive harshness.