Stay at Malta--Its injurious effects--Return to England--Meeting with
De Quincey--Residence in London--First series of lectures.
[1806-1809.]
Never was human being destined so sadly and signally to illustrate the
_coelum non animum_ aphorism as the unhappy passenger on the
_Speedwell_. Southey shall describe his condition when he left England;
and his own pathetic lines to William Wordsworth will picture him to us
on his return. "You are in great measure right about Coleridge," writes
the former to his friend Rickman, "he is worse in body than you seem to
believe; but the main cause lies in his own management of himself, or
rather want of management. His mind is in a perpetual St. Vitus's
dance--eternal activity without action. At times he feels mortified
that he should have done so little, but this feeling never produces any
exertion. 'I will begin to-morrow,' he says, and thus he has been all
his lifelong letting to-day slip. He has had no heavy calamities in
life, and so contrives to be miserable about trifles. Poor fellow,
there is no one thing which gives me so much pain as the witnessing
such a waste of unequalled powers." Then, after recalling the case of a
highly promising schoolfellow, who had made shipwreck of his life, and
whom "a few individuals only remember with a sort of horror and
affection, which just serves to make them melancholy whenever they
think of him or mention his name," he adds: "This will not be the case
with Coleridge; the _disjecta membra_ will be found if he does not die
early: but having so much to do, so many errors to weed out of the
world which he is capable of eradicating, if he does die without doing
his work, it would half break my heart, for no human being has had more
talents allotted." Such being his closest friend's account of him, and
knowing, as we now do (what Southey perhaps had no suspicion of at the
time), the chief if not the sole or original cause of his morally
nerveless condition, it is impossible not to feel that he did the worst
possible thing for himself in taking this journey to Malta. In quitting
England he cut himself off from those last possibilities of
self-conquest which the society and counsels of his friends might
otherwise have afforded him, and the consequences were, it is to be
feared, disastrous. After De Quincey's incredibly cool assertion that
it was "notorious that Coleridge began the use of opium, not as a
relief from any bodily pain or nervous irritations, since his
constitution was strong and excellent(!), but as a source of luxurious
sensations," we must receive anything which he has to say on this
particular point with the utmost caution; but there is only too much
plausibility in his statement that, Coleridge being necessarily thrown,
while at Malta, "a good deal upon his own resources in the narrow
society of a garrison, he there confirmed and cherished ... his habit
of taking opium in large quantities." Contrary to his expectations,
moreover, the Maltese climate failed to benefit him. At first, indeed,
he did experience some feeling of relief, but afterwards, according to
Mr. Gillman, he spoke of his rheumatic limbs as "lifeless tools," and
of the "violent pains in his bowels, which neither opium, ether, nor
peppermint combined could relieve."
Occupation, however, was not wanting to him, if occupation could have
availed in the then advanced stage of his case. He early made the
acquaintance of the governor of the island, Sir Alexander Ball, who,
having just lost his secretary by death, requested Coleridge to
undertake that official's duties until his successor should be
appointed. By this arrangement the governor and the public service in
all likelihood profited more than the provisional secretary; for
Coleridge's literary abilities proved very serviceable in the
department of diplomatic correspondence. The dignities of the office,
Mr. Gillman tells us, no doubt on Coleridge's own authority, "he never
attempted to support; he was greatly annoyed at what he thought its
unnecessary parade, and he petitioned Sir Alexander Ball to be relieved
from it." The purely mechanical duties of the post, too, appear to have
troubled him. He complains, in one of the journals which he kept during
this period, of having been "for months past incessantly employed in
official tasks, subscribing, examining, administering oaths, auditing,
etc." On the whole it would seem that the burden of his secretarial
employment, though doubtless it would have been found light enough by
any one accustomed to public business, was rather a weariness to the
flesh than a distraction to the mind; while in the meantime a new
symptom of disorder--a difficulty of breathing, to which he was always
afterwards subject--began to manifest itself in his case. Probably he
was glad enough--relieved, in more than one sense of the word--when, in
the autumn of 1805, the new secretary arrived at Malta to take his
place.
On 27th September Coleridge quitted the island on his homeward journey
_vié_ Italy, stopping for a short time at Syracuse on his way. At
Naples, which he reached on the 15th of December, he made a longer
stay, and in Rome his sojourn lasted some months. Unfortunately, for a
reason which will presently appear, there remains no written record of
his impressions of the Eternal City; and though Mr. Gillman assures us
that the gap is "partly filled by his own verbal account, repeated at
various times to the writer of this memoir," the public of to-day is
only indebted to "the writer of this memoir" for the not very startling
information that Coleridge, "while in Rome, was actively employed in
visiting the great works of art, statues, pictures, buildings, palaces,
etc. etc., observations on which he minuted down for publication." It
is somewhat more interesting to learn that he made the acquaintance of
many literary and artistic notabilities at that time congregated there,
including Tieck, the German poet and novelist, and the American painter
Alston, to whose skill we owe what is reputed to be the best of his
many not easily reconcilable portraits. The loss of his Roman memoranda
was indirectly brought about by a singular incident, his account of
which has met with some undeserved ridicule at the hands of Tory
criticism. When about to quit Rome for England _vié_ Switzerland and
Germany he took the precaution of inquiring of Baron von Humboldt,
brother of the traveller, and then Prussian Minister at the Court of
Rome, whether the proposed route was safe, and was by him informed that
he would do well to keep out of the reach of Bonaparte, who was
meditating the seizure of his person. According to Coleridge, indeed,
an order for his arrest had actually been transmitted to Rome, and he
was only saved from its execution by the connivance of the "good old
Pope," Pius VII., who sent him a passport and counselled his immediate
flight. Hastening to Leghorn, he discovered an American vessel ready to
sail for England, on board of which he embarked. On the voyage she was
chased by a French vessel, which so alarmed the captain that he
compelled Coleridge to throw his papers, including these precious MSS.,
overboard. The wrath of the First Consul against him was supposed to
have been excited by his contributions to the _Morning Post_, an
hypothesis which De Quincey reasonably finds by no means so ridiculous
as it appeared to a certain writer in _Blackwood_, who treated it as
the "very consummation of moonstruck vanity," and compared it to "John
Dennis's frenzy in retreating from the sea-coast under the belief that
Louis XIV. had commissioned commissaries to land on the English shore
and make a dash at his person." It must be remembered, however, that
Mr. Fox, to whose statement on such a point Napoleon would be likely to
attach especial weight, had declared in the House of Commons that the
rupture of the Peace of Amiens had been brought about by certain essays
in the _Morning Post_, and there is certainly no reason to believe that
a tyrant whose animosity against literary or quasi-literary assailants
ranged from Madame de Staël down to the bookseller Palm would have
regarded a man of Coleridge's reputation in letters as beneath the
stoop of his vengeance.
After an absence of two years and a half Coleridge arrived in England
in August 1806. That his then condition of mind and body was a
profoundly miserable one, and that he himself was acutely conscious of
it, will be seen later on in certain extracts from his correspondence;
but his own _Lines to William Wordsworth_--lines "composed on the night
after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual
mind"--contain an even more tragic expression of his state. It was
Wordsworth's pensive retrospect of their earlier years together which
awoke the bitterest pangs of self-reproach in his soul, and wrung from
it the cry which follows:--
"Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn
The pulses of my being beat anew:
And even as life returns upon the drowned,
Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains--
Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;
And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope;
And hope that scarce would know itself from fear;
Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;
And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild,
And all which patient toil had reared, and all,
Commune with thee had opened out--but flowers
Strewn on my corse, and borne upon my bier,
In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"
A dismal and despairing strain indeed, but the situation unhappily was
not less desperate. We are, in fact, entering upon that period of
Coleridge's life--a period, roughly speaking, of about ten years--which
no admirer of his genius, no lover of English letters, no one, it might
even be said, who wishes to think well of human nature, can ever
contemplate without pain. His history from the day of his landing in
England in August 1806 till the day when he entered Mr. Gillman's house
in 1816 is one long and miserable story of self-indulgence and
self-reproach, of lost opportunities, of neglected duties, of
unfinished undertakings. His movements and his occupation for the first
year after his return are not now traceable with exactitude, but his
time was apparently spent partly in London and partly at Grasmere and
Keswick. When in London, Mr. Stuart, who had now become proprietor of
the _Courier_, allowed him to occupy rooms at the office of that
newspaper to save him expense; and Coleridge, though his regular
connection with the _Courier_ did not begin till some years afterwards,
may possibly have repaid the accommodation by occasional contributions
or by assistance to its editor in some other form. It seems certain, at
any rate, that if he was earning no income in this way he was earning
none at all. His friend and patron, Mr. Thomas Wedgwood, had died while
he was in Malta; but the full pension of £150 per annum bestowed upon
him by the two brothers jointly continued to be paid to him by Josiah,
the senior. Coleridge, however, had landed in England in ignorance of
his patron's death. He had wholly neglected to keep up any
correspondence with the Wedgwoods during his stay in Malta, and though
"dreadfully affected" by it, as Mr. Poole records, he seems to have
allowed nearly a year to elapse before communicating with the surviving
brother. The letter which he then wrote deserves quotation, not only as
testimony to his physical and pecuniary condition on his arrival in
England, but as affording a distressing picture of the morbid state of
his emotions and the enfeebled condition of his will. "As to the
reasons for my silence, they are," he incoherently begins, "impossible,
and the numbers of the _causes_ of it, with the almost weekly
expectation for the last eight months of receiving my books,
manuscripts, etc. from Malta, has been itself a cause of increasing the
procrastination which constant ill health, despondency, domestic
distractions, and embarrassment from accidents, equally unconnected
with my will or conduct" [every cause mentioned, it will be seen, but
the true one], "had already seated deep in my very muscles, as it were.
I do not mean to accuse myself of idleness--I have enough of
self-crimination without adding imaginary articles--but in all things
that affect my moral feelings 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. After a most miserable
passage from Leghorn of fifty-five days, during which my life was twice
given over, I found myself again in my native country, ill, penniless,
and worse than homeless. I had been near a month in the country before
I ventured or could summon courage enough to ask a question concerning
you and yours, and yet God Almighty knows that every hour the thought
had been gnawing at my heart. I then for the first time heard of that
event which sounded like my own knell, without its natural hope or
sense of rest. Such shall I be (is the thought that haunts me), but O!
not such; O! with what a different retrospect! But I owe it to justice
to say, Such good I truly can do myself, etc., etc." The rest of this
painfully inarticulate letter is filled with further complaints of ill
health, with further protestations of irresponsibility for the neglect
of duties, and with promises, never to be fulfilled, of composing or
assisting others to compose a memoir of Thomas Wedgwood, who, in
addition to his general repute as a man of culture, had made a special
mark by his speculations in psychology.
The singular expression, "worse than homeless," and the reference to
domestic distractions, appear to indicate that some estrangement had
already set in between Coleridge and his wife. De Quincey's testimony
to its existence at the time (a month or so later) when he made
Coleridge's acquaintance may, subject to the usual deductions, be
accepted as trustworthy; and, of course, for aught we know, it may then
have been already of some years' standing. That the provocation to it
on the husband's part may be so far antedated is at least a reasonable
conjecture. There may be nothing--in all likelihood there is
nothing--worth attention in De Quincey's gossip about the young lady,
"intellectually very much superior to Mrs. Coleridge, who became a
neighbour and daily companion of Coleridge's walks" at Keswick. But if
there be no foundation for his remarks on "the mischiefs of a situation
which exposed Mrs. Coleridge to an invidious comparison with a more
intellectual person," there is undoubtedly plenty of point in the
immediately following observation that "it was most unfortunate for
Coleridge himself to be continually compared with one so ideally
correct and regular in his habits as Mr. Southey." The passion of
female jealousy assuredly did not need to be called into play to
account for the alienation of Mrs. Coleridge from her husband. Mrs.
Carlyle has left on record her pathetic lament over the fate of a woman
who marries a man of genius; but a man of genius of the coldly selfish
and exacting type of the Chelsea philosopher would probably be a less
severe burden to a woman of housewifely instincts than the weak,
unmethodical, irresolute, shiftless being that Coleridge had by this
time become. After the arrival of the Southeys, Mrs. Coleridge would
indeed have been more than human if she had not looked with an envious
eye upon the contrast between her sister Edith's lot and her own. For
this would give her the added pang of perceiving that she was specially
unlucky in the matter, and that men of genius could ("if they chose,"
as she would probably, though not perhaps quite justly have put it)
make very good husbands indeed. If one poet could finish his poems, and
pay his tradesmen's bills, and work steadily for the publishers in his
own house without the necessity of periodical flittings to various
parts of the United Kingdom or the Continent, why, so could another.
With such reflections as these Mrs. Coleridge's mind was no doubt sadly
busy during the early years of her residence at the Lakes, and, since
their causes did not diminish but rather increased in intensity as time
went on, the estrangement between them--or rather, to do Coleridge
justice, her estrangement from her husband--had, by 1806, no doubt
become complete. The fatal habit which even up to this time seems to
have been unknown to most of his friends could hardly have been a
secret to his wife, and his four or five years of slavery to it may
well have worn out her patience.
This single cause indeed, namely, Coleridge's addiction to opium, is
quite sufficient, through the humiliations, discomfort, and privations,
pecuniary and otherwise, for which the vice was no doubt mediately or
immediately responsible, to account for the unhappy issue of a union
which undoubtedly was one of love to begin with, and which seems to
have retained that character for at least six years of its course. We
have noted the language of warm affection in which the "beloved Sara"
is spoken of in the early poems, and up to the time of Coleridge's stay
in Germany his feelings towards his wife remained evidently unchanged.
To his children, of whom three out of the four born to him had
survived, he was deeply attached; and the remarkable promise displayed
by the eldest son, Hartley, and his youngest child and only daughter,
Sara, made them objects of no less interest to his intellect than to
his heart. "Hartley," he writes to Mr. Poole in 1803, "is a strange,
strange boy, exquisitely wild, an utter visionary; like the moon among
thin clouds, he moves in a circle of light of his own making. He alone
is a light of his own." And of his daughter in the same poetic strain:
"My meek little Sara is a remarkably interesting baby, with the finest
possible skin, and large blue eyes, and she smiles as if she were
basking in a sunshine as mild as moonlight of her own quiet happiness."
Derwent, a less remarkable but no less attractive child than his
brother and sister (whom he was destined long to survive), held an
equal place in his father's affections. Yet all these interwoven
influences--a deep love of his children and a sincere attachment to his
wife, of whom, indeed, he never ceased to speak with respect and
regard--were as powerless as in so many thousands of other cases they
have been, to brace an enfeebled will to the task of self-reform. In
1807 "respect and regard" had manifestly taken the place of any warmer
feeling in his mind. Later on in the letter above quoted he says, "In
less than a week I go down to Ottery, with my children and their
mother, from a sense of duty" (_i.e._ to his brother, the Rev. George
Coleridge, who had succeeded his father as head master of the Ottery
St. Mary Grammar School) "as far as it affects myself, and from a
promise made to Mrs. Coleridge, as far as it affects her, and indeed of
a debt of respect to her for her many praiseworthy qualities." When
husbands and wives take to liquidating debts of this kind, and in this
spirit, it is pretty conclusive evidence that all other accounts
between them are closed.
The letter from which these extracts have been taken was written from
Aisholt near Bridgewater, where Coleridge was then staying, with his
wife and children, as the guest of a Mr. Price; and his friend Poole's
description to Josiah Wedgwood of his state at that time is significant
as showing that some at least of his intimate acquaintances had no
suspicion of the real cause of his bodily and mental disorders. "I
admire him," Poole writes, "and pity him more than ever. His
information is much extended, the _great_ qualities of his mind
heightened and better disciplined, but alas! his health is much weaker,
and his great failing, procrastination, or the incapability of acting
agreeably to his wish and will, much increased."
Whether the promised visit to Ottery St. Mary was ever paid there is no
record to show, but at the end of July 1807 we again hear of the
Coleridges at the house of a Mr. Chubb, a descendant of the Deist, at
Bridgewater; and here it was that De Quincey, after having endeavoured
in vain to run the poet to earth at Stowey, where he had been staying
with Mr. Poole, and whence he had gone to pay a short visit to Lord
Egmont, succeeded in obtaining an introduction to him. The
characteristic passage in which the younger man describes their first
meeting is too long for quotation, and it is to be hoped too well known
to need it: his vivid and acute criticism of Coleridge's conversation
may be more appropriately cited hereafter. His evidence as to the
conjugal relations of Coleridge and his wife has been already
discussed; and the last remaining point of interest about this
memorable introduction is the testimony which it incidentally affords
to De Quincey's genuine and generous instinct of hero-worship, and to
the depth of Coleridge's pecuniary embarrassments. The loan of £300,
which the poet's enthusiastic admirer insisted on Cottle's conveying to
him as from an unknown "young man of fortune who admired his talents,"
should cover a multitude of De Quincey's subsequent sins. It was indeed
only upon Cottle's urgent representation that he had consented to
reduce the sum from £500 to £300. Nor does there seem any doubt of
his having honestly attempted to conceal his own identity with the
nameless benefactor, though, according to his own later account, he
failed. [1]
This occurred in November 1807, and in the previous month De Quincey
had been able to render Coleridge a minor service, while at the same
moment gratifying a long cherished wish of his own. Mrs. Coleridge was
about to return with her children to Keswick, but her husband, not yet
master of this £300 windfall, and undoubtedly at his wits' end for
money, was arranging for a course of lectures to be delivered at the
Royal Institution early in the ensuing year, and could not accompany
them. De Quincey offered accordingly to be their escort, and duly
conducted them to Wordsworth's house, thus making the acquaintance of
the second of his two great poetical idols within a few months of
paying his first homage to the other. In February 1808 Coleridge again
took up his abode in London at his old free quarters in the _Courier_
office, and began the delivery of a promised series of sixteen lectures
on Poetry and the Fine Arts. "I wish you could see him," again writes
Poole to Wedgwood, "you would pity and admire. He is much improved, but
has still less voluntary power than ever. Yet he is so committed that I
think he must deliver these lectures." Considering that the authorities
of the Royal Institution had agreed to pay him one hundred guineas for
delivering the lectures, he undoubtedly was more or less "committed;"
and his voluntary power, however small, might be safely supposed to be
equal to the task of fulfilling a contract. But to get the lecturer
into the lecture-room does not amount to much more than bringing the
horse to the water. You can no more make the one drink than you can
prevent the other from sending his audience away thirsty. Coleridge's
lectures on Poetry and the Fine Arts were confused, ill arranged, and
generally disappointing to the last degree. Sometimes it was not even
possible to bring the horse to the water. Charles Lamb writes to
Manning on the 20th of February 1808 (early days indeed) that Coleridge
had only delivered two lectures, and that though "two more were
intended, he did not come." De Quincey writes of "dismissals of
audience after audience, with pleas of illness; and on many of his
lecture-days I have seen all Albemarle Street closed by a lock of
carriages filled with women of distinction, until the servants of the
Institution or their own footmen advanced to the carriage-doors with
the intelligence that Mr. Coleridge had been suddenly taken ill."
Naturally there came a time when the "women of distinction" began to
tire of this treatment. "The plea, which at first had been received
with expressions of concern, repeated too often began to rouse disgust.
Many in anger, and some in real uncertainty whether it would not be
trouble thrown away, ceased to attend." And what De Quincey has to say
of the lectures themselves when they did by chance get delivered is no
less melancholy. "The lecturer's appearance," he says, "was generally
that of a man struggling with pain and over-mastering illness."
"His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and
in spite of the 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" [_i.e._ I
suppose to move the lower jaw]. "In such a state it is clear that
nothing could save the lecture itself from reflecting his own
feebleness and exhaustion except the advantage of having been
precomposed in some happier mood. But that never happened: most
unfortunately, he relied on his extempore ability to carry him through.
Now, had he been in spirits, or had he gathered animation and kindled
by his own emotion, no written lecture could have been more effectual
than one of his unpremeditated colloquial harangues. But either he was
depressed originally below the point from which reascent was possible,
or else this reaction was intercepted by continual disgust from looking
back upon his own ill success; for assuredly he never once recovered
that free and eloquent movement of thought which he could command at
any time in a private company. The passages he read, moreover, in
illustrating his doctrines, were generally unhappily chosen, because
chosen at haphazard, from the difficulty of finding at a moment's
summons these passages which his purpose required. Nor do I remember
any that produced much effect except two or three which I myself put
ready marked into his hands among the _Metrical Romances_, edited by
Ritson. Generally speaking, the selections were as injudicious and as
inappropriate as they were ill delivered, for among Coleridge's
accomplishments good reading was not one. He had neither voice (so at
least I thought) nor management of voice. This defect is unfortunate in
a public lecturer, for it is inconceivable how much weight and
effectual pathos can be communicated by sonorous depth and melodious
cadence of the human voice to sentiments the most trivial; [2] nor, on
the other hand, how the grandest are emasculated by a style of reading
which fails in distributing the lights and shadows of a musical
intonation. However, this defect chiefly concerned the immediate
impression; the most afflicting to a friend of Coleridge's was the
entire absence of his own peculiar and majestic intellect; no heart, no
soul, was in anything he said; no strength of feeling in recalling
universal truths, no power of originality or compass of moral relations
in his novelties,--all was a poor, faint reflection from pearls once
scattered on the highway by himself in the prodigality of his early
opulence--a mendicant dependence on the alms dropped from his own
overflowing treasury of happier times."
Severe as is this censure of the lectures, there is unhappily no good
ground for disputing its substantial justice. And the inferences which
it suggests are only too painfully plain. One can well understand
Coleridge's being an ineffective lecturer, and no failure in this
respect, however conspicuous, would necessarily force us to the
hypothesis of physical disability. But a Coleridge who could no more
compose a lecture than he could deliver one-a Coleridge who could
neither write nor extemporise anything specially remarkable on a
subject so congenial to him as that of English poetry--must assuredly
have spent most of his time, whether in the lecture-room or out of it,
in a state of incapacity for sustained intellectual effort. De
Quincey's humorous account of the lecturer's shiftless untidy life at
the Courier office, and even the Rabelaisian quip which Charles Lamb
throws at it in the above-quoted letter to Manning, are sufficient
indications of his state at this time. "Oh, Charles," he writes to
Lamb, early in February, just before the course of lectures was to
begin, "I am very, very ill. _Vixi._" The sad truth is that, as seems
to have been always the case with him when living alone, he was during
these months of his residence in London more constantly and hopelessly
under the dominion of opium than ever.
FOOTNOTES
1. "In a letter written by him (Coleridge) about fifteen years after
that time, I found that he had become aware of all the circumstances,
perhaps through some indiscretion of Mr. Cottle's." Perhaps, however,
no very great indiscretion on Mr. Cottle's part was needed to enable
Coleridge to trace the loan to so ardent a young admirer and disciple.
2. The justice of this criticism will be acknowledged by those many
persons whom Mr. Bright's great elocutionary skill has occasionally
deluded into imagining that the very commonplace verse which the famous
orator has been often known to quote with admiration is poetry of a
high order.