London again--Second recourse to journalism--The _Courier_
articles--The Shakespeare lectures--Production of _Remorse_--At Bristol
again as lecturer--Residence at Calne--Increasing ill health and
embarrassment--Retirement to Mr. Gillman's.
[1810-1816.]
The life led by Coleridge during the six years next ensuing is
difficult to trace, even in the barest outline; to give a detailed and
circumstantial account of it from any ordinarily accessible source of
information is impossible. Nor is it, I imagine, very probable that
even the most exhaustive search among whatever imprinted records may
exist in the possession of his friends would at all completely supply
the present lack of biographical material. For not only had it become
Coleridge's habit to disappear from the sight of his kinsmen and
acquaintances for long periods together; he had fallen almost wholly
silent also. They not only ceased to see him, but they ceased to hear
of him. Letters addressed to him, even on subjects of the greatest
importance, would remain for months unnoticed, and in many instances
would receive no answer at all. His correspondence during the next
half-dozen years must have been of the scantiest amount and the most
intermittent character, and a biographer could hope, therefore, for but
little aid in bridging over the large gaps in his knowledge of this
period, even if every extant letter written by Coleridge during its
continuance were to be given to the world.
Such light, too, as is retrospectively thrown upon it by Coleridge's
correspondence of a later date is of the most fitful
description,--scarcely more than serves, in fact, for the rendering of
darkness visible. Even the sudden and final departure from the Lakes it
leaves involved in as much obscurity as ever. Writing to Mr. Thomas
Allsop [1] from Ramsgate twelve years afterwards (8th October 1822) he
says that he "counts four grasping and griping sorrows in his past
life." The first of these "was when" [no date given] "the vision of a
happy home sank for ever, and it became impossible for me longer even
to hope for domestic happiness under the name of husband." That is
plain enough on the whole, though it still leaves us in some
uncertainty as to whether the "sinking of the vision" was as gradual as
the estrangement between husband and wife, or whether he refers to some
violent rupture of relations with Mrs. Coleridge, possibly
precipitating his departure from the Lakes. If soothe second "griping
and grasping sorrow" followed very quickly on the first, for he says
that it overtook him "on the night of his arrival from Grasmere with
Mr. and Mrs. Montagu;" while in the same breath and paragraph, and as
though undoubtedly referring to the same thing, he speaks of the
"destruction of a friendship of fifteen years when, just at the moment
of Tenner and Curtis's (the publishers) bankruptcy" (by which Coleridge
was a heavy loser, but which did not occur till seven years
afterwards), somebody indicated by seven asterisks and possessing an
income of £1200 a-year, was "totally transformed into baseness." There
is certainly not much light here, any more than in the equally
enigmatical description of the third sorrow as being "in some sort
included in the second," so that "what the former was to friendship the
latter was to a still more inward bond." The truth is, that all
Coleridge's references to himself in his later years are shrouded in a
double obscurity. One veil is thrown over them by his deliberate
preference for abstract and mystical forms of expression, and another
perhaps by that kind of shameful secretiveness which grows upon all men
who become the slaves of concealed indulgences, and which often
displays itself on occasions when it has no real object to gain of any
kind whatever.
Thus much only we know, that on reaching London in the summer of 1810
Coleridge became the guest of the Montagus, and that, after some
months' residence with them, he left as the immediate result of some
difference with his host which was never afterwards composed. Whether
it arose from the somewhat trivial cause to which De Quincey has,
admittedly upon the evidence of "the learned in literary scandal,"
referred it, it is now impossible to say. But at some time or other,
towards the close probably of 1810, or in the early months of 1811,
Coleridge quitted Mr. Montagu's house for that of Mr. John Morgan, a
companion of his early Bristol days, and a common friend of his and
Southey's; and here, at No. 7 Portland Place, Hammersmith, he was
residing when, for the second time, he resolved to present himself to
the London public in the capacity of lecturer. His services were on
this occasion engaged by the London Philosophical Society, at Crane
Court, Fleet Street, and their prospectus announced that on Monday,
18th November, Mr. Coleridge would commence "a course of lectures on
Shakspeare and Milton, in illustration of the principles of poetry and
their application, on grounds of criticism, to the most popular works
of later English poets, those of the living included. After an
introductory lecture on false criticism (especially in poetry) and on
its causes, two-thirds of the remaining course," continues the
prospectus, "will be assigned, 1st, to a philosophical analysis and
explanation of all the principal characters of our great dramatists, as
Othello, Falstaff, Richard the Third, Lago, Hamlet, etc., and to a
critical comparison of Shakspeare in respect of diction, imagery,
management of the passions, judgment in the construction of his
dramas--in short, of all that belongs to him as a poet, and as a
dramatic poet, with his contemporaries or immediate successors, Jonson,
Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, and in the endeavour to
determine which of Shakespeare's merits and defects are common to him,
with other writers of the same age, and what remain peculiar to his
genius."
A couple of months before the commencement of this course, viz. in
September 1811, Coleridge seems to have entered into a definite
journalistic engagement with his old editor, Mr. Daniel Stuart, then
the proprietor of the _Courier_. It was not, however, his first
connection with that journal. He had already published at least one
piece of verse in its columns, and two years before, while the _Friend_
was still in existence, he had contributed to it a series of letters on
the struggle of the Spaniards against their French invaders. In these,
as though to show that under the ashes of his old democratic enthusiasm
still lived its wonted fires, and that the inspiration of a popular
cause was only needed to reanimate them, we find, with less of the
youthful lightness of touch and agility of movement, a very near
approach to the vigour of his early journalistic days. Whatever may be
thought of the historic value of the parallel which he institutes
between the struggle of the Low Countries against their tyrant, and
that of the Peninsula against its usurping conqueror, it is worked out
with remarkable ingenuity of completeness. Whole pages of the letters
are radiant with that steady flame of hatred which, ever since the hour
of his disillusionment, had glowed in his breast at the name and
thought of Bonaparte; and whenever he speaks of the Spaniards, of
Spanish patriotism, of the Spanish Cortes, we see that the names of
"the people," of "freedom," of "popular assembly," have some of their
old magic for him still. The following passage is almost pathetic in
its reminder of the days of 1792, before that modern Leonidas, the
young French Republic, had degenerated into the Xerxes of the Empire.
"The power which raised up, established, and enriched the Dutch
republic,--the same mighty power is no less at work in the present
struggle of the Spanish nation, a power which mocks the calculations of
ordinary statecraft too subtle to be weighed against it, and mere
outward brute force too different from it to admit of comparison. A
power as mighty in the rational creation as the element of electricity
in the material world; and, like that element, infinite in its
affinities, infinite in its mode of action, combining the most
discordant natures, fixing the most volatile, and arming the sluggish
vapour of the marsh with arrows of fire; working alike in silence and
in tempest, in growth and in destruction; now contracted to an
individual soul, and now, as in a moment, dilating itself over a whole
nation! Am I asked what this mighty power may be, and wherein it
exists? If we are worthy of the fame which we possess as the countrymen
of Hampden, Russell, and Algernon Sidney, we shall find the answer in
our own hearts. It is the power of the insulted free-will, steadied by
the approving conscience and struggling against brute force and
iniquitous compulsion for the common rights of human nature, brought
home to our inmost souls by being, at the same time, the rights of our
betrayed, insulted, and bleeding country."
And as this passage recalls the most striking characteristics of his
earlier style, so may its conclusion serve as a fair specimen of the
calmer eloquence of his later manner:--
"It is a painful truth, sir, that these men who appeal most to facts,
and pretend to take them for their exclusive guide, are the very
persons who most disregard the light of experience when it refers them
to the mightiness of their own inner nature, in opposition to those
forces which they can see with their eyes, and reduce to figures upon a
slate. And yet, sir, what is history for the greater and more useful
part but a voice from the sepulchres of our forefathers, assuring us,
from their united experience, that our spirits are as much stronger
than our bodies as they are nobler and more permanent? The historic
muse appears in her loftiest character as the nurse of Hope. It is her
appropriate praise that her records enable the magnanimous to silence
the selfish and cowardly by appealing to actual events for the
information of these truths which they themselves first learned from
the surer oracle of their own reason."
But this reanimation of energy was but a transient phenomenoa It did
not survive the first freshness of its exciting cause. The Spanish
insurrection grew into the Peninsular war, and though the glorious
series of Wellington's victories might well, one would think, have
sustained the rhetorical temperature at its proper pitch, it failed to
do so. Or was it, as the facts appear now and then to suggest, that
Coleridge at Grasmere or Keswick-Coleridge in the inspiring (and
restraining) companionship of close friends and literary compeers--was
an altogether different man from Coleridge in London, alone with his
thoughts and his opium? The question cannot be answered with
confidence, and the fine quality of the lectures on Shakespeare is
sufficient to show that, for some time, at any rate, after his final
migration to London, his critical faculty retained its full vigour. But
it is beyond dispute that his regular contributions to the _Courier_ in
1811-12 are not only vastly inferior to his articles of a dozen years
before in the _Morning Post_ but fall sensibly short of the level of
the letters of 1809, from which extract has just been made. Their tone
is spiritless, and they even lack distinction of style. Their very
subjects, and the mode of treating them, appear to show a change in
Coleridge's attitude towards public affairs if not in the very
conditions of his journalistic employment. They have much more of the
character of newspaper hack-work than his earlier contributions. He
seems to have been, in many instances, set to write a mere report, and
often a rather dry and mechanical report of this or the other
Peninsular victory. He seldom or never discusses the political
situation, as his wont had been, _au large_; and in place of broad
statesmanlike reflection on the scenes and actors in the great
world-drama then in progress, we meet with too much of that sort of
criticism on the consistency and capacity of "our contemporary, the
_Morning Chronicle_," which had less attraction, it may be suspected,
even for the public of its own day than for the journalistic
profession, while for posterity, of course, it possesses no interest at
all. The series of contributions extends from September of 1811 until
April of the following year, and appears to have nearly come to a
premature and abrupt close in the intermediate July, when an article
written by Coleridge in strong opposition to the proposed reinstatement
of the Duke of York in the command-in-chief was, by ministerial
influence, suppressed before publication. This made Coleridge, as his
daughter informs us on the authority of Mr. Crabb Kobinson, "very
uncomfortable," and he was desirous of being engaged on another paper.
He wished to be connected with the _Times_, and "I spoke," says Mr.
Eobinson, "with Walter on the subject, but the negotiation failed."
With the conclusion of the lectures on Shakespeare, and the loss of the
stimulus, slight as it then was to him, of regular duties and recurring
engagements, Coleridge seems to have relapsed once more into thoroughly
desultory habits of work. The series of aphorisms and reflections which
he contributed in 1812 to Southey's _Omniana_, witty, suggestive,
profound as many of them are, must not of course be referred to the
years in which they were given to the world. They belong unquestionably
to the order of _marginalia_, the scattered notes of which De Quincey
speaks with not extravagant admiration, and which, under the busy
pencil of a commentator always indefatigable in the _strenua inertia_
of reading, had no doubt accumulated in considerable quantities over a
long course of years.
The disposal, however, of this species of literary material could
scarcely have been a source of much profit to him, and Coleridge's
difficulties of living must by this time have been growing acute. His
pension from the Wedgwoods had been assigned, his surviving son has
stated, to the use of his family, and even this had been in the
previous year reduced by half. "In Coleridge's neglect," observes Miss
Meteyard, "of his duties to his wife, his children, and his friends,
must be sought the motives which led Mr. Wedgwood in 1811 to withdraw
his share of the annuity. An excellent, even over-anxious father, he
was likely to be shocked at a neglect which imposed on the generosity
of Southey, himself heavily burdened, those duties which every man of
feeling and honour proudly and even jealously guards as his own.... The
pension of £150 per annum had been originally granted with the view to
secure Coleridge independence and leisure while he effected some few of
his manifold projects of literary work. But ten years had passed, and
these projects were still _in nubibus_--even the life of Leasing, even
the briefer memoir of Thomas Wedgwood; and gifts so well intentioned,
had as it were, ministered to evil rather than to good." We can hardly
wonder at the step, however we may regret it; and if one of the reasons
adduced in defence of it savours somewhat of the fallacy known as _...
non causƒ, pro causƒ_, we may perhaps attribute that rather to the
maladroitness of Miss Meteyard's advocacy than to the weakness of Mr.
Wedgwood's logic. The fact, however, that this "excellent, even
over-anxious father" was shocked at a neglect which imposed a burden on
the generosity of Southey, is hardly a just ground for cutting off one
of the supplies by which that burden was partially relieved. As to the
assignment of the pension to the family, it is impossible to question
what has been positively affirmed by an actual member of that family,
the Rev. Derwent Coleridge himself; though, when he adds that not only
was the school education of both the sons provided from this source,
but that through his (Coleridge's) influence they were both sent to
college, his statement is at variance, as will be presently seen, with
an authority equal to his own.
In 1812, at any rate, we may well believe that Coleridge's necessities
had become pressing, and the timely service then rendered to him by
Lord Byron may have been suggested almost as much by a knowledge of his
needs as by admiration for the dramatic merits of his long-since
rejected tragedy. _Osorio's_ time had at any rate come. The would-be
fratricide changed his name to Ordonio, and ceased to stand sponsor to
the play, which was rechristened _Remorse_, and accepted at last, upon
Byron's recommendation, by the committee of Drury Lane Theatre, the
playhouse at whose doors it had knocked vainly fifteen years before it
was performed there for the first time on the 23d of January 1813. The
prologue and epilogue, without which in those times no gentleman's
drama was accounted complete, was written, the former by Charles Lamb,
the latter by the author himself. It obtained a brilliant success on
its first representation, and was honoured with what was in those days
regarded as the very respectable run of twenty nights.
The success, however, which came so opportunely for his material
necessities was too late to produce any good effect upon Coleridge's
mental state. But a month after the production of his tragedy we find
him writing in the most dismal strain of hypochondria to Thomas Poole.
The only pleasurable sensation which the success of _Remorse_ had given
him was, he declares, the receipt of his friend's "heart-engendered
lines" of congratulation. "No grocer's apprentice, after his first
month's permitted riot, was ever sicker of figs and raisins than I of
hearing about the _Remorse_. The endless rat-a-tat-tat at our
black-and-blue bruised doors, and my three master-fiends, proof-sheets,
letters, and--worse than these--invitations to large dinners, which I
cannot refuse without offence and imputation of pride, etc., oppress me
so much that my spirits quite sink under it. I have never seen the play
since the first night. It has been a good thing for the theatre. They
will get eight or ten thousand pounds by it, and I shall get more than
by all my literary labours put together--nay, thrice as much." So
large a sum of money as this must have amounted to should surely have
lasted him for years; but the particular species of intemperance to
which he was now hopelessly enslaved is probably the most costly of all
forms of such indulgence, and it seems pretty evident that the proceeds
of his theatrical _coup_ were consumed in little more than a year.
Early in 1814, at any rate, Coleridge once more returned to his old
occupation of lecturer, and this time not in London, but in the scene
of his first appearance in that capacity. The lectures which he
proposed to deliver at Bristol were, in fact, a repetition of the
course of 1811-12; but the ways of the lecturer, to judge from an
amusing story recorded by Cottle, more nearly resembled his proceedings
in 1808. A "brother of Mr. George Cumberland," who happened to be his
fellow-traveller to Bristol on this occasion, relates that before the
coach started Coleridge's attention was attracted by a little Jew boy
selling pencils, with whom he entered into conversation, and with whose
superior qualities he was so impressed as to declare that "if he had
not an important engagement at Bristol he would stay behind to provide
some better condition for the lad." The coach having started, "the
gentleman" (for his name was unknown to the narrator of the incident)
"talked incessantly and in a most entertaining way for thirty miles out
of London, and, afterwards, with little intermission till they reached
Marlborough," when he discovered that a lady in the coach with him was
a particular friend of his; and on arriving at Bath he quitted the
coach declaring that he was determined not to leave her till he had
seen her safe to her brother's door in North Wales. This was the day
fixed for the delivery of Coleridge's first lecture. Two or three days
afterwards, having completed his _détour_ by North Wales, he arrived
at Bristol: another day was fixed for the commencement of the course,
and Coleridge then presented himself an hour after the audience had
taken their seats. The "important engagement" might be broken, it
seems, for a mere whim, though not for a charitable impulse--a
distinction testifying to a mixture of insincerity and unpunctuality
not pleasant to note as an evidence of the then state of Coleridge's
emotions and will.
Thus inauspiciously commenced, there was no reason why the Bristol
lectures of 1814 should be more successful than the London Institution
lectures of 1808; nor were they, it appears, in fact. They are said to
have been "sparsely attended,"--no doubt owing to the natural
unwillingness of people to pay for an hour's contemplation of an empty
platform; and their pecuniary returns in consequence were probably
insignificant. Coleridge remained in Bristol till the month of August,
when he returned to London.
The painful task of tracing his downward course is now almost
completed. In the middle of this year he touched the lowest point of
his descent. Cottle, who had a good deal of intercourse with him by
speech and letter in 1814, and who had not seen him since 1807, was
shocked by his extreme prostration, and then for the first time
ascertained the cause. "In 1814," he says in his _Recollections_, "S.
T. C. had been long, very long, in the habit of taking from two quarts
of laudanum a week to a pint a day, and on one occasion he had been
known to take in the twenty-four hours a whole quart of laudanum. The
serious expenditure of money resulting from this habit was the least
evil, though very great, and must have absorbed all the produce of his
writings and lectures and the liberalities of his friends." Cottle
addressed to him a letter of not very delicate remonstrance on the
subject, to which Coleridge replied in his wontedly humble strain.
There is a certain Pharisaism about the Bristol poet-publisher which
renders it necessary to exercise some little caution in the acceptance
of his account of Coleridge's condition; but the facts, from whatever
source one seeks them, appear to acquit him of any exaggeration in his
summing up of the melancholy matter. "A general impression," he says,
"prevailed on the minds of Coleridge's friends that it was a desperate
case, that paralysed all their efforts; that to assist Coleridge with
money which, under favourable circumstances would have been most
promptly advanced, would now only enlarge his capacity to obtain the
opium which was consuming him. We merely knew that Coleridge had
retired with his friend, Mr. John Morgan, to a small house at Calne in
Wiltshire."
It must have been at Calne, then, that Coleridge composed the series of
"Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher concerning his charge to the Grand
Jury of the county of Wexford, at the summer Assizes in 1814," which
appeared at intervals in the _Courier_ between 20th September and 10th
December of this year. Their subject, a somewhat injudiciously animated
address to the aforesaid Grand Jury on the subject of the relations
between Catholicism and Protestantism in Ireland, was well calculated
to stimulate the literary activity of a man who always took something
of the keen interest of the modern Radical in the eternal Irish
question; and the letters are not wanting either in argumentative force
or in grave impressiveness of style. But their lack of spring and
energy as compared with Coleridge's earlier work in journalism is
painfully visible throughout.
Calne, it is to be supposed, was still Coleridge's place of abode when
Southey (17th October) wrote Cottle that letter which appears in his
_Correspondence_, and which illustrates with such sad completeness the
contrast between the careers of the two generous, romantic, brilliant
youths who had wooed their wives together--and between the fates, one
must add, of the two sisters who had listened to their wooing--eighteen
years before: a letter as honourable to the writer as it is the reverse
to its subject. "Can you," asks Southey, "tell me anything of
Coleridge? A few lines of introduction for a son of Mr. ---- of St.
James's, in your city, are all that we have received from him since I
saw him last September twelvemonth (1813) in town. The children being
thus left entirely to chance, I have applied to his brothers at Ottey
(Ottery?) concerning them, and am in hopes through their means and the
assistance of other friends of sending Hartley to college. Lady
Beaumont has promised £30 a year for the purpose, and Poole £10. I
wrote to Coleridge three or four months ago, telling him that unless he
took some steps in providing for this object I must make the
application, and required his answer within a given term of three
weeks. He received the letter, and in his note by Mr. ---- promised to
answer it, but he has never taken any further notice of it. I have
acted with the advice of Wordsworth. The brothers, as I expected,
promise their concurrence, and I daily expect a letter stating to what
extent they will contribute." With this letter before him an impartial
biographer can hardly be expected to adopt the theory which has
commended itself to the filial piety of the Rev. Derwent
Coleridge--namely, that it was through the father's "influence" that
the sons were sent to college. On a plain matter of fact such as this,
one may be permitted, without indelicacy, to uphold the conclusions
compelled by the evidence. Such expressions of opinion, on the other
hand, as that Coleridge's "separation from his family, brought about
and continued through the force of circumstances over which he had far
less control than has been commonly supposed, was in fact nothing else
but an ever-prolonged absence;" and that "from first to last he took an
affectionate, it may be said a passionate, interest in the welfare of
his children"--such expressions of mere opinion as these it may be
proper enough to pass by in respectful silence.
The following year brought with it no improvement in the embarrassed
circumstances, no reform of the disordered life. Still domiciled with
Mr. Morgan at Calne, the self-made sufferer writes to Cottle: "You will
wish to know something of myself. In health I am not worse than when at
Bristol I was best; yet fluctuating, yet unhappy, in circumstances poor
indeed! I have collected my scattered and my manuscript poems
sufficient to make one volume. Enough I have to make another. But, till
the latter is finished, I cannot, without great loss of character,
publish the former, on account of the arrangement, besides the
necessity of correction. For instance, I earnestly wish to begin the
volumes with what has never been seen by any, however few, such as a
series of odes on the different sentences of the Lord's Prayer, and,
more than all this, to finish my greater work on 'Christianity
considered as philosophy, and as the only philosophy.'" Then follows a
request for a loan of forty pounds on the security of the MSS., an
advance which Cottle declined to make, though he sent Coleridge "some
smaller temporary relief." The letter concludes with a reference to a
project for taking a house and receiving pupils to hoard and instruct,
which Cottle appeared to consider the crowning "degradation and
ignominy of all."
A few days later we find Lord Byron again coming to Coleridge's
assistance with a loan of a hundred pounds and words of counsel and
encouragement. Why should not the author of Remorse repeat his success
I "In Kean," writes Byron, "there is an actor worthy of expressing the
thoughts of the character which you have every power of embodying, and
I cannot but regret that the part of Ordonio was disposed of before his
appearance at Drury Lane. We have had nothing to be mentioned in the
same breath with Remorse for very many years, and I should think that
the reception of that play was sufficient to encourage the highest
hopes of author and audience." The advice was followed, and the drama
of Zapolya was the result. It is a work of even less dramatic strength
than its predecessor, and could scarcely, one thinks, have been as
successful with an audience. It was not, however, destined to see the
footlights. Before it had passed the tribunal of the Drury Lane
Committee it had lost the benefit of Byron's patronage through the
poet's departure from England, and the play was rejected by Mr. Douglas
Kinnaird, the then reader for the theatre, who assigned, according to
Mr. Gillman, "some ludicrous objections to the metaphysics." Before
leaving England, however, Byron rendered a last, and, as the result
proved, a not unimportant service to his brother-poet. He introduced
him to Mr. Murray, who, in the following year, undertook the
publication of _Christabel_--the most successful, in the sense of the
most popular, of all its author's productions in verse.
With the coming of spring in the following year that dreary story of
slow self-destruction, into which the narrative of Coleridge's life
from the age of thirty to that of forty-five resolves itself, was
brought to a close. Coleridge had at last perceived that his only hope
of redemption lay in a voluntary submission of his enfeebled will to
the control of others, and he had apparently just enough strength of
volition to form and execute the necessary resolve. He appears, in the
first instance, to have consulted a physician of the name of Adams,
who, on the 9th of April 1816, put himself in communication with Mr.
Gillman of Highgate. "A very learned, but in one respect an unfortunate
gentleman, has," he wrote, "applied to me on a singular occasion. He
has for several years been in the habit of taking large quantities of
opium. For some time past he has been in vain endeavouring to break
himself of it. It is apprehended his friends are not firm enough, from
a dread lest he should suffer by suddenly leaving it off, though he is
conscious of the contrary, and has proposed to me to submit himself to
any regimen, however severe. With this view he wishes to fix himself in
the house of some medical gentleman who will have the courage to refuse
him any laudanum, and under whose assistance, should he be the worse
for it, he may be relieved." Would such a proposal, inquires the
writer, be absolutely inconsistent with Mr. Gillman's family
arrangements? He would not, he adds, have proposed it "but on account
of the great importance of the character as a literary man. His
communicative temper will make his society very interesting as well as
useful." Mr. Gillman's acquaintance with Dr. Adams was but slight, and
he had had no previous intention of receiving an inmate into his house.
But the case very naturally interested him; he sought an interview with
Dr. Adams, and it was agreed that the latter should drive Coleridge to
Highgate the following evening. At the appointed hour, however,
Coleridge presented himself alone, and, after spending the evening at
Mr. Gillman's, left him, as even in his then condition he left most
people who met him for the first time, completely captivated by the
amiability of his manners and the charm of his conversation. The next
day Mr. Gillman received from him a letter, finally settling the
arrangement to place himself under the doctor's care, and concluding
with the following pathetic passage:
"And now of myself. My ever wakeful reason and the keenness of my moral
feelings will secure you from all unpleasant circumstances connected
with me save only one, viz. the evasion of a specific madness. You will
never hear anything but truth from me; prior habits render it out of my
power to tell an untruth, but, unless carefully observed, I dare not
promise that I should not, with regard to this detested poison, be
capable of acting one. Not sixty hours have yet passed without my
having taken laudanum, though, for the last week, comparatively
trifling doses. I have full belief that your anxiety need not be
extended beyond the first week, and for the first week, I shall not,
must not, be permitted to leave your house, unless with you; delicately
or indelicately, this must be done, and both the servants, and the
assistant, must receive absolute commands from you. The stimulus of
conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but, when I am
alone, the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the
blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. If (as I feel for the _first
time_ a soothing confidence that it will prove) I should leave you
restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not myself only that will
love and honour you; every friend I have (and, thank God! in spite of
this wretched vice I have many and warm ones, who were friends of my
youth, and have never deserted me) will thank you with reverence. I
have taken no notice of your kind apologies. If I could not be
comfortable in your house and with your family, I should deserve to be
miserable."
This letter was written on a Saturday, and on the following Monday
Coleridge presented himself at Mr. Gillman's, bringing in his hand the
proof--sheets of _Christabel_, now printed for the first time. He had
looked, as the letter just quoted shows, with a "soothing confidence"
to leaving his retreat at some future period in a restored condition of
moral and bodily health; and as regards the restoration, his confidence
was in a great measure justified. But the friendly doors which opened
to receive him on this 15th of April 1816, were destined to close only
upon his departing bier. Under the watchful and almost reverential care
of this well-chosen guardian, sixteen years of comparatively quiet and
well-ordered life, of moderate but effective literary activity, and of
gradual though never complete emancipation from his fatal habit, were
reserved to him. He had still, as we shall see, to undergo certain
recurrences of restlessness and renewals of pecuniary difficulty; his
shattered health was but imperfectly and temporarily repaired; his
"shaping spirit of imagination" could not and did not return; his
transcendental broodings became more and more the "habit of his soul."
But henceforth he recovers for us a certain measure of his long-lost
dignity, and a figure which should always have been "meet for the
reverence of the hearth" in the great household of English literature,
but which had far too long and too deeply sunk below it, becomes once
more a worthy and even a venerable presence. At evening-time it was
light.
FOOTNOTES
1. Coleridge made the acquaintance of this gentleman, who became his
enthusiastic disciple, in 1818. His chief interest for us is the fact
that for the next seven years he was Coleridge's correspondent.
Personally, he was a man of little judgment or critical discrimination,
and his sense of the ridiculous may be measured by the following
passage. Speaking of the sweetness of Charles Lamb's smile, he says
that "there is still one man living, a stockbroker, who has that
smile," and adds: "To those who wish to see the only thing left on
earth, _if it is still left_, of Lamb, his best and most beautiful
remain--his smile, I will indicate its possessor, Mr. ---- of
Throgmorton Street." How the original "possessor" of this apparently
assignable security would have longed to "feel Mr. Allsop's head"!