HIGHGATE; LECTURES OF 1818
[It was in the Spring of 1816 that Coleridge took refuge from himself
and the world and came to the Gillmans of Highgate, and became the great
lay preacher of his time. Before this he had been staying at 42, Norfolk
Street, Strand, and consulting a physician, Dr. Joseph Adams, who
recommended him to Mr. Gillman. The letter of Dr. Adams to Mr. Gillman
is as follows:
Hatton Garden, April 9, 1816.
Dear Sir.
A very learned, but in one respect an unfortunate gentleman, has 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 courage to refuse him any laudanum, and under whose
assistance, should he be the worse for it, he may be relieved. As he is
desirous of retirement, and a garden, I could think of no one so readily
as yourself. Be so good as to inform me whether such a proposal is
absolutely inconsistent with your family arrangements. I should not 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. Have the goodness to favour me with an
immediate answer, and believe me, dear sir,
Your faithful humble servant,
JOSEPH ADAMS.
Before calling on Dr. Gillman, Coleridge wrote the following letter:
LETTER 166. TO JAMES GILLMAN
42, Norfolk Street, Strand, Saturday Noon.
(April 13, 1816.)
My Dear Sir.
The first half hour I was with you convinced me that I should owe my
reception into your family exclusively to motives not less flattering to
me than honourable to yourself. I trust we shall ever in matters of
intellect be reciprocally serviceable to each other. Men of sense
generally come to the same conclusions; but they are likely to
contribute to each other's enlargement of view, in proportion to the
distance or even opposition of the points from which they set out.
Travel and the strange variety of situations and employments on which
chance has thrown me, in the course of my life, might have made me a
mere man of _observation_, if pain and sorrow and self-miscomplacence
had not forced my mind in on itself, and so formed habits of
_meditation_. It is now as much my nature to evolve the fact from the
law, as that of a practical man to deduce the law from the fact.
With respect to pecuniary remuneration, allow me to say, I must not at
least be suffered to make any addition to your family expenses--though I
cannot offer anything that would be in any way adequate to my sense of
the service; for that indeed there could not be a compensation, as it
must be returned in kind, by esteem and grateful affection.
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. No 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, I 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 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[94] 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. If you could make it convenient, I should wish
to be with you by Monday evening, as it would prevent the necessity of
taking fresh lodgings in town.
With respectful compliments to Mrs. Gillman and her sister, I remain,
dear sir,
Your much obliged,
S. T. COLERIDGE.[95]
The Gillmans felt spellbound by Coleridge's talk, and consented to
receive him into their household, where he remained for the last
eighteen years of his life.
It was at Highgate that Coleridge sat looking down upon the "illimitable
limitary ocean of London," as Carlyle finely puts it. He had still his
ambitions to do something for the Permanent; but the world of England
was not yet ripe for Transcendentalism, and the fine distinctions
between the Reason and the Understanding, Imagination and Fancy, the
Person and the Thing, and all the other subtle analysings of the Human
Intellect; but he still had his lore on Shakespeare to fall back on, and
he could re-churn it into a new series of Lectures. His ninth course he
delivered in 1818, 27th January to 13th March. The course was delivered
at "Flower de Luce" Court (Fleur-de-Lis Court). The notes of these
lectures occupy about a half of the Bohn Library volume of the _Lectures
on Shakespeare_. They are often, like the rest of Coleridge's prose
writing, a series of brilliant digressions from the main point, but like
De Quincey's similar wanderings, they often come wonderfully round to
the subject in hand. H. Crabb Robinson attended only four of the course,
and he does not give a very favourable account of them. Gillman says:
"He lectured from notes, yet it was obvious that his audience was more
delighted when, putting his notes aside, he spoke extempore. He was
brilliant, fluid, and rapid; his words seemed to flow from a person
repeating with grace and energy some delightful poem. If, however, he
sometimes paused, it was not for the want of words, but that he was
seeking the most appropriate, or their most logical arrangement." The
following letters, given by Gillman in his _Life of Coleridge_, are
supposed to belong to this period.
LETTER 167. TO ----
(-- 1816?)
In a copy of verses, entitled _A Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of
Chamouni_, I describe myself under the influence of strong devotional
feelings, gazing on the mountain, till as if it had been a shape
emanating from and sensibly representing her own essence, my soul had
become diffused through the mighty vision: and there,
As in her natural form, swell'd vast to Heaven.
Mr. Wordsworth, I remember, censured the passage as strained and
unnatural, and condemned the hymn in toto, (which, nevertheless, I
ventured to publish in my _Sibylline Leaves_,) as a specimen of the mock
sublime. It may be so for others, but it is impossible that I should
myself find it unnatural, being conscious that it was the image and
utterance of thoughts and emotions in which there was no mockery. Yet,
on the other hand, I could readily believe that the mood and habit of
mind out of which the hymn rose, that differs from Milton's and
Thomson's and from the psalms, the source of all three, in the author's
addressing himself to _individual_ objects actually present to his
senses, while his great predecessors apostrophize _classes_ of things
presented by the memory, and generalized by the understanding;--I can
readily believe, I say, that in this there may be too much of what our
learned _med'ciners_ call the _idiosyncratic_ for true poetry.--For,
from my very childhood, I have been accustomed to _abstract_, and as it
were, unrealize whatever of more than common interest my eyes dwelt on,
and then by a sort of transfusion and transmission of my consciousness
to identify myself with the object; and I have often thought within the
last five or six years, that if ever I should feel once again the genial
warmth and stir of the poetic impulse, and refer to my own experiences,
I should venture on a yet stranger and wilder allegory than of
yore--that I would allegorize myself as a rock, with its summit just
raised above the surface of some bay or strait in the Arctic Sea, "while
yet the stern and solitary night brooked no alternate sway"--all around
me fixed and firm, methought, as my own substance, and near me lofty
masses, that might have seemed to "hold the moon and stars in fee," and
often in such wild play with meteoric lights, or with the quiet shine
from above, which they made rebound in sparkles, or dispand in
off-shoot, and splinters, and iridescent needle shafts of keenest
glitter, that it was a pride and a place of healing to lie, as in an
apostle's shadow, within the eclipse and deep substance-seeming gloom of
"these dread ambassadors from earth to heaven, great hierarchs!" And
though obscured, yet to think myself obscured by consubstantial forms,
based in the same foundation as my own. I grieved not to serve
them--yea, lovingly and with gladsomeness I abased myself in their
presence: for they are my brothers, I said, and the mastery is theirs by
right of older birth, and by right of the mightier strivings of the
hidden fire that uplifted them above me.
LETTER 168. TO ----[96]
(--1816?)
My dear sir,
Accept my thanks for your kind remembrance of me, and for the proof of
it in the present of your tribute of friendship, I have read it with
uninterrupted interest, and with satisfaction scarcely less continuous.
In adding the three last words, I am taking the word satisfaction in its
strictest sense: for had I written pleasure, there would have been no
ground for the limitation. Indeed as it was, it is a being scrupulous
over much. For at the two only passages at which I made a moment's
_halt_ (viz. § p. 3, and p. 53, last line but five,) "she had
seldom"----"oppressive awe," my not _objection_ but _stoppage_ at the
latter amounted only to a doubt, a _quære_, whether the trait of
character here given should not have been followed by some little
comment, as for instance, that such a state of feeling, though not
desirable in a regenerate person, in whom belief had wrought love, and
love obedience, must yet be ranked amongst those constitutional
differences that may exist between the best and wisest Christians,
without any corresponding difference in their spiritual progress. One
saint fixes his eyes on the _palm_, another saint thinks of the previous
_conflict_, and closes them in prayer. Both are waters of the same
fountain--_this_ the basin, _that_ the salient column, both equally dear
to God, and both may be used as examples for men, the one to invite the
thoughtless sceptic, the other to alarm the reckless believer. You will
see, therefore, that I do not object to the sentence itself; but as a
matter of _feeling_, it met me too singly and suddenly. I had not
anticipated such a trait, and the surprise counterfeited the sensation
of perplexity for a moment or two. On as little objection to anything
you have said, did the _desiderium_ the sense of not being quite
satisfied, proceed in regard to the § p. 3. In the particular instance
in the application of the sentiment, I found nothing to question or
qualify. It was the rule or principle which a certain class of your
readers might be inclined to deduce from it, it was the possible
generalization of the particular instance that made me pause. I am
jealous of the disposition to turn Christianity or Religion into a
particular _business_ or line. "Well, Miss, how does your pencil go on,
I was delighted with your last landscape." "Oh, sir, I have quite given
_up_ that, I have got into the religious line." Now, my dear sir, the
rule which I have deduced from the writings of St. Paul and St. John,
and (permit me also to add) of Luther, would be this. Form and endeavour
to strengthen into an habitual and instinct-like feeling, the sense of
the utter incompatibility of Christianity with every thing wrong or
unseemly, with whatever betrays or fosters the mind of flesh, the
predominance of the _animal_ within us, by having habitually present to
the mind, the full and lively conviction of its perfect compatibility
with whatever is innocent of its harmony, with whatever
contra-distinguishes the HUMAN from the animal; of its sympathy and
coalescence with the cultivation of the faculties, affections, and
fruitions, which God hath made _peculiar_ to _man_, either wholly or in
their ordained _combination_ with what is peculiar to humanity, the
blurred, but not obliterated signatures of our original title deed, (and
God said, man will we make in our own image.) What?--shall Christianity
exclude or alienate us from those powers, acquisitions, and attainments,
which Christianity is so preeminently calculated to elevate and enliven
and sanctify?
Far, very far, am I from suspecting in you, my dear sir, any
participation in these prejudices of a shrivelled proselyting and
censorious religionist. But a numerous and stirring faction there is, in
the so-called Religious Public, whose actual and actuating principles,
with whatever vehemence they may disclaim it in words, is, that
redemption is a something not yet effected--that there is neither sense
nor force in our baptism--and that instead of the Apostolic command,
_Rejoice, and again I say unto you, rejoice_; baptized Christians are to
put on sackcloth and ashes, and try, by torturing themselves and others,
to procure a rescue from the devil. Again, let me thank you for your
remembrance of me, and believe me from the hour we first met at
Bristol, with esteem and regard,
Your sincere friend,
S. T. COLERIDGE.
* * * * *
In 1816 an attempt was made to revive _Remorse_ at Drury Lane, and
Coleridge had some intercourse with Byron regarding it and another
tragedy he was proposing to write for the theatre (_Westminster Review_,
94 (1874), p. 2). He wrote the following fragment on Byron probably
about this time:
LETTER 169. TO----
(--1816?)
If you had seen Lord Byron, you could scarcely disbelieve him--so
beautiful a countenance I scarcely ever saw--his teeth so many
stationary smiles--his eyes the open portals of the sun--things of light
and for light--and his forehead so ample, and yet so flexible, passing
from marble smoothness into a hundred wreathes and lines and dimples
correspondent to the feelings and sentiments he is uttering.[97]]
FOOTNOTES:
[94] This is too strong an expression. It was not idleness, it was
not sensual indulgence, that led Coleridge to contract this
habit. No, it was latent disease, of which sufficient proof is
given in this memoir.--[Note by Gillman.]
[95] [Letter CCVIII is our 166.]
[96] [Cottle or Estlin.]
[97] [Letters CCIX-CCXVIII follow 169.]