Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes

conceptions. God must be considered as a Platonic idea, “the Archetype” of all living things, expressed in a personal trinity whose presence had direct impact on each individual. Otherwise, “God becomes a mere power in darkness, even as Gravitation, and instead of a moral Religion of practical Influence we shall have only a physical Theory to gratify ideal curiosity.” Similarly, the soul must be conceived not as a mechanistic entity, but as a progression “of reflex consciousness” arising through the hierarchy of Nature.

      This idea, clearly developed from his reading in Schelling, would profoundly affect Coleridge’s later grapplings with the scientific theory of evolution. The human soul differed from all other levels of animal consciousness, first by its ability to reflect upon itself, thereby producing a “continuous” moral conscience; but second by its power to be “modified” by other human beings and to move towards some greater unity or spiritual identity. This ultimately mystical idea could be seen as an intensification of his earlier poetic conception of “the One Life”, so beautifully set out in his Conversation Poems and his letters to Sotheby of 1802. It is a vivid mixture of his old Pantheism, now combined with the traditional Christian doctrine of spiritual unity in the body of Christ.

      Coleridge formulated this in a strikingly untheological way. “A male & female Tiger is neither more or less whether you suppose them only existing in their appropriate wilderness, or whether you suppose a thousand Pairs. But man is truly altered by the co-existence of other men; his faculties cannot be developed in himself alone, & only himself. Therefore the human race not by a bold metaphor, but in sublime reality, approach to, & might become, one body whose Head is Christ (the Logos)”.²⁰ In anthropological language, “the whole Species is capable of being regarded as one Individual”.^*

      The essay contained much else, speculative and self-questioning. It was not least remarkable for demonstrating Coleridge’s ability to withdraw into his cave of metaphysics with Olympian calm at the very moment when the crisis of his marriage pressed upon him. Perhaps the image of paired tigers alone betrayed his worldly terrors.

      During Coleridge’s absence in Malta, Clarkson had published his Portraiture of Quakerism, and resumed his campaigning work on the Abolition Committee which sponsored a series of successful bills against the slave trade in 1805–6 championed by Wilberforce. His wife Catherine had become intimate with Dorothy Wordsworth, and now Coleridge also opened his heart to Catherine, remaining with her at Bury St Edmund’s for nearly a week. One result of this stop-over was that Catherine and Dorothy now began a confidential correspondence about Coleridge’s health and marriage which provided an inexhaustible topic for gossip over the next four years.

      Coleridge’s anxieties did not preclude a flying visit to the Newmarket races, where he was particularly struck by the mahoganytopped dicing tables, deeply indented by the circular heels of dice-boxes banged down by the players in their excitement or disappointment, so that the imprinted table-tops were “truly a written History of the fiendish Passions of Gambling”.²¹ Another expedition took him to Cambridge, the first return since undergraduate days twelve years previously, where the young men all looked just the same in the university pubs and “the only alteration” was in himself. He dropped into Trinity College library, where he found his old Professor of Greek, Richard Porson, who failed to recognize him, though this could have been because Porson was in a “pitiable State” of drunkenness. These visions of excess were not reassuring, and he wondered gloomily what impression he himself would make at Keswick under the penetrating gaze of Southey and Mrs Coleridge.

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      On 26 October he finally committed himself to the Carlisle stagecoach. But on the way he formed a plan to find Sara Hutchinson where she was staying at Penrith, before going on to his family at Greta Hall. His legs and face swelled during the journey, as he blanketed himself in opium and brandy. At Penrith, he found that Wordsworth had forestalled him. Sara had left half an hour previously with the whole Grasmere household, who had at last set out for their winter stay at Coleorton. They were now stopping over with friends at Kendal. Notes flew between Penrith and Kendal, Coleridge refusing to go on, and the Wordsworths refusing to go back, hampered by their trunks and three small children. It was a chaotic reunion. In the end Coleridge appeared at Kendal at seven in the evening, but took rooms at an inn in a curious gesture of independence, bidding William to join him for supper. Of course they all came hurrying round at once.

      They had been apart for nearly three years. Coleridge the Romantic traveller, Coleridge the imagined confidant of the Prelude, Coleridge the tragic exile, had grown to mythical proportions in their minds. But it was far from the emotional reunion they had all imagined. He was physically unrecognizable: pallid, overweight, ill at ease, his mind still drifting somewhere in the Mediterranean.

      It was Dorothy who recorded their dismay at the strange, distracted wanderer whom they found in place of their old, long-lost friend. She wrote to Mrs Clarkson: “We all went thither to him and never did I feel such a shock as the first in sight of him. We all felt in the same way…He is utterly changed; and yet sometimes, when he was in animated conversation concerning things removed from him, I saw something of his former self. But never when we were alone with him. He then scarcely ever spoke of anything that concerned him, or us, or our common friends nearly, except we forced him to it; and immediately he changed the conversation to Malta, Sir Alexander Ball, the corruptions of government, anything but what we were yearning after…that he is ill I am well assured, and must sink if he does not grow more happy.” Only once or twice did Dorothy catch a shadow, a transitory gleam, of that “divine expression of his countenance” they all remembered.²²

      They remained with him from Sunday evening till Tuesday morning; “his misery has made him so weak”. They supported his plan to separate from Mrs Coleridge, though fearing he would never have the resolution to go through with it. Wordsworth criticized the London lecture scheme, and offered instead to cancel the whole Coleorton plan and rent a large house near Hawkshead so they could all winter together again in the Lakes. Coleridge in turn rejected this, as compromising all hope of financial independence. Finally Wordsworth sent his whole party on to Leicestershire, and remained behind for a third night at the inn alone with Coleridge.

      Alone, that is, except for Sara Hutchinson, who also stayed behind unchaperoned with the two men. This was an unconventional move, with some risk of scandal. There is no record of what the three of them discussed or decided on that momentous night of 29 October 1806 at Kendal, but it was to affect Coleridge’s life for the next four years. One immediate result was that, despite all his resolutions and reflections in Italy, Coleridge found that he was still desperately in love with Asra, and he believed the feeling was reciprocated.

      He later entered in his Notebook what was perhaps his most open declaration of love for Asra; and not merely love, but undeniable sexual passion: “I know, you love me! – My reason knows it, my heart feels it; yet still let your eyes, your hands tell me; still say, O often & often say, ‘My Beloved! I love you’; indeed I love you: for why should not my ears, and all my outward Being share in the Joy – the fuller my inner Being is of the sense, the more my outward organs yearn & crave for it. O bring my whole nature into balance and harmony.”²³

      Wordsworth’s role as friend and confidant, and go-between with Asra, is not entirely easy to understand. His private letters (as well as Dorothy’s) certainly show that he believed Coleridge’s marriage was already wrecked, and that he alone could provide the stable household that could bring Coleridge’s drinking and opium-taking under control. “If anything good is to be done for him, it must be done by me.”²⁴ But he also wanted Coleridge’s help and advice with The Prelude, and perhaps unconsciously did everything he could to forestall Coleridge’s embarking on a new literary career in London.

      Sara Hutchinson thus became crucial to the future life Wordsworth