Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes

them. He ain’t well that’s certain – Wordsworth is coming to see him. He sits up in a two pair of stairs room at the Courier Office, & receives visitors on his close-stool [commode].”³⁵

      Davy, himself recovering from the near lethal dose of gaol fever, was appalled by what he had witnessed from the gallery of the Great Lecture Room. He felt he had observed a great mind in operation, but undergoing a process of self-destruction. Using imagery that Coleridge had himself used of Shakespeare’s mind, he saw his friend being overwhelmed by a jungle of disorder. “He has suffered greatly from Excessive Sensibility – the disease of genius. His mind is a wilderness in which the cedar & oak which might aspire to the skies are stunted in their growth by underwood, thorns, briars and parasitical plants. With the most exalted genius, enlarged views, sensitive heart & enlightened mind, he will be the victim of want of order, precision and regularity. I cannot think of him without experiencing mingled feelings of admiration, regard & pity.”³⁶

      By contrast, De Quincey gleefully recalled the “philosopher’s” abject state like the scene from a comic opera. “I often saw him, picturesquely enveloped in nightcaps, surmounted by handkerchiefs indorsed upon handkerchiefs, shouting from the attics of the Courier office, down three or four flights of stairs, to a certain ‘Mrs Brainbridge’, his sole attendant, whose dwelling was in the subterranean regions of the house…until I expected to hear the Strand and distant Fleet Street, take up the echo of ‘Brainbridge!’.”³⁷

      Besides being ill, Coleridge was intensely lonely. Throughout February and March, his letters flew out in every direction – to Asra, the Wordsworths, Lamb, De Quincey, Southey, Mrs Coleridge, and above all to the Morgans, seeking some form of solace. It was not easily to be found. To Mary Morgan he wrote of what seemed to him an inexplicably cruel reply from his wife: “from beginning to end it is in a strain of dancing, frisking high spirits – jokes about the Itch…and she notices my illness, the particulars of which and the strong & fearful suspicions entertained of the Stone, in these words – neither more nor less – ‘Lord! how often you are ill! You must be MORE careful about Colds!’”³⁸

      When John Morgan kindly suggested he retreat again to Bristol, Coleridge felt he could not abandon his lectures. Besides, he asked, “what right have I to make your House my Hospital – how am I justified in bringing Sickness, & Sorrow, and all the disgusts and all the troublesomeness of Disease, into your quiet Dwelling. Ah! whither else can I go? – To Keswick? The sight of that Woman would destroy me. To Grasmere? – They are still in their Cottage…& they have not room scarcely for a Cat.”³⁹

      In a wild attempt to lift his gloom, Coleridge now pursued a postal flirtation with Mary and Charlotte, with strange suggestive sallies and opium-inspired fancies. He wore locks of their hair round his neck, and carried Charlotte’s profile miniature in his pocket like a lucky charm. When he lost the “pretty Shirt Pin” Charlotte had sent him (another sign of chaos) he swore that he would never wear another one as long as he lived: “The sense of its real Absence shall make a sort of Imaginary Presence to me.”⁴⁰

      He concocted an extraordinary scheme of having Mary and Charlotte purchase dresses in Bristol, measured to fit them, but intended to be sent on as presents for Asra and Mary Wordsworth in the Lake District. This was the “Two Sisters” fantasy brought alarmingly to life. Astonishingly, John Morgan allowed this to proceed, the dresses were bought and cut and posted north, while Coleridge gallantly disputed the price, pretending they had charged him too little. Coleridge’s amorous protestations were couched in nursery endearments of the most deliberately blush-making kind. “As to my lovely Mantua-makers, if a beautiful Lady with a fine form, a sweet Chin and Mouth and black eyes will tell an Eff-I-Bee, about 14 shillings instead of at least £5, and another sweet young Lady with dear meek eyes, as sweet a chin & mouth, & a general Darlingness of Tones, manners, & Person, will join with her Sister & swear to the same Fib, what can a gallant young Gentleman do but admit that his Memory is the Fibster, tho’ he should tell another Fib in so Doing?”⁴¹

      When further fuelled by opium, this coy dalliance got increasingly out of hand and confused. Coleridge in one letter imagined an alternative life in which he might have been married to Charlotte, or for that matter to Mary Morgan, or either of the Hutchinson sisters. His actual marriage was a crucifixion. “Neither wonder nor be wounded, if in this transient Infirmity of Soul I gave way in my agony, and causelessly & almost unknowing what I did: cried out from my Cross, Eli lama sabachthani! My friends! My Sisters! Why have you forsaken me!”⁴²

      This was too much, even for the Morgans, as Coleridge quickly realized. He hastily apologized: “I intreat dear Miss Brent to think of what I wrote as the mere light-headedness of a diseased Body, and a heart sore-stricken – and fearing all things from every one.”⁴³ Yet there is little doubt that these dreams did possess and torture him. He felt he had “played the fool, and cut the throat of my Happiness, of my genius, of my utility” in marrying Sara Coleridge.

      Underneath all this still lay the haunting, seductive image of Asra. Besides the symbolic dress, he sent her a copy of Chapman’s Homer (used in his lecture preparations), plaintively remarking that its battered jacket properly represented its sender’s state: “to quote from myself – A Man disinherited, in form & face/ By nature & mishap, of outward Grace!’⁴⁴ He talked endlessly about her to Daniel Stuart – still his great confidant in this crisis – and wrote as well: “Would to God I had health & liberty! – If Sense, Sensibility, sweetness of Temper, perfect Simplicity and an unpretending Nature, joined to shrewdness & entertainingness, make a valuable Woman, Sara H. is so.” He added bitterly that in marriage he saw no middle way “between great happiness and thorough Misery”.⁴⁵

      Still seeking to reach Asra’s heart, he roused himself from his sickbed to champion the cause of her sailor brother, Henry Hutchinson, who was trying to buy himself out of the navy. His story was typical of the times, and gives another view of Nelson’s service. Henry had originally been taken by a wartime press gang, nearly wrecked in the Gulf of Mexico, and imprisoned for four months in Vera Cruz. He now languished in the man-of-war Chichester, anchored off the Essex marshes, which was about to set sail on another enforced voyage.

      Coleridge organized food and clothes, and wrote an impassioned plea to Thomas Clarkson and Sir George Beaumont, begging them to intervene in the case. He dramatized Henry (whom he had never actually met) as an Ancient Mariner and even, one might think, as an alter ego. “This man’s whole Life has been one dream-like Tale of Sufferings – of repeated Imprisonments, of Famine, of Wounds – and twice he has had the Yellow Fever – & escaped each time from among a charnel-house of Corpses. He has done enough – he has suffered enough. And to me it is as if it were my own child – far more than if it were myself – for he is the Brother of the two Beings, whom of all on Earth I most highly honour, most fervently love.”⁴⁶ Henry Hutchinson’s release was eventually obtained through the Admiralty the following year.

      It was now that Wordsworth came south, as Lamb had prophesied, reaching London on 24 February. He was genuinely concerned by Coleridge’s illness and mental state, and wild reports that he was dying. He had always disapproved of the lectures, and he determined to take Coleridge back to the safety of the Lakes, “to prevail on him to return” as Dorothy put it.⁴⁷ He also wished to consult Coleridge about his new poem, “The White Doe of Rylstone”, and arrange for its publication