Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
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together on purely literary matters.
Wordsworth left at seven o’clock on Sunday morning to catch the mail coach north from the City. It was snowing lightly, and his thoughts were very full, of Coleridge and poetry and the Imagination they both worshipped. He described his sensations in a most beautiful passage to Sir George Beaumont, which he later turned into a blank-verse poem. It can be taken as a tribute to their ancient comradeship, even as their paths and destinies were dividing; the one left to struggle in the great city, the other returning to his native stronghold.
“You will deem it strange,” he told Beaumont “but really some of the imagery of London has since my return hither been more present to my mind, than that of this noble Vale. I will tell you how this happens to be. – I left Coleridge at 7 o’clock on Sunday morning; and walked towards the City in a very thoughtful and melancholy state of mind; I had passed through Temple Bar and by St Dunstans, noticing nothing, and entirely occupied by my own thoughts, when looking up, I saw before me the avenue of Fleet Street, silent, empty, and pure white with a sprinkling of new fallen snow, not a cart or carriage to obstruct the view…and beyond and towering above it was the huge and majestic form of St Paul’s, solemnized by a thin veil of falling snow. I cannot say how much I was affected at this un-thought of sight, in such a place and what a blessing I felt there is in habits of exalted Imagination.”57 It was precisely this gift of poetic vision that Coleridge had been analysing in his fourth lecture.
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Coleridge continued lecturing twice weekly, mainly using Shakespeare and Milton, until the end of May. He rarely stuck to his programme, but noted: “Illustration of principles my main Object, am therefore not so digressive as might appear.”58 The records of the remaining sixteen lectures are very scattered, but Crabb Robinson, the newly appointed Foreign Correspondent to The Times, was particularly struck by the combination of close textual readings of English poetry, with sudden upward flights into dizzy philosophical speculations from Kant, Schiller and Herder. He also observed that the digressions could be the most valuable and moving part of a session.59 Later Coleridge would pride himself on the risky, but electrifying effect of seeming to have no text, like a high-wire artist working without a net.
The diarist Joseph Farrington recorded one characteristic opening gambit: “When Coleridge came into the Box there were several Books laying. He opened two or three of them silently and shut them again after a short inspection. He then paused, & leaned his head on his hand, and at last said, He had been thinking for a word to express the distinct character of Milton as a Poet, but not finding one that would express it, He should make one – ’Ideality‘. He spoke extempore.”60
The shorthand reporter, J. P. Collier, who covered the later 1811 lecture series, recalled how Coleridge had learned his technique in 1808 by painful trial and error, finally claiming to hold his audience by complete spontaneity. “The first lecture he prepared himself and when it was finished received many high flown frigid compliments, which had evidently been before studied. For the next lecture he prepared himself less, and was much admired; for the third lecture, and for the remainder, he did not prepare himself at all, and was most enthusiastically applauded and approved, and the Theatre completely filled. The reason to his mind was obvious, for what he said came warm from the heart…”61 Of course it was certainly not as simple as that (the second lecture had been De Quincey’s memorable disaster), but it was a true reflection of Coleridge’s method as it painfully evolved.
A twelve-year-old girl, Katherine Byerly (daughter of the manager of the Wedgwood potteries) recalled years later: “He came unprepared to lecture. The subject was a literary one, and the poet had either forgotten to write, or left what he had written at home. His locks were now trimmed, and a conscious importance gleamed in his eloquent eyes, as he turned then towards the fair and noble heads which bent to receive his apology. Every whisper (and there were some hundreds of ladies present) was hushed, and the poet began. I remember there was a stateliness in his language, and…I began to think, as Coleridge went on, that the lecture had been left at home on purpose; he was so eloquent – there was such a combination of wit and poetry in his similes…”62
The journalist Edward Jerningham was rather harder to please. Nonetheless he recorded grudging praise in a letter to his niece, Lady Bedingfield. Jerningham’s evident disapproval of Coleridge’s highly personal style makes his witness account particularly intriguing. “My opinion as to the Lecturer is that he possesses a great reach of mind; that he is a wild Enthusiast respecting the objects of his elogium; that he is sometimes very eloquent, sometimes paradoxical, sometimes absurd. His voice has something in it particularly plaintive and interesting. His person is short, thick, his countenance not inspirited with any animation. He spoke without assistance from a manuscript, and therefore said several things suddenly, struck off from the Anvil, some of which were entitled to high Applause and others incurred mental disapprobation. He too often interwove Himself into the texture of his Lecture.”
The last trait was exactly what appealed to other listeners. Even Jerningham, seeing Coleridge’s wild and dishevelled figure among so many judges, bishops, and “ladies of the first fashion”, was prompted to compare him to the great medieval lecturer Peter Abelard, in the fashionable Schools of Paris.63
Coleridge found ways of charming and engaging his audience, even in the midst of his most obscure flights. Crabb Robinson recalled: “I came in late one day and found him in the midst of a deduction of the origin of the fine arts from the necessities of our being, which a friend who accompanied me could make neither head nor tail of, because he had not studied German metaphysics. The first ‘free art’ of man (architecture) arose from the impulse to make his habitation beautiful; 2nd arose from the instinct to provide himself food; the 3rd the love of dress. Here C. atoned for his metaphysics by his gallantry: he declared that the passion for dress in females has been the cause of the civilization of mankind. ‘When I behold the ornaments which adorn a beautiful woman, I see that instinct which leads man not to be content with what is necessary or useful, but impels him to the beautiful.’”64
Again and again in the lectures he returned to the psychology of the Imagination, often finding both original and homely analogies. In one he examined the accounts of ghosts and apparitions, comparing them with the effects of stage illusion. A “trick” ghost was quite different from an internalized hallucination, which worked by a process of imaginative association very similar to poetry. The one merely stunned with painful shock, while the other gradually took over the mind like a dream or a fairytale, holding rational laws at bay. He had often experienced the latter himself in Malta.65
In another lecture, one attended by Sir George Beaumont, he developed the same central idea of the imaginative power suspending rational law, by analogy with children’s modes of thinking. Here he “interwove” not himself, but his son Hartley. Taking the example of stage illusion, he used child psychology to explore a new Romantic doctrine of perception. The eighteenth-century French critics had claimed that theatre produced “actual Delusion” in an adult audience; while Dr Johnson had championed the English empiricist or common-sense tradition by denying “altogether” that any real delusion took place. Coleridge disagreed with both positions, and argued for a more subtle, dynamic account of what actually occurs. The mind does not stand passively outside its experience, registering and recording. It is more like an electrical current, pulsing between objective and subjective polarities.
This example was calculated to appeal to his audience:
As Sir George Beaumont was showing me a very fine engraving from Rubens, representing a storm at sea (without a Vessel or Boat introduced), my little Boy (then about 5 years old)