Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
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Mary Todd invited him to supper with her husband, and Coleridge spent an exquisitely embarrassing evening with them, soon realizing that the poor, worn-out-looking woman was deeply unhappy in her own marriage and regretted the past even more than he. He lay awake that night in his Strand rooms, weeping. Later he told Stuart that Mary had suffered “the very worst parts of my own Fate, in an exaggerated Form”. Mary Todd separated from her husband three years later.79
Talking over these matters with Stuart in May, he felt a growing urge to reassert himself, and prevent life slipping through his fingers. It was now that he wrote his long entries on the mid-life crisis, and “for the first time suffered murmurs, & more than murmurs, articulate Complaints, to escape from me, relatively to Wordsworth’s conduct towards me…”80 At his Strand rooms, in the midst of his lectures and dinners, Coleridge felt the awful gap between his busy public existence and his private isolation. “Ah! dear Book!” he sighed, “Sole Confidant of a breaking Heart, whose social nature compels some Outlet. I write more unconscious that I am writing, than in my most earnest modes I talk.”81
Somewhere across the street, when the rumble of carriages fell silent, he could hear a caged canary singing from a hidden attic window. “O that sweet Bird! Where is it – it is encaged somewhere out of sight – but from my bedroom at the Courier office, from the windows of which I look out on the walls of the Lyceum, I hear it, early Dawn – often alas! then lulling me to late Sleep – again when I awake – and all day long. It is in Prison – all its instincts ungratified – yet it feels the influence of Spring – & calls with unceasing Melody to the Loves, that dwell in Fields and Greenwood bowers –; unconscious perhaps that it calls in vain. – O are they the Songs of a happy enduring Day-dream? Has the Bird Hope? Or does it abandon itself to the Joy of its Frame – a living Harp of Eolus? – O that I could do so.”82 The very self-consciousness of the symbolism, so plangent and so beautiful, was its own reproach.
But other symbols, uglier and more accusing, also haunted him and were strong enough to become verse. If he was a caged bird, Coleridge was also a caterpillar emerging in the spring, insatiable and devouring in the hunger of his heart. If his soul was the “Psyche” of Greek mythology, a butterfly free to take flight; his body was a more sinister and repulsive creature, perhaps even a monster of emotional greed:
…For in this earthly frame
Ours is the reptile’s lot, much toil, much blame,
Manifold motions making little speed,
And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.83
Yet he also wondered if the Greek doctrine of the separation of soul and body implied that his mind could never be truly corrupted, even by opium. Indeed, perhaps opium was the source of his inspiration, despite its terrible physical effects. “Need we wonder at Plato’s opinions concerning the Body; at least, need that man wonder whom a pernicious Drug shall make capable of conceiving & bringing forth Thoughts, hidden in him before, which shall call forth the deepest feelings of his best, greatest & sanest Contemporaries?…That the dire poison for a delusive time has made the body, the unknown somewhat, a fitter Instrument for the all-powerful Soul.”84
His Notebooks (“alas, my only Confidants”)85 of May and June are full of such questioning, about the nature of love, genius, imaginative power and self-destruction. As he lay “musing” on his sofa, his literary speculations from the lectures feeding back into his private ruminations, he often felt overwhelmed by the sheer activity of his mind: “My Thoughts crowd each other to death”.86 He was never free of painful broodings on Wordsworth, shimmering memories of Asra, or “fantastic pangs of imagination” about Charlotte Brent, either.87
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Meanwhile the Royal Institution lectures came to an end as dramatically as they had begun. Coleridge was due to close the series with a final five lectures in the first fortnight of June on “Contemporary Poets”, and most notably on Wordsworth. Whether he ever gave this one, or any of them, is wrapped in mystery. According to his own account, he became violently ill again at the beginning of June, and also suffered the loss of his crucial Notebook containing all his headings and quotations. He postponed, and then extemporized for at least one lecture, probably on 10 June, and then abruptly the whole series was terminated. What exactly occurred, and why, is problematic.
Edward Jerningham gave one sufficiently theatrical explanation, though without revealing if Wordsworth was ever mentioned. “He looked sullen and told us that He previously had prepared and written down Quotations from different Authors to illustrate the present Lecture. These Quotations he had put among the leaves of his Pocket Book which was stolen as he was coming to the Institution. This narrative was not indulgently received, and he went through his Lecture heavily and without advancing anything that was spirited or animated. The next day he received an Intimation from the Managers that his Lectures were no longer expected.”88
The theft, though, really did occur. De Quincey, down from Oxford for the summer, told his sister shortly afterwards: “This day week he lectured at the Institution, and had his pocket picked as he walked from the Strand; but, having notes, he managed to get through it very well.”90 Moreover, the Institution was keen for him to continue. It was only when the Secretary received a desperate note from Coleridge on 13 June, that they regretfully accepted his demission on the grounds of ill-health.
The Secretary took the highly unusual step of recording the letter in full in the Institution minutes. “I find my health in such a state as to make it almost death to me to give any further Lectures. I beg that you would acquaint the Managers that instead of expecting any remuneration, I shall, as soon as I can, repay the sum I have received. I am indeed more likely to repay it by my executors than myself. If I could quit my Bed-room, I would have hazarded everything rather than not have come, but I have such violent Fits of Sickness and Diarrhoea that it is literally impossible.”89
The Committee, headed by Thomas Bernard, refused to accept Coleridge’s gallant offer to return the £40 advance, but instead voted to make “a proportional payment” for the twenty lectures actually given, a sum calculated at £60. It was unfortunate that owing to the Institution’s own financial difficulties, this was not made until ten months later in April 1809. Coleridge remained in friendly touch with Bernard, who clearly admired his work, and later advised him on a journalistic scheme. But later literary lectures were thereafter placed in more conventional hands (the Reverend Mr Dibdin and John Campbell, otherwise unknown to fame).
It was not till long after that the Institution came to regard Coleridge’s series as one of the most remarkable it had ever sponsored, and commissioned retrospective lectures to celebrate it in the same theatre. It came to be seen as a historic linkage between philosophies of poetry and science, as essentially experimental disciplines “performed with the passion of Hope”. It was the series that launched Coleridge into a new career as lecturer over the next decade, and always connected him in the public mind with the star scientific performer of the age, Humphry Davy. Indeed Davy, after his grim forebodings of February, was inspired to write a celebratory poem on the subject.*
But the puzzle of Coleridge’s collapse in June 1808 remains. The real explanation seems to have been personal unhappiness, increased to the