come and dictate a letter for me to write to her…but yet a letter from me or you shall go today.” Yet she never regretted his presence, and reminded him that “a few cheerful evenings spent with you serves to bear up our spirits many a long & weary year”.12
In the event, Coleridge’s letter was subdued and suspiciously practical. He did not speak of a separation as such, but proposed a schedule of work commitments which would quickly bring him back to London. His wife and Hartley could join him if they wished. “On Friday Sennight, please God! I shall quit Town, and trust to be at Keswick on Monday, Sept. 29th. If I finally accept the Lectures, I must return by the midst of November; but propose to take you and Hartley with me, as we may be sure of Rooms either in Mr Stuart’s House at Knightsbridge, or in the Strand. – My purpose is to divide my time steadily between my ‘Reflections Moral and Political grounded on Information obtained during two years Resident in Italy and the Mediterranean’; and the Lectures on the Principles common to all the Fine Arts.” He reminded her of the £110 sent from Malta, spoke of his tenderness to his “dear children” and assured her of his “deep tho’ sad affection” towards her.13
In the event, Coleridge did not set out for Keswick until 12 October, but from now on he kept his wife regularly informed of his movements, emphasizing the financial importance to both of them of the lecture scheme. One further possibility was a combined series of winter lectures, at both the Royal Institution and the London Institution, which would make “a respectable annuity of perhaps £400 a year”. When he heard that Southey “strongly disapproved” of the scheme, he added indignantly: “Something (he knows) I must do, & that immediately, to get money…And if I should die, as soon as I feel probable, it seems the most likely mode of distinguishing myself so as to leave Patrons for you & my Children.”14
Perhaps it should have been clear to Sara Coleridge that her husband had come back from the Mediterranean with a new vision of his future. That future lay essentially in London, where he could find work as a writer and some help for his opium addiction. He was not prepared to live permanently with her again at Keswick, but he wanted to see his children, help with their education, and support the whole family with the Wedgwood annuity and his own literary earnings. He wanted the two boys, especially Hartley who had just turned ten years old, to spend time with him and perhaps attend London schools for part of the year. “The opportunity of giving Hartley opportunities of Instruction, he would not otherwise have, weighed a great deal with me.”15 Given the “unconquerable Difference of Temper” which he referred to both in his letters and private Notebooks, it did not seem an unreasonable compromise.16
The lecture scheme, which both Southey and soon Wordsworth would discourage, was a perfectly realistic one. Public lectures had begun to flourish in the city (itself a wartime phenomenon, like increased newspaper reading) and several new lecture institutions had been founded. Humphry Davy had achieved an extraordinary popular following at the Royal Institution, making Albemarle Street notorious for its traffic jams. The first of his great Bakerian lectures also began at the Royal Society in November 1806. Indeed it was Davy, with his passionate belief in Coleridge’s potential as a public educator, who now sought him out and introduced him to Thomas Bernard, the Committee Member and secretary of the Royal Institution, who was commissioning lecture series on a wide range of arts and science subjects.
As Coleridge informed his wife on 3 October: “Davy has been for many days urging me, with an eagerness and importunity not common to him, to go with him to Mr Bernard’s at Roehampton…the business is really important.”17 Davy, backed by Stuart, would persist with his encouragement for the whole of the next year, finally bringing Coleridge to the lecture dais in the winter of 1807–8. From then on, public lectures would provide Coleridge with an income, and sometimes even a raison d’être, for more than a decade. Indeed it was lecturing, and the sense of a continuing audience, that may partly have saved Coleridge’s life in the dark years to come.
4
Coleridge’s last weeks before the dreaded marital confrontation at Keswick were not entirely spent in prevarication. Sara’s wayward brother, young George Fricker, had turned to Methodism in a crisis of nerves and unemployment after his disastrous adventures at sea. Coleridge introduced him to the kindly Lambs, and wrote him long soothing letters about his faith, and had many patient talks with him. Coleridge was at his best and most tender with lost young men of this kind (as he had shown years before with Hazlitt). He opened his own heart with directness and sympathy. “I am far from surprised that, having seen what you have seen, and suffered what you have suffered, you should have opened your soul to a sense of our fallen nature; and the incapability of man to heal himself. My opinions may not be in all points the same as yours; but I have experienced a similar alteration.”
His Mediterranean journeys had forced him to “look into himself” in a new way. “Ill health, and disappointment in the only deep wish I ever cherished” had led him to reread the New Testament in a new light. He felt that the proof of God from the design of the natural world, as argued by Paley and other eighteenth-century theologians, was producing “infidels” in the new mechanistic culture. Thinking men needed habitually “to look into their own souls, instead of always looking out, both of themselves and of their nature”.18
He discussed the Trinitarian view of Christianity, but felt that his own “living Faith” was still uncertain on such questions. “Alas! my moral being is too untranquil, too deeply possessed by one lingering passion after earthly good withheld…to be capable of being that, which its own ‘still small voice’ tells me, even in my dreams, that it ought to be…”19
His grief over his marriage, and his impossible love for Asra, is evidently referred to in these asides; as well as his guilt over opium. Philosophically it marked the continuation of a long path of religious self-enquiry which would culminate in the Aids to Reflection twenty years later. George Fricker responded by joining in the search for his sea-box at Wapping.
The time was also used to renew his contacts with Thomas Clarkson, the evangelical who was writing a history of the slave trade. This, too, produced some striking reflections on religious matters. When Coleridge finally set out for Keswick, he immediately broke his journey at Clarkson’s house at Bury St Edmund’s, and wrote for Clarkson a brilliant 3,000-word essay on the nature of theological belief. Clarkson had set him three fundamental questions: what is God? what is the Soul? and what is the difference between Kantian higher “Reason” (Vernunft) and logical, scientific thought or “Understanding” (Verstandt)?
Once again, he argued against mechanistic 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
