During Coleridge’s long absence in the Mediterranean, she had settled into an increasingly domestic role in Wordsworth’s household, caring for the Wordsworth children, and sharing with Dorothy the arduous role of Wordsworth’s secretary and amanuensis. As Coleridge would soon discover, she had become less of a free spirit and more of a universal aunt, relied on for her wit and practicality, and dedicated to Wordsworth himself. The death of John Wordsworth had not freed her as Coleridge supposed, but drawn her more tightly into the family circle. His “Moorish maid” – like his Abyssinian maid – had disappeared.
Perhaps they all felt, in their genuine anxiety to help their old friend, that they could “manage” his passion as they could manage his brandy-drinking and opium-taking. This at any rate was what Dorothy seemed to imply in a long, circumspect letter to Lady Beaumont, describing in great detail the breakdown of his health and his marriage: “if he is not inclined to manage himself, we can manage him…”25 The repeated emphasis on “managing” did not bode well. Yet all agreed that the great object was to get Coleridge safely to Coleorton, and it was with this promise that Wordsworth and Asra continued south, and Coleridge turned his face, if not his heart, towards Keswick again.
6
Coleridge arrived at Greta Hall on 30 October 1806. He had been away for very nearly three years, but the children at least – Hartley, Derwent and little Sara – greeted him with raptures. Derwent, then six, remembered years later the excitement, and how he had surrendered his pillow to make his father’s bed comfortable: “I would lie on a straw for my father”.26 Sara Coleridge seemed welcoming, and bustled around him as though he were an invalid. Southey greeted him with cordiality, but very much as the master of the house. For a few days there was something like harmony, and long talks about his adventures in the Mediterranean. But the moment Coleridge raised the question of separation, all the old antagonisms burst out, and for night after night there were scenes of “outrageous passions”, exactly as Coleridge had feared, and indeed as he must have expected.
During the day he walked uneasily with Southey, and sank himself in the works of Fulke Greville, upon which he made copious notes. In the evenings he returned to the fray, and then made himself incoherent with opium. He felt exposed in all his “human weakness”, but convinced that his wife felt nothing for him and only feared the social scandal of a divorce. She was motivated by “mere selfish desire to have a rank in life”. He wrote bitterly to the Wordsworths of Sara’s “temper, and selfishness, her manifest dislike of me (as far as her nature is capable of a positive feeling) and her self-encouraged admiration of Southey as a vindictive feeling in which she delights herself as satirizing me etc. etc…”27
There was much in this that exposed Coleridge’s own guilt and sense of inadequacy as a husband, especially with the ever-present example of his brother-in-law’s shining virtues. Southey’s literary career was driving ahead, a popular poet, a respected reviewer (soon to be thundering from the Quarterly Review), an acknowledged expert on Spain and Portugal who was embarking on his massive History of Brazil. Mrs Coleridge’s admiration for Southey went back to her early Bristol days: he was prompt, hard-working, self-disciplined and reliable, where Coleridge was merely brilliant, erratic and now increasingly self-destructive. Nothing seemed to be gained by the long Mediterranean absence. To be rejected by such a man, after those long months of holding his household together, must have seemed a terrible humiliation and betrayal. Little wonder that she fought him, made scenes, and appealed to Southey.
Southey tried to appear the voice of reason. He upbraided Coleridge for his submission to the Wordsworths, yet he counselled Sara that a separation on proper terms was advisable. But underneath his moderation lay the old, self-righteous scorn that reduced Coleridge and all his difficulties to a mere monster of self-indulgence. Gossiping to his friend John Rickman of the affair, with cruel indiscretion, he seemed to take perverse delight in the whole, sad business. “The separation is a good thing – his habits are so murderous of all domestic comfort that I am only surprised Mrs C. is not rejoiced at being rid of him. He besots himself with opium, or with spirits, till his eyes look like a Turks who is half reduced to idiotcy by the practice – he calls up the servants at all hours of the night to prepare food for him – he does in short all things at all times except the proper time – does nothing that he ought to do, and everything which he ought not.
“His present scheme is to live with Wordsworth – it is from idolatry of that family that this had begun – they have always humoured him in all his follies, listened to his complaints of his wife, and when he complained of his itch, helped him to scratch, instead of covering him with brimstone ointment, and shutting him up by himself.”28
Despite everything that Southey implied, Coleridge in fact brought the situation round with remarkable swiftness. Within a fortnight he entered in his notebook: “Keswick, finally resolved, Wednesday 15 November 1806.”29 What almost certainly transformed the position was his fondness for the children, and his determination to care for them and Sara financially. The Wedgwood annuity of £150 would remain with her; he would contribute what he could to the boys’ education; Hartley would go with him to Coleorton, but Derwent and little Sara (“sweet Squirrel”) could stay at Greta Hall, until they all met up together again in the spring in London.
This last provision caused Coleridge particular heart-searching as he wrote to the Wordsworths: “If I go away without them [Hartley and Derwent] I am a Bird who has struggled himself from off a Bird-lime twig, & then finds a string round his leg pulling him back…”30 But he acquiesced, and hoped for the best. In his study, he opened the sash window where his old Aeolian harp lay, and at once let in “music and sweet air” that seemed to purify and delight the whole room. At night he sat with his candle, watching how the “amber-edged” inner flame seemed to combine with the blue outer one, which made him think of his love for Asra.31
Instead of preparing his Royal Institution lectures, Coleridge began teaching Hartley Greek. He started to compile a Greek grammar, dedicated to his son, on 4 November 1806, which eventually ran to ninety-three pages in a special leather-bound notebook. It ranged from simple, humorous mnemonics to a philosophical defence of grammar itself, as teaching “Habits of attention, and the power of self-control”.32 There are amusing notes on poetic metre, and some curious sequences of vocabulary for learning, including this list of fifth-declension nouns: “Rook – Dewdrop – Lyre – Lynx – Furrow – Flesh – Starling – Wife – Liver – Louse – Sky – Saviour – Heart – Witness – Water.”33 Later he turned the metrical notes into a poem, which he also sent to Derwent from Coleorton. It ended:
Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not from its whole Ridge
See a man who so loves you, as your fond S.T. Coleridge.34
This could perhaps be described as a galloping anapaest, momentarily hobbled by a little spondee.
He remained at Greta Hall for a further month, still coping with delayed-fuse explosions from his wife, and coming out in a sympathetic crop of boils. He was exhausted. But he still managed to leave with Hartley in time for Christmas at Coleorton. Hartley, now ten years old, would later recall this as the start of an “annus mirabilis” with his father.35
