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 by Longman. He remained in London, with several much needed relief-visits to the Clarksons at Bury, until 4 April.
Rather to his surprise, Coleridge initially made difficulties about seeing him, and he could never get entry to his Courier rooms until four in the afternoon. But after several evenings together, he began to feel that Coleridge had simply given way to opium and could easily recover himself.48 His suspicions were deepened when Coleridge gave an animated tea-party in his rooms on 3 March, receiving his guests – Wordsworth, Godwin, Lamb and De Quincey – like an oriental potentate, swathed in blankets, and throned on his bed, thoroughly enjoying the fuss. Lamb was amused by the situation, a case of the Mountain coming to Mahomet. He joked about Wordsworth’s grand descent upon the Strand. “Wordsworth, the great poet, is coming to Town; he is to have apartments in the Mansion House. He says he does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare…Even Coleridge is a little checked by this hardihood of assertion.”49
Wordsworth also brought news that Asra was ill, with a mysterious “broken blood vessel”; news which according to Dorothy would prevent Coleridge from brooding over his own misfortunes. Wordsworth continued to rally him: they went to see Sir Thomas Lawrence’s collection of pictures, and later dined with Longman to discuss “The White Doe”. It was a dull evening, “saving that we had some good haranguing – talk I cannot call it – from Coleridge.”50 It was now clear that Coleridge was indeed recovering, and determined to restart his lectures. Wordsworth, though gloomily apprehensive, loyally remained in London to attend the third and fourth of the relaunched series, delivered on 30 March and 2 April.
5
When Coleridge recommenced with his third lecture on Friday, 30 March, his approach had altered. His notes had become compact, and more like a prompt script. There were no long quotations from aesthetic theory. He began with an eloquent personal apology that immediately caught up his audience in the drama of his own struggles. “I could not but be conscious to how severe a trial I had put your patience and candour in my last Lecture…still lingering bodily indisposition…my Faculties too confused…too weak to recite aloud…my mind gradually regained its buoyancy…” This appeal was immediately followed by an amusing definition of types of listeners: sponges, sand-glasses, straining-bags, “and lastly, the Great-Moguls Diamond Sieves” who retain everything that is valuable and forget the rest.51
He then launched directly into one of his great psychological explorations of the poetic principle, as illustrated by Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Even before Shakespeare became a great dramatist, Coleridge argued, he had shown eight essential “Instances of the poetic Power of making everything present to the Imagination”. His notes number these off with effective brevity, and some indications of extempore development.
1 Sense of Beauty…good sign-painter who begins with old men’s and old women’s faces –
2 With things remote from his own feeling…
3 Love of Natural objects – quote “The Hare”…
4 Fancy, or the aggregative Power – “Full gently now she takes him by the hand,/ A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow”
5 That power & energy of what a living poet has grandly & appropriately – “To flash upon the inward eye/ Which is the Bliss of solitude” – & to make everything present by a Series of Images…
6 Imagination:
