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) came dancing & singing into the room, and all at once (if I may dare use so low a phrase) tumbled in upon the print. He instantly started, stood silent and motionless, with the strongest expression first of wonder & then of Grief in his eyes and countenance, and at length said “And where is the Ship? But that is sunk! – and the men all drowned!” – still keeping his eye fixed upon the Print. Now what Pictures are to little Children, Stage-Illusion is to Men, provided they retain any part of the Child’s sensibility: except that in the latter instance, this suspension of the Act of Comparison, which permits this sort of Negative Belief, is somewhat more assisted by the Will, than in that of the Child respecting a picture.66
This argument proclaims the enduring, childlike part of the creative sensibility. But it also first uses the striking idea of “Negative Belief” (the metaphor drawn from positive and negative electrical polarities). He would later apply this doctrine of the “suspended state” of Imagination to poetry as a whole, in the Biographia Literaria, to produce one of the most influential of all his critical formulations, the “willing suspension of disbelief”. In other lectures he drew similar analogies with dream states and nightmares.*
The most talked-about lecture of the whole series took place on 3 May 1808, and was a single digression from beginning to end. Still anxious to make good the casual impression of his postponements, Coleridge volunteered to give a free “supernumerary” double lecture on a subject of topical debate. His lecture was scheduled to last over two hours. The theatre and even the gallery were packed out with fashionable figures, and among his supporters were Davy, William Sotheby, Godwin, Basil Montagu, William Rogers, and Crabb Robinson (still busily taking notes).67
The subject he chose was intensely controversial, and bound to be popular. Two educationalists, Dr Andrew Bell and Mr Joseph Lancaster, had recently published rival schemes to expand national schools by using a “monitor” system, in which older pupils were trained to teach younger ones. (By 1815 over 500 schools were using their methods.) Bell was an Anglican and saw his schools as state foundations, while Lancaster was a Quaker and saw them as independent institutions. Coleridge believed passionately that education, especially in poorer areas, should be the responsibility of the state, and supported Bell’s “Madras System” (so-called because it had been pioneered in India). But what most engaged his attention was Lancaster’s enforcement of rote-learning by an elaborate system of punishment and penalties. These particularly outraged Coleridge, who was otherwise a great admirer of the Quaker philosophy. They included an astonishing panoply of cruelties and humiliations: makeshift pillories, shackling of the leg with wooden logs, trussing up in a sack, walking backwards through the corridors, and being suspended in a “punishment basket” from the classroom ceiling.68
Southey later reported an eyewitness account of how Coleridge had riveted his audience
