of Newgate, or feel any horror at the thought of a slave ship!”69 Coleridge bitterly attacked these practices, not merely as inhumane, but as an essential perversion of the educational principle, which was to “lead forth” by love and imagination, not to instil by rivalry and terror. Instead he proposed three cardinal rules for early education. “These are 1. to work by love and so generate love; 2. to habituate the mind to intellectual accuracy or truth; 3. to excite power.”70
“He enforced a great truth strikingly,” noted Robinson, taking down his words verbatim. “My experience tells me that little is taught or communicated by contest or dispute, but everything by sympathy and love. Collision elicits truth only from the hardest heads.” He said that the text, “he that spareth the rod, spoileth the child”, was the “source of much evil”. He was against cramming, severe religious observance, or an atmosphere of “quiet and gloom” in the classroom. Everything should be done to draw out each child, most especially those from poor and deprived backgrounds.
What really moved his audience was, once again, Coleridge’s “inter-weaving” of his own experiences. He retold the story of John Thelwall in the weed-covered garden at Stowey: “‘What is this?…Only a garden educated according to Rousseau’s principles.’” And according to Robinson, he deeply moved his audience with recollections of his sufferings at Christ’s Hospital, leaving an image which remained with them long after. “On disgraceful punishments…he spoke with great indignation and declared that even now his life is embittered by the recollection of ignominious punishment he suffered when a child. It comes to him in disease and when his mind is dejected. – This part was delivered with fervour. Could all the pedagogues of the United Kingdom have been before him!”71
Crabb Robinson summarized the impact of this remarkable performance in a letter to Mrs Clarkson. “The extraordinary lecture on Education was most excellent, delivered with great animation and extorting praise from those whose prejudices he was mercilessly attacking. And he kept his audience on the rack of pleasure and offence two whole hours and 10 minutes, and few went away during the lecture…”
But the lecture also caused a scandal. Supporters of Lancaster threatened Coleridge, and talked of a prosecution for libel. The management of the Royal Institution complained that he had exceeded his functions as a literary lecturer, and eventually passed a motion of censure.72 When accounts reached the Lake District, Wordsworth was troubled and Southey astounded. No one had expected such an explosive return of Coleridge’s energy and daring.
The lecture on education established the controversial reputation of the entire series. Coleridge was regarded as brilliant, unorthodox, uneven, and prone to plunge without warning between metaphysics and melodrama. No one could tell from one performance to the next if he would be inspired or obscure, rambling or provocative. But he tasted a new kind of fame, and even notoriety, in London. His rooms in the Strand were besieged by smart visitors (seven in one evening); he dined with the Bishop of Durham; went to fashionable routs in Portman Square; was insulted publicly by Sir Henry Englefield; was jostled in the streets by “Bullies of Lancaster’s Faction”; was praised by Sir George Beaumont; was invited to a celebration dinner by the Literary Fund and by “a very droll mistake” dined at the Whig Club instead.73
He was asked to sit for his portrait by the society painter Matilda Betham, but, on the way to her studio across the Thames, fell out of the boat (“two mere children were my Charons”) and knocked himself out on the landing stage.74 His next lecture began with a vivid account of this accident, which rather characteristically no one believed. He was now at last able to write to Mrs Coleridge, with an account of his activities: “Now, my dear! I leave it to you to judge whether I can do more than I do – having besides all this to prepare William’s Poem for the Press.”75
He had found time to conclude the negotiations with Longman for Wordsworth’s “White Doe”, to go over the text in detail, and write Wordsworth a long appreciation of the poem.76 But by contrast he spoke deprecatingly of his lectures, and the stir they had caused: “whole Hods full of plaister of Paris – flatteries about as pleasant to me as rancid large Spanish Olives – these on the one side – & permanent hatred, & the most cruel public Insults on the other”.77 He found it difficult to boast of any success to Wordsworth.
His fame in London, besides helping to renew old friendships with Godwin, Sotheby, Montagu and others, brought him one unexpected and strangely upsetting encounter. At the end of one lecture, a plump, anxious, middle-aged woman appeared at his dais and introduced herself as Mrs Mary Todd. It took Coleridge several agonizing seconds to realize that he was talking to his old love from Cambridge days, Mary Evans – the woman whose rejection had led to his marriage to Sara Coleridge in 1795.78
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
