href="#litres_trial_promo">2 He discussed the inward spirituality of the great Quaker teachers William Law and George Fox, and envied the Quakers’ simple confidence in prayer, so unlike his own.
“The habit of psychological Analysis makes additionally difficult the act of true Prayer. Yet as being a good Gift of God it may be employed as a guard against Self-delusion, tho’ used creaturely it is too often the means of Self-delusion…O those who speak of Prayer, of deep, inward, sincere Prayer, as sweet and easy, if they have the Right to speak thus, O how enviable in their Lot!”3 The struggle to renew his religious faith went hand in hand with the struggle against opium, each relapse felt like a “Savage Stab” piercing both “Health and Conscience”.4 He experienced as never before a sense of personal sin, of the “Fall” he had mentioned to Wordsworth, but now as an absolute condition of his life. The idea of redemption, both as religious and psychological need, came to possess his thinking “O for the power to cry out for mercy from the inmost: That would be Redemption!”5
Philosophically this placed the concept of Evil, as a fundamental and inescapable fact of nature, back at the centre of all his thought. Poetically, it had been there since the days of “The Ancient Mariner”. But now it had returned as a personal conviction, connecting his religious views with those on art and politics. When he came to write the opening number of The Friend, he startled his readers with the declaration of this as an a priori truth of experience. “I give it merely as an article of my own faith, closely connected with all my hopes of amelioration in man…that there is Evil distinct from Error and from Pain, an Evil in human nature which is not wholly grounded in the limitations of our understandings. And this too I believe to operate equally in the subjects of Taste, as in the higher concerns of Morality.”6 It was a dark reflection, born out of personal sufferings, and articulating the spiritual “witness” that the anonymous Quakers had encouraged during this phase of his regeneration.
2
By the time Coleridge reached Grasmere on 1 September 1808, much of his old physical energy was miraculously returning. He made one of his spectacular arrivals at 11.30 at night, waking the whole household, booming down the tall, newly painted corridors of Allan Bank, admiring and greeting. Wordsworth thought him “in tolerable health and better spirits than I have known him to possess for some time”.7 Southey, when he saw him, declared him offensively noisy and fat, “about half as big as the house”.8
But Coleridge’s feelings were delicate and silent. The sight of Asra filled him with secret, trembling delight. “For Love, passionate in its deepest tranquillity, Love unutterable fills my whole Spirit, so that every fibre of my Heart, nay, of my whole frame seems to tremble under its perpetual touch and sweet pressure, like the string of a Lute…O well may I be grateful – She loves me.”9
Domestic matters quickly engulfed him. Mary Wordsworth was about to give birth to her fourth child, rooms were still being decorated, De Quincey was expected, the Coleridge children were longing to see their father. Coleridge marched over Dunmail Raise with Wordsworth, and stayed a week with Mrs Coleridge, a visit that passed off with unexpected goodwill on all sides. Southey had now moved into Coleridge’s old rooms at the front of Greta Hall, and plans were agreed to send Hartley and Derwent to the local school at Ambleside. Coleridge felt the Keswick household was running smoothly in his absence, and was pleased and not a little astonished when his wife tranquilly gave permission for his daughter, little six-year-old Sara, to stay with him for a month at Allan Bank, and the boys to visit at weekends. A degree of reconciliation was in the autumn air.
“Be assured, my dear Sara!” Coleridge told his wife gently, “that your kind behaviour has made a deep impression on my mind – Would to God, it had been always so on both sides – but the Past is past – & my business now is to recover the Tone of my Constitution if possible & to get money for you and our Children.”10 Mrs Coleridge expressed her approval by sorting out his shirts and making “a pair or two of Drawers for the thighs and seat” of her husband, which had mysteriously expanded under his new health regime.11
Allan Bank was large, with tall windows looking north, and east over Grasmere lake, and the towering shape of Silver Howe Fell enclosing it to the south. It had none of the charm of Dove Cottage (which Dorothy always regretted), or the comforts of Greta Hall. Bleak and exposed, the down-winds from the fell filled it with draughts in summer, and chimney-smoke in the winter, so that food and books were often dusted with soot. Coleridge had a large study and separate bedroom on the first floor, but there was little sense of peace or space. Wordsworth was determined to be self-sufficient, and the three women were endlessly busied with cooking, laundry, vegetable-gardening, baking, and looking after the children – as well as a cow and two piglets.12 Visitors were frequent, including Hartley and Derwent, De Quincey and his friend John Wilson, and Dorothy records that there were often more than a dozen round the table at meals.
Little Sara’s visit to Allan Bank with her father remained one of her earliest memories: a mixture of awkwardness, enchantment and homesickness. She felt overshadowed by the Wordsworth children, especially the angelic Dora, her blonde locks dressed with paper curlers, and all of whom seemed able to play with Coleridge much more freely than herself, making “enough racket for twenty”. Though she slept in her father’s bedroom, she felt lonely and inhibited at first. “My father reproached me, and contrasted my coldness with the childish caresses of the little Wordsworths. I slunk away, and hid myself.”13
But Coleridge was delighted with his daughter, and understood her fears as he had understood Hartley’s. He told her stories, kept a candle burning in the bedroom, took her for walks to make her “rosier and hardier”, and encouraged her childish romance with little John Wordsworth. He also realized that she was extremely bright and bookish, in a quieter less fantastical way than Hartley, and had inherited the extraordinary Coleridge eyes. “Verily, Sara is a deal cleverer than I supposed. She is indeed a very sweet unblameable Darling. And what elegance of Form and Motion – her dear Eyes too! as I was telling a most wild Story to her & John, her large eyes grew almost as large again with wonderment.”14
Sara remembered those stories ever after. “I slept with him, and he would tell me fairy stories when he came to bed at twelve and one o’clock. I remember his telling me a wild tale, too, in his study, and my trying to repeat it to the maids afterwards.”
Sara was also aware, in the acute way of a child, of the mysterious bond between her father and Asra. But, like Hartley, she felt uneasy with it and could not understand the attraction. She saw Asra through her mother’s disapproving eyes. “My father used to talk to me with much admiration and affection of Sara Hutchinson…She had fine, long, light brown hair, I think her only beauty, except a fair skin, for her features were plain and contracted, her figure dumpy, and devoid of grace and dignity. She was a plump woman, of little more than five feet. I remember my father talking to me admiringly of her long light locks, and saying how mildly she bore it when the baby pulled them hard.”15
This tiny observation of Asra’s willingness to suffer, perhaps out of a frustrated maternal instinct, and Coleridge’s curious, almost
