– had its roots in the 1790s, perhaps drawing on what Wordsworth and Coleridge had read of Rousseau, or perhaps inheriting from him as I had inherited from them. Co-presence with the natural world, a closeness that was inaccessible in what Coleridge always described as the ‘dim’ light of the city – the persistent coal smog of eighteenth-century London – was somehow a release into a form of wellbeing which normal political, commercial, professional or even educational life would not only fail to approach but would actually disrupt and destroy. It is a powerful connection to make: love of nature as the route both to a love of truth and to a love of man.
No room in the world was closed to Coleridge. As he said to a friend, ‘I hate the word but.’ Every connection needed to be an and. Every corridor and every chamber branching off it was available to the roaming, skipping investigations of his mind, not ponderous but almost gravity-free, and in each store and warehouse to which he pushed open the door he found lying in wait for him caves of beauty and significance.
He walked as he talked, never pursuing a single line direct, but famously moving from one side of the lane or the path to another so that his companion would always have to shift to accommodate him. His mode was multiple but not anarchic. He could not put up with nonsense, and consistently searched for systematic connections across the whole width of what he had to know. That was the essence of his life: a never-ending appetite for all that was and had been, struggling with the need to bring it into a single frame of understanding.
Any talk of mere personality he detested: there was more to wisdom than the idiosyncrasies of the individual. Nor did he live in an unbroken morning of bland optimism. Excitement and despondency alternated within him. And he knew of his own failings. Forgive me, he would remark to his listeners, if sometimes you hear in what I say a verb orphaned of its subjective noun or a subjective noun widowed of its verb. He could get lost in his paragraphs like a man in a thicket. His relationship to knowledge was so hungry that knowledge itself came to live in his mind as an infinite sequence of overlapping and self-generating circles, in which no understanding of one circle could be complete without an understanding of its neighbour, an unending progression of unfolding spheres, like the universes that expand from the black holes each one contains, a multiverse strung out across space and time. It is little wonder that even his great and encompassing mind eventually faded under the strain of the challenge.
The energy, if undeniable, was fervid and troubled, drawing into itself at different times schemes for everything: a book on the modern Latin poets, an Epic Poem on the Origin of Evil, something on William Godwin, an Opera, a Liturgy, a Tragedy, editions of English eighteenth-century poets, a book on Milton, on the Greek tragedians, on the technicalities of scansion, on the laws upon wrecks, a poem in the style of Dante on Thor, on his hero the philosopher David Hartley, on the obscurities of Behmen, Helmont, Swedenborg, Philo Judaeus, Porphyry, Plotinus, Platypus, Mesmer, an address to Poverty, on the art of prolonging life – by getting up in the morning, an Ode to a Looking Glass, hymns to the Sun, the Moon and the Elements, an Ode to Southey, an Ode to a Moth, a history of night, or of privacy, or of silence, or the self.
For I am now busy on the subject, and shall in a very few weeks go to Press with a volume on the prose writings of Hall, Milton and Taylor; and shall immediately follow it up with an Essay on the writings of Dr. Johnson and Gibbon. And in these two volumes I flatter myself I shall present a fair History of English Prose … I have since my twentieth year meditated an heroic poem on the Siege of Jerusalem by Titus. This is the Pride and the Stronghold of my Hope. But I never think of it except in my best moods.
It was a fountain of being, in which the pressure was always ready to flow, no urging needed. ‘My heart seraglios a whole host of joys,’ he wrote in his notebook, a new verb for the promiscuity of knowledge and happiness.
He knew too, in a way that was profoundly different from Wordsworth, that the endless liquidity of his self-conception, the flux and reflux of his mind, the stream of the organism called Coleridge, was the lens through which he perceived the world. He thought he had ‘a smack of Hamlet myself’, as a figure who partly observed and partly created the world around him. Hamlet’s thoughts, Coleridge said in his lectures on Shakespeare, ‘and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own’. What was within him imposed itself on what he saw. ‘All actual objects are faint and dead to him.’
He was aware that his perceptions of the outward world were so shaped by what he already knew and remembered that when, for example, he saw the moon, he did not see a moon but instead experienced ‘the dim awakening of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature’. A nightingale’s song, or the sound of a stream as it fell and slid over the rocks in its bed, or the frost creeping over the roofs of the village, or the swifts screech-screaming in the streets of Nether Stowey, or Stowey’s own flowing gutter, or a cockerel in a farmyard holding its tattered tail aloft: all of these phenomena seemed to be aspects of himself. Anything his eye saw was ‘supported by the images of memory flowing in on the impulses of immediate impression’. Nothing was uninflected by what he knew, trying to find a steady path through the jangling crowd of objects vibrating in his brain.
He could be teased. He knew he was ‘a thought-bewilder’d man’, and he knew he wasn’t like the man who had once been his best friend, the poet Robert Southey. Southey, although undoubtedly capable of great and empathetic poetry, had an austerity and a self-preservative strictness about him. Coleridge had called him ‘a man of perpendicular Virtue … enlightened and unluxurious’. But those Roman virtues were accompanied by a deep self-regard. Southey was neat, clever, handsome, conceited, ‘a coxcomb’ in Wordsworth’s eyes, well-mannered and well-ordered, a man who, Coleridge thought, had surrendered his idealism – they had planned to set up a Utopian community together in America – to a rational and rather mean self-interest. In their bruising and final argument in 1795, when Southey had decided to abandon any communitarian plans, Coleridge had told him, ‘You are lost to me, because you are lost to Virtue.’ Southey was someone, as Coleridge wrote later, who had ‘the power of saying one thing at a time’. Can you imagine, one thing at a time! The sterility of it!
Coleridge knew he was not like that but instead ‘a Surinam toad’, a creature which has the habit of embedding her eggs in pouches set in the skin of her back. Up to a hundred of them can grow there, developing into little toadlets that, when the time comes, jump out of their nests, waving their tiny hands as they emerge and drop off their mother into the roadway, scattering around her like the pips from a pomegranate as she continues on her way through life.
That is the beautiful South American amphibian walking down the road to the Wordsworths on the afternoon of 4 or 5 June 1797 – the exact date is unclear – a man who investigates everything and strews and sprinkles his own progeny around him, a king with guineas at his own coronation, a fountain of largesse, the volcano of ideas. He knew of course how he did not conform to the required ideal of manly self-containment, and that he spawned plans like a herring, but he recognised there was beauty in that. Orderliness is no more than a narrowing funnel through which to experience the world. Every step an arrival is the walker’s credo; there can be no restrictive plot or narrative that remains true. That is the source of Coleridgean wonder. What happens happens, looseness is all and absorbency beauty. The good man blesses everything unawares.
‘Southey once said to me,’ Coleridge wrote to his son Hartley in 1820,
You are nosing every nettle along the Hedge, while the Greyhound (meaning himself, I presume) wants only to get to sight of the Hare, & FLASH! – strait as a line! – he has it in his mouth! –
Coleridge thought that the kind of remark a cannibal would make to an anatomist as he watched him dissect a body, commenting on the time the doctor was taking to prepare his dinner. Must a man wait a whole day before he is allowed to eat? But it was the journey Coleridge valued as much
