English Men of Letters: Coleridge Part 4

Life at Keswick--Second part of _Christabel_--Failing health--Resort to opium--The _Ode to Dejection_--Increasing restlessness--Visit to Malta.

[1800-1804.]

We are now approaching the turning-point, moral and physical, of Coleridge's career. The next few years determined not only his destiny as a writer but his life as a man. Between his arrival at Keswick in the summer of 1800 and his departure for Malta in the spring of 1804 that fatal change of const.i.tution, temperament, and habits which governed the whole of his subsequent history had fully established itself. Between these two dates he was transformed from the Coleridge of whom his young fellow-students in Germany have left us so pleasing a picture into the Coleridge whom distressed kinsmen, alienated friends, and a disappointed public were to have before them for the remainder of his days. Here, then, at Keswick, and in these first two or three years of the century--here or nowhere is the key to the melancholy mystery to be found.

It is probable that only those who have gone with some minuteness into the facts of this singular life are aware how great was the change effected during this very short period of time. When Coleridge left London for the Lake country he had not completed his eight-and-twentieth year. Before he was thirty he wrote that _Ode to Dejection_ in which his spiritual and moral losses are so pathetically bewailed. His health and spirits, his will and habits, may not have taken any unalterable bent for the worse until 1804, the year of his departure for Malta--the date which I have thought it safest to a.s.sign as the definitive close of the earlier and happier period of his life; but undoubtedly the change had fully manifested itself more than two years before. And a very great and painful one it a.s.suredly was. We know from the recorded evidence of Dr. Carrlyon and others that Coleridge was full of hope and gaiety, full of confidence in himself and of interest in life during his few months' residence in Germany.

The _annus mirabilis_ of his poetic life was but two years behind him, and his achievements of 1797-98 seemed to him but a mere earnest of what he was destined to accomplish. His powers of mental concentration were undiminished, as his student days at Gottingen sufficiently proved; his conjugal and family affections, as Dr.

Carrlyon notes for us, were still unimpaired; his own verse gives signs of a home-sickness and a yearning for his own fireside which were in melancholy contrast with the restlessness of his later years. Nay, even after his return to England, and during the six months of his regular work on the _Morning Post_, the vigour of his political articles entirely negatives the idea that any relaxation of intellectual energy had as yet set in. Yet within six months of his leaving London for Keswick there begins a progressive decline in Coleridge's literary activity in every form. The second part of _Christabel_, beautiful but inferior to the first, was composed in the autumn of 1800, and for the next two years, so far as the higher forms of literature are concerned, "the rest is silence." The author of the prefatory memoir in the edition of Coleridge's _Poetical and Dramatic Works_ (1880), enumerates some half-dozen slight pieces contributed to the _Morning Post_ in 1801, but declares that Coleridge's poetical contributions to this paper during 1802 were "very rich and varied, and included the magnificent ode ent.i.tled _Dejection_." Only the latter clause of this statement is ent.i.tled, I think, to command our a.s.sent. Varied though the list may be, it is hardly to be described as "rich." It covers only about seven weeks in the autumn of 1802, and, with the exception of the _Lovers' Resolution_ and the "magnificent ode"

referred to, the pieces are of the shortest and slightest kind. Nor is it accurate to say that the "political articles of the same period were also numerous and important." On the contrary, it would appear from an examination of Mrs. H. N. Coleridge's collection that her father's contributions to the _Post_ between his departure from London and the autumn of 1802 were few and intermittent, and in August 1803 the proprietors.h.i.+p of that journal pa.s.sed out of Mr. Stuart's hands. It is, in short, I think, impossible to doubt that very shortly after his migration to the Lake country he practically ceased not only to write poetry but to produce any mentionable quant.i.ty of _complete_ work in the prose form. His mind, no doubt, was incessantly active throughout the whole of the deplorable period upon which we are now entering; but it seems pretty certain that its activity was not poetic nor even critical, but purely philosophical, and that the products of that activity went exclusively to _marginalia_ and the pages of note-books.

Yet unfortunately we have almost no evidence, personal or other, from which we can with any certainty construct the psychological--if one should not rather say the physiological, or better still, perhaps, the pathological--history of this cardinal epoch in Coleridge's life. Miss Wordsworth's diary is nearly silent about him for the next few years; he was living indeed some dozen miles from her brother at Grasmere, and they could not therefore have been in daily intercourse. Southey did not come to the Lakes till 1803, and the records of his correspondence only begin therefore from that date. Mr.

Cottle's _Reminiscences_ are here a blank; Charles Lamb's correspondence yields little; and though De Quincey has plenty to say about this period in his characteristic fas.h.i.+on, it must have been based upon pure gossip, as he cites no authorities, and did not himself make Coleridge's acquaintance till six years afterwards. This, however, is at least certain, that his gloomy accounts of his own health begin from a period at which his satisfaction with his new abode was still as fresh as ever. The house which he had taken, now historic as the residence of two famous Englishmen, enjoyed a truly beautiful situation and the command of a most n.o.ble view. It stood in the vale of Derwent.w.a.ter, on the bank of the river Greta, and about a mile from the lake. When Coleridge first entered it, it was uncompleted, and an arrangement was made by which, after completion, it was to be divided between the tenant and the landlord, a Mr. Jackson. As it turned out, however, the then completed portion was shared by them in common, the other portion, and eventually the whole, being afterwards occupied by Southey. In April 1801, some eight or nine months after his taking possession of Greta Hall, Coleridge thus describes it to its future occupant:--

"Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of which is one field and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery garden. Behind the house is an orchard and a small wood on a steep slope, at the foot of which is the river Greta, which winds round and catches the evening's light in the front of the house. In front we have a giant camp--an encamped army of tent-like mountains which, by an inverted arch, gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely vale and the wedge-shaped lake of Ba.s.senthwaite; and on our left Derwent.w.a.ter and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrowdale. Behind is the ma.s.sy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two chasms and a tent-like ridge in the larger. A fairer scene you have not seen in all your wanderings."

There is here no note of discontent with the writer's surroundings; and yet, adds Mr. Cuthbert Southey in his _Life and Correspondence_ of his father, the remainder of this letter was filled by Coleridge with "a most gloomy account of his health." Southey writes him in reply that he is convinced that his friend's "complaint is gouty, that good living is necessary and a good climate." In July of the same year he received a visit from Southey at Greta Hall, and one from Charles and Mary Lamb in the following summer, and it is probable that during such intervals of pleasurable excitement his health and spirits might temporarily rally. But henceforward and until his departure for Malta we gather nothing from any source as to Coleridge's _normal_ condition of body and mind which is not unfavourable, and it is quite certain that he had long before 1804 enslaved himself to that fatal drug which was to remain his tyrant for the rest of his days.

When, then, and how did this slavery begin? What was the precise date of Coleridge's first experiences of opium, and what the original cause of his taking it? Within what time did its use become habitual? To what extent was the decline of his health the effect of the evil habit, and to what, if any, extent its cause? And how far, if at all, can the deterioration of his character and powers be attributed to a decay of physical const.i.tution, brought about by influences beyond the sufferer's own control?

Could every one of these questions be completely answered, we should be in a position to solve the very obscure and painful problem before us; but though some of them can be answered with more or less approach to completeness, there is only one of them which can be finally disposed of. It is certain, and it is no doubt matter for melancholy satisfaction to have ascertained it, that Coleridge first had recourse to opium as an anodyne. It was Nature's revolt from pain, and not her appet.i.te for pleasure, which drove him to the drug; and though De Quincey, with his almost comical malice, remarks that, though Coleridge began in the desire to obtain relief "there is no proof that he did not end in voluptuousness," there is on the other hand no proof whatever that he did so end--_until the habit was formed_. It is quite consistent with probability, and only accords with Coleridge's own express affirmations, to believe that it was the medicinal efficacy of opium, and this quality of it alone, which induced him to resort to it again and again until his senses contracted that well-known and insatiable craving for the peculiar excitement, "voluptuous" only to the initiated, which opium-intoxication creates. But let Coleridge speak on this point for himself. Writing in April 1826 he says:--

"I wrote a few stanzas three-and-twenty years ago, soon after my eyes had been opened to the true nature of the habit into which I had been ignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium, in the sudden removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended with swellings in my knees and palpitation of the heart and pains all over me, by which I had been bed-ridden for nearly six months. Unhappily among my neighbours' and landlord's books were a large number of medical reviews and magazines. I had always a fondness (a common case, but most mischievous turn with reading men who are at all dyspeptic) for dabbling in medical writings; and in one of these reviews I met a case which I fancied very like my own, in which a cure had been effected by the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour I procured it: it worked miracles--the swellings disappeared, the pains vanished. I was all alive, and all around me being as ignorant as myself, nothing could exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing else, prescribed the newly-discovered panacea for all complaints, and carried a little about with me not to lose any opportunity of administering 'instant relief and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentle or simple. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and how I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to which I was drawing, just when the current was beyond my strength to stem. The state of my mind is truly portrayed in the following effusion, for G.o.d knows! that from that time I was the victim of pain and terror, nor had I at any time taken the flattering poison as a stimulus or for any craving after pleasurable sensation."

The "effusion" in question has parted company with the autobiographical note, and the author of the prefatory memoir above quoted conjectures it to have been a little poem ent.i.tled the _Visionary Hope_; but I am myself of opinion, after a careful study of both pieces, that it is more probably the _Pains of Sleep_, which moreover is known to have been written in 1803. But whichever it be, its date is fixed in that year by the statement in the autobiographical note of 1826 that the stanzas referred to in it were written "twenty-three years ago."

Thus, then, we have the two facts established, that the opium-taking habit had its origin in a bodily ailment, and that at some time in 1803 that habit had become confirmed. The disastrous experiment in amateur therapeutics, which was the means of implanting it, could not have taken place, according to the autobiographical note, until at least six months after Coleridge's arrival at Keswick, and perhaps not for some months later yet. At any rate, it seems tolerably certain that it was not till the spring of 1801, when the climate of the Lake country first began to tell unfavourably on his health, that the "Kendal Black Drop" was taken. Possibly it may have been about the time (April 1801) when he wrote the letter to Southey which has been quoted above, and which, it will be remembered, contained "so gloomy an account of his health." How painfully ailing he was at this time we know from a variety of sources, from some of which we also gather that he must have been a sufferer in more or less serious forms from his boyhood upwards. Mr. Gillman, for instance, who speaks on this point with the twofold authority of confidant and medical expert, records a statement of Coleridge's to the effect that, as a result of such schoolboy imprudences as "swimming over the New River in my clothes and remaining in them, full half the time from seventeen to eighteen was pa.s.sed by me in the sick ward of Christ's Hospital, afflicted with jaundice and rheumatic fever." From these indiscretions and their consequences "may be dated," Mr. Gillman thinks, "all his bodily sufferings in future life." That he was a martyr to periodical attacks of rheumatism for some years before his migration to Keswick is a conclusion resting upon something more than conjecture. The _Ode to the Departing Year_ (1796) was written, as he has himself told us, under a severe attack of rheumatism in the head. In 1797 he describes himself in ill health, and as forced to retire on that account to the "lonely farmhouse between Porlock and London on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devons.h.i.+re," where _Kubla Khan_ was written. [1]

Thus much is, moreover, certain, that whatever were Coleridge's health and habits during the first two years of his residence at Keswick, his career as a poet--that is to say, as a poet of the first order--was closed some months before that period had expired. The ode ent.i.tled _Dejection_, to which reference has so often been made, was written on the 4th of April 1802, and the evidential importance which attaches, in connection with the point under inquiry, to this singularly pathetic utterance has been almost universally recognised. Coleridge has himself cited its most significant pa.s.sage in the _Biographia Literaria_ as supplying the best description of his mental state at the time when it was written.

De Quincey quotes it with appropriate comments in his _Coleridge and Opium-Eating_. Its testimony is reverently invoked by the poet's son in the introductory essay prefixed by him to his edition of his father's works. The earlier stanzas are, however, so necessary to the comprehension of Coleridge's mood at this time that a somewhat long extract must be made. In the opening stanza he expresses a longing that the storm which certain atmospheric signs of a delusively calm evening appear to promise might break forth, so that

"Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, And sent my soul abroad, Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live."

And thus, with ever-deepening sadness, the poem proceeds:

"A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpa.s.sioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear-- O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd, All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green: And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye!

And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel how beautiful they are!

"My genial spirits fail, And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The pa.s.sion and the life, whose fountains are within.

"O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!

And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the earth-- And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

"O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me What this strong music in the soul may be!

What, and wherein it doth exist, This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, This beautiful and beauty-making power.

Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given, Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud-- Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud-- We in ourselves rejoice!

And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light."

And then follows the much quoted, profoundly touching, deeply significant stanza to which we have referred:--

"There was a time when, though my path was rough, This joy within me dallied with distress, And all misfortunes were but as the stuff Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.

But now afflictions how me down to earth: Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, But O! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination.

For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural Man-- This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my Soul."

Sadder lines than these were never perhaps written by any poet in description of his own feelings. And what gives them their peculiar sadness--as also, of course, their special biographical value--is that they are not, like Sh.e.l.ley's similarly ent.i.tled stanzas, the mere expression of a pa.s.sing mood. They are the record of a life change, a veritable threnody over a spiritual death. For there can be no doubt-- his whole subsequent history goes to show it--that Coleridge's "shaping spirit of Imagination" was in fact dead when these lines were written.

To a man of stronger moral fibre a renascence of the poetical instinct in other forms might, as I have suggested above, been possible; but the poet of _Christabel_ and the _Ancient Mariner_ was dead. The metaphysician had taken his place, and was striving, in abstruse research, to live in forgetfulness of the loss. Little more, that is to say, than a twelvemonth after the composition of the second part of _Christabel_ the impulse which gave birth to it had pa.s.sed away for ever. Opium-taking had doubtless begun by this time--may conceivably indeed have begun nearly a year before--and the mere _mood_ of the poem, the temporary phase of feeling which directed his mind inwards into deeper reflections on its permanent state, is no doubt strongly suggestive, in its excessive depression, of the terrible reaction which is known to follow upon opium-excitement. But, I confess, it seems to me improbable that even the habitual use of the stimulant for so comparatively short a time as twelve months could have produced so profound a change in Coleridge's intellectual nature. I cannot but think that De Quincey overstates the case in declaring that "opium killed Coleridge as a poet," though it may well be that, after the collapse of health, which appears to me to have been the real _causa causans_ in the matter, had killed the poet as we know him, opium prevented his resurrection in another and it may be but little inferior form. On the whole, in fact, the most probable account of this all-important era in Coleridge's life appears to me to be this: that in the course of 1801, as he was approaching his thirtieth year, a distinct change for the worse--precipitated possibly, as Mr. Gillman thinks, by the climate of his new place of abode--took place in his const.i.tution; that his rheumatic habit of body, and the dyspeptic trouble by which it was accompanied became confirmed; and that the severe attacks of the acute form of the malady which he underwent produced such a permanent lowering of his vitality and animal spirits as, _first_, to extinguish the creative impulse, and _then_ to drive him to the physical anodyne of opium and to the mental stimulant of metaphysics.

From the summer of 1801, at any rate, his _malaise_, both of mind and body, appears to have grown apace. Repeated letters from Southey allow us to see how deeply concerned he was at this time about his friend's condition. Plans of foreign travel are discussed between them, and Southey endeavours in vain to spur his suffering and depressed correspondent to "the a.s.sertion of his supremacy" in some new literary work. But, with the exception of his occasional contributions to the press, whatever he committed to paper during these years exists only, if at all, in a fragmentary form. And his restlessness, continually on the increase, appears by the end of 1802 to have become ungovernable. In November of that year he eagerly accepted an offer from Thomas Wedgwood to become his companion on a tour, and he spent this and the greater part of the following month in South Wales with some temporary advantage, it would seem, to his health and spirits. "Coleridge," writes Mr. Wedgwood to a friend, "is all kindness to me, and in prodigious favour here. He is quite easy, cheerful, and takes great pains to make himself pleasant. He is willing, indeed desirous, to accompany me to any part of the globe."

"Coll and I," he writes on another occasion, the abbreviation of name having been suggested to him by Coleridge himself, "harmonise amazingly," and adds that his companion "takes long rambles, and writes a great deal." But the fact that such changes of air and scene produced no permanent effect upon the invalid after his return to his own home appears to show that now, at any rate, his fatal habit had obtained a firm hold upon him. And his "writing a great deal resulted" only in the filling of many note-books, and perhaps the sketching out of many of those vast schemes of literary labour of which he was destined to leave so remarkable a collection at his death. One such we find him forwarding to Southey in the August of 1803--the plan of a Bibliotheca Britannica, or "History of British Literature, bibliographical, biographical, and critical," in eight volumes. The first volume was to contain a "complete history of all Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books that are not translations, but the native growth of Britain;" to accomplish which, writes Coleridge, "I will with great pleasure join you in learning Welsh and Erse." The second volume was to contain the history of English poetry and poets, including "all prose truly poetical." The third volume "English prose, considered as to style, as to eloquence, as to general impressiveness; a history of styles and manners, their causes, their birthplace and parentage, their a.n.a.lysis." The fourth volume would take up "the history of metaphysics, theology, medicine, alchemy; common, canon, and Roman law from Alfred to Henry VII." The fifth would "carry on metaphysics and ethics to the present day in the first half, and comprise in the second half the theology of all the reformers." In the sixth and seventh volumes were to be included "all the articles you (Southey) can get on all the separate arts and sciences that have been treated of in books since the Reformation; and by this time," concludes the enthusiastic projector, "the book, if it answered at all, would have gained so high a reputation that you need not fear having whom you liked to write the different articles-- medicine, surgery, chemistry, etc.; navigation, travellers' voyages, etc., etc." There is certainly a melancholy humour in the formulation of so portentous a scheme by a man who was at this moment wandering aimlessly among the lakes and mountains, unable to settle down to any definite piece of literary work, or even to throw off a fatal habit, which could not fail, if persevered in, to destroy all power of steady application in the future. That neither the comic nor the pathetic element in the situation was lost upon Southey is evident from his half-sad, half-satirical, wholly winning reply. "Your plan," he writes, "is too good, too gigantic, quite beyond my powers. If you had my tolerable state of health and that love of steady and productive employment which is now grown into a necessary habit with me, if you were to execute and would execute it, it would be beyond all doubt the most valuable work of any age or any country; but I cannot fill up such an outline. No man can better feel where he fails than I do, and to rely upon you for whole quartos! Dear Coleridge, the smile that comes with that thought is a very melancholy one; and if Edith saw me now she would think my eyes were weak again, when in truth the humour that covers them springs from another cause." A few weeks after this interchange of correspondence Coleridge was once again to prove how far he was from possessing Southey's "tolerable state of health."

Throughout the whole of this year he had been more restless than ever.

In January 1803 we find him staying with Southey at Bristol, "suffering terribly from the climate, and talking of going abroad." A week later he is at Stowey, planning schemes, not destined to be realised, of foreign travel with Wedgwood. Returning again to Keswick, he started, after a few months' quiescence, on 15th August, in company with Wordsworth and his sister, for a tour in Scotland, but after a fortnight he found himself too ill to proceed. The autumn rains set in, and "poor Coleridge," writes Miss Wordsworth, "being very unwell, determined to send his clothes to Edinburgh, and make the best of his way thither, being afraid to face much wet weather in an open carriage." It is possible, however, that his return to Keswick may have been hastened by the circ.u.mstance that Southey, who had paid a brief visit to the Lake country two years before, was expected in a few days at the house which was destined to be his abode for the longest portion of his life. He arrived at Greta Hall on 7th September 1803, and from time to time during the next six months his correspondence gives us occasional glimpses of Coleridge's melancholy state. At the end of December, his health growing steadily worse, he conceived the project of a voyage to Madeira, and quitted Keswick with the intention, after paying a short visit to the Wordsworths, of betaking himself to London to make preparations. His stay at Grasmere, however, was longer than he had counted on. "He was detained for a month by a severe attack of illness, induced, if his description is to be relied on, by the use of narcotics. [2] Unsuspicious of the cause, Mrs. and Miss Wordsworth nursed him with the tenderest affection, while the poet himself, usually a parsimonious man, forced upon him, to use Coleridge's own words, a hundred pounds in the event of his going to Madeira, and his friend Stuart offered to befriend him." From Grasmere he went to Liverpool, where he spent a pleasant week with his old Unitarian friend, Dr. Crompton, and arrived in London at the close of 1803. Here, however, his plans were changed. Malta was subst.i.tuted for Madeira, in response to an invitation from his friend Mr., afterwards Sir John, Stoddart, then resident as judge in the Mediterranean island. By 12th March, as we gather from the Southey correspondence, the change of arrangements had been made. Two days afterwards he receives a letter of valediction from his "old friend and brother" at Greta Hall, and on 2d April 1804, he sailed from England in the _Speedwell_, dropping anchor sixteen days later in Valetta harbour.

FOOTNOTES

1. Were it not for Coleridge's express statement that he first took opium at Keswick, one would be inclined to attribute the gorgeous but formless imagery of that poem to the effects of the stimulant. It is certainly very like a metrical version of one of the pleasant variety of opium-dreams described in De Quincey's poetic prose.

2. See Miss Meteyard (_A Group of Englishmen_, p. 223). Her evidence, however, on any point otherwise doubtful in Coleridge's history should be received with caution, as her estimate of the poet certainly errs somewhat on the side of excessive harshness.

CHAPTER VI

Stay at Malta--Its injurious effects--Return to England--Meeting with De Quincey--Residence in London--First series of lectures.

[1806-1809.]

Never was human being destined so sadly and signally to ill.u.s.trate the _coelum non animum_ aphorism as the unhappy pa.s.senger on the _Speedwell_. Southey shall describe his condition when he left England; and his own pathetic lines to William Wordsworth will picture him to us on his return. "You are in great measure right about Coleridge," writes the former to his friend Rickman, "he is worse in body than you seem to believe; but the main cause lies in his own management of himself, or rather want of management. His mind is in a perpetual St. Vitus's dance--eternal activity without action. At times he feels mortified that he should have done so little, but this feeling never produces any exertion. 'I will begin to-morrow,' he says, and thus he has been all his lifelong letting to-day slip. He has had no heavy calamities in life, and so contrives to be miserable about trifles. Poor fellow, there is no one thing which gives me so much pain as the witnessing such a waste of unequalled powers." Then, after recalling the case of a highly promising schoolfellow, who had made s.h.i.+pwreck of his life, and whom "a few individuals only remember with a sort of horror and affection, which just serves to make them melancholy whenever they think of him or mention his name," he adds: "This will not be the case with Coleridge; the _disjecta membra_ will be found if he does not die early: but having so much to do, so many errors to weed out of the world which he is capable of eradicating, if he does die without doing his work, it would half break my heart, for no human being has had more talents allotted." Such being his closest friend's account of him, and knowing, as we now do (what Southey perhaps had no suspicion of at the time), the chief if not the sole or original cause of his morally nerveless condition, it is impossible not to feel that he did the worst possible thing for himself in taking this journey to Malta. In quitting England he cut himself off from those last possibilities of self-conquest which the society and counsels of his friends might otherwise have afforded him, and the consequences were, it is to be feared, disastrous. After De Quincey's incredibly cool a.s.sertion that it was "notorious that Coleridge began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pain or nervous irritations, since his const.i.tution was strong and excellent(!), but as a source of luxurious sensations," we must receive anything which he has to say on this particular point with the utmost caution; but there is only too much plausibility in his statement that, Coleridge being necessarily thrown, while at Malta, "a good deal upon his own resources in the narrow society of a garrison, he there confirmed and cherished ... his habit of taking opium in large quant.i.ties." Contrary to his expectations, moreover, the Maltese climate failed to benefit him. At first, indeed, he did experience some feeling of relief, but afterwards, according to Mr. Gillman, he spoke of his rheumatic limbs as "lifeless tools," and of the "violent pains in his bowels, which neither opium, ether, nor peppermint combined could relieve."

Occupation, however, was not wanting to him, if occupation could have availed in the then advanced stage of his case. He early made the acquaintance of the governor of the island, Sir Alexander Ball, who, having just lost his secretary by death, requested Cole- ridge to undertake that official's duties until his successor should be appointed. By this arrangement the governor and the public service in all likelihood profited more than the provisional secretary; for Coleridge's literary abilities proved very serviceable in the department of diplomatic correspondence. The dignities of the office, Mr. Gillman tells us, no doubt on Coleridge's own authority, "he never attempted to support; he was greatly annoyed at what he thought its unnecessary parade, and he pet.i.tioned Sir Alexander Ball to be relieved from it." The purely mechanical duties of the post, too, appear to have troubled him. He complains, in one of the journals which he kept during this period, of having been "for months past incessantly employed in official tasks, subscribing, examining, administering oaths, auditing, etc." On the whole it would seem that the burden of his secretarial employment, though doubtless it would have been found light enough by any one accustomed to public business, was rather a weariness to the flesh than a distraction to the mind; while in the meantime a new symptom of disorder--a difficulty of breathing, to which he was always afterwards subject--began to manifest itself in his case. Probably he was glad enough--relieved, in more than one sense of the word--when, in the autumn of 1805, the new secretary arrived at Malta to take his place.

On 27th September Coleridge quitted the island on his homeward journey _vie_ Italy, stopping for a short time at Syracuse on his way. At Naples, which he reached on the 15th of December, he made a longer stay, and in Rome his sojourn lasted some months. Unfortunately, for a reason which will presently appear, there remains no written record of his impressions of the Eternal City; and though Mr. Gillman a.s.sures us that the gap is "partly filled by his own verbal account, repeated at various times to the writer of this memoir," the public of to-day is only indebted to "the writer of this memoir" for the not very startling information that Coleridge, "while in Rome, was actively employed in visiting the great works of art, statues, pictures, buildings, palaces, etc. etc., observations on which he minuted down for publication." It is somewhat more interesting to learn that he made the acquaintance of many literary and artistic notabilities at that time congregated there, including Tieck, the German poet and novelist, and the American painter Alston, to whose skill we owe what is reputed to be the best of his many not easily reconcilable portraits. The loss of his Roman memoranda was indirectly brought about by a singular incident, his account of which has met with some undeserved ridicule at the hands of Tory criticism. When about to quit Rome for England _vie_ Switzerland and Germany he took the precaution of inquiring of Baron von Humboldt, brother of the traveller, and then Prussian Minister at the Court of Rome, whether the proposed route was safe, and was by him informed that he would do well to keep out of the reach of Bonaparte, who was meditating the seizure of his person. According to Coleridge, indeed, an order for his arrest had actually been transmitted to Rome, and he was only saved from its execution by the connivance of the "good old Pope," Pius VII., who sent him a pa.s.sport and counselled his immediate flight. Hastening to Leghorn, he discovered an American vessel ready to sail for England, on board of which he embarked. On the voyage she was chased by a French vessel, which so alarmed the captain that he compelled Coleridge to throw his papers, including these precious MSS., overboard. The wrath of the First Consul against him was supposed to have been excited by his contributions to the _Morning Post_, an hypothesis which De Quincey reasonably finds by no means so ridiculous as it appeared to a certain writer in _Blackwood_, who treated it as the "very consummation of moonstruck vanity," and compared it to "John Dennis's frenzy in retreating from the sea-coast under the belief that Louis XIV. had commissioned commissaries to land on the English sh.o.r.e and make a dash at his person." It must be remembered, however, that Mr.

Fox, to whose statement on such a point Napoleon would be likely to attach especial weight, had declared in the House of Commons that the rupture of the Peace of Amiens had been brought about by certain essays in the _Morning Post_, and there is certainly no reason to believe that a tyrant whose animosity against literary or quasi-literary a.s.sailants ranged from Madame de Stael down to the bookseller Palm would have regarded a man of Coleridge's reputation in letters as beneath the stoop of his vengeance.

After an absence of two years and a half Coleridge arrived in England in August 1806. That his then condition of mind and body was a profoundly miserable one, and that he himself was acutely conscious of it, will be seen later on in certain extracts from his correspondence; but his own _Lines to William Wordsworth_--lines "composed on the night after his recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual mind"--contain an even more tragic expression of his state. It was Wordsworth's pensive retrospect of their earlier years together which awoke the bitterest pangs of self-reproach in his soul, and wrung from it the cry which follows:--

"Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn The pulses of my being beat anew: And even as life returns upon the drowned, Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains-- Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart; And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope; And hope that scarce would know itself from fear; Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, And genius given, and knowledge won in vain; And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, And all which patient toil had reared, and all, Commune with thee had opened out--but flowers Strewn on my corse, and borne upon my bier, In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"

A dismal and despairing strain indeed, but the situation unhappily was not less desperate. We are, in fact, entering upon that period of Coleridge's life--a period, roughly speaking, of about ten years--which no admirer of his genius, no lover of English letters, no one, it might even be said, who wishes to think well of human nature, can ever contemplate without pain. His history from the day of his landing in England in August 1806 till the day when he entered Mr. Gillman's house in 1816 is one long and miserable story of self-indulgence and self- reproach, of lost opportunities, of neglected duties, of unfinished undertakings. His movements and his occupation for the first year after his return are not now traceable with exact.i.tude, but his time was apparently spent partly in London and partly at Grasmere and Keswick.

When in London, Mr. Stuart, who had now become proprietor of the _Courier_, allowed him to occupy rooms at the office of that newspaper to save him expense; and Coleridge, though his regular connection with the _Courier_ did not begin till some years afterwards, may possibly have repaid the accommodation by occasional contributions or by a.s.sistance to its editor in some other form. It seems certain, at any rate, that if he was earning no income in this way he was earning none at all. His friend and patron, Mr. Thomas Wedgwood, had died while he was in Malta; but the full pension of 150 per annum bestowed upon him by the two brothers jointly continued to be paid to him by Josiah, the senior. Coleridge, however, had landed in England in ignorance of his patron's death. He had wholly neglected to keep up any correspondence with the Wedgwoods during his stay in Malta, and though "dreadfully affected" by it, as Mr. Poole records, he seems to have allowed nearly a year to elapse before communicating with the surviving brother. The letter which he then wrote deserves quotation, not only as testimony to his physical and pecuniary condition on his arrival in England, but as affording a distressing picture of the morbid state of his emotions and the enfeebled condition of his will.

"As to the reasons for my silence, they are," he incoherently begins, "impossible, and the numbers of the _causes_ of it, with the almost weekly expectation for the last eight months of receiving my books, ma.n.u.scripts, etc. from Malta, has been itself a cause of increasing the procrastination which constant ill health, despondency, domestic distractions, and embarra.s.sment from accidents, equally unconnected with my will or conduct" [every cause mentioned, it will be seen, but the true one], "had already seated deep in my very muscles, as it were. I do not mean to accuse myself of idleness--I have enough of self-crimination without adding imaginary articles--but in all things that affect my moral feelings I have sunk under such a strange cowardice of pain that I have not unfrequently kept letters from persons dear to me for weeks together unopened. After a most miserable pa.s.sage from Leghorn of fifty-five days, during which my life was twice given over, I found myself again in my native country, ill, penniless, and worse than homeless. I had been near a month in the country before I ventured or could summon courage enough to ask a question concerning you and yours, and yet G.o.d Almighty knows that every hour the thought had been gnawing at my heart. I then for the first time heard of that event which sounded like my own knell, without its natural hope or sense of rest. Such shall I be (is the thought that haunts me), but O!

not such; O! with what a different retrospect! But I owe it to justice to say, Such good I truly can do myself, etc., etc." The rest of this painfully inarticulate letter is filled with further complaints of ill health, with further protestations of irresponsibility for the neglect of duties, and with promises, never to be fulfilled, of composing or a.s.sisting others to compose a memoir of Thomas Wedgwood, who, in addition to his general repute as a man of culture, had made a special mark by his speculations in psychology.

The singular expression, "worse than homeless," and the reference to domestic distractions, appear to indicate that some estrangement had already set in between Coleridge and his wife. De Quincey's testimony to its existence at the time (a month or so later) when he made Coleridge's acquaintance may, subject to the usual deductions, be accepted as trustworthy; and, of course, for aught we know, it may then have been already of some years' standing. That the provocation to it on the husband's part may be so far antedated is at least a reasonable conjecture. There may be nothing--in all likelihood there is nothing--worth attention in De Quincey's gossip about the young lady, "intellectually very much superior to Mrs. Coleridge, who became a neighbour and daily companion of Coleridge's walks" at Keswick. But if there be no foundation for his remarks on "the mischiefs of a situation which exposed Mrs. Coleridge to an invidious comparison with a more intellectual person," there is undoubtedly plenty of point in the immediately following observation that "it was most unfortunate for Coleridge himself to be continually compared with one so ideally correct and regular in his habits as Mr.

Southey." The pa.s.sion of female jealousy a.s.suredly did not need to be called into play to account for the alienation of Mrs. Coleridge from her husband. Mrs. Carlyle has left on record her pathetic lament over the fate of a woman who marries a man of genius; but a man of genius of the coldly selfish and exacting type of the Chelsea philosopher would probably be a less severe burden to a woman of housewifely instincts than the weak, unmethodical, irresolute, s.h.i.+ftless being that Coleridge had by this time become. After the arrival of the Southeys, Mrs.

Coleridge would indeed have been more than human if she had not looked with an envious eye upon the contrast between her sister Edith's lot and her own. For this would give her the added pang of perceiving that she was specially unlucky in the matter, and that men of genius could ("if they chose," as she would probably, though not perhaps quite justly have put it) make very good husbands indeed. If one poet could finish his poems, and pay his tradesmen's bills, and work steadily for the publishers in his own house without the necessity of periodical flittings to various parts of the United Kingdom or the Continent, why, so could another. With such reflections as these Mrs. Coleridge's mind was no doubt sadly busy during the early years of her residence at the Lakes, and, since their causes did not diminish but rather increased in intensity as time went on, the estrangement between them--or rather, to do Coleridge justice, her estrangement from her husband--had, by 1806, no doubt become complete. The fatal habit which even up to this time seems to have been unknown to most of his friends could hardly have been a secret to his wife, and his four or five years of slavery to it may well have worn out her patience.