Wordsworth and Coleridge met briefly for the first time in Bristol, in 1795. Their close friendship, which led to the composition and publication of the Lyrical Ballads, began in 1797, when Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, moved from Racedown in Dorset to Alfoxden in Somerset, to be near Coleridge, who was living in a cottage in Nether Stowey. Each man had qualities and abilities the other lacked, and at that time needed. The result of the continuous conversation and long walks of that year was, for both of them, an increase in poetic power, and the elaboration of a complex idea of the poetic imagination. It is also true to say that the qualities which brought them together later helped to create the friction and estrangement between them. This introductory chapter is intended to map out, briefly, the pattern of the relationship.
Wordsworth, in 1797, was at the end of an uncertain and miserable period of his life. Both his parents had died when he was young, his mother when he was eight, his father when he was thirteen: Wordsworth and his brothers and sister were cared for by relatives. There were financial troubles—Wordsworth’s father had been law agent to James Lowther, First Earl of Lonsdale, who had owed him, when he died, about £5,000, and the family were engaged in prolonged and useless legal struggles to recover this money, which was only finally repaid by the Earl’s heir, in 1804, after his death in 1802. William, after going to Hawkshead Grammar School, was sent to Cambridge with the intention that he should take Orders and become a clergyman; after leaving Cambridge he hesitated over this for some time, and was finally saved by a legacy of £900 from a friend, Raisley Calvert, whom he nursed in the last stages of consumption in 1794: this enabled him to set up house with his sister Dorothy and devote himself to poetry. Before this, he had spent the year of 1791–2 in France—a year which had caused him some pain and disillusionment in more than one way.
He had gone to France in the early days of the Republic, full of revolutionary idealism, and was deeply shocked by the Terror. He had also got himself into deep emotional trouble: his love-affair with Annette Vallon in Blois in 1792 had led to the birth of his daughter Caroline in December. Wordsworth came back to England leaving Annette, who believed and hoped that he would marry her and referred to herself as his wife, in a France internally boiling and soon to be at war with most of Europe, including England. His sense of guilt and bewilderment at this desertion on his own part was expressed in various later poems, such as the tale of Vaudracour and Julia, with its seduction and illegitimate child, and, more obliquely, in various descriptions of female vagrants, victims of both men and society, such as the central story of Salisbury Plain, written after his solitary walking tour from Salisbury to North Wales in 1793 and published much later under the title of Guilt and Sorrow.
Wordsworth the young man was on the whole solitary, painfully proud, self-critical and self-suspecting. His letters and other writings have an overwhelming tone of high moral idealism and high poetic purpose, sometimes conflicting. He meant, even then, to be great, and nothing but the best would do, but the circumstances of his life—poverty, lack of family security, lack of practical vocation, responsibility to Annette—left him in doubt about when he would achieve or how he would achieve it. In 1791, writing to his friend, William Matthews, about the latter’s decision not to enter the Church but to try to live by travelling and writing, Wordsworth says
It is impossible you can ever have your father’s consent to a scheme which to a parent at least, if not to everyone else, must appear wild even to insanity. It is an observation to whose truth I have long since consented that small certainties are the bane of great talents.
Wordsworth is torn in this letter between conventional morals and the conflict between small certainties and ‘great talents’: he tells Matthews that ‘I do not think you could ever be happy while you were conscious that you were a cause of such sorrow to your parents’, and yet cannot resist adding in the next paragraph that he himself might, without moral obligations to relatives, prefer Matthews’ idea to ‘vegetating on a paltry curacy’. The relevance of Matthews’ situation to Wordsworth’s own is clear; Wordsworth recommends Industry to Matthews and assures him he will somehow make a living in London, but in November he writes again to tell Matthews he himself is going to France, and adds gloomily
I am doomed to be an idler throughout my whole life. I have read nothing this age, nor indeed did I ever. Yet with all this I am tolerably happy; do you think this ought to be a matter of congratulation to me or no? For my own part, I think certainly not.
In 1794 he and Matthews were planning to publish a periodical, and in his letters about this his mixture of self-suspicion and extreme idealism in terms of his own writing can clearly be seen:
I have not been much used to composition of any kind, particularly in prose, my style therefore may frequently want fluency and sometimes perhaps perspicuity but these defects will gradually wear off; an ardent wish to promote the welfare of mankind will preserve me from sinking under them.
Before the meeting with Coleridge, the only person with whom Wordsworth seems to have been really at ease was his sister Dorothy. Dorothy, a year younger than William, was the only girl in the family; she spent her youth in the care of various relatives before setting up house with William, first at Keswick in 1794, and then at Racedown. She was an energetic, intelligent woman, most of whose considerable passions were spent in devotion to her brothers, particularly John and William. An early letter to a girl friend written from her grandmother’s house in 1787 gives an idea of her narrow life, and of the energies repressed by it. Her grandmother, she says, shows so little affection
that while I am in her house I cannot consider myself as at home, I feel like a stranger. You cannot think how gravely and silently I sit with her and my Gfr, you would scarcely know me, you are well acquainted that I was never remarkable for taciturnity, but now I sit for whole hours without saying anything except that I have an old shirt to mend, then, my Grandmr and I have to set our heads together and contrive the most notable way of doing it, which I daresay in the end we always hit upon, but really the contrivance its self takes up more time than the shirt is worth, our only conversation is about work, work, or what sort of servant such a one’s is, who are her parents, what places she lived in, why she left them etc. etc. What my dear Jane can be more uninteresting than such conversation as this? Yet I am obliged to set upon the occasion as notable a face as if I was delighted with it, and that nothing could be more agreeable to me; notability is preached up to me every day, such an one is a very sedate, clever, notable girl says my Gmr.
It has been argued that William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s love for each other was so exclusive and violent in its early days that neither of them were able to give the same amount of emotional energy to any other relationship: Wordsworth’s marriage to Mary Hutchinson seems calm, conventional and dutiful by comparison. Their letters preceding their setting up house together are alive with love. Dorothy writes of William
I must be blind, he cannot be so pleasing as my fondness makes him. I am willing to allow that half the virtues with which I fancy him endowed are the creation of my Love, but surely I may be excused! he was never tired of comforting his sister, he never left her in anger, he always met her with joy, he preferred her society to every other pleasure, or rather when we were so happy as to be within each other’s reach he had no pleasure when we were compelled to be divided.
And to the same friend, Jane Pollard, Dorothy proudly quotes William’s letters to her about their coming meeting and the possibility of setting up house together.
How much do I wish that each emotion of pleasure and pain that visits your heart should excite a similar pleasure or a similar pain within me, by that sympathy which will almost identify us when we have stolen to our little cottage!
And
Oh my dear, dear sister with what transport shall I again meet you, with what rapture shall I again wear out the day in your sight. I assure you so eager is my desire to see you that all obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running or rather flying to my arms.
F. W. Bateson has argued convincingly that Wordsworth’s remotely beautiful love poems about the strangely immaterial ‘Lucy’ are poems about his feelings for Dorothy: he wrote himself in a letter to Coleridge in 1802 that the poem The Glow-Worm (‘Among all lovely things my Love had been’) was written about an incident that had taken place between himself and Dorothy, and Coleridge himself believed that ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ was written in ‘some gloomier moment’ when he fancied that his sister might die. And in a fragment of poetry composed about 1800 Wordsworth described Dorothy as
The dear companion of my lonely walk
My hope, my joy, my sister and my friend,
Or something dearer still, if reason knows
A dearer thought, or in the heart of love
There be a dearer name.
It is possible that Coleridge’s arrival at Alfoxden to share this intimacy provided a stabilizing influence on the emotions of both brother and sister, who were able to share them with him, and through him: it was Coleridge himself who wrote of them at this time (1797–8) that they were ‘Three persons and one soul’. Wordsworth at Alfoxden before the advent of Coleridge seems to have been troubled by obscure guilts and despair: perhaps the best example of this state of mind is a fragmentary poem from his Alfoxden note-book:
Away, away, it is the air
That stirs among the withered leaves;
Away, away, it is not there,
Go, hunt among the harvest-sheaves.
There is a bed in shape as plain
As from a hare or lion’s lair
It is the bed where we have lain
In anguish and despair.
Away and take the eagle’s eye,
The tyger’s smell,
Ears that can hear the agonies
And murmurings of hell;
And when you there have stood
By that same bed of pain,
The groans are gone, the tears remain.
Then tell me if the thing be clear,
The difference betwixt a tear
Of water and of blood.
The source of this emotion is impossible to trace—guilt over Annette, obscure fear of the nature of his feelings for Dorothy, or some more purely dramatic and fictional impetus have all been suggested—but the emotion itself is clear enough and sharply expressed. With its direct emphasis on sexual pain and guilt, its elaboration of a kind of strained and agonized universal sensuality, and its further religious guilty sense of having committed a crime which is observed by the whole of nature and judged, the poem expresses acute anxiety with an immediacy rare in Wordworth’s personal poetry.
Coleridge’s life before the meeting at Alfoxden had been more social than Wordsworth’s. He was the youngest of nine brothers, the son of an impractical literary clergyman and an ambitious mother. As a little boy he was precocious and clever, which produced in him an anxious desire to display his learning and be admired, and a deeper fear of not living up to what was expected of him. He seems to have been afraid of his brothers, with whom he never managed to be on easy terms—he spent his life alternately shocking them, apologizing abjectly and profusely, and making grandiose gestures and plans to impress them with his seriousness. He describes the child he was with a mixture of self-mockery, self-contempt and showing off which became habitual with him. As a child, he wrote, he was ‘fretful and inordinately passionate; and as I could not play at anything and was slothful, I was despised and hated by the boys … before I was eight years old I was a character. Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my understanding, were even then prominent and manifest.’ He extended his self-contempt and mockery even to his Christian name, which he rarely used, preferring to be called Coleridge and sign himself S.T.C.
His father’s death, when Coleridge was nearly nine, was the occasion of his being sent to Christ’s Hospital, where he had an audience for his brilliance, although he seems to have been lonely in himself and in need of the close affection and steady love provided by a family: separation, which increased the Wordsworths’ fierce devotion to each other, simply increased the difference between Coleridge and his respectable elder brothers. Charles Lamb, his junior at the school, wrote a brilliant description of Coleridge’s later days there, in an essay called Christ’s Hospital Thirty-five years ago:
Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!—How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula) to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts) or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar—while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy!
The capacity for making brilliant and endless speeches lasted the rest of Coleridge’s life: so did the learning and the philosophical curiosity and application. Coleridge, too, was intended for the Church, and Coleridge, too, found himself unwilling to commit himself to it. Like Wordsworth, he went up to Cambridge, where his academic career was much more successful than his friend’s, and he made much more impression on his contemporaries. He tried, however, to live the life of a fashionable undergraduate, and ended up in debt: this resulted in flight from Cambridge, and his secret enrolment in the 15th Light Dragoons under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke. He was a poor horseman and his equipment was rusty: he ended up nursing a man sick with smallpox and had to be ignominiously rescued by his brothers and returned to University. Whilst still an undergraduate he met Robert Southey, with whom he conceived the plan of emigrating to the southern part of the United States and forming an egalitarian colony on the banks of the Susquehanna river—this was Pantisocracy. It was at this time that a Miss Charlotte Poole wrote of him, when he was visiting Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, who was to remain one of his closest and most stable friends:
Tom Poole has a friend with him of the name of Coldridge: a young man of brilliant understanding, great eloquence, desperate fortune, democratick principles, and entirely led away by the feelings of the moment.
Coleridge’s deepest need was for emotional security, the sense of having a safe place within a group of people he could trust, the love which he had not received from his family, and for which dazzled admiration of his brilliant discourses, or delighted response to his clowning was no substitute. Like many people who demand from those they meet the total response they failed to achieve in childhood, he always demanded too much, and at the same time expected, even provoked, the rejection which was in fact the response he could recognize. He had romantic hopes of both men and women—all men were potentially ideal friends, all women potentially devoted lovers—and at the same time he was obsessed by the fear of living perpetually unloved and solitary. An early sonnet, On receiving an account that his only sister’s death was inevitable, written in 1791, shifts its central preoccupation from the sister’s sufferings to the poet’s frightening loneliness:
Say, is this hollow eye, this heartless pain,
Fated to rove thro’ Life’s wide cheerless plain—
Nor father, brother, sister meet its ken—
My woes, my joys unshared!
This is already, more nakedly, the central theme of the great Dejection Ode, written eleven years later: the sonnet ends, significantly ‘Better to die than live and not be lov’d’. And some cancelled lines from an early poem called Happiness combine the clowning at his own expense with the desire for the impossible total love:
Ah! doubly blest, if love supply
Lustre to this now heavy eye,
And with unwonted Spirit grace
That fat vacuity of face.
Or if e’en Love, the mighty Love
Shall find this change his powers above;
Some lovely maid perchance thou’lt find
To read thy visage in thy mind.
It was the combination of the need for a family group and the need for love that brought about Coleridge’s early marriage at the age of twenty-two. During 1794, the year of enthusiasm for Pantisocracy, Southey was the ideal friend, for whose approbation Coleridge poured out all his ideas, plans, politics, philosophy. Southey himself was engaged to a Miss Edith Fricker, a dressmaker, one of the five daughters of a Bristol widow. Edith Fricker’s sister, Mary, and her husband, Robert Lovell, were to share in the Pantisocratic expedition: Southey and Coleridge enthusiastically decided that it would be an idealistic convenience if Coleridge married the eldest sister, Sarah Fricker. Coleridge’s letters to Southey about this proposed union make it clear that it was primarily enthusiasm for Southey and Pantisocracy which impelled him:
Well, my dear Southey! I am at last arrived at Jesus. My God! how tumultuous are the movements of my Heart—Since I quitted this room what and how important Events have been evolved! America! Southey! Miss Fricker! Yes—Southey—you are right—Even Love is the creature of strong Motive—I certainly love her. I think of her incessantly and with unspeakable tenderness—with that inward melting away of Soul that symptomatises it.
Pantisocracy—O I shall have such a scheme of it! My head, my heart are all alive ….
I am longing to be with you—Make Edith my Sister—Surely, Southey! we shall be … most friendly where all are friends. She must therefore be most emphatically my Sister.
But even then, in September 1794, he was writing agitated and self-exculpatory letters to Southey excusing himself for not having written to Sarah Fricker—he stayed in London unintentionally and would have written if he had known he was staying:
I told her, I should write the moment I arrived in Cambridge—I have fulfilled the Promise—Recollect, Southey! that when you mean to go to a place—tomorrow—and tomorrow—and tomorrow—the time that intervenes is lost—Had I meant at first to stay in London a fortnight, a fortnight should not have elapsed without my writing to her—If you are satisfied, tell Miss F. that you are so—but assign no Reasons. I ought not to have been suspected …
Typically, he takes a high moral line with Southey’s indignation on Sarah Fricker’s behalf—Southey is too virtuous, judges too strictly—he, Coleridge, would be more sympathetic in Southey’s position. ‘Southey! Precipitance is wrong!’
But Coleridge was very much the opposite of precipitate in Miss Fricker’s direction. On leaving Cambridge he went to London, where he met a girl called Mary Evans whom he had indeed loved, and was deeply disturbed by the meeting. He lurked in silence in London, distressed by his conscious knowledge that he did not love Miss Fricker, and by Southey’s growing ambivalence towards Pantisocracy. It was Southey himself, always throughout his life a man of punctuality, precision, duty and moral rectitude, who brought the reluctant bridegroom to a sense of his duties. ‘Coleridge,’ he said, ‘did not come back to Bristol till January 1795, nor would he, I believe, have come back at all, if I had not gone to London to look for him. For having got there from Cambridge at the beginning of winter, there he remained without writing to Miss F. or to me till we actually apprehended that his friends had placed him somewhere in confinement.’ Coleridge, however indecisive, was always anxious to behave rightly and to be thought well of—when informed by Southey and by Miss Fricker ‘with her customary delicacy’ that he had compromised her, that she considered herself engaged and had even refused two advantageous offers on his behalf, he submitted to marriage with a good grace. Tom Poole found them the cottage at Nether Stowey; his first son, Hartley, was born in 1796. From this time on he was never free of anxiety about money, and Mrs Coleridge’s desire to be a respectable woman in society made life no easier. Family responsibilities are now added to the lack of self-respect and tortuous habit of mind which, combined with high ambition, already made it difficult for him to commit himself to any course of work or piece of writing and carry it through. He was genuinely harassed and bewildered, as is clear in a letter he wrote to the Bristol bookseller Joseph Cottle who befriended him, despite its notes of petulance, exaggeration and over-dramatization:
I have left my friends: I have left plenty; I have left that ease which would have secured a literary immortality and have enabled me to give to the public works conceived in moments of inspiration and polished with leisurely solicitude and alas! for what have I left them? for [Southey] who deserted me in the hour of distress and for a scheme of virtue impracticable and romantic! So I am forced to write for bread! write the flights of poetic enthusiasm when every minute I am hearing a groan from my wife. Groans, and complaints, and sickness! The present hour I am in a quick-set hedge of embarrassment, and whichever way I turn, a thorn runs into me! The future is cloud, and thick darkness! Poverty perhaps, and the thin faces of them that want bread, looking up to me! Nor is this all. My happiest moments for composition are broken in upon by the reflection that I must make haste, I am too late! I am already months behind! I have received my pay beforehand!
Here again is a theme that recurs throughout the rest of Coleridge’s life.
Coleridge was to ascribe many of his later misfortunes to his wife’s lack of sympathy with his intellectual needs and aspirations. De Quincey, a sharp observer and psychologist, who worshipped Coleridge as a young man to the extent of making him an anonymous gift of £300, questioned in his Recollections of the Lake Poets ‘whether Coleridge would not, under any circumstances, have become indifferent to a wife not eminently capable of enlightened sympathy with his own ruling pursuits’, and gave it as his opinion that ‘neither Coleridge nor Lord Byron could have failed, eventually, to quarrel with any wife ….’ But De Quincey, at the time he wrote that, was given to a slightly malicious touching up and exaggeration of Coleridge’s faults, partly at least because he used Coleridge as a kind of public scapegoat for the opium-taking habit with which he was also cursed, and which he alternately glamourized and despised. It is probable that Coleridge would have expected far too much and therefore received far too little from any marriage: but the one he did make was nevertheless certainly far less suitable than many he could have made, and sprang from impractical moral idealism and a terror of disappointing Southey. Writing of how he had, against his principles, allowed himself to be persuaded not to wear coloured clothes when acting as a Unitarian lay preacher in Sheffield, he said
Indeed I want firmness, I perceive, I do—I have that within me which makes it difficult for me to say, No! repeatedly to a number of persons who seem uneasy and anxious.
And in 1804 he wrote to Southey from Malta:
I was blasted in my only absolute wish, having married for honour and not for love! Southey! that I think and feel so kindly and lovingly of you, who were the sole cause of my marriage, this is a proof to me that my nature is not ignoble—
The Alfoxden year, 1797–8, provided an intellectual and emotional release for both poets. Wordsworth had the qualities Coleridge most needed and admired. He believed in himself, he was sure of his vocation as a poet, he had immense will-power and tenacity of purpose when it came to getting things done. Dorothy admired and worshipped him, and Wordsworth accepted this as his due: Coleridge’s deep need to admire and worship, particularly since Southey’s defection from Pantisocracy, found a natural focus within the pattern already set up by the Wordsworths. Wordsworth was resolute and independent: Coleridge, too self-disparaging to be consistently ambitious on his own behalf, could expand his ideals vicariously through Wordsworth, who was going to write the ‘great philosophical poem’ he, Coleridge, was convinced should be written. The Wordsworths’ passionate loyalty to each other, their sharing of ideas about literature, nature and human nature, gave him the sense of naturally belonging within a group which he had lacked, wanted, and failed to create in Pantisocracy. And he was necessary to Wordsworth, and expanded into intellectual brilliance and emotional joy as this became clear. He was much more widely read than Wordsworth, much more interested in ‘placing’ an idea in the history of ideas and in the context of general thought: he was able to give shape and articulation and complexity to the views Wordsworth was feeling for about what subjects poetry should treat, and in what manner. He was good for Wordsworth too, in that their emotional needs were complementary. Wordsworth, in his innermost self proud, solitary, courageous and self-regarding, was on the surface suspicious and awkward. Coleridge, who lacked self-respect or self-confidence at the deepest level, was on the surface charming, warm, welcoming and quick to relax and involve people he met. Wordsworth increased Coleridge’s sense of his own value: Coleridge made it possible for Wordsworth to communicate, and thus more precisely to formulate, his solitary thoughts. It is arguable that the beneficial effects on Wordsworth were finally more lasting; and his tribute to Coleridge’s humanizing influence at the end of the Prelude is precise, eloquent, and beautiful:
Coleridge! with this my argument of thee
Shall I be silent? O capacious Soul!
Placed on this earth to love and understand
And from thy presence shed the light of love
Shall I be mute ere thou be spoken of?
Thy kindred influence to my heart of hearts
Did also find its way. Thus fear relaxed
Her overweening grasp: thus thoughts and things
In the self-haunting spirit learned to take
More rational proportions; mystery
The incumbent mystery of sense and soul,
Of life and death, time and eternity,
Admitted more habitually a mild
Interposition …
De Quincey suggested that Coleridge’s marriage was not made easier by the advent of Dorothy, ‘a young lady whom I will not describe more particularly than by saying that intellectually she was very much superior to Mrs Coleridge’. He describes her as ‘the very wildest (in the sense of the most natural) person that I have ever known; and also the truest, most inevitable and at the same time the quickest and readiest in her sympathy with either joy or sorrow … with the realities of life or the larger realities of the poets.’ Mrs Coleridge, he suggests, was annoyed by the cavalier way in which Dorothy, with her ‘Gipsy Tan’ and her ‘wild and startling’ eyes would come in after a long, wet walk and borrow Sarah Coleridge’s clothes. But there is little evidence to support the idea, put forward by some romantic biographers, that Dorothy was in love with Coleridge, or he with her: they were both held by the powerful emotion of love for William and the high poetic purpose. Coleridge’s admiration for her, and hers for him, were both extravagant and detailed. Coleridge wrote:
Wordsworth and his exquisite sister are with me. She is a woman indeed! in mind I mean, and heart; for her person is such, that if you expected to see a pretty woman you would think her rather ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman you would think her pretty! but her manners are simple, ardent, impressive … Her information various. Her eyes watchful in minutest observation of nature; and her taste, a perfect electrometer. It bends, protrudes and draws in, at subtlest beauties and most recondite faults.
It has been said that Dorothy taught Coleridge to see; both poets drew on her journals for accurate natural descriptions, and Coleridge’s poetry and his poetic theory become much more involved in the precise ‘minute observation’ of nature, as opposed to ‘poetic’ generalizations, from this time.
Dorothy wrote of Coleridge, to Mary Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s future wife:
He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul, mind and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very plain, that is, for about three minutes: he is pale and thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips and not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, half-curling rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of them.
She describes, too, the reading aloud that became a regular occupation: first ‘William’s new poem The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘after tea he repeated to us two acts and a half of his tragedy Osorio’. The next morning William read his tragedy The Borderers.
Out of these readings, this close attention to the poetic process, and the long walks in which they encouraged each other to notice and accurately describe minute natural details, so that the descriptions became part of, and intensified, their feeling for each other, grew many of the Lyrical Ballads, much of Coleridge’s greater nature poetry (Frost at Midnight, This Lime Tree Bower) and the precise analyses of the workings of poetry and the poetic imagination which made Wordsworth’s great preface to the Lyrical Ballads and, much later, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. The relationship was prolonged for many more years, but stresses were already present within it. In 1798 the three went to Germany together, but separated there, Coleridge to study meta-physics and be sociable at Göttingen University, Wordsworth and Dorothy to a cold and self-contained existence in parsimonious lodgings in Goslar, where Wordsworth wrote much great poetry. Back in England, they went to live near each other, Coleridge at Greta Hall in Keswick, Wordsworth and Dorothy at Grasmere. By now Coleridge’s health was poor—he had gouty swellings and bowel troubles, and the opium he began to take to relieve them only exacerbated them. His domestic troubles increased. Dorothy began to refer to him as ‘Poor C.’. In 1802, about a month after Wordsworth’s marriage, she wrote in her journal
Poor C. left us and we came home together … C. had a sweet day for his ride. Every sight and every sound reminded me of him—dear, dear fellow, of his many walks to us by day and by night, of all dear things. I was melancholy and could not talk, but at last I eased my heart by weeping—nervous blubbering, says William. It is not so. O! how many many reasons have I to be anxious for him.
A month later she records that they had from him ‘a sad melancholy letter’ that ‘prevented us all from sleeping’.
By now Coleridge had fallen deeply in love with Sara Hutchinson, his ‘Asra’, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law. In 1802 he wrote Dejection: an Ode, a great poem inspired by a combination of his despair at his own lack of will and productivity compared with Wordsworth, and the hopelessness of his passion for Sara—the first, unpublished version of the poem is a long, loosely formed, personal verse-letter addressed to her. Dorothy’s journal for 21 April 1802 records that
William and I sauntered a little in the garden. Coleridge came to us, and repeated the verses he wrote to Sara. I was affected with them, and was on the whole, not being well, in miserable spirits. The sunshine, the green fields and the fair sky made me sadder; even the little, happy sporting lambs seemed but sorrowful to me. The pile wort spread out on the grass a thousand shining stars. The primroses were there, and the remains of a few Daffodils. The well, which we cleaned out last night, is still but a little muddy pond, though full of water.
Dorothy’s prose captures both the feeling of Dejection (‘I see, not feel, how beautiful they are’) and that of her brother’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, the sense that there has passed away a glory from the earth. The glory had passed away from the relationship too. In 1804 Coleridge went to Malta, partly in search of a better climate for his health than the wet Lakes, partly in order to shelve the problem of his quarrels with his wife and his love for Sara Hutchinson. The Wordsworths thought about him constantly, and awaited his return eagerly: he was needed, for without him Wordsworth seemed unable to embark properly on his ‘great philosophical poem’, The Recluse. When he did return in 1806, they encouraged him to be decisive about making a complete separation from his wife, and to become part of their own close family group. But Coleridge was no longer the same man—increasing addiction to opium had changed him. He lingered indecisively in the south for months after his return, communicating neither with the Wordsworths nor with his wife. Dorothy recorded their shock at the first meeting—he was unhealthily fat and lethargic, would not speak of personal matters, was as different from what they had expected as a stranger would have been. They encouraged him to live with them nevertheless, but the situation became increasingly strained. Wordsworth and Coleridge began to criticize each other, and the qualities which had led to their understanding now became the points of stress.
In 1808 Coleridge was still writing to friends ‘That there is such a man in the world as Wordsworth, and that such a man enjoys such a Family, makes both Death and my inefficient Life a less grievous Thought to me’. But in fact Wordsworth’s austere existence with his close and worshipping family would not have suited Coleridge even if he had been in good health. He needed wide social contacts, and an audience. Lamb describes him reciting Kubla Khan, ‘which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour when he sings or says it … his face when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory; an archangel a little damaged’. Crabb Robinson described him holding him ‘on the stretch of attention and admiration from past 3 till 12 o’clock’ on politics, metaphysics and poetry: De Quincey describes him as delivering more aphorisms and ‘weight of truth’ in three hours’ talk ‘than would easily be found in a month’s select reading’. But the Wordsworths were not entirely admiring of the skills he had—they undervalued, as will be seen later, his greatest poetic achievements, and Dorothy told Lady Beaumont that he was unwise to lecture since ‘a man is perpetually tempted to lower himself to his hearers to bring them into sympathy with him’.
The Wordsworths’ increasing impatience with, and criticism of his lack of will-power and decisiveness at this stage of his life coincided with his own self-distaste for the same reason. But Coleridge was a great man and a great psychologist, and beneath both the very real suffering and the hysterical self-pity, self-accusation and self-excusing, was a steady intellectual curiosity about the relationship between body and mind, intellect and emotions (what he called thought and feeling). His greatest need, both as a man and as a thinker, was for a sense of unity and coherence in things: his projected magnum opus was to be an organic philosophy which should unite the insights of theology, science, the arts, metaphysics and logic; his primary interest as a critic was in the creative imagination of the poet which fused disparate objects into a new ‘organic’ whole and was an image ‘in the finite mind’ of the original FIAT or ‘I AM’ which had created the universe. His great poems—The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Dejection—all present images of worlds in which the vital unifying principle is not functioning or not perceived: the mariner is becalmed, stared at by Life-in-Death, alone on a wide wide sea—
So lonely ’twas that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
Kubla Khan is an image of a lost Paradise, that sunny dome, those caves of ice, that can only be rebuilt if the visionary poet can ‘revive within me’ the ‘symphony and song’ of harmony. In Dejection the poet can see, not feel, how beautiful are the natural objects, from which we ‘receive but what we give’. And even during the dark years of opium addiction, apparently blasted promise, and apparently hopeless emotional isolation, Coleridge was observing precisely the effects of illness, opium, frustrated sexual desire, on his poetry, his metaphysics, his moral being. It is typical of him that, having been seized in a field with an excruciating attack of diarrhoea and faintness, he should climb back onto the stile he had failed to get over and make notes in his pocket book about the effects on his emotions of the weakness in his stomach, and the uses of the word ‘bowels’ in the Bible to denote the affections.
The theme of his own increasing alienation from any sense of being connected as a conscious agent to his own immediate life pervades much of his thinking during this period. The world of the senses, of natural objects, seems unreal, and so does the world of normal emotions—domestic affections, family life. He examines various causes for this. He is sexually confused—he can feel only dislike for Mrs Coleridge, and cannot allow himself morally to feel desire for Sara Hutchinson—he watches himself escaping this predicament by constructing general theories about the nature of love and the affections, or, more desperately, about the nature of the universe. He considers his own pain as an agent of his moral weakness. It confuses his perceptions, tires him and defeats him. He considers the effects of the opium ‘reverie’ on both his thoughts and his sensations—the sense of effortless distance it produces, the endless ramifications of thought without action. He considers his own predisposition to create complex abstract structures of ideas as originating in his imaginative but insecure childhood. In 1800 he wrote to Thomas Wedgwood that he was oppressed by the state of affairs in France, and remarked gloomily that ‘the dedication of much hope and fear to subjects which are perhaps disproportionate to our faculties and powers is a disease’. It is probable, he says, reciting Wordsworth’s creed, ‘that a man’s private and personal connections and interests ought to be uppermost in his daily and hourly thoughts’ but he himself has had the disease of abstract thought so long ‘and my early Education was so undomestic, that I know not how to get rid of it; or even to wish to get rid of it’. And he uses the effects of opium as an illustration of his meaning. ‘Life were so flat a thing without Enthusiasm—that if for a moment it leave me, I have a sort of stomach-sensation attached to all my Thoughts, like those which succeed to the pleasurable operation of a dose of Opium. Now I make up my mind to a sort of heroism in believing the progressiveness of all nature, during the present melancholy state of Humanity—’.
On the same kind of subject, he tells Godwin in 1802 that ‘partly from ill-health and partly from an unhealthy and reverie-like vividness of Thoughts and (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes and feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from emotion and action. In plain and natural English, I am a dreaming, and therefore an indolent man—I am a Starling self-incaged and always in the Moult, and my whole Note is, Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.’ The causes that have robbed him of will-power have also taken away his power to resist ‘Impulses from without’. He is, he says, ‘as an acting man, a creature of mere Impact. “I will,” and “I will not” are phrases, both of them equally, of rare occurrence in my dictionary.’
He even began to construct a theory of the nature of evil and original sin from his observation of the effects of his physical discomforts on his own will-power. The will and the understanding working together, the equivalence of conscience and consciousness were his ideal, and it was in his own complete helplessness under the stream of delirious images and fantasies created in his consciousness by illness and opium that he glimpsed the workings of something which might be really hostile to philosophy and morality. In 1803 he wrote in a notebook
I will at least make the attempt to explain to myself the Origin of moral Evil from the streamy Nature of Association, which Thinking = Reason curbs and rudders/how this comes to be so difficult/Do not the bad Passions in Dreams throw light and shew of proof upon this Hypothesis?—Explain those bad Passions: and I shall gain Light, I am sure …
The innocent sleep of children may contradict the theory that simple passive consciousness and random association offer the point of entry for evil and corruption—‘but what is the height, and ideal of mere association?—Delirium.—But how far is this state produced by Pain and Denaturalization? And what are these?—In short, as far as I can see anything in this Total Mist, Vice is imperfect yet existing Volition, giving diseased Currents of association because it yields on all sides and yet is—So think of Madness.’
In 1800 he had already touched on the theme of the distortion of consciousness and conscience through pain in a letter to his friend Humphry Davy, the scientist, which shows his typical precise curiosity about the nature of his experience:
Did Carlisle ever communicate to you, or has he in any way published, his facts concerning Pain, which he mentioned when we were with him? It is a subject which exceedingly interests me—I want to read something by somebody expressly on Pain, if only to give an arrangement to my own thoughts, though if it were well treated I have little doubt it would revolutionize them—
For the last month I have been tumbling on through sands and swamps of Evil and bodily grievance. My eyes have been inflamed to a degree, that rendered reading and writing scarcely possible: and strange as it seems, the act of poetic composition as I lay in bed, perceptibly affected them, and my voluntary ideas were every minute passing, more or less transformed into vivid spectra. I had leaches repeatedly applied to my Temples, and a Blister behind my ear—and my eyes are now my own but in the place where the Blister was, six small but excruciating Boils have appeared, and harrass me almost beyond endurance.
Love too, like evil, is to be defined within the distinction between acts of will and random acts of fantasy, day-dream, sensual preference:
Love, however sudden, as when we fall in love at first sight (which is, perhaps, always the case of love in its highest sense) is yet an act of the will, and that too one of its primary and therefore ineffaceable acts. This is most important; for if it be not true, either love itself is all a romantic hum, or mere connection of desire with a form appropriated to excite and gratify it, or the mere repetition of a daydream.
If love is not an act of the will
I know not how we could attach blame and immorality to inconstancy, when confined to the affections and a sense of preference. Either therefore we must brutalize our notions with Pope:—
Lust, through some certain strainers well refined
Is gentle love and charms all woman-kind:
Or we must dissolve and thaw away all bonds of morality by the irresistible shocks of an irresistible sensibility with Sterne.
Coleridge himself was, in fact, trapped by the conflict between his own morality and his own experience. In 1801 he wrote to Poole that he believed ‘that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling’ and declared that the souls of five hundred Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton—because in Newton’s materialist system the mind was passive—‘a lazy Looker-on, in an external world’. Coleridge was afraid of the passive mind, increasingly connected in his own view as it was with hallucination and evil, far from the ratiocination of materialist philosophy—mind for him was ‘made in God’s image—the Image of the Creator’.
But his own thoughts and feelings could not be connected and unified. He could not afford, morally, to pay them attention. In a spate of private letters in 1802 he quotes the famous lines of Dejection which were not published in the first version of the poem, but only later, in 1817:
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.
Coleridge quotes these lines again and again in terms of his domestic misery—‘Ill-tempered speeches sent after me when I went out of the house, ill-tempered speeches on my return, my friends received with freezing looks, the least opposition or contradiction occasioning screams of passion—’. But his misery over Sara Hutchinson—the effort he made to turn his reflections on love, desire, sensuality, into abstractions, to keep the relationship Platonic, so that no ‘natural man’ should corrupt it—this probably told on him much more, as it was much more what he needs must feel but cannot afford to ‘think’ about. So, as he says of himself in Biographia Literaria ‘I relapsed into the same mental disease … I sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches which exercised the strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart.’
Critics who emphasize that Coleridge’s philosophical researches are not necessarily an inferior or less valuable mode of thought than his poetic ones are right. But that Coleridge was afraid of the state of mind in which he was capable of endless distant abstract generalization and yet of no action—even if he was also endlessly able to generalize and abstract this very fear—is indisputable. It works on various levels.
At the simplest level it is comic. His nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge, records him saying ‘I have the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim one of the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but where I saw them I mostly forget.’ His nephew adds a note that there was no man whose opinion of morals or general conduct in life he himself would sooner adopt. ‘But I would not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads. He had much of the geometrician about him; but he could not find his way.’
His lack of relation to ‘earthly roads’, his incapacity to find his way, he also saw in one of his deeper Shakespearean insights:
Hamlet’s character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should be impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.
But beneath his personal problems, his own conflict between thought and feeling, capacity and incapacity to use will and consciousness in meaningful action, lay his preoccupation with wholeness, with the life that seemed to him to unify and pervade all things. And when he and the outside world were in a state of calm his curiosity about the ‘feelings’ of pain and grief, which could lead to random evil motions of the will, turned in the opposite direction. In poetry and religion a man of deep thought and deep feeling could discern meaning and action everywhere: it was negative thought, the human need to be passive, the limitations of consciousness, that produced the sense of death:
On this calm morning of the 13th of November 1809, it occurs to me, that it is by a negation and voluntary act of no thinking that we think of earth, air, water etc. as dead. It is necessary for our limited powers of consciousness, that we should be brought to this negative state, and that this state should pass into custom; but it is likewise necessary that at times we should awake and step forward; and this is effected by those extenders of our consciousness—sorrow, sickness, poetry and religion. The truth is, we stop in the sense of life just when we are not forced to go on, and then adopt a permission of our feelings for a precept of our reason.
Wordsworth, during the period immediately preceding the quarrel between the friends, was apparently both much more self-confident and much more self-contained. He wrote much upon the theme of Duty, and accepted himself the duty and devotion of the three women of his household. Coleridge, however, wrote, arguably rightly, ‘My many weaknesses are of some advantage to me; they unite me more with the great mass of my fellow-beings—but dear Wordsworth appears to me to have hurtfully segregated and isolated his being. Doubtless his delights are more deep and sublime; but he has likewise more hours that prey upon the flesh and blood.’ And he saw Wordsworth’s personal isolation reflected in his poetry: Wordsworth, like Goethe he said, had ‘this peculiarity of utter non-sympathy with the subjects of … poetry. They are always, both of them, spectators ab extra—feeling for, but never with, their characters.’ There is some truth in this judgment, if not a complete truth. It can be related to Coleridge’s view that Wordsworth was ‘by nature incapable of being in Love, tho’ no man more tenderly attached—hence he ridicules the existence of any other passion, than a compound of Lust with Esteem and Friendship, confined to one Object, first by accidents of Association, and permanently, by the force of Habit and a sense of Duty. Now this will do very well—it will suffice to make a good Husband—it may even be desirable … that we should have this and no more—but still it is not Love—and there is such a. passion as Love—which is no more a compound, than Oxygen.’
If Coleridge at this time was distressed by the remoteness from life imposed on him by ‘bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility’, Wordsworth was building up, in his isolated being, a self-contained poetic ‘self’ which was to develop into a seer and judge of mankind. His great autobiographical poem, The Prelude, usually referred to in his life-time as the Poem on his own Life, describes the knitting together of this self from the experience of his childhood and youth, and his conscious organization and acceptance of it. It describes the development of what Keats, in a brilliant phrase called ‘the egotistical sublime’, although Keats had not read The Prelude, which was published after Wordsworth’s death. In the beginning this egotism provided a healthy and outgoing energy and curiosity that enabled Wordsworth to do something analogous to, if not the same as, what Coleridge aspired to and missed, the unification of thought and feeling and the sense of life in the world beyond the self. Wordsworth himself was worried by the apparent egotism of the undertaking: he wrote to his friend and patron, Sir George Beaumont, explaining his purpose:
It will not be much less than 9,000 lines, not hundred but thousand lines, long; an alarming length! and a thing unprecedented in Literary History that a man should talk so much about himself. It is not self-conceit, as you will know well, that has induced me to do this, but real humility; I began the work because I was unprepared to treat any more arduous subject and diffident of my own powers. Here at least I hoped that to a certain degree I should be sure of succeeding, as I had nothing to do but describe what I had felt and thought, therefore could not easily be bewildered.
In the poem on his own life the self-absorption is greedy, curious and creative. His early miseries are wound up in his better self:
Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society. How strange that all
The terrors, pains and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e’er have borne a part
And that a needful part in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself.
But the ‘better self’ whose creation was marked by the Poem on his Own Life contained dangerous elements. The hopeful arrogance of the early letters, the determination to be an extraordinary man, produced some great poetry, and an Olympian ‘stance’ which is sometimes moving and sometimes maddening. Wordsworth writes to Sir George Beaumont about Sir Joshua Reynolds in a high patronizing tone. Reynolds, ‘a Man with such a high sense of the dignity of his Art’, should have paid more attention to the ‘nobler departments of painting’ not only because his paintings might have been better but because a great man must set a good example. A man of genius, he says, clearly thinking of Wordsworth as much as of Reynolds, should, ‘regardless of temporary gains whether of money or praise’, fix his attention ‘solely upon what is intrinsically interesting and permanent’. His concluding sentence puts this laudable view about external values slightly differently. Reynolds could have given an example ‘of a man preferring the cultivation and exertion of his own powers in the highest possible degree to any other object of regard’. In some way the egotistical sublime, the cultivation of one’s own powers, has become equated with ‘what is intrinsically interesting and permanent’. This is a common Romantic theme and the consciousness and work of the artist becomes the intrinsic and permanent value of the poetry of the period for reasons outside the scope of this book, and its power can be felt in Coleridge’s exaltation of the Creative mind in man and the universe—but it puts a great strain on the character of the individual artist. Wordsworth inevitably became his own isolated sense of the source of value, morality and truth. Crabb Robinson’s record of his first meeting with him makes this clear.
He said he thought of writing an Essay ‘Why bad poetry pleases’. He never wrote it—a loss to our literature. He said He could not respect the Mother who could read without emotion his poem ‘Once in a lonely hamlet I sojourned’ … He wished popularity for his ‘Two voices are there: one is of the Sea’ as a test of elevation and moral purity.
Crabb Robinson added
At the end of 40 years since this introduction my admiration and love of this great man is unabated, aye, enhanced.
One’s own feelings for this ‘great man’ aspect of Wordsworth are more mixed. When he says of himself that
verse was what he had been wedded to;
And his own mind did like a tempest strong
Come to him thus and drove the weary Wight along.
his driven purpose is admirable. And in a sonnet on the evening star the solitary ambition has its splendour, and its candour.
O most ambitious Star! an inquest wrought
Within me when I recognised thy light;
A moment I was startled at the sight:
And while I gazed, there came to me a thought
That I might step beyond my natural race
As thou now seem’st to do; might one day trace
Some ground not mine—
But in the poems of the later Wordsworth—the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, many poems about monasteries in Memorials of a Tour in Italy 1837, one or two of the Duddon poems, and even the White Doe of Rylstone which he admired himself and defended so fervently—one is struck by a kind of ferocious monastic piety which seems to have overtaken Wordsworth in his inferior poetry. The theme is in another sense a man’s retreat into himself: Wordsworth’s symbol for the solitary man alone with Nature becomes increasingly the voluntarily confined ascetic in the chosen cell. He can still describe the activity of this man as the exercise of ‘natural sympathies’ and Keats could still have called it the egotistical sublime. But something is missing—the note becomes increasingly one of conceit, rather than one of self-confidence, and it strikes one that the self Wordsworth is contemplating and praising is increasingly not the creating mind but the created reputation, not energy but responsibility and moral truth. There is an irony in the fact that as he increasingly preaches humility and patience he sounds increasingly remote, arrogant, self-absorbed and self-praising—it is as though he knew that guilt and sorrow were once potent creative forces and is seeking to re-establish them within the conventional framework of official self-chastisement. Only occasionally does the poet admit that this isolation is terrifying. It appears obliquely in his (to me) appalling sonnets on Capital Punishment, when he argues that the terror of the man doomed to lasting solitary confinement is worse than the terror of death. And one poem, composed significantly fairly early, The Small Celandine, expresses a much more candid and desperate view of the isolation of age. The poet has seen the celandine, he says, often
muffled up from harm
In close self-shelter, like a Thing at rest.
But now it is old and open to storms.
I stopped, and said with inly-muttered voice
‘It doth not love the shower, nor seek the cold:
This neither is its courage nor its choice
But its necessity in being old.
The sunshine may not cheer it, nor the dew;
It cannot help itself in its decay;
Stiff in its members, withered, changed of hue.’
And in my spleen I smiled that it was grey.
The quarrel between the two poets brewed slowly. Coleridge’s very admiration for Wordsworth provided grounds for later differences. He wrote in the early days about the essential happiness of Wordsworth’s family—‘that it is I rather than another, is almost an Accident: but being so very happy within themselves they are too good, not the more for that very reason to want a Friend and common Object of Love out of their Household’. In 1800 he wrote to Poole with truthful enthusiasm, when Poole suggested he abased himself too much before his friend for his own good:
… You charge me with prostration in regard to Wordsworth. Have I affirmed anything miraculous of W? Is it impossible that a greater poet than any since Milton may appear in our days? Have any great poets appeared since him? … Future greatness! Is it not an awful thing my dearest Poole? What if you had known Milton at the age of thirty and believed all you now know of him?—What if you should meet in the letters of any then living man, expressions concerning the young Milton totidem verbis the same as mine of Wordsworth, would it not convey to you a most delicious sensation? Would it not be an assurance to you that your admiration of the Paradise Lost was no superstition, no shadow of flesh and bloodless abstraction, but that the Man was even so, that the greatness was incarnate and personal?
He felt admiration, and wistful envy too for Wordsworth’s ‘practical Faith’, which he himself found so difficult to share, ‘that we can do but one thing well, and that therefore we must make a choice …’.
But by 1807, desperate with opium and with love for Asra, he was growing jealous of Wordsworth. He wrote in his notebook
It is not the W’s knowledge of my frailties that prevents my entire love of them. No! it is their ignorance of the deep place of my being …. O agony! O cruel! is he not beloved, adored by two—and two such beings, and must I not be beloved near him except as a satellite? … W is greater, better, manlier, more dear, by nature to woman than I—I—miserable I!—but does he—O no! no! no! no! he does not—he does not pretend, he does not wish, to love you as I love you ….
More coldly, he criticized the effect of Wordsworth’s domestic life on his poetry and morals. Wordsworth was
living wholly among devotees, having every the minutest thing, almost his very eating and drinking done for him by his sister or wife—and I trembled, lest a film should rise and thicken on his moral eye. The habit, too, of writing such a multitude of small poems was in this instance hurtful to him ….
Wordsworth had always patronized Coleridge, which had suited Coleridge. But now, when Coleridge was beginning to understand that medical restraint was necessary to cope with his addiction, Wordsworth preached his own bracing morality of self-contained self-control, duty, resolution and independence:
One thing is obvious, that health of mind, that is, resolution, self-denial and well-regulated conditions of feeling are what you must depend on; … Doctors can do you little good and that Doctors’ stuff has been one of your greatest curses; and of course, ours through you. You must know … better than any surgeon … What is to do you good …. Do not look out of yourself for that stay which can only be found within.
Coleridge accused him of keeping Sara Hutchinson from him: Wordsworth exculpated himself with dignity, telling Coleridge (with much truth) that he was ‘a man in a lamentably insane state of mind’.
Sara Hutchinson left, exhausted: Coleridge finally arranged to travel to London, in 1810, and the quarrel broke. Coleridge was travelling with a certain Basil Montague who wanted him to stay with him: Wordsworth warned Montague of Coleridge’s unpleasant habits: and Montague in London repeated the whole warning to Coleridge, who reacted as violently as the complexity and intensity of his worship and dependence and jealousy in regard to Wordsworth would lead one to expect. The Wordsworths tried to ignore his distress but he persisted in it, and would not come north again. In 1811 Dorothy wrote indignantly to a friend
I do not think he can resolve to come if he does not at the same time lay aside his displeasure again William. Surely this one act of his mind out does all the rest.
William for the most benevolent purposes communicated to a friend a small part of what was known to the whole town of Penrith—sneered and laughed at there, to our great mortification … and William is therefore treacherous!!! He does not deny the truth of what William said but William ought not to have said it ….
William bears all with calm dignity, neither justifying himself nor complaining of C ….
When Coleridge did, in 1812, go to Grasmere, he went past the Wordsworths’ house without calling. He was still in a state of great distress and wrote to a friend that Dorothy had ‘expressed her confident hope, that I should come to them at once!! I, who for years past had been an ABSOLUTE NUISANCE in the family.’ (Wordsworth admitted the use to Montague of the term ‘absolute nuisance’—one of his favourite expressions.) A reconciliation was finally arranged, and years later the two poets toured in Germany with Wordsworth’s daughter Dora—but the old intimacy was over for ever. Coleridge had admired too much and was too hurt. He wrote—‘the Feeling, which I had previous to that moment, when the 3/4th Calumny burst like a Thunderstorm from a blue sky on my Soul—after 15 years of such religious, almost superstitious Idolatry and Self-Sacrifice—O no! no! that I fear, never can return.’
The literary effects of the quarrel were better for Coleridge than for Wordsworth if only because the friendship had been slowly decreasing Coleridge’s belief in his own gifts. He had never seen himself primarily as a poet—certainly not as one rivalling Wordsworth. In 1800 he was writing that his literary pursuits were the Northern languages, Slavonic, Gothic, Celtic for amusement and for serious work the investigation of the laws relating human feelings, ideas, and words. ‘As to poetry I have altogether abandoned it, being convinced that I never had the essentials of poetic Genius and that I mistook a strong desire for original power.’ It was in 1800 that Wordsworth decided to exclude Coleridge’s unfinished Christabel from the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. At the time Coleridge accepted the judgment—he wrote that ‘the poem was in direct opposition to the very purpose for which the Lyrical Ballads were published—viz.—an experiment to see how far those passions, which alone give any value to extraordinary Incidents, were capable of interesting, in and for themselves, in the incidents of common Life.’ And in the same letter, to Humphry Davy, he hastens to add that ‘I would rather have written Ruth and Nature’s Lady than a million such poems/but why do I calumniate my own spirit by saying, I would rather—God knows—it is as delightful to me that they are written—I know that at present (and I hope, that it will be so) my mind has disciplined itself into a willing exertion of its powers without any reference to their comparative value—’.
This is Coleridge over-persuading himself, abasing himself before Wordsworth—the emphases and the cautious parenthesis prove it. By 1801 in a letter to Godwin, his distress about his poetry has itself a real poetry, like that of the Dejection Ode:
You would not know me—! all sounds of similitude keep at such a distance from each other in my mind, that I have forgotten how to make a rhyme—I look at the Mountains (that visible God Almighty that looks in at all my windows) I look at the Mountains only for the Curves of their outlines; the Stars, as I behold them, form themselves into Triangles—and my hands are scarred with scratches from a Cat whose back I was rubbing in the Dark in order to see whether the sparks from it were refrangible by a Prism. The Poet is dead in me—my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed and mitred with Flame ….
If I die, and the Booksellers will give you anything for my Life, be sure to say—‘Wordsworth descended on him like the γνŵθι σεαυτόν [know thyself] from Heaven; by shewing to him what true Poetry was, he made him know, that he himself was no Poet.’
Not only did Wordsworth insist on the exclusion of the Christabel: he wrote an ungracious prefatory note on the deficiencies of the Ancient Mariner, which was published in the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, although, partly because it aroused a critical fury in Charles Lamb, who wrote a very intelligent condemnation of the note to Wordsworth, it was omitted subsequently.
Coleridge had given up his work in order to help Wordsworth with the laborious preparation of Wordsworth’s poems for the press for this 1800 edition. He felt betrayed, but could only as a poet admit the betrayal much later, when in 1818 he began to speak of his own great poems, Kubla Khan, the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, as perhaps a different kind of poetry, one not subsumed in the Wordsworthian definition he quoted at the time. He talked of the Wordsworths’ ‘cold praise and effective discouragement of every attempt of mine to roll onward in a distinct current of my own—’. And in his later years in Highgate Coleridge became accustomed to reciting these coldly praised poems with enthusiasm, and delivering long speeches on their significance. Lamb records, with admiration, his recitation of Christabel, and adds
But more peculiar in its beauty than this, was his recitation of Kubla Khan. As he repeated the passage
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played
Singing of Mount Abora!
his voice seemed to mount, and melt into air as the images grew more visionary and the suggested associations more remote. He usually met opposition by conceding the point to the objector, and then went on with his high argument as if it had never been raised: thus satisfying his antagonist, himself, and all who heard him; none of whom desired to hear his discourse frittered into points or displaced by the near encounter even of the most brilliant wits.
Wordsworth without Coleridge continued self-sufficient; but work on The Recluse, that grand philosophical poem on human nature, dragged unproductively—partly perhaps because without Coleridge’s sharp, fluid organizing intellect the inspiration for the grand scale was lacking. Although if we read the grandiose plan Coleridge laid out for the work he thought Wordsworth (he himself was naturally incapable, but to Wordsworth all things were possible) should write, it is questionable whether either of them had or could have had, any real idea of what the poem should be. In 1814 Wordsworth published The Excursion, intended as part of The Recluse and very much informed by the recluse’s monastic habit of mind and imagery, although it contained the beautiful Ruined Cottage. In 1817 Coleridge, partly revitalized by the regular Highgate regime, published his Biographia Literaria. He had written in his notebooks
Seem to have made up my mind to write my metaphysical works as my Life and in my Life—intermixed with all the other events or history of the mind of S. T. Coleridge.
The Biographia, incomplete though it is, and difficult to follow, with many of its major statements tucked away in footnotes, is one of the central critical documents of our literature, and it is the inclusion of Coleridge’s assessment of Wordsworth’s poems, including the largely maligned Excursionfn1 which helps to make it so. He said that he intended to establish Wordsworth’s greatness by writing a balanced account of the characteristic merits and defects of his poetry, and essentially this is what he did. But the passages on Wordsworth have other meanings within the literary biographies of both poets. Coleridge, by writing a personal account of the inception of the Lyrical Ballads and his own part in them, and by writing a balanced, distanced judgment of Wordsworth’s kind of poetry, detached himself from the over-close, or biased judgments; it gave the work a critical edge and insight that is still largely unequalled, and a certain personal wit that is still amusing. Wordsworth, at that stage of his life wincing from every criticism, and mistrusting Coleridge’s motives as well as despising his weakness and his social involvement, was not grateful for the work. As Coleridge had prophesied, he refused to do more than skim the book, and found ‘the praise extravagant and the censure inconsiderate’. But it did much to establish his reputation as a major writer during his life-time, and it was the establishment of the reputation that made him able at last to relax a little. Coleridge was aware of this, too, and by 1819 was able to defend Wordsworth’s egotism with detached and truthful generosity. Speaking of a parody of Wordsworth, the True Simon Pure, he conceded that it was funny and added
The writer however ought (as a man, I mean) to recollect, that Mr Wordsworth for full 16 years had been assailed, weekly, monthly and quarterly, with every species of wanton detraction and contempt … that during all these years Mr Wordsworth made no answer, displayed no resentment—and lastly, that from Cicero to Luther, Giordano Bruno, Milton, Dryden, Wolfe, John Brown, etc. etc. I know but one instance (that of Benedict Spinoza) of a man of great Genius and original Mind who on those very accounts had been abused, misunderstood, decried and … persecuted, who has not been worried at last into a semblance of egotism.
Coleridge’s criticism of Wordsworth’s poems in the Biographia reflects the relationship between the men: the habit of joint detailed commentary on each other’s work, the knowledge of character and habits of mind. The following quotation illustrates both Coleridge’s shrewdness and psychological accuracy, and his need to reject the Wordsworthian ideal of poetry as the presentation of ‘passions, in and for themselves in the incidents of common Life’ which he had capitulated to over the rejection of Christabel. He is in fact distinguishing between Wordsworth’s personal need to see the strong, self-contained mind as the creator of its own values and the general modes of writing and reading great poetry—which requires a literate and thoughtful public and a poet who knows how to communicate with other minds and needs to do it:
Who is not at once delighted and improved when the poet Wordsworth himself exclaims,
O many are the poets that are sown
By nature; men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine,
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse,
Nor having e’er as life advanced, been led
By circumstance to take unto the height
The measure of themselves, those favoured beings,
All but a scattered few, live out their time,
Husbanding that which they possess within,
And go to the grave unthought of. Strongest minds
Are often those of whom the noisy world
Hears least. (Excursion, I)
To use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, in such language, do one’s heart good; though I for my part have not the fullest faith in the truth of the observation. On the contrary, I believe the instances to be exceedingly rare; and should feel almost as strong an objection to introduce such a character in a poetic fiction, as a pair of black swans on a lake, in a fancy landscape.
And with the great Immortality Ode, which had stimulated him into writing Dejection he was equally sharp, criticizing Wordsworth’s image of the child as the ‘Best Philosopher’, as the ‘deaf and silent’ eye reading the eternal deep by asking ‘In what sense can the magnificent attributes above quoted be appropriated to a child, which would not make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or a field of corn; or even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The omnipresent spirit works equally in them as in the child; and the child is equally unconscious of it as they.’
He goes on to quote four lines which Wordsworth later omitted, and to criticize them on the grounds that children brought up in Christian families do not see death in this way, but more conventionally, as sleep—and if they do not, would be terrified of ‘the frightful notion of lying awake in the grave’.
The disputed passage speaks of children
To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie.
Coleridge’s criticism is apt at the level he is working on. But the passage reminds me, at least, irresistibly, of Wordsworth’s later prevalent image of the monastic cell—the spirit retired into itself and its own thought. And Wordsworth’s use of this image in this poem brings back the ideas about the human imagination, sensual reality, the unity of both, about which both poets continued to think, and about which their ideas were forever profoundly influenced by each other. Both had had a sense of the world and their minds as united parts of ‘an omnipresent Spirit’: both wrote most movingly of the gulf between that sense and the opposing sense that they, or the world, or both, were dead, lifeless, disconnected. Wordsworth’s biographer tells us that Wordsworth said the Immortality ode was based on two recollections—‘a splendour in the objects of sense which is passed away’ and ‘an indisposition to bend to the law of death as applying in our own case’. Far from regarding these intimations as fanciful, he hailed them as the most precious experiences his life had afforded him. And with them he valued something akin to them—the sense of the immateriality of all objects; that state in which everything he saw seemed inherent in himself, ‘a prospect in the mind’, dreamlike in vividness and solemnity. His song of praise was for ‘those obstinate questionings. Of sense and outward things / Fallings from us, vanishings’.
It is in terms of the Ode’s sense that as ‘a prospect in the mind’ sensual things had had ‘the glory and the freshness of a dream’ that Wordsworth’s image even of the solitary confinement of the cell, of the grave as only ‘a place of thought where we in waiting lie’—not death, not final, but only wisely passive thought—is both moving and appropriate. There is no light or warmth, but there is still the connection to Nature and the spirit of life that the later cell images more fumblingly insist on, and the celandine poem contradicts. Wordsworth also described the withdrawal of this sense of unity. In the Elegiac Stanzas on Peele Castle, he explains that once he would have painted this storm-beaten castle with ‘the light that never was, on sea or land’, the ‘gleam’, the ‘Poet’s dream’ with ‘no motion but the moving tide, a breeze/Or merely silent Nature’s breathing life’. This would have seemed ‘the soul of truth in every part/A steadfast peace that might not be betray’d’. And then, thinking of his encounter with real death, in the tragic drowning of his brother, John:
So once it would have been—’tis so no more;
I have submitted to a new control:
A power is gone, which nothing can restore;
A deep distress hath humanized my Soul.
Coleridge’s sense of the gulf between life and death was different but analogous. Coleridge, the tortured, the expansive, the believer that the body’s pains clogged the immortal spirit feared death less than the essentially pagan Wordsworth, whom Blake called ‘the natural man rising up against the spiritual’. Indeed, in his moments of despair and weakness he genuinely desired it, seeing it not as solitary confinement but as expansion into the infinite. Very early he wrote to a friend
I can at times feel strongly the beauties you describe, in themselves and for themselves—but more frequently all things appear little—all the knowledge that can be acquired, child’s play—the universe itself—what but an immense heap of little things?—I can contemplate nothing but parts, and parts are all little. My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great,—something one and indivisible—and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns, give me the sense of sublimity or majesty. But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity!—‘Struck with the deepest calm of Joy I stood
Silent with swimming sense; and gazing round
On the wide Landscape gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily, a living Thing
Which acts upon the mind, and with such Hues
As cloath th’ Almighty Spirit, when he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.’—
It is but seldom that I raise and spiritualize my intellect to this height—and at other times I adopt the Brahmin Creed, and say—It is better to sit than to stand, it is better to lie than to sit, it is better to sleep than to wake—but Death is the best of all!
Here too is the sense that the intermittent vision of all things as a ‘prospect in the mind’ gives meaning to all things. The Dejection ode describes Coleridge’s opposing vision of the universe of death.
The dying Coleridge is still speculating about the reality of experience, but by now his early sense of visioned unity has been transferred to the spiritual truths of Christianity—both Wordsworth and Coleridge turned to the Church, but whereas Wordsworth needed a cell, a refuge, an outside assurance beyond the bodily failure he experienced, Coleridge took to theology and mysticism in the same way, and with the same needs, as he had taken to artistic vision. Two weeks before his death, he brought his theme together:
I am dying, but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently bygone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope—those twin realities of this phantom world! I do not add Love—for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and so seen as one? I say realities; for reality is a thing of degrees, from the Iliad to a dream … Yet in a strict sense reality is not predictable at all of aught below Heaven.
And so he wished he had been spared to complete that elusive description of this reality,—‘my Philosophy’. ‘But visum aliter Deo, and his will be done.’
Coleridge died in 1834: Wordsworth lived on, outlived by Dorothy (feeble-minded for many years) until 1850. His references to Coleridge towards the end of Coleridge’s life already sound with his eternal valuation of him, rather than their temporary differences or imperfections. In 1832 he wrote ‘he and my beloved sister are the two beings to whom my intellect is most indebted, and they are now proceeding, as it were, pari passu, along the path of sickness …’. At his death he wrote to Coleridge’s nephew ‘though I have seen little of him for the last twenty years, his mind has been habitually present with me, with an accompanying feeling that he was still in the flesh. That frail tie is broken …’.
And in 1835 the thought of death, and the death of Coleridge, aroused one of his few great late poems, the Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg:
Nor has the rolling year twice measured,
From sign to sign its steadfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source;
The rapt One, of the godlike forehead,
The heaven eyed creature sleeps in earth:
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth.
Like clouds that rake the mountain summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother,
From sunshine to the sunless land.
The images of the Immortality ode and Elegiac Stanzas appear in a grimmer context: clouds and waves, once, in their movements symbolic of the life that moved in all things, are now wild and lawless, ‘raking’ the mountains, uncurbed. Sunlight and the sunless land stand in unqualified contrast to each other, light and dark, life and death—and Wordsworth’s own life, like London, partakes of death:
Our haughty life is crowned with darkness,
Like London with its own black wreath,
On which with thee, O Crabbe! forth looking
I gazed from Hampstead’s breezy heath.
They were great men, and both had an unusually powerful grasp on the relationship of the various aspects of life and nature. I have gone into their ideas and their relationship at such length because to an unusual extent their social beliefs, their political theory, their theories of art and landscape are related to each other and to their fundamental ideas, consciously and in a complex way. The power of their minds still impresses us as strongly as in the days when Lamb wrote, only half-joking, about Coleridge having come to live near him:
I think his essentials not touched: he is very bad; but then he wonderfully picks up another day, and his face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory; an archangel a little damaged …. Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet. If I lived with him, or the Author of the Excursion, I should, in a very little time, lose my own identity and be dragged along in the current of other people’s thoughts, hampered in a net.