Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
he still managed to leave with Hartley in time for Christmas at Coleorton. Hartley, now ten years old, would later recall this as the start of an “annus mirabilis” with his father.35
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Coleridge and Hartley arrived at Coleorton on 22 December, where they were greeted with “an uproar of sincere Joy”. Hartley’s parting from his mother had passed off easily: “he behaved very well indeed”, but on the coach south he suddenly disappeared at the coaching inn outside Derby while the horses were being changed. He was finally found by his frantic father, standing by the margin of a nearby river, a small solitary figure looking down into the swiftly flowing waters. This piece of “field-truantry”, a disquieting echo of Coleridge’s own boyhood disappearance by the river Otter, was explained as his “hatred of confinement”.
Coleridge found him “a very good, and sweet child”, yet also strange and fantastical. He had invented an entire imaginary world called “Ejuxria”, to which he flew on the back of a “great bird” borrowed from the Arabian Nights. Tiny for his age, brilliantly clever at his lessons, and mischievous at play, he caused chaos among the three Wordsworth children, with pixyish freaks and ingenious make-believe. Coleridge adored him, though he worried about his fibs and “sophisim”, his indiscipline, and his “logical false-dice in the game of Excuses”.
But in trying to reassure his wife of how well Hartley was being looked after, Coleridge made an extravagantly tactless reference to Sara Hutchinson’s good influence. To Hartley’s mother it can only have appeared deliberately wounding. “All here love him most dearly: and your name sake takes upon her all the duties of his Mother & darling Friend, with all the Mother’s love and fondness. He is very fond of her.” If this was not vindictiveness, it was certainly wishful thinking: for Sara Hutchinson was the one member of the Wordsworth household whom Hartley never liked. Like his son, Coleridge could live in imaginary worlds.36
The descent of Coleridge père et fils on the tranquil Coleorton household was magnificently disruptive. Hitherto the worst they had had to suffer was whooping cough among the children, and rain-storms cutting off the road to Ashby de la Zouche. The Beaumonts’ vast estate, perched on the edge of Charnwood Forest, was being rebuilt from the profits of the local coalmines which criss-crossed the villages to the south. Coleorton Hall itself, secluded on an eminence amidst trees, was being redesigned in the gothic style by the architect George Dance the Younger, with polygonal turrets and medieval fluted windows, like a stage-set for the unfinished “Christabel”. There was a family chapel, and extensive eighteenth-century grounds, part of which Wordsworth was helping to redesign as a winter garden on picturesque principles with cedar trees, holly-groves and bucolic monuments. (When the painters Haydon and Wilkie visited two years later, they found a cenotaph to Sir Joshua Reynolds at the end of one tree-lined alley, a bust of Wordsworth at another, and various stone seats and arbors carved with Wordsworthian couplets at each vantage point.)37
As the Hall itself was full of workmen, the Wordsworths were quartered in Coleorton Farm, ten minutes’ walk across the fields to the west, a “roomy”, comfortable, rambling old building with beamed ceilings and large fireplaces, offering fine views to Ashby and Coleorton village. “The sitting room,” enthused Dorothy, “where by the fireside we have seen some glorious sunsets, we far more than like – we already love it.” The Hall and its mysterious turrets looked “exceedingly well by moonlight”.38
Both Coleridge and Wordsworth had writing-rooms, but some doubling-up was required: the children shared a nursery, Wordsworth slept with Mary, Dorothy with Sara Hutchinson, and Coleridge with Hartley, who was still frightened of the dark. Coleridge recalled touchingly how Hartley used to hug him in his sleep, “between sleeping and waking”, and talk endlessly of Derwent and little Sara “before his eyes are fully open in the morning, and while he is closing them at Night”.39
Despite the Greek lessons, pursued each day, paternal discipline was not very strict. To Dorothy, the boy appeared a “restless, whirling, self-sufficing creature” and they had trouble keeping him “silent and still” in the sitting-room. Like his father, he was perfectly undomesticated: “he is absolutely in a dream when you tell him to do the simplest things – his Books, his Slate, his Pencils, he drops them just where he finds them no longer useful.” Yet his sweet temper made her forgive him everything.
Similarly Coleridge needed much organizing, especially at mealtimes (which he often missed) and at night when he went rambling or drinking at the local taverns or stayed up till dawn. She thought he had almost completely cut out his brandy, but there was “some danger in the strong beer” which he found in the nearby inns at Ashby and Thringston village. There is no overt mention of opium, but of course he was still taking it: “Stimulants to keep him in spirits while he is talking”, as she tactfully put it to Lady Beaumont.40
The atmosphere at Coleorton Farm was very strange throughout the winter. Outwardly, the three women were running a thoroughly domestic household, largely dominated by the children: Mary was weaning little Tom, Dorothy was managing cooking and laundry, Asra was schooling and copying manuscripts. But the two men were engaged in a subliminal battle of wills of extraordinary intensity. It involved not only the whole question of their future careers and poetical precedence, but also Coleridge’s drinking and opium-taking, and what were clearly disputed claims on Asra’s affections.
For Wordsworth, Coleridge’s return to their ancient comradeship meant that the Prelude could now be worked over in great detail. A grand formal reading in the sitting-room at Coleorton was planned for the New Year. For Coleridge there was the pressing matter of the London lectures. But Wordsworth finally persuaded him to postpone them, after a long discussion over Christmas. He thought him in too “dreamy and miserable state of mind” to undertake any regular work, and better off at Coleorton where they could “manage” him and keep him from the temptations of brandy and company.41 There was still the plan for the Mediterranean travel book – “not formal Travels, but certain remarks and reflections which suggested themselves to him during his residence abroad”.42 But any immediate chance of financial income in the spring, as Coleridge had promised his wife, was thereby abandoned. This led on to talks about Coleridge’s separation, in which Asra was again closely involved.
There were long rambles through the estate woodlands together, and an all-day expedition to visit Grace Dieu Abbey, a romantic ruin (once the home of the Jacobean dramatist Francis Beaumont) beneath the lowering crags of Charnwood Forest. Asra rode there on a little ass, which the men took turns to lead “over the dirty places”.43 All this time Coleridge seems to have been tortured by his feelings for Asra. Perhaps he was remembering that strange vow of sexual fidelity he had made at the bedside of Cecilia Bertozzi, the siren of Syracuse, two years before. His Notebook entries show the terrible contradiction of his emotions, which he could not express to her. “I should feel myself as much as fallen and unworthy of her Love in any tumult of Body indulged towards her, as if I had roamed (like a Hog) in the rankest Lanes of a (prostitute) city…” Yet at the same time he felt this love heaving within him, “like a Volcano beneath a sea always burning, tho’ in silence…”44
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It is very difficult to reconstruct what followed. Two days after Christmas, early in the morning, there was some sort of confrontation between him and Asra and Wordsworth. (Possibly Coleridge had been up all night, and gone into her room, but this is speculation.) Coleridge seems to have run out across the fields to the local inn, the Queen’s Head, in a mood of despair and started drinking the “strong