Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
about seeing him, and he could never get entry to his Courier rooms until four in the afternoon. But after several evenings together, he began to feel that Coleridge had simply given way to opium and could easily recover himself.48 His suspicions were deepened when Coleridge gave an animated tea-party in his rooms on 3 March, receiving his guests – Wordsworth, Godwin, Lamb and De Quincey – like an oriental potentate, swathed in blankets, and throned on his bed, thoroughly enjoying the fuss. Lamb was amused by the situation, a case of the Mountain coming to Mahomet. He joked about Wordsworth’s grand descent upon the Strand. “Wordsworth, the great poet, is coming to Town; he is to have apartments in the Mansion House. He says he does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare…Even Coleridge is a little checked by this hardihood of assertion.”49
Wordsworth also brought news that Asra was ill, with a mysterious “broken blood vessel”; news which according to Dorothy would prevent Coleridge from brooding over his own misfortunes. Wordsworth continued to rally him: they went to see Sir Thomas Lawrence’s collection of pictures, and later dined with Longman to discuss “The White Doe”. It was a dull evening, “saving that we had some good haranguing – talk I cannot call it – from Coleridge.”50 It was now clear that Coleridge was indeed recovering, and determined to restart his lectures. Wordsworth, though gloomily apprehensive, loyally remained in London to attend the third and fourth of the relaunched series, delivered on 30 March and 2 April.
5
When Coleridge recommenced with his third lecture on Friday, 30 March, his approach had altered. His notes had become compact, and more like a prompt script. There were no long quotations from aesthetic theory. He began with an eloquent personal apology that immediately caught up his audience in the drama of his own struggles. “I could not but be conscious to how severe a trial I had put your patience and candour in my last Lecture…still lingering bodily indisposition…my Faculties too confused…too weak to recite aloud…my mind gradually regained its buoyancy…” This appeal was immediately followed by an amusing definition of types of listeners: sponges, sand-glasses, straining-bags, “and lastly, the Great-Moguls Diamond Sieves” who retain everything that is valuable and forget the rest.51
He then launched directly into one of his great psychological explorations of the poetic principle, as illustrated by Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Even before Shakespeare became a great dramatist, Coleridge argued, he had shown eight essential “Instances of the poetic Power of making everything present to the Imagination”. His notes number these off with effective brevity, and some indications of extempore development.
1 Sense of Beauty…good sign-painter who begins with old men’s and old women’s faces –
2 With things remote from his own feeling…
3 Love of Natural objects – quote “The Hare”…
4 Fancy, or the aggregative Power – “Full gently now she takes him by the hand,/ A lily prison’d in a gaol of snow”
5 That power & energy of what a living poet has grandly & appropriately – “To flash upon the inward eye/ Which is the Bliss of solitude” – & to make everything present by a Series of Images…
6 Imagination: power of modifying one image or feeling by the precedent or following one…
7 The describing natural objects by clothing them appropriately with human passions “Lo, here the gentle lark”…
8 Energy, depth and activity of Thought without which a man may be a pleasing and effective poet; but never a great one. Here introduce Dennis’s “The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry”…& end with Chapman’s “Homer”52
He wound up the lecture by leaving his audience with a single, striking image of Shakespeare’s godlike creative power to transform himself into other forms of being: “to become by power of Imagination another Thing – Proteus, a river, a lion, yet still the God felt to be there”.*
In his fourth lecture, which followed promptly on Friday, 2 April, he turned to analyse in greater detail the visionary gift and power of the Imagination. It was “the power of so carrying the eye of the Reader as to make him almost lose the consciousness of words – to make him see every thing…without any anatomy of description”. The effect was achieved by converting a series of visual details into a single, unified impression or feeling: “by a sort of fusion to force many into one”.
Here the Imagination, “this greatest faculty of the human mind”, used language to imitate a shaping principle within the natural world itself. It created an interior landscape within the mind’s eye, with a unifying perspective. Poetry worked “even as Nature, the greatest of Poets, acts upon us when we open our eyes upon an extended prospect”. Coleridge here returned to Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis”, to give one of his most brilliant re-enactments of the imaginative process in the reader’s mind. It is based on a single couplet from the poem, an evocation of the emotions of separation and departure.
Thus the flight of Adonis from the enamoured Goddess in the dusk of evening:
“Look! How a bright star shooteth from the Sky
So glides he in the night from Venus’ Eye”
How many Images & feelings are here brought together without effort & without discord – the beauty of Adonis – the rapidity of his flight – the yearning yet hopelessness of the enamoured gazer – and a shadowy ideal character thrown over the whole – or it acts by impressing the stamp of human feeling, over inanimate Objects…53
Wordsworth was witnessing Coleridge lecture in public for the first time, and listening to a historic declaration of the Romantic principle of the Imagination. He had also had the peculiar satisfaction of hearing Coleridge quote his own lines on “Daffodils” in the third lecture (themselves adapted from an entry in Dorothy’s Journal), as a signal illustration of that power. Yet he was dry in his praise to Sir George Beaumont, though he now seemed to accept the physical and mental struggle of Coleridge’s undertaking. “I heard Coleridge lecture twice and he seemed to give great satisfaction; but he was not in spirits, and suffered much during the course of the week both in body and mind.”54
Nonetheless Wordsworth did not think Coleridge too ill to leave him without several important commissions, concerning his own work, to fulfil in London. He was to undertake entire charge of the “White Doe” manuscript; to show it to Lamb for comments and present it to Sir George Beaumont, and negotiate the financial terms of its publication with Longman. He also hoped that Coleridge would puff it when he came to lecture on “The Moderns”.
Dorothy was particularly anxious that William would not change his mind about immediate publication, despite the likelihood of a hostile reception from reviewers, as they needed the money for Allan Bank – “what matter, if you get your 100 guineas in your pocket?”55 Later she wrote herself to Coleridge: “Our main reason (I speak in the name of the Females) for wishing that the Poem may be speedily published, is that William may get it out of his head; but further we think that it is of the utmost importance that it should come out before the Buzz of your Lectures is settled.”56
Wordsworth spent the entire Saturday night after this fourth lecture in Coleridge’s rooms in the Strand. They talked over its themes, the concept of the Imagination, and the use Coleridge had made of Wordsworth’s poem “Daffodils” to illustrate the “fifth instance of poetic power”, that of producing visual images in the