Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
reproaching them for their behaviour over the past months. To Wordsworth he wrote of Asra, and to George of the unfeeling cruelty of the Ottery Coleridges. To both he was bitter in his reproaches with an intensity he had never previously expressed.
To George he said it was his last ever communication: “when Brothers can exert themselves against an Orphan Brother, the latter must be either a mere monster, or the former must be warped by some improper Passion.” He now asked merely for a copy of his birth certificate, so he could increase his life assurance policy so that all his family debts could be paid off on his death.90
What exactly he wrote to Wordsworth is not known, because Wordsworth destroyed the letter. Coleridge’s feelings are, however, partly revealed in his Notebooks. He was overwhelmed with anger and self-pity; he felt that none of his friends or family understood the efforts he had made, or the loneliness of his situation in London. He felt isolated, rejected and disapproved of, by people who were far happier and better established than he would ever be.
Driven on, no doubt by opium dosing late at night, he surrendered to lament and wild accusation. “In short, I have summoned courage sfogarmi to give vent to my poor stifled Heart – to let in air upon it: Cruelly have I been treated by almost everyone – by T. Poole, all my Brothers, by the Wedgwoods, by Southey…but above all by [the Fates] and by Wordsworth…A blessed Marriage for him & for her it has been! But O! wedded Happiness is the intensest sort of Prosperity, & all Prosperity, I find, hardens the Heart – and happy people become so very prudent & far-sighted…O human Nature! – I tremble, lest my own tenderness of Heart, my own disinterested enthusiasm for others, and eager Spirit of Self-sacrifice, should be owing almost wholly to my being & ever having been an unfortunate unhappy Man.”91
Coleridge’s complaints were hysterical and self-pitying, and could easily be dismissed as wholly unjustified, the paranoia of opium addiction. (It is difficult to see what he could have held against the faithful T. Poole.) But the envious cry against Wordsworth had its meaning, and probably lay at the root of his outburst. It was triggered by a strictly practical matter. After all his efforts over the “White Doe”, Longman suddenly informed him that Wordsworth had withdrawn the poem and that Coleridge had “misunderstood” his commission to negotiate its publication. Coleridge was “painfully surprised”, having heard nothing direct from Wordsworth about it, only Dorothy’s urgings to forward the sale of the work with the “buzz” of his last lectures on contemporary poetry.92
In a first letter he pointed all this out, remarking that neither Wordsworth’s nor Dorothy’s judgement should be warped by “money-motives”. He should publish without regard to criticism or financial disadvantage, considering only the “steady establishment of your classical Rank”. Indeed Coleridge had written “a little preface” to help sell the poem if required, and even planned a publishing scheme which would bring in regular money to support Wordsworth if he needed it.
This last, apparently quixotic plan, was mentioned in terms that might have alerted Wordsworth to the coming explosion. “Indeed before my Fall etc. etc. etc. I had indulged the Hope, that by a division of Labour you would have no occasion to think about [money] – as if I had been to live, with very warm & zealous patronage, I was fast ripening a plan, which secures from 12 to 20£ a week – (the Prospectus indeed going to the Press, as soon as Mr Sotheby and Sir G. Beaumont has read it).”93 This was Coleridge’s first reference to his newspaper The Friend, originally conceived in the flush of his lecturing success, as a plan partly to help Wordsworth.
All these offers were swept aside, and Wordsworth did not publish “The White Doe” until 1815. He may have had his own sound literary reasons (Coleridge had himself suggested some 200 lines of rewriting), but his peremptory treatment of Coleridge’s efforts and advice was humiliating. He now received a second letter, of shaking intensity, “an outcry at the heart” going back over months of frustration and suppressed hostility, but concentrating on the struggle over Asra’s affections. This had become the symbol of their threatened friendship. It was, noted Wordsworth in his draft reply, “the keystone of our offences viz. our cruelty, a hope in infusing into Sara’s mind the notion that your attachment to her has been the curse of all your happiness”.94
Wordsworth tried to refute Coleridge’s accusations point by point, and thus some idea of what Coleridge had actually written to him emerges. It is a series of most intimate reproaches: they had supervised Asra’s letters; they had regarded his influence as “poison entering into her mind”; they had told Asra that she was “the cause” of all his misery.
It is clear that Wordsworth was shocked. The draft of his reply is several pages long, laborious and unusually rambling, its tone veering between outrage and pained rebuttal. Coleridge’s accusations were made “in a lamentably insane state of mind”. His obsession with Asra, and suspicions over Wordsworth’s own conduct towards her, his “transports of passion”, were all “unmanly and ungentlemanly” and the product of a perverted sexual imagination. It seems clear that Coleridge had mentioned, among other things, the bedroom vision at Coleorton.
There is more than one sentence in your letter which I blushed to read, and which you yourself would have been unable to write, could never have thought of writing, nay, the matter of which could never even have passed through your mind, had you not acquired a habit, which I think a very pernicious one, of giving by voice and pen to your most lawless thoughts, and to your wildest fancies, an external existence…and finding by insensible reconcilement fair and attractive bosom-inmates in productions from which you ought to have recoiled as monsters.95*
It is revealing that Wordsworth did not question his own behaviour, or accept that Coleridge’s feelings might have been genuinely wounded. Perhaps it was more than he could afford to do. Instead he is fiercely dismissive, and loftily confident in the purity of his own motives. “[Sara] is 34 years of age and what have I to do with overlooking her letters: It is indeed my business to prevent poison entering into her mind and body from any quarter, but it would be an extreme case in which I should solicit permission to explore her letters to know whether such poison were contained in them.”96 The implication of the word “body” seems deliberate.
Equally, there is no consideration of the obvious effect of opium on Coleridge’s outburst, though if there was “the possibility of some matter of truth” in Coleridge’s deplorable letter then it was the sort of truth conjured up in “the phrenzy of wine”. For Wordsworth it served to show Coleridge’s weakness of temperament by comparison with his own. “I am not fond of making myself hastily beloved and admired, you take more delight in it than a wise man ought. I am naturally slow to love and to cease loving, you promptitude. Here lies the inconsistency.”
It is the sort of exchange of letters that could have ended their friendship forever. But Wordsworth’s great strength, and indeed loyalty, is shown in the fact that having unburdened himself, he did not send his reply. No doubt with Dorothy’s help, the matter was somehow smoothed over, and the invitation for Coleridge to join them later in the summer at Allan Bank still stood. But the whole episode is more than enough to explain Coleridge’s collapse in London. Moreover the emotional hostilities, tacit at Coleorton, now rumbled perilously just beneath the surface of their literary relations, and were almost bound – sooner or later – to explode.
8
Meanwhile Coleridge was rescued from his Strand rooms once again by Daniel Stuart, who summoned him from his sickbed to convalesce at Margate. The sea air blew away some of his self-absorbed miseries. Relieved from the strain of lecturing and the tortuous solitude of his thoughts, he recovered steadily, and in early July went to join the Clarksons in Essex to talk over some