Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
that Coleridge would now settle in London, where all the professional help he required was easily available. In particular, the logistics of a weekly paper – in terms of research, printing and circulation – demanded the resources of the capital city. Coleridge now made one of the most critical decisions of his career. He determined once more to return to the Lake District, and to try once again to make his home and relaunch his writing in the North. He went back to the Wordsworths and Asra and his children, drawn by a power far greater than literary ambition. He entered in his Notebook one phrase: “Plucked up my Soul from its Root.”111
1
When Coleridge left Bury St Edmund’s in August 1808, he performed one of his characteristic disappearing acts, and did not arrive at Grasmere for a month. This time it seems that he went on a kind of “retreat”, part religious and part medical, before embarking on the great gamble of his newspaper enterprise. His Notebooks suggest that he went to ground at Leeds, staying with some of Clarkson’s Quaker friends. Here he underwent the worst pains of an opium-withdrawal regime. Clarkson wrote to him secretly at the Golden Sun Inn; and John Broadhead, a Quaker bookseller, furnished him with grocery supplies and more spiritual nourishment.1
Coleridge talked at length with the Friends (the title of his paper may have been inspired partly by their unworldly sympathy) and even visited one of their schools at nearby Ackworth, noting that the “Girls’ Playground” was grassed but the Boys’ worn “perfectly bare”, a sign of their different capacities for play and aggression.2 He discussed the inward spirituality of the great Quaker teachers William Law and George Fox, and envied the Quakers’ simple confidence in prayer, so unlike his own.
“The habit of psychological Analysis makes additionally difficult the act of true Prayer. Yet as being a good Gift of God it may be employed as a guard against Self-delusion, tho’ used creaturely it is too often the means of Self-delusion…O those who speak of Prayer, of deep, inward, sincere Prayer, as sweet and easy, if they have the Right to speak thus, O how enviable in their Lot!”3 The struggle to renew his religious faith went hand in hand with the struggle against opium, each relapse felt like a “Savage Stab” piercing both “Health and Conscience”.4 He experienced as never before a sense of personal sin, of the “Fall” he had mentioned to Wordsworth, but now as an absolute condition of his life. The idea of redemption, both as religious and psychological need, came to possess his thinking “O for the power to cry out for mercy from the inmost: That would be Redemption!”5
Philosophically this placed the concept of Evil, as a fundamental and inescapable fact of nature, back at the centre of all his thought. Poetically, it had been there since the days of “The Ancient Mariner”. But now it had returned as a personal conviction, connecting his religious views with those on art and politics. When he came to write the opening number of The Friend, he startled his readers with the declaration of this as an a priori truth of experience. “I give it merely as an article of my own faith, closely connected with all my hopes of amelioration in man…that there is Evil distinct from Error and from Pain, an Evil in human nature which is not wholly grounded in the limitations of our understandings. And this too I believe to operate equally in the subjects of Taste, as in the higher concerns of Morality.”6 It was a dark reflection, born out of personal sufferings, and articulating the spiritual “witness” that the anonymous Quakers had encouraged during this phase of his regeneration.
2
By the time Coleridge reached Grasmere on 1 September 1808, much of his old physical energy was miraculously returning. He made one of his spectacular arrivals at 11.30 at night, waking the whole household, booming down the tall, newly painted corridors of Allan Bank, admiring and greeting. Wordsworth thought him “in tolerable health and better spirits than I have known him to possess for some time”.7 Southey, when he saw him, declared him offensively noisy and fat, “about half as big as the house”.8
But Coleridge’s feelings were delicate and silent. The sight of Asra filled him with secret, trembling delight. “For Love, passionate in its deepest tranquillity, Love unutterable fills my whole Spirit, so that every fibre of my Heart, nay, of my whole frame seems to tremble under its perpetual touch and sweet pressure, like the string of a Lute…O well may I be grateful – She loves me.”9
Domestic matters quickly engulfed him. Mary Wordsworth was about to give birth to her fourth child, rooms were still being decorated, De Quincey was expected, the Coleridge children were longing to see their father. Coleridge marched over Dunmail Raise with Wordsworth, and stayed a week with Mrs Coleridge, a visit that passed off with unexpected goodwill on all sides. Southey had now moved into Coleridge’s old rooms at the front of Greta Hall, and plans were agreed to send Hartley and Derwent to the local school at Ambleside. Coleridge felt the Keswick household was running smoothly in his absence, and was pleased and not a little astonished when his wife tranquilly gave permission for his daughter, little six-year-old Sara, to stay with him for a month at Allan Bank, and the boys to visit at weekends. A degree of reconciliation was in the autumn air.
“Be assured, my dear Sara!” Coleridge told his wife gently, “that your kind behaviour has made a deep impression on my mind – Would to God, it had been always so on both sides – but the Past is past – & my business now is to recover the Tone of my Constitution if possible & to get money for you and our Children.”10 Mrs Coleridge expressed her approval by sorting out his shirts and making “a pair or two of Drawers for the thighs and seat” of her husband, which had mysteriously expanded under his new health regime.11
Allan Bank was large, with tall windows looking north, and east over Grasmere lake, and the towering shape of Silver Howe Fell enclosing it to the south. It had none of the charm of Dove Cottage (which Dorothy always regretted), or the comforts of Greta Hall. Bleak and exposed, the down-winds from the fell filled it with draughts in summer, and chimney-smoke in the winter, so that food and books were often dusted with soot. Coleridge had a large study and separate bedroom on the first floor, but there was little sense of peace or space. Wordsworth was determined to be self-sufficient, and the three women were endlessly busied with cooking, laundry, vegetable-gardening, baking, and looking after the children – as well as a cow and two piglets.12 Visitors were frequent, including Hartley and Derwent, De Quincey and his friend John Wilson, and Dorothy records that there were often more than a dozen round the table at meals.
Little Sara’s visit to Allan Bank with her father remained one of her earliest memories: a mixture of awkwardness, enchantment and homesickness. She felt overshadowed by the Wordsworth children, especially the angelic Dora, her blonde locks dressed with paper curlers, and all of whom seemed able to play with Coleridge much more freely than herself, making “enough racket for twenty”. Though she slept in her father’s bedroom, she felt lonely and inhibited at first. “My father reproached me, and contrasted my coldness with the childish caresses of the little Wordsworths. I slunk away, and hid myself.”13
But Coleridge was delighted with his daughter, and understood her fears as he had understood Hartley’s. He told her stories, kept a candle burning in the bedroom, took her