dilemma. He was only thirty-four that October, but he felt that somewhere in the Mediterranean he had imperceptibly crossed a shadowline into darker waters.
Stuart had made the “important remark” that there was a middle period in a man’s life, “varying in various men, from 35 to 45”, when for no evident reason he began to feel the “vanity of his pursuits” and to ask “what is all this for?”. Coleridge felt this sudden undermining of the self, this panicky self-questioning of the grounds of life, was especially acute in lonely men – in bachelors, widowers or “Unhappy Husbands”. Such a man “becomes half-melancholy, gives in to wild dissipation, or self-regardless Drinking” and might even deliberately destroy himself. He would leave his “ingenious female, or female-minded friends, to fish out some motive for an act which…would have acted even without a motive even as the Terror in Nightmairs”.2
Such a crisis would burst upon a man from whatever casual cause, as surely as “gunpowder in a Smithy” would eventually be ignited by some chance spark or other. “I had felt this Truth; but never saw it before so clearly; it came upon me at Malta, under the melancholy dreadful feeling of finding myself to be a Man, by a distinct division from Boyhood, Youth, and ‘Young Man’ – Dreadful was the feeling – before that Life had flown on so that I had always been a Boy, as it were – and this sensation had blended in all my conduct…” If men survived this period, “they commonly become cheerful again – that is a comfort – for mankind – not for me!”3 It was this sense of crisis, the entry into Dante’s “dark wood” of middle age, that haunted Coleridge quite as much as opium in these restless years.
3
Some practical prospects slowly took shape in London during September. The Royal Institution proposed a series of Lectures on the Fine Arts for the autumn. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Howick, agreed to an interview about a possible civil service post, in response to Sir Alexander Ball’s recommendations to Downing Street. Charles and Mary Lamb fed him with meat and porter and puns, and discussed his marriage. He and Charles tried smoking “segars”. Very gradually things fell into place. He even grappled with the opium problem, making an analytic list of the repeated pattern of his relapses. “1. Uncomfortable [feelings]. 2. Opium + Brandy. 3. Increased N.E. [Nervous Energy]. 4. Positive body pain. 5. Remorse & Despondency…Try little by little…”4
He sketched a beautiful, haunting new stanza for the Mariner, a sort of nightmare souvenir of his time on the Gosport:
…And stifled words & groans of pain
Mix’d on each murmuring lip,
We look’d round & we look’d up
And Fear at our hearts as at a Cup
The Life-blood seem’d to sip.
The Sky was dull & dark the Night
The Helmsman’s face by his lamp gleam’d bright,
From the Sails the Dews did drip –
Till clomb above the eastern bar
The horned Moon, with one bright Star
Within its nether tip.’5
So these early weeks of autumn 1806 became a time of stocktaking and confidences about his life. Ostensibly Coleridge was delayed by an absurd series of confusions about his book box, which was lost at Wapping, with its precious cargo of books, papers, old shirts, Roman pearls and attar of roses perfume. Coleridge suspected Captain Derkheim of purloining the latter (the Captain had suddenly married and even more suddenly returned to sea, an object-lesson in American promptitude) and he spent days frantically combing the warehouses around Tower Hill in the rain.6 It was not till October that everything was found safely packed away in a box labelled “Thomas Russell”. Similar confusion attended his attempts to wait on Lord Howick, who finally dismissed him in the best bureaucratic manner, with a non-committal message left with the doorman. But by this time another government posting was far from Coleridge’s mind.7
He wrote to Stuart a measured reflection on his Mediterranean adventures. “Though no emolument could ever force me again to the business, intrigue, form and pomp of a public situation, yet beyond all doubt I have acquired a great variety of useful knowledge, quickness in discovering men’s characters, and adroitness in dealing with them. I have learnt the inside character of many eminent living men…In short, if I recover a steady tho’ imperfect Health, I perhaps should have no reason to regret my long Absence, not even my perilous detention in Italy.” He thought that his friendship with Allston and other “Artists of acknowledged highest reputation” had done more for his insight into the fine arts, in three months in Rome, than had twenty years in England.8
He also wrote, in less measured tones, about his marriage. Stuart later destroyed most of this confession, marking the gap grimly “Coleridge 1806 wife”. What has remained is a memorable passage of special pleading, heightened by the vivid imagery of his “Dejection” ode to Sara Hutchinson. Coleridge claimed that his unhappy marriage was the source of all his difficulties. “This, this perpetual Struggle, and endless heart-wasting, was at the bottom of all my irresolution, procrastination, languor, and former detestable habit of poison-taking –: this turned me away so long from political and moral disquisition, poetry, and all the flowers & herbs that grow in the Light and Sunshine, to be meanwhile a Delver in the unwholesome quick-silver mines of abstruse Metaphysics…”9
He had said it before, and he would say it again, endlessly, and with great poetic conviction. Certainly he believed now that his marriage had always been ill-destined, and it had long been beyond his powers to save it. Every divorce lawyer is familiar with such retrospective statements. Yet the strangest claim was not that his “former” opium habit was the product of his marriage; or that his wife had “turned him away” from a literary career. Even their mutual friends (even Southey) saw that they had long been unable to live on productive, or even tranquil terms. It was the claim that metaphysics, which in reality he loved passionately and to which he would dedicate so much of his later life, was somehow shameful and “unwholesome”. For these “quick-silver mines” were also his magic caverns “measureless to man”, the dimension that gave his poetry and all his writing its unique resonance. Why should he deny these to Stuart, unless they were inextricably associated in his mind with the guilt and deception of his opium underworld?
While Coleridge lurked in London, anxious messages beamed out from Grasmere. Dorothy wrote to Mary Lamb, and Wordsworth to Sir George Beaumont. The planned autumn move to Beaumont’s estate at Coleorton was in suspense, until Coleridge had decided on his “settled rational plan” and this seemed less and less forthcoming. A single sonnet appeared in the pages of the Courier of 27 September, like a distant distress flare. It was entitled “Farewell to Love”, a beautiful adaptation of a piece by Fulke Greville. But to whom was it addressed – to which Sara? To Asra or to Mrs Coleridge? (And did it contain a reproach to Wordsworth in its seventh line?)
Farewell, sweet Love! Yet blame you not my truth;
More fondly ne’er did mother eye her child
Than I your form: yours were my hopes of youth,
And as you shaped my thoughts I sighed or smiled.
While most were wooing wealth, or gaily swerving
To pleasure’s secret haunts, and some apart
Stood strong in pride, self-conscious of deserving,
To