Chapter XLV: Letter 163: To Wade

Bristol, June 26th, 1814.

Dear sir,

For I am unworthy to call any good man friend--much less you, whose hospitality and love I have abused; accept, however, my intreaties for your forgiveness, and for your prayers.

Conceive a poor miserable wretch, who for many years has been attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to the vice that reproduces it. Conceive a spirit in hell, employed in tracing out for others the road to that heaven, from which his crimes exclude him! In short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and you will form as tolerable a notion of my state, as it is possible for a good man to have.

I used to think the text in St. James that "he who offended in one point, offends in all," very harsh: but I now feel the awful, the tremendous truth of it. In the one crime of OPIUM, what crime have I not made myself guilty of!--Ingratitude to my Maker! and to my benefactors--injustice! _and unnatural cruelty to my poor children!_--self-contempt for my repeated promise--breach, nay, too often, actual falsehood!

After my death, I earnestly entreat, that a full and unqualified narration of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made public, that at least, some little good may be effected by the direful example.

May God Almighty bless you, and have mercy on your still affectionate, and in his heart, grateful--

S. T. COLERIDGE.[88]

Meantime, during all this strange transaction with Cottle and Wade, Coleridge during the year 1814, was never more brilliant in his intellectual output, whether as lecturer, letter-writer, or political writer. His letters at this date to Charles Mathews (_Letters_, 621), to Sir George Beaumont (_Col. Mem._) of 9th June; to John Murray (_Letters_, 624), about a projected translation of Faust; to Daniel Stuart, of 12th September and 30th October; and to John Kenyon, of 3rd November 1814 (_Letters_, 627-64), his _Essays on the Fine Arts_ to Felix Fairley's _Bristol Journal_ (August, 1814, see _Bohn Lib. Misc. Works_, 4-52), and his six political letters to the Editor of _The Courier_ from 20th September to 10th December 1814, show no diminution of intellectual power, but rather sustained mental vigour. C. R. Leslie's account of Coleridge at this date, too, leaves us to imagine a very different Coleridge from the one depicted in the _Reminiscences_ of this period. Leslie was accompanying the Allstons from London to Bristol. Mr. Allston fell ill at Salt Hill, and Coleridge was sent for from town. Coleridge came to Salt Hill the same afternoon, accompanied by his friend, Dr. Tathill. He stayed and nursed Allston. "We were kept up late," says Leslie, "in consequence of the critical condition of Allston, and when he retired, Coleridge, seeing a copy of _Knickerbocker's History of New York_ lying on the table, took it up and began reading. I went to bed, and I think he must have been up the greater part of the night, for the next day I found he had nearly got through _Knickerbocker_. He was delighted with it." Leslie adds: "At Salt Hill, and on some other occasions, I witnessed his performance of the duties of friendship in a manner which few men of his constitutional indolence could have roused themselves to equal" (_Autobiography_, i, pp. 33-35).

Coleridge was a chameleon[89] character; and altered his tone to suit every kind of individual with whom he came into contact. We have seen how he changed his attitude to Godwin between his letter in _The Watchman_ in 1796, and his letters to the author of _Political Justice_ in 1811. It was the same in many cases, and Southey reproved him for it. Hence it was that, in the presence of Cottle and Wade, of an evangelical tone of mind, Coleridge humiliated himself and wrote penitential letters, while at the same time towards Sir George Beaumont, Stuart, and others, he was the Coleridge of vast intellectual pretensions to whom no task was impossible.

Whether Cottle was justified in publishing the "opium letters" of Coleridge has always been a moot point. The fact is Cottle had determined on "pointing a moral and adorning a tale," as was the custom of writers of his day, and he enlisted the sympathy and support of Southey and John Foster to endorse his project of making moral capital out of the story of Coleridge's life. The long correspondence at the end of the _Reminiscences_ with these two friends regarding how much he should divulge and how much he should keep back, is a study in the art of compromise; but the "moralist's duty," as it was then called, prevailed in the end. They had determined, as is mentioned in the last letter of the correspondence (p. 482) by John Foster, that "an emphatic moral lesson" should be wrung out of the life of Coleridge; and Southey and Foster warned Cottle to be on his guard against collaborating with Gillman--as was his original intention--to write the _Life of Coleridge_, lest the "solemn warning and example should be lost" (Cottle's _Rem._, p. 482).

The real cause of Coleridge's many and harassing ailments has now been made known. Writing to the _Times_ newspaper in reply to a criticism which had appeared in its columns on Coleridge's _Letters_, just published (in 1895), and which had asserted that the perpetual cry of ill health which echoes through the volume from end to end, meant little less than "opium and indolence," Mrs. Lucy E. Watson, granddaughter of James Gillman, quotes a letter by the latter narrating the circumstances attending the post mortem examination of Coleridge's body. The disease from which he had suffered was enlargement of the heart, by which the sides of that organ were so attenuated as not to be able to sustain it when raised. An article appeared in the _Lancet_ on 15th June 1895 on the matter, which closes by saying: "The record suffices to prove that this intellectual giant must have suffered more than the world was aware of, and it can be understood that his _indolence_ as well as his opium habit had a physical basis. It can only add to the marvel with which his achievements are justly regarded that one so physically disabled should have made such extensive and profound contributions to philosophy and literature. It is one more instance of the triumph of mind over body" (_The Gillmans of Highgate_, p. 35).

This physical defect was the cause of all Coleridge's inability to execute his own ambitious schemes. As he states in his letter to Davy of 25 March 1804, he had Power minus Strength. His enfeeblement of will is attributable to the physical defect of his enlarged heart; and while he treated himself for gout and kindred ailments by taking narcotics he, of course, only increased his own inability to act. He was continually trying to drive what he felt to be an inward stomach gout to the extremities. Coleridge enjoyed, however, at rare intervals, some happy spells of health duly recorded in his letters. He seems to have been best while climbing hills and bathing in the dry, hard air of the East Coast. His ascent of the Brocken, his long walk in the Scottish Highlands in 1803, in which he accomplished 263 miles in 8 days (Letter _Col. Mem._ i, 7, quoted in Dyke Campbell's Edition of the _Poems_, 631), and other hill walks seemed to inspire him with a new life. He has given an account of the effects of mountain climbing on him in his letter to Tom Wedgwood of 14th January 1803, and this is one of his most surprising letters.

Coleridge made a great mistake, however--labouring under the impression that his ailment was gout--of choosing warm and slumberous climates for his health-recruiting spheres. Malta did him no good, for he had an intellectual affinity for the sunshine, for the land of the Lotus. In fact, Coleridge's addiction to opium was temperamental as well as acquired. He contracted the habit to deaden pain, it is true; but his nature was of an Asiatic cast. He had in his infancy, as he tells us, been brought up on the _Arabian Nights_, and his mind had been habituated to the Vast (Letter 4). Joined to a dreaminess of imagination was the love of warm climatic associations betraying the Asiatic temperament. _Kubla Khan_, with its slumberous melody and vague music, embodies the Asiatic sentiment. We feel in reading it on the borders of the Buddhistic territory. To those endowed with such a temperament the opium habit is easy to fall into; their dreamy soul is the seed-bed on which it fastens. Indolence, Procrastination, vast ambitions, unachieved accomplishments are the results: and we have in Coleridge and his brother genius, Amiel, two examples in the Western world of the Asiatic Genius, one terminating his career in opium and the other in the Malady of the Ideal. Both endeavoured to push beyond the limitations of Humanity. "Man can destroy the harmony of his being in two ways," says Chateaubriand, Coleridge's great French contemporary and brother Romanticist, "by wishing to love too much and by wishing to know too much" (_Genius of Christianity_, 1st Part, III, chap. iii). Coleridge and Amiel have this fault in common; it is one of the defects of their qualities.]

FOOTNOTES:

[74] A Dissenting minister of Bristol [Cottle].

[75] It is apprehended that this must be a mistake. I sent Mr.
Coleridge five guineas for my Shakspeare ticket, and entertain
no doubt but that some others did the same. But his remark may
refer to some succeeding lectures, of which I have no distinct
recollection [Cottle].

[76] A request of permission from Mr. Coleridge, to call on a few of
his known friends, to see if we could not raise an annuity for
him of one hundred a year, that he might pursue his literary
objects without pecuniary distractions [Cottle].

[77] [Estlin.]

[78] A worthy medical Friend of Bristol, who first in that city,
interested himself in the establishment of infant schools
[Cottle].

[79] [I include the whole of this correspondence with Cottle because
fragments only have been printed in biographies of Coleridge.]

[80] In Letters 132 and 133.

[81] This long sentence, between brackets, was struck out by Mr.
Southey, in perusing the MS., through delicacy, as it referred
to himself; but on the present occasion it is restored
[Cottle]. [Cottle submitted the MS. of his _Early
Recollections_ to Southey before publication.]

[82] ["And such a dreadful falling abroad."--_Early Recollections._]

[83] [Letter CXCVII is our 158.]

[84] Some supplemental lecture [Cottle.]

[85] These four lines in the edition of Mr. C.'s _Poems_, published
after his death, are oddly enough thrown into the _Monody on
Chatterton_, and form the four opening lines. Many readers may
concur with myself in thinking, that the former commencement
was preferable; namely,--

"When faint and sad, o'er sorrow's desert wild,
Slow journeys onward poor misfortune's child;" etc. [Cottle].

[The lines were first included in the _Monody_ in 1829.]

[86] [_The Picture, or the Lover's Resolution_, 1800.]

[87] [Letter CXCVIII is our 162. CXCIX follows.]

[88] [Letter CC is our 163. CCI-CCIV follow.]

[89] [Mr. John Mackinnon Robertson, in _New Essays towards a
Critical Method_, 1897, employs this epithet to describe
Coleridge.]