Into the light

COLERIDGE: DARKER REFLECTIONS..

By Richard Holmes.

HarperCollins; 622 pages; £19.99

Pantheon; $32

THE life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is an extraordinary gift to a biographer. He left his memorials not only in poetry, literary criticism, essays and books of philosophy, but also in the writings of his friends, ex-friends, critics and admirers. Above all, he left the magnificently sprawling notebooks in which he recorded almost minute by minute his insights, raptures, conversations, longings and opium-tinctured dreams. Anyone, it seems, can get into Coleridge's head. But no one gets there as convincingly, as sympathetically or as movingly as Richard Holmes does.

This volume is the second part of the life; the first, “Early Visions”, which took Coleridge as far as his departure for the Mediterranean in 1804, was published almost a decade ago. In true Coleridgean fashion, Mr Holmes appeared to anxious observers to have lost faith in his own project, perhaps to have bitten off too much, and to have set so high a standard for minute observation and philosophic flights that he could not continue. All doubts are now dispelled. The second volume is every bit as enthralling as the first.

It is very different in mood, however, as befits the poet's middle age. Before, the most astonishing scenes were all out of doors: Coleridge, on the road, glimpsing eternal truths in the evening flight of starlings; wandering over the fells with the Wordsworths, and gazing with them at the stars; scrambling down perpendicular stream beds to visit his friends. In the second volume, he has become less physical. After a first vivid glimpse of the poet on deck, “double waistcoats flapping”, the reader barely sees him again; it is the mind he is engaged with. The settings, too, are interiors: cramped rooms, generally lent by understanding friends after Coleridge had left his wife and children in the Lake District and decided to become a man of letters in London. He felt this restriction himself: the world, he wrote, “that spidery Witch, spins its threads narrower and narrower, still closing in on us walls of flues and films, windowless—”

Coleridge's pursuit of fame was almost wrecked several times by opium. At his worst, in 1814, he was taking a pint of laudanum a day, diluted with quince juice, flavoured with cinnamon, disguised in “Syrup of Marshmallow”. Each binge was followed by horrific sessions with aperients and enemas. Kindly chemists kept him surreptitiously supplied, and kinder friends tried to take it away or at least restrict the dose. These friends—endlessly encouraging this chaotic and sometimes abusive man with lodgings, money, recommendations and invitations—are the real heroes of this book. And the real villain, without a doubt, is Wordsworth, who after the breach with Coleridge in 1810 pours down indifference on him from a vast height of self-importance.

Much of Coleridge's writing has worn badly. He loved pseudo-scientific jargon, drew heavily on German idealist philosophy and could be obscure for page upon page. Even sympathetic contemporaries found him frustrating. They realised, however, that the obscurity would suddenly be illuminated by dazzling and provoking ideas. Coleridge believed (if such a searching and puzzling mind can ever be summed up), that all creation, especially man himself, was suffused with God, and that imagination was a function of the divine power, a recovered memory of a higher state. All his life was a torment between conviction of that brightness, and his own patently fallen condition. “If a man could pass through Paradise in a Dream,” he wrote in his notebook, “& have a pledge presented to him that his Soul had really been there, & found that Flower in his hand when he awoke—aye! and what then?”

Much of his energy in later life, in lecturing and writing, was devoted to trying to show that such innately religious beliefs could co-exist with scientific discovery. The joy of this man, however, lies less in these starry speculations than in the way he loved to apply observation of the natural or mechanical world to deeper and more difficult concepts. Watching the setting of the sails at sea, he muses on the relationship of parts to the whole in creation; watching a beetle on the surface of the water, casting “a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook”, he compares its motion to the act of thinking, “by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion.”

This is a momentous biography, full of such depths and details. Mr Holmes even tells you when the writing in the notebooks shows that Coleridge was drunk, or when it suddenly turns red (the poet's pen dipped either in laudanum, or in gout medicine). It is no surprise that the biographer, like his subject, occasionally gets weary. But this is quibbling criticism. The only real objection this reviewer must register comes at the very end, when Coleridge slips “into the dark”. It seems obvious, not only from his own dying remarks but from everything that has gone before, that he slipped into the light.