In 1803, when bad health was the chief source of trouble, a volume of the earlier poems was reprinted with the editorial aid of Lamb. In 1804, Coleridge joined William and Mary Wordsworth on their Scottish tour, but did not remain with them for long. He left them for a solitary walking tour in the Highlands, apparently seeking in vain to tire himself so completely that drugs should cease to be a necessity. There is unfortunately no reason to believe that the device was successful. By mid-September he was back at Greta Hall, where Robert Southey and his wife were now installed. Southey, methodical, hard-working and temperate, was not likely to side with his brother of the pen in the controversies that made the household unhappy. Further residence in that house, the home that had so many outside attractions, was becoming impossible, and Coleridge started for the south, only to fall ill at Dove Cottage, where he stopped on the way. Recovered, he went for a while to London, thence to the Beaumonts' place at Dunmow in Essex. In town again, he sat for his portrait to Northcote, one that seems to present an accurate picture enough of his strength and weakness, "the heaven-eyes and flabby irresoluteness of mien." In April left England for Malta armed with letters to the Civil Commissioner, Vice-Admiral Ball, and, mirabile dictu, a pocket full of money. He had £100 lent by his patient and admiring friend William Wordsworth, whose position had improved by the return of the money borrowed from his father, in years long past, by the head of the Lonsdale family, and he had prevailed upon his conscience to accept a gift of £100 from Sir George Beaumont. His fellow-passengers on board the Speedwell were but two, one of them the "unconscionably fat woman who would have wanted elbow-room on Salisbury Plain." Mrs. Coleridge remained at Greta Hall in the company of her sister and brother-in-law, dependent for her support upon the continued charity of the Wedgwoods, but it may be noticed that her husband corresponded with her while he was abroad. When the ill-matched pair were not under the same roof they could be good friends.
The years so briefly summarised here show Coleridge at his best as a poet and at his worst as a man, sometimes kindled by the fire of genius, sometimes so degraded that he is dangerously near the ranks of the begging-letter writer. He is only saved from the contempt of his critics because he was at least sincere in his belief that the lack of pence alone stood between him and the mental tranquillity that would enable him to enrich the world with a masterpiece.
There is a passage in Lucretius, in which the poet speaks of the wealthy senator, no longer able to endure the turmoil of the capital, galloping away as hard as his chariot can carry him to his country villa, only to find that change cannot cure his unrest, and to come thundering back to Rome. It is of himself that he is tired, and from himself there is no escape. So it has been with men of uneven mind for all time, so it was with Coleridge, so it will ever be with those to whom the secret of rational living is "a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed."
For rather more than two years he left England behind him, but his letters, or those that remain to us, would suggest that he was no happier out of England than he was at home. At first the change stimulated his sick mind, he enjoyed his stay in Gibraltar, even while he complained that the lack of exercise on board affected his health and spirits. At Valetta, he became first the guest and then the private secretary of the Civil Commissioner, in whose service he describes himself rather complacently as "a sort of diplomatic understrapper." In August he left Malta for Sicily, to draw up a report of the island's possibilities. Sir Alexander Ball had a firm belief that Sicily should be taken over by Great Britain to keep it from falling into Napoleon's hands. Nothing came of the proposal, and by the beginning of the winter Coleridge was back in Malta, to find himself formally installed as the Commissioner's private secretary. The Public Secretary of Malta died soon afterward, and, while his successor was absent from the island, Coleridge was appointed to the temporary charge of the department at a salary of £600, no bad allowance for the man who could assure his friends that he had refused to accept a share in the Morning Post because he thought that £250 per annum was enough for anybody, the man whose wife and children were being supported in his absence from England by the charity of friends. But the work at Malta was regular, and demanded constant attention; there was no leisure for dreaming of what was to be accomplished some day, so the position was bound to prove irksome to Coleridge, who was soon full of bitter complaints. The official salary attaching to the post was £1200 per annum; Coleridge, as a temporary substitute for the gentleman appointed, a Mr. Chapman, was paid half, and this inequality of reward provided ground for a considerable grievance. But the real trouble lay more in the work than in the pay, for at the end of April we find him greatly distressed by the news that Mr. Chapman could not arrive before July. Even that month brought no Secretary; he did not reach Malta until September, and then Coleridge went in company with a friend to Rome and Naples. Of his stay in Italy his own accounts are vague and unsatisfactory, but he claims to have obtained a better knowledge of the Fine Arts in three months spent at Rome than he could have gained in his own country in twenty years. Doubtless his health was bad; the Roman winter in 1805-6 was not as healthy as it is to-day; it may be, too, that the poet was particularly susceptible to low fever and ague, and that he cured his attacks, or sought to cure them, with the aid of drugs. He reached London in the middle of August 1806, and described his forlorn state in a letter written long after to Josiah Wedgwood, whose brother Thomas had died in the previous year. He said he had reached England, "ill, penniless, and worse than homeless." That he was ill is undoubted; that he was homeless is a figure of speech that will pass, though it should be remembered that Greta Hall was still open to him; but inasmuch as he had been the Civil Commissioner's private secretary, had earned over four hundred pounds as Public Secretary, and had gone to Italy at the expense of his travelling companion, the financial straits are more than ever inexplicable and unsatisfactory. Stuart was still willing and anxious to publish and pay for his erratic contributor's work; travel had increased its value. There can be no doubt but that Coleridge's will-power and self-respect were both at the lowest ebb at this period, all had gone save the love of friends and the admiration of those with whom he came in contact. He could still hold an audience silent, still prove to his immediate circle that his intellect was of the keenest and highest order. But the world, which demands from all poor men a definite expression of their rights to live, was far too strong for him, nor could any of the chances that came his way, and they were many, give to his strange character the strength it needed. He seemed to have inherited the curse of Cain—"a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be on the earth." So with a sick mind and an ailing body he cast about once more for the means to live in some position which should meet his own undefined requirements.
CHAPTER IV
TROUBLED YEARS
For a while Coleridge stayed with the Lambs, to whom his company was ever welcome, and then took up work in the office of the Courier, where he found a room. By the end of September he was at Greta Hall, where his relations with his wife, doubtless made more difficult by the undiplomatic but strenuous and honest Southey, must have gone from bad to worse, for by December the two had decided to separate, Coleridge being allowed to take the boys, Hartley and Derwent, on the understanding that they spent their holidays with their mother. He passed Christmas at Coleorton, lent by Sir George Beaumont to the Wordsworths, and it may be that the relief of the proposed separation accounted for better spirits, better health, and inclination to work. He was still far from well, no day seems to have passed without bringing some hours of pain and unrest, but there was some change, and it was for the better. Wordsworth's dedication of The Prelude may have given him a much-needed stimulus. In the early summer of 1807, Coleridge joined his wife for a time at Nether Stowey, where kindly Thomas Poole managed to patch up the differences between husband and wife, and brought Coleridge and Josiah Wedgwood together again. The poet had refused to answer his patron's letters or to supply promised material for a life of Thomas Wedgwood. In his letter to Josiah Wedgwood he declared that the contribution to the story of Thomas Wedgwood's life had been detained at Malta together with "many important papers," and that he had several works on the eve of publication. The measure of foundation upon which these statements stood was hardly sufficient to support them even in the pages of a letter to a fairly credulous patron. Soon the "penniless and friendless" man was to find another supporter, Thomas de Quincey, who, after meeting the poet and spending one evening in his company, supplied him anonymously, through Cottle the publisher, with a loan of three hundred pounds, without any conditions, in order that his financial troubles might be ended.
Here we have another proof of the extraordinary personal magnetism of Coleridge. However badly he might behave, his friends forgave him and continued to love him, strangers helped to smooth the rough road over which his follies drew him—all in vain. Coleridge accepted the gift from an unknown sympathiser without compunction—he was quite reconciled to doles—merely remarking that he hoped in twelve months to ask the name of his benefactor in order to show him the results of his gift. Towards the end of an unsatisfactory year, Coleridge returned to his room and his work in the office of the Courier, and set himself to prepare some long-promised lectures to be delivered at the Royal Institution. The first were heard in February 1808, and others followed in the spring; they seem to have attracted considerable attention and to have been representative of the lecturer's considerable gifts. This work over, he went to stay at Bury St. Edmunds with his friend Mrs. Clarkson, whose influence was wholly good, and helped in no small measure to restore his health and peace of mind. From there he went to visit the Wordsworths at Allan Bank, and the improvement in health was maintained. He was now separated from Mrs. Coleridge; they met as friends, united to some extent by a genuine interest in their children's welfare. The year 1809 saw the birth of a paper called The Friend, described as "a Literary, Moral, and Political Weekly Paper, excluding Personal and Party Politics and Events of the Day. Conducted by S. T. Coleridge of Grasmere, Westmorland." This was another ill-planned venture, foredoomed to failure from the start. It contrived to appear at regular intervals on twenty-seven occasions, and considering the enormous difficulties associated with its production, this was a remarkable achievement enough. Needless to say helpers came forward with hard work and advances of money. Wordsworth wrote much for the columns of his friend's venture, but success and Coleridge never could run in double harness.
By March 1810, after involving in endless trouble all who helped the editor, The Friend was numbered among the things that had been, and until October the poet lingered on in the Lake Country, apparently at his wits' ends once more. He took his latest failure very much to heart.