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.]
CHAPTER XXI
THE MORGANS, BRISTOL, AND CALNE
[John James Morgan, the joint friend of Coleridge and Southey in their Pantisocratic days, was the son of a Bristol merchant, and as early as 1795 was acquainted with Coleridge (see Letter 16). It was to the house of Morgan that Coleridge repaired after his return from Malta, at the close of 1807, when he felt himself “ill, penniless, and worse than homeless” (Meteyard’s Group of Englishmen, p. 325); and in the Courier of 10th December 1807 appeared a poem, entitled the Wanderer’s Farewell, addressed to Mrs. Morgan and Charlotte Brent, her sister. Morgan was at one time possessed of a fortune of £10,000 to £15,000 (Southey’s Life and Cor., iv. 361); but adverse circumstances had come against him, and he and his family had removed to Hammersmith, London. After the quarrel with Wordsworth, Coleridge, as we have already seen, went to the Morgans, and remained off and on with them in the various places of their abode for the six years between 1810 and 1816. Not only were the Morgans kind hosts to Coleridge; Mrs. Morgan exercised a considerable command for good over him, and put compulsory measures in force when he was indulging in opium.
Although the Morgans were not exactly literary people, they were discerners and appreciators of the genius of Coleridge; and it was while staying with them that he produced his greatest contributions to thinking. The Morgans changed about a good deal. In November 1810 they were living at 7, Portland Place, Hammersmith; in April 1812 they had removed to 71, Berners Street: in April 1814 they were at 2, Queen’s Square, Bristol; in September Coleridge and they had taken up quarters at Ashley, Box, near Bath; on 3rd November they were at Bath; and on 10th November they had removed to Calne, in Wiltshire.
It would make an interesting study to detail in full all the changes of Coleridge’s political creed from the time when he was an ardent enthusiast for the French Revolution to his gradual evolution into a conservative whose creed was