Chapter 12
In reference to these statements regarding Coleridge's physical condition, Cottle remarks: "I can testify that, during the four or five years in which Mr. C. resided in or near Bristol, no young man could enjoy more robust health. Dr. Carlyon also verbally stated that Mr. C., both at Cambridge and at Gottingen, 'possessed sound health.' From these premises the conclusion is fair that Mr. Coleridge's unhappy use of narcotics, which commenced thus early, was the true cause of all his maladies, his languor, his acute and chronic pains, his indigestion, his swellings, the disturbances of his general corporeal system, his sleepless nights, and his terrific dreams."
Scattered through Dr. Gilman's "Life of Coleridge" are indications of this kind:
"In 1804, his rheumatic sufferings increasing, he determined on a change of climate, and went in May to Malta. He seemed at this time, in addition to his rheumatism, to have been oppressed in his breathing, which oppression crept on him, imperceptibly to himself, without suspicion of its cause. Yet so obvious was it that it was noticed by others 'as laborious;' and continuing to increase, though with little apparent advancement, at length terminated in death.
"At first he remarked that he was relieved by the climate of Malta, but afterward speaks of his limbs 'as lifeless tools,' and of the violent pain in his bowels, which neither opium, ether, nor peppermint, separately or combined, could relieve.
"Coleridge _began_ the use of opium from bodily pain (rheumatism), and for the same reason _continued_ it, till he had acquired a habit too difficult uder his own management to control. To him it was the thorn in the flesh, which will be seen in the following note found in his pocket-book: 'I have never loved evil for its own sake; no! nor ever sought pleasure for its own sake, but only as the means of escaping from pains that coiled around my mental powers as a serpent around the body and wings of an eagle! My sole sensuality was _not_ to be in pain.'"
Little is known of Coleridge's opium habits during his residence at Malta. On his return to England in 1807, he wrote to Mr. Cottle: "On my return to Bristol, whenever that may be, I will certainly give you the right hand of old fellowship; but, alas! you will find me the wretched wreck of what you knew me, rolling, rudderless. My health is extremely bad. Pain I have enough of, but that is indeed to me a mere trifle, but the almost unceasing, overpowering sensations of wretchedness--achings in my limbs, with an indescribable restlessness that makes action to any available purpose almost impossible--and worst of all the sense of blighted utility, regrets, not remorseless. But enough; yea, more than enough, if these things produce or deepen the conviction of the utter powerlessness of ourselves, and that we either perish or find aid from something that passes understanding."
A period of seven years here intervenes, during which no light is thrown upon the opium life of Coleridge. The following extract from a letter written by him during this period, sufficiently indicates, however, both his consciousness of his great powers and his remorse for their imperfect use:
"As to the letter you propose to write to a man who is unworthy even of a rebuke from you, I might most unfeignedly object to some parts of it from a pang of conscience forbidding me to allow, even from a dear friend, words of admiration which are inapplicable in exact proportion to the power given to me of having deserved them if I had done my duty.
"It is not of comparative utility I speak; for as to what has been actually done, and in relation to useful effects produced--whether on the minds of individuals or of the public--I dare boldly stand forward, and (let every man have his own, and that be counted mine which but for and through me would not have existed) will challenge the proudest of my literary contemporaries to compare proofs with me of usefulness in the excitement of reflection, and the diffusion of original or forgotten yet necessary and important truths and knowledge; and this is not the less true because I have suffered others to reap all the advantages. But, O dear friend, this consciousness, raised by insult of enemies and alienated friends, stands me in little stead to my own soul--in how little, then, before the all-righteous Judge! who, requiring back the talents he had entrusted, will, if the mercies of Christ do not intervene, not demand of me what I have done, but why I did not do more; why, with powers above so many, I had sunk in many things below most!"
In 1814 he returned to Bristol, and here the painful narrative of Mr. Cottle comes in: "Is it expedient, is it lawful, to give publicity to Mr. Coleridge's practice of inordinately taking opium; which to a certain extent, at one part of his life, inflicted on a heart naturally cheerful the stings of conscience, and sometimes almost the horrors of despair?
"In the year 1814, all this, I am afflicted to say, applied to Mr. Coleridge. Once Mr. Coleridge expressed to me, with indescribable emotion, the joy he should feel if he could collect around him all who were 'beginning to tamper with the lulling but fatal draught,' so that he might proclaim as with a trumpet, 'the worse than death that opium entailed.'
"When it is considered, also, how many men of high mental endowments have shrouded their lustre by a passion for this stimulus, would it not be a criminal concession to unauthorized feelings to allow so impressive an exhibition of this subtle species of intemperance to escape from public notice? In the exhibition here made, the inexperienced in future may learn a memorable lesson, and be taught to shrink from opium as they would from a scorpion, which, before it destroys, invariably expels peace from the mind, and excites the worst species of conflict--that of setting a man at war with himself.
"I had often spoken to Hannah More of S. T. Coleridge, and proceeded with him one morning to Barley Wood, her residence, eleven miles from Bristol. The interview was mutually agreeable, nor was there any lack of conversation; but I was struck with something singular in Mr. Coleridge's eye. I expressed to a friend, the next day, my concern at having beheld him during his visit to Hannah More so extremely paralytic, his hands shaking to an alarming degree, so that he could not take a glass of wine without spilling it, though one hand supported the other! 'That,' said he, 'arises from the immoderate quantity of OPIUM he takes.'
"It is remarkable that this was the first time the melancholy fact of Mr. Coleridge's excessive indulgence in opium had come to my knowledge. It astonished and afflicted me. Now the cause of his ailments became manifest. On this subject Mr. C. may have been communicative to others, but to me he was silent.
"I ruminated long upon this subject with indescribable sorrow; and having ascertained from others not only the existence of the evil but its extent, I determined to write to Mr. Coleridge. I addressed him the following letter, under the full impression that it was a case of 'life and death,' and that if some strong effort were not made to arouse him from his insensibility, speedy destruction must inevitably follow.
"'BRISTOL, April 25,1814.
"'DEAR COLERIDGE:--I am conscious of being influenced by the purest motives in addressing to you the following letter. Permit me to remind you that I am the oldest friend you have in Bristol, that I was such when my friendship was of more consequence to you than it is at present, and that at that time you were neither insensible of my kindnesses nor backward to acknowledge them. I bring these things to your remembrance to impress on your mind that it is still a _friend_ who is writing to you; one who ever has been such, and who is now going to give you the most decisive evidence of his sincerity.
"'When I think of Coleridge I wish to recall the image of him such as he appeared in past years; now, how has the baneful use of opium thrown a dark cloud over you and your prospects! I would not say any thing needlessly harsh or unkind, but I must be _faithful_. It is the irresistible voice of conscience. Others may still flatter you, and hang upon your words, but I have another, though a less gracious duty to perform. I see a brother sinning a sin unto death, and shall I not warn him? I see him perhaps on the borders of eternity; in effect, despising his Maker's law, and yet indifferent to his perilous state!
"'In recalling what the expectations concerning you once were, and the excellency with which seven years ago you wrote and spoke on religious truth, my heart bleeds to see how you are now fallen, and thus to notice how many exhilarating hopes are almost blasted by your present habits. This is said, not to wound, but to arouse you to reflection.
"'I know full well the evidences of the pernicious drug! You can not be unconscious of the effects, though you may wish to forget the cause. All around you behold the wild eye, the sallow countenance, the tottering step, the trembling hand, the disordered frame! and yet will you not be awakened to a sense of your danger, and I must add, your guilt? Is it a small thing, that one of the finest of human understandings should be lost? That your talents should be buried? That most of the influences to be derived from your present example should be in direct opposition to right and virtue? It is true you still talk of religion, and profess the warmest admiration of the Church and her doctrines, in which it would not be lawful to doubt your sincerity; but can you be unaware that by your unguarded and inconsistent conduct you are furnishing arguments to the infidel; giving occasion for the enemy to blaspheme; and (among those who imperfectly know you) throwing suspicion over your religious profession? Is not the great test in some measure against you, "By their fruits ye shall know them?" Are there never any calm moments, when you impartially judge of your own actions by their consequences?
"'Not to reflect on you-not to give you a moment's _needless_ pain, but in the spirit of friendship, suffer me to bring to your recollection some of the sad effects of your undeniable intemperance.
"'I know you have a correct love of honest independence, without which there can be no true nobility of mind; and yet for opium you will sell this treasure, and expose yourself to the liability of arrest by some "dirty fellow" to whom you choose to be indebted for "ten pounds!" You had, and still have, an acute sense of moral right and wrong, but is not the feeling sometimes overpowered by self-indulgence? Permit me to remind you that you are not more suffering in your mind than you are in your body, while you are squandering largely your money in the purchase of opium, which, in the strictest equity, should receive a _different direction_.
"I will not again refer to the mournful effects produced on your own health from this indulgence in opium, by which you have undermined your strong constitution; but I must notice the injurious consequences which this passion for the narcotic drug has on your literary efforts. What you have already done, excellent as it is, is considered by your friends and the world as the bloom, the mere promise of the harvest. Will you suffer the fatal draught, which is ever accompanied by sloth, to rob you of your fame, and, what to you is a higher motive, of your power of doing good; of giving fragrance to your memory, among the worthies of future years, when you are numbered with the dead?
"'And now let me conjure you, alike by the voice of friendship and the duty you owe yourself and family; above all, by the reverence you feel for the cause of Christianity; by the fear of God and the awfulness of eternity, to renounce from this moment opium and spirits as your bane! Frustrate not the great end of your existence. Exert the ample abilities which God has given you, as a faithful steward. So will you secure your rightful pre-eminence among the sons of genius; recover your cheerfulness, your health--I trust it is not too late--become reconciled to yourself; and, through the merits of that Saviour in whom you profess to trust, obtain at last the approbation of your Maker, My dear Coleridge, be wise before it be too late. I do hope to see you a renovated man; and that you will still burst your inglorious fetters and justify the best hopes of your friends.
"'Excuse the freedom with which I write. If at the first moment it should offend, on reflection you will approve at least of the motive, and perhaps, in a better state of mind, thank and bless me. If all the good which I have prayed for should not be effected by this letter, I have at least dis charged an imperious sense of duty. I wish my manner were less exceptionable, as I do that the advice through the blessing of the Almighty might prove effectual. The tear which bedims my eye is an evidence of the sincerity with which I subscribe myself your affectionate friend,
"'JOSEPH CUTTLE.'
"The following is Mr. Coleridge's reply:
"'April 26,1814.
"'You have poured oil in the raw and festering wound of an old friend's conscience Cottle, but it is _oil of vitriol!_ I but barely glanced at the middle of the first page of your letter, and have seen no more of it-not from resentment, God forbid! but from the state of my bodily and mental sufferings, that scarcely permitted human fortitude to let in a new visitor of affliction.
"'The object of my present reply is to state the case just as it is--first, that for ten years the anguish of my spirit has been indescribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the consciousness of my GUILT worse--far worse than all! I have prayed, with drops of agony on my brow; trembling not only before the justice of my Maker, but even before the mercy of my Redeemer. "I gave thee so many talents, what hast thou done with them?" Secondly, overwhelmed as I am with a sense of my direful infirmity, I have never attempted to disguise or conceal the cause. On the contrary, not only to friends have I stated the whole case with tears and the very bitterness of shame, but in two instances I have warned young men--mere acquaintances, who had spoken of having taken laudanum--of the direful consequences, by an awful exposition of its tremendous effects on myself.
"'Thirdly, though before God I can not lift up my eyelids, and only do not despair of his mercy because to despair would be adding crime to crime, yet to my fellow-men I may say that I was seduced into the ACCURSED habit ignorantly. I had been almost bedridden for many months with swellings in my knees. In a medical journal I unhappily met with an account of a cure performed in a similar case, or what appeared to me so, by rubbing in of laudanum, at the same time taking a given dose internally. It acted like a charm, like a miracle! I recovered the use of my limbs, of my appetite, of my spirits, and this continued for near a fortnight. At length the unusual stimulus subsided, the complaint returned--the supposed remedy was recurred to--but I can not go through the dreary history.
"'Suffice it to say that effects were produced which acted on me by terror and cowardice of pain and sudden death, not (so help me God!) by any temptation of pleasure, or expectation or desire of exciting pleasurable senstations. On the very contrary, Mrs. Morgan and her sister will bear witness so far as to say that the longer I abstained the higher my spirits were, the keener my enjoyments, till the moment, the direful moment arrived when my pulse began to fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such falling abroad as it were of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness and incipient bewilderment, that in the last of my several attempts to abandon the dire poison I exclaimed in agony, which I now repeat in seriousness and solemnity, "I am too poor to hazard this!" Had I but a few hundred pounds--but £200--half to send to Mrs. Coleridge, and half to place myself in a private mad-house, where I could procure nothing but what a physician thought proper, and where a medical attendant could be constantly with me for two or three months (in less than that time life or death would be determined), then there might be hope. Now there is none!! O God! how willingly would I place myself under Dr. Fox in his establishment; for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement, an utter impotence of the volition and not of the intellectual faculties. You bid me rouse myself. Go bid a man paralytic in both arms to rub them briskly together and that will cure him. "Alas!" he would reply, "that I can not move my arms is my complaint and my mysery." May God bless you, and your affectionate but most afflicted
S. T. COLERIDGE.'
"On receiving this full and mournful disclosure I felt the deepest compassion for Mr. C.'s state, and sent him a letter to which I received the following reply:
"'O, dear friend! I have too much to be forgiven to feel any difficulty in forgiving the cruellest enemy that ever trampled on me: and you I have only to _thank!_ You have no conception of the dreadful hell of my mind, and conscience, and body. You bid me pray. Oh, I do pray inwardly to be able to pray; but indeed to pray, to pray with a faith to which a blessing is promised, this is the reward of faith, this is the gift of God to the elect. Oh! if to feel how infinitely worthless I am, how poor a wretch, with just free-will enough to be deserving of wrath and of my own contempt, and of none to merit a moment's peace, can make a part of a Christian's creed--so far I am a Christian,
S. T. C.'
"'April 26, 1814.
"At this time Mr. Coleridge was indeed in a pitiable condition. His passion for opium had so completely subdued his _will_ that he seemed carried away, without resistance, by an overwhelming flood. The impression was fixed on his mind that he should inevitably die unless he were placed under _constraint_, and that constraint he thought could be alone effected in an asylum. Dr. Fox, who presided over an establishment of this description in the neighborhood of Bristol, appeared to Mr. C. the individual to whose subjection he would most like to submit. This idea still impressing his imagination, he addressed to me the following letter:
"'DEAR COTTLE:--I have resolved to place myself in any situation in which I can remain for a month or two as a child, wholly in the power of others. But, alas! I have no money. Will you invite Mr. Hood, a most dear and affectionate friend to worthless me, and Mr. Le Breton, my old school-fellow and likewise a most affectionate friend, and Mr. Wade, who will return in a few days; desire them to call on you, any evening after seven o'clock that they can make convenient, and consult with them whether any thing of this kind can be done. Do you know Dr. Fox? Affectionately,
"'S. T. C.'
"I _did_ know the late Dr. Fox, who was an opulent and liberal-minded man, and if I had applied to him, or any friend had so done, I can not doubt but that he would instantly have received Mr. Coleridge gratuitously; but nothing could have induced me to make the application but that extreme case which did not then appear fully to exist.
"The years 1814 and 1815 were the darkest periods in Mr. Coleridge's life. However painful the detail, it is presumed that the reader would desire a knowledge of the undisguised truth. This can not be obtained without introducing the following letters of Mr. Southey, received from him after having sent him copies of the letters which passed between Mr. Coleridge and myself.
"'KESWICK, April, 1814.
"'MY DEAR COTTLE:--You may imagine with what feelings I have read your correspondence with Coleridge. Shocking as his letters are, perhaps the most mournful thing they discover is, that while acknowledging the guilt of the habit he imputes it still to morbid bodily causes, whereas after every possible allowance is made for these, every person who has witnessed his habits knows that for the greater, infinitely the greater part, inclination and indulgence are its motives.
"'It seems dreadful to say this, with his expressions before me, but it is so, and I know it to be so from my own observation, and that of all with whom he has lived. The Morgans, with great difficulty and perseverance, _did_ break him of the habit at a time when his ordinary consumption of laudanum was from _two quarts a week to a pint a day!_ He suffered dreadfully during the first abstinence, so much so as to say it was better for him to die than to endure his present feelings. Mrs. Morgan resolutely replied, it was indeed better that he should die than that he should continue to live as he had been living. It angered him at the time, but the effort was persevered in.
"'To what, then, was the relapse owing? I believe to this cause--that no use was made of renewed health and spirits; that time passed on in idleness, till the lapse of time brought with it a sense of neglected duties, and then relief was again sought for _a self-accusing mind_ in bodily feelings, which, when the stimulus ceased to act, added only to the load of self-accusation. This, Cottle, is an insanity which none but the soul's Physician can cure. Unquestionably, restraint would do as much for him as it did when the Morgans tried it, but I do not see the slightest reason for believing it would be more permanent. This, too, I ought to say, that all the medical men to whom Coleridge has made his confession have uniformly ascribed the evil not to bodily disease but indulgence. The restraint which alone could effectually cure is that which no person can impose upon him. Could he be compelled to a certain quantity of labor every day for his family, the pleasure of having done it would make his heart glad, and the sane mind would make the body whole.
"'His great object should be to get out a play, and appropriate the whole produce to the support of his son Hartley at college. Three months' pleasurable exertion would effect this. Of some such fit of industry I by no means despair; of any thing more than fits I am afraid I do. But this of course I shall never say to him. From me he shall never hear aught but cheerful encouragement and the language of hope.'
"After anxious consideration I thought the only effectual way of benefiting Mr. Coleridge would be to renew the project of an annuity, by raising for him among his friends one hundred, or, if possible, one hundred and fifty pounds a year, purposing through a committee of three to pay for his comfortable board and all necessaries, but not of giving him the disposition of any part till it was hoped the correction of his bad habits and the establishment of his better principles might qualify him for receiving it for his own distribution. It was difficult to believe that his subjection to _opium_ could much longer resist the stings of his own conscience and the solicitations of his friends, as well as the pecuniary destitution to which his _opium habits_ had reduced him. The proposed object was named to Mr. C., who reluctantly gave his consent.
"I now drew up a letter, intending to send a copy to all Mr. Coleridge's old and steady friends (several of whom approved of the design), but before any commencement was made I transmitted a copy of my proposed letter to Mr. Southey to obtain his sanction. The following is his reply:
"'April 17th, 1814.
"'DEAR COTTLE:--I have seldom in the course of my life felt it so difficult to answer a letter as on the present occasion. There is, however, no alternative. I must sincerely express what I think, and be thankful I am writing to one who knows me thoroughly.