A Pantocrat who should be on everyone’s curriculum
The decision by the authorities to drop Coleridge from the syllabus of state schools is intended as another nail in the coffin of English literature. He is to be replaced by a person unknown to me but apparently popular on TV quiz shows. No reason is provided for giving the old poet-philosopher the boot. Too difficult? A white, middle-class male? Not politically correct enough? It is true that, having been an extreme radical in his youth, planning to found a utopian settlement on the Susquehanna in America, in conjunction with Robert Southey and other idealists — it was to be called a Pantisocracy — he became conservative in middle age, and a pillar of Christianity, if rather an unusual and wobbly one. It is also true that his one practical experiment in demotic activity was a failure. In 1793 he ran away from Jesus College, Cambridge, and enlisted as a trooper in the 15th Dragoons, a regiment of heavy cavalry, under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberback. But he not only failed to become a proficient rider; he found it difficult even to stay on a horse’s back. Eventually he was bought out by his elder brothers, an ignominious end to the foray, in April 1794.
On the other hand, I should have thought that in many ways Coleridge was surprisingly in tune with the more esoteric notes struck by advanced opinion in our times. His ‘Cologne’, for example, is the earliest poetical protest against the evils of river pollution:
In Köhn, the town of monks and bones,
And pavements fang’d with murderous stones,
And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches;
I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well-defined, and several stinks!
Ye nymphs that reign o’er sewers and sinks,
The River Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, nymphs, what power divine,
Shall henceforth wash the River Rhine?
Coleridge also shared the fascination, current among the progressive intelligentsia, with the weather, and its changing nature, and the causes of those changes. His ‘Frost at Midnight’ is one of the best weather poems I know. He had an extraordinary gift for writing about the weather, in coining a subtle phrase, like the ‘secret ministry’ of frost, or coming out with a neat epigram: ‘Summer has set in with its usual severity.’ In ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, the descriptions of the extreme conditions through which the ship passes — loud wind, the rain pouring down ‘from one black cloud’, the lightning flashing through the fierce moonlight, the iceberg ‘mast high’, the deadly cold, the pitiless sun and the scourge of thirst:
Water, water everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
And not a drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yes, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
The ‘Rime’ is essentially a poem about freak weather conditions of the kind beloved of modern climatologists and the contemporary pantheists who believe in ‘global warming’ and ‘greenhouse gases’. (The last the new personification of the sanctus spiritus or Holy Ghost — a point Coleridge would have relished.) He was fascinated by polarities and conjunctions of opposites, particularly in weather. This is also a preoccupation of climate changers, who are currently claiming that the severe winter we are experiencing is ‘a classic example’ and ‘proof positive’ of the way in which global warming operates, since ‘emissions’ generated by modern technology have a tendency in the short term to produce extreme cold, or so they say. Coleridge liked such paradoxes. It was the essence of Kubla Khan’s miraculous garden that it combined warmth and sunlight with all the delightful forms of frozen water produced by intense cold:
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice.
This is the complementary opposite of the horror-paradox of the ‘Rime’, where sun and ice combine to produce varieties of agony.
Coleridge also strikes a contemporary note with his rambling discourses. Madame de Staël, who heard him, said: ‘He is incapable of dialogue, but a genius of monologue.’ Charles Lamb made the same point when he described his discourse as ‘sermonising’. When Coleridge asked, ‘Charles, have you ever heard me preach?’ (he had once been a Unitarian minister, briefly), Lamb replied: ‘I have never heard you do anything else.’ Sounds dull, doesn’t it? Yet the fact is that his talk fascinated everyone. As Hazlitt said: ‘He talked for ever, and you wanted him to talk for ever.’ In the second half of his life, when he was under the care of Dr Gillman for his opium addiction (another aspect of Coleridge’s life which has a particularly modern resonance), he held forth at Gillman’s house, on the lofty cliffs of Highgate overlooking London, to a fascinated company of mostly young intellectuals who came from far and wide to hear him, and sat at his feet while he expounded metaphysics and everything else, without remission, sometimes for two or three hours at a time. Thomas Carlyle, who was a youngish man, a recent emigrant from Scotland when he attended various of these Highgate seminars, has left a wonderful description of them, which he published in his Life of John Sterling. One can almost see the dense, luminous, impenetrable clouds of Kant-style metaphysical maunderings which issued from Coleridge’s puffy lips, in unending, measured and logical flow. What a television performer he would have been! And who would have had the honour of interviewing him? David Frost? John Humphrys? Jeremy Paxman? I would certainly like to have seen and heard Coleridge on Face to Face, with John Freeman putting his telling questions out of the shadows behind the camera, while the lights shone full on the magnificent talking head of the great panjandrum. And what would we not give to hear him do his stint on Desert Island Discs?
In the 1820s Coleridge usually went to the Gillmans for an autumn sea-cure at Ramsgate, and described what went on there in wonderful letters. He left the best and most detailed description I know of what it was actually like to take a dip, in a frisky sea, from a bathing-machine: ‘It was glorious!’ he wrote, ‘I watched each time from the top-step for a high wave coming, and then with my utmost power of projection shot myself off into it, for all the world like a Congreve Rocket into a Whale!’ All sorts frequented Ramsgate. The prime minister, Lord Liverpool, came there. He had been at Christ Church with Canning, where they became friends, and in 1821, after the suicide of Castlereagh, he had the satisfaction of making Canning his foreign secretary. Early next autumn they came to Ramsgate together, and chummed up with Coleridge. There is a description of the three of them walking arm in arm all over the town, Coleridge, who was two years younger, naturally doing all the talking. What a man! Certainly one for all seasons, of intellectual life anyway. Twenty years before, he and Humphry Davy had studied chemistry together. Now he was telling Britain’s rulers how to run the world. He ought to be on everyone’s curriculum.
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