A House of Air. Hermione Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ also has to show his subject as frequently sunk in melancholy, constipated, a heavy drinker and addicted (as he had been since the winter of 1801) to opium. Coleridge went to Malta in 1804 partly on account of his health, partly to escape from his marriage and perhaps from his long-term infatuation with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson, partly—since Malta was a wartime base for the British fleet—in hope of getting some kind of administrative post. He did get employment, as diplomatic secretary to the Governor, for whom he wrote what are now called position papers on Britain’s strategic situation in the Mediterranean. As a hardened journalist, quick to seize the main points of any situation, Coleridge, as long as he was sober, had no difficulty with the work.

      On his return to England he made it clear that he was not coming back to his wife, although he always did his erratic best to support her and their three children. Lecturing seemed the ideal occupation for the great talker who rarely paused for an answer, and he lectured, on and off, for almost the whole of the rest of his life—at Bristol (where he was an hour late for his first appearance, having been secured by his friends and deposited on the platform), at the Royal Institution (where he collapsed into opium and missed five engagements), at the Philosophical Institution, at the Surrey Institution, at the Crown and Anchor, at the Royal Society of Literature (on Prometheus). Organizers were always ready to book him, audiences almost always ready to hear him. What did he look like? Like a wildly dishevelled Dissenting minister. What did he sound like? Sometimes he was unintelligible, but when he caught fire (as for instance in his celebrated lecture on Hamlet) it was agreed that he talked as no man had talked before him.

      In 1809 he was taken with the idea of writing and publishing his own journal, The Friend. This, he thought, could be done from the Lake District. He stayed there at first with Wordsworth, whose household, with its dutiful womenfolk, was always under good control. But The Friend lasted for only twenty-seven numbers.

      It was at this point, when Wordsworth saw little or no hope of his recovery, that Coleridge absconded to London and began what started as a fortnight’s stay (it turned into six years) with the Morgans, whom he had known in Bristol. John Morgan took down whatever Coleridge could be persuaded to dictate; his wife and daughter put in order Coleridge’s papers and notebooks. In January 1813 a play, which he had written many years earlier and now renamed Remorse, was put on at the Drury Lane Theatre. It was an unexpected success, and he received £400 (although in a few months he was penniless). Meanwhile, news came that the Wordsworths’ dearly loved little son Tom had died. Coleridge dithered, delayed, and did not go to Grasmere. Can he be forgiven? On the other hand, during one of his worst periods of opium overdose and suicidal depression he rallied himself, Heaven knows how, to write five articles in praise of the paintings of his old friend Washington Allston. His manic energy and generosity have to be set against his recurrent paralysis of the will, when he could be becalmed like the Mariner on his stagnant sea.

      Remorse had been put on partly at the request of Lord Byron, who, however impatient he might be with Coleridge’s metaphysics (‘I wish he would explain his explanation’), shared the impulse felt by so many that he was worth saving at all costs. Charles Lamb, who had been at school with him at Christ’s Hospital, continued a faithful friend; so did the publisher Joseph Cottle, who attributed Coleridge’s ills not to alcohol and opium but to satanic possession; so did the young De Quincey and Daniel Stuart, the sage editor of The Courier. He had, of course, plenty of unsparing enemies who couldn’t forgive him for deserting the radical cause. But for forty disorganized years Coleridge was never at a loss for someone to give him a home. Would the twentieth or the twenty-first century take him in so generously?

      In his Notebooks Coleridge is a witness, often deeply remorseful, to his own life, creating a double viewpoint. Holmes is perfectly attuned to this, and in addition creates what he calls a ‘downstage voice’ in his footnotes, ‘reflecting on the action as it develops.’ Anything less than this would not represent the multiplicity of STC. This often unexpected downstage commentary is particularly valuable when Holmes comes to discuss the Biographia Literaria, which Coleridge wrote while he was with the Morgans and which he described to Byron as ‘a general Preface’ to his collected poems, ‘on the Principles of philosophic and genial criticism relative to the Fine Arts in general; but especially to Poetry.’ In fact, it began as a dialogue, or rather an argument at a distance, with Wordsworth. But that was not enough. He had much more to say on his own personal philosophical journey from the materialism of Locke to the perception that faith in God is not only beyond reason but a continuation of it. He produced forty-five thousand words in six weeks, anxiously watched by the faithful Morgan. Hard pressed, he borrowed passages wholesale from the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling. Holmes admits the plagiarism, but you can rely on him for a spirited defence. The plagiarisms, he claims, ‘form a kind of psychodrama within the heart of the Biographia.’ We have to wait for the true Coleridge to free himself and emerge.

      Coleridge’s last years were spent in Highgate, then a hill village just north of London, with the humane Dr James Gillman and his motherly wife, Ann. Gillman regulated the opium taking, tactfully overlooking the extra supplies secretly bought from the local chemist, and arranged for Coleridge something quite new, holidays by the seaside. The Gillmans’ fine house and garden was a retreat where he could receive visitors—Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Fenimore Cooper. A familiar figure by now in the village, Coleridge, looking twenty years older than he was, had become a ‘white-haired, shuffling sage,’ walking, according to young John Keats, like an after-dinner alderman but, as he talked, casting the same enchantment still.

      ‘At 6.30 a.m. on 25 July 1834 he slipped into the dark.’ I could wish that Richard Holmes hadn’t felt that here, at the very end, ‘dark’ was the right word. But it’s impossible to describe the extraordinary quality of this biography, felt on every page. ‘There is a particular kind of silence which falls after a life like Coleridge’s,’ Holmes says, ‘and perhaps it should be observed.’

      New York Times Book Review, 1999

       SARAH ORNE JEWETT The News from Dunnet Landing

      Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories, edited by Michael Davitt Bell

      The author of the novel The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett, born in 1849, was widely read at the turn of the century, much less after the First World War. Now that a selection of her works is in the Library of America series, perhaps she will be read again.

      Sarah Orne Jewett was a New Englander, descended from a well-to-do merchant family in South Berwick, Maine. Her father was a doctor with a local practice (although he later became Professor of Obstetrics at Bowdoin), and she was brought up as one of an extended family in the ‘great house’ of her grandfather Jewett in South Berwick. It was a place of hospitality where she could listen to the stories told at leisure by visitors, among them superannuated sea captains and ship owners and relatives from the lonely inland farms.

      As a child she was not a great scholar, preferring hopscotch and skating and her collections of woodchucks, turtles, and insects. ‘In those days,’ she wrote, ‘I was given to long childish illnesses, to instant drooping if ever I were shut up in school,’ so that her father, trusting in fresh air as a cure, took her with him on his daily rounds, teaching her at the same time to keep her eyes open, and telling her the names of plants and animals. He recommended her to read (in her teens) Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Milton’s L’Allegro, and the poetry of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. Her mother and grandmother advised Pride and Prejudice, George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Pearl of Orr’s Island.

      In 1867, Jewett graduated from Berwick Academy with serious thoughts of studying medicine. The echo of her debate with herself СКАЧАТЬ