No More Learning

His sight was always straining into the darkness; and he
has himself noted that from earliest childhood his "mind was habituated to
the Vast. " "I never regarded my senses," he says, "as the criteria of my
belief"; and "those who have been led to the same truths step by step,
through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to want a sense which
I possess. " To Coleridge only mind existed, an eternal and an eternally
active thought; and it was as a corollary to his philosophical conception
of the universe that he set his mind to a conscious rebuilding of the world
in space. His magic, that which makes his poetry, was but the final release
in art of a winged thought fluttering helplessly among speculations and
theories; it was the song of release.

De Quincey has said of Coleridge: "I believe it to be notorious that he
first began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pains or
nervous irritations--for his constitution was strong and excellent--but as
a source of luxurious sensations. " Hartley Coleridge, in the biographical
supplement to the "Biographia Literaria," replies with what we now know to
be truth: "If my Father sought more from opium than the mere absence of
pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing
phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but that the power of the medicine might
keep down the agitations of his nervous system, like a strong hand grasping
the strings of some shattered lyre. " In 1795. that is, at the age of
twenty-three, we find him taking laudanum; in 1796, he is taking it in
large doses; by the late spring of 1801 he is under the "fearful slavery,"
as he was to call it, of opium. "My sole sensuality," he says of this time,
"was not to be in pain. " In a terrible letter addressed to Joseph Cottle in
1814 he declares that he was "seduced to the _accursed_ habit
ignorantly"; and he describes "the direful moment, when my pulse began to
fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such a dreadful falling abroad, as it
were, of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness, and incipient
bewilderment . . . 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. " And, throughout, it is always the pains, never the
pleasures, of opium that he registers.

Opium took hold of him by what was inert in his animal nature, and not by
any active sensuality.
His imagination required no wings, but rather
fetters; and it is evident that opium was more often a sedative than a spur
to his senses.

The effect of opium on the normal man is to bring him into something like
the state in which Coleridge habitually lived. The world was always a
sufficiently unreal thing to him, facts more than remote enough,
consequences unrelated to their causes; he lived in a mist, and opium
thickened the mist to a dense yellow fog. Opium might have helped to make
Southey a poet; it left Coleridge the prisoner of a cobweb-net of dreams.
What he wanted was some astringent force in things, to tighten, not to
loosen, the always expanding and uncontrollable limits of his mind. Opium
did but confirm what the natural habits of his constitution had bred in
him: an overwhelming indolence, out of which the energies that still arose
intermittently were no longer flames, but the escaping ghosts of flame,
mere black smoke.

At twenty-four, in a disinterested description of himself for the benefit
of a friend whom he had not yet met, he declares, "the walk of the whole
man indicates _indolence capable of energies_. " It was that walk which
Carlyle afterwards described, unable to keep to either side of the garden-
path. "The moral obligation is to me so very strong a stimulant," Coleridge
writes to Crabb Robinson, "that in nine cases out of ten it acts as a
narcotic. The blow that should rouse, _stuns_ me. " He plays another
variation on the ingenious theme in a letter to his brother: "Anxieties
that stimulate others infuse an additional narcotic into my mind. . . . Like
some poor labourer, whose night's sleep has but imperfectly refreshed his
overwearied frame, I have sate in drowsy uneasiness, and doing nothing have
thought what a deal I have to do. " His ideal, which he expressed in 1797 in
a letter to Thelwall, and, in 1813, almost word for word, in a poem called"
The Night-Scene," was, "like the Indian Vishnu, to float about along an
infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a
million years for a few minutes just to know that I was going to sleep a
million years more.