This Long Pursuit: Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

Many of Coleridge’s most subtle early poems, such as ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798), with its complex patterns of memory association, are explorations of Hartley’s theories. Like a memory box, this poem contains a series of physical objects and sensations – an owl’s cry, a flickering fire, a baby’s cradle, the sound of church bells – which reverberate into an ever-expanding orchestration of memories. These also produce, like complex harmonies, several layers of past and future identity. The adult Coleridge becomes a child again; while the child remembers he has become a father; and the father blesses the child. It is no coincidence that the actual baby in this poem is Coleridge’s eldest son, Hartley, born near Bristol in 1796 and named in honour of the philosopher-doctor.

Coleridge’s later Notebooks have many passages exploring the phenomenon of memory association, such as those connected with his beloved ‘Asra’, Sara Hutchinson. In an agonised notebook entry for 5 March 1810, when she was preparing to leave him, he wrote down an enormous catalogue of all the objects which by ‘the Law of Association’ reminded him of her – from a piece of music to a waterfall, from a bedroom door ajar to the delicious white sauce on a joint of meat. He described them as forming a powerful cluster of ideas, almost unbearably strong and vivid, ‘that subtle Vulcanian Spider-web Net of Steel – strong as Steel yet subtle as the Ether – in which my soul flutters enclosed with the Idea of your’s’.

Here Hartley’s ‘vibrations’ have been subtly transformed back into a ‘flutter’ of the soul; a word that also occurs at a key place in ‘Frost at Midnight’. In this beautiful and observant passage, Coleridge uses the faint flicker of convected air above his fire (the mirage-like ‘film’, not the visible flame) to produce a remarkable image of human consciousness itself. It is essentially unstable, dynamic and playfully inventive.

… the thin blue flame

Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature

Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,

Making it a companionable form,

Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit

By its own moods interprets, every where

Echo or mirror seeking of itself,

And makes a toy of Thought.

Coleridge would go on to dedicate three entire chapters of his Biographia Literaria (1817) to the history of Associationism ‘traced from Aristotle to Hartley’. In one place in Chapter 6, he remarked that Hartley’s theory of memory could be compared to ‘a broad stream, winding through a mountainous country with an indefinite number of currents, varying and running into each other according as the gusts chance to blow from the opening of the mountains’.

8

In one form or another, the theory of Associationism remained hugely influential throughout the Romantic period. The radical idea of memory as a physiological process was seen to provide a possible link between human consciousness and the rest of the living world, however remote. Coleridge had written of ‘dim sympathies’ with ‘companionable forms’. More than seventy years after Hartley’s Observations, the great chemist Sir Humphry Davy was exploring Associationism in connection with freshwater fish in his book Salmonia, or Days of Fly-Fishing, published in 1828.

He was investigating the mysterious memories of fish, which he regarded as quite as interesting a phenomenon as those of human beings. For example, once a trout was caught and thrown back into the river, could it remember being hooked? Could it remember the pain of being hooked? Could it feel – or remember – pain at all? And if so, was trout-fishing inherently cruel? This seems an astonishingly modern question: ‘But do you think nothing of the torture of the hook, and the fear of capture, and the misery of struggling against the powerful rod?’

Davy debates these issues in a series of dialogues, which gain an added poignancy from the fact that he himself was ill, in pain and near death at the time he wrote them. ‘My only chance of recovery is in entire repose,’ he wrote from the shores of Lake Constance in July 1827, ‘and I have even given up angling, and amuse myself by dreaming and writing a very little, and studying the natural history of fishes … I now use green spectacles, and have given up my glass of wine per day.’

He concludes that although a trout may not feel pain in a human sense, it does remember being hooked, and afterwards may subsequently ‘refuse an artificial fly day after day, for weeks together’. Davy thought the reason for this was that the trout associated the pain with the place: ‘The memory seems local and associated with surrounding objects; and if a pricked trout is chased into another pool, he will, I believe, soon again take the artificial fly. Or if the objects around him are changed, as in Autumn, by the decay of weeds, or by their being cut, the same thing happens.’

9

One afternoon about five years ago I was walking around a favourite flowerbed in Norfolk, which my beloved Rose and I had dug and planted from scratch. Every plant and shrub was an old friend – iceberg roses, Hidcote lavenders, blue hydrangeas, magnolia, purple berberis, red-tipped photinia, Japanese anemones, scarlet crocosmia, white potentilla. Then I came to a pleasant, green-tufted shrub which had once been the size of a modest pincushion and was now more like that of a plump chaise-longue. I had often fed it, clipped it, hoed uxoriously under its skirts. I had, frankly, often wished to sprawl full length on its springy, inviting mattress of minute green foliage and tiny white flowerets.

But on this particular afternoon I gazed down at its familiar, cheery, hospitable shape and realised that I had totally forgotten its name. For several uncomfortable minutes I stared blankly at it, reaching into the pocket of my memory and finding it alarmingly empty, just as if I had suddenly lost a set of car keys. Only when I turned to walk back up the lawn, and was momentarily distracted by the flight of a pigeon above the beech trees, did the name ‘hebe’ spring effortlessly to mind.

Of course this is a common phenomenon among the late-middle-aged. (Is it called ‘nominative aphasia’? I can’t remember.) It applies particularly to the names of specific things – people, places, books, or – as in my case – plants. It can be combated, especially by child-like mnemonic devices. ‘Hebe-jeeby’ has rarely failed me since. Nevertheless, it tends to spread steadily and insidiously once it has begun. No one has quite explained its causes. I know a computer expert who calls it the ‘disk full’ effect; while others speak of ‘senior moments’, or hardening cerebral arteries, weakened synaptic links, alcohol, tea-drinking, metaphysical distraction, existential anxiety, incipient dementia, or just the middle-aged mind generally ‘on other things’ – though not necessarily higher ones.

This kind of forgetting certainly belongs to the goddess who has no name. Yet it is not so much a failure to remember – more a failure to recollect. The missing word, the absent object, has not really disappeared; rather, it has become temporarily and mysteriously unavailable. Moreover, the act of recollection works in a curious way. When I actively tried to recollect, it was as if I was constantly on the brink of remembrance, or stuttering with a word, or slipping back from the last few inches of a rope-climb. But the moment I stopped trying, the moment I looked up and admired the pigeon in his evening swoop over the beech trees, the word ‘hebe’ arrived without effort, without strain, like a free gift.

Coleridge was one of the first to describe this phenomenon of ‘active and passive recollection’, in his Biographia. It also appears in the remarkable Chapter 6, where he compares the mental law of Association with that of the physical law of gravitation: ‘it is to Thought the same, as the law of gravitation is to locomotion’. Sometimes we actively strive for memory, sometimes we passively yield to forgetfulness. When someone is ‘trying to recollect a name’, he uses ‘alternate pulses of active and passive motion’. The surprising analogy Coleridge gives for this mental process is that of a tiny water-beetle paddling its way up the surface of a stream. He adds that a very similar active-passive is at work in the composing of poetry. The passage, with its impression of Coleridge himself bending over the surface of the water (or the mind), minutely observant, half poet and half scientist, is itself a kind of mnemonic image:

Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name … Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current and now yielding to it in order to gather further strength and a momentary fulcrum