washington allston and samuel taylor coleridge: a remarkable relationship

The Smithsonian Institution

Washington Allston and Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Remarkable RelationshipAuthor(s): Elizabeth JohnsSource: Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 19, No. 3 (1979), pp. 2-7Published by: The Smithsonian InstitutionStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1557259 .

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2

Washington Allston and

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A

Remarkable

Relationship

Elizabeth Johns It has not been of help to historians that Washington Allston has no colleague in American art, no fellow artist with parallel hopes, achievements, and failures. The tasks of the historian-analy- sis, evaluation, and tribute-are most responsibly carried out within a complex supporting context. But, although Amer- ica does not offer such a context for Allston, there is indeed one to be found. It is in the rich currents of English and

European Romanticism. There one finds Allston's colleagues, fellow artists with similar ambitions, ideals, and problems, like the German painters Gottlieb Schick and Joseph Anton Koch, the Scot George Wallis, and the Englishmen Wil- liam Hilton and Benjamin Robert Hay- don; and writers as well, particularly the English, the poet William Wordsworth and the poet and seminal thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Although Allston knew all of these artists, it was Coleridge with whom he formed a close friendship, and each man had a strong effect on the other's ideas.

They met in Rome in 1806, Cole- ridge seeking out the unknown Allston after seeing Diana in the Chase or Swiss Scenery on exhibition. Their friendship developed quickly, and Allston painted Coleridge's portrait. Then from 1811 to 1818, when Allston was in London, their friendship deepened and their respect for each other achieved its full measure. It was Coleridge who referred to Allston as a "man of genius."

Yet it is something beyond their friendship and reciprocal influence that is of especial interest: it is the way in which the career of Coleridge startlingly illuminates that of Allston.

A comparison between these men's aspirations, achievements, and failings is compelling both historically and bio- graphically. In their separate countries Allston and Coleridge played remarkably similar roles as Romantic artists. Cole- ridge lived virtually the archetypal Ro- mantic career in the first wave of Ro- mantic poets in England: he was a man of prodigious ambition, a brilliant poetic talent, evidenced by only a handful of works, and had an astonishing capacity for talk and an engulfing propensity for procrastination. And Allston, almost alone in the first wave of Romantic painters in America, was the archetypal Ro- mantic painter: a man of high ambition, with a unique poetic sensibility evidenced in a few powerful works, a repu- tation for social amiability, and a ruin- nous susceptibility to self-doubt. Even in such bare outline these parallels reveal Allston and Coleridge's collegiality. I pro- pose, therefore, to explore them in detail.

Elizabeth Johns is an assistant professor of art at the University of Maryland. This paper was originally delivered at a symposium at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which was sponsored in part by the Archives of American Art's New England office.

Washington Allston, Diana in the Chase, 1805, oil on canvas (64/4 x 951/2 in.). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. Gift of Mrs. Edward W. Moore.

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The most readily apparent point of comparison is the wide range of their artistic expression. Each man combined and focused in a single career the several aspirations of his Romantic colleagues. Whereas his fellow Romantic writer John Keats generally restricted his efforts to the lyric poem, Charles Lamb to the per- sonal essay, and Lord Byron to satire and the satiric epic, Coleridge tried, and was successful at, poetry, critical and politi- cal essays, sermons, and philosophy. And unlike his fellow Romantic painters, William Hilton who focused on history painting, John Constable on the landscape, David Wilkie on genre, and C. R. Leslie on literary subjects, Allston ex- plored history painting, the landscape, figure painting, poetry, the Gothic novel, and aesthetic essays. Allston and Cole- ridge turned from one form to another, not because they were dissatisfied either with the form or with their efforts, but because they believed that no one form could encompass the potential for art. They sought breadth, and thus artistic truth, through the ideas and language peculiar to many different forms of expression. Even when Allston first planned his debut as a history painter with his Dead Man Restored to Life By Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, Coleridge had to talk him out of including some "poetic" paintings, as he called them, in the projected exhibition, so that Allston would make a unified im- pression on potential patrons. It was this sense of his multiple directions - already clear in 1812-that guided Allston through his later career in a variety of accomplishments.

A second parallel between Coleridge and Allston is considerably more complex. Both men had profound expectations of their art. In this optimism Cole- ridge and Allston had extraordinary confidence in the power of the human mind. Both adhered to the traditional theories that an artist or poet became great by absorbing and imitating the ideas, forms, and specific language of past geniuses, but they also subscribed- and this is crucial-to the new Kantian theories that elevated the perceiving and creating mind to a unique level. Whereas in the traditional theories of perception and imitation the mind was likened to a mirror, Kant proposed that the mind was like a lamp, projecting its own sensibility onto everything it perceived. Thus, Kant held that first in perception and then in the creative act each person made a unique synthesis of the external world. Coleridge's and Allston's subscription to this theory led them to expect that through their own transforming imagina- tion they could appropriate both the forms and the power of past art. They were among the last to look to the past with such total confidence. Allston at-

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Washington Allston, Portrait of Samuel T Coleridge, 1806, oil on canvas (292h x 25% in.). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. Washington Allston Trust.

tended to such sources as Phidias and Fuseli, Titian and Flaxman; Coleridge studied Vergil, Horace, Dante, Shakes- peare, and Milton. The traditions in art and literature which they inherited were dazzlingly rich, and their goal, somehow to appropriate them, caused the central difficulty of their later careers.

When Coleridge and Allston were young, they did not restrain their ambition. Each man conceived, identified as his potential, and announced his impend- ing creation of a great work, immense in its scale and in its synthesis of the tradi- tion-a virtual magnum opus. Coleridge planned an epic, an achievement com- parable to a entire cycle of history paintings. With earnestness, and not a little pleasure, he wrote to his friend Joseph Cottle that only exhaustive preparation, religious dedication, and severe self- criticism would bring his work to frui- tion. "I should not think of devoting less than twenty years to an Epic Poem. Ten

to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science-mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, chemistry, geol- ogy, anatomy, medicine. Then I would know the minds of men [through] histo- ries, voyages, travels. So I would spend ten years-the next five to the composi- tion of the poem-and the five last to the correction of it."

Allston's "great works" were his history paintings, the Dead Man Re- stored to Life By Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha and Belshazzar's Feast. The very method informing his training to be a history painter recalls the extent, if not the length of time of Cole- ridge's preparations: the study of antique casts, drawing from the model, the study of the principles of expression in Raphael's cartoons- to name only a few. As Coleridge expected of his own task in writing an epic, Allston's work on his Dead Man Restored was characterized by extensive preparations, exclusive dedica-



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Washington Allston, The Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, 1811-14, oil on canvas (156x 120in.). Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Academy Purchase.



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Washington Allston, Belshazzar's Feast, 1817-43, oil on canvas (144 x 192 in.). The Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of the Washington Allston Trust.

tion, and severe self-criticism. Coleridge called the painting Allston's "great work" and followed Allston's progress on it with a constant attention. For both men labor was the measure of their seri- ousness. In Coleridge's disdain for art that was produced too easily, he took as his model the poet Milton, whose work he described as distinguished by "severe application, laborious polish, deep meta- physical researches, prayers to God before he began his great poem, all that could lift and swell his great intellect." Indeed such words-except, perhaps, the prayers to God-characterize precisely the unremitting devotion of Allston, first to his Dead Man Restored, which undermined his health, and, later, to his Belshazzar's Feast, which undermined his confidence.

Coleridge's and Allston's conviction that they could produce a great work through labor, persistence, and frustra- tion was intractably central to their sense of artistic identity. It was a goal

they could neither realize nor reduce to modest proportions. Coleridge wrote neither his epic nor his projected philo- sophical magnus opus. Allston completed but was dissatisfied with his Dead Man Restored and the fate of his Belshazzar's Feast is familiar history. Be- cause of these failures, much of the re- sponse to Allston and Coleridge from their contemporaries consisted of puz- zlement, pity, and, occasionally, censure. Though Coleridge's collected writings fill thousands of pages, critics lamented that he "lived in the shadow of his own ambition." They blamed his opium- taking, his miserable marriage, his pre- carious financial situation (it was much worse than Allston's), and his tendency to daydream. And in America some of Allston's associates were no less dubious about him. Some held against him his love of talk and cigars and good food; even William Dunlap criticized him in History of the Arts of Design for talking more and working less. We have since

blamed for his failures his departure from the stimulating artistic environment of London, his Puritanical inability to live with debt, and his changing aesthetic ideals.

Yet Coleridge and Allston had the confidence and support of frieds and intelligent colleagues, and generally they were not without patrons. In their aspirations and subsequent failures, it was the conjunction of academic ideals and Kantian faith that was their nemesis. In short, in their plans to produce "great works" they overreached themselves and they lived with the knowledge with great pain. For years Coleridge worried about his longest poetic work, the unfinished "Christabel." He talked about it obsessively, claimed occasionally that he had had the completing part of the narra- tive in his head since he began it and need only put it to paper, and then finally ad- mitted to a friend that he did not dare complete the poem because it could never live up to his own or anyone else's



6

expectations. Is not this the burden of over-expectation that also haunted Alls- ton? The promise that everyone saw in his Dead Man Restored remained unful- filled: Beaumont saw it and, on the strength of that promise, commissioned a new work; West lauded it, but suggested a change; and the British Institution awarded it its prize, but no English patron stepped forward to buy it. All this even- tually took its toll. That his accomplish- ment, however great, might never be enough, affected Allston even before he began his long struggle with Belshazzar's Feast. After 1820, when ten friends formed the Allston Trust to buy the finished Belshazzar from him, it was not so much the debt as debt that incapacitated Allston as he labored to finish the painting as his alarm that, having already been purchased for $10,000, the painting was thereby pronounced a great work.

Whether Stuart advised Allston to change the vanishing point in the painting or not, Allston could hardly have found a more effective way to postpone a final reckoning of the painting's great- ness than to make a total alteration of its mechanical system. When in the mid and late 1820's the painting became a virtual taboo (no one could even mention it, much less see it), it had come to repre- sent for Allston the ultimately audacious act: to overreach, and to do it publicly. Indeed, the theme of over-ambition is spread throughout the work of both Cole- ridge and Allston like an apology. In poems such as "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Ode to Dejection," and the unfinished "Christabel," Coleridge probed the theme of man's pride as the cause of evil and suffering. After Allston's chastening experience with the Dead Man Restored, he chose the Scriptural

subjects Belshazzar's Feast, Saul and the Witch of Endor, and Jeremiah Dictating His Prophecy of the Destruction of Jerusalem, all subjects which exemplify the certainty that over-ambition will be punished. Even Allston's Miltonic themes have similar overtones: Uriel and Gabriel are the angels who guard Paradise against the intrusion of Satan, so recently cast into Hell for his arrogant ambition. Thus, in Allston's breadth of achievement and in his ambition to cre- ate great works, and in the penalties he paid for this ambition, he was not alone. Neither was he alone, however, in the character of his successes.

It was when Coleridge was not aiming for a magnum opus that he produced his memorable and truly original work. During a fifteen-month annus mirabilis between June 1797 and Sep- tember 1798, Coleridge, living in Wether Stowey near the Wordsworths, produced seven of the greatest poems of the language, including "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Christabel, Part I," and "Kubla Khan." Yet these achievements do not pretend to the scope of a Vergil or Shakespeare or Milton. Neither do they set forth startlingly new subject matter, diction, or verse forms. Coleridge was not even able to finish two of them. Yet these, of all Coleridge's work, are the in- disputable, haunting achievements of his career that rank with the greatest work in the five-hundred year history of mod- em English literature.

Is this not also a significant aspect of Allston's career? Allston's greatest works are those he virtually tossed off as pot- boilers, as preparatory, or at least ancil- lary, to the work of the magnum opus. Like Coleridge's '"Kubla Khan" and "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Allston's Flight of Florimel," "Moonlit Land- scape" and other paintings of the years 1819 and 1820, perhaps his annus mirabilis, are not new in the history of art in subject, form, or coloring, and in scope are modest. But they evoke the mysteri- ous, beautiful, and harmonizing forces in the universe in an inimitable manner and stand among the most beautiful of American paintings. Like Coleridge, it was when Allston did not strain for a synthesis that he created works which, filled with allusions after all, sparkle with life.

However, Coleridge never wrote of "Kubla Khan" as his greatest work, nor did Allston of his Moonlit Landscape. Blinded by their ideals, they could not measure the amplitude of their own achievements.

There is a fourth parallel between Coleridge and Allston. For both, their personae were almost substitutes for their art. Coleridge's silver hair, the mo- bility of his face and light in his eyes as he pursued an idea, his volubility, and

Washington Allston, Flight of Florimell, 1819, oil on canvas (36 x 28 in.). The Detroit Institute of Arts. City Appropriation.

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Washington Allston, Moonlit Landscape, 1819, oil on canvas (24 x 35 in.). Gift of William Sturgis Bigelow. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

his sweetness of temper, even when he was in racking pain, became legendary in his time. For twenty years, admirers including Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing made the pil- grimage to Highgate to see him. His talk, whether at his formal lectures, or at in- numerable dinner parties which lasted through the night, or in Allston's studio, or at the Gillmans', was one of his mosf successful media of achievement. It was in talk that he could best show the syn- thesizing mind, picking up facts, events, characters, and images from the past, and transforming them into new understand- ings. Coleridge himself held this point of view. "As important a record of my life as my writing is my conversation," he vowed; "if you judge my output, you must include my talk." In his portrait of Coleridge in 1814, Allston regretted that he could not capture this definitive aspect of his friend. Although he had to show Coleridge between paragraphs, other aspects of the painting carry the import: Coleridge's book is closed, being but his springboard in a mental universe

where talk explicates and ultimately transcends the limitations of the written word. Coleridge sits near a Gothic win- dow: in an epigram in which we can read his own never-completed achievements, Coleridge wrote, "T'he Gothic is always becoming."

To his fellow Bostonians Allston was similarly cerebral, kindly, and always "becuming." His waving silver locks, his clear blue eyes, his gentle and courtly manner, his love of talk are qualities which dominate the observations of those who knew him. His talk in his studio rose to eloquent heights, much like that of Coleridge when he was set off by the proper questions; apparently he could discourse for hours about his unfinished painting Titania's Court. Seen on the street, Allston represented for many the purity-and the loss-of a past ideal. He implored that he be judged by what he had destroyed rather than by what he had completed. Thus, the measure of his life, he felt, was what he had attempted rather than what he had created.

With this paper I hope to have put Allston in the company of one of his true peers. Looking at Allston and Cole- ridge through the same glass, we can as- sert that they tried more, had higher hopes, and, in ways they did not expect, demand of us more than their contemporaries. They show us the humbling and yet reassuring lesson that much of men's doing is. talking, dreaming, and hoping, trusting that his will be taken for his deed, and that, as Allston wrote of Cole- ridge on his death, it is not only works but thoughts left behind that we cherish.



washington allston and samuel taylor coleridge: a remarkable relationship

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