Morton D. Paley. Portraits of Coleridge.

Scott, Grant F.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xvii+171. 25 illus. $55.00.

Painting Coleridge boils down to this fundamental problem: the man looked nothing like a romantic poet. Unlike the expressive faces of his well-known contemporaries, which all in one way or another hint at the visionary rumblings beneath the surface, Coleridge's face was wide, fleshy, and inert. He looked more like a barrister from Bleak House than a winged seraph. Although his eyes were penetrating and luminous and his forehead solid, everything else was a bit pulpy: a wide, plump nose and thick moist lips bobbed in a vague ocean of cheek and jowl washed by the sea-drift of sideburns. The complexion was oily, the forehead and nose glistening on occasion with perspiration, either from corpulence or opium-addiction. In a number of portraits his mouth is slightly open, revealing two dingy-looking front teeth like a pair of tombstones. These characteristics are of course not as pronounced in the youthful portraits, where the face is more elastic and alert, but it is the later portraits that have had more currency and have come to shape our image of the man. Commenting on James Northcote's attempt to render Coleridge in 1805, Wordsworth summed up the problem with his usual tact: "I consider C.'s as a face absolutely impracticable" (40).

Coleridge himself, as Paley says, did not like his own face, maintaining that it was "not ... representable" (53). His friends, however, were of a different opinion and often noticed a distinct change in his features once they were animated by conversation. Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, and Washington Allston, among others, record the dramatic improvement of his aspect when an idea seized him or he began to speak. "The appearance of a friend, a stranger, a human being," wrote Bronson Alcott in 1835, "seemed to awake him ... the eyes radiated supernatural splendor, the mouth was full of meaning, and the whole countenance was, perhaps, more purely angelic than that of any modern living man" (56). Social interaction, as it turns out, was the catalyst that transformed Coleridge's face into that of a romantic poet.

Because the portrait genre mandates stillness and repose, however, artists were confronted with a major challenge: how to capture Coleridge's verbal alacrity in a medium that both privileges visual stasis and is inherently silent. Paley's gallery shows us that few of Coleridge's portraitists were able to solve this technical problem. In abandoning the mimetic and devising a far more fluid visual vocabulary, perhaps only twentieth-century movements like vorticism or abstract expressionism could adequately depict Coleridge's character. In any case, what we get in the majority of portraits is exactly the carcass Coleridge refers to, with a few feeble props (mostly books) and gestures (eyes uplifted) to signify the inner self. The worst example of this kind of obviousness is William Shuter's portrait of the young Coleridge who is shown with his thumb in a book. Pasted to the front cover (not the spine) the name "Hartley" appears in bold capitals on a handwritten label. Coleridge's index finger underlines the name for those of us who still haven't gotten the message. Like Shuter's, many of the other portraits are similarly disappointing.

Fortunately, Paley has included an equal number of verbal descriptions of Coleridge and commentary on his portraits that offer a measure of compensation for this missing dimension. In fact, one of the great ironies of his book is that these descriptions provide a far better sense of Coleridge's physical appearance than any of the visual portraits. (Another irony is that in a book about portraits, there is no jacket photo of the author looking ruminative and ironic). William Hazlitt, for example, speaks of Coleridge's high forehead, "light as if built of ivory" (23); De Quincey mentions his "resplendent acreage of cheek" and comes "to understand that the glistening face, glorious from afar like the old Pagan face of the demigod Aesculapius, simply reported the gathering accumulation of insensible perspiration" (36); and Southey confesses that "his countenance is the most variable that I have ever seen" (46). It is Washington Allston, however, who comes closest to revealing the essence of the man. In a letter to Henry Hope Reed, Allston frankly admits the weakness of his second portrait (1814), and then realizes what is missing: "It is not Coleridge in his highest mood, the poetic state. When in that state, no face that I ever saw was like to his: it seemed almost <intellect> spirit made visible, without a shadow of the physical upon it" (55-56).

Interestingly, one of the best descriptions of Coleridge ever written (to my mind) never finds its way into Paley's book--Keats's account of meeting the famous man on Hampstead Heath. Importantly, Keats encounters Coleridge in medias res, not seated in his parlor but walking "at his alderman-after dinner pace" and "in conversation" with Joseph Green. This brief portrait is memorable not only for its surreal inventory of Coleridgean topics (metaphysics, monsters, nightmares, mermaids, etc), but also because Keats never once describes what Coleridge actually looks like; instead, he represents him as a voice: "I heard his voice as he came towards me--I heard it as he moved away--I had heard it all the interval" (Rollins 11: 88-89). Keats intuits that it is the aural rather than the visual sense that is better able to apprehend this man. It's as if Keats, walking in a dream, has collided with a library.

In other respects, Portraits of Coleridge is a fine book, beautifully presented and meticulously organized. In addition to a useful chronology that locates the portraits in relation to the key events of Coleridge's life, Paley has provided an extensive and detailed catalogue of the existing images, a section of supplementary notes tracing Coleridge's life and death masks and discussing missing, unidentified, or non-existent portraits, and a thorough bibliography. The first chapter places the portraits of Coleridge in the context of familiar images of the other five (male) romantic poets, the second discusses the life portraits of Coleridge in chronological order (from the first known portrait by Peter Vandyke in 1795 to the last by Abraham Wivell in 1833), and the third focuses on posthumous portraits of Coleridge, including sculptured busts, group portraits, and caricatures. The illustrations are clear and allotted ample space, though only two appear in color reproductions, probably because of the expense. Unfortunately this has also been the case with lively caricatures by Max Beerbohm and David Levine; their inclusion might have provided welcome relief from the book's rather somber procession of images.

At times, Portraits of Coleridge reads more like a reference book than a work of literary or aesthetic criticism, though this is not necessarily a shortcoming. There's no doubt that Paley has done his homework; each portrait is carefully embedded in its context, given a full provenance, priced, measured, dated. References to the portraits are gathered from published and unpublished sources as well as from Coleridge family letters. Moreover, Paley has pursued the afterlife of specific portraits in engravings and other reproductions and provided useful biographies of the artists, many of whom are not exactly household names (Edward Rippingille, Mathilda Betham). The book's slim countenance (strangely at odds with its subject) disguises the immense labor of archival research that must have been involved in its making, as well as the legwork in tracking down the portraits themselves. In many respects, then, this is an admirable piece of scholarship and a highly useful sourcebook.

If there is a weakness in this otherwise immaculately produced book it comes in the abbreviated discussions of the portraits themselves. Granted, most are not visually compelling, but it does seem that by the time Paley arrives at the moment of analysis, he has expended all his energy on background scholarship. Many of the portraits are given cursory readings, some are analyzed by others (like Allston's curious first portrait of Coleridge in 1806), and the last portrait by Wivell is not discussed at all. Clearly, the author's own favorite rendering of Coleridge is the 1832 portrait by Moses Haughton. It appears in three prominent places: on the book's dust jacket, as the frontispiece (in color), and in the book's closing words, where Paley heralds it as the only truly romantic image of Coleridge. Yet because it is so brief and so conservative, his discussion of the picture remains unsatisfying. Paley argues that Haughton's portrait "is remarkable for its strangely iconic character," that it represents Coleridge as "a prematurely aged child" (93), and that it "conveys a startling sense of presence" (96). There's nothing especially objectionable about these observations except the fact that they're not terribly objectionable.

It is certainly true that Haughton plays up this contrast of age and youth in the portrait, but he also articulates a rather startling femininity. The fineness and delicacy of feature--particularly in the curving brows, the tender, sensitive eyes, and the bird-like nose and soft lips--combine to produce a face that is stunningly different from the massive, fleshy Coleridge that most other observers emphasize. Even more interesting, perhaps, is the weirdly plant-like and fungal cravat, which appears to be creeping up Coleridge's neck like some nightmare embodiment of his own organic analogy. This, too, is feminine--rippled and plaited--anticipating the soft canyons of an O'Keeffe landscape. Why does Haughton choose to feminize Coleridge in this way? And why does this portrait differ so markedly from the others, which are more emphatically masculine?

The better portraits lend themselves to these sorts of questions and one senses that the book as a whole might have profited from a more sustained analysis of their details. Although Paley might have risked more in his interpretations, he has clearly given us the foundation from which to begin such discussions, and for this his book merits considerable praise. It will also serve as a valuable guide for future biographers of Coleridge and for scholars interested in the visual representation of romantic poets.

GRANT F. SCOTT is Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis and the Visual Arts (UP of New England, 1994) and editor of Selected Letters of John Keats (Harvard UP, 2002). He is currently working on a new edition of the letters and memoirs of Joseph Severn.