Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes
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tripes again till the departure of a Cantab; one whom I very much esteem and admire tho two thirds of our conversation be spent in disputing on metaphysical subjects.”6
Southey was a schoolboy rebel who had been expelled from Westminster for editing a magazine, the Flagellant, against flogging and other undemocratic practices. (Southey wrote as “St Basil”, and Bedford as “Peter the Hermit”.) He had come up to Oxford in 1792 with “a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther, and my religious principles shaken by Gibbon”. He wrote bad poetry at tremendous speed, having already burnt 10,000 lines of Joan of Arc, and bound up the rest in expensive marbled paper with a green silk ribbon.
Like Coleridge, he felt trapped by his home situation and lack of money. His father, a failed Bristol linen-merchant, had recently died, leaving a consumptive mother with two infant children, besides Robert and his younger brother Tom. His education had been paid for by a clerical uncle, Herbert Hill, and an eccentric aunt, Elizabeth Tyler, both of whom expected him to go into the Church. For months he had been fantasising his way out of this impasse. Southey composed long lyrical letters to Bedford, which alternately considered suicide, joining the French Revolutionary Army, and emigrating to America where he would build a farm “on ground uncultivated since the creation” and live in Rousseauesque seclusion until “cooked for a Cherokee, or oysterised by a tiger”.7 He considered British society hopelessly corrupt, and with the suspension of habeas corpus in May, expected an imminent revolution. He carried a copy of Goethe’s Werther everywhere he went, and like Coleridge also worshipped the poetry of Bowles.
Exactly what “metaphysical subjects” they discussed with increasing wildness at Oxford, becomes clear from their subsequent letters during the summer. In sum it was Rousseau and the back to Nature movement; Godwin and the anarchist society of shared property and ideal communism; David Hartley and the psychological motivations of human action and intellectual prejudice; Joseph Priestley and the American emigration movement. (Priestley had already left for Philadelphia that April.) All these figures contributed something to the scheme which Coleridge christened at first “Pantocracy”: that is, an experimental society, living in pastoral seclusion, sharing property, labour, and self-government equally among all its adult members, both men and women. (Coleridge created the word from the Greek roots pant-isocratia, an all-governing-society; not of course from the Latin root panto-mimus, meaning a comic dumb-show.) It was, in effect, a heady cocktail of all the progressive idealism of the Romantic Age.*
As the first rapturous outlines of the scheme emerged (they were to take six months of clarifying), Southey and Coleridge became fast friends. Their enormous differences in temperament and outlook were not immediately evident. Southey confided to Bedford, in London: “Allen is with us daily, and his friend from Cambridge, Coleridge, whose poems you will oblige me by subscribing to…He is of the most uncommon merit, – of the strongest genius, the clearest judgement, the best heart. My friend he already is, and must hereafter be yours. It is, I fear, impossible to keep him till you come, but my efforts shall not be wanting.”8 He later added to his brother, Thomas Southey: “This Pantisocratic system has given me new life new hope new energy. All the faculties of my mind are dilated.”9
Coleridge in turn was deeply, but differently, impressed by Southey. He saw him as a lonely dreamer like himself (he urged him to fight despondency, “I once shipwrecked my frail bark on that rock”), but far more politicised and self-disciplined – hard-working, early rising, poetically fluent, morally pure, “a Nightingale among Owls” in Oxford. He later wrote: “His Genius and acquirements are uncommonly great – yet they bear no proportion to his moral Excellence – He is truly a man of perpendicular Virtue – a down-right upright Republican!.” (He would add, in private conversation, that Southey was a virgin, and sternly “converted” him back from sexual promiscuity.)10
As in so many of his later friendships, Coleridge was hypnotically drawn by a man of less humour and imagination than himself, but with far greater force of character and willpower. Southey was soon to replace George in his emotional esteem. There was also a sexual component to the friendship: the handsome, hawk-nosed, narcissistic Southey (he had once paraded through Bristol in women’s clothes) attracted Coleridge with a physical self-confidence that he had always lacked. Southey in turn was dazzled and enchanted by Coleridge’s warmth and generosity of feeling, his spectacular talk, his responsiveness, and superb imaginative flights. From the beginning he recognised an intellect far richer than his own, but chaotically undirected; and determined – like many others – to discipline it. The two young men were soon dancing round each other in mutual delight, and frequently comic misunderstanding, whirling into their scheme any bystanders they could find. It is notable that those who knew them best at that time – Allen, Hucks, Bedford, Caldwell – were never drawn in.
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When Hucks finally dragged Coleridge off to Gloucester (by the mail) on 5 July, it had been decided that Southey would return to Bristol to canvass for Pantisocrats among his Balliol College friends George Burnett and Robert Lovell, and find others. Coleridge would proselytise in Wales, and they would perhaps meet again in Aberystwyth to plan the financing of the scheme by the sale of Imitations, Joan of Arc, and other literary work. While Southey wrote long, apocalyptic letters prophesying violent revolution in England, and urging his friends to join him in Kentucky (the first site for Pantisocracy), Coleridge adopted an altogether lighter touch. The difference in tone here was already significant, for there was always an element of humorous fantasy in Coleridge’s Pantisocracy which quite escaped Southey’s earnestness. Having seen a poor beggar girl ejected from their inn for begging a bit of bread and meat, Coleridge announced to Southey: “When the pure System of Pantisocracy shall have aspheterized the Bounties of Nature, these things will not be so –! I trust, you admire the word ‘aspheterized’ from a non,
With disconcerting swiftness, the patriot trooper and the prodigal son now gave way to the missionary Pantisocrat and republican. After long hours of foot-slogging over white, dusty roads which seemed to quiver in the summer heat through Hereford and Shropshire, Coleridge was indefatigable. At the King’s Arms, Ross, he scratched democratic verses upon the window shutter, speaking of “wine-cheer’d moments” and the honest man of Ross, friend to the friendless, and “nobler than Kings or king-polluted Lords”. At Llanfyllin, beyond Welshpool, he “preached Pantisocracy and Aspheterism with so much success that two great huge Fellows of Butcher like appearance, danced about the room in enthusiastic agitation”. They drank seditious toasts in brandy to the King: “May he be the last”.
At Bala, according to Coleridge, they almost got in a pub-room brawl when he provokingly proposed an American toast, to General Washington, in front of the local JP, the doctor, the parson, and other assembled Welsh worthies. The doctor immediately countered with: “I gives a sentiment, Gemmen! May all Republicans be gullotined!” and this was answered by a Welsh democrat who proposed guillotining fools. “Thereon Rogue, Villain, Traitor flew thick in each other’s faces as a hailstorm.”
Coleridge claims to have finally pacified everyone by appealing to Christian brotherhood, and they all shook his hand (except for the parson) calling him “an open-speaking, honest-hearted Fellow, tho’ I was a bit of a Democrat”. Coleridge varied these accounts for