Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes
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fleas from the Welsh democrat: “I trembled, lest some discontented Citizens of the animalcular Republic should have emigrated.”12 Hucks says they took no part in the dispute at all, but silently withdrew.13
Coleridge’s play-acting and high-spirited fooling was partly for Southey’s benefit. It was a sort of exhibitionism with which he often dazzled and delighted new friends, a form of intellectual flirtation, a floor-show, an intense desire to please and astound. He later came to regard this as one of the great moral weaknesses of his character, and an older and wiser Southey would upbraid him for it. But it was also the result of genuine excitement and enthusiasm, the discovery of a cause which he felt would rescue him from all the confusions and disappointments of Cambridge. Eleven years after, in Malta, he soberly looked back at this “stormy time”, when “for a few months America really inspired Hope, & I became an exalted Being.”14
Writing publicly in The Friend in 1809, at a time of political reaction, he still acknowledged that exaltation, and saw Pantisocracy with great perception as a peculiar product of the French revolutionary excitement. More than that, he claimed it as essential to his education in human affairs. This passage is important in the light of the accusations of political apostasy, which were subsequently heaped on him by William Hazlitt and others.
My feelings, however, and imagination did not remain unkindled in the general conflagration; and I confess I should be more inclined to be ashamed of myself, if they had! I was a sharer in the general vortex, though my little World described the path of Revolution in an orbit of its own. What I dared not expect from constitutions of Government and whole Nations, I hoped from Religion and a small Company of chosen Individuals, and formed a plan, as harmless as it was extravagant, of trying the experiment of human Perfectibility on the banks of the Susquahannah; where our little Society, in its second generation, was to have combined the innocence of the patriarchal Age with the knowledge and genuine refinements of European culture: and where I had dreamt of beholding, in the sober evening of my life, the Cottages of Independence in the undivided Dale of Industry…Strange fancies! and as vain as strange! yet to the intense interest and impassioned zeal, which called forth and strained every faculty of my intellect for the organization and defence of this Scheme, I owe much of whatever I at present possess, my clearest insight into the nature of individual Man, and my most comprehensive views of his social relations…15
It is an exculpatory statement, perhaps; yet much of it is borne out in the ideological struggle with Southey that developed over the next few months, in London and Bristol.
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It was not just the Pantisocrat who emerged on the Welsh tour, either. Coleridge began writing poetry with much greater fluency, and for the first time showed his passionate response to wild nature, so physical and direct that he felt almost at times like a child suckling at her rocky breasts.
From Llanvunnog we walked over the mountains to Bala – most sublimely terrible! It was scorchingly hot – I applied my mouth ever and anon to the side of the Rocks and sucked in draughts of Water cold as Ice, and clear as infant Diamonds in their embryo Dew! The rugged and stony Clefts are stupendous – and in winter must form Cataracts most astonishing…I slept by the side of one an hour & more. As we descended the Mountain the Sun was reflected in the River that winded thro’ the valley with insufferable Brightness – it rivalled the Sky.16
Coleridge’s physical energy exhausted Hucks. He bathed in the sacred pool at Holywell, climbed Penmaenmawr, Snowdon, Plynlimon and Cader Idris; and at Beaumaris “ordered a supper sufficient for ten aldermen”. While tramping, Coleridge fuelled himself with vast supplies of bread, cheese and brandy. He insisted on climbing Penmaenmawr without a guide: they got lost, ran out of water, and were then benighted and thought they were pursued by monsters. Years later Coleridge said the discovery of water under a flat stone on the summit when they “grinned like idiots”, provided an image for the Ancient Mariner.17 After that, Hucks refused to go up Snowdon, and Coleridge climbed it with two other undergraduates. At Harlech, he scaled the castle walls without permission, and had to buy beer all round to pacify the town watch.18
Coleridge’s rapturous letters to Southey, and to his Jesus College friend, Henry Martin, were full of such escapades, set against a vividly perceived Romantic landscape of rivers, waterfalls, mountains, sunsets, and ruins by moonlight. In a sense he was still seeing self-consciously through the eyes of Bowles’ sonnets of travel. Yet everywhere “the sublime” was punctured by his individual sense of fun and farce. His favourite device was to adopt some Romantic pose, and then explode it with laughter. In the ruins of Denbigh Castle, he spied a melancholy young man sitting beneath the moon with a flute – “Bless thee, Man of Genius and Sensibility! I silently exclaimed” – and then appreciatively described the ludicrous effect of the “Romantic Youth” instantly striking up the bawdy drinking song of “Mrs Casey”.19 This was play-acting at being the poet, like the Pantisocrat; yet the feelings beneath were evidently deep and genuine. It was almost as if he were frightened of the intensity of his own emotions.
The most revealing of these Romantic incidents occurred at Wrexham. Standing at the window of their inn with Hucks, one Sunday morning, Coleridge was astonished to see the figures of Mary Evans and her sister coming back from church. In a flash he realised that they must have come for a summer holiday with their Welsh grandmother who lived in the town. He had not seen her since joining the dragoons and had been told that she was engaged to another man in London. All his frustrated love for her burst out: “I turned sick and all but fainted away.” He hid in the inn, and then fled from Wrexham as soon as possible with Hucks. For a day he could not eat or sleep, and tried to lose himself “amid the terrible Graces of the wildwood scenery”. All this he recounted for Southey’s benefit with spectacular displays of lovelorn emotion. “Her Image is in the sanctuary of my Heart, and never can it be torn away but with the strings that grapple it to Life. – Southey! There are few men of whose delicacy I think so highly as to have written all this – I am glad, I have so deemed of you – We are soothed by communication.”20
The part of the star-crossed lover was too good to keep only for Southey. A week later he gave an even more tortured and detailed account to Henry Martin of the meeting, now adding a throw-away line: “But Love is a local Anguish – I am 50 miles distant, and am not half so miserable.”21 What did he really feel about Mary Evans at this juncture? It is impossible to say, and probably Coleridge himself knew least of all, besides unaccountable longings and the old loneliness and rejection he had always felt. But it did produce a touching lyric (afterwards set to music) which marks the sudden flowering of his poetry on this tour, “The Sigh”:
…And though in distant climes to roam,
A wanderer from my native home,
I fain would soothe the sense of Care,
And lull to sleep the Joys that were!
Thy Image may not banish’d be –
Still, Mary! still I sigh for thee.22
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Southey never met them as arranged, on the return leg through Aberystwyth; and Hucks had had enough by the time they reached Llandovery on 2 August. So Coleridge pushed on southwards alone, catching his first glimpse of Tintern, and then hastily crossing by the Chepstow ferry to Bristol, where he arrived on 5 August, sending a note round to his “fellow Citizen”, Robert Lovell.