Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes
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soft Bosom I repos’d my Cares,
And gaind’ for every wound an healing Tear.
To her I pour’d forth all my puny Sorrows,
(As a sick Patient in his Nurse’s arms)
And of the Heart those hidden Maladies
That shrink asham’d from even Friendship’s Eye.
O! I have woke at midnight, and have wept
Because she was not!…70
Love here expresses itself as tenderness, confidentiality, and – once again – as maternal nursing. Charles Lamb nurses, and Coleridge – in his careful parenthesis – is nursed. Love is a form of healing, for both of them.
The intimacy of the poem is a great advance on most of the public sonnets, and allowed Coleridge even to allude amusingly to Lamb’s fondness for puns, describing Mary’s polished wit “as mild as lambent Glories/That play around an holy Infant’s head”. Coleridge gave him the poem together with an early manuscript draft of “Religious Musings” (dated Christmas Eve, 1794), the long philosophic piece which he here dismissed as “Elaborate & swelling – but the Heart / Not owns it”. This, too, indicates his own sense of breaking through to a more powerful and direct verse form, in which spontaneity of feeling and simplicity of expression become important new values.
Coleridge admired and even envied the relationship between Lamb and his sister (“Her mind is elegantly stored – her Heart feeling”), as he would later be attracted by the relationship between Wordsworth and Dorothy. And it was probably this kind of closeness and love that he wished, above all, from Mary Evans.
But it was not to be. On 24 December he finally received a letter confirming Mary Evans’ engagement. He wrote a short, concluding note in reply, honourably free of all reproach: “To love you Habit has made unalterable. This passion however, divested, as it now is, of all Shadow of Hope, will lose its disquieting power. Far distant from you I shall journey thro’ the vale of Men in calmness…I have burnt your Letters – forget mine – and that I have pained you, forgive me! May God infinitely love you.”71
On 29 December he informed Southey of this outcome. But he was now almost brutally frank about his dilemma over Sara Fricker in a letter which acknowledges the disturbing element of sexual enticement he felt: “to marry a woman whom I do not love – to degrade her, whom I call my Wife, by making her the Instrument of low Desire – and on the removal of a desultory Appetite, to be perhaps not displeased with her Absence! – Enough! These Refinements are the wildering Fires that lead me into Vice. Mark you, Southey! – I will do my Duty.”72
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But what was his duty now? London, Cambridge, Bath, Wales, America – in which direction should he go? How could he best pursue the Pantisocratic dream? Coleridge sat on in the snug at the Salutation & Cat, smoking and drinking and talking with Lamb, in a haze of indecision, into the New Year 1795. Southey, sweeping aside delicacies, insisted that he must come to Bath immediately. Coleridge replied, in a fantastical letter, that he would come down “helter skelter” on a local farm cart, the two-mile-an-hour “Flying Wagon”, wrapped up in hay, “fraternizing” with the calves, and well supplied with gin and oronoko. “I shall be with you by Wednesday [7th January], I suppose.”73
Southey took this proposal literally, and was full of amazed indignation when, having walked to Marlborough with Lovell to intercept the Flying Wagon, it failed to deliver its Pantisocratic contents. By 11 January he was himself in London, “to reclaim his stray”, who even then proved elusive. “I went to the Salutation and Cat – a most foul stye – no Coleridge,” he told Edith Fricker. “I went to Christ’s Hospital…where is Coleridge?” Finally he was located with Lamb in the Unitarian Chapel, seeking divine guidance. They had a difficult dinner together.
“Coleridge objected to Wales and thought it best to find some situation in London till we could prosecute our original plan. He talks of tutorage – a public office – a newspaper one for me. I went to bed in dirty sheets – and tost and turned, cold, weary and heart sick till seven in the morning.”74 It was a low moment for Pantisocracy. Southey’s letter shows how much he counted on Coleridge’s support, increasingly anxious about his own marriage to Edith, his retreating work prospects, and the financial difficulties at Bath. It was this appeal to Coleridge’s generosity and easy good nature, as much as any bullying over Sara Fricker, that finally convinced Coleridge that his Pantisocratic “duty” lay in the West Country. By the end of January 1795 his university degree, his career at the Bar, his London journalism were all abandoned. The three Pantisocrats – Coleridge, Southey and Burnett – were established in their first commune, a cramped apartment at 25 College Green, Bristol.
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The story of the ensuing ten months in Bristol has been told (notably by Coleridge himself) in terms of the inevitable and comic collapse of naive Pantisocratic ideals when exposed to the mundane realities of human nature. Family pressures, financial difficulties, temperamental differences between Coleridge and Southey and Lovell, can all be seen as the inescapable emergence of the Old Adam in such unworldly dreams. It was what Tom Poole had already foreseen at Stowey: and what Coleridge himself revealed in a long, bitter, retrospective letter to Southey of November 1795, in which he referred contemptuously to “the Mouse of which the Mountain Pantisocracy was at last safely delivered!”1 But this is far from being the whole story, or the whole truth.
In the first place, the Susquehanna scheme did become a reality in other hands, and had considerable influence on radical thinking in England at this time. In January 1795 the British Critic carried a long article on the rival emigration schemes for the Susquehanna and for Kentucky, which were being promoted by Thomas Cooper and Gilbert Imlay. Though it mocked them as “two rival auctioneers, or rather show-men, stationed for the allurement of incautious passengers”, it acknowledged the growing popularity of such expeditions among Quakers, Unitarians, and other idealistic freethinkers. By 1796 it was calculated that some 2,000 people had set out, though many returned disillusioned.2
The most distinguished of these pioneers was Joseph Priestley, who set up a scientific academy at Northumberland, Pennsylvania, and remained there until his death in 1804. His Memoirs clearly indicate that Coleridge’s Pantisocracy was part of a larger, undefined movement among “the friends of liberty” to settle on the Susquehanna.
At the time of my leaving England (April 1794), my son in conjunction with Mr Cooper, and other English emigrants, had a scheme for a large settlement for the friends of liberty in general near the head of the Susquehannah in Pennsylvania. And taking it for granted that it would be carried into effect, after landing at New York, I went to Philadelphia, and thence came to Northumberland (in July 1794), a town nearest the proposed settlement, thinking to reside there until some progress had been made in it.3
Priestley’s son, who was in partnership with Thomas Cooper, explains that this was to be a substantial settlement of 300,000 acres, situated in the “forks” or confluence of the north-east and Western branches of the Susquehanna, some 150 miles west of Philadelphia, and fifty miles from Northumberland.4
The promised English settlers never arrived in any numbers, but interestingly a French colony of