Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes
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1795. One of them, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, left a vivid sketch of Priestley’s Northumberland: a one-horse town of log-cabins, five bars, and no sidewalks, in which the eminent doctor provided the focus of civilisation, refusing to be tempted back even by the offer of a professorship at Philadelphia. Thomas Cooper, the most determined of the settlers, ended his career as President of South Carolina College, and was described by the American President Adams as “a learned, ingenious, scientific, and talented madcap”.5 It is not impossible to imagine Coleridge, in some alternative life, flourishing among these original Susquehanna pioneers, and making his own distinctive contribution to the history of the Wild West.
Certainly Joseph Cottle’s story, repeated by Gillman, that the Susquehanna scheme was wholly invented by Coleridge on the sole ground that the name was “pretty and metrical”, emerges as one of his many humorous smoke-screens. It was propagated in later life by Coleridge himself to disguise the seriousness of his disputes with Southey.6
Moreover, if Pantisocracy did not produce an actual settlement in America, it still shaped Coleridge’s career in England. It forced him to start to earn his living as a writer. In Bristol this spring he began to give lectures, to assemble poems for Joseph Cottle, and to keep the first of his surviving Notebooks (known as the Gutch Memorandum Book).* He read and studied hard at the Bristol Library (the list of his extensive borrowings has survived), and he began to pursue his highly original investigations into travel-writing, philosophy, theology and the world of poetic myth. The long poems of this time, “Religious Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations: A Vision”, are in effect huge, rag-bag anthologies of his reading, speculations, and enthusiasms, all released by the debate over Pantisocracy.
The arguments with Southey, increasingly fierce and personalised, were an intellectual and emotional education in themselves. The relationship with Sara Fricker, which had begun in the “ebullience of schematism” and sexual excitement, did surprisingly mature into a genuine love-affair which – though fraught with difficulties and tensions from the start – released real passion on both sides, and greatly concentrated the youthful Coleridge’s wild personality. This becomes especially evident in the development of the Conversation Poems.
Pantisocracy, in other words, gave him his first sense of vocation, of having a spiritual task in the world. And the dream of some form of communal life, of living among close friends and working for a common objective, in some “happy valley” or “magic dell” of inspiration, became a permanent feature of his imagination. It certainly haunted the whole next decade of his life – in Bristol, at Stowey, in the Lakes – and was never entirely abandoned. Paradoxically, it was the very visionary quality of Pantisocracy that first made him grapple with the realities of life. As he wrote angrily of Southey’s own waverings over a career in August: “Southey! Pantisocracy is not the Question – it’s realization is distant – perhaps a miraculous Millenium – What you have seen, or think, that you have seen of the human heart, may render the formation even of a pantisocratic seminary improbable to you – but this is not the question.”7 Defining the question, the way forward, became the real story of these months.
2
Bristol was an immensely stimulating place to be in the 1790s, much improved from the backwater of commercial dullards and “Damn’d narrow notions” experienced by Thomas Chatterton twenty-five years before, where there was “no credit” for the Muses.8 The second city, and the first port in the kingdom, it had a thriving community of Unitarian businessmen who acted as an intellectual leaven among the rich commercial clan of merchants, ship-owners, lawyers, manufacturers and shopkeepers. The public life of the city was sustained by several newspapers, publishing houses, theatres, Assembly Rooms, lecture halls in the Corn Market, a large municipal lending library, and research bodies like Dr Beddoes’ Pneumatic Institute. Great national issues like the war with France, the slave trade, the breach with the American colonies, Pitt’s increasingly draconian legislation against “English Jacobins”, and the questions of free speech and habeas corpus, were regarded as the personal responsibilities of the Bristol citizens. But lacking its own university, the city was an ideal arena for men from Oxford and Cambridge to attract immediate attention, and the Pantisocrats – who revealed a flair for publicity – were rapidly drawn to the centre of public affairs, in a way that would never have happened so quickly in London. A Bristolian writing many years later in the Monthly Magazine, and discreetly signing himself “Q”, described Coleridge’s arrival as “like a comet or meteor in our horizon”.9
Looking urgently for sources of income, Coleridge was encouraged to embark on a career of public speaking, and with the example of John Thelwall’s controversial political lectures in London, he immediately announced a series of three “Moral and Political Lectures” in rooms above the Corn Market, with entrance tickets at a shilling each. These took place in late January and early February, arousing such passions that the last had to be moved to a private house in Castle Green. Drawing on his endless daylong and nightlong discussions with Southey, he took as his theme a radical analysis of the various zealous “Advocates of Freedom” – Paine, Godwin, Tooke, Gerrald – attempting “to evince the necessity of bottoming on fixed Principles, that so we may not be the unstable Patriots of Passion or Accident, or hurried away by names of which we have not sifted the meaning, and by tenets of which we have not examined the consequences.”10
The combination of wild enthusiasm and “flame-coloured epithets”, with a strongly religious emphasis against revolutionary violence is the characteristic of these early speeches: “The annals of the French Revolution have recorded in Letters of Blood, that the Knowledge of the Few cannot counteract the Ignorance of the Many.” They left his hearers (and perhaps himself) deeply confused as to his exact ideological position: at one moment a fiery democrat, at the next an unworldly Unitarian idealist preaching universal benevolence.
Coleridge’s talent for public speaking, and gift for projecting an intense, Romantic persona, were however at once evident. Cottle records the enthusiasm of his audiences, and his instinctive gift for dealing with hecklers. When assailed on one occasion by jeers and hisses, he responded with a majestic smile: “I am not at all surprised, when the red hot prejudices of aristocrats are suddenly plunged into the cool waters of reason, that they should go off with a hiss!”11
He revealed, too, a power of poetic imagery, which reached out directly to his listeners with sometimes magical effect. Standing at the window of the Corn Market Rooms, which overlooked the clusters of ships’ masts along the Bristol quay, he opened his first lecture with a skilful maritime analogy.
When the Wind is fair and the planks of the vessel sound, we may safely trust everything to the management of professional Mariners; but in a Tempest and on board a crazy Bark, all must contribute their Quota of Exertion. The Stripling is not exempted from it by his Youth, nor the Passenger by his Inexperience. Even so in the present agitations of the public mind, every one ought to consider his intellectual faculties as in a state of requisition.12
One can hear both the poet and the lay preacher in this.
The reporter “Q”, who attended this lecture, gained the impression that Coleridge was “a favourer of revolution”, and that his views were “positively and decidedly democratic”.13 To prove that his views were not, however, Jacobin or treasonable, Coleridge was “obliged” to publish his text, which he did in a sixpenny pamphlet by “ST Coleridge of Jesus College”, with a superscription from Akenside: “‘To calm and guide / The swelling democratic tide’.” He told George Dyer that the whole thing had been concocted at one sitting