Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes
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After the third lecture, when the house was surrounded by a small crowd complaining of the “damn’d Jacobin…jawing away”, Coleridge received death-threats and was advised to desist; he did not speak publicly again until May. He seems rather to have enjoyed his notoriety, all the same. “Mobs and Mayors, Blockheads and Brickbats, Placards and Press gangs have leagued in horrible conspiracy against me – The Democrats are as sturdy in the support of me – but their number is comparatively small.”
He remained deeply angry about the practical effects of Pitt’s pro-war policies, which encouraged every kind of “patriotic” fanaticism, and contradicted everything that Pantisocracy stood for. One of his first Gutch Notebook entries read: “People starved into War. – over an enlisting place in Bristol a quarter of Lamb and piece of Beef hung up.”15
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At 25 College Street, Southey was ecstatic about their commune. “Coleridge is writing at the same table,” he told Bedford, “our names are written in the book of destiny on the same page.” Arguments about the Welsh scheme modulated into the practicalities of earning rent money. They both planned further lecture series, and considered applying for reporting posts on the Telegraph. Cottle advanced thirty guineas to each of them, for the publication of future poems.
Much time was spent with the Frickers, and though no correspondence has survived between Sara and Coleridge from this period, he began to write a number of increasingly affectionate poems to her during the spring and summer. The pressure of the impetuous “engagement” had evidently relaxed: Lovell, and Sara’s relations, were actually advising her against the match; and Sara herself was considering another suitor, though as Coleridge observed with a touch of pique, he was “a man whom she strongly dislikes, in spite of his fortune and solicitous attentions to her.”16
He still felt that Southey did not understand with what an effort he had broken off his love for Mary Evans, “as if it had been a Sinew of my Heart”; and this was to remain a bitter point between them. But it is clear that Coleridge now courted Sara with growing ardour, responsive as before to her immediate and seductive physical presence, and throwing all caution to the winds. Southey cannot be held responsible for this. As Coleridge told him frankly in his otherwise accusatory letter of November: “I returned to Bristol, and my addresses to Sara, which I at first payed from Principle not Feeling, from Feeling & from Principle I renewed: and I met a reward more than proportionate to the greatness of the Effort. I love and I am beloved, and I am happy!”17
This is certainly the evidence of his beautiful Conversation Poem, “The Eolian Harp”, which hints at the physical delights of their courtship that summer, and is dated 20 August, some six weeks before their actual marriage:
And that simplest Lute,
Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark!
How by the desultory breeze caress’d,
Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover,
It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs
Tempt to repeat the wrong!18
By the end of March, Southey gives the impression of a definitely amended Pantisocratic plan, with Coleridge having yielded to the Welsh scheme, and the Fricker sisters committed to join them, once the financing was assured. “If Coleridge and I can get 150 pounds a year between us,” he told his brother Thomas, “we purpose marrying, and retiring into the country, as our literary business can be carried on there, and practising agriculture till we can raise money for America – still the grand object in view.”19 It was in fact Southey’s anxieties about money, and his own difficulties in marrying Edith against family opposition, which were to prove the destruction of the Pantisocratic brotherhood.
They soon renewed their lecturing, Southey completing a biweekly series on the historical background to the French Revolution on 28 April; and Coleridge returning to the fray at the Assembly Coffeehouse, Bristol Quay, on 19 May. His subject appeared suitably esoteric: “Six Lectures on Revealed Religion” according to the well-advertised prospectus, but containing the sting in its subtitle: “Its Corruptions and Political Views”.
This series was now officially under the patronage of several leading Bristol citizens, of Unitarian or liberal persuasion, who were to become lifelong supporters of Coleridge. They included Joseph Cottle and his brother; John Prior Estlin, an influential Unitarian preacher; and the Morgans, a wealthy family of wine-shippers, whose son John was later to look after Coleridge in the very worst days of his opium addiction, one of the most striking examples of the loyalty which Coleridge so frequently inspired.* This group of supporters were also responsible for commissioning the fine and charismatic portrait of Coleridge by Peter Vandyke (1795) which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. The bright top-coat and high white silk stock are in the latest fashion of the French Directory, and the radiant face of the young lecturer, with parted lips, glows with “sensibility” and inspiration.
The patrons seem to have got their money’s worth, and there was no further talk of the “damn’d Jacobin”, though Coleridge’s central theme was the relevance of the “essential beliefs” of Christianity to the poor and oppressed. But he also attacked the atheism of the radicals – especially Holcroft and Godwin – while weaving a brilliant path through current theological debate: Mosaic history, primitive Christianity, Newton’s scientific philosophy, Paley’s argument “from design”, Priestley’s deism, and the psychological “associationism” of Hartley (which was one of the planks of Pantisocracy).
Much of this material, in true undergraduate fashion, was in fact cannibalised more or less directly from commentaries borrowed (usually the day before) from the Bristol Library. But Coleridge always added his own distinctive touch, opening lecture one for example with an elaborate allegorical dream: “It was towards Morning when the Brain begins to reassume its waking state, and our dreams approach to the regular trains of Reality, that I found myself in a vast Plain…”
Lecture six contained “the Fable of the Maddening Rain”, an anti-Pantisocratic or dystopian parable, describing how a single sane man fails to maintain his intellectual independence and reason in a community driven collectively mad, gradually sinking from “hopeless Conformity into active Guilt”. This, he argued, was the fate of many erstwhile reformers like Pitt or Edmund Burke, in the national reaction against the Revolution.20
One thing that emerges from these lectures is the profoundly religious impulse behind all Coleridge’s Pantisocratic radicalism. Unlike Paine or Godwin, he never appeals to “the Rights of Man”, but always to a fundamentalist view of “Christ’s teaching” about wealth, property, temporal power, and the brotherhood of man. He also begins his restless worrying at the problem of the “origins of Evil”. Even in his earliest theories of “material necessity”, based on a crude mechanistic interpretation of David Hartley’s concepts of mental association, he is never content with the Rousseauist optimism about human nature. He acknowledges that an imperfect physical environment (such as the great cities of poverty and sickness) produces human evil. “But whence proceeds this moral Evil? Why was not Man formed without the capability of it?”21 This question would soon become a central theme in his poetry.
Coleridge completed this second series of lectures on a high, combative note, delivering a rumbustious seventh address “On the Slave Trade” on 16 June. As Bristol was the unchallenged centre of the trade in England, this was a daring attack and very different from penning a Greek Ode on the subject in the hallowed courts of Cambridge. The Bristol Observer noted impartially that it was “a proof of the detestation in which he holds