Coleridge: Early Visions

Indeed he was beginning to define the world of his own poetic imagination; and lack of money, lack of “stock”, was really a symbol of a more general lack of worldly, conventional ambitions: something his brothers would never understand. The earnestness with which they now all rallied round to get him back to Cambridge has a touching futility. Coleridge had really escaped through Comberbache. In the Henley Pest House, close to disease and death, he had glimpsed other possibilities. He would go through the motions, but he would not really “come back” again.

9

It took over six weeks to obtain his discharge. Meanwhile he was shifted on the regimental baggage cart from Henley to High Wycombe, where he was stationed in a tavern, and effortlessly made friends with the adjutant, Captain Nathaniel Ogle. Seconded to light stable duties, he shared gentlemanly bottles of wine with Ogle, took a daily newspaper, translated Casimir’s poems for his intended classical anthology, and dashed off an essay on the evils of the modern novel for Bob Allen – who submitted it at Oxford for his declamation.

(#litres_trial_promo) His letters to George rapidly recovered their old élan, and he gave an amusing account of a pot-house philosopher at the inn, who kept him up till three in the morning spinning “theories of Heaven and Hell”. He added with boldly returning self-confidence: “My Memory tenacious & systematizing would enable me to write an Octavo from his Conversation.”

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Negotiations for the discharge continued with Colonel Gwynne’s office throughout March, but it proved no military formality. The problem was to find a substitute recruit. James did not pursue the matter with much alacrity (he probably felt that the army was just what his younger brother needed), but the faithful George tactfully pressed the case in a series of letters, pointing out that Coleridge needed to return to Jesus by mid-April in order to take his annual Rustat Scholarship exam. George finally went to the regimental headquarters in person. Coleridge meanwhile was drafted back to Henley, quartered at the White Hart and began further training on “an horse, young and as undisciplined as myself”. It ran away with him during each parade, and he was thrown off three times in one week.

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To his embarrassment, several friends came to visit him, including Charles Le Grice, and George Cornish of Ottery who initially failed to recognise him in his riding breeches and powdered and pomatumed hair tied back in a military pigtail. Cornish thought him “much agitated”, and half suspecting his brothers meant to punish him by the delay in discharge: “he gave me a little detail of his sufferings, but he says they are not half enough to expiate his follies.” Cornish slipped him a guinea, quite shocked to see him go through “all the drudgery of a Dragoon recruit”.

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On 30 March, still not discharged, Coleridge wrote humbly to George promising the “utmost contrivances of Economy” and speaking for the first time of his religious doubts. “Fond of the dazzle of Wit, fond of subtlety of Argument”, he had read Voltaire and Helvetius, who had drawn him into “a kind of religious Twilight”. He still loved the Jesus of the Gospels, but “my reasonings would not permit me to worship.” This marks the beginning of his Unitarian phase, which would lead him for several years into a radical view of Christianity as a philosophy of social reform, with strong egalitarian overtones, which were evidently encouraged by his army experience. He fervently reassured George of his penitence: “believe me your severities only wound me as they awake the Voice within to speak ah! how more harshly! I feel gratitude and love towards you, even when I shrink and shiver –”

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When on 7 April definite news of his imminent discharge arrived, he cheered up again and announced he was writing the libretto for an opera.

(#litres_trial_promo) The army had found its own method of dealing with the matter; after an unofficial payment from George of some twenty-five guineas, the Regimental Muster Roll recorded succintly: “discharged S. T. Comberbache, Insane; 10 April 1794”.

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FOUR PANTISOCRAT (#ulink_729a9296-2053-5304-8658-067d9f3cb306)

1

Coleridge returned to Cambridge on 11 April 1794, travelling up on the outside of the night mail after symbolically missing the Cambridge fly. He had booked a seat, but then went for a contemplative walk, and the fly shot by him on the road. For all his brothers’ hopes, he would never again settle down at the university; his dreams were elsewhere. Outwardly he was full of good resolutions: having sat the Rustat Exam and got a credit, he would now study hard, contend “for all the Prizes”, and compile his slim volume of Imitations from the Modern Latin Poets to pay off his debts. (It was advertised in the Cambridge Intelligencer for June, but never appeared.) He would “solemnly” drop all unsuitable college friends, rise at six o’clock every morning, forswear wine parties and politics, and practise a “severe Economy”. “Every enjoyment – except of necessary comforts – I look upon as criminal.” Even in his Greek verse he would now aim at “correctness & perspicuity, not genius”. His last Ode had been so sublime that no one could understand it.

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He accepted the college’s reprimand, a month’s gating, and ninety pages of Greek translation from Demetrius Phalereus (“dry, and utterly intransferable to modern use”) with a great show of philosophy. Though his tutor, Mr Plampin, had treated him with “exceeding and most delicate kindness”, the Master, Dr Pearce, had behaved with great asperity. “All the Fellows tried to persuade the Master to greater Lenity, but in vain – without the least affectation I applaud his conduct – and think nothing of it,” he told George on 1 May. “The confinement is nothing – I have the fields and Grove of the college to walk in – and what can I wish more? What do I wish more? Nothing.”

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But of course, he now wished for everything. He played the part of the penitent prodigal with conviction, indeed he rather enjoyed it. But as Trooper Comberbache he had seen the outside world, and tasted notoriety; and guiltily he enjoyed that too. How could he return to the small existence of college honours, the remote degree (now postponed until Christmas 1795), or the narrow prospect of a clergyman’s career like dear, earnest brother George? Radical politics, Unitarian theology, poetry, newspapers, the glories of nature and science, were all fizzing in his mind. He had already attracted a following among Bob Allen’s circle in Oxford. At Cambridge, even cautious men like Caldwell treated him with respect and “almost fraternal affection”. He had become one of the wild men of his university generation, and people waited to see what he would do next. He confided to his fellow undergraduate Samuel Butler: “There are hours in which I am inclined to think very meanly of myself, but when I call to memory the number & character of those who have honoured me with their esteem, I am almost reconciled to my follies, and again listen to the whispers of self-adulation.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Pride and guilt mixed in him like combustible fuel, waiting to be ignited. What he wished for was an ideal cause, a grand scheme, a mighty passion. And even deeper than this, perhaps, love and friendship. It was to come initially in the shape of Pantisocracy.

2

Like many things in Coleridge’s life, it all began with a walking tour. These tours, common enough today, were then a new fashion with strong democratic overtones. Young men from the universities dressed as tramps and wandered over the countryside, staying at local inns, talking enthusiastically with “the common people”, hill-climbing, swimming, star-gazing and communing with nature. William Frend had walked through France, Wordsworth had crossed the Alps into Italy, Bowles had wandered through Wales and Germany. Coleridge now planned “a pedestrian scheme” through the Wye Valley and up into North Wales, starting the moment that his gating was officially over. His practical preparations consisted largely in purchasing a curious five-foot walking-stick carved to a suitably modest design. “On one side it displays the head of an Eagle, the Eyes of which represent rising Suns, and the Ears Turkish Crescents. On the other side is the portrait of the Owner in Wood-work. Beneath the head of the Eagle is a Welch Wig – and around the neck of the Stick is a Queen Elizabeth’s Ruff in Tin. All adown it waves the Line of Beauty in very ugly Carving.”

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He chose a large, genial, fellow undergraduate, Joseph Hucks, to accompany him: “a man of cultivated, tho’ not vigorous understanding”, as Coleridge kindly described his Sancho Panza. Hucks subsequently published a Rousseauesque account of the tour, which leadenly omits every incident of human interest. When they met nude female bathers at Abergele, Hucks chose “to retire further up the shore”. Coleridge insisted on wearing rough workmen’s jackets, loose trousers, (rather than gentleman’s breeches and stockings), and carrying canvas knapsacks, which Hucks thought gave them the appearance of “two pilgrims performing a journey to the tomb of some wonder-working saint”. In fact they were usually mistaken for French tinkers (dangerously republican) or demobbed soldiers (dangerously drunk).

It was the first of Coleridge’s many epic walks: during the serious part of the tour they covered over 500 miles in just over a month – from Gloucester to Anglesey through the Welsh hills, and back by the coast to Bristol. They departed from Cambridge at dawn on 15 June, planning a brief stop-over with Bob Allen in Oxford, before disappearing into wild Wales. Coleridge, feeling like a man released from prison, was in a state of manic enthusiasm. On the way he bought the first of many Notebooks, with a “portable Ink horn” and quills: “as I journey onward, I ever and anon pluck the wild Flowers of Poesy.”

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They tramped into Oxford about 17 June, going straight round to Allen’s rooms in University College for a memorable reunion between the two Grecians. Coleridge had brought a subscribers’ list for his Imitations in his knapsack, and armed with this they trooped over to Balliol to meet Robert Southey, the twenty-year-old poet from Bristol who was already renowned for his extreme republican views. This meeting delayed their planned three-day stop-over for three weeks, and saw the birth of the famous “Pantisocratic” scheme.

The tall, idealistic, rather forbidding young Southey was then sporting a radical beard, studying anatomy, and finishing an epic drama, Joan of Arc. His rooms were next to the college lavatories, by an alley that opened on to St Giles. He was leaving Oxford that summer without a degree, destined for the Church, though he proclaimed himself an atheist and democrat with strong French Jacobin sympathies. He was profoundly depressed at his situation, and the arrival of the ebullient and voluble Coleridge took him by storm. He wrote instantly to his old school friend, Grosvenor Bedford, after their first interview: “I am delaying the pickling of my 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.”

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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”.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.”

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.”

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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.)

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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.

3

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,

proprius!…We really wanted such a word – instead of travelling along the circuitous dusty, beaten high-Road of Diction, you thus cut across the soft, green pathless Field of Novelty! Similies forever! Hurra!” At the end of this letter, he gravely promised his “sturdy Republican” a more “sober & chastised Epistle” in his next. Meanwhile, “Fraternity & civic Remembrances” were conveyed to Lovell.

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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 comic effect, in another saying he had proposed the toast to Priestley (an even greater provocation), and caught fleas from the Welsh democrat: “I trembled, lest some discontented Citizens of the animalcular Republic should have emigrated.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Hucks says they took no part in the dispute at all, but silently withdrew.