Coleridge: Early Visions

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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.”

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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…

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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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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”.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.”

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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.”

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) Southey was agreeably surprised by Coleridge’s “unexpected arrival”, and spent the next ten days introducing him to his circle of friends in the city.

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News of Pantisocracy quickly spread through Bristol, where Southey, Lovell and Coleridge (two Oxons and one Cantab) were regarded as the three moving spirits of the enterprise. Coleridge met Joseph Cottle, a young Unitarian publisher who was already printing Southey’s Joan of Arc, and who immediately offered to publish anything by Coleridge. “I instantly descried his intellectual character,” wrote Cottle, “exhibiting as he did, an eye, a brow, and a forehead, indicative of commanding genius. Interviews succeeded and these increased the impression of respect.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Cottle gained the impression, from the fervour of the three, that they were considering taking ship for America from Bristol at any moment, and considered it as a noble but “epidemic delusion”. This was an important introduction, and Cottle would become Coleridge’s first publisher in 1796.

Southey and Lovell also introduced Coleridge to the Fricker family. They were a household of five, high-spirited, dashing girls, whose widowed mother kept a dress shop in Bristol. (There was also a son, George Fricker, who was always getting into scrapes.) Robert Lovell had just married the second daughter, Mary, who had worked as an actress; and Southey was courting the third, Edith, who was generally regarded as the sweetest-natured of the Frickers, and who worked as a milliner.

Of the remaining two of marriageable age (little Eliza was still a schoolgirl), Sara Fricker, the eldest then twenty-four, was thought to be the most handsome and hot-tempered; and Martha Fricker the most wayward and amusing. Among the Pantisocrats, George Burnett – then living in Somerset – had expressed interest in Martha, and would propose to her later that autumn. (She turned him down.) By simple mathematics, that left Sara and Coleridge, though temperamentally they were the most wildly unsuited of the couples.

Under normal circumstances it would be difficult to imagine anything more than a brief, summer holiday flirtation taking place. But circumstances were not normal, for several reasons. In the first place, the entire Fricker family was also caught up in the Pantisocratic whirlwind, and as Coleridge later observed mournfully, it was easy to mistake “the ebullience of schematism for affection, which a moment’s reflection might have told me, is not a plant of so mushroom a growth”.

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In the second place, Coleridge’s encounter with Mary Evans at Wrexham had reminded him how avidly he craved affection, and of the lost joys of the Evans family household. The Fricker family seemed to offer an instant and almost miraculous substitute. He was – in the old phrase, which seems particularly suited to Coleridge – on the rebound, and feeling increasingly isolated from his own people at Ottery. Moreover, Southey was now aware of this volatility, as later events that autumn showed. He felt a moral duty to help Coleridge put his emotions in proper order. An alliance with Sara seemed the logical answer, which fitted so beautifully into all their plans.

Southey’s own position was curiously ambiguous. There is evidence that his own attentions had first been paid to Sara until, finding her too demanding, he had turned to the more docile Edith.

(#litres_trial_promo) He always retained great fondness for Sara (as life at Keswick later showed), and there may well have been some element of soothing his own guilty conscience in the brotherly rigour with which he soon pressed her suit with Coleridge.

Finally, there can be little doubt that there was considerable sexual attraction on both sides. Coleridge was generally acknowledged as the most brilliant of the Pantisocrats, a Cambridge scholar with a possibly dazzling future, which greatly appealed to the high-strung and ambitious Sara, who loved his jokes, his dark hair, and large wild eyes. While Coleridge, always susceptible to female beauty, must easily have fallen for Sara’s bright animated face, her bubbling ringlets of brown hair, her quick teasing wit and generous, carefully laced figure turned out in the latest dress-shop fashions.

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Coleridge and Southey now had much to talk about between themselves, and on 14 August they left Bristol together, on a further walking tour through Somerset to see George Burnett at Huntspill, and work out further Pantisocratic details. Accompanied by Southey’s enthusiastic dog Rover (also a Pantisocrat), they climbed the Mendip Hills, visited the towering red cliffs and echoing caverns of Cheddar Gorge – and made their way to Bridgwater at the foot of the Quantocks.

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They were in wild spirits. At the Cheddar Inn, the landlady insisted on locking them all into the garret room for the night (including Rover), fearing they were footpads. They slept in the same bed, and Southey – with a revealing touch of physical distaste – found Coleridge to be “a vile bedfellow”, much disturbed by dreams.

(#litres_trial_promo) At Chilcompton, Coleridge dashed off a thirty-two-line poem about the village stream, describing the small boys sailing paper navies on its “milky waters cold and clear”, which greatly impressed Southey.

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At Nether Stowey, they called in to introduce themselves to the family of Thomas Poole, the young owner of the local tannery who was well-known in Bristol for his democratic views. News of the death of Robespierre in Paris (28 July) had just reached the village, and provoked animated discussion, during which Southey dramatically announced that he had rather have heard of the death of his own father.

(#litres_trial_promo) This might have lost some of its impact had anyone realised that Southey’s father was already dead.

Poole’s cousin, John, was shocked by their behaviour and recorded in his Latin diary for 18 August: “About one o’clock, Thomas Poole…and two young men, friends of his, come in. One is an undergraduate of Oxford, the other of Cambridge. Each of them was shamefully hot with Democratic Rage as regards politics, and both Infidel as to religion. I was extremely indignant.”