Coleridge: Early Visions

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One of Coleridge’s surprisingly practical conclusions was that after so much “academic” indolence, they should all spend the winter getting their bodies into “full tone and strength” and learn the “theory and practice of agriculture and carpentry”.

(#litres_trial_promo) He intended to write a short treatise on the whole subject, also outlining their political creed of aspheterism.

At Cambridge during this autumn term of 1794, which was to be Coleridge’s last, Pantisocracy became the talk of the whole university, and not only among the undergraduates. Coleridge argued out his ideas with his tutors, with Dr Pearce, with young dons like Francis Wrangham, as well as with friends like Caldwell. “Caldwell the most excellent, the most pantisocratic of Aristocrats, has been laughing at me – Up I arose terrible in Reasoning – he fled from me – because ‘he could not answer for his own Sanity sitting so near a madman of Genius!’”

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One debate, with the theologian Dr Thomas Edwards and a local councillor Mr Lushington (“A Democrat – and a man of most powerful and Briarean Intellect”) lasted for six hours over the tea cups, and Coleridge came back to Jesus at one in the morning triumphant, feeling that he had “exhibited closer argument in more elegant and appropriate Language, than I had ever conceived myself capable of”.

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The verse-drama, The Fall of Robespierre, was published by Benjamin Flower in October in an edition of 500 copies, and gave further publicity to the cause, circulating widely in Cambridge, London and Bath.

(#litres_trial_promo) Coleridge became a fashionable figure among the undergraduates, and conducted a public flirtation with a popular young actress, Elizabeth Brunton. But he was also reading and writing hard, composing many sonnets, adding a Pantisocratic section to his “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”, and beginning a long philosophic poem, “Religious Musings”, which dramatised his thoughts about the French Revolution, and the political significance of English radicals like Priestley, “Patriot and Sage”.

Long and furiously argued letters about poetry and Pantisocracy passed between him and Southey throughout these months. How should the children be educated? What status should servants have? (Coleridge thought they should evidently be equal.) What religious beliefs should be taught? How should the women be freed from domestic drudgery? Time and again Coleridge revealed himself as both the most radical, and the most visionary, of the two. “Let the married Women do only what is absolutely convenient and customary for pregnant Women or nurses. – Let the Husbands do all the Rest – and what will that all be – ?Washing with a Machine and cleaning the House. One Hour’s addition to our daily Labor – and Pantisocracy in its most perfect Sense is practicable.”

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While pressing the philosophic basis for the scheme, he also emphasised the need for a total revolution in their daily lives, often phrasing his arguments with striking and poetic force.

The leading Idea of Pantisocracy is to make men necessarily virtuous by removing all Motives to Evil – all possible Temptations…It is each Individual’s duty to be Just, because it is in his Interest. To perceive this and assent to it as an abstract proposition – is easy – but it requires the most wakeful attentions of the most reflective minds in all moments to bring it into practice. – It is not enough, that we have once swallowed it – The Heart should have fed upon the truth, as Insects on a Leaf – till it be tinged with the colour, and show its food in every the minutest fibre.

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8

Yet despite the high, optimistic tone of these exchanges, privately all was not well with the two Pantisocrats. In Bristol, Southey had been ejected from Aunt Tyler’s house because of the scheme, and threatened with disinheritance. He feared for his engagement with Edith Fricker, and even more he feared that Coleridge – now apparently flourishing in Cambridge – was allowing his own commitment to Sara to slide conveniently away.

Coleridge himself was once again in deep family difficulties. His brothers, George and James, had now discovered the emigration plan – worse even than the dragoons – and had written letters of “remonstrance, and Anguish”, suggesting that he was “deranged”, and threatening to cut off his finances. They proposed that he should leave Cambridge, and study law at the Temple.

Worse still, at the beginning of October, an unsigned letter from Mary Evans arrived at Jesus College, also begging him to abandon his “absurd and extravagant” scheme, and repeating the suggestion that his was a noble mind “o’erthrown” (like Hamlet). Brother George may have instigated this appeal as a stratagem, through Mrs Evans; for it held out the tantalising possibility of renewal of their friendship should Coleridge abandon his mad Bristol friends. “There is an Eagerness in your Nature,” Mary wrote gently, “which is ever hurrying you into the sad Extreme…I often reflect on the happy hours we spent together, and regret the loss of your Society. I cannot easily forget those whom I once loved…”

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Coleridge was now in “a waking Night-mare of Spirits”, with his thoughts “floating about in a most Chaotic State”.

(#litres_trial_promo) Torn between Mary Evans and Sara Fricker, and berated by both Southey and George for disloyalty, it was difficult to know which way to turn. He wrote an agonised sonnet beginning, “Thou bleedest, my poor Heart!…”; but added drily: “When a Man is unhappy, he writes damned bad Poetry, I find.”

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In fact his sonnet-writing, if nothing else, continued to flourish and improve under these pressures, and he composed a fine Gothic piece to Schiller, after reading his verse-drama The Robbers at one o’clock in the morning, in a delicious state of terror that brought obvious relief from his own problems. “My God! Southey! Who is this Schiller? This Convulser of the Heart? Did he write his tragedy amid the yelling of Fiends?…I tremble like an Aspen Leaf.”

(#litres_trial_promo) His desperation also brought excitement and exhilaration.

In November, he did his best to grapple with his affairs, writing long explanatory letters to both Mary Evans and George, and going for a week to London in an attempt to sort out matters. He travelled down stylishly in a friend’s phaeton. To George he insisted that he was neither a mad democrat nor an atheist, but that Pantisocracy was a serious plan. “After a diligent, I may say, an intense study of Locke, Hartley and others who have written most wisely on the Nature of Man – I appear to myself to see the point of possible perfection at which the World may perhaps be destined to arrive.”

He went through the usual gestures of self-recrimination, which were becoming habitual in his relations with George, this time describing himself as a poor fluttering creature escaping from a “birdlimed thorn-bush” of his follies.

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(#litres_trial_promo) George does not appear to have been mollified, failing perhaps to acknowledge the Coleridgean spirit of adventure that had taken John and Frank to India. It must have struck Coleridge very painfully that while Southey’s mother and younger brother so actively supported Pantisocracy, his own family simply regarded the whole thing as an aberration.

To Mary Evans he wrote with passionate sincerity, describing his four years of “ardent attachment” to her, asking whether or no she was actually engaged to another suitor, Fryer Todd, and begging her to say outright whether she felt any more than sisterly affection for him. “Restore me to Reality, however gloomy.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Several other letters and poems seem to have passed between them at this period, but Mary’s final response was to be delayed until the end of December, leaving Coleridge in an agony of indecision. They do not appear to have met face to face, and this uncertainty accounts for much of the confusion in his arrangements with Southey. An immediate plan to make a flying visit to Bath was postponed.

Instead Coleridge used the time in London to follow the Treason Trials of Hardy, Tooke, Thelwall and Holcroft which were then taking place at the Old Bailey. Lovell too was in London, and actually visited Holcroft in Newgate Gaol, where he received a blessing upon the Pantisocratic scheme. Then Coleridge hurried back to Cambridge, where he remained until the end of the academic term in mid-December.

Still determinedly seeking literary publicity, he proposed a whole series of sonnets on “Eminent Contemporaries” to the Morning Chronicle, and these began to appear on 1 December. His twelve subjects were carefully chosen among the distinguished reformers and liberal figures among the arts; they included Joseph Priestley, Lord Stanhope and William Godwin; Thomas Erskine, the lawyer who had defended Hardy and earlier Tom Paine; the politician and philosopher Edmund Burke; the French statesman Lafayette and the Polish nationalist, General Kosciusko; and his poetical master William Bowles. His theatrical interests were represented by the actress, Mrs Siddons, and the playwright R. B. Sheridan; while Southey was also honoured. One last sonnnet daringly attacked the Prime Minister, William Pitt, as eminent “fiend” and warmonger.

These were all essentially ideological pieces, which caused a considerable stir in the city and made Coleridge’s name generally known for the first time. As verse, they were clumsy and laboured, but Coleridge was aware of this, telling Southey: “I cannot write without a body of thought – hence my Poetry is crowded and sweats beneath a heavy burthen of Ideas and Imagery! It has seldom Ease…” But this was soon to come.

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9

Throughout this time letters continued to fly between Cambridge and Bath (where Southey was now living with his mother), hammering out the details of Pantisocracy. Because of the emotional drama over Sara Fricker and Mary Evans (which always ended in Coleridge grimly promising to do his “Duty”), it is easy to overlook the brilliant coherence with which Coleridge developed the concepts behind the emigration scheme. He never wrote the promised treatise on Pantisocracy, but it is possible to summarise the body of ideas which emerges from the letters between October and December 1794. Several of them were to shape Coleridge’s writing for the rest of his life. Far from being an aberration, or – as is often suggested – a temporary fit of youthful idealism, they form the intellectual basis of many of the speculative questions which Coleridge carried into his major poetry and later critical prose.

Behind the broad, rather Godwinian notion of a small, self-governing community of friends (with its Quaker overtones), lay several Coleridgean ideas about the nature of man and his relations to the physical world. First was “Aspheterism”, a word coinage of memorable unpleasantness, which implied not simply the common ownership of land and stock, but the abolition of the idea of ownership itself: “non proprius”. Coleridge would later specifically deny that he intended the abolition of private property as the basis for national government, as opposed to a small community.

(#litres_trial_promo) But the notion that the land, and particularly the countryside, could never be “owned” in the ordinary way, that it was a common heritage belonging to all, remains in his thought. It was, so to speak, a national trust.

Second, and closely related to this, is a characteristically poetic and humorous notion of the brotherhood of man and animals, as belonging to a common nature. The Pantisocrats would befriend the natural world, and live harmoniously as part of it. This fraternal idea first appears in a splendid signing-off passage in a letter of 24 October to Francis Wrangham.

If there be any whom I deem worthy of remembrance – I am their Brother. I call even my Cat Sister in the Fraternity of universal Nature. Owls I respect & Jack Asses I love: for Alderman & Hogs, Bishops & Royston Crows, I have not particular partiality –; they are my Cousins however, at least by Courtesy. But Kings, Wolves, Tygers, Generals, Ministers, & Hyaenas, I renounce them all…May the Almighty Pantisocratizer of Souls pantisocratize the Earth, and bless you and S.T. Coleridge.

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As often with Coleridge, one of his most serious and even mystical ideas begins as a flight of extravagant fancy, a poetical joke, in which humour and imagination are inextricably entwined. Two weeks later he had developed the ideas into a deliberately provoking little poem, “Address to a Young Jack Ass”, inspired by an animal he had noticed tethered on Jesus Green, a “poor little Foal of an oppressed Race”. Here the fraternal idea is directly presented with a mixture of comic bathos and polemic defiance, with coat-trailing, “democratic” references to poverty, the “fellowship of woe”, and a “scoundrel monarch”. He daringly submitted it to the Morning Chronicle where it appeared on 9 December, the first public allusion to Pantisocracy in print:

Innocent Foal! thou poor despis’d Forlorn! –

I hail thee Brother, spite of the Fool’s Scorn!

And fain I’d take thee with me in the Dell

Of high-soul’d Pantisocracy to dwell…

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It was, of course, a gift to satirists: five years later Coleridge appeared as a braying jack-ass in a famous cartoon against the British radicals which appears in the Anti-Jacobin: and Byron would long after recall this jibe in English Bards and Scotch Renewers. Coleridge was in this sense as innocent as his foal. Yet the idea of the fraternal community in nature, the “One Life”, was to be crucial to him.

A third, shaping idea that grew out of his reflection on Pantisocracy, was the notion of the “child of Nature”. Throughout the letters he emphasises again and again to Southey the need to bring up children outside the old, transmitted “prejudications” of corrupt society.

(#litres_trial_promo) Thoughtless fathers, uneducated mothers, and even older schoolfellows, could unwittingly pass on the “Fear and Selfishness” which warps the infant mind in an unreformed state of civilisation. Even religious doctrines could be dangerous – “How can we ensure their silence concerning God etc?” – when these were not allowed to develop naturally and directly from personal reverence for the creation. It was nature herself who must be the great teacher, and the essential role of education – and by extension, poetry and philosophy itself – must be as an affectionate interpreter of man’s place in the natural world. In the countryside the images of divine beauty and goodness “are miniatured on the mind of the beholder, as a Landscape on a Convex Mirror”.