Coleridge: Early Visions

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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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?”

(#litres_trial_promo) 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 that infamous traffic”.

His distinctive radical views were now very generally known in the city – anti-war, anti-Pitt, anti-slave trade, and professing some vision of an ideal, fraternal society halfway between a democratic “bloodless Revolution” and a hot-gospelling Christian millennium. As the Critical Review put it on the publication of his first lecture, in April, it was essentially the production of “a young man who possesses a poetical imagination”. The address was “spirited and often brilliant, and the sentiments manly and generous…We also think our young political lecturer leaves his auditors abruptly, and that he has not stated, in a form sufficiently scientific and determinate, those principles to which, as he expresses it, he now proceeds as the most important point.”

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4

It was an ideological confusion that was becoming increasingly evident at College Street. Under the pressure of producing their lectures, Coleridge and Southey found fraternity difficult to sustain, and financial worries increasing. Notes to Cottle show them borrowing rent money, and even begging food for their suppers. Southey found Coleridge’s endless talk, dilatory methods of composition, and general “indolence” as maddening as the fabled rain.

When Coleridge promised to stand in for the last of Southey’s “Historical Lectures”, and then failed to appear in the lecture hall, Southey was shocked into doubts about their whole partnership. Meticulous in his own habits, and obsessively precise in his working timetable, Southey felt that the Pantisocrats were let down by Coleridge’s chaotic approach to life. Even the Observer contrasted Southey’s precise style and presentation with Coleridge’s dreamy speech and “slovenly” appearance, advising him to appear “with cleaner stockings in public” and his long black hair better “combed out”.

Coleridge in turn felt that Southey was concentrating more and more on his own career, and his marriage with Edith. Having abandoned all hope of support from his own family, he was hypersensitive to the least sign of emotional betrayal from the person to whom – far more than Sara Fricker – he had committed himself at this point.

As he wrote retrospectively in November:

We commenced lecturing. Shortly after, you began to recede in your conversation from those broad Principles, in which Pantisocracy originated. I opposed you with vehemence…And once (it was just before we went in to Bed) you confessed to me that you had acted wrong. But you relapsed: your manners became cold and gloomy: and pleaded with increased pertinacity for the Wisdom of making Self an undiverging Center.

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This has something of the overtone of a lovers’ quarrel: and later, before the final breach, there were certainly tearful scenes.

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During that summer they went for several long walking expeditions together, trying to argue out their differences. Over thirty-five years later, in a Notebook of 1827, Coleridge fondly recalled the absurd intensity of one such tramp with Southey, “on a desperate hot summerday from Bath to Bristol with a Goose, 2 vls of Baxter On the Immortality of the Soul, and the Giblets, in my hand.”

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In June they went on a tour to see Tintern Abbey and the Wye Valley, this time accompanied by Joseph Cottle (trying to smooth matters over between his two poets), and Edith and Sara. They lost their way, were benighted, and then had a row at the inn. The Fricker girls each supported their own fiancés. Again, Coleridge recalled the incident with painful precision.

You had left the Table and we were standing at the Window. Then darted into my mind the Dread, that you were meditating a Separation. At Chepstow your conduct renewed my Suspicion: and I was greatly agitated even to many Tears. But in Percefield Walks you assured me that my Suspicions were altogether unfounded, that our differences were merely speculative, and that you would certainly go into Wales. I was glad and satisfied. For my Heart was never bent from you but by violent strength – and heaven knows, how it leapt back to esteem and love you.

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