Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes
last arrived at Jesus. My God! how tumultous are the movements of my Heart – Since I quitted this room what and how important Events have been evolved! America! Southey! Miss Fricker! – Yes – Southey – you are right – Even Love is the creature of strong Motive – I certainly love her. I think of her incessantly & with unspeakable tenderness – with that inward melting away of Soul that symptomatizes it. Pantisocracy – O I shall have such a scheme of it! My head, my heart are all alive – I have drawn up my arguments in battle array – they shall have the Tactician excellence of the Mathematician with the Enthusiasm of the Poet.41
Poetry indeed was now much in evidence. They were exchanging bulging packets of verse, and this letter enclosed Coleridge’s early version of the sonnet “Pantisocracy”, which lyrically develops the theme of the Song to “Domestic Peace”, with the prophetic addition of a ritual dance:
…Sublime of Hope I seek the cottag’d Dell, Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray, And dancing to the moonlight Roundelay The Wizard Passions weave an holy Spell.42
This same dream-like evocation also includes a more darkly prophetic phrase, where Coleridge refers to the return of nightmares (one recalls the “vile bedfellow”) and vividly describes waking with a start “From Precipices of distemper’d sleep”.43 But Southey does not seem to have understood this side of Coleridge either.
During the fortnight in London, Coleridge had been immensely busy on Pantisocratic business. Taking lodgings – still in his filthy tramping clothes – at a tavern near Christ’s Hospital, the Salutation & Cat in Newgate Street, he sought out converts among the new generation of Grecians – the younger Le Grice, Favell – and argued with older ones like the poet George Dyer (author of The Complaints of the Poor People of England). “He was enraptured – pronounced it impregnable – He is intimate with Dr Priestley.”44
An attempt to convert the rather starchy Grosvenor Bedford – to whom Southey had provided a heady introduction – was less successful, foundering (thought Coleridge) on the “anti-genteel” appearance of his clothes and Newgate Street address, altogether too democratic. Bedford observed that he was “sorry, very sorry” about the whole scheme; a sentiment soon to be echoed by Coleridge’s own family.
Undeterred, Coleridge now began to research the whole subject in the bookshops, rediscovering on the way his old childhood passion for adventures and travel-writing. He read Brissot’s Travels in the United States (one of Poole’s favoured books), Thomas Cooper’s Some Information Respecting America (just published), and the stimulating book by Mary Wollstonecraft’s American lover, Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of North America (1792).
Cooper’s book seems to have particularly attracted him. It gave details of land prices, farming methods, climate, and local resources such as wildfowl and bison, as well as painting a seductive picture of an idyllic Pennsylvanian hinterland: “At this distance, you look down upon the Susquehannah about three or four miles off, a river about half a mile broad, running at the foot of bold and steep mountains, through a valley…rich, beautiful and variagated.”45
Coleridge also made contact with a young American land-agent (ex-Christ’s Hospital) who had spent the last five years there and who enthusiastically drank punch in the Salutation & Cat, descanting on mosquitoes, Indians, bison, diet (“the Women’s teeth are bad there”), and the practicalities of twelve men clearing 300 acres in five months. Like Cooper, he also recommended the Susquehanna for its “excessive Beauty, & its security from hostile Indians”.46
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”.47 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!’”48
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”.49
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.50 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.”51
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.52
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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.