Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.⁶⁰ 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.⁶¹

      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…⁶²

      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.⁶³ 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”.⁶⁴

      10

      Coleridge was back in London for the Christmas vacation by 11 December, where he was to remain for a month, lodging at the Salutation & Cat, furiously writing letters and poetry, and trying to decide if he should really leave the university. In theory the Pantisocratic expedition was still scheduled for March or April 1795, but none of the £2,000 capital had been raised, and various alternatives had to be considered.

      Southey, still demanding his immediate presence in Bath, proposed with Lovell a preliminary scheme to go shares in a Welsh farm where they could learn agricultural skills before departing. He was also arguing that they should take servants to do the manual labour, and that the women should have exclusive charge of the children and domestic work. Coleridge described all these compromises succinctly as “nonsense”, and continued the debate of first principles.⁶⁵ But having still not settled matters with Mary Evans, he was in a growing panic about Sara Fricker, and felt he had written to her “like an hypocrite”. For the time being it was arranged that Southey would return with him to Cambridge in the New Year, to argue out the Welsh scheme, and help raise money from his Imitations.66 Meanwhile Burnett and Lovell would prospect for farms in Caernarvonshire or Merioneth.

      But London now presented all sorts of exciting opportunities for Coleridge. With his sonnets being published, he met Perry, the editor of the Morning Chronicle, and discussed a future in journalism. He spent lively evenings with William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft, the leading radical writers, who cross-questioned him about Pantisocracy.

      Godwin, then thirty-eight, was at the height of his fame, having followed Political Justice (1793) with his intellectual gothic thriller Caleb Williams (1794), which became a bestseller. He was still advocating atheism and anti-matrimonialism (he had not yet formed his liaison with Mary Wollstonecraft), and this deeply shocked Coleridge. But the celebrated philosopher and the wild young poet fiercely argued the merits of atheism and Unitarian belief, and a close friendship was later to form that Godwin would describe as one of the most influential in his life.⁶⁷ Holcroft – “he absolutely infests you with Atheism” – outraged Coleridge by his “Blasphemy against the divinity of a Bowles!” It is clear that the Pantisocrat was not in the mood to be overawed by these distinguished introductions: “my great coolness and command of impressive Language certainly did him over.”

      Meanwhile George Dyer, perhaps attempting some gentle delaying tactics to keep Coleridge in England, came up with a possible post for him as a family tutor to the Earl of Buchan.⁶⁸ On top of all this, brother George was still assiduously making “liberal proposals” for financing a career at the Bar. Coleridge, as so often in his later life, found himself drifting among an embarrassment of siren possibilities, vaguely and good-naturedly trying to please and charm everybody, but at heart deeply confused and temperamentally incapable of imposing himself decisively upon events. Pantisocracy and poetry were still his real passions. But he was discovering his genius for prevarication.

      One advantage of this was the easy and undemanding friendship which now developed with schoolfellow and junior Grecian, Charles Lamb. Lamb was living nearby at the Inner Temple with his aged parents and invalid elder sister, Mary, whom he adored. He had taken a clerkship at the East India Office to support them all, and dedicated his evenings to literature and drinking. His fine pixieish wit and cultivated, bookish eccentricity were enhanced by a nervous stutter and inexhaustible supply of puns. Tall, shy and depressive, with one eye blue and one eye brown, he was drawn like a moth to the spinning, phosphorescent conversations that took place each night at the Salutation СКАЧАТЬ