Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes

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СКАЧАТЬ to the mundane realities of human nature. Family pressures, financial difficulties, temperamental differences between Coleridge and Southey and Lovell, can all be seen as the inescapable emergence of the Old Adam in such unworldly dreams. It was what Tom Poole had already foreseen at Stowey: and what Coleridge himself revealed in a long, bitter, retrospective letter to Southey of November 1795, in which he referred contemptuously to “the Mouse of which the Mountain Pantisocracy was at last safely delivered!”¹ But this is far from being the whole story, or the whole truth.

      In the first place, the Susquehanna scheme did become a reality in other hands, and had considerable influence on radical thinking in England at this time. In January 1795 the British Critic carried a long article on the rival emigration schemes for the Susquehanna and for Kentucky, which were being promoted by Thomas Cooper and Gilbert Imlay. Though it mocked them as “two rival auctioneers, or rather show-men, stationed for the allurement of incautious passengers”, it acknowledged the growing popularity of such expeditions among Quakers, Unitarians, and other idealistic freethinkers. By 1796 it was calculated that some 2,000 people had set out, though many returned disillusioned.²

      The most distinguished of these pioneers was Joseph Priestley, who set up a scientific academy at Northumberland, Pennsylvania, and remained there until his death in 1804. His Memoirs clearly indicate that Coleridge’s Pantisocracy was part of a larger, undefined movement among “the friends of liberty” to settle on the Susquehanna.

      At the time of my leaving England (April 1794), my son in conjunction with Mr Cooper, and other English emigrants, had a scheme for a large settlement for the friends of liberty in general near the head of the Susquehannah in Pennsylvania. And taking it for granted that it would be carried into effect, after landing at New York, I went to Philadelphia, and thence came to Northumberland (in July 1794), a town nearest the proposed settlement, thinking to reside there until some progress had been made in it.³

      Priestley’s son, who was in partnership with Thomas Cooper, explains that this was to be a substantial settlement of 300,000 acres, situated in the “forks” or confluence of the north-east and Western branches of the Susquehanna, some 150 miles west of Philadelphia, and fifty miles from Northumberland.⁴

      The promised English settlers never arrived in any numbers, but interestingly a French colony of exiled Girondists and royalist émigrés did successfully settle near the Susquehanna at Frenchtown, as was reported in the Gentleman’s Magazine for June 1795. One of them, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, left a vivid sketch of Priestley’s Northumberland: a one-horse town of log-cabins, five bars, and no sidewalks, in which the eminent doctor provided the focus of civilisation, refusing to be tempted back even by the offer of a professorship at Philadelphia. Thomas Cooper, the most determined of the settlers, ended his career as President of South Carolina College, and was described by the American President Adams as “a learned, ingenious, scientific, and talented madcap”.⁵ It is not impossible to imagine Coleridge, in some alternative life, flourishing among these original Susquehanna pioneers, and making his own distinctive contribution to the history of the Wild West.

      Certainly Joseph Cottle’s story, repeated by Gillman, that the Susquehanna scheme was wholly invented by Coleridge on the sole ground that the name was “pretty and metrical”, emerges as one of his many humorous smoke-screens. It was propagated in later life by Coleridge himself to disguise the seriousness of his disputes with Southey.⁶

      Moreover, if Pantisocracy did not produce an actual settlement in America, it still shaped Coleridge’s career in England. It forced him to start to earn his living as a writer. In Bristol this spring he began to give lectures, to assemble poems for Joseph Cottle, and to keep the first of his surviving Notebooks (known as the Gutch Memorandum Book).^* He read and studied hard at the Bristol Library (the list of his extensive borrowings has survived), and he began to pursue his highly original investigations into travel-writing, philosophy, theology and the world of poetic myth. The long poems of this time, “Religious Musings” and “The Destiny of Nations: A Vision”, are in effect huge, rag-bag anthologies of his reading, speculations, and enthusiasms, all released by the debate over Pantisocracy.

      The arguments with Southey, increasingly fierce and personalised, were an intellectual and emotional education in themselves. The relationship with Sara Fricker, which had begun in the “ebullience of schematism” and sexual excitement, did surprisingly mature into a genuine love-affair which – though fraught with difficulties and tensions from the start – released real passion on both sides, and greatly concentrated the youthful Coleridge’s wild personality. This becomes especially evident in the development of the Conversation Poems.

      Pantisocracy, in other words, gave him his first sense of vocation, of having a spiritual task in the world. And the dream of some form of communal life, of living among close friends and working for a common objective, in some “happy valley” or “magic dell” of inspiration, became a permanent feature of his imagination. It certainly haunted the whole next decade of his life – in Bristol, at Stowey, in the Lakes – and was never entirely abandoned. Paradoxically, it was the very visionary quality of Pantisocracy that first made him grapple with the realities of life. As he wrote angrily of Southey’s own waverings over a career in August: “Southey! Pantisocracy is not the Question – it’s realization is distant – perhaps a miraculous Millenium – What you have seen, or think, that you have seen of the human heart, may render the formation even of a pantisocratic seminary improbable to you – but this is not the question.”⁷ Defining the question, the way forward, became the real story of these months.

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      Bristol was an immensely stimulating place to be in the 1790s, much improved from the backwater of commercial dullards and “Damn’d narrow notions” experienced by Thomas Chatterton twenty-five years before, where there was “no credit” for the Muses.⁸ The second city, and the first port in the kingdom, it had a thriving community of Unitarian businessmen who acted as an intellectual leaven among the rich commercial clan of merchants, ship-owners, lawyers, manufacturers and shopkeepers. The public life of the city was sustained by several newspapers, publishing houses, theatres, Assembly Rooms, lecture halls in the Corn Market, a large municipal lending library, and research bodies like Dr Beddoes’ Pneumatic Institute. Great national issues like the war with France, the slave trade, the breach with the American colonies, Pitt’s increasingly draconian legislation against “English Jacobins”, and the questions of free speech and habeas corpus, were regarded as the personal responsibilities of the Bristol citizens. But lacking its own university, the city was an ideal arena for men from Oxford and Cambridge to attract immediate attention, and the Pantisocrats – who revealed a flair for publicity – were rapidly drawn to the centre of public affairs, in a way that would never have happened so quickly in London. A Bristolian writing many years later in the Monthly Magazine, and discreetly signing himself “Q”, described Coleridge’s arrival as “like a comet or meteor in our horizon”.⁹

      Looking urgently for sources of income, Coleridge was encouraged to embark on a career of public speaking, and with the example of John Thelwall’s controversial political lectures in London, he immediately announced a series of three “Moral and Political Lectures” in rooms above the Corn Market, with entrance tickets at a shilling each. These took place in late January and early February, arousing such passions that the last had to be moved СКАЧАТЬ