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‘God forbid!’ replied Southey, ‘that the Ebullience of Schematism should be over. It is the Promethean Fire that animates my soul – and when that is gone, all will be darkness! I have DEVOTED myself! –’
(#)
The night he arrived back in Cambridge, Coleridge wrote a strange, emotional letter to Edith, recalling his own dead sister Nancy.
I had a Sister – an only Sister. Most tenderly did I love her! Yea, I have woke at midnight, and wept – because she was not …
There is no attachment under heaven so pure, so endearing …
My Sister, like you, was beautiful and accomplished … I know, and feel, that I am your Brother – I would, that you would say to me – ‘I will be your sister – your favourite Sister in the Family of Soul.’
(#)
A month later, Coleridge was thrown into deeper confusion by the arrival of an unsigned letter in a familiar hand: ‘Is this handwriting altogether erased from your Memory? To whom am I addressing myself? For whom am I now violating the Rules of female Delicacy? Is it for the same Coleridge, whom I once regarded as a Sister her best-beloved Brother?’ The writer urged him to abandon his ‘absurd and extravagant’ plan to leave England. ‘I cannot easily forget those whom I once loved,’ she wrote teasingly, and finished: ‘Farewell – Coleridge – ! I shall always feel that I have been your Sister.’ The writer, of course, was Mary Evans. She may have written at the request of George Coleridge, who was deeply distressed at the possibility that his youngest brother might emigrate. George had also written to him direct – a letter of ‘remonstrance, and Anguish, & suggestions, that I am deranged!!’
Coleridge copied out Mary’s letter for Southey:
I loved her, Southey! almost to madness … I endeavoured to be perpetually with Miss Brunton – I even hoped, that her Exquisite Beauty and uncommon Accomplishments might have cured one passion by another. The latter I could easily have dissipated in her absence – and so have restored my affections to her, whom I do not love – but whom by every tie of Reason and Honour I ought to love. I am resolved – but wretched!
He was now in even more of a muddle. ‘My thoughts are floating about in a most Chaotic State,’ he confessed. ‘What would I not give for a Day’s conversation with you? So much, that I seriously think of Mail coaching it to Bath – altho’ but for a Day.’
(#)
His excitable state of mind is evident in a letter he wrote around this time to Francis Wrangham, formerly of Cambridge, now a Cobham curate, in which he sneered at the stock formula of sending ‘compliments’.* (#)
Compliments! Cold aristocratic Inanities – ! I abjure their nothingness. 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 Aldermen & Hogs, Bishops & Royston Crows I have not particular partiality –; they are my Cousins however, at least by Courtesy. But Kings, Wolves, Tygers, Generals, Ministers, and Hyaenas, I renounce them all – or if they must be my kinsmen, it shall be in the 50th Remove –
He ended this letter with the exhortation: ‘May the Almighty Panti-socratizer of Souls pantisocratize the Earth.’
(#) A little later, he addressed a poem ‘To a Young Ass’, which opened with the line ‘Poor Little Foal of an oppressed Race’:
Innocent Foal! Thou poor despis’d Forlorn! –
I hail thee Brother, spite of Fool’s Scorn!
And fain I’d take thee with me in the Dell
Of high-soul’d Pantisocracy to dwell;
Coleridge was much mocked for this poem after it was published.
He could not stop thinking about Mary Evans. ‘She WAS VERY lovely, Southey!’ He wrote a poem about her, ‘On a Discovery Made Too Late’. Finally, he screwed up the courage to write to her: ‘Too long has my Heart been the torture house of Suspense.’ He had heard a rumour that she was engaged to be married to another man. Was it true? In asking this, he had no other design or expectation, he said, ‘than that of arming my fortitude by total hopelessness’. He saw that she regarded him ‘merely with the kindness of a Sister’. For four years, he wrote, ‘I have endeavoured to smother a very ardent attachment … Happy were I, had it been with no more than a Brother’s ardor!’
(#)
He received another letter from George, now suggesting that he should leave Cambridge and study law in the Temple – and in reply, assured his brother that the views he had put into the mouths of his characters in The Fall of Robespierre were not his own. ‘Solemnly, my Brother! I tell you – I am not a Democrat.’
(#) (Thomas Poole had described Coleridge as ‘in politicks a Democrat, to the utmost extent of the word’.
(#))
Early in November Coleridge travelled up to London with his friend Potter, an undergraduate at Emmanuel, a fellow poet, and liberal in politics despite having £6,000 a year and his own phaeton. The cases against the twelve prominent radicals charged with treason had come to trial,* (#) and Coleridge wanted to be on the spot. (He may have attended the trials themselves in the public gallery.) Robert Lovell was in town too; he visited one of the defendants, Godwin’s close friend Thomas Holcroft, in Newgate prison, and attempted to convert him to Pantisocracy. He believed (mistakenly) that he had succeeded, and reported back to Southey that ‘Gerrald,† (#) Holcroft and Godwin – the three first men in England, perhaps in the world – highly approve our plan’.
(#) Superbly represented in court by the brilliant advocate Thomas Erskine (who had defended Paine when he was tried in absentia in 1792), the accused had also been powerfully defended in print by Godwin, whose pamphlet Cursory Strictures on the Charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury dissected the treason charges, leaving them in tatters. (Coleridge may well have read Godwin’s Strictures, which were reproduced in the Morning Chronicle.) Though the government had raided the homes of the radicals and seized their papers, the searches had failed to turn up incriminating evidence of a conspiracy. The Attorney-General, Sir John Scott (later Lord Eldon), resorted to petulant tears in his attempt to persuade the jury to convict – but in vain. As one after another of the defendants was acquitted, it became clear that the government had overreached itself. Pitt himself was subpoenaed by the defence and humiliated in the witness box. After several successive acquittals, charges against the remaining prisoners were dropped.
The verdicts were a triumph for the resurgent radical cause. On their release, the radicals – among them Thomas Hardy, founder of the London Corresponding Society, the orator and writer John Thelwall, and the pamphleteer John Horne Tooke – were greeted as heroes. Coleridge celebrated with a sonnet in honour of Erskine, the first of a sequence of eleven ‘Sonnets on Eminent Characters’ published in the Morning Chronicle from 1 December onwards. Most of his subjects were prominent liberal or radical figures, such as Priestley, Godwin and Sheridan,* (#) but he also wrote a sonnet honouring William Lisle Bowles, the poet he had admired so much as a schoolboy, and even a sonnet to Southey. One sonnet was devoted to Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish patriot who had led the armed resistance to the partition of his country; another, unlike the others scathingly critical, to a subject who, though unnamed, was obviously (‘foul apostate from his father’s fame’) the Prime Minister.
Coleridge had returned to Jesus after a week in the capital, but early in December he again left Cambridge for London, this time never to return. Once more he based himself at the Salutation and Cat, where, as one story has it, he attracted so many listeners that in recognition the landlord provided him with free lodging.† (#) Here Coleridge was reunited with another former Christ’s Hospital pupil, Charles Lamb, who was to become one of his closest friends. They had known each other at school – but not intimately, since Lamb was three years younger. Indeed Lamb had hero-worshipped Coleridge, whose schoolboy eloquence was such that it could make the casual passer-by pause in the cloisters and stand entranced. Lamb was a lovable figure, gentle and delicate. A severe stutter provoked indulgent affection rather than derision from his schoolmates. Slightly built, with spindly legs and a shambling gait, the legacy of childhood polio, Lamb habitually dressed in worn black clothes, giving him the appearance of a country curate recently arrived in town. The austerity of his dress was relieved by what Hazlitt (a painter) later described as his ‘fine Titian head’: his curly hair, his startling eyes, each a different colour, and his characteristic expression of droll amusement. Though nervous and shy, and prone to depression, Lamb had an independent mind, fine critical judgement, a strong sense of the ludicrous and a teasing wit. Like Coleridge, he had been a ‘Grecian’, but circumstances had not enabled him to attend university, and he now supported his parents and his elder sister Mary by working as a clerk in the East India Office. In the evenings he unwound in convivial conversation, smoking and drinking, sometimes heavily. After Coleridge had left London Lamb would cherish the memory of their comfortable evenings together by the fire in the Salutation and Cat, drinking ‘egg-hot’* (#) and smoking Oronoko.† (#) Like Coleridge he was a sincere Christian, and at this time of his life was strongly drawn to Unitarianism. Coleridge particularly admired Lamb’s devotion to his sister Mary, whose mind was ‘elegantly stored’ and her heart ‘feeling’.
(#)
On 16 December Coleridge dined with the two editor-proprietors of the Morning Chronicle. Also present was Thomas Holcroft, known for his dogmatism and fierce argumentativeness. It was immediately obvious that Holcroft had not been impressed when Lovell visited him in Newgate, and he launched into a violent attack on Pantisocracy. Coleridge was not overawed, at least not in the version he relayed to Southey:
I had the honour of working H. a little – and by my great coolness and command of impressive Language certainly did him over – /Sir (said he) I never knew so much real wisdom – & so much rank Error meet in one mind before! Which (answered I) means, I suppose – that in some things, Sir! I agree with you and in others I do not.
(#)
Holcroft invited Coleridge to dine at his house four days later. Among the other guests was Godwin himself, then at the zenith of his powers. ‘No one was more talked about, more looked up to, more sought after,’ wrote Hazlitt of this period many years afterwards, ‘and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off.’ Though there is no detailed record of their conversation, Godwin noted in his diary afterwards that the talk was of ‘self love & God’. One can be confident that Coleridge – only twenty-two years old – held his own against these two formidable middle-aged men, one an atheist, the other ‘inclined to atheism’. In a letter to Southey some months earlier he had remarked of Godwin, ‘I think not so highly of him as you do – and I have read him with the greatest attention.’
(#)
Coleridge rejected one of Godwin’s essential tenets: of an antithesis between ‘universal benevolence’ and personal or private affections. In support of his argument Godwin cited the example of Brutus* (#) – a cult figure in revolutionary thought – who pro patria sentenced his own sons to death, for plotting to restore the monarchy. Coleridge’s thinking on this subject was the very opposite of Godwin’s: ‘The ardour of private Attachments makes Philanthropy a necessary habit of the soul. I love my Friend – such as he is, all mankind are or might be!’
(#)
Just at this moment, Coleridge received a belated reply from Mary Evans. It is not clear what she wrote – but he decided that it was a brush-off. He was calm, he told Southey:
To love her Habit has made unalterable…. To lose her! – I can rise above that selfish Pang. But to marry another – O Southey! bear with my weakness. Love makes all things pure and heavenly like itself: – but to marry a woman whom I do not love – to degrade her, whom I call my Wife, by making her the Instrument of low Desire – and on the removal of a desultory Appetite, to be perhaps not displeased with her Absence! … Mark you, Southey! – I will do my Duty.
(#)
For seven weeks or more Southey had been ‘in hourly expectation’ of Coleridge. He renewed the pressure on his friend, who had been promising for at least three weeks to return to Bristol ‘within a day or two’. Coleridge protested that he was ‘all eagerness’ to leave town, and resolved to be in Bath by the following Saturday (3 January 1795).
(#) But on 2 January he wrote a frantic letter to Southey, full of excuses: the roads were dangerous, the inside of a coach unhealthy, the outside too cold, he had no money, he had a sore throat. Finally he offered to come by wagon, sharing it with four or five calves, wrapped up snugly in the hay. Southey and Lovell walked more than forty miles to Marlborough to meet the wagon – ‘but no S.T. Coleridge was therein!’ Southey wrote irritably to Sara Fricker: ‘Why will he ever fix a day if he cannot abide by it?’
(#) He decided to fetch Coleridge from London himself.
Mathews wrote to Wordsworth announcing the abandonment of the periodical scheme. He once again encouraged Wordsworth to come to London and earn a living writing for the newspapers. Wordsworth replied that he had decided to come when he could. But he would only feel happy working for an opposition paper, he told Mathews, ‘for really I cannot in conscience and in principle, abet in the smallest degree the measures pursued by the present ministry. They are already so deeply advanced in iniquity that like Macbeth they cannot retreat.’
(#) Wordsworth’s bitterness against Pitt and his fellow ministers is remarkable, and lasted long after his radicalism had shrivelled – it was obvious even as he wrote The Prelude, a decade later:
Our shepherds (this say merely) at that time
Thirsted to make the guardian crook of law
A tool of murder …
He believed them blind to the lesson of the Terror:
Though with such awful proof before their eyes
That he who would sow death, reaps death, or worse,
And can reap nothing better, childlike longed
To imitate – not wise enough to avoid,
Giants in their impiety alone,
But, in their weapons and their warfare base
As vermin working out of reach, they leagued
Their strength perfidiously to undermine
Justice, and make an end of Liberty.
(#)
Wordsworth joined Mathews in rejoicing at the verdicts in the treason trials: ‘The late occurrences in every point of view are interesting to humanity. They will abate the insolence and presumption of the aristocracy by shewing it that neither the violence, nor the art, of power, can crush even an unfriended individual.’ Wordsworth was further cheered by signs of a shift in opinion in favour of a negotiated peace with France.
(#)
‘I begin to wish much to be in town,’ he informed Mathews; cataracts and mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions.’
(#) Like Coleridge, he was intrigued by developments in the capital.* (#) While Raisley Calvert lingered on, Wordsworth felt unable to leave him; but he quit Penrith almost immediately after Calvert’s death in early January 1795, and a few weeks later he was in London. Straight away, it seems, he found himself at the centre of radical discussion. On 27 February he took tea at the house of William Frend, who had moved to London after his expulsion from Cambridge and was now teaching pupils privately (among them the future social philosopher Thomas Malthus). Also present were eight others, all radicals, including Holcroft, Dyer and Godwin. This was a high-powered gathering of writers, lawyers and university Fellows. These radicals were closely interconnected through a multitude of personal and institutional links, shared interests and beliefs. A majority of those present were Cambridge men, at least two were Unitarians, and several were members of either the Society for Constitutional Information or the London Corresponding Society. Wordsworth, though new to this group, was not a stranger: he had known some of the younger men at Cambridge, George Dyer had been an old friend of his schoolmaster William Taylor, and Holcroft had reviewed his poems (unfavourably) in the Monthly Review. Another of those present, James Losh, a Cambridge friend of Wordsworth’s, had been in Paris late in 1792, and the two of them may have met there, perhaps at the dinner of expatriate Englishmen at White’s Hotel where a toast to Tom Paine had been drunk. Losh and Wordsworth had a further connection in that both came from Cumberland.
Wordsworth called on Godwin the very next day (probably by invitation), and then again ten days later, when he was invited to breakfast. For Wordsworth, to be able to converse tête à tête with the famous philosopher made an exhilarating change from hours spent at Raisley Calvert’s bedside, unable to talk with or even read to the dying young man. During the previous year he had been spouting Godwinian ideas; now he could drink them fresh from the source. This was the time when, according to Hazlitt, Wordsworth urged a young student, ‘Throw aside your books of chemistry, and read Godwin on Necessity.’ Over the coming months Wordsworth called on Godwin a number of times, usually alone, but twice with Mathews, and on one of these occasions also with Joseph Fawcett. Godwin paid Wordsworth the compliment of calling on him too, suggesting that he valued Wordsworth’s company: further evidence, perhaps, of the favourable impression this young man made on others.
Wordsworth’s poetry written in this period shows a strong Godwinian influence. In particular, drawing on Godwin’s philosophical novel The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), he planned to rewrite his Salisbury Plain poem to show how ‘the vices of the penal law and the calamities of war’ could lead an otherwise innocent man to commit the most terrible of crimes.
(#)
Southey bundled a protesting Coleridge onto the Bristol coach, and stood guard over him until they reached their destination. There the two founding Pantisocrats settled into cheap lodgings with George Burnett while they considered their next move. The scheme was not going to plan. There had been no further recruits, and they had not managed to raise anything like enough money to fund their emigration – barely any money at all, in fact (The Fall of Robespierre had not sold so well as hoped). Southey was now in favour of taking a farm in Wales, as a less ambitious venture. When he had first proposed this back in early December, Coleridge had dismissed it as ‘nonsense’. Now, demoralised, he accepted the revised plan.
The immediate need was to earn some money. While in London Southey had tried to interest publishers in his Wat Tyler, but all had declined for fear of prosecution. Coleridge toyed with a number of alternatives, including returning to London to work as a reporter for the Telegraph, and going to Scotland to act as tutor to the sons of the Earl of Buchan. But both of these meant abandoning Sara, and now that they were together again Coleridge found that he did not want to leave her – indeed, very much the opposite. He discovered, too, that she had attracted the attentions of two other men, one of them of large Fortune’, and that she was being pressed by her relatives to accept this suitor if Coleridge would not marry her first. Naturally this discovery increased Coleridge’s interest.
Very quickly it was decided that Coleridge should give a series of public lectures in Bristol’s Corn Market, capitalising on his qualities as an orator by charging a shilling a head in attendance money. The idea may have been inspired by the example of John Thelwall, who since his acquittal had been drawing large audiences – as many as eight hundred at a time – for his political lectures (though even so he found it hard to find a venue that would take him). Coleridge’s first lecture was written at a single sitting, under Southey’s supervision, between midnight and breakfast time of the day on which it was to be delivered. The lectures blasted Pitt’s repressive government and condemned its war against Revolutionary France, earning Coleridge a local reputation as a dangerous radical. He revelled in the notoriety: ‘Mobs and Mayors, Blockheads and Brickbats, Placards and Press gangs have leagued in horrible Conspiracy against me.’ Soon after delivering the first lecture he published this as a pamphlet, claiming he felt ‘obliged’ to do so, ‘it having been confidently asserted that there was Treason in it’. He triumphed over hecklers, and proudly announced to Dyer that he had succeeded in provoking ‘furious and determined’ opposition from ‘the Aristocrats’, to the extent of hiring thugs – ‘uncouth and unbrained Automata’ – who threatened to attack him. After the second lecture it was felt necessary to move the third to a private address – and even then a crowd gathered outside could scarcely be restrained from attacking the house on Castle Green where the ‘damn’d Jacobine was jawing away’.
(#)
Coleridge was an amusing lecturer, and his talks were both well attended and enthusiastically received. He dealt cleverly with hecklers. On one occasion ‘some gentlemen of the opposite party’, disliking what they heard, began to hiss. Coleridge responded instantly: ‘I am not at all surprised, when the red hot prejudices of aristocrats are suddenly plunged into the cool water of reason, that they should go off with a hiss!’ His witty riposte was greeted with ‘immense applause’. There was no more hissing after that.
The lectures were crafted to appeal to the sentiments of the dissenters who formed the majority of Bristol’s radical population. Coleridge likened the People to the blinded Samson, standing between ‘those two massy Pillars of Oppression’s Temple, Monarchy and Aristocracy’; they needed guidance. While deploring revolutionary violence, he insisted on the need for reform to prevent such violence occurring. The ‘great object in which we are anxiously engaged’ was ‘to place Liberty on her seat with bloodless hands’. All this was meat and drink to Bristol’s radicals, who were further cheered by his second lecture, ‘On the Present War’, which referred to ‘the distressful stagnation of Trade and Commerce’, and its woeful effect on the poor in particular:
War ruins our Manufactures; the ruin of our Manufactures throws Thousands out of employ; men cannot starve; they must either pick their countrymen’s Pockets – or cut the throats of their fellow-creatures … If they chuse … the former, they are hung or transported to Botany Bay. And here we cannot but admire the deep and comprehensive Views of our Ministers, who having starved the wretch into Vice send him to the barren shores of New Holland to be starved back again into Virtue.
Soon afterwards, Southey began delivering a course of twelve historical lectures on the background to the French Revolution. Each lecturer helped the other; it was a joint endeavour in suitably Pantisocratic style. ‘We live together and write together,’ Southey reported happily. ‘Coleridge is writing at the same table; our names are written in the book of destiny, on the same page.’
(#)
In London Coleridge had tried to place a volume of his poems, but most of the booksellers would not even look at them, and the only offer he received was a derisory six guineas. Here in Bristol, Cottle generously offered him thirty guineas, to be paid in advance as required. ‘The silence and the grasped hand, showed that at that moment one person was happy.’
(#) Coleridge began collecting his poems and composing new ones for a volume to appear later in the year. Southey was still completing his long historical epic Joan of Arc, to which Coleridge contributed 255 lines and ‘corrected’ the rest. Cottle commissioned handsome portraits of both young authors by Peter Vandyke, a supposed descendant of the Flemish master.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the popularity of Coleridge’s lectures, he was ‘soon obliged by the persecutions of Darkness to discontinue them’.
(#) Undeterred, a group of prominent Bristol dissenters commissioned him to deliver a fresh course of six lectures on revealed religion at the Assembly coffee house on the Quay.
(#) Drawing on the ideas of Unitarian thinkers such as Frend and Priestley, Coleridge denounced the corruption of the Church of England. He ridiculed the dogma of the Trinity, and rejected the doctrine of the Redemption. For Coleridge, the teaching of Jesus Christ called for the complete abolition of private property – a measure too extreme for even the wildest Jacobins.* (#) Indeed, passages from his sixth and final lecture sound like a manifesto for Pantisocracy:
The necessaries of twenty men are raised by one man, who works ten hours a day exclusive of his meals. How then are the other nineteen employed? Some of them are mechanics and merchants who collect and prepare those things which urge this field Labourer to unnatural Toil by unnatural Luxuries – others are Princes and Nobles and Gentlemen who stimulate his exertions by exciting his envy, and others are Lawyers and Priests and Hangmen who seduce or terrify him into passive submission. Now if instead of this one man the whole twenty were to divide the labor and dismiss all unnecessary wants it is evident that none of us would work more than two hours a day of necessity, and that all of us might be learned from the advantages of opportunities, and innocent from the absence of Temptation.
The lectures demonstrate the central importance to Coleridge of Christian revelation, an emphasis that distinguished him from radicals such as Thelwall. Indeed, Coleridge was repelled by the atheism and apparent immorality of many of the most prominent radicals, and appalled that such men might capture the leadership of the people. He was particularly concerned at the ubiquity of Godwin’s ideas in the minds of radicals. In the process of writing these lectures Coleridge sought to develop a Christian alternative to Godwin’s atheistic radicalism.
(#) Much of his opposition to Godwin stemmed from his (brief) personal experience of the man, and of Godwin’s close associate Holcroft. There is a pugnacious tone to his criticism of Godwin, which suggests rivalry: ‘I set him at Defiance.’
Coleridge also delivered two stand-alone lectures, one, ‘by particular desire’, devoted to a subject particularly controversial in Bristol: a condemnation of the slave trade. Coleridge’s final lecture was on Pitt’s recently introduced hair-powder tax, a fine subject for his satirical wit, as democrats chose to wear their hair unpowdered anyway. Only ‘aristocrats’ would pay the guinea necessary for a licence to wear hair powder.
Meanwhile, all was not well in the Pantisocratic household. Coleridge exasperated Southey by his erratic working habits. Southey was by nature disciplined and organised, Coleridge wayward and chaotic. Even Coleridge’s appearance irritated Southey: untidy, unkempt and sometimes not entirely clean.
(#) The strain began to show. Coleridge had agreed to give the fourth of Southey’s historical lectures – ‘On the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Roman Empire’ – as it was a subject which he had particularly studied. At the end of Southey’s third lecture, therefore, it was announced that Coleridge would be giving the next. When the time came, ‘the room was thronged’ – but the lecturer failed to appear. After waiting half an hour, the disgruntled crowd dispersed. Coleridge was eventually found in his lodgings, smoking a pipe, deep in thought.
The next day, on a ramble up the Wye Valley with Cottle and the two Fricker sisters, Southey remonstrated with Coleridge. The two friends quarrelled, embarrassing Cottle, especially when each of the sisters entered the argument in support of her suitor. Afterwards, in the woods above Tintern, they lost their way as darkness descended, with Coleridge riding ahead on Cottle’s horse and shouting back encouragement, while Southey advanced supporting a sister on each arm, and the lame Cottle hobbled along behind, until at last they reached the inn.
Southey’s zeal for Pantisocracy was cooling. His priorities had changed; marriage to Edith was now in the forefront of his mind, and other considerations subsidiary. He began to express reservations about aspects of the scheme. Coleridge perceived his diminishing enthusiasm, and strove to keep him true to the principles to which they had devoted themselves. Southey was caught in a trap of his own making. Having advertised his own integrity so freely, having laid such stress on principle, having insisted to Coleridge that Pantisocracy was a duty, he found it difficult to withdraw. A succession of impassioned arguments ensued, followed by partial reconciliations. Each man accused the other of behaving coldly towards him. Strong words were exchanged, and tears shed. One night, just before they went to bed, Southey confessed that he had acted wrongly. But soon his manners became cold and gloomy again. It was like the break-up of a marriage. Poor George Burnett was a spectator of this contest; he watched aghast.
Then a wealthy friend offered Southey an annuity of £160, to begin the following autumn. Now that he had the prospect of some property, Southey found himself less inclined to share it. He put forward a new proposal: everything in Wales should be owned separately, except five or six acres. Coleridge reacted with indignation and contempt; Southey’s scheme amounted to rank apostasy: ‘In short, we were to commence Partners in a petty Farming Trade. This was the Mouse of which the Mountain Pantisocracy was at last safely delivered!’ From this time on, Coleridge kept up the appearance of a friendship with Southey – ‘but I locked up my heart from you’.
In August, Southey’s clergyman uncle Herbert Hill returned to England from Portugal. He had funded Southey’s education at Westminster and Oxford in the expectation that his nephew would follow his example, and he now wrote urging Southey to take Holy Orders. Apparently Hill was intimate with a bishop, and a post worth £300 a year was Southey’s for the asking. Southey informed his fellow lodgers of the offer one evening. ‘What answer have you returned?’ asked Coleridge. ‘None – Nor do I know what Answer I shall return,’ replied Southey, and retired to bed. Coleridge was incredulous; Southey had been as scathing as he was on the iniquity of the Church – indeed, had been so before they met (in December 1793, for example, Southey had written that to enter the Church ‘I must become contemptible infamous and perjured’
(#)). Burnett sat gaping, half-petrified at the possibility that his idol might abandon them. Coleridge wrote a letter to Southey that same night, frantically urging him not to ‘perjure himself’. The next morning he walked with Southey to Bath, insisting on the ‘criminality’ of such an action. Southey wavered, tempted by the prospect of a regular income that would at last allow him to marry Edith. After a struggle, he decided against the Church; but his uncle was determined to lure him away from Pantisocracy. Further inducements were placed in front of Southey to return to Oxford and study law – a course that Coleridge described as ‘more opposite to your avowed principles, if possible, than even the Church’. The temptations were proving too great for Southey, whose scruples disappeared one by one. He was now talking of ‘rejoining Pantisocracy in about 14 years’, citing Coleridge’s ‘indolence’* (#) as a reason for his quitting. On 22 August 1795 Coleridge wrote bitterly to Cottle that Southey ‘leaves our Party’. On 1 September Southey quitted their shared lodgings in College Street. Their landlady was reduced to tears at his departure.
A week or two later Coleridge made his way back to west Somerset. On 19 September Poole’s cousin Charlotte noted in her journal that Tom had with him a friend by the name of ‘Coldridge: a young man of brilliant understanding, great eloquence, desperate fortune, democratick principle, and entirely led away by the feelings of the moment’. A poem by Poole (not known as a poet) addressed to ‘Coldridge’ – ‘Hail to thee, Coldridge, youth of various powers!’ – is dated seven days earlier. Presumably Coleridge stayed the intervening week with Poole at Nether Stowey. He may have visited Henry Poole at Shurton Court as well, because some time during September he composed a poem nearby, at Shurton Bars, where a murky, gently shelving sea recedes with the tide to reveal a shingle beach, broken by bars of exposed rock. ‘Lines Written at Shurton Bars’ was a response to a letter from Sara, in which she seems to have referred to chilly treatment from Southey and Edith. The growing estrangement from Southey was obviously prominent in Coleridge’s thoughts at the time. Poole’s poem refers to the same subject. On his return from Shurton to Bristol, Coleridge encountered Southey, who offered his usual handshake. Coleridge took Southey’s outstretched hand, and shook it ‘mechanically’. The significance of this handshake, or lack of it, subsequently became a point of contention between them.
In ‘Lines Written at Shurton Bars’ Coleridge quoted an expression borrowed from Wordsworth’s ‘An Evening Walk’. Such borrowing was a form of acknowledgement much practised at the time, and in fact Coleridge had already used another phrase of Wordsworth’s elsewhere.
(#) A note to the published version of Coleridge’s poem would refer to ‘Mr. Wordsworth’ as ‘a Poet whose versification is occasionally harsh, and his diction too frequently obscure; but whom I deem unrivalled among the writers of the present day in manly sentiment, novel imagery, and vivid colouring’.
(#) Obviously Coleridge had read and admired Wordsworth’s otherwise neglected poems published in 1793. What is striking about this note is that he should have rated Wordsworth so highly, on the evidence of so little.
Coleridge had decided to marry Sara. Though his addresses to her had at first been paid ‘from Principle not Feeling’, now his heart was engaged: ‘I love and I am beloved, and I am happy!’ He had found a cottage for them at Clevedon, a dozen or so miles west of the city, overlooking the Bristol Channel, for the modest rent of £5 per year. There they would live with George Burnett, the object of the Susquehanna delayed but not yet wholly abandoned. There Coleridge set ‘The Eolian Harp’, the first of what have since become known as his ‘conversation poems’, written in blank verse and usually addressed to an intimate companion, in which contemplation of nature evokes associated feelings, and leads to the resolution of an emotional or psychological problem. It would be hard to overstate the influence of these poems on Wordsworth and the later Romantic poets, and indeed on lyric poets ever since.
(#) Some critics have argued that they are not so original as has sometimes been claimed; that Coleridge drew on earlier poets such as Cowper and Thomson. But many great writers have plundered the past. And even if this new style of poetry did have its antecedents, it was Coleridge’s conversation poems that shaped the future.
‘The Eolian Harp’ opens with Coleridge seated, Sara’s cheek resting on his arm, outside the cottage which will be theirs when they are married, gazing up at the evening sky. The scent of flowering plants fills the air, while the sea murmurs in the distance. Sensuousness permeates the poem, suffusing it with tender eroticism. Everything is in harmony, and Coleridge meditates on the conceit of the Aeolian harp, a stringed instrument that plays as the wind blows though it. Coleridge was fascinated by Hartley’s* (#) belief that all sensation in the body takes place by means of vibrations along the nerves, like the strings of a musical instrument, and that each vibration leaves a trace that can be detected by the memory. Coleridge imagines ‘all of animated Nature’ as ‘organic harps’ that ‘tremble into thought’ as a divine ‘intellectual breeze’ blows through them. In the conclusion of the poem, Sara gently bursts the philosophical bubbles that arise within his ‘unregenerate mind’, and in doing so, lovingly leads this ‘sinful and most miserable man’ back to his maker. Thus erotic fulfilment is linked with redemption; the conflict between sacred and profane love is resolved.
On 4 October† (#) they were married in Bristol’s St Mary Redcliffe, the vast church where Chatterton had claimed to have found Rowley’s manuscripts. Southey was not present at the wedding. He was still in an agony of indecision. He could not face Coleridge; they passed each other in the street without acknowledgement. In a letter he accused Coleridge of having withdrawn his friendship – though to others he maintained that Coleridge was more his friend than ever. Tongues were wagging in Bristol; Southey charged Coleridge with gross misrepresentation and wicked and calumnious falsehoods’. He complained to Grosvenor Charles Bedford that Coleridge had ‘behaved wickedly towards me’.
