Читать книгу Coleridge: Early Visions - Richard Holmes - Страница 35

Like many things in Coleridge’s life, it all began with a walking tour. These tours, common enough today, were then a new fashion with strong democratic overtones. Young men from the universities dressed as tramps and wandered over the countryside, staying at local inns, talking enthusiastically with “the common people”, hill-climbing, swimming, star-gazing and communing with nature. William Frend had walked through France, Wordsworth had crossed the Alps into Italy, Bowles had wandered through Wales and Germany. Coleridge now planned “a pedestrian scheme” through the Wye Valley and up into North Wales, starting the moment that his gating was officially over. His practical preparations consisted largely in purchasing a curious five-foot walking-stick carved to a suitably modest design. “On one side it displays the head of an Eagle, the Eyes of which represent rising Suns, and the Ears Turkish Crescents. On the other side is the portrait of the Owner in Wood-work. Beneath the head of the Eagle is a Welch Wig – and around the neck of the Stick is a Queen Elizabeth’s Ruff in Tin. All adown it waves the Line of Beauty in very ugly Carving.”⁴

He chose a large, genial, fellow undergraduate, Joseph Hucks, to accompany him: “a man of cultivated, tho’ not vigorous understanding”, as Coleridge kindly described his Sancho Panza. Hucks subsequently published a Rousseauesque account of the tour, which leadenly omits every incident of human interest. When they met nude female bathers at Abergele, Hucks chose “to retire further up the shore”. Coleridge insisted on wearing rough workmen’s jackets, loose trousers, (rather than gentleman’s breeches and stockings), and carrying canvas knapsacks, which Hucks thought gave them the appearance of “two pilgrims performing a journey to the tomb of some wonder-working saint”. In fact they were usually mistaken for French tinkers (dangerously republican) or demobbed soldiers (dangerously drunk).

It was the first of Coleridge’s many epic walks: during the serious part of the tour they covered over 500 miles in just over a month – from Gloucester to Anglesey through the Welsh hills, and back by the coast to Bristol. They departed from Cambridge at dawn on 15 June, planning a brief stop-over with Bob Allen in Oxford, before disappearing into wild Wales. Coleridge, feeling like a man released from prison, was in a state of manic enthusiasm. On the way he bought the first of many Notebooks, with a “portable Ink horn” and quills: “as I journey onward, I ever and anon pluck the wild Flowers of Poesy.”⁵

They tramped into Oxford about 17 June, going straight round to Allen’s rooms in University College for a memorable reunion between the two Grecians. Coleridge had brought a subscribers’ list for his Imitations in his knapsack, and armed with this they trooped over to Balliol to meet Robert Southey, the twenty-year-old poet from Bristol who was already renowned for his extreme republican views. This meeting delayed their planned three-day stop-over for three weeks, and saw the birth of the famous “Pantisocratic” scheme.

The tall, idealistic, rather forbidding young Southey was then sporting a radical beard, studying anatomy, and finishing an epic drama, Joan of Arc. His rooms were next to the college lavatories, by an alley that opened on to St Giles. He was leaving Oxford that summer without a degree, destined for the Church, though he proclaimed himself an atheist and democrat with strong French Jacobin sympathies. He was profoundly depressed at his situation, and the arrival of the ebullient and voluble Coleridge took him by storm. He wrote instantly to his old school friend, Grosvenor Bedford, after their first interview: “I am delaying the pickling of my tripes again till the departure of a Cantab; one whom I very much esteem and admire tho two thirds of our conversation be spent in disputing on metaphysical subjects.”⁶

Southey was a schoolboy rebel who had been expelled from Westminster for editing a magazine, the Flagellant, against flogging and other undemocratic practices. (Southey wrote as “St Basil”, and Bedford as “Peter the Hermit”.) He had come up to Oxford in 1792 with “a heart full of poetry and feeling, a head full of Rousseau and Werther, and my religious principles shaken by Gibbon”. He wrote bad poetry at tremendous speed, having already burnt 10,000 lines of Joan of Arc, and bound up the rest in expensive marbled paper with a green silk ribbon.

Like Coleridge, he felt trapped by his home situation and lack of money. His father, a failed Bristol linen-merchant, had recently died, leaving a consumptive mother with two infant children, besides Robert and his younger brother Tom. His education had been paid for by a clerical uncle, Herbert Hill, and an eccentric aunt, Elizabeth Tyler, both of whom expected him to go into the Church. For months he had been fantasising his way out of this impasse. Southey composed long lyrical letters to Bedford, which alternately considered suicide, joining the French Revolutionary Army, and emigrating to America where he would build a farm “on ground uncultivated since the creation” and live in Rousseauesque seclusion until “cooked for a Cherokee, or oysterised by a tiger”.⁷ He considered British society hopelessly corrupt, and with the suspension of habeas corpus in May, expected an imminent revolution. He carried a copy of Goethe’s Werther everywhere he went, and like Coleridge also worshipped the poetry of Bowles.

Exactly what “metaphysical subjects” they discussed with increasing wildness at Oxford, becomes clear from their subsequent letters during the summer. In sum it was Rousseau and the back to Nature movement; Godwin and the anarchist society of shared property and ideal communism; David Hartley and the psychological motivations of human action and intellectual prejudice; Joseph Priestley and the American emigration movement. (Priestley had already left for Philadelphia that April.) All these figures contributed something to the scheme which Coleridge christened at first “Pantocracy”: that is, an experimental society, living in pastoral seclusion, sharing property, labour, and self-government equally among all its adult members, both men and women. (Coleridge created the word from the Greek roots pant-isocratia, an all-governing-society; not of course from the Latin root panto-mimus, meaning a comic dumb-show.) It was, in effect, a heady cocktail of all the progressive idealism of the Romantic Age.^*

As the first rapturous outlines of the scheme emerged (they were to take six months of clarifying), Southey and Coleridge became fast friends. Their enormous differences in temperament and outlook were not immediately evident. Southey confided to Bedford, in London: “Allen is with us daily, and his friend from Cambridge, Coleridge, whose poems you will oblige me by subscribing to…He is of the most uncommon merit, – of the strongest genius, the clearest judgement, the best heart. My friend he already is, and must hereafter be yours. It is, I fear, impossible to keep him till you come, but my efforts shall not be wanting.”⁸ He later added to his brother, Thomas Southey: “This Pantisocratic system has given me new life new hope new energy. All the faculties of my mind are dilated.”⁹

Coleridge in turn was deeply, but differently, impressed by Southey. He saw him as a lonely dreamer like himself (he urged him to fight despondency, “I once shipwrecked my frail bark on that rock”), but far more politicised and self-disciplined – hard-working, early rising, poetically fluent, morally pure, “a Nightingale among Owls” in Oxford. He later wrote: “His Genius and acquirements are uncommonly great – yet they bear no proportion to his moral Excellence – He is truly a man of perpendicular Virtue – a down-right upright Republican!.” (He would add, in private conversation, that Southey was a virgin, and sternly “converted” him back from sexual promiscuity.)¹⁰

As in so many of his later friendships, Coleridge was hypnotically drawn by a man of less humour and imagination than himself, but with far greater force of character and willpower. Southey was soon to replace George in his emotional esteem. There was also a sexual component to the friendship: the handsome, hawk-nosed, narcissistic Southey (he had once paraded through Bristol in women’s clothes) attracted Coleridge with a physical self-confidence that he had always lacked. Southey in turn was dazzled and enchanted by Coleridge’s warmth and generosity of feeling, his spectacular talk, his responsiveness, and superb imaginative flights. From the beginning he recognised an intellect far richer than his own, but chaotically undirected; and determined – like many others – to discipline it. The two young men were soon dancing round each other in mutual delight, and frequently comic misunderstanding, whirling into their scheme any bystanders they could find. It is notable that those who knew them best at that time – Allen, Hucks, Bedford, Caldwell – were never drawn in.