Читать книгу Coleridge: Early Visions - Richard Holmes - Страница 39

Coleridge and Southey now had much to talk about between themselves, and on 14 August they left Bristol together, on a further walking tour through Somerset to see George Burnett at Huntspill, and work out further Pantisocratic details. Accompanied by Southey’s enthusiastic dog Rover (also a Pantisocrat), they climbed the Mendip Hills, visited the towering red cliffs and echoing caverns of Cheddar Gorge – and made their way to Bridgwater at the foot of the Quantocks.²⁸

They were in wild spirits. At the Cheddar Inn, the landlady insisted on locking them all into the garret room for the night (including Rover), fearing they were footpads. They slept in the same bed, and Southey – with a revealing touch of physical distaste – found Coleridge to be “a vile bedfellow”, much disturbed by dreams.²⁹ At Chilcompton, Coleridge dashed off a thirty-two-line poem about the village stream, describing the small boys sailing paper navies on its “milky waters cold and clear”, which greatly impressed Southey.³⁰

At Nether Stowey, they called in to introduce themselves to the family of Thomas Poole, the young owner of the local tannery who was well-known in Bristol for his democratic views. News of the death of Robespierre in Paris (28 July) had just reached the village, and provoked animated discussion, during which Southey dramatically announced that he had rather have heard of the death of his own father.³¹ This might have lost some of its impact had anyone realised that Southey’s father was already dead.

Poole’s cousin, John, was shocked by their behaviour and recorded in his Latin diary for 18 August: “About one o’clock, Thomas Poole…and two young men, friends of his, come in. One is an undergraduate of Oxford, the other of Cambridge. Each of them was shamefully hot with Democratic Rage as regards politics, and both Infidel as to religion. I was extremely indignant.”³² But Tom Poole himself was greatly excited by the Pantisocratic scheme, and was particularly impressed by Coleridge, without taking his wild talk entirely seriously. In the course of a few hours, another fast friendship was formed which would endure for many years, and which again shows Coleridge’s almost hypnotic effect on new acquaintances.

Tom Poole was then twenty-eight years old, a bachelor, much attached to his invalid and widowed mother. He had been born in Stowey, and given a practical education to prepare him for the lucrative business of the local tannery which he inherited from his father. Quiet, thoughtful, and widely read, he early dedicated himself to liberal causes and philanthropy. He founded the Stowey Book Club, which circulated the works of Paine, Franklin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Later, in 1817, he founded the first Stowey Co-operative Bank. He followed the events of the French Revolution closely, and often dreamed of emigrating to America. In 1790 he was the youngest delegate from the West of England to the Tanners’ Conference in London, and was elected to interview Prime Minister Pitt for the conference the following year. In the summer of 1793, he dressed himself as a common workman and travelled through the Midlands to discover the conditions of working people for himself. It was said that he first heard of Coleridge in the dragoons, while at the Reading Fair at the end of that year.

From a very different class background, he shared a political idealism close to Coleridge, and was constantly criticised by his relatives for his extreme views. He fell in love with one of his cousins at Over Stowey, but she always refused him for this reason. A self-made and self-educated man, he had the highest respect for literature and science, and collected a library at Stowey in a special upstairs Book Parlour, which later attracted not only Coleridge, but also Wordsworth and Humphry Davy. Almost naively fascinated by those he regarded as men of intellectual genius, his letters show him as earnest, sententious, slightly humourless and yet resolutely down-to-earth. In appearance he was short and stocky (the perfect yeoman farmer, said De Quincey), with prematurely balding hair and slow, deliberate Somersetshire speech: one of nature’s favourite uncles.

Poole’s characteristic first reaction to Pantisocracy was this:

Could they realise [their plan] they would, indeed, realise the age of reason; but however perfectible human nature may be, I fear it is not yet perfect enough to exist long under the regulations of such a system, particularly when the Executors of the plan are taken from a society in a high degree civilized and corrupted…I think a man would do well first to see the country and his future hopes, before he removes his connections or any large portion of his property, there. I could live, I think, in America, much to my satisfaction and credit, without joining such a scheme…though I should like well to accompany them, and see what progress they make.³³

Poole also gave a summary of the Pantisocratic plan as it had matured by mid-August. Coleridge and Southey were talking of twelve couples, who would embark from Bristol the following April. The men would provide a capital of £125 each, and expect to labour on a common land-holding for two or three hours a day. “The produce of their industry is to be laid up in common for the use of all, and a good library of books is to be collected, and their leisure hours to be spent in study, liberal discussions, and the education of their children.” Political and religious opinions would be free, but the essence of the scheme was to bring up a new generation of enlightened children untainted by corrupt values. In particular, the absence of property ownership – Coleridge’s “Aspheterism” – would philosophically ensure that there were no grounds for selfish materialism. Poole added shrewdly: “the regulations relating to the females strike them as the most difficult; whether the marriage contract shall be dissolved if agreeable to one or both parties, and many other circumstances, are not yet determined.”³⁴

But most perceptive of all was Tom Poole’s first impression of Coleridge, whom he considered “the Principal in the undertaking”, and a man of “splendid abilities”. He saw at once his mixture of genius and impracticality, someone struggling with themselves, a “shining scholar” bursting with ideas but almost dangerously adrift and confused in his personal life. He also sensed immediately the undercurrent of guilt.

He speaks with much elegance and energy, and with uncommon facility, but he, as it generally happens to men of his class, feels the justice of Providence in the want of those inferior abilities which are necessary to the rational discharge of the common duties of life. His aberrations from prudence, to use his own expression, have been great; but he now promises to be as sober and rational as his most sober friends could wish. In religion he is a Unitarian, if not a Deist; in politicks a Democrat, to the utmost extent of the word.³⁵

It is evident from this that even at their first meeting, Coleridge had spoken freely of himself and such matters as the dragoon episode; and that Poole was already adopting the paternal attitude that would soon make him Coleridge’s “sheet-anchor”. By contrast, Poole was much less impressed by Southey, whom he considered “more violent in his principles”, wavering between deism and atheism, and intellectually “a mere Boy” compared to Coleridge. Already there is a touch of surprise that the two young men should be so closely associated, an acute premonition of future difficulties.

The Pantisocrats were back in Bristol by 22 August. They immediately decided to raise money by writing a topical verse-drama on the death of Robespierre, using the newspaper reports of the final struggle in the Convention between Barère, Tallien, Robespierre and St-Just. Eight hundred lines were completed in forty-eight hours of furious all-night composition. Coleridge wrote the first Act, Southey the second, and Robert Lovell was meant to write the third; but he could not keep Pantisocratic pace. Coleridge’s section shows clearly his sympathies for the Girondists such as Madame Roland and Brissot, whom Robespierre – “the tyrant guardian of the country’s freedom” – had executed. In general it is a farrago of rhetorical bad verse, remarkable only for the swiftness of composition, though Coleridge came up with some striking scientific metaphors, comparing the power of liberty to condensed air in a glass jar,

…bursting

(Force irresistible!) from its compressure –

To shatter the arch chemist in the explosion!³⁶

Even Joseph Cottle refused to publish it, but Coleridge announced confidently that he would get it printed under his own name in Cambridge that autumn. Cottle may have overlooked – or Coleridge may have later added – one outstanding passage, the Song to “Domestic Peace”, which shows the rapid development of his lyric gift, already heralded in “Genevieve” and “The Sigh”, and soon to overflow in a mass of sonnet-writing. Far from revolutionary in tone, it indicates perhaps better than anything the real undercurrent of his thoughts during this wild summer of scheming and romance: a wistful mixture of Pantisocratic dreams, marriage fantasies (Mary or Sara?), and magic childhood nostalgia (that small boy playing in a distant country churchyard):

Tell me, on what holy ground

May Domestic Peace be found?

Halcyon daughter of the skies,

Far on fearful wings she flies,

From the pomp of Sceptered State,

From the Rebel’s noisy hate,

In a cottag’d vale She dwells

Listening to the Sabbath bells!…³⁷

What strikes one is the Rousseauism of the entire enterprise, and Coleridge’s underlying philosophical belief in the essential innocence of man once retired from corrupt European civilisation in the rural “cottag’d vale”. This philosophical assumption, the absence of inherent evil in man’s nature, and the possibility of retrieving some paradisial “unfallen” state, was to become a central theme in his poetry over the next four years.

Poole already understood this problem, in his practical way. But Southey, who seemed to think in political cartoons, never touched on the issue at any depth. As he wrote jauntily in Bristol: “Should the resolution of others fail, Coleridge and I will go together, and either find repose in an Indian wig-wam – or from an Indian tomahawk…if earthly virtue and fortitude can be relied on, I shall be happy…What is the origin of moral evil? Whence arise the various vices and misfortunes that disgrace human nature and destroy human happiness? From individual property.”³⁸