Читать книгу Coleridge: Early Visions - Richard Holmes - Страница 46

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 to a private house in Castle Green. Drawing on his endless daylong and nightlong discussions with Southey, he took as his theme a radical analysis of the various zealous “Advocates of Freedom” – Paine, Godwin, Tooke, Gerrald – attempting “to evince the necessity of bottoming on fixed Principles, that so we may not be the unstable Patriots of Passion or Accident, or hurried away by names of which we have not sifted the meaning, and by tenets of which we have not examined the consequences.”¹⁰

The combination of wild enthusiasm and “flame-coloured epithets”, with a strongly religious emphasis against revolutionary violence is the characteristic of these early speeches: “The annals of the French Revolution have recorded in Letters of Blood, that the Knowledge of the Few cannot counteract the Ignorance of the Many.” They left his hearers (and perhaps himself) deeply confused as to his exact ideological position: at one moment a fiery democrat, at the next an unworldly Unitarian idealist preaching universal benevolence.

Coleridge’s talent for public speaking, and gift for projecting an intense, Romantic persona, were however at once evident. Cottle records the enthusiasm of his audiences, and his instinctive gift for dealing with hecklers. When assailed on one occasion by jeers and hisses, he responded with a majestic smile: “I am not at all surprised, when the red hot prejudices of aristocrats are suddenly plunged into the cool waters of reason, that they should go off with a hiss!”¹¹

He revealed, too, a power of poetic imagery, which reached out directly to his listeners with sometimes magical effect. Standing at the window of the Corn Market Rooms, which overlooked the clusters of ships’ masts along the Bristol quay, he opened his first lecture with a skilful maritime analogy.

When the Wind is fair and the planks of the vessel sound, we may safely trust everything to the management of professional Mariners; but in a Tempest and on board a crazy Bark, all must contribute their Quota of Exertion. The Stripling is not exempted from it by his Youth, nor the Passenger by his Inexperience. Even so in the present agitations of the public mind, every one ought to consider his intellectual faculties as in a state of requisition.¹²

One can hear both the poet and the lay preacher in this.

The reporter “Q”, who attended this lecture, gained the impression that Coleridge was “a favourer of revolution”, and that his views were “positively and decidedly democratic”.¹³ To prove that his views were not, however, Jacobin or treasonable, Coleridge was “obliged” to publish his text, which he did in a sixpenny pamphlet by “ST Coleridge of Jesus College”, with a superscription from Akenside: “‘To calm and guide / The swelling democratic tide’.” He told George Dyer that the whole thing had been concocted at one sitting between midnight and breakfast, on the morning on which it was delivered.¹⁴

After the third lecture, when the house was surrounded by a small crowd complaining of the “damn’d Jacobin…jawing away”, Coleridge received death-threats and was advised to desist; he did not speak publicly again until May. He seems rather to have enjoyed his notoriety, all the same. “Mobs and Mayors, Blockheads and Brickbats, Placards and Press gangs have leagued in horrible conspiracy against me – The Democrats are as sturdy in the support of me – but their number is comparatively small.”

He remained deeply angry about the practical effects of Pitt’s pro-war policies, which encouraged every kind of “patriotic” fanaticism, and contradicted everything that Pantisocracy stood for. One of his first Gutch Notebook entries read: “People starved into War. – over an enlisting place in Bristol a quarter of Lamb and piece of Beef hung up.”¹⁵