Innocent Foal! thou poor despis’d Forlorn! –
I hail thee Brother, spite of the Fool’s Scorn!
And fain I’d take thee with me in the Dell
Of high-soul’d Pantisocracy to dwell…62
It was, of course, a gift to satirists: five years later Coleridge appeared as a braying jack-ass in a famous cartoon against the British radicals which appears in the Anti-Jacobin: and Byron would long after recall this jibe in English Bards and Scotch Renewers. Coleridge was in this sense as innocent as his foal. Yet the idea of the fraternal community in nature, the “One Life”, was to be crucial to him.
A third, shaping idea that grew out of his reflection on Pantisocracy, was the notion of the “child of Nature”. Throughout the letters he emphasises again and again to Southey the need to bring up children outside the old, transmitted “prejudications” of corrupt society.63 Thoughtless fathers, uneducated mothers, and even older schoolfellows, could unwittingly pass on the “Fear and Selfishness” which warps the infant mind in an unreformed state of civilisation. Even religious doctrines could be dangerous – “How can we ensure their silence concerning God etc?” – when these were not allowed to develop naturally and directly from personal reverence for the creation. It was nature herself who must be the great teacher, and the essential role of education – and by extension, poetry and philosophy itself – must be as an affectionate interpreter of man’s place in the natural world. In the countryside the images of divine beauty and goodness “are miniatured on the mind of the beholder, as a Landscape on a Convex Mirror”.64
10
Coleridge was back in London for the Christmas vacation by 11 December, where he was to remain for a month, lodging at the Salutation & Cat, furiously writing letters and poetry, and trying to decide if he should really leave the university. In theory the Pantisocratic expedition was still scheduled for March or April 1795, but none of the £2,000 capital had been raised, and various alternatives had to be considered.
Southey, still demanding his immediate presence in Bath, proposed with Lovell a preliminary scheme to go shares in a Welsh farm where they could learn agricultural skills before departing. He was also arguing that they should take servants to do the manual labour, and that the women should have exclusive charge of the children and domestic work. Coleridge described all these compromises succinctly as “nonsense”, and continued the debate of first principles.65 But having still not settled matters with Mary Evans, he was in a growing panic about Sara Fricker, and felt he had written to her “like an hypocrite”. For the time being it was arranged that Southey would return with him to Cambridge in the New Year, to argue out the Welsh scheme, and help raise money from his Imitations.66 Meanwhile Burnett and Lovell would prospect for farms in Caernarvonshire or Merioneth.
But London now presented all sorts of exciting opportunities for Coleridge. With his sonnets being published, he met Perry, the editor of the Morning Chronicle, and discussed a future in journalism. He spent lively evenings with William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft, the leading radical writers, who cross-questioned him about Pantisocracy.
Godwin, then thirty-eight, was at the height of his fame, having followed Political Justice (1793) with his intellectual gothic thriller Caleb Williams (1794), which became a bestseller. He was still advocating atheism and anti-matrimonialism (he had not yet formed his liaison with Mary Wollstonecraft), and this deeply shocked Coleridge. But the celebrated philosopher and the wild young poet fiercely argued the merits of atheism and Unitarian belief, and a close friendship was later to form that Godwin would describe as one of the most influential in his life.67 Holcroft – “he absolutely infests you with Atheism” – outraged Coleridge by his “Blasphemy against the divinity of a Bowles!” It is clear that the Pantisocrat was not in the mood to be overawed by these distinguished introductions: “my great coolness and command of impressive Language certainly did him over.”
Meanwhile George Dyer, perhaps attempting some gentle delaying tactics to keep Coleridge in England, came up with a possible post for him as a family tutor to the Earl of Buchan.68 On top of all this, brother George was still assiduously making “liberal proposals” for financing a career at the Bar. Coleridge, as so often in his later life, found himself drifting among an embarrassment of siren possibilities, vaguely and good-naturedly trying to please and charm everybody, but at heart deeply confused and temperamentally incapable of imposing himself decisively upon events. Pantisocracy and poetry were still his real passions. But he was discovering his genius for prevarication.
One advantage of this was the easy and undemanding friendship which now developed with schoolfellow and junior Grecian, Charles Lamb. Lamb was living nearby at the Inner Temple with his aged parents and invalid elder sister, Mary, whom he adored. He had taken a clerkship at the East India Office to support them all, and dedicated his evenings to literature and drinking. His fine pixieish wit and cultivated, bookish eccentricity were enhanced by a nervous stutter and inexhaustible supply of puns. Tall, shy and depressive, with one eye blue and one eye brown, he was drawn like a moth to the spinning, phosphorescent conversations that took place each night at the Salutation & Cat. His gentle hero-worship was exactly what Coleridge needed at this juncture. Long, alcoholic evenings passed effortlessly away in the tavern snug, fuelled by egg-flip and heady clouds of oronoko tobacco, while they exchanged new sonnets and emotional intimacies of their tortured love-lives.
A revealing topic that emerged in common – among all the high talk of philosophy, religion, and Pantisocracy – was a shared attachment for their sisters. Charles talked fondly of Mary, Coleridge reminisced lyrically about the Evans sisters and about his own dear, dead sister Nancy Coleridge. This depth of curious, asexual, but genuinely fraternal feeling tells as much of Coleridge’s struggles between Mary Evans and Sara Fricker (both essentially part of sisterly families) as any of his melodramatic outpourings to Southey.
Moreover, it produced one of Coleridge’s most striking early poems in the “Conversational” mode which was later to become so important in his work: an intimate, low-key, blank verse style very close to his most personal letters. Back in September he had written a touching and unexpected note to Edith Fricker (rather than Sara), in which he fondly recalled 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…My Sister, like you, was beautiful and accomplished – like you, she was lowly of Heart…I know, and feel, that I am your Brother.”69
He now versified these sentiments to Lamb, finding a new naturalness of phrase and grace of rhythm, which has the startling inevitability of a completely original, spontaneous kind of Romantic self-declaration. It is a landmark in his work.
In Fancy, well I know,
Thou creepest round a dear-lov’d Sister’s Bed
With noiseless step, and watchest the faint Look
Soothing each Pang with fond Solicitudes
And tenderest Tones medicinal of Love.
I too a Sister had – an only