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
3
At 25 College Street, Southey was ecstatic about their commune. “Coleridge is writing at the same table,” he told Bedford, “our names are written in the book of destiny on the same page.” Arguments about the Welsh scheme modulated into the practicalities of earning rent money. They both planned further lecture series, and considered applying for reporting posts on the Telegraph. Cottle advanced thirty guineas to each of them, for the publication of future poems.
Much time was spent with the Frickers, and though no correspondence has survived between Sara and Coleridge from this period, he began to write a number of increasingly affectionate poems to her during the spring and summer. The pressure of the impetuous “engagement” had evidently relaxed: Lovell, and Sara’s relations, were actually advising her against the match; and Sara herself was considering another suitor, though as Coleridge observed with a touch of pique, he was “a man whom she strongly dislikes, in spite of his fortune and solicitous attentions to her.”16
He still felt that Southey did not understand with what an effort he had broken off his love for Mary Evans, “as if it had been a Sinew of my Heart”; and this was to remain a bitter point between them. But it is clear that Coleridge now courted Sara with growing ardour, responsive as before to her immediate and seductive physical presence, and throwing all caution to the winds. Southey cannot be held responsible for this. As Coleridge told him frankly in his otherwise accusatory letter of November: “I returned to Bristol, and my addresses to Sara, which I at first payed from Principle not Feeling, from Feeling & from Principle I renewed: and I met a reward more than proportionate to the greatness of the Effort. I love and I am beloved, and I am happy!”17
This is certainly the evidence of his beautiful Conversation Poem, “The Eolian Harp”, which hints at the physical delights of their courtship that summer, and is dated 20 August, some six weeks before their actual marriage:
And that simplest Lute,
Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark!
How by the desultory breeze caress’d,
Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover,
It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs
Tempt to repeat the wrong!18
By the end of March, Southey gives the impression of a definitely amended Pantisocratic plan, with Coleridge having yielded to the Welsh scheme, and the Fricker sisters committed to join them, once the financing was assured. “If Coleridge and I can get 150 pounds a year between us,” he told his brother Thomas, “we purpose marrying, and retiring into the country, as our literary business can be carried on there, and practising agriculture till we can raise money for America – still the grand object in view.”19 It was in fact Southey’s anxieties about money, and his own difficulties in marrying Edith against family opposition, which were to prove the destruction of the Pantisocratic brotherhood.
They soon renewed their lecturing, Southey completing a biweekly series on the historical background to the French Revolution on 28 April; and Coleridge returning to the fray at the Assembly Coffeehouse, Bristol Quay, on 19 May. His subject appeared suitably esoteric: “Six Lectures on Revealed Religion” according to the well-advertised prospectus, but containing the sting in its subtitle: “Its Corruptions and Political Views”.
This series was now officially under the patronage of several leading Bristol citizens, of Unitarian or liberal persuasion, who were to become lifelong supporters of Coleridge. They included Joseph Cottle and his brother; John Prior Estlin, an influential Unitarian
