Coleridge and the patriotism of the English Romantics

Notes after reading the excellent biography of Coleridge by Richard Holmes.

In his forties, when he was settling down after a fraught and often misunderstood life, Coleridge wrote about his youthful pantheistic beliefs in a beautiful sonnet, ‘To Nature’:

It may indeed by phantasy, when I
Essay to draw from all created things
Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings;
And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie
Lessons of love and earnest piety.
So let it be; and if the wide world rings
In mock of this belief, it brings
Not fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity.
So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee,
Thee only God! And thou shalt not despise
Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice.

He was known as a great metaphysical writer. To his contemporaries, this generally meant that he was incomprehensible, for which he was mocked cruelly by Hazlitt and others in the press, as he recognises in the poem. What he tried to do in his writing, however, was to make sense of the new Romantic movement that he played a part in during his collaboration with Wordsworth twenty years earlier, in the context of the rise also of science.

He was criticised variously for being too radical and for not being radical enough (potent accusations in the turbulent years of the Napoleonic Wars and the economically depressed years afterwards in England that led to the Great Reform Bill of 1831), because he was ambitious for change without revolution. He wanted to promote a better society based on better education and better moral understanding; a society where industrialisation (then booming) would be humane and not merely rational and profit-seeking. However, he shied away from party politics, and taught that an proper understanding of history, philosophy and literature (epitomised in Shakespeare, who, in his view, captured the human soul) would make men not only ‘civilised’ but also ‘cultivated’, and this cultivation entailed for him a sense of one’s place and duty to one’s fellow men and to God.

Significantly, then, he was tenaciously religious. It might seem to modern readers that radical thinkers after the Enlightenment can hardly have avoided scepticism, but Coleridge was quite typical of his time in expressing a ‘common-sense’ and one might say ‘grounded’ idea of the importance of theology and belief in God, partly as a deliberately patriotic, anti-French sentiment. As they saw it, the French Revolution, and all the chaos and disaster that followed was, after all, a result of rampant empiricism which elevated man’s rational nature above his moral being. One of the reasons that Shakespeare became so popular for the Romantics was the fact that his imagination was so unconstrained and so very ‘un-French’.

The Romantic celebration of nature as something morally empowered, which had its origins in the ‘Gothic’ eighteenth century, was driven in large part by this patriotism, as well as by a reaction against the ‘dark, satanic mills of the industrial revolution. (Coleridge met the ageing and impoverished William Blake once and was moved by the experience.) But it was also a quasi-scientific attempt to identify what ‘was’ the Imagination – could it be defined and described, and how far could it be exercised? Somehow, it seemed to open the way to an understanding of the soul and what the meaning of man could be, especially in relation to the world he found himself in and was so dramatically shaping.