Pantisocracy

 

It's a word that is, as you can see from this screenshot (click to embiggen), in the OED now: ‘a form of social organization in which all members are equal in social position and responsibility, usually also having property in common; a political doctrine advocating this. Chiefly with reference to the political ideas of a group of writers and intellectuals of the 1790s, including Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.’ 

So, yes: Coleridge and Southey planned for a time to establish a Pantisocratic, utopian community in Kentucky: twelve married couples, clearing an area of land and living thereupon with all labour and possessions in common. Later they pinned their hopes upon the Susquehanna River in Maryland/ Pennsylvania. Coleridge wrote to Southey [6th September 1794] with the calculation that ‘£2000 will do’, that ‘we shall buy the land a great deal cheaper when we arrive in America than we could do in England.’ He added, rather over-optimistically, ‘that twelve men may easily clear 300 acres in four or five months’, adding that he had been speaking to an agent who ‘recommends the Susquehannah for its excessive beauty and its security from hostile Indians.’ Finally, as the project recoiled from its encounter with the Reality Principle, not least in financial terms, Southey proposed moving themselves and their wives instead to Wales, a downgrading of ambition that disappointed Coleridge muchly. In the end it all came to nothing.

The OED entry at the head of this post cites Southey as the first to use the word in print, but it was Coleridge's coinage: the root of the word being the Greek ἰσοκρατία. So: as democracy is rule by the demos, or people; as oligarchy is rule by the oligos or few, and as aristocracy is rule by the aristos or best (supposedly), so isocracy is rule by equals (as an isoscles triangle is one whose two longest sides are of equal length). Coleridge adds in the παντ-, or παν-, pan-, meaning all, to show not only that all will rule but that all will rule as equals. As Michael Murphy notes:

Ian Wylie argues that Pantisocracy was modelled on ‘the early Christian communities of the first centuries’; Kelvin Everest views the scheme as ‘a means of escape from the hostility of anti-jacobin England’ (influenced by Hartley’s Unitarianism); J. A. Appleyard reads Pantisocracy in terms of the philosophical systems of Hartley, Priestley, and Godwin; Peter Kitson examines the influence of Harrington and Puritan utopias; Leonard Deen focuses on the influence of Godwin, the Bible, and Hartley; Robert Sayre notes the coexisting traditions of the French Revolution and Romantic Utopianism; Stuart Andrews identifies a utopianism that has its roots in the American Revolution; and E. Logan explores Coleridge’s use of American travel accounts.

Godwin and Priestly were certainly the most immediate inspirations, at least so far as Coleridge was concerned. Writing to Southey [21st October 1794] he announced that ‘in the book of Pantisocracy I hope to have comprised all that is good in Godwin’ [Collected Letters 1:115] ... ‘all that was good’ being Coleridge's way of announcing that he was jettisoning the humanist and atheistical ‘bad’. In other letters he added to Godwinian thought Hartley’s system of association, from The Observations on Man (1749), extrapolating from principles of mental and perceptual connection of ideas, feelings and sensations to social connections of fellowship, ethics and benevolence: ‘the ardour of private Attachments makes Philanthropy a necessary habit of the Soul. I love my Friend—such as he is, all mankind are or might be! The deduction is evident. Philanthropy (and indeed every other Virtue) is a thing of Concretion—Some home-born Feeling is the centre of the Ball, that, rolling on thro’ Life collects and assimilates every congenial Affection. [Collected Letters 1:86].

There's been a lot written on Coleridge's concept of Pantisocracy, but less on its origins as a piece of terminology. What was in Coleridge's mind as he coined the word? There are two possible answers I think. One is that he was reading-up ancient history. The crucial thing here is that various Greek city-states had various ideas of governance, democracy (as at Athens) being only one among many. There were other (as we might say) ‘democratic’ social models in the larger environment. And, to be specific, the word ἰσοκρατία, meaning a social system of ‘equal power’, is a word only used, in this political sense, by Herodotus. He uses it to describe not a Greek polis but a people in Asia Minor: the Issedones. Interestingly, their radical equality of social distribution was a specifically gendered matter: δὲ δίκαιοι καὶ οὗτοι λέγονται εἶναι, ἰσοκρατέες δὲ ὁμοίως αἱ γυναῖκες τοῖσι ἀνδράσι ‘these are said to be a law-abiding people, too, and the women to have equal power [ἰσοκρατέες] with the men’ [Herodotus 2:26.2]. In other words, if democracy is the rule by the demos excluding women, foreigners and slaves, isocracy is the rule by men and women. Is that what Coleridge had in mind?

There's another possibility, which is that Coleridge came upon the word not in Herodotus but Galen. This second-century Greek physician used the word in a physiological rather than a political sense: a well-balanced individual enjoyed health, he argued, on account of his or her inner ἰσο-κράτεια [‘equilibrium, equivalence’; Galen Historia Philogia, 126]. This makes more sense to me, as a source for Coleridge's neologism: that all (pan) should be in equilibrium for a perfect society. And if it's where Coleridge found the word it's interesting because it suggests he was reading Galen quite early in the 1790s Searching his corpus I can only find much later, occasional Galenic references, usually where Galen is (for instance) quoted in ‘Sennertus’, the 17th-century German physician Daniel Sennert. So that would be interesting.

Which is more likely, do you think? That Coleridge was extrapolating Heorodotian ideas of social democracy into the modern 1790s? Or that he was thinking of social equality in physiological terms? 

Coca-Coleridge

 

"The Safety of the Country" (1807): A New Coleridge Poem?

 

New in the sense of hitherto unnoticed. This is only speculative, but on balance I'd say these verses are by Coleridge. See what you think.

So, my starting point was this eight-line political squib, which certainly is by Coleridge: ‘The Taste of the Times’:

Some whim or fancy pleases every age;
For talents premature ’tis now the rage.
In Music how great Handel would have smil'd
T' have seen whole crowds enraptur'd with a child!
A Garrick we have had in little Betty,
And now, we're told, we have a Pitt in Petty.
All must allow, since thus it is decreed.
He is a very Petty Pitt indeed.

J. C. C. Mays in his edition of the Poetical Works has this as #384, and records in the headnote that ‘the only known text of the poem is a transcript by John Taylor Coleridge in his Commonplace book, subscribed “S.T.C.”’ 

The joke here concerns the extreme youth of Lord Henry Petty, who, though only 25, was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Greville's ‘Ministry of All the Talents’, the government which succeeded the death of Pitt in January 1806. Coleridge returned to England from Malta on the 17th August that year and presumably wrote the poem thereafter. Mays adds, shrewdly, ‘it is likely that the poem was copied from a contemporary newspaper which has not been traced.’

Being curious I checked, and Mays is right: this poem appeared in the Morning Post 25th February 1807. I wasn’t able to find an actual copy of the paper, short of paying a hefty subscription for full access to the British Newspaper Archives database, but I did find a copy of the anthology The Spirit of the Public Journals 1807: Being an Impartial Selection of the Most Ingenious Essays and Jeux D'Espirit That Appear in the Newspapers and Other Publications, Volume 11 (1808), a publication which selected and reprinted choice verse and prose from a range of British papers. And there is Coleridge’s poem, subscripted ‘From the Morning Post’, and with a few variants from the version Mays, following JTC, prints:

Some whim or fancy pleases every age;
And talents premature are now the rage.
In music how great Handel would have smil'd
T' have seen whole crowds in raptures with a child!
A Garrick we have had in little Betty,
And now, we're told, we have a Pitt in Petty.
All must allow, since thus it is decreed.
He is a very Petty Pitt indeed.

The child singer famous for performing Handel was Maria Poole, later Mrs Dickons, who was only six years old when she started performing, and who, engaged by Covent Garden in the 1790s, drew large crowds. The reference to ‘Betty’ is to a famous child actor who first trod the boards in December 1804 at the age of 13: William Henry West Betty (1791 -1874), known as ‘the Young Roscius’. Betty's father auditioned the boy before Michael Atkins, manager of the Belfast Theatre, who said ‘I never dared to indulge in the hope of seeing another Garrick, but I have seen an infant Garrick in Betty.’   

So far so trivial: nice to trace the poem (though it is a very minor piece of Coleridge), and to have a text closer, even if only in small ways, to what STC actually wrote. 

But here's the kicker: because, as you can see from the screenshot at the head of this post, The Spirit of the Public Journals prints ‘The Taste of the Times’ as a twofer, together with a similarly light-hearted political squib, ‘The Safety of the Country’:

                    — — Non deficit alter Aureus;
                 et simili frondescit virga metallo.

When Richmond's great Duke long ago sallied forth,
He entrench’d the whole country—south, east, west, and north;
For he held that this mis’rable nation of ours
Must be sav'd by mud walls, palisadoes, and towers.
Next Windham, with projects and crotchets quite new,
Comes forward (for he will be Quixotting too)
And with Crawfurd, as Sancho and Dapple to back him,
He defies all the windmills on earth to attack him;
Our army, which cost us such trouble to train,
He begs to set free, to enlist them again;
Our militia, he thinks, to our strength may conduce,
If, to make them more strong, you their numbers reduce;
While the poor volunteers, those unfortunate elves!
He dresses in green—to be kill'd by themselves:
And their leaders—whom fortune and rank may make prouder,
He mentions as proper provision for powder.
Jack Tar, who has heard them these projects discuss,
Exclaims— “Let them leave but the ocean to us;
We care not a jot what these lubbers are a’ter—
They shall find that the land shall be sav’d by the water.”
             MILITARIS

Is this Coleridge too? JTC didn't think it worth copying-out into his memorandum book (perhaps it was too long; or perhaps he just didn't like it. It's not as witty as ‘The Taste of the Times’, I think). The target of this satire is William Windham, a member, like Petty, of the the Ministry of All the Talents in 1806–7. As Secretary for War and the Colonies, Windham undertook various reforms of the army (specifically, he abolished the ballot for the militia to ensure that it was staffed with volunteers rather than impressed men, and he limited service in the Army to seven years, hoping thereby to attract more recruits. This poem, clearly, thinks both measures bad ones.) The Latin epigraph is from Vergil, Aeneid 6:144-45 ‘[when the first bough is torn off], a second also of gold soon follows, and a new twig shoots forth leaves of the same metal.’ Though, as you can see, the poet has added a non to the start of this quotation, negating it: so once the first twig is torn off, no golden bough succeeds.

The pseudonym ‘Militaris’ is not one that Coleridge uses elsewhere, but so far as I can see neither did anyone else. I've searched for other poems by ‘Militaris’ and can't find any, either in the Morning Post (which can be searched at the British Newspaper Archives, although if you actually want to access the results of your search you need to pay them a subscription fee), or in any other publication of the period. And STC did use a variety of pseudonyms. It doesn't seem impossible to me that he might pick this name for a squib directed at the Secretary of State for War.

My main point is that the approach of both poems is the same: pick a member of the Ministry of All the Talents, then make fun of them by riffing on their name. In the first poem, it's ‘Petty’, as ‘petty’, ‘Pitt-y’ and ‘Betty’; in the second one ‘Windham’, as ‘Windmill’ and so to ‘Tilting at Windmills’, Don Quixote and all the rest (‘Dapple’, mentioned, is Sancho Panza's mule; Colonel Crawfurd was an MP and soldier who backed Windham's reforms in the House). What's funny about Petty is that he is so young. What's funny about Windham is that he's so Quixotic.

It really does seem that these two poems go together. So if the first is by Coleridge, then isn't it possible the second is too?

Astounding Novel by John Coleridge!

 John Coleridge? Any relation, I wonder? Alas, no.

‘John Coleridge’ was one of the pseudonyms used by the US author brothers Earl Andrew Binder (1904-1966), who was born in Austria-Hungary and came to the US in 1910, and Otto Oscar Binder (1911-1975), who was the more active (and ultimately better known) of the two; after approximately 1934, when Earl became inactive as a writer, Otto continued to sign himself Eando Binder, so that some Eando Binder books – they were all published after 1940; several contain pre-1935 material – are collaborative and some by Otto alone. Together the brothers wrote eleven stories as John Coleridge and one as Dean D O'Brien, while Otto alone also wrote as Gordon A Giles and, later, as Ione Frances (or Ian Francis) Turek (forms of his wife's maiden name), did some work under the name Will Garth, and finally published a couple of novels under his own name. A third brother, Jack Binder was an illustrator who did much of the early drawing for Captain Marvel, which was regularly scripted by Otto. The brothers all retained the German pronunciation of their surname, with a short i.

Still: STC was certainly interested in ‘the life beyond ...’  

Water, Water Everywhere ...

 

Could these be Coleridge's most famous lines?

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink. [Ancient Mariner (1834 version), lines 119-122]

Where did they come from? Out of Coleridge's pure imagination, perhaps. Still: ‘it is scarcely practicable for a man,’ as he once noted, ‘to write in the ornamented style on any subject without finding his poem, against his will and without his previous consciousness, a cento of lines that had pre-existed in other works’ [Griggs (ed), Coleridge: Collected Letters (1956-71), 3:469-70].

We know that Coleridge read Angelo Poliziano, or Politian (1454-94). He talks about him in Church and State [CC 10:64] and variously in the Marginalia and Notebooks [374, 1673, 2670]. And in the Biographia he mocks George Canning for plagiarising some Poliziano in his university prize-winning poem Iter ad Meccam, ‘The Pilgrimage to Mecca’:

‘In the Nutricia of Politian, there occurs this line:

“Pura coloratos interstrepit unda lapillos.”

Casting my eye on a University prize poem, I met this line:

“Lactea purpureos interstrepit unda lapillos.”

Now look out in the Gradus for purus, and you find, as the first synonyme, lacteus; for coloratus, and the first synonyme is purpureas. I mention this by way of elucidating one of the most ordinary processes in the ferrumination of these centos.’ [Biographia, ch 1]

Centos again. Coleridge's mind was running on questions of plagiary, advertent or inadvertent. The first line of Latin quoted there (it's from Poliziano’s Rustica rather than his Nutricia, but who's counting) means: ‘the pure stream goes murmuring over little coloured pebbles’. The plagiarised line means: ‘the milk-white stream goes murmuring over the little purple pebbles.’ Canning capped his time as a student at Oxford by winning the poetry prize in 1789. He went on, of course, to become Prime Minister. Here Coleridge pays back the ridicule Canning had subjected him to in his reactionary newspaper The Anti-Jacobin, by accusing the eminent statement of plagiary (‘ferrumination’ seals the joke: the Latin ferrumino means ‘to cement, solder, join’, and ‘soldering’ is, of course, the principle strategy involved in canning, a process patented in 1810). 

What does all this have to do with the Ancient Mariner? Well, here's one of Poliziano's more famous short poems, ‘In Amicam’ [Epigrammata, 64]:

Allicis, expellis, sequeris, fugis, es pia, et es trux;
   me vis, me non vis, me crucias, et amas.
promittis, promissa negas, spem mi eripis, et das.
   iam iam ego vel sortem Tantale malo tuam.
durum ferre sitim circum salientibus undis,
   durius in medio nectare ferre sitim.

P.'s ‘amica’ is the woman he loves, and her treatment of him is not consistent. Tricky to capture the compression of the Latin in English, mind. Here's a fairly slack version:

You lure me, you banish me; you follow, you flee; you're kind and are cruel;
   you want me, you don't want me; you torment me, you're in love.
You promise then deny your promise, you snatch away my hope and offer it.
   Right now I feel like Tantalus in wanting you:
how hard my thirst, surrounded by salty waves,
   how hard my thirst in the midst of such nectar!

Here's another version:

You tease, reject; follow, flee; are kind, cruel;
   want me, don't want; torment me, are loving.
You vow, break your vow, crush hope and give it.
   Right now I'm Tantalus in wanting you:
hard thirst surrounded by salty waves,
   hard in the midst of such nectar to thirst

That's probably a bit elliptical. At any rate, it strikes me that Coleridge's potent image of desperate thirst in the midst of salt water has an antecedent in Poliziano's little love poem. Then again, I'm not accusing him of Canning-like plagiary. These things register, sinking into the mulch of the creative imagination, and are reworked. By excerpting the image from Poliziano's mannered itinerary of erotic contrasts Coleridge frees it from its rather starchy wit and re-somatizes it as something universal, something indeed existential. Immature poets, as Eliot said, imitate, mature poets steal and good poets make what they take into something better.