REDISCOVERING WILLIAM "HURRICANE" GILBERT:
A LOST VOICE OF REVOLUTION AND MADNESS IN THE WORLDS OF
BLAKE AND THE ROMANTICS
Paper presented at BARS Conference on "Romantic Revelations,"
University of Keele (July l999)
(c) Marsha Keith Schuchard 2005, all rights reserved
In spring l796, while living in Bristol, the youthfully radical Coleridge
invited an eccentric writer to contribute to his journal The Watchman.
Though the essay on "The Commercial Academic" was once attributed to
Davies Giddy, it is now recognized that its author was William Gilbert, who
also contributed a "Fragment by a West Indian," passages from his
unpublished poem The Hurricane.
Coleridge edited Gilbert's lines to form a brief conversation poem in the
manner of his own "Eolian Harp" and "Reflections on Leaving a
Place of Retirement":
Near where with Tropic heats bright CANCER glows,
And Sun-beams glitter with perennial force;
Girt by the azure wave an Island lies,
Called by Spaniards, ANTIENT.
The balmy East here holds perpetual sway,
And blows salubrious to the toil-worn Slave.
The Eastern Shore receives the welcome Gale,
And leads to Caverns, or the brow of rocks;
To gravel banks with glitt'ring Shell-fish strew'd,
To deep-green Mangrove, or the shadowing branch
Of lofty Cedar, dropping blossoms white,
That tremble as they fall, and meet the wave
Progressive to their root. Here, oft at Eve,
When length'ning shadows to the calmy wave
Shot dubious twilight and alluring gloom,
I've sat contemplative--and viewed the breeze
Checquer the water, with far-streaming light
That glistened as with gems: I've sat and thought
That all the hopes attending various man,
Were robbers of his rest; I've thought that Love
Was all the sum indulgent Heaven e'er meant
To form our Bliss. I thought so and was blest.
Despite the
serene eloquence of the passage, Coleridge was troubled by the combination of
genius and madness in his friend Gilbert. On 17 December l796, he sent the
recently published Hurricane to John Thelwall, with this comment:
--A strange Poem written by an Astrologer here, who was a man
of fine Genius, which, at intervals, he
still discovers.--But, ah me! Madness smote with her hand, and stamped with her feet and swore that he should be her's--& her's he is.--He is a man of fluent Eloquence & general knowledge,
gentle in his manners, warm in his
affections; but unfortunately he has received
a few rays of supernatural Light thro' a crack in his upper story. I express myself unfeelingly; but indeed my heart always aches when I think of him.
As we shall see, Southey, Wordsworth, and Keats also admired
Gilbert's poetic gifts, but they were curiously reticent about Gilbert's life
in London, where he lived between his two residencies in Bristol. It is
possible that they were genuinely ignorant about Gilbert's career as a radical
astrologer and Freemason in London (l788-l795), or they were sufficiently
alarmed by his revolutionary activities to suppress their knowledge of his
other life. However, as the editor of The Hurricane facsimile observes,
"The crack in the poet's `upper story', like that in Blake's more
distinguished cranium, receives its `supernatural light' as a refraction of
Swedenborg's `theosophy."
In order to rediscover William Gilbert, it will be necessary to dig into the
occultist underworld of Blake's Swedenborgian milieu in Lambeth and London. In the process,
it will become clear that Gilbert provided a direct link between the radical
urban world of Blake and the revolutionary natural environment of the
Romantics.
Born in Antigua in the West Indies,
Gilbert (1760-1825?) was the son of Nathaniel Gilbert, a wealthy plantation
owner and speaker of the House of Assembly.
Though the Gilberts had long been slave-holders, Nathaniel was convinced by
John Wesley in l758 that the slaves should be educated and converted to
Christianity. A re-born Gilbert returned to Antigua, where his eloquent and
courageous preaching won over hundreds of slaves to Methodism. According to Southey,
"This conduct drew upon him contempt, or compassion, according as it was
imputed to folly, or insanity"--words predictive of later reactions to
Nathaniel's son William.
After Nathaniel's death, the preaching was carried on by African women, one of
whom married William's cousin Francis and became a distinguished abolitionist
writer.
This family background of radical, unconventional beliefs shaped the young
William's own heterodox ideas. Though Gilbert's recent editor observes that
"little is known about his life" before he came to England to train
as a barrister, Gilbert actually revealed much about himself in the pages of The
Conjuror's Magazine, published in London in l791-93, as an organ of radical
Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. By linking the correspondent "B,"
code name for Gilbert, with the poetic friend of Coleridge and Southey, we
begin to suspect that the latter's silence about the astrologer's activities in
London was deliberate. Moreover, like his close neighbor and Swedenborgian
colleague Blake, Gilbert ran real risks with the law as he articulated his
radical theosophical vision.
In the July l793 issue of Conjuror's Magazine, Gilbert
revealed that he entered the royal navy in February l779 and served nearly
three years, during which he visited New York
and Charleston, South Carolina.
Returning to Antigua in l783 ("the year of American peace"), he
served as clerk to the Assembly before leaving for England to train as a barrister
(ca. l784). Then, according to Joseph Cottle, Gilbert went to Portsmouth, where
he defended a victim of military court marshal and, upon losing the case,
became deranged:
In the year l787, a want of self-control having become painfully evident, he was placed by his friends in the Asylum of Mr. Richard Henderson, at Hanham, near Bristol, when I first
knew him. He occasionally accompanied John Henderson into
Bristol, on one of which occasions, he introduced him to my brother and myself, as the "Young Counsellor!"... Many
and great talkers have I known, but William Gilbert, at this time, exceeded them all. His brain seemed to be in a state of boiling, effervescence, and his tongue, with
inconceivable rapidity, passed from subject to subject, but with an incoherence
that was to me, at least, marvellous...
He continued in the Asylum
about a year, when his mind being partially restored, his friends removed him, and he
wholly absented himself from Bristol, till the year l796, when he re-appeared in that city.
Cottle's account gives a clue to where Gilbert went in l788, for
John Henderson (who died in November that year) was an ardent student of
Swedenborg and other mystics.
The eulogist at Henderson's
funeral was William Agutter, an admirer of Swedenborg, who later became minister
at the Asylum for Female Orphans in Lambeth (where Blake and the non-sectarian
Swedenborgians often met).
Gilbert evidently met another Swedenborgian astrologer, Ebenezer Sibly, who
introduced him to the "irregular" (i.e., occultist) Freemasons in Bristol.
In l788-89 both men moved from Bristol to London, where Gilbert
took up residence on the Bridge Roads in Lambeth, just a short walk from
Blake's home in the Hercules Buildings.
From Gilbert's later references to Swedenborg and his partisans in the Conjuror's
Magazine, it is clear that he frequented their meetings and read their
publications. Like Blake, he became disillusioned with the more prudish and
conservative Swedenborgians (who met at the Great Eastcheap Chapel) but found
sympathetic colleagues among the radical Swedenborgian Illuminés (who
met in Masonic lodges, private homes, and at the Lambeth Asylum).
However, there is no more evidence of Gilbert's activities until he appears in
the pages of the occultist magazine.
In July l791 various newspapers reported that Ebenezer Sibly had
defeated the government's effort to suppress his astrological and occult
publications. On 4 July, The Gloucester Journal expressed its pleasure
that the second edition of Sibly's New and Complete Illustration of the
Occult Sciences would now be printed in sixty weekly numbers:
...the cabal, formed on purpose to cry down this interesting
book, hath been defeated, and driven from every argument set
up against it.--The Act of Parliament, by which the work was
at first suppressed, has since been repealed.
The Journal
subsequently explained that "the work was at first suppressed, under an
idea that it discovered secrets dangerous to be known."
Sibly's book was dedicated to the Grand Master of the Freemasons and it revealed
his friendship with John Henderson, the abolitionist Methodists (including
James Gilbert), and the Swedenborgians. It was his radical interpretations of
the astrological charts of George Washington and the American and French
revolutionaries that alarmed Pitt's government.
Sibly's success in defeating the attempted suppression inspired his
occultist friends to launch the Conjuror's Magazine in August l791.
Published by Henry Lemoine, a French Huguenot and self-educated hack writer, the
magazine catered to the growing demand for anti-government, astrological,
magical, and millenarial literature.
Lemoine persuaded (or was persuaded by) Henry Fuseli to reprint Lavater's Essays
on Physiognomy in a cheap, serialized edition. Fuseli's motives are
obscure, but it seems likely that he hoped to sabotage Thomas Holcroft's rival
edition. Blake had worked closely with Fuseli on his translation of Lavater's Aphorisms
on Man (1788), and he engraved a plate for the Fuseli-supervised edition of
Hunter's translation of the Essays on Physiognomy (1788). Thus, Blake
must have been aware of and sympathetic to Fuseli's "public-spirited"
gesture of making Lavater available to a popular audience. However, in order to
save money, Fuseli's designs of Lavater's physiognomic heads were engraved by
Barlow, the most mediocre of the artists who worked on the deluxe editions.
Among contributors to the magazine were Lemoine's friend Richard Cosway
("R.C."); the Swedenborgian Masons Ebenezer Sibly, his brother Manoah
Sibly, and George Adams; the Masonic magician Katterfelto; the Rosicrucian
Francis Barrett ("F.B."); and--most importantly--William Gilbert
("B.").
In the September issue, the frontispiece was Fuseli's "Head of
Satan," while Gilbert announced his forthcoming "Essay on
Magic." In October, Fuseli contributed a "Head of St. John,"
while Gilbert presented Agrippa's chart of Hebrew names (from which Blake had
earlier taken the names Tiriel, Zazel, and Bne Seraphim).
As a preface to the chart, Gilbert expounded learnedly on the theory and
practice of magic--in a discourse that sheds light on Blake's own
"illuminated" theories. Because the Conjuror's Magazine has
become a rare work, it will be useful to give a lengthy extract of Gilbert's
theosophy:
...The macrocosm, or great
world, corresponds, nerve to nerve, and joint to joint, with the microcosm or
little world... This is answer enough for all the impudent trash and lies of
the Hemi-encyclopedias on the present subject [magic and magnetism], for this
wise century past. "Seeking to be wise, they
became fools." St. Paul.
..................................................
...No divination is perfect
without astrology...But astrology has of late been considered merely as giving
an intimation of future events; so, that her grand office of gate-keeper or usher
to magic, (viz. the action of the mind, as walking, speaking or embracing, is
the action of the body) has been forgotten.
................................................
...Now, there arises another
distinction, spiritual magic and natural magic...no part of a man, internal or
external, can exist without its own proper spirit. ................................................
...It must be remembered that as
man is three-fold, so are his members; that is, there is a spiritual,
innermost, or remotest, a natural or external, and a medium between these two
extents, viz. an internal... Mr. Swedenborg, before me, has very elaborately explained this in his "Treatise of the Holy
Scripture."
.................................................
...The ancients felt the seat of
their strength to be in mind; they invigorated as they spiritualised; they
expressed their idea of strength by the seat of the most subtle spirits, the nerves;
they enlarged, they grew firm as they approach divinity...
.................................................
The class I am now with, Magicians, do not
in religion as chymists in spirituals, speculatively deny its possibility or
sneer at its principles...As a parallel to these, are those mystics, nay even
receivers of Swedenborg, whose practice has been hugging the ground like a
worm, while their intellect has been basking in some of the brightest beams of
divine splendours.
.............................................
The putting of the mind of man into
motion by the deepest or most efficacious or most mental means, which the
person can devise, is spiritual Magic Practical; the devising or knowledge of
these means is spiritual Magic Speculative or Scientific.
As man embraces in his form (that of God)
the forms, and consequently the principles or spirits of all creation, it follows
that, when these springs are touched in him, they are touched in all creation.
Hence at his fall, at the moment that his mind ceased to be the garden of GOD, the ground brought forth thorns and
brambles: hence at his renewal in peace and love, "the wolf shall dwell
with the lamb."... Therefore the true magician is the true christian...(CM,77-79).
In the same issue, Gilbert contributed a politically daring account
of "the singular life and fate of Count Cagliostro," who was
currently suffering in an Inquisition prison in Italy. I argue elsewhere that Blake
admired Cagliostro, who was currently the subject of vicious attacks from the
conservative press.
Under the title "Rosycrucian Philosophy," Gilbert asserted that
"it is well known" that Caglistro was the friend of a German Count
who was a Rosicrucian (evidently the Comte de St. Germanin, a crypto-Jewish
alchemist), and that the fraternity is also called the Illuminati. (p. 85).
Since Edmund Burke (whom Gilbert later scorns), had warned about Illuminatist
infiltration of English Freemasonry, this identification was risky for an
avowedly Rosicrucian magazine.
Even worse for the conservative faction of Swedenborgians, Gilbert claimed that
"the society forming this branch of the sect is now held at Avignon."
This revelation of links between the Swedenborg society in London and the lodge
of Illuminés at Avignon would provoke government suspicion about the
loyalist group at Eastcheap as well as the more radical Swedenborgian Masons.
In November, the magazine featured a biography of "the Celebrated Mystic, Emanuel
Swedenborg" (CM,130).
However, by January l792, Gilbert was skirting close to the limits
of seditious publication, when he wrote "Cagliostro to Triumph as a
Freemason." After painting a sympathetic portrait of the Cabalistic
magician who was charged with fomenting the French Revolution, Gilbert
concluded:
The Freemasons are the only
Corporation, whether under the name of a church, a nation, or a society, who
have melted the knowledge of God the Creator possessed by the
Ancients into the same fire with the knowledge of a Redeemer given to Christians.
May they shine with invigorated glories! They shall! And shall give Rome the blow, it has
always suspected and feared from their hands. As far as Cagliostro is a Freemason,
he shall revenge and triumph (CM,183).
Gilbert defended
Cagliostro's system of Egyptian theosophy and brandished the capitalized
slogan, "LIBERTY IS SOLIDITY." That this issue featured Fuseli's
design of "The Magician Balaam," which was "purposely engraved
for this work," suggests Fuseli's continuing interest in Cagliostro, whose
occultist collaboration with Lavater had received wide publicity.
Becoming increasingly
reckless, Gilbert predicted in February the coming downfall of European kings,
and he pointed especially to Gustav III of Sweden, who planned to lead the
counter-revolutionary armies against France: "The Head of Sweden [will be]
drowned cruelly"(CM,144).
After Gustav was assassinated in March, it was widely speculated that
the Swedenborgian Masons--including the Swedes who were then resident in
London--had collaborated in the plot. In fact, the inside knowledge revealed by
an April article on the Swedish assassination, coupled with Gilbert's
description of the damned Gustav in Hell, suggests his contact with those
Swedish Illuminés accused of conspiracy (CM,382,396-97). Gilbert
also mocked Pitt, the Duke of Richmond (later Blake's great enemy), Sir George
Yonge, and "any tottering German despot" who opposed the French--thus
risking prosecution for insulting King George III.
During this month of radical pronouncements, Gilbert moved from
Blake's neighborhood in Lambeth to #11, Devonshire Street, Queen-Square. He
apparently sought a more convenient address to accommodate his plan to establish
a secret occult society, which he announced in February l792:
I have for a considerable time, had it in
contemplation to establish a Weekly Lecture or
Conversationi for the occult sciences and true philosophy;
but the want of a proper basis in the
public mind has delayed it.
I would indeed establish two societies--one
more open, the other more consolidated: the
last should be of renovated, purified, and invigorated Free
Masonry, from which I will not exclude
women... Mr. Locke will keep a book for subscribers (CM,220).
Unfortunately,
Locke's register has not been located, but it is certainly possible that Blake
was associated with Gilbert's secret society.
By this time, Conjuror's Magazine had developed an enormous circulation,
which meant that it fell under the same kind of scrutiny given to Paine's Rights
Of Man and other "seditious" publications aimed at a popular
audience.
In March l792, while the editor boasted of his collaboration with a
French occult journal, Gilbert referred to his plans to organize "county
societies" (which would sound ominously like corresponding societies to
the government). In April he gave a detailed plan for his network of magical
societies:
Proposals for instructing Pupils in Spiritual
Knowledge, including a Plan for commencing
Societies or Colleges for receiving instruction.
Mr. William Gilbert will teach Astrology and
Spirit, with the nature and use of
Talismans...
...............................................
As there are many excellent treatises in the Latin tongue on Astrology and Magic, Mr. Gilbert
will also instruct any Lady in that
language, in order to promote her better knowledge of Spirit and Astrology...
Societies.--To accommodate the lowest
class, Mr. Gilbert will instruct any
number of persons from three to twelve... (CM,404)
By the word
"Spirit," Gilbert probably meant necromancy or evocation of the
spirits of the dead--a magical art practised by Blake since the death of his
brother in l787.
Gilbert's radicalism now caused increasing alarm among the more
moderate Swedenborgians who contributed to the magazine. In May the editor
announced, "We esteem ourselves highly favored by Mr. Adams; his
observations and strictures shall be attended to... proper attention has been paid
to his remarks" (CM,400). George Adams, who served as mathematical
instrument maker to the Prince of Wales, was a Swedenborgian and student of the
occult, but he shared the growing political conservatism of the Eastcheap
faction.
From this point forward, though the magazine maintained its Whiggish
perspective, its astrological predictions would favor George III.
In August the editors praised Adams as a "mathematician in Fleet Street,
who is a great admirer of the Theosophists" (CM,70). However, by November, even the moderate Adams
became an object of government suspicion, for the magazine reported that he was
examined, with eighteen others, at Bow Street.
Meanwhile, a former neighbor of Gilbert began a friendly rivalry in
astrological interpretations. William
Elder ("W.E.") of "22 Kendall Place, near Lambeth Walk,"
was praised in June as "our worthy friend at Lambeth" (CM,404,432-33).
It is possible that Elder was the "W.E." for whom Blake later colored
a copy of Night Thoughts in l797.
Another neighbor and friend of Blake, John Augustus Tulk (of Kennington Lane, Vauxhall), was probably
the "J.T." who contributed a nativity of Swedenborg in January l793.
In April Ebenezer Sibly ("Mercurius") praised Gilbert's work, while
his brother Manoah Sibly sent in nativities of his twin children (CM,320,370).
Manoah, a Swedenborgian minister who also worked as a court-reporter, probably
supplied the gossipy news on current trials, libels, and scandals. His
expertise in short-hand would later be utilized by the London Corresponding
Society, when it defended members during the treason trials of l794.
Though the editors continued to complain about shackles on the
press, government placemen and spies, and the folly of going to war against
France, Gilbert went beyond their parameters of dissent. In May l793 he claimed
that the Duchess of York, daughter of Frederick William II of Prussia and wife
of George III's second son, had a passion for chiromancy or divination by hand:
...Her royal father has been celebrated
as an illuminé, and there is
great affinity between the characters.
The Princess Royal is said to be a deep
student in astrology; in which she
perseveres, notwithstanding the advice of Mr. Best to the contrary (CM,404).
George Adams and
the conservative Swedenborgians had earlier lamented the influence of the
radical prophet, Samuel Best ("Poor Help") on the royal family.
At a time when the Duke of York was back-pedaling from his earlier radicalism
and association with illuminist Freemasonry, the characterization of his wife
as an Illuminé and astrologer would have greatly annoyed George III and
Prime Minister Pitt.
By July l793, Gilbert's revolutionary predictions and political
indiscretions went too far--even for the Whig editors. In that month, he
lamented the apparent betrayal of his former friend William Elder: "how
came W.E. to be my open enemy in this Magazine, both personally and as to
France?" (CM,518). As Michael Phillips shows, the inhabitants of
Lambeth were now subject to intense pressure to spy on their neighbors and
report any radicals to the government. In a defensive move against Elder's
criticism, Gilbert revealed biographical details of his earlier service in the
royal navy and hinted at his friendship with the Duke of Gloucester, brother of
George III and uncle of the Duke of York:
...[Prince William of Gloucester] has
followed me every where, into the navy, to New York,
on board the Warwick, to Antigua, the place of
my birth, to England again,
and now to friendship with France.
Besides this, he was always a favourite with me.(CM,517)
Though Gilbert's characterization of the Duchess of York as an Illuminé
was certainly reckless, his claim that the Duke of Gloucester currently
maintained his friendly attitude to France was asking for trouble. Gloucester had long been
associated with illuminist Freemasonry, and he continued to share occult
studies with Cosway, Loutherbourg, and other Swedenborgian Masons.
Moreover, he kept up a secret correspondence with a prominent Illuminé
in Lyons, France, whose Cagliostroan ritual
he tried to introduce into English Masonry. Though he ended the risky
correspondence when England declared war on France in January l793, Gloucester
remained a student of Swedenborg and theosophical Masonry until his death in
1805. Following his comments on Gloucester, Gilbert praised Swedenborg's
"Canon for the Apocalypse" and linked the Swede's pronouncements on
"the consummation of the old, and commencement of the New and
Eternal" with revolutionary developments in France.
Gilbert linked his Swedenborgian commentary with a proud assertion
that he had earlier sent the editor a prediction that 14 July would mark the
end of counter-revolutionary victories. Now, as reports reached London of the
assassination of Marat on that day, he was triumphantly proven right. Though
Gilbert admired Marat as an enlightened republican, he argued that his former
hero had achieved too much power:
His death bears thus; the French have lost their Archangel but not their God--consequently, there is now
no medium between them and their God, and they cease to be vincible. ...It was
then a proud and auspicious day for the Republic when he fell--for now, no
individual among them, but yet the aggregate, possesses his zeal. The fire now
has the benefit of diffusion without dissipation, and while it has lost locality
retains its heat, and is, to its extremes, a furnace. (CM.518)
With a
prediction that "the allies will not continue to triumph till September;
their neck is broken already," Gilbert sang his swan song in the Conjuror's
Magazine. In August l793, the title was changed to The Astrologer's
Magazine and the editor Lemoine evidently sold it to another publisher.
Though the magazine continued to praise the English reformers--such as
Priestley, Walker, Eaton, Muir, and Palmer--it no longer catered to the
Swedenborgian Illuminés.
Once Gilbert disappeared from the occultist magazine, little is known
of his activities until he appeared in Bristol
in early l796.
There his old friend Cottle introduced him to Southey and Coleridge, then in
their pro-revolutionary phase. Gilbert had worked for a long time on his poem, The
Hurricane: a Theosophical and Western Eclogue, for he referred earlier to
its theme in the Conjuror's magazine of March l792 (CM,341). In
the poem, he revealed that he was still in London in l794, when he saw an exhibition of
a dried mermaid in Oxford Street.
He also followed the career of the prophet Richard Brothers, who proclaimed
himself Prince of the Hebrews in l794 and promised to lead the Jews back to Jerusalem. However,
Gilbert did not accept Brothers' pretensions, and he criticized his former
illuminist colleagues, "the highest and wisest of you," who became
"the staring dupes of any Brothers who cries, Hark! To
Jerusalem!" (H, 93n.K). Like Blake and Fuseli, he admired the
radical Rosicrucianism of Erasmus Darwin's poetry, and he despised the
conservative mathematicism of Isaac Newton's partisans.
However, it is his continuing praise of Swedenborg and his
utilization of Swedenborg's belief in "illuminated" Africans that
suggests the possibility that Gilbert was in contact with Blake in the lost
years of l793-95. Like Blake, Gilbert was struck by Swedenborg's argument that
there was an interior community of Africans, whose virile potency made them
capable of spiritual influx and angelic communication. Gilbert followed the
efforts of the Swedish abolitionists to found a Swedenborgian colony in Africa,
and he was aware of the timidly compromising changes made by the Sierra Leone
Company to the original illuminist proposals (CM,383). Blake drew on
Swedenborgian themes in "The Little Black Boy" (1789), and he
addressed the slavery issue in Visions of the Daughters of Albion
(1793), as well as in his engravings for John Stedman's narrative of his
experiences with slavery in the West Indies.
In successive works--America
(l793), Europe (1794), and The Song
of Los (l795)--Blake developed an occultist, radical myth of the
interrelationship of the continents that bore a striking resemblance to the
myth developed in Gilbert's Hurricane. There may well have been a mutual
influence.
In l796, after Coleridge printed fragments of The Hurricane,
he persuaded Gilbert to publish the whole. In his Preface, Gilbert explained
that the poem "is grounded on, a Theosophical view of the relation
between America and Europe; but concatenated, because necessary
for illustration, with the two old Quarters of the Globe" (H, iii).
He then extended the theosophical principles he had earlier enunciated in his
"Essay on Magic" to the spiritual principles that rule different
continents. The poem itself retraces his love for a beautiful young woman, who
is washed up on shore by a violent hurricane. Like Stedman, he describes an
idyllic scene of innocent love and sensuality. The atmosphere of timelessness
and retreat from the turbulent world also pre-figures that created by Byron in
the Haidee episode in Don Juan. Like the Swedenborgians, Gilbert
searched for the proper mental mate with whom he could achieve "conjugial
love," as Southey ruefully noted:
Poor Gilbert is
deplorably in love with one of the daughters of
Wainhouse whose poems are to be found in Burnetts Library; he says "she
has a greater compass of mind than any woman he ever conversed with." She
ridicules him I understand. A debating
society meet every Saturday night at the Red Lodge, the members are
respectable, and Gilbert the Cicero
of the forum.[35]
However, it is the bizarre series of notes to The Hurricane
that both enraptured and embarrassed Gilbert's friends. Southey tried to get his
review of the poem published in the British Critic:
It is upon a strange poem with still stranger notes, written by a
man of brilliant genius and polished manners who is deranged. It is easy to
imply this without doing it in terms as would wound his feelings... I know him
and pity him.
Coleridge and
Southey evidently showed the poem to Wordsworth, who was much impressed by the
prose in one of Gilbert's notes. In his own notes to The Excursion,
Wordsworth remarked: "The reader, I am sure, will thank me for the
following quotation, which, though from a strange book, is one of the finest
passages of modern English prose." He then quoted a passage from The
Hurricane:
A man is supposed to
improve by going out into the world, by visiting London. Artificial man does, he extends with
his sphere; but, alas! that sphere is microscopic; it is formed of minutiae,
and he surrenders his genuine vision to the artist, in order to embrace it in
his ken. His bodily senses grow acute, even to barren and inhuman pruriency;
while his mental become proportionally obtuse. The reverse is the man of mind.
He who is placed in the sphere of Nature and of God, might be a mock at
Tattersall's and Brookes's, and a sneer at St. James's: He would certainly be
swallowed alive by the first Pizarro that crossed him:--But when he walks along
the river of Amazons; when he rests his eye on the unrivalled Andes; when he
measures the long and watered Savannah; or contemplates, from a sudden
Promontory, the distant, vast Pacific--and feels himself a Freeman in this vast
Theatre... his exaltation is not less than Imperial...He becomes at once a
child and a king...His mind in himself is also in his God; and therefore he loves, and therefore he soars.
That Keats found
inspiration in this passage for his brilliant image of "Stout
Cortez...upon a peak in Darien"
has long been recognized by scholars.
The note that really distressed Gilbert's romantic friends, however,
was his claim that he was related to a tribe of "Gibberti" in Africa,
who acted as merchants and emissaries for the Abyssinians, who in turn
inhabited the original Garden of Eden (H, 73-83). That Gilbert's family
really had intermarried with Africans meant that there was some plausibility in
his belief of kinship--a point never mentioned by Cottle and Southey, who also
never mentioned the Swedenborgian origins of Gilbert's African theosophy.
Cottle later wrote that Gilbert disappeared in l796, but Southey was still in
touch with him in March l798.
According to Southey, after Gilbert published The Hurricane, he
"placarded the walls in London
with the largest bills that had at that time been seen, announcing "The
Law of Fire."
It was apparently later in l798 when Southey concluded that Gilbert was trying
to sail to Africa in search of the "Gibberti." Worried about
Gilbert's mental condition, he wrote to Fuseli's friend Roscoe in Liverpool to find the poet and prevent his sailing.
Over the next decades, the Bristol
circle believed--or claimed to believe--that Gilbert was dead. In fact, he had
migrated to Charleston, South Carolina, where he prospered in that city's
lively subculture of French revolutionaries, Methodist abolitionists, and
Jewish Freemasons.
Were Gilbert's Bristol friends aware of his activities as a radical,
illuminist Freemason in London? Southey, whose uncle was a prominent Mason in Bristol, was almost
certainly a member of the fraternity.
Moreover, he was a keen investigator of the Swedenborgian movement and the
radical occultist underground in London
(which he colorfully described in Don Espriella's Letters from England
in l807). However, Southey also studied carefully the revelations of the Abbé
Barruel, who accused the Swedenborgians and Illuminés Théosophes of
Masonic conspiracy.
He recognized both the truths and falsehoods in Barruel's sensational exposé:
A little of what
was ascribed to them [the Illuminists] had really occurred, but the whole plot,
colouring, and costuming of the book [Barruel's Memoirs] were
fictitious. It was a work written to
serve the purposes of a party, with the same spirit and same intent as those
which in old times led to such absurd and monstrous calamities against the
Jews; and, had its intent succeeded, there would have been a Saint
Bartholomew's Day in England.
True it was that a Society had existed, whose object was to influence the governments
of Europe; it was well organized and widely
extended, but enthusiasm, not infidelity was the means which they employed.
Southey may have
feared being tarred with Barruel's broad brush, if he revealed anything about
the revolutionary Masonic activities of Gilbert.
Coleridge was also familiar with Illuminism and with Barruel's
accusations of Masonic conspiracy. However, as late as June l800, Coleridge
could proudly accept Southey's charge that he "illuminized" in his political
attitudes:
You say I illuminize--I
think that Property will some time or other be modified by the predominance of
intellect...but first those more particular modes of Property itself must be done
away, as injurious to Property itself--these are, Priesthood and too great
Patronage of Government. Therefore if to act on the belief that all things are
process and that all inapplicable Truths are more Falsehoods, be to illuminize,
why, then I illuminize!
These words
would have been applauded by Gilbert, whose peculiar economic theories in
"The Commercial Academic" had earlier impressed Coleridge. In l815,
as Coleridge struggled with opium addiction and political confusion, he
remembered his old friend. After jotting down his thoughts on "Community with
nature; + the Eye & Heart intuitive of all living yet One
Life in all; + the modifying Imagination, the true creative...robur
intellectuale," Coleridge noted:
The preceding Mem.
reminds me of poor Gilbert's--No one will understand me...I understand myself...We
all love to be a little mad, when we are certain that there is no Witness or Noticer
of our madness. Two master feelings are gratified--Freedom & Dependence.--Who
can be himself, who does not at times prove to himself that he is free?
Perhaps
Coleridge envied the reckless Gilbert, who always confidently affirmed his
freedom--even when confined for lunacy or persecuted by government spies.
Though Southey and Coleridge gave partial witness to Gilbert's
radical esprit, Wordsworth never mentioned any personal information
about the poet, whose prose he so admired. Was he too aware of the political
hazard in public association with Illuminism? During his youthful residence in
France, Wordsworth may have attended lodge meetings, as suggested by the
Masonic affiliation of several of his French friends and the oblique wording of
his tribute to the revolutionary officer Michel Beaupuy:
By birth he ranked
With the most noble, but unto the poor
Among mankind he was in service bound
As by some tie invisible, oaths professed
To a religious Order. Man he loved
As Man...
But, like much
else of his revolutionary activity, Wordsworth quietly buried his possible
"illuminist" past.
Byron saw the extract from Gilbert's poem in Wordsworth's Excursion,
and he may have read the whole Hurricane. Though he was possibly
influenced by Gilbert in the Haidee episode in Don Juan, he ridiculed
the type of millenarian enthusiasm espoused by Gilbert. In fact, Byron's
description of Wordsworth's unintelligibility in the Excursion could
well have applied to Gilbert: "--who can understand him?...Jacob
Behmen--Swedenborg--& Joanna Southcott are mere types of this Arch-Apostle
of mystery & mysticism."
Unlike Gilbert and the theosophical, "illuminist" Masons, Byron
participated in rationalist, "illuminatist" lodges in Italy, whose
members struggled to implement on earth--in defiance of heaven--their
revolutionary vision.
In the process, he became the object of police surveillance over the radical
Carbonari.
In 1820, when Southey praised the "passages of exquisite
beauty" produced by Gilbert, "whose mind was in ruins," he also
noted, "I have among my papers some curious memorials of this interesting
man."
One can only hope that the increasingly reactionary Southey did not destroy
those memorials--and that the rediscovery of William "Hurricane"
Gilbert will continue.
*********************************************
. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, l970), 168-72, 350-51.
. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. Earl L.
Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, l956), I, 164.
. Introd. to William Gilbert, The Hurricane: a Theosophical and
Western Eclogue (Bristol: R. Edwards, l796). Facsimile Rpt. (Oxford and New
York: Woodstock Books, l990), [ii].
. "William Gilbert," DNB. Supplement I.
. Robert Southey, The Life of John Wesley (New York: Evert
Duyckinck, l820), I, 210-11.
. On Ann Hart Gilbert, see Mona Ferguson, ed., The Hart Sisters:
Early African Caribbean Writers, Evangelicals, and Radicals (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska, 1993), 5-14.
. The Conjuror's Magazine, or Magical and Physiognomical Mirror
(London: W. Locke, l791-93), 517. Henceforth cited in text as CM.
. Joseph Cottle, Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
Robert Southey (New York: Wiley and Putnam, l847), 31-32; see also, Early
Recollections; Chiefly Relating to the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, During His
Long Residence in Bristol (London: Longman, Rees, l837), I, 62-69.
. Cottle, Reminiscences, 361-68; "John Henderson," DNB;
Astrologer's Magazine (November l793), 156.
. "William Agutter," DNB. In May l797 Southey urged
his friends to "get Agutter's papers" in order to write "a full
life of John Henderson"; see New Letters of Robert Southey, ed.
Kenneth Curry (New York: Columbia UP, l965), I, 127.
. On the activities of Ebenezer and Manoah Sibly, see J.C.
Brookhouse, "The Good Samaritans or Ark Masons in Politics; with a Note on
Some of Their Members," Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, 24 (l911), 81-106.
. Minet Library: Parish of Lambeth, Poor Rates (l788-1792).
. For background, see my article, "The Secret Masonic History of
Blake's Swedenborg Society," Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 26
(l992), 40-51.
. Gloucester Journal (l9 January l792).
. "Henry Lemoine," DNB. Lemoine was friendly with
Richard Cosway, Isaac Disraeli, David Levi, and the Goldsmid brothers. His
research on the history and techniques of engraving may have led him to contact
with Blake. He also became London's greatest expert on Jewish literature and
printing.
. For the identification of Gilbert as "B.," see Ellic
Howe, Urania's Children: The Strange World of the Astrologers (London:
William Kimber, 1967), 23-24.
. David Erdman, Prophet Against Empire, rev. ed. (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1969), 137-38.
. I have put together a complete run of the magazine from the
incomplete holdings at the British Library, Bodleian, and New York Public
Library.
. See my articles, "William Blake and the Promiscuous Baboons:
A Cagliostroan Sèance Gone Awry," British Journal of Eighteenth-Century
Studies, 18 (1995), 185-200; and "Blake's Tiriel and the
Regency Crisis: Lifting the Veil on a Royal Masonic Scandal," Blake,
Politics, and History, eds. Tony Rosso, Jackie Di Salvo, and Christopher
Hobson (New York: AMS, 1998), 115-35.
. On the Jewish origins of St. Germain, see Raphael Patai, The
Jewish Alchemists (Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, l994, 463-587. It
is also possible that Gilbert referred to Swedenborg, who was sometimes
described as a German baron in London newspapers.
. In November l790, in his Reflections on the Revolution in
France, Burke instructed the reader to "See two books intitled Einige
Originalschriften des Illuminatenordens.--System un Folgen des
Illuminatenordens. Munchen, l787." Reprinted in Two Classics of the
French Revolution (New York: Doubleday, l989), 169.
. A possibility first presented by Mark Perugini, "Blake's
Prophetic Books," Times Literary Supplement (29 July l926), 512.
. Howe, Urania's Children, 24 n.1; G.E. Bentley, Blake
Records (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 32-33.
. Adams initially supported the illuminist activities of the Duché
family and the foreign Masons who visited them at the Lambeth Asylum; however,
he became increasingly conservative. See George Adams, Lectures on Natural
and Experimental Philosophy, 5 vols. (London: Robert Hindmarsh, l794).
. See Gerald Bentley, Blake Books (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
l977), 645.
. See William Spence, Essays in Divinity and Physics (London:
Robert Hindmarsh, l792), 47-53. Blake's friend Cosway owned multiple copies of
this book.
. For the Duke of York's changing politics and Masonic associations,
see Schuchard, "Blake's Tiriel."
. Michael Phillips, "Blake and the Terror, l792-93," The
Library, 6th s., 16 (l994), 263-97.
. For Gloucester's illuminist career, see Schuchard, "Blake's Tiriel,"
where I argue that Blake portrays the prince in the guise of Ijim, brother of
Tiriel.
. By February l796, Coleridge refers to Gilbert as a friend; see
Coleridge, Collected Letters, VI, 1004.
. Gilbert, Hurricane, 51 n.A. Henceforth cited in text as H.
. Barlow, the engraver for Conjuror's Magazine, also
contributed to Stedman's work.
. Robert Southey to Henry
Southey (7 March l798); in New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth
Curry (New York: Columbia UP, l965), 162.
. Southey to Williams Wynn (26 January l797); New Letters,
120.
. Quoted in Cottle, Early Recollections, 67-68.
. Introd. to Hurricane, [iii]; "Gilbert," DNB.
. Southey, New Letters, I, 161-62.
. Southey, New Letters, II, 442.
. W.J. Williams, "Was Robert Southey a Freemason?" Transactions:
Lodge of Research, #2429 Leicester (l926-27), 68-76. Also, see Southey's
Masonic emblem and allusions in The Doctor (London: Longman, Rees,
l834), I, title-page, 136, 165.
. See the long extracts from Barruel's Memoires pour servir a
l'Histoire du Jacobinisme (Londres, l797-98), in Southey's Common-Place
Book, ed. J.W. Warter, 4th s. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, l851),
380-83.
. Robert Southey, Letters from England by Don M.A. Espriella,
3rd, ed. (l807: London: Longman's, l814), III, 196.
. Southey, New Letters, I, 215.
. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen
Coburn (London: Pantheon, 19--), II, 4244 and note.
. The Prelude, Book IX, ll. 309-13; in William Wordsworth,
ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford UP, l989), 516.