Kitabı oku: «Coleridge: Early Visions», sayfa 3
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In the autumn of 1779, when he was seven, a quarrel took place between Sam and Frank which throws much light on the psychology of the youngest son, and which Coleridge himself shrewdly presented as a formative event. It is given more space than any other incident in the autobiographical letters to Tom Poole, and often reappears in the poetry. It began, one October evening in the kitchen of the Vicarage, in a dispute about food – and favouritism. Sam, typically demanding, had asked his mother to prepare him some special sliced cheese for toasting. Frank stole in, and minced it up “to disappoint the favourite”, and a violent fight ensued. Fifteen years later Coleridge still entered into the drama as he wrote.
I returned, saw the exploit, and in an agony of passion flew at Frank – he pretended to have been seriously hurt by my blow, flung himself on the ground, and there lay with outstretched limbs – I hung over him moaning & in a great fright – he leaped up, & with a horse-laugh gave me a severe blow in the face – I seized a knife, and was running at him, when my Mother came in and took me by the arm – I expected a flogging – & struggling from her I ran away, to a hill at the bottom of which the Otter flows – about one mile from Ottery.44
The violence of this little scene is surprising – the “dreamer” is armed with a kitchen knife – and calls into question the whole poetic image of the “careless” childhood.
Sam fled down through the gardens of the Chanter’s House to his old friend the river, going along the bank almost as far as Cadhay Bridge. Here he hid. “I distinctly remember my feelings when I saw a Mr Vaughan pass over the Bridge, at about a furlong’s distance – and how I watched the Calves in the field beyond the river.” It grew dark, and he remained there for the entire night, “a dreadful stormy night”, and a long time for a boy of seven. He said his prayers, and thought “at the same time with inward & gloomy satisfaction, how miserable my Mother must be!” Finally he went to sleep under a mass of old thorn bush cuttings, within a few yards of the water’s edge.
His mother, indeed, was “almost distracted”. She sent out first to the churchyard where he still often played, then despatched boys all round the streets; and by dark raised a general alarm. By ten o’clock half the town had turned out to search for the missing child, the Ottery town-crier was sent to the neighbouring villages, and the ponds and mill-race were dragged. The search continued throughout the night without success, and “no one went to bed”. At five in the morning Sam awoke, now frozen through, and too weak to move. “I saw the Shepherds & Workmen at a distance – & cryed but so faintly, that it was impossible to hear me 30 yards off – and there I might have lain & died – for I was now almost given over.” His saviour was Sir Stafford Northcote, the good old fox-hunting squire, and Coleridge relived the moment of his rescue with perhaps the deepest emotion of all his childhood reminiscences.
By good luck Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been out all night, resolved to make one other trial, and came so near that he heard my crying – He carried me in his arms, for near a quarter of a mile; when we met my father & Sir Stafford’s Servants. – I remember, & never shall forget, my father’s face as he looked upon me while I lay in the servant’s arms – so calm, and the tears stealing down his face: for I was the child of his old age. – My Mother, as you may suppose, was outrageous with joy…I was put to bed – & recovered in a day or so – but I was certainly injured – For I was weakly, & subject to the ague for many years after.45
Coleridge added that “neither Philosophy or Religion” would allow him to forgive a local lady who suggested that he should have been whipped for this exploit.
Its importance to him is shown by the number of times he referred to it in later life. Both Tom Poole and the Gillmans at Highgate were given detailed accounts; and it recurs in his Notebooks. Twenty-four years later, one cold summer night at Keswick, he thought he heard one of his own children moaning: “listened anxiously, found it was a Calf bellowing – instantly came on my mind that night, I slept out at Ottery – & the Calf in the Field across the river whose lowing had so deeply impressed me – Chill+Child+Calf-lowing probably the rivers Greta and Otter.”46 Other versions of the incident appear in Act III of his verse-play Osorio; in his “Monody on the Death of Thomas Chatterton”; in stanza seven of his great poem “Dejection”; and in the fragmentary prologue to “The Wanderings of Cain”, possibly as late as 1828:
Alone, by night, a little child,
In place so silent and so wild –
Has he no friend, no loving mother near?47
What was its significance to Coleridge? It was clearly the idea of being the abandoned and outcast child, the child “lowing” like a calf for its lost parents. The bitter rivalry with Frank, for food and affection, was merely a pretext for this much deeper sense of grievance. Coleridge never harboured a lasting grudge against his brother, but after his departure for India, even tended to hero-worship him. He wrote to George in 1793: “he was the only one of my Family, whom similarity of Ages made more peculiarly my Brother – he was the hero of all the little tales, that make the remembrance of my earliest days interesting!”48
For the first time in his life he had taken the fictional drama of the outcast – Robinson Crusoe, Philip Quarll – and played it out in childish reality, enacting a kind of symbolic revenge against his parents, and especially his mother. The whole point of his flight, his night of “exile”, was to demand further expressions of their affection: his father’s tears, his mother’s “outrageous” joy. It was to be the first of many such symbolic escapes throughout his life, and his poetry, acts of flight and exile, with their undertone of “inward and gloomy satisfaction”.
Yet the exploit remains a strange episode, a piece of wilful mischief by a spoilt, clever, and highly strung child determined to be the centre of attention. Little Sam was, after all, very far from being outcast or abandoned at this time. Relations with his mother may have been passionate and difficult, but the Reverend John paid much attention to the boy, encouraging him once more in his adventurous reading, and devoting long evenings to the development of his extraordinary mind.
Of the following year, 1780, Coleridge recalled with something close to idyllic happiness:
I read every book that came in my way without distinction – and my father was very fond of me, & used to take me on his knee, and hold long conversations with me. I remember, that at eight years old I walked with him one winter evening from a farmer’s house, a mile from Ottery – & he told me the names of the stars – and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world – and that the other twinkling stars were Suns that had worlds rolling round them – & when I came home, he shewed me how they rolled round –. I heard him with a profound delight & admiration; but without the least mixture of wonder or incredulity. For from my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii etc etc – my mind had been habituated to the Vast.49
Looking back at this early vision of the natural universe, opened up to him by his beloved father, Coleridge characteristically saw the beginnings of his own metaphysical interests even at the age of eight. He felt that his mind was naturally formed to a religious, mystical conception of the world, always reaching towards a sense of infinity and unity within the creation. Once again he was interpreting his childhood along Romantic lines, opposed to the whole analytic and rational tradition of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment education. It is interesting to compare this with John Stuart Mill’s criticism of his own strictly utilitarian upbringing in his Autobiography (1873).
Coleridge put this to Tom Poole with what was, at twenty-five, glowing confidence in his own powers.
I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions not by my sight – even at that age. Should children be permitted to read Romances, & Relations of Giants & Magicians, & Genii? – I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a love of “the Great”, & “the Whole”…I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness; but when they looked at great things, all became a blank & they saw nothing…and uniformly put the negation of a power for the possession of a power – & called the want of imagination, Judgment, & the never being moved to Rapture Philosophy!50
That childlike sense of reverence and wonder remained with him, almost miraculously, far into middle age.
Despite such lyrical recollections as this, it is hard to decide how happy Sam really was at Ottery. There are no more than fleeting references to him in his brothers’ letters, and Coleridge’s own evidence is curiously contradictory. Against the golden memories of his father’s kindness, there are the tight-lipped references to his mother, and (in later letters to George) the forlorn recollections of his brothers’ lack of interest. In 1804 he would write with sudden vehemence, “I was hardly used from infancy to Boyhood; & from Boyhood to Youth most, MOST cruelly,” but this was at a time of general discouragement, and self-pity.51
In his poetry, the picture is consistently magical and dreaming, but this was part of the carefully orchestrated Romantic myth. It has to be set against the equally vivid account of the night-escape to the Otter, which might almost suggest a disturbed child. The desire to perform, to please, to claim attention, to impress his elders, is certainly very evident; and this he would carry into later life. With it came those entrancing natural powers of talk and charm which never left him. It was a charismatic gift, coupled with the effect of his extraordinary eyes, almost like that of an actor or an old-fashioned mountebank. It was confirmed by all who met him (whether approving or not), and eventually put to work professionally in a long public career as lay preacher, popular lecturer, society talker, improvisatore, and philosophical sage or guru. Yet against this, the solitariness of his imaginative life, with its obsessional reading, its dream-haunted inner world, its terrors and self-doubts, also established itself in these earliest days.* One of the saddest, and yet most ironic, reflections he ever made on these first years – coming from the great champion of innocent Romantic childhood – was given with a sigh to Gillman: “Alas! I had all the simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the child’s habits. I never thought as a child, never had the language of a child.”52
TWO ORPHAN OF THE STORM
1
Whatever the quality of Coleridge’s happiness at Ottery, everything changed just before his ninth birthday, with the sudden and wholly unexpected death of his father, the Reverend John, in October 1781. The circumstances suggest considerable stress within the family.
It had been decided – perhaps because of the rivalry and battles between the two youngest brothers – to send Frank into the navy at the early age of twelve. He was signed on as a junior midshipman under Admiral Graves, a family friend, and taken to Plymouth with his small sea-chest by his father, where he joined a convoy for Bengal. It must have been a heart-breaking parting, for the Reverend John, then aged sixty-two, could not realistically expect to see the boy again.
He returned from Plymouth via Exeter on 4 October, evidently upset, and having – according to Coleridge – dreamed a strange allegorical dream, that Death “as he is commonly painted” had touched him with his dart. He drank a bowl of punch, went to bed, and died that same night of a massive heart attack. Coleridge always remembered his mother’s “shriek” in the night, and his instant realisation that “Papa is dead”. He may have felt some sense of childish responsibility for his father’s loss (if he had quarrelled less with Frank, it might never have happened); or he may obscurely have blamed his mother for forcing one more premature departure from Ottery. Certainly in later life he came to fear his own death at night from “a fit of Apoplexy”. At all events, the sense of bereavement was very strong, and henceforth he would often refer to himself as an “orphan”. He was not quite nine.1
His life now altered rapidly. Ann Coleridge lost her position and income, and almost immediately the family moved out of the spacious Vicarage and School House, into temporary lodgings provided by Sir Stafford Northcote in the Warden’s House nearby. Of the children still nominally at home, George was at Oxford, Luke at medical school, both with fees to pay. She was now largely dependent on what James, still making his way in the army, and John, far away in India, could provide. It was decided that Nancy would have to get work as a shop-assistant in a milliner’s at Exeter; and Sam would have to be sent to a boarding school on a charity grant. That winter he was temporarily allowed to continue as a day scholar, without fees, at the King’s School by the new headmaster Parson Warren. Sam pronounced his father’s replacement to be a “booby”, and picked holes in his grammar-teaching, “every detraction from his merits seemed an oblation to the memory of my Father”.2 Plans for Charterhouse fell through, and Judge Buller recommended a formal application to Christ’s Hospital, London, originally founded for the sons of needy clergy, famous throughout the city as “blue-coat charity boys”. It was the same uniform that Thomas Chatterton had once worn in Bristol.
On 28 March 1782, Sam’s godfather Mr Samuel Taylor drew up the petition to Christ’s Hospital, countersigned by the new vicar the Reverend Fulwood Smerdon MA. (The job of vicar and headmaster had now been divided, a final testimony to the Reverend John’s great abilities.) Ann’s financial anxieties were emphasised by the rather misleading way she was described as being left “with a Family of Eleven Children, whom she finds it difficult to maintain and educate without assistance”. She also agreed to “the right of the Governors of Christ’s Hospital to apprentice her son”, if Sam did not prove academically promising.3 This clause effectively put Sam’s destiny in the hands of the Christ’s Hospital authorities, and did indeed make him the child of an institution. Family worries about this were to be expressed most forcibly by John in India, when he later wrote from Surat enclosing a handsome £200, and urging James not to neglect Sam’s education “in any respect whatever”, and suggesting he seek the help of “his very good friend” General Godard. John, incidentally, also strongly objected to the plan for Nancy: “I would rather live all the rest of my days on Bread and Water than see my sister standing behind a counter where she is hourly open to the insults of every conceited young Puppy that may chance to purchase a Yard of Ribbon from her.”4
James, however, busily seeking promotion from his captaincy, does not seem to have bothered much with Sam, content to pursue his own very successful career. He became a lieutenant-colonel in the Exmouth and Sidmouth Volunteers, married a local heiress Frances Taylor in 1788, and by 1796 was able to purchase the Chanter’s House at Ottery, thus becoming – as Coleridge said with some irony – “a respectable Man”. John, on the other hand, continued to worry about his little brother up to the time of his own death. In one of his last letters from Bengal in 1785, he wrote to James: “I have been thinking these some days past of getting Sam, a couple of years hence, sent out to me as Cadet at the India House. Let me know your sentiments on this scheme…”5 Thoughts of John, and Frank, far away in India were to have subtle influence on Sam’s restless dreams in the future.
Frank’s convoy had been met at Bombay by his brother John, who arranged for his transfer from the navy to the Indian army as a subaltern. Dashing and high-spirited (“the young dog is as fond of his sword as a girl is of a new lover,” wrote John approvingly), Frank was promoted to an ensign of infantry in 1784, and served with distinction for eight years, until wounded in a night-attack on Seringapatam. His commanding officer, Lord Cornwallis, presented him with a gold watch for his gallantry. But Frank contracted a fever, and shot himself in delirium soon after, dying in 1792 aged twenty-two.
Coleridge was much impressed by this romantic military career, which came to seem a reproach for his own fecklessness at Cambridge (as his mother no doubt pointed out), and later composed a fictional sketch of Frank’s upbringing in his poem “The Foster Mother’s Tale”, which ends with a haunting image of the young man’s loss in the distant “golden lands”. Characteristically, the fever and suicide is transformed into a moonlit voyage up an imaginary river. The “poor mad youth”
…seized a boat,
And all alone, set sail by silent moonlight
Up a great river, great as any sea,
And ne’er was heard of more: but ‘tis suppos’d
He liv’d and died among the savage men.6
2
Sam was accepted at Christ’s Hospital (probably through the influence of Judge Buller) for the Michaelmas term of 1782, with a six-week preliminary attendance at the preparatory school at Hertford beginning in July. If Ann Coleridge did not wish to be parted from her youngest child, there is no sign of this, for she immediately despatched him to London in April to spend the spring and summer with her brother John Bowdon. The impression that she was glad to have him off her hands is increased by the remarkable fact that he was not allowed back to Ottery, during the brief Christmas and summer vacations, more than three or possibly four times over the next nine years. Significantly, Coleridge left no memory of his parting from his mother at Ottery, except in a sonnet of 1791 when he refers rather formally to how his
weeping childhood, torn
By early sorrow from my native seat,
Mingled its tears with hers – my widow’d Parent lorn.7
Nor is there much evidence of correspondence between school and home: of his seven known schoolboy letters, only one is to his mother; another is to Luke, and the remaining five are to George, whose role as father-figure became increasingly evident.
The first three months in London with Uncle Bowdon – who kept a tobacconist’s near the Stock Exchange and was also a part-time clerk for an underwriter – were recalled with immense and comic satisfaction by Coleridge. Far from grieving for the countryside of Ottery, he revelled in his first experience of the big city, and felt his wings as a talker and social being. Bowdon was a kindly, generous man but also a drinker – “a Sot” who was “fleeced unmercifully” by his servant in the shop, and bullied at home by “an ugly and an artful” daughter. Sam accompanied him on his frequent escapes to the taverns, and had his first unforgettable taste of the great talking-shop of London, the Johnsonian world of clubs and coffee-houses, with its last echoes of the elegant, rakish Augustan society of Steele and Addison.
It was all highly unsuitable for a child of nine and a half, and pleased him no end. “My Uncle was very proud of me, & used to carry me from Coffee-house to Coffee-house, and Tavern to Tavern, where I drank, & talked & disputed, as if I had been a man –. Nothing was more common than for a large party to exclaim in my hearing, that I was aprodigy etc etc etc – so that, while I remained at my Uncle’s, I was most completely spoilt & pampered, both mind and body.”8 But this vision of forbidden, urban, adult delights – which attracted Coleridge’s gregarious nature all his life – was merely a prologue to the tribal, schoolboy horrors to come.
In July he “donned the Blue coat & yellow stockings”, and went down to the prep school at Hertford for six weeks, where he was briefly very happy – “for I had plenty to eat & drink, & pudding & vegetables almost every day”. Then, in September 1782, he was delivered up to the Under Grammar School of Christ’s Hospital, one small boy among 600, with his private world reduced to an iron bedstead in a “ward” or dormitory of fifteen others. For the next three years his existence was remembered with self-pity and righteous indignation: “Oh, what a change! depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved”.9
These early, beastly memories of Christ’s Hospital have a familiar ring, and variations can be found in the schooldays of many English writers: Shelley, Dickens, or Kipling. The rising bell at 6 a.m.; the miserable food, consisting largely of bread, thin porridge, and bad beer – and “never any vegetables”; the heartless “Nurse” or dormitory matron, who scrubbed him with stinging sulphur ointment against ringworm; the ill-fitting clog shoes and the nauseous stench of the communal boot-room and lavatories; the flogging in the classrooms and the loneliness in the cloisters. He later indignantly told Godwin that he was treated with “contumely & brutality”, and frequently took refuge “in a sunny corner, shutting his eyes, & imagining himself at home”.10
There is however evidence that Coleridge, with his verbal fluency (despite the Devon accent which he retained all his life), and his powerful, moody temperament (sometimes utterly withdrawn, sometimes exuberantly outgoing and wild) stood up quite well to the ordeal. Despite the “excessive subordination” to senior boys required, there was little overt suggestion of bullying or homosexuality. Though it is true that in his adult dreams nightmares of Christ’s Hospital would often surface, suggesting more subtle forms of persecution, physical humiliations and, above all, profound, almost disabling homesickness. Many of these dreams would centre on the headmaster, James Bowyer, who became a dominating figure in the later part of his schooling.
Coleridge’s first known letter home, which dates from February 1785 – when he was twelve – says almost nothing of school life, but mentions a litany of Ottery friends he wishes to greet, and a careful enumeration of small presents sent to him: “two handkerchiefs and the half-a-crown from Mr. Badcock…a half-a-crown from Mrs Smerdon, but…not a word of the plumb cake…My aunt [Bowdon] was so kind as to accommodate me with a box”. It was a stiff, schoolboy performance, with only tiny glimpses of his real life and thoughts: “I suppose my sister Anna’s beauty has many admirers. My brother Luke says that Burke’s Art of Speaking would be of great use to me.” It is signed rather formally to his mother, “your dutiful son”; but has a revealing concession in its postscript: “P.S. Give my kind love to Molly.”11
