Kitabı oku: «Coleridge: Early Visions», sayfa 4

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At this period Christ’s Hospital was sharply distinguished from the great public schools such as Eton (attended by Shelley), Harrow (Byron) or Westminster (Southey), with their aristocratic connections, anarchic regimes, and in-built sense of class privileges. There were no riots, no underground magazines, no tutorial friendships between boys and masters, no freedoms outside school hours. It was a highly conservative institution, largely funded by philanthropists from the City of London, with spartan facilities and food, lengthy church attendances, and strictly practical aims for most of its pupils.

The main building, founded by Edward VI in 1552, on the site of a Franciscan friary, stood on Newgate Street close to the prison burnt down by the Gordon Rioters in 1780. To the south rose the dome of St Paul’s, to the east was the Bank of England, to the west the Smithfield Meat Market and the Inns of Court. The boys ate together in the Great Hall with pictures of its benefactors gazing down upon them, attended the church in a special gallery above the nave, and played in a walled and cloistered courtyard. Except on leave-days they were forbidden to go out into the city streets – though there are early records of Coleridge’s truancy – and there was a single long vacation of three weeks during the summer.

Of the three main school divisions, the Writing School prepared boys for commercial apprenticeships at the age of fourteen or fifteen; the Mathematical and Drawings Schools sent boys into the navy and the East India Company at the age of sixteen; and the Grammar School retained the brightest pupils for professional careers in the law, the army, or the Church. The most gifted of these, directly supervised by James Bowyer, were put into a Classical Sixth Form, known as the Deputy Grecians, and from there three or four boys a year – distinguished as the Grecians, with special uniforms and privileges – would go on to Oxford or Cambridge.

The powerful sense of intellectual hierarchy, which affected Coleridge for the rest of his life, inculcated fear and respect for all social authority. When a Grecian walked through the cloisters every other boy was expected to get out of his way. All discipline was enforced by Bowyer with savage and frequent flogging. There was great rivalry between the boys concerning the social standing of parents, and outside gifts of food and money – well reflected in Coleridge’s letters. Nearly half the boys were “orphans” (usually from a widowed family), and the daily Christ’s Hospital hymn referred humiliatingly to their charity status. Coleridge’s frequent references to himself as an orphan, poor and neglected, partly reflect this intense consciousness of status throughout his time at Christ’s Hospital.

Despite the severity of the institution – or perhaps because of it – the school did produce at this time a number of notable literary men and scholars, all from the ranks of the Grecians. Among these were Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, the poet George Dyer, Thomas Barnes (the future editor of The Times), and Thomas Middleton (a classical scholar who became the first Bishop of Calcutta). Of these, Lamb and Middleton were Coleridge’s fellow pupils, the former two years junior, the latter two years senior. All retained vivid and painful memories of Christ’s Hospital.

Lamb, who would later become one of Coleridge’s most faithful friends and confidants, touchingly projected himself into the older boy’s homesickness. In “Christs Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago” (1820), Lamb – as Elia – wrote in Coleridge’s imagined voice of schoolboy grief: “My parents and those who should care for me were far away…How, in my dreams, would my native town (far in the west) come back, with its church, and trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire!” Lamb altered Ottery to Calne (the Wiltshire town where Coleridge wrote his own memoirs of Christ’s Hospital in the Biographia) to avoid upsetting the Ottery Coleridges with accusations of – perhaps romanticised – neglect.

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Coleridge’s own private recollections have a somewhat different tone. He describes himself as magnificently idle in class – until his genius was unfortunately unearthed by Bowyer. He was a down-at-heel ragamuffin in the cloisters, a frequenter of illegal bathing expeditions to the New River in the East End, and a voracious reader of extra-curricular books. These were obtained from a public lending library in nearby King Street, to which he had been given a ticket – so he said – by an unknown gentleman he bumped into in the Strand.

The story, told long after to Gillman, describes another of his epic daydreams: he was Leander swimming the Hellespont, and “thrusting his hands before him as in the act of swimming” he inadvertently struck the man’s pocket on the crowded pavement, and to his bewilderment was accused of pick-pocketing. Tearful denials were followed by a vivid, breathless account of his dreaming re-enactment of Leander’s adventures, all in young Coleridge’s most eloquent, large-eyed manner. The gentleman “was so struck and delighted by the novelty of the thing”, that he ended by subscribing him the library ticket.¹²

This odd tale, which is certainly strange enough to be true, has something curiously prophetic about it: the daydreaming poet – the sudden interruption – the accusation of (literary) theft – the hypnotic, glittering-eyed explanation. They are all emblems of the future literary man at work. The story also suggests that Coleridge was independent enough in his world of books and dreams to regularly go “skulking”, school slang for breaking bounds.

The King Street Library provided him, for two or three years, with a private larder of delights, to substitute for gifts of food.

I read through the catalogue, folios and all, whether I understood them, or did not understand them, running all risks to go skulking out to get the two volumes which I was entitled to have daily…My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read, read, read; fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe’s island, finding a mountain of plumb-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs – hunger and fancy!¹³

His earliest compositions seem to have been a couple of schoolboy charms, or dog-rhymes against sickness. One was intended to ward off the dreaded “itch” that brought the sulphur treatment. The other was against morning cramps, a rhyming spell to be chanted aloud while making magic cross-marks of spittle on the seized calf muscles, “pressing the foot on the floor, and then repeating this charm with the acts configurative thereupon prescribed”.¹⁴ These were his first essays in a long line of poetical incantations.

It was the obsessive reading that first brought him to Bowyer’s fatal attentions, probably in his third year, 1785, in the Grammar School. He was then still under his junior master, the easy-going Mr Field, who had conveniently assumed that he was a daydreaming dunce. Thomas Middleton, the earnest well-meaning scholar, then a Deputy Grecian, found him reading Virgil “for pleasure” in the cloisters, and mentioned this with admiration to the headmaster. Bowyer made enquiries of Field and learned with grim interest that in class the boy was “a dull and inapt scholar” who could not repeat a single rule of syntax. Coleridge was summoned, flogged, and told that he was destined to be a Grecian. Thereafter Coleridge’s dreaming and carelessness “never went unpunished”; and whenever Bowyer beat him he would cruelly add an extra stroke, “for you are such an ugly fellow!”.¹⁵ But the gentle Middleton became henceforth Coleridge’s “patron and protector”, a significant friendship which was to continue right through to Cambridge days, and which was remembered gratefully in the Biographia, with an affectionate classical tag from Petronius.¹⁶

Coleridge’s position improved as steadily as he rose out of the most tribal ranks of the junior boys. His waywardness, cleverness, and voluble charm soon made him fast friends with two other future Grecians, Robert Allen and Valentine Le Grice, who shared the attentions of Bowyer. They formed one of those schoolboy triumvirates of contrasted talents: Bob Allen the handsome extrovert, Val Le Grice the mischievous wit, and Sam Coleridge the learned eccentric.

From 1785 he also had two of his brothers within reach in London, as Luke was training at the London Hospital under Sir William Blizard, and George came down from Oxford to teach at Newcome’s Academy in Hackney. Initially it was Luke who exercised the greatest influence, and Coleridge “became wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon”. He launched into medical and anatomy books – “Blanchard’s Medical Dictionary I had nearly by heart” – and trudged off every Saturday to attend dressings and hold plasters at the hospital. Luke’s fellow medical student, the younger brother of Admiral de Saumerez, vividly remembered the “extraordinary, enthusiastic, blue-coat boy” trailing round the wards with his endless questions.¹⁷

Another, more hair-brained, ambition at the age of fifteen was a scheme to apprentice himself to a local shoemaker, largely because the man and his wife had been so kind to him during the lonely “leave-days”. Perhaps this was a serious attempt to escape from Christ’s Hospital early (apprenticeships were, after all, allowed by the statutes), and to flee back into a less demanding, domestic existence. At all events the kindly shoemaker, a Mr Crispin, was sent packing by Bowyer after a ferocious interview – “Crispin might have sustained an action in law against him for an assault” – and Coleridge was flogged again to remind him of his privileged status as a future Grecian. “Against my will,” he recalled mournfully, “I was chosen by my master as one of those destined for the university.” But it is difficult to believe in his reluctance to excel by this stage, and the whole incident may have been one of Coleridge’s self-dramatisations – the prodigy who merely wanted to be a simple cobbler’s son, a thoroughly romantic role.¹⁸

Soon afterwards both shoemaking and medicine gave way to “a rage for metaphysics”. He read Cato on Liberty and Necessity, discovered Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, and announced that he was a theological sceptic. Bowyer proved himself quite equal to this development too: “his argument was short and forcible – ‘So, sirrah, you are an infidel, are you? then I’ll flog your infidelity out of you.’”¹⁹ Coleridge often spoke of this as the severest beating of his life, though it is one of the many peculiarities of the Biographia that he afterwards pretended that Bowyer was a paragon of pedagogical justice. This is contradicted by all other records of Christ’s Hospital, even that of its official historian, who implicitly admitted that Bowyer was a sadist. Leigh Hunt quietly recalled that Bowyer not only flogged unmercifully, but picked up boys by their earlobes until they bled, and once threw a copy of Homer at him so hard that it knocked out one of his teeth. Hunt later said that Coleridge admitted all this in private, and “said he dreamt of the master all his life, and that his dreams were horrible”.²⁰ Many Notebook entries confirm this.²¹

Coleridge’s genial retrospective attempt to pass off Bowyer’s cruelties in the Biographia is one of the earliest, clear examples of his urge to rewrite his personal history in a comic mode that embraced the authorities he had once rebelled against. This was to show even more sharply in his political reminiscences, where the problem of authority recurs in a different but related form. Yet the deception is a complex one, for Coleridge obviously felt genuinely indebted to Bowyer for the encouragement he was soon to give him as a fledgling poet. The truth seems to be that all his life Coleridge longed to submit to figures of authority, while at the same time he secretly resented many aspects of their domination. Casting himself in a comic role provided a sort of modus vivendi; yet he could rarely resolve the underlying conflict in his life. He longed to assert himself and give free rein to his enormous, anarchic talents; but at the same time he needed to submit, and be petted and approved of. Throughout his life, and his writing, he fluctuated wildly between these two extremes. Only his dead father, perhaps, ever allowed him to do both.

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In spring 1787 Luke qualified as a doctor, and returned to Devon to take up a practice at Thorverton, near Exeter, where he was soon to marry. Coleridge missed him greatly – “I have now no one, to whom I can open my heart in full confidence” – and asked him to keep up “an epistolary correspondence”. In May that year he sent Luke his first serious poems, six stanzas on “Easter Holidays”, and a Latin translation which was accepted by Bowyer for the Christ’s Hospital “Album”. This was a notable distinction at the age of fourteen and a half. The theme is loneliness and misfortune, rendered in the manner of Gray:

Then without child or tender wife,

To drive away each care, each sigh,

Lonely he treads the paths of life,

A stranger to Affection’s tye…²²

Bowyer promised he would be a Deputy Grecian within a year, “if I take particular care of my exercises etc”. Coleridge added that the Bowdons were still very kind to him – “I dine there every Saturday” – and that George in Hackney was now his mainstay. “He is father, brother, and every thing to me.”²³ Instead of plum cake, he now asked for a copy of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, the famous volume of the “Graveyard School”, with its celebration of solitary musings on death and mutability. Adolescence had arrived.

Over the next two years poetry, classics and Platonic philosophy became his dominant interests, as befitted a Grecian. He also discovered his own protégé, a boy called Tom Evans, whose widowed mother lived in London with three teenage daughters, soon to be extravagantly courted by Coleridge and the dashing Bob Allen. It was a time of rapid intellectual development, with long enthusiastic talks in the cloisters, alternating with lonely hours spent up on the school leads – or flat roof. Coleridge found he could secretly climb out through a Ward window and sit gazing at the sunset and the stars, with the spires and domes of the city laid out beneath him.

The taste for roof-top contemplation was one that returned to him years later, at Greta Hall in Keswick. It was there in 1802 that he recalled the first stirrings of his poetic longing, the rich self-conscious sense of beauty and isolation in the world.

In my first Dawn of Youth that Fancy stole

With many secret Yearnings on my Soul.

At eve, sky-gazing in “ecstatic fit”

(Alas! for cloister’d in a city School

The Sky was all, I knew, of Beautiful)

At the barr’d window often did I sit,

And oft upon the leaded School-roof lay…²⁴

Coleridge often later talked of these inspired times to his friends – he described them also in “Frost at Midnight” – and it is interesting how each subtly adapted them to conform to quite different aspects of his boyhood mythology. For Wordsworth, they became the “seedtime” of a visionary poet, the “liveried schoolboy, in the depths of the huge city, on the leaded roof”, who lay alone gazing upon “the clouds moving in heaven”, and who closed his eyes to see by the “internal light” of imagination

…trees, and meadows, and thy native Stream,

Far distant, thus beheld from year to year

Of thy long exile.²⁵

By contrast, for Charles Lamb the genius of Coleridge was not solitary at all. He saw him already as a public figure, finding his natural audience in the gregarious cloisters of Christ’s Hospital – not exiled amidst the clouds but thoroughly at home amidst a circle of admiring boys, urbane, eloquent and sociable. Lamb wrote a celebrated encomium of this schoolboy hero, a radiant figure already bursting with confidence, though perhaps comically so:

Come back into memory, like as thy wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee – the dark pillar not yet turned – Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! – How I have seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar – while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy!²⁶

This is a very different Coleridge from the Wordsworthian exile. Nor does Elia take him entirely seriously – the Neoplatonic mystics and gnostics have the air of being plucked out of a conjuror’s hat, and there is a certain undercurrent of affectionate mockery. In the frequent “wit-combats” with Val Le Grice in the cloisters, Lamb added shrewdly that Coleridge was like a magnificent Spanish galleon – “far higher in Learning”, but wordy and cumbersome – being harried by an English man-o’-war, quick and inventive.

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The year 1789 was a turning point for Coleridge’s whole generation. With the fall of the Bastille in July, the first tide of revolutionary excitement flooded through Europe, reaching even into the remote cloisters of Christ’s Hospital. The sixteen-and-a-half-year-old Coleridge now wrote his first substantial and original poem, “The Fall of the Bastille”. In it he records the “universal cry” of liberty from “Gallia’s shore”, and imagines the spirit of freedom reaching down even to the humble field-labourer:

…mark yon peasant’s raptur’d eyes;

Secure he views his harvests rise;

No fetter vile the mind shall know,

And Eloquence shall fearless glow…²⁷

The excitement was indeed universal, and a hundred such Odes filled the newspapers and magazines: “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”. Wordsworth, already at Cambridge, felt the same sudden intensification of life among the undergraduates, and planned a walking tour in France for the following summer. But perhaps Coleridge alone characteristically pointed out that language itself – “Eloquence” – had been freed.

Feeling his wings and independence for the first time, he visited Ottery during the summer, where he went through the solemn rite of recarving his initials in the Pixies’ Parlour, alongside those of his distant brothers. He learned too that his beloved sister Nancy was gravely ill, and this appears in one of his earliest sonnets, “Life”, dated September 1789, “musing in torpid woe a Sister’s pain”.²⁸ Another sonnet, “To the Autumnal Moon”, also belongs to this period.

This quickening of the poetic impulse – he produced two more translations for Bowyer’s “Album” – reflects another outside influence. Thomas Middleton, now at Pembroke College, Cambridge, sent him a copy of the second edition of William Bowles’ Sonnets. This was one of those books, now largely forgotten, which magically captured the spirit of the times; Coleridge was so excited by it that he wrote out by hand no less than forty copies to give to friends during his last eighteen months at school.²⁹

The collection, a slim octavo volume in fine bold print, consisted of twenty-one sonnets, “Written chiefly on Picturesque Spots, During a Tour”, which Bowles had made through Wales, Scotland, France and Germany in the previous year, while recovering from an unhappy love-affair. It concentrates notably on the evocative, melancholy feelings of seashores and river banks – the shores of Tynemouth, Dover, Ostend; the rivers Tweed, Wenbeck, Itchin, and the Rhine. Bowles, born in the West Country and a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, exactly ten years older than Coleridge, brilliantly captured a new Romantic sense of spiritual isolation and nostalgia for childhood, projecting into natural surroundings the image of a rootless, wandering poet at the mercy of his dreams and memories.

Coleridge could instantly recognise this aspect of himself in many of the gentle, highly musical, and nakedly emotional sonnets, with their familiar imagery, such as “The Bells, Ostend”:

…And hark! with lessening cadence now they fall!

And now, along the white and level tide,

They fling their melancholy music wide;

Bidding me many a tender thought recall

Of summer-days, and those delightful years

When from an ancient tower, in life’s fair prime,

The mournful magic of their mingling chime

First waked my wondering childhood into tears!

In discovering Bowles, Coleridge found that for the first time in his life he was reading “a contemporary”; unlike the remote classics, these poems possessed an immediate reality of circumstances for him, so as to “inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man”. They assumed “the properties of flesh and blood”.³⁰ For the next five years, until he became aware of Wordsworth (who had also been greatly struck by Bowles, stopping to read through the entire volume while crossing London Bridge), they were the dominant influence on his own poetry, though he could only match the “austere” style – “so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real” – intermittently.

In fact throughout this period of apprenticeship there was a long struggle between the “florid diction” and epigrammatic polish and personifications of many of his longer and more formal Odes, Effusions and Monodies; and the Bowles-like plain style, expressing emotion in run-on lines, musical alliteration, and bold monosyllabic statements of personal feeling. This second style – a profound attack on eighteenth-century conventions – became particularly evident in his own shorter pieces and sonnets composed between 1789 and 1794. These included many sonnets about his own experience of change and loss, and family griefs: “To the Autumnal Moon”; “Pain”; “On Quitting School for College”; “On Receiving an Account that his only Sister’s Death was Inevitable”; and his masterpiece in the Bowles’ style (but wonderfully transforming it) “To the River Otter”.

In the Biographia he well described what he was groping after, as a poetry “of the lines running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet, and of natural language, neither bookish, nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel [the gutter], such as ‘I will remember thee’; instead of the same thought tricked up in the rag-fair finery of – ‘Thy image on her wing/Before my Fancy’s eye shall Memory bring.’”³¹ He counted Bowles’ poetry, along with the friendship of Tom Evans’ family, as the two humanising forces in his academic life as a Grecian. Between them, they drew him out of the bookish maze of metaphysics and classical philosophy, into the living world.³²