Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes

of the Senate House, during eight days in May, and was one of the ringleaders of what the Vice-Chancellor described as “the noisy and tumultuous irregularities of conduct” which frequently interrupted the proceedings.²⁹ On one particular day the clapping and heckling became so bad that the Senior Proctor, Mr Farish, was sent to arrest “one man who had particularly distinguished himself”, his position in the gallery having been carefully noted. This offender was in fact Coleridge; but when Farish pushed through the crowd and seized the man’s shoulder, he discovered that it was an undergraduate with a deformed arm who was quite incapable of clapping. The error produced a barrage of ironic applause, “which continued for some minutes”. What had actually occurred was observed by a Junior Fellow, Henry Gunning, who subsequently included the incident in a history of Cambridge life at this period.

      The name of the young man was Charnock, and his college was Clare Hall; the real culprit was S. T. Coleridge, of Jesus College, who having observed that the Proctor had noticed him, and was coming into the Gallery, turned round to the person who was standing behind him, and made an offer of changing places, which was gladly accepted by the unsuspecting man. Coleridge immediately retreated, and mixing with the crowd, entirely escaped suspicion. This conduct on the part of Coleridge, was severely censured by the Undergraduates as it was quite clear that, to escape punishment himself, he would have subjected an innocent man to rustication or expulsion.³⁰

      Coleridge, not surprisingly, gave rather different versions of this escapade to later friends. To his newspaper editor, Daniel Stuart, who once accompanied him on a nostalgic trip to Cambridge in 1812, he recast the incident as a piece of high farce: Charnock was a man with “an iron hook” instead of a hand, and the kindly Proctor, “well knowing” that Coleridge was the real culprit who might be expelled, deliberately picked on a man who could not possibly be blamed.³¹ Later still, he told James Gillman that after Charnock’s arrest, he went directly to the Proctor’s office and confessed “that no innocent person should incur blame”. Farish told him that he had “a narrow escape”, and let him off.³²

      This may be true, though it is odd that Gunning does not mention it. Yet the pattern of extravagant behaviour, followed by remorseful confession to the authorities, is one that further emerges in 1793 and thenceforth recurs throughout Coleridge’s life, and is surely significant. Gunning’s only other comment is that Coleridge was by now renowned throughout the university for brilliant classical scholarship, flamboyant talk, and peculiar political views.³³

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      There was no doubt that after Coleridge’s failure to win the Craven Scholarship, his whole attitude to academic success altered. There was now little chance that he would obtain a Fellowship, and his secret religious doubts made a conventional career in the Church impossible – though George still hoped for one. It is indicative that the other three finalists either became bishops – as, also, did Middleton – or celebrated public school headmasters.

      Yet this failure can be seen as an immensely liberating one: it saved Coleridge from a safe, Establishment career (as pursued by his brothers in the Church and the army), and threw him back on his inner, imaginative resources, which drew him powerfully and naturally towards poetry, religious speculation, metaphysics, and the political idealism of the time. But unable to explain these wayward longings to his brothers, it also brought intense guilt. He began to live a kind of double life at Cambridge, his wild expenditure on books, drinking, violin lessons, theatre and whoring (he later described this as the time of his “unchastities”) alternating with fits of suicidal gloom and remorse. These were deepened by the news of Frank’s death, which finally reached him soon after the scholarship results, and filled him with depression.³⁴

      The first of many plans for reform, announced to George, now significantly included his earliest scheme to publish poetry.

      I am now employing myself omni Marte in translating the best Lyric Poems from the Greek, and the modern Latin Writers – which I mean in about half a year’s time to publish by Subscription. By means of Caldwell, Tucket, & Middleton I can ensure more than two hundred Subscribers – so that this and frugality will enable me to pay off my debts, which have corroded my Spirits greatly for some time Past. – I owe about £50 to my Tutor – and about £8 elsewhere…I think therefore of staying all the Summer in Cambridge…I have been lesson’d by the wholesome discipline of Experience.³⁵

      Meanwhile his letters to Mary Evans continued to describe wine parties, “swingeing Impositions” from the Dean, the radical politics of the opposition leader Charles James Fox – “quite the political Go at Cambridge” – and the performances of Mrs Siddons, which suggest that he was already making clandestine visits to London. “And why should not a man amuse himself sometimes? Vive la bagatelle!”³⁶

      By July, his finances were in such a state that he was forced to go down to Ottery for the vacation, to confront James and George with his debts: from £58 they had suddenly grown to the remarkable sum of £148 17sl ¹/₄d, a figure of delusory accuracy.³⁷ He confessed some at least of his “follies”, and after a severe family conference, fraternal cash was provided to pay off some of these at the commencement of the Michaelmas term. Meanwhile he embarked on his customary tour of relations in Salisbury, Exeter and Tiverton.

      The atmosphere was now subtly different from the scholarly triumph of the previous year: there was much drinking and arguing with Edward, much flirtation with local girls, and considerably more poetry. At Salisbury he first glimpsed Bowles crossing the market-place, but did not dare to speak to him; at Exeter he attended a literary society at which a newly published poem, “An Evening Walk”, by an unknown writer, William Wordsworth, was read out and praised.³⁸

      He wrote unguardedly to George in August: “I stayed at Tiverton about 10 days, and got no small kudos among the young Belles by complimentary effusions in the poetic Way…Do you know Fanny Nesbitt? She was my fellow-traveller in the Tiverton diligence from Exeter. – I think a very pretty Girl.”³⁹ This suggests that he was seeking consolation for Mary Evans having already decided that his love for her was ill-starred because of his lack of academic prospects: though he had not plucked up courage to declare himself, and indeed would never do so until the very end of the affair in November 1794.⁴⁰ The poems of this summer included, besides various pieces “of the namby pamby Genius”, his “Sonnet: To the River Otter”, and a long sentimental Ode set in the Pixies’ Parlour at Ottery, “Songs of the Pixies”. Here he presents himself in the melancholy manner of Bowles, as the sorrowing, lonely, lovelorn young poet:

      Thither, while the murmuring throng

      Of wild-bees hum their drowsy song,

      By Indolence and Fancy brought,

      A youthful Bard, “unknown to Fame”,

      Wooes the Queen of Solemn Thought…⁴¹

      Perhaps the most striking aspect of this poem is the prose preface, which Coleridge subsequently attached to it for publication in 1796. In it he first shows his genius for mythologising the place and conditions in which his poetry was conceived. In a quiet and delicately understated way, it entwines local folklore with the magic psychology of memory and love, in a manner that points towards much later work. It was his first attempt to re-invent a poetic world of natural emblems, in which the imagination stealthily transforms the everyday into the visionary. The