Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes
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he chose to say nothing about his time in the little, claustrophobic Pest House, which affected him more deeply than any other part of his ordeal.
News of his whereabouts eventually leaked back to Cambridge via the Grecians of Christ’s Hospital, some of whom must have heard of his adventures in Holborn. Once the story was out, Coleridge received several letters of support and offers of help, from Val Le Grice, Tucker, and Bob Allen. Even his old headmaster, James Bowyer, allowed it to be understood that his prize pupil had volunteered with his permission, thereby safeguarding the precious Christ’s Hospital Exhibition, which would otherwise have been instantly forfeited.51 George Coleridge was naturally distraught and, still not knowing Coleridge’s regiment, persuaded his fellow Jesus College undergraduate Tucker, to forward an unaddressed letter, begging him to get in touch and saying that their mother was ill with worry.
This letter reached Coleridge at the Henley Pest House on 6 February, but he did not dare to open it for two days. His reply on 8 February was hysterical with grief and guilt. “I have been a fool even to madness. What shall I dare promise? My mind is illegible to myself – I am lost in the labyrinth, the trackless wilderness of my own bosom…The shame and sorrow of those who loved me – the anguish of him, who protected me from my childhood upwards – the sore travail of her who bore me – intolerable Images of horror! They haunt my sleep – they enfever my Dreams!”52 The “riot” of feeling was still running with melodramatic strength, oddly confused with the “loathsome form” of the feverish man Coleridge was still patiently nursing.
George immediately answered with a letter of great patience and kindness. “A handsome Sum shall be gotten ready for the liquidation of your College debts, if either my interest or person can procure it – and the business of your discharge commenc’d immediately – Write me as swift as wind – that I may take every step for restoring you to happiness & myself.”53 Once these communications were opened in such a manner, Coleridge was immensely relieved. He could now play the part of the prodigal son, and he proceeded to do so with something approaching gusto.
To James Coleridge, who was put in charge of the delicate and expensive business of negotiating the discharge (which was rumoured to cost more than forty guineas), he wrote that his conduct had “displayed a strange Combination of Madness, Ingratitude, & Dishonesty”; adding pitifully that recruits from his regiment were already being drafted for service abroad. (The manuscript of this letter still hangs in the Officers Mess of the 15th King’s Royal Hussars, one of its most treasured memorabilia.)54
While to George he promised more expansively “a minute history” of all his secret thoughts and actions for the last two years at Cambridge. This emotional confession was written late one Sunday night, 23 February, after his duties at the Pest House were completed. Though it studiously omits any details about Mary Evans, Frend’s trial, or his new political and literary aspirations, it does reveal much of the pent-up guilt he had felt for so long.
His new identity as Trooper Comberbache gave him, paradoxically, a chance to be himself. For the first time one can really hear the voice of the frantic young poet & intellectual, dramatising and over-dramatising himself with a lurid satisfaction that so frequently hovers on pure comedy. As so often in Coleridge’s later life, the absurd disaster of his practical affairs seems almost a liberation of the spirit. His letter soars upwards out of the catastrophe it recounts, with something close to exultation. He makes the worst of everything, brilliantly.
I laugh almost like an insane person when I cast my eye backward on the prospect of my past two years – What a gloomy Huddle of eccentric Actions, and dim-discovered motives! To real Happiness I bade adieu from the moment, I received my first Tutor’s Bill – since that time since that period my Mind has been irradiated by Bursts only of Sunshine – at all other times gloomy with clouds, or turbulent with tempests…I became a proverb to the University for Idleness – the time, which I should have bestowed on the academic studies, I employed in dreaming out wild Schemes of impossible extrication. It had been better for me, if my Imagination had been less vivid – I could not with such facility have shoved aside Reflection! How many and how many hours have I stolen from the bitterness of Truth in these soul-enervating Reveries – in building magnificent Edifices of Happiness on some fleeting Shadow of Reality! My Affairs became more and more involved – I fled to Debauchery – fled from silent and solitary Anguish to all the uproar of senseless Mirth! Having, or imagining that I had, no stock of Happiness, to which I could look forwards, I seized the empty gratifications of the moment, and snatched at the Foam, as the Wave passed by me. – I feel a painful blush on my cheek, while I write it – but even for the Un. Scholarship, for which I affected to have read so severely, I did not read three days uninterruptedly – for the whole six weeks, that preceded the examination, I was almost constantly intoxicated! My Brother, you shudder as you read –55
No doubt George was intended to shudder; but also, to forgive. Even allowing for the Wertherism and exaggeration of all this (Coleridge was deliberately dismissing any academic achievement whatever), it is interesting to find him, long before his days of opium addiction, accusing himself of “soul-enervating Reveries”, and touching on the “Kubla Khan” imagery of edifices, waves and fleeting shadows.
Indeed he was beginning to define the world of his own poetic imagination; and lack of money, lack of “stock”, was really a symbol of a more general lack of worldly, conventional ambitions: something his brothers would never understand. The earnestness with which they now all rallied round to get him back to Cambridge has a touching futility. Coleridge had really escaped through Comberbache. In the Henley Pest House, close to disease and death, he had glimpsed other possibilities. He would go through the motions, but he would not really “come back” again.
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It took over six weeks to obtain his discharge. Meanwhile he was shifted on the regimental baggage cart from Henley to High Wycombe, where he was stationed in a tavern, and effortlessly made friends with the adjutant, Captain Nathaniel Ogle. Seconded to light stable duties, he shared gentlemanly bottles of wine with Ogle, took a daily newspaper, translated Casimir’s poems for his intended classical anthology, and dashed off an essay on the evils of the modern novel for Bob Allen – who submitted it at Oxford for his declamation.56 His letters to George rapidly recovered their old élan, and he gave an amusing account of a pot-house philosopher at the inn, who kept him up till three in the morning spinning “theories of Heaven and Hell”. He added with boldly returning self-confidence: “My Memory tenacious & systematizing would enable me to write an Octavo from his Conversation.”57
Negotiations for the discharge continued with Colonel Gwynne’s office throughout March, but it proved no military formality. The problem was to find a substitute recruit. James did not pursue the matter with much alacrity (he probably felt that the army was just what his younger brother needed), but the faithful George tactfully pressed the case in a series of letters, pointing out that Coleridge needed to return to Jesus by mid-April in order to take his annual Rustat Scholarship exam. George finally went to the regimental headquarters in person. Coleridge meanwhile was drafted back to Henley, quartered at the White Hart and began further training on “an horse, young and as undisciplined as myself”. It ran away with him during each parade, and he was thrown off three times in one week.58
To his embarrassment, several friends came to visit him, including Charles Le Grice, and George Cornish of Ottery who initially failed to recognise him in his riding breeches and powdered and pomatumed hair tied back in a military pigtail. Cornish thought him “much agitated”, and half suspecting his brothers meant to punish him by the delay in discharge: “he gave me a little detail of his sufferings, but he says they are not half enough to expiate