Richard Holmes – Coleridge: Early Visions (страница 10)
…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
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’
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
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In his happier recollections Coleridge described his final period as a Grecian, between 1790 and 1791, as “the era of poetry and love”. With Bob Allen and Val Le Grice he would escort the three Miss Evanses (Anne, Eliza, and Mary) home on a Saturday, from their milliner’s shop in the West End to the family house at Villiers Street, off the Strand. On summer mornings they would carry “the pillage of the Flower Gardens within six miles of Town with Sonnet or Love-rhyme wrapped round the Nosegay”.33
Even Bowyer’s teaching of poetry became a pleasure and fascination, according to Coleridge. “At the same time that we were studying the Greek Tragic Poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons…I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes.”34
Both Lamb and Leigh Hunt deny that Bowyer’s teaching of poetry was any more than “commonplace”, and that his taste in moderns reached any higher than Pope. Perhaps Coleridge responded more subtly than they; but in reality he seems to have gained this crucial insight into the structure of poetry from his own reading of Bowles and Edward Young.*
Nevertheless he claimed too that Bowyer was an early champion of the plain style: “he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by sound sense…Lute, harp, and lyre, muse, muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hyppocrene were all abominations to him.”35 Perhaps this was so; but the fact remains that his main contribution to the Christ’s Hospital “Album” for 1790 was the highly ornate “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”, packed with eighteenth-century personifications, and opening with full bardic diapason: “Now prompts the Muse poetic lays” – the very style that Bowyer was meant to abominate.