Coleridge: Early Visions

And bedded sand that vein’d with various dyes

Gleam’d through thy bright transparence!…Ah! that once more I were a careless Child!

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9

In his first year at the King’s School (1779) an epidemic swept through the pupils, and both Sam and George lay dangerously ill isolated at the top of the School House with “putrid fever”. This is the first time that Coleridge experienced the terrible nightmares that returned to him intermittently for the rest of his life, dreams so vivid and overmastering that he would wake whole households at Stowey, at Grasmere, and even at Highgate with his screams, and which are the subject – and indeed the inspiration – of many poems. Even as a boy he tried to keep them off with a poetic charm, the old rhyming prayer, “Four Angels round me spread, Two at my foot & two at my head…”

It was to give him a lifelong sympathy not only with other children suffering night terrors, but with any adult friend on a feverish sickbed, to many of whom he would prove a tender nurse. “This prayer I said nightly – & most firmly believed the truth of it. – Frequently have I, half-awake & half-asleep, my body diseased & fevered by my imagination, seen armies of ugly Things bursting in upon me, & these four angels keeping them off.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The suspended condition of “half-awake & half-asleep”, with the mind floating and planing between the conscious and unconscious state, always fascinated him.

During this illness, Frank, with typical daring and “in spite of orders to the contrary”, would steal up to read Pope’s Homer to his small brother. Sam also became much closer to George, then sixteen and about to go to Oxford, a quiet, kindly, studious boy whom Coleridge would soon look on as his second father. Of the first fifty letters Coleridge is known to have written, thirty-five were to George; and the Poems of 1797 would be dedicated to him, with an epigraph from Horace, “notable among brothers for his paternal spirit”.

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He later wrote – before quarrelling with him – “My Brother George is a man of reflective mind & elegant Genius. He possesses Learning in a greater degree than any of the Family, excepting myself. His manners are grave, & hued over with a tender sadness. In his moral character he approaches every way nearer to Perfection than any man I ever yet knew – indeed, he is worth the whole family in a Lump.”

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His sister Nancy also showed great kindness at this time, and Coleridge came to idealise the brother-sister relationship: “she lov’d me dearly, and I doted on her!” To Charles Lamb, so deeply attached to his own sister Mary, he would later say in a poem of 1794 that she became his only real confidante, listening to all his “puny sorrows” and “hidden maladies”, which he poured forth “As a sick Patient in a Nurse’s arms”.

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But in these reminiscences there is an exaggerated idealising quality, that suggests that the perfection of Nancy was really a disguised form of reproach to his real mother. John, out in India, would also make a cult of his sister, whom he had never seen, while Frank in turn idealised his old nurse, “my good, my dear, and faithful Molly”, to whom he sent money.

(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps they all felt certain reservations about their mother. Yet, except for Sam, they all grew up with a marked self-confidence in personal relations. Frank would cheerfully sign a letter to Nancy, “Your affectionate and handsome brother, Francis”, adding a postscript asking if Maria Northcote was kept fully informed of his growing good looks.

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10

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.

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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.

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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.”

(#litres_trial_promo) 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?

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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!”

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.”

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