Coleridge: Early Visions. Richard Holmes
trying to furnish them comfortably. These debts were to be the cause of growing difficulties between him and his brothers. After a bad bout of flu, when he took opium without “any disagreeable effects”, he established under Middleton’s guidance a strict, scholarly routine. Chapel twice a day, mathematical reading and lectures in the morning, walks in the afternoons, and long evenings of classical reading and translation work in Middleton’s rooms until eleven o’clock at night, occasionally enlivened by taking pot-shots at the Pembroke College rats.
Val Le Grice sent him parcels of second-hand books from London, and he discovered manuscripts of Thomas Gray’s poems in the Pembroke Library, which he copied out as he had done Bowles’.4 In November he reported virtuously to George, “If I were to read on as I do now – there is not the least doubt, that I should be Classical Medallist, and a very high Wrangler – but Freshmen always begin very furiously. I am reading Pindar, and composing Greek verse, like a mad dog. I am very fond of Greek verse, and shall try hard for the Brown’s Prize ode…There is no such thing as discipline at our college.”5
A letter to Edward Coleridge, written in a “feverish state of body and mind” had a less reassuring effect, being full of “petulance and passion”, complaining about the college, lack of money, and the wild behaviour of the young bloods.6 That month, two undergraduates fought a duel at Newmarket, and one was killed. Thereafter, Coleridge was careful to edit his letters to Ottery and Hackney – they are very different from the wild accounts he sent to the Evans family – and he assured George that he was an “economist”, living without invitations or wine parties, and stressed the improving friendship with Middleton.7
The Christmas vacation of 1791 was spent with the Evanses in Villiers Street where Coleridge passed a “potently medicinal” fortnight, eating turkey, tutoring Tom, and walking the three sisters to their milliner’s shop in Jermyn Street. The sixth-form flirtation now subtly altered into a general seduction of the whole family. He liked both Anne and Mary – the former for her intelligence, the latter for her “beautiful little leg” – but the real attraction, at least initially, was the mother, who treated him with “maternal affection”. He longed to be considered as one of her “very children”, but felt that he was physically too ugly for that.8
Back at Cambridge for the Easter term, while he assured George that he was soberly reading Homer and Horace for the Rustat Exams, he regaled the Evans family with a more colourful version of his doings, as he had promised. He had purchased a swanskin waistcoat in the latest mode, kept a cat in his rooms, and was planning to hire an allotment garden with a fellow undergraduate, George Caldwell (later a Fellow and Tutor of Jesus). He attended wine parties, at which three or four freshmen were “deplorably drunk”, and described hauling one of them out of the shallow Cambridge gutter in King’s Parade. (The man insisted that he save his friend instead: “never mind me – I can swim.”)9
In his rooms, he raised the ghost of Thomas Gray – this for Mary’s benefit – who advised him in a hollow voice: “O Young Man…write no more verses – in the first place, your poetry is vile stuff: and secondly (here he sighed almost to bursting) all poets go to – 11, we are so intolerably addicted to the Vice of Lying!”10 He sent his verses, “Odelings” and translations to Mary – also copies of Bowles, a sure mark of favour. But it was Anne he proposed as his Valentine, perhaps because she was not so dauntingly pretty. He would even have sent the drawing of a heart pierced with arrows – “But as the Gods have not made me a drawer (of any thing but corks) you must accept the will for the deed.”11
Physical inferiority was a constant, if comic note, in these early letters: he described his bad teeth, and asked for a box of “Mr Stringer’s tooth powder”, and noted that a dashing literary lady had described him as “a very gentle Bear”.12 The small, dishevelled schoolboy had grown into a large, shambling young man, with a mass of long dark hair and excitable manners. The mouth was “voluptuous”, the eyebrows stormy, the eyes bigger than ever. (All these features he would later enumerate with mock impartiality.) Nevertheless, he was proud of his robust energy, and described a marathon eight-hour walk round the villages of Cambridge with Middleton, ending benighted in a quagmire and pursued by footpads and Jack-o’-lanterns.
He also boated on the Cam, and fell in gloriously: “we swam to shore, and walking dripping home, like so many River Gods.”13 There was no doubt that “brother Coly” in his tragical farcical role was a grand success at Villiers Street, and when he went there again for the Easter vacation it began to feel like his adopted home. It was to be the first of many.
3
Despite, or perhaps because of, these distractions, it is clear that Coleridge worked very hard at Cambridge throughout the spring and summer of 1792. “I have been writing for all the prizes,” he told George, and he submitted pieces for university awards in the Greek Sapphic Ode (Brown Medal), the Latin Ode, and the Greek Epigrams. He also found time to provide George with the text of sermons to preach at Hackney, an early example of his skill in assimilating and rehandling the writings of others, invaluable for a journalist and lecturer, but a dangerous facility for a literary man later to be much tempted by plagiarism. “I have sent you a sermon metamorphosed from an obscure publication by vamping, transposition, etc – if you like it, I can send you two more of the same kidney.”14* Doggerel verses – “A Fragment found in a Lecture Room” – and an elegant Greek epitaph were also sent, carefully sandwiched round an urgent request for £5 or £10, “as I am at present cashless”.15
The first academic year closed brilliantly in June 1792, when Coleridge’s Greek Sapphic “Ode on the Slave Trade” was declared the winner of the Brown Gold Medal. He had chosen a subject that was politically popular – the West Indian slave trade had recently been debated both in parliament, and in the University Senate – and which showed his growing interest in public affairs, and the libertarian ideas of the French Revolution. Technically it was not quite flawless: Richard Porson, the new Professor of Greek, privately offered to show 134 examples of bad Greek in it. Since the Ode was twenty-five stanzas long, this was more than one error per line.
But for a freshman it was a triumph; he formally declaimed it before the assembled Fellows at Commencement on 3 July, and proudly posted an autographed copy to George, before going down to Ottery for the long vacation. George was so delighted by his youngest brother’s success that he broke out into congratulatory verses earnesly praising the Sacred Fire that flowed “spontaneous from thy golden lyre”.16 For a few brief weeks, Coleridge basked in the approval of his entire family, perhaps the one time in his life that he felt he had achieved what was expected of him.
Through July and August he made a triumphal tour of West Country relatives: Edward at Salisbury, his half-sister at Tiverton, James at Exeter, his mother at Ottery. Racy accounts flowed back to George at Hackney, now written in Latin, prose alternating with hexameters. There was much talk of events in revolutionary France – the storming of the Tuileries Palace, and Tom Paine being elected to the National Convention. Coleridge was amazed at the conservative attitudes displayed: it was thought “very sad” that Paine was “not cut to pieces at Canterbury” on his way to the Continent.17
In fact he was witnessing the beginning of the great wave of English