Читать книгу Coleridge: Early Visions - Richard Holmes - Страница 33

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 his follies.” Cornish slipped him a guinea, quite shocked to see him go through “all the drudgery of a Dragoon recruit”.⁵⁹

On 30 March, still not discharged, Coleridge wrote humbly to George promising the “utmost contrivances of Economy” and speaking for the first time of his religious doubts. “Fond of the dazzle of Wit, fond of subtlety of Argument”, he had read Voltaire and Helvetius, who had drawn him into “a kind of religious Twilight”. He still loved the Jesus of the Gospels, but “my reasonings would not permit me to worship.” This marks the beginning of his Unitarian phase, which would lead him for several years into a radical view of Christianity as a philosophy of social reform, with strong egalitarian overtones, which were evidently encouraged by his army experience. He fervently reassured George of his penitence: “believe me your severities only wound me as they awake the Voice within to speak ah! how more harshly! I feel gratitude and love towards you, even when I shrink and shiver –”⁶⁰

When on 7 April definite news of his imminent discharge arrived, he cheered up again and announced he was writing the libretto for an opera.⁶¹ The army had found its own method of dealing with the matter; after an unofficial payment from George of some twenty-five guineas, the Regimental Muster Roll recorded succintly: “discharged S. T. Comberbache, Insane; 10 April 1794”.⁶²