Coleridge- Darker Reflections Read online

  Meanwhile Major Adye briefed him on military matters, and sent a Corporal to escort him round the cliff-side gun emplacements – “The Noise so deafening in these galleries on the discharge of Guns, that the Soldiers’ Ears have bled.” By contrast, he scrambled alone into the deep silence of St Michael’s Cave, with its massy natural pillars and huge stalactites “the models of Trees in stone”, and wondered at the subterranean chambers (an old fascination) where men had descended three or four hundred feet “till the Smoke of their torches became intolerable”.37

  Sitting high up at Signal House, the very summit of Gibraltar, “which looks over the blue Sea-lake to Africa”, the magic of the Mediterranean south rose up to him in sight and sound and smell (the crushed tansy under his shoe). He thought how many mountains he had stood on in his life, and how the Rock was something profoundly new and mysterious, in all its warlike nameless shapes and intimations. “What a complex Thing! At its feet mighty ramparts establishing themselves in the Sea with their huge artillery – hollow trunks of Iron where Death and Thunder sleep; the gardens in deep Moats between lofty and massive walls; a Town of All Nations & all languages;…fences of the prickly aloe, strange Plant that does not seem to be alive, but to have been a thing fantastically carved in wood & coloured, some Hieroglyph or temple Ornament of undiscovered meaning.”38

  Coleridge was deeply excited by the Mediterranean, and his whole body responded to the physical impact of sun and sea. Moving easily among the soldiers and sailors, picking up their talk and laughter, he saw himself once again as footloose adventurer, poetic traveller, special correspondent for Daniel Stuart’s newspaper. His letter gives detailed naval “intelligence” of Nelson’s lost dispatches, and the Hindoostan burnt out with only four survivors and the loss of fifty guns and £300,000 of cargo, “chiefly of naval Stores of all kinds for Malta with a hundred Artificers”. Malta would be in “great Distress” for these losses, and he thought this would be the first crucial chance to get the news to London, by the return convoy: “after Letters will be better worth the postage”.39

  But, of course, beneath breathless activity, the manly sweating extraversion of the new self, older feelings stirred. “What change of place, Country, climate, company, situation, health – of Shrubs, Flowers, Trees – moving Seasons: & ever is that one feeling at my heart, felt like a faint Pain, a spot which it seems I could lay my finger on.” It was Asra, of course; and everything she represented of the Wordsworths, the Lakes, lost love.

  The past self stood like a ghostly reflection in every company; the remembered hills rose up behind every sunlit cliff and rock. “I talk loud or eager, or I read or meditate the abstrusest Researches; or I laugh, jest, tell tales of mirth; & ever as it were, within & behind, I think & image you; and while I am talking of Government or War or Chemistry, there comes ever into my bodily eye some Tree, beneath which we have rested, some Rock where we have walked together, or on the perilous road edging high above the Crummock Lake, where we sat beneath the rock, & those dear Lips pressed my forehead.”40 This was the cargo of memory that could not be sunk or abandoned or burnt; the secret self that crouched below the waterline.

  Coleridge’s last day on Gibraltar was spent on a “long & instructive walk” with Major Adye round the entire defences, from the gun emplacements to the brewery, discussing British strategy in the Mediterranean. They visited St Michael’s Cave again, and Coleridge was more and more struck by its mysterious rock formations, “the obelisks, the pillars, the rude statues of strange animals” like some cathedral of half-created forms and monuments.41

  They planned to meet again in Malta, and Adye promised to carry home to England whatever letters and journals Coleridge had prepared. Back on the Speedwell, they discussed the dangers of the voyage ahead, and sailors’ superstitions about dates and positions of the moon which reminded Coleridge of his Mariner. Captain Findlay said briskly, “Damn me! I have no superstition”, but then revealed that he thought “Sunday is a really lucky day to sail on.” They were interrupted by a huge cargo-ship, which nearly rammed them as they lay at anchor, and were only saved by Findlay shouting directions to the lubberly crew to go about. “Myself, the Capt. and the Mate all confessed, that our knees trembled under us,” for the towering forecastle threatened to strike them amidships and sink them instantly. This at any rate was not a good omen.42

  6

  The Speedwell got under way from Gibraltar on 25 April 1804, now escorted by HMS Maidstone, and hoping to make the second leg of their journey in a week. In the event it took twenty-eight days, alternately beaten by storms and transfixed by calms, which took a terrible toll on Coleridge’s health and spirits. Initially his journal records the continuing beauty of the seascape, the excitement of a turtle hunt, hornpipe dancing on the deck, and long grog sessions in Captain Findlay’s cabin.

  To beguile the time he began an essay on Superstition, “taken in its philosophical and most comprehensive Sense”, as it affects men of action – soldiers, sailors, fishermen, farmers, even lovers and gamblers – who are placed “in an absolute Dependence on Powers & Events, over which they have no Control”.43 He noted how the patterns of “an old Idolatry” rose in response to physical fear, and fixed themselves angrily on scapegoats or astronomical signs, like the star which dogs a crescent moon. There began to be talk of a “Jonas in the Fleet”, and he dryly remarked that this was one advantage of sailing in a convoy. “On a single Vessel the Jonas must have been sought among ourselves.”

  Conditions aboard the Speedwell steadily deteriorated. The “Mephitis of the bilge burst forth, like a fury” filling the cabins with nauseous stench, turning the gold paintwork red and black and covering everything with a kind of “silvery grease” which stank of sulphur. (Coleridge made a note to ask Humphry Davy about the chemistry of this effect.)44 He became incapable of holding down food, and began to resort to opium: “desperately sick, ill, abed, one deep dose after another”.45 His unhappy dreams of Asra returned, mixed up with memories of schoolboy bullying and deprivation, “Christ Hospitalized the forms & incidents”.46*

  On 1 May, in wet, foggy, oppressive weather, they had drifted back towards the Barbary coast off Carthagina. “We are very nearly on the spot, where on Friday last about this same hour we caught the Turtles – And what are 5 days’ toiling to windward just not to lose ground, to almost 5 years. Alas! alas! what have I been doing on the Great Voyage of Life since my return from Germany but fretting upon the front of the wind – well for me if I have indeed kept my ground even!”47

  On 4 May, a wind got up, and Coleridge composed a grateful sea-shanty for Captain Findlay, “who foretold a fair wind/ Of a constant mind”, though “neither Poet, nor Sheep” could yet eat.48 But the wind turned into a squall, and then a storm, which carried away their foremost yard-arm on 6 May. He sank further into opium, besieged by “these Sleeps, these Horrors, these Frightful Dreams of Despair”. He could no longer get up on deck, and was now seriously ill, with violent stomach pains and humiliating flatulence. A flowered curtain was rigged round his bunk, and he began to hallucinate, seeing “yellow faces” in the cloth. The ship was again becalmed, and he thought the flapping sails were fish dying on the deck.49 Mr Hardy, the surgeon of the Maidstone, was alerted and the rumour went round the convoy that one of the Speedwell’s passengers was dying. Coleridge knew he had become the Jonas of the fleet.

  The opium doses had completely blocked his bowels. The shame, guilt and horrid symbolism of this seized upon him. His body had closed upon itself, just as his mind had become fruitless and unproductive. He was a vessel full of mephitic horror. His journal becomes extraordinarily explicit, and details his sufferings with weird, unsparing exactitude. “Tuesday Night, a dreadful Labour, & fruitless throes, of costiveness – individual faeces, and constricted orifices. Went to bed & dozed & started in great distress.”50

  Wednesday, 9 May was “a day of Horror”. He spent the morning sitting over a bucket of hot water, “face convulsed, & the sweat
streaming from me like Rain”. Captain Findlay brought the Speedwell alongside the Maidstone, and sent for Mr Hardy. “The Surgeon instantly came, went back for Pipe & Syringe & returned & with extreme difficulty & the exertion of his utmost strength injected the latter. Good God! – What a sensation when the obstruction suddenly shot up!” Coleridge lay with a hot water bottle on his belly, “with pains & sore uneasiness, & indescribable desires”, instructed to retain himself as long as possible. “At length went: O what a time! – equal in pain to any before. Anguish took away all disgust, & I picked out the hardened matter & after awhile was completely relieved. The poor mate who stood by me all this while had the tears running down his face.”51

  The humiliation of this experience never left Coleridge. He knew it was caused by opium, and he reverted to it frequently in his Notebooks, and even in his later letters. From now on he dreaded the enema, as the secret sign and punishment for his addiction. The pain of “frightful constipation when the dead filth impales the lower Gut”, was unlike any other illness, because it was shameful and could not be talked about “openly to all” like rheumatism, or other chronic complaints. It crept into his dreams, and haunted him with its grotesque symbolism of false birth and unproductivity. “To weep & sweat & moan & scream for parturience of an excrement with such pangs & such convulsions as a woman with an Infant heir of Immortality: for Sleep a pandemonium of all the shames and miseries of the past Life from earliest childhood all huddled together, and bronzed with one stormy Light of Terror & Self-torture. O this is hard, hard, hard.”52

  It was “a Warning”. Profoundly shaken, he resolved – as he was to do time and again in later years – to do without opium altogether. This resolution was fierce and genuine on each occasion. But what Coleridge could not know was that by now complete withdrawal from the drug was physiologically a virtual impossibility without skilled medical aid. He could no longer do it alone, by a simple effort of will. So each time his will was broken, he suffered and lost confidence in his own powers. This terrible repetition of resolution and failure – like one of the endless, circular punishments of Dante’s Inferno – shaped much of what happened in the second part of his life. Yet he never stopped resolving, and this dogged determination to battle on also became characteristic and took him through experiences that few of his contemporaries shared or even remotely understood.

  Aboard the Speedwell, at midnight on 13 May, he turned towards his Creator for help: “O dear God! give me strength of Soul to make one thorough trial – if I land at Malta – spite all horrors to go through one month of unstimulated Nature – yielding to nothing but manifest danger of Life – O great God! Grant me grace truly to look into myself, & to begin the serious work of Self-amendment…Have Mercy on me Father & God!…who with undeviating Laws Eternal yet carest for the falling of the feather from the Sparrow’s wing.”53

  Crawling back on deck, he found they were in sight of Sardinia. A hawk with battered plumage flew overhead, and settled on the bowsprit, until the sailors shot at it. It flew off heavily among the other ships, and Coleridge listened to the firing from further and further away, as each crew refused it hospitality in turn. “Poor Hawk! O strange Lust of Murder in Man! – It is not cruelty: it is mere non-feeling from non-thinking.”54 He ate rhubarb for his bowels, and was cosseted by “the good Mrs Ireland”, never again referred to as “Mrs Carnosity”.

  Gradually his thoughts grew calmer. “Scarcely a day passes but something new in fact or illustration rises up in me, like Herbs and Flowers in a Garden in early Spring; but the combining Power, the power to do, the manly effective Will, that is dead or slumbers most diseasedly – Well I will pray for the Hour when I ‘may quit the tiresome sea & dwell on Shore’…” He sat at the rudder-case and wrote notes on the moon, the notion of Sublimity, and the nature of poetry. “Poetry – a rationalized Dream – dealing out to manifold Forms our own Feelings – that never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own Personal Selves”.55

  7

  By 17 May Coleridge was quite restored, “uncommonly well”, and observing the noble blue peak of Mount Etna rising out of the eastern waters. By dawn on the 18th the Speedwell was in clear sight of Malta, and Mrs Ireland was confiding in him that she expected to be met by her lover.56 Captain Findlay put on all sail, and by 4 p.m. they were sliding under the huge sandstone fortifications of Valletta harbour ahead of the Maidstone. Observing the great battlements and citadel, originally built by the Knights of Malta to withstand the Great Siege of 1565, Coleridge felt like Aeneas arriving at Carthage.

  Leaving his boxes to be unloaded, he disembarked in the first cutter and clambered breathlessly up the long stairs of Old Bakery Street, feeling like his own Mariner, “light as a blessed Ghost”. He was glad to be alive. He made straight for the Casa de St Foix, the house of John Stoddart, the Chief Advocate of Malta. It stood at the top of the street, a large building in orange freestone, with brightly painted wooden casements and enclosed balconies, commanding a dramatic view over the Marsamxett harbour. Round it spread a labyrinth of tilting streets, enclosed by huge bastions, which echoed with the bustle and shout of Maltese street-vendors, the barking of dogs, the clanging of church bells and rumble of donkeycarts. Music poured from the taverns, as the innkeepers and prostitutes prepared to welcome the new influx of British sailors.

  Coleridge was stunned by the noise and activity. “They are the noisiest race under Heaven…sudden shot-up explosive Bellows – no cries in London would give you the faintest idea of it. When you pass by a fruit stall, the fellow will put his Hand like a speaking trumpet to his mouth & shoot such a Thunder bolt of Sound full at you.”57

  After two hours of confusion and delay among the servants, Stoddart finally appeared and greeted him with a further “explosion of surprise and welcome”. He was given rooms and promised introductions. So began Coleridge’s sixteen-month sojourn on the tiny, rocky, Mediterranean outpost.

  Initially, Coleridge’s plans were uncertain. He would restore his health, travel to Sicily perhaps, keep a journal, maybe find a temporary post in the colonial administration. He would write essays on art or politics, and send articles to Stuart. He would let the Mediterranean sun bleach out his heartache and his opium sickness. What actually fixed these plans was his meeting with the civilian governor of Malta, Sir Alexander Ball. It was, Coleridge later wrote, “that daily and familiar intercourse with him, which made the fifteen months from May 1804 to October 1805, in many respects, the most memorable and instructive period of my life”.58 It was also, perhaps, the most unlikely of all his friendships, for Ball was, par excellence, the man of action, a wartime admiral, confidant of Nelson, hero of the battle of Aboukir Bay, and forceful administrator and strategist.

  Coleridge first met Ball on 20 May, when he called officially at the Governor’s palace, to deliver letters of recommendation to him and General Villettes, the military commander. The great palace with its huge shadowy inner courtyard, planted with palm trees, rather overawed him. The meeting in a vast chamber hung with crimson silk and Italian religious pictures was coldly formal. “A very polite man; but no hopes, I see clearly, of any situation.”59 Ball was a tall, avuncular figure, with a high domed forehead and small observant eyes, who said little. But the following day Coleridge was invited out to his country palace at San Antonio.

  Coleridge rode out with unaccustomed punctuality at 6 a.m., and breakfasted with Ball in a garden full of orange and lemon trees. This time, a Mr Lane, the tutor of Ball’s son, was present and the conversation became more general. It was later that Ball, riding back alone with Coleridge to Valletta through the little stony lanes overlooking the harbour, began to talk of the role of luck in naval actions and life generally.

  Turning to his visitor, Ball suddenly asked if he thought the old proverb was true, that “Fortune Favours Fools”. It could have been meant as a joke, but to his surprise Coleridge launched into a brilliant monologue on notions of chance, accident, contingency and superstition;
and contrasted these with the underlying patterns of scientific law and human skills. In what sense, he asked, could it be said that Humphry Davy’s discoveries in chemistry were lucky? In what sense that a great commander’s victories were fortunate?60

  Ball was impressed, and probably also amused. He began to tell Coleridge his own life story, and on this conversation Coleridge later felt was founded “the friendship and confidence, with which he afterwards honoured me”. It was one of the “most delightful mornings” he ever passed. Very soon he was riding with the Governor over most of the island, and the Coleridgean floodgates were opened, day after day in June. But Coleridge also listened, and Ball’s anecdotes and opinions came to fill his Malta Notebooks. Years later, in 1809, they became the basis for a biographical study – both of Ball and Nelson – in which the notion of leadership and courage, of command and self-command, is philosophically examined.61

  Besides dealing with the civil administration of Malta, most pressing being the matters of law decrees and corn supplies, Ball was also engaged in a continuous debate with Nelson off Toulon, and the War Office in London, over the exact objectives of British strategy in the Mediterranean, as the war unfolded. Ball’s central idea was that Britain should permanently occupy both Malta and Sicily, with a view to controlling the sea-routes via Egypt to India. By mid-June he had enlisted Coleridge in this top-level and highly confidential discussion, commissioning him to draft a series of “position papers” setting forth arguments with the addition of whatever Coleridge could glean from books, pamphlets or newspapers.