Coleridge: Darker Reflections

(#)

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.

(#) 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.”

(#)

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”.

(#) 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.”

(#) 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?

(#)

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.

(#)

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.

This was work well adapted to Coleridge’s experience as a leader writer for Daniel Stuart on the Courier. Over the next weeks he produced four long papers, the first of which, “The French in the Mediterranean”, was dispatched to Nelson on 7 July 1804. Others followed on “Algeria”, “Malta”, and “Egypt”, which were forwarded to Granville Penn in Downing Street, for presentation to the secretary of state for war, during the summer. A fifth paper on “Sicily” was completed in September.

(#) It was evidently this work which convinced Ball of Coleridge’s real abilities; not merely a poet of genius, he would crisply inform the British Ambassador in Naples. Coleridge was given official rooms in the Governor’s palace and a salary, all within five weeks of his arrival in Malta.

On 5 July he wrote triumphantly to Sotheby, “I have hitherto lived with Dr Stoddart, but tomorrow shall take up residence at the Palace, in a suite of delightfully cool & commanding Rooms which Sir Alexander was so kind as not merely to offer me but to make me feel that he wished me to accept the Offer…Sir A.B. is a very extraordinary man – indeed a great man. And he is really the abstract Idea of a wise & good Governor.”

(#)

As Coleridge got into the new routine of his work, his health improved and his spirits soared. He breakfasted, dined and took evening coffee with the Governor, meeting foreign diplomats and navy staff, and making contact with leading Maltese figures like Vittorio Barsoni, the influential editor of the Malta Gazette. “I have altered my whole system,” he wrote to his wife in July: he was getting up to swim before sun-rise, eating regular meals, spending a few shillings on summer clothes and ice-creams, and filling his Notebooks with Italian lessons and Ball’s table-talk.

With ceaseless, extrovert activity he was able to keep opium at bay, avoid depression, and even stop longing so obsessively for Asra to be with him – a shift of feeling he hoped to put into “a poem in 2 parts”.

(#) He found “Salvation in never suffering myself to be idle ten minutes together; but either to be actually composing, or walking, or in Company. – For the moment I begin to think, my feelings drive me almost to agony and madness; and then comes on the dreadful Smothering on my chest etc.”

(#)

To Stuart he wrote, that “after being near death, I hope I shall return in Spirit a regenerated Creature”; and also with his finances much improved. He started sending confidential copies of the “position papers” for the Courier to publish anonymously (a rather daring form of unofficial “leaks”): “some Sibylline Leaves, which I wrote for Sir A.B. who sent them to the Ministry – they will give you my Ideas on the importance of the Island…you will of course take them – only not in the same words.” If he survived, he would become “a perfect man of business”, and already he considered himself “a sort of diplomatic Understrapper hid in Sir Alexander’s Palace”. In the rocky, sun-beaten island (“86 in the Shade”), he was starting to flourish again.

8

In mid-July 1804 Sir Alexander moved his family and staff four miles inland, to the summer residence at San Antonio, with its high cool rooms, exotic gardens, and magnificent panoramas over Citta Vecchia (Medina) and the eastern approaches. The diplomatic understrapper went with them, now admitted to real intimacy, and was given a fine room immediately under the tower from where he could turn his telescope over much of the island.

(#)

There was a holiday atmosphere, and in the early mornings he wandered for hours in the high stony pastures, never out of the sound of “Steeple Clock and Churchbells”, chewing the pods of locust trees “full of an austere dulcacid Juice, that reminds me of a harsh Pear”. He was continually amazed by the gorgeous variety of trees and shrubs in the San Antonio garden, a sort of oasis among the rocky landscape, where he sat making notes. He listed pomegranate, prickly pear, pepper tree, oleander, date (“with its Wheel of Plumage”), myrtle, butterfly-flower, walnut, mulberry, orange and lemon.

(#) He wished he had a copy of Linnaeus to look them all up in.

Coleridge was happier at San Antonio in the summer of 1804 than he had been for many months. He had “manifest strength and spirits”.

(#) Beside the work for Sir Alexander, he wrote the long-promised letter to Wordsworth laying out the philosophical structure for “The Recluse”, completed a travel journal of the Malta voyage for the Beaumonts (which he later intended to publish), and laid his plans for an autumn expedition to Sicily and Naples.

His Notebooks contain exquisite observations on wildlife, such as his description of the brilliantly coloured green lizards with their bright gold spots and “darting and angular” movements. Some of these approach the condition of prose-poems, meditations on the relations between man and animal, which foreshadow the poems of D. H. Lawrence. The lizard’s attentive posture, “the Life of the threddy Toes…his head & innocent eye sidelong towards me, his side above the forepaw throbbing with a visible pulse”, becomes an emblem of Nature’s mysterious and fragile beauty. One “pretty fellow” lying frozen under Coleridge’s gaze in a network of sun and shade, seems to summon up a protective power to save him from all human interference: “…then turned his Head to me, depressed it, & looked up half-watching, half-imploring; at length taking advantage of a brisk breeze that made all the Network dance & toss, & darted off as if an Angel of Nature had spoken in the breeze: – Off! I’ll take care, he shall not hurt you.”

(#)

9

On 10 August Coleridge set sail for Sicily, in the company of Major Adye who had now arrived from Gibraltar. Sir Alexander Ball generously retained him on his Private Secretary’s salary of £25 per month, and supplied him with a letter of introduction to the honorary consul at Syracuse, G. F. Leckie. But first Coleridge and Adye struck out for Catania along the coast, and made a strenuous ascent of Mount Etna, with local guides. They camped at one of the casina or shelters just above the tree-line, where the ground “scorched” their feet, and dined off meat barbecued over an open fire and drank the local wine, chatting in bad Italian to some beautiful local peasant girls: “voices shrill but melodious, especially the 21 years old wheedler & talker, who could not reconcile to herself that I did not understand her: yet in how short a time a man living so would understand a language”.

(#) Around them stretched the desolate lava field, purple in the shadows, with a “smoke-white Bloom upon it”.

(#)

Coleridge seems to have made two ascents to the crater itself, though curiously there is no description in his Notebooks of the bleak, ashy lip or of his impressions from the top. Yet he seems to have reached it, for ten years later the image came surging back to him in the time of his worst opium struggles when his religious faith was threatened by a dark pit of despair.

(#) “I recollect when I stood on the summit of Etna, and darted my gaze down the crater; the immediate vicinity was discernible, till lower down, obscurity gradually terminated in total darkness. Such figures exemplify many truths revealed in the Bible. We pursue them until, from the imperfection of our faculties, we are lost in impenetrable night.”

(#)

At the time he recalled only the blessed cool of the Benedictine monastery at Nicolsai as they returned, and the next day the sun on Etna rising “behind Calabria out of the midst of the Sea…deep crimson…skies coloured with yellow a sort of Dandelion”.

(#) On the way down he copied a Latin inscription from the monastery gardens. “Here under Black Earth, Ashes of Holy Monks lie Hid. Marvel not. Sterile sand of Sacred Bones, everywhere becomes Fruit, And loads the fruit-Tree Branches…Go on your road, All things will be well.”

(#)

At the ancient port of Syracuse, made famous by Thucydides’s account of the Greek Expedition and its catastrophic defeat, Coleridge was given rooms by Leckie in his idyllic villa on the site of the Timoleon antiquities overlooking the bay. For two months it was his base for a series of rambles round the island, with Leckie often acting as his guide. Leckie was a formidable figure. A classical scholar and adventurer, he had farmed in India, knocked about the Mediterranean, and finally settled with a beautiful wife in Sicily, where his money and fluency in Italian and French set him on equal terms with the local aristocracy. His hospitality, his pungent views, and the flirtatiousness of his glamorous wife, made the Villa Timoleon a popular port of call among numerous English travellers and naval officers, and he remained in regular contact with Sir Alexander. Coleridge’s admiration of Mrs Leckie was expressed in a subtle appreciation of her jewellery: “Mrs Leckie’s opal surrounded with small brilliants: grey blue & the wandering fire that moves about it; and often usurps the whole.”

(#)

The air of voluptuous enchantment which descended over this Sicilian sojourn was oddly disturbing to Coleridge. As he walked and rode between the classical ruins, he was haunted by the discovery that the fields were full of poppies cultivated for opium. Leckie described to him the process in expert detail. “The white poppy seed, sown in the months of October & November, the plants weeded to 8 inches distance, & well watered till the plants are about

/