Coleridge: Darker Reflections

This was Allston in the American Sublime style perhaps, but it suggests why Coleridge found him congenial company. When the French army arrived at the outskirts of Rome in February, the two men simply sauntered off to Allston’s bucolic retreat up at Olevano under the trees. They remained there for some five weeks, sketching, talking, sampling the Albano wine, and discussing art history and aesthetics. Coleridge’s sketches were verbal ones, describing the green panorama of the Olevano valley – “a Labyrinth of sweet Walks, glens, green Lanes, with Hillsides” – much as it still is. While Allston painted, Coleridge lounged, making notes on chiaroscuro, painter’s easels, goddesses, ruins and harmony.

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In March, primroses came out and it snowed on the blossom of the almond trees.171 Coleridge seems to have been perfectly happy, suspended briefly from all sense of duty or guilt; and Allston asked him to sit for a half-length portrait, relaxed and meditative, in a window overlooking the valley. His face looks puffy and pale, yet handsome and almost raffish, with an extravagant tangle of silk scarves knotted casually round his neck. The mouth is full, and the eyes gaze into the distance with the hint of a smile. The Public Secretary has reverted to his persona of footloose artist on his travels. Coleridge later said it was one of his best likenesses, perhaps partly because it was unfinished.172

But Allston felt he had not captured his friend’s animation, and some ten years after he would try again. He would also try to describe Coleridge in verse, comparing his nightlong talks to a great ship, launched out into the dark of “the Human Soul” but radiating light over the shadowy waters:

…For oft we seemed

As on some starless sea, – all dark above,

All dark below, – yet, onward as we drove,

To plough up light that ever round us streamed.173

They returned to Rome in March for the Easter celebrations, and found the city now occupied by the French army. But Napoleon had not yet ordered the expulsion of English nationals, and Coleridge continued to visit the galleries and the Sistine Chapel, making notes on Michelangelo, Raphael and the Apollo Belvedere, apparently unperturbed. He regarded the French with increasing contempt. On one occasion, he was delivering a learned analysis of the monumental statue of Moses by Michelangelo, which is part of Julius II’s tomb in San Pietro. Coleridge observed that the Moses was remarkable for its beard and horns, which could be interpreted as an ancient sun-sign from Greek, Abyssinian and Middle Eastern mythologies, symbolizing a “darker power than the conscious intellect of man”, and the equivalent to the horned figure of Pan.

At this juncture, two elegant French officers swaggered into the church, and leeringly remarked that Moses wore the beard of a goat and the horns of a cuckold. Coleridge thought this a typical example of “degraded” French wit, not only because it exhibited their taste for “burlesque and travesty”, but because it indicated an inability to grasp a “unified” symbolic pattern as opposed to vulgar and fragmentary “generalizations”. The French were “passive Slaves of Association”. That was why they would never match German literary criticism, or British naval strategy. They saw everything in fixed “parts” without a sense of the fluid “whole”: they had fancy without imagination, wit without intuition.174

He had the same criticism of Bernini’s baroque hemisphere of Papal statues outside St Peter’s: “a great genius bewildered – and lost by an excess of fancy over imagination”.175 Other entries in his Notebooks show him trying to forge a new language of art criticism, obviously in conversation with Allston. How can one use terms like “truth”, “beauty” the “ideal” with proper philosophical accuracy; “without possibility of misconception”?176 And why were direct images from nature always so symbolically powerful? There was a shopkeeper’s sign near the Castello St Angelo, advertising “Aqua Vita, Rosoli, Spiriti, e Tabacchi”, but broken off its wall and “more than half veiled by tall nettles”. Why did this produce the exact image “of a deserted City”?177

But Coleridge was now running short of funds. He gave up his lodgings, and moved in with Wallis’s family, borrowing money from Thomas Russell. Russell would later recall his “destitute condition” and increasing moods of depression.178 Bad dreams and opium returned, and the sense of indecision. “A Kettle is on the slow Fire; & I turn from my Book, & loiter from going to my bed, in order to see whether it will boil: & on that my Hope hovers – on the Candle burning in the socket – or will this or that Person come this evening.“179 Once again he was being forced to meet the necessity of returning home. But still he did not write, and back in England it was only through Stoddart’s letters that there were rumours of him in Rome, being “much noticed” among the German and American colony.

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On 18 May 1806, Coleridge finally set out with Russell for the port of Livorno, making a leisurely journey by vetturino, and stopping off to visit the waterfall at Terni and the galleries of Perugia and Florence. At Pisa he saw the leaning tower by moonlight, “something of a supernatural look”, but was more interested by “the perfect cleanliness & good order” of the two hospitals for men and women. He contemplated the “great door of open iron work” to the wards, through which all must pass.

He was transfixed by the huge fresco in the Camposanto at Pisa, said to be by Giotto and his pupils, “The Triumph of Death”. The faded condition of the tempera, the flat glimmering of human forms without colour or perspective, all processing towards inevitable death, impressed him even more than Dante. He was haunted by it, and over a decade later recalled his impressions at length in a set of Philosophical Lectures. The frescoes presented that sense of inexhaustible and hypnotic power, “which we are reminded of when in the South of Europe we look at the deep blue sky…The same unwearied form presents itself, yet still we look on, sinking deeper and deeper, and therein offering homage to the infinity of our souls which no mere form can satisfy.”180

At Pisa he had less Platonic detachment, and felt that he was now drifting into Death’s cortège. By the time he reached Livorno on 7 June, he was in a mood of “black” despair equal to any experienced in Malta. While Russell looked for a ship to take them back, Coleridge plunged into a suicidal state of gloom, dreading the dangers of the voyage, and dreading even more its safe completion. Nothing could more clearly reveal his reluctance to leave the South, which he had so long half-hidden from himself, disguising it as his duty to Ball, or the difficulties of travel, or his new friendship with Allston. Now all his thoughts turned to his children, the one thing he felt he could not abandon. “O my Children, my Children! I gave you life once, unconscious of the Life I was giving; and you as unconsciously have given Life to me…Many months past I should have essayed whether Death is what I groan for, absorption and transfiguration of Consciousness…Even this moment I could commit Suicide but for you, my Darlings.”181

Even the thought of returning to the Wordsworths and Asra was no comfort. “Of Wordsworths – of Sara Hutchinson: that is passed – or of remembered thoughts to make a Hell of.” He felt racked with pain and self-disgust: “no other Refuge than Poisons that degrade the Being, while they suspend the torment”.182 Grimly, he went out and purchased a brass enema and pipe.

It was not easy to find a ship, as the navy had suspended its operations off Italy, and neutral merchantmen were nervous of taking British nationals. They shuttled between inns at Livorno, Pisa and Florence, making enquiries and spending the last of their money. Allston’s recommendation to Pietro Benevuti, the Professor of Painting at the Florentine Academy, came to nothing as Coleridge was for once beyond the point of projecting his charm in bad Italian. But at last they found an American sailor, Captain Derkheim of “the Gosport”, and Coleridge summoned sufficient energy to convince the Captain that they were cargo worthy of passage on credit. Captain Derkheim later said he had heard nothing like Coleridge since leaving the Niagara Falls.183

The effort of it all was so great that Coleridge awoke the next day screaming and trying to vomit, his right arm paralysed. It gradually wore off, but he believed he had suffered a “manifest stroke of Palsy”. Trying to calm himself, he finally sat and wrote a long letter to Allston at the Cafe Greco in Rome. He did not mention opium, but wrote frankly about his depression, his dangerous illness, and his thoughts of his children.

“But for them I would try my chance. But they pluck out the wingfeathers from the mind.” He praised young Russell for his “Kindness & tender-heartedness to me”; and worried about the Wallis family still in Rome. His farewell to Allston expressed passionate friendship, and a sense of star-crossed destiny as he prepared to leave. “My dear Allston! somewhat from increasing age, but much more from calamity & intense pre-affections my heart is not open to more than kind good wishes in general; to you & to you alone since I have left England, I have felt more; and had I not known the Wordsworths, should have loved & esteemed you first and most: and as it is, next to them I love & honour you. Heaven knows, a part of such a Wreck as my Head & Heart is scarcely worth your acceptance.”184

By 22 June, Coleridge and Russell were back at Pisa, waiting at the Globe Inn for a storm to disperse before boarding. It seems that it was too dangerous to linger in Livorno itself, because of possible arrest by French troops, and Captain Derkheim had already had to pass them off as American nationals. Coleridge would later embroider a much more dramatic story that Napoleon had issued a personal warrant for his arrest, and his “escape” from Rome to Livorno had been arranged through “the kindness of a noble Benedictine, and the gracious connivance of that good old man, the present Pope”.185

A warrant had certainly been issued for the British consul in Rome, Mr Jackson, and a general order to expel British nationals from Italy in May, which was why Coleridge was worried about the Wallis family. But the tale of a hectic personal pursuit was really a fiction, designed to cover up the otherwise inexplicable time he had remained in Italy with Allston, undecided about returning to England at all.186

Coleridge would soon present this whole latter part of his sojourn in the Mediterranean as a sequence of events almost entirely beyond his control: “retained” against his will by Sir Alexander Ball, “duped” by the consul at Naples Mr Elliot, and forced to live in hiding among the bohemians of Rome while pursued by Napoleon’s vengeful officers. In truth, he had acted much more wilfully, delaying and taking casual risks which would have appalled his family and friends.

The true chaos of his existence over the past eighteen months came to a head at Pisa. He was holed up in a cheap inn with an art student, virtually penniless, having a few books and presents in an old box, a supply of opium and an enema, and two precious Notebooks. He was in imminent danger of arrest, disguised as an American, and deeply uncertain if he wanted to return to England to take up his old life and identity. Once again he felt the best solution would have been if he had died in John Wordsworth’s place. “O dear John Wordsworth! Ah that I could but have died for you: & you have gone home, married S. Hutchinson, & protected my Poor little ones. O how very, very gladly would I have accepted the conditions.’187

On the night before their final departure for Livorno, he wrote a hymn to death, sitting in the window of the inn and watching the bolts of lightning crash down over the river Arno. “Sunday, June 22nd 1806. Globe, Pisa…Repeatedly during this night’s storm have I desired that I might be taken off, not knowing when or where. But a few moments past a vivid flash passed across me, my nerves thrilled, and I earnestly wished, so help me God! like a Love-longing, that it would pass through me!”188

Yet this Coleridgean death was no ordinary extinction. It was more like a transfiguration, a complete transformation of the terms of his existence. It would “take him off” to some other dimension. It was: “Death without deformity, or assassin-like self-disorganization; Death, in which the mind by its own wish might seem to have caused its own purpose to be performed, as instantaneously and by an instrument almost as spiritual, as the Wish itself!” It was Death which seemed almost like re-birth, Death which seemed like an act of love, preparing for something new, blowing away the old self:

Come, come, thou bleak December wind,

And blow the dry Leaves from the Tree!

Flash, like a love-thought, thro’ me, Death!

And take a life, that wearies me.189

The imagery of winter, with its dead leaves, still promised the possibility of some other springtime, with the buds and blossoms of another life.

It would be easy to misjudge Coleridge’s mood of temporary despair on departing from Italy. Years later he would remember the “heavenly” valley of the Arno with affection, and put it into his poetry. He would write and lecture on Italian art, and recall the work of Michelangelo and Giotto as “deeply interesting to me…having a life of its own in the spirit of that revolution of which Christianity was effect, means and symbol”. He would fix on Italy as an ideal place of retreat, and an image of spiritual resurrection from the dead. “Were I forced into exile…I should wish to pass my summers at Zurich, and the remaining eight months alternately at Rome and in Florence, so to join as much as I could German depth, Swiss ingenuity, and the ideal genius of Italy; that, at least, which we cannot help thinking, almost feeling, to be still there, be it but as the spirit of one departed hovering over his own tomb, the haunting breeze of his own august, desolate mausoleum.”190

As he and Russell rattled along in the coach to Livorno, he looked tenderly on a group of “beggar children” running alongside and calling to them with a strange “shudder-whistle” of farewell. The Gosport set sail for England on 23 June 1806.

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The passage took fifty-five days – almost twice the outward voyage – and lived up to Coleridge’s worst expectations. He spent much of his time in his cabin, sick and constipated, and for once kept no journal at all of his impressions. They were boarded by a Spanish privateer, but Captain Derkheim talked them free, after throwing official papers (including some of Coleridge’s Malta notes) into the sea. Coleridge submitted to twelve enemas, “my dread of and antipathy increased every time”, each administered by Derkheim in conditions of pain and humiliation. The sense of violation and punishment horrified him, as he later admitted to Southey. “Tho’ the Captain was the strongest man on board – it used to take all the force of his arm, & bring the blood up in his face before he could finish. Once I brought off more than a pint of blood – & three times he clearly saved my Life.”191

Both Derkheim and Russell continued to behave with “every possible Tenderness”, though their own feelings can only be imagined. For the rest it was a battering, claustrophobic voyage: “working up against head winds, rotting and sweating in calms, or running under hard gales, with the dead lights secured”. Russell later wrote home of their grim experience, saying that Coleridge had nearly died. Coleridge himself wrote that “no motive on earth” would make him venture on another sea-voyage of more than three days: “I would rather starve in a hovel”.

Confined in his quarters, he grew fat and pallid, and his Mediterranean tan faded away. Gazing out through the closed porthole, he thought distractedly of Asra at Grasmere. It was perhaps now that the first images of his fine, bleak meditative poem on their love, “Constancy to an Ideal Object” began to coalesce.

…Home and Thou are one.

The peacefull’st cot, the moon shall shine upon,

Lulled by the thrush, and wakened by the lark,

Without thee were but a becalméd bark,

Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide

Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside.192

But it would be many years before the verse were completed.

The Gosport finally sighted Portsmouth in early August, where it was quarantined, and then allowed to continue eastwards into the Thames estuary. Here Coleridge took the earliest chance of disembarking at the little quayside and customs post of Stangate Creek, on the edge of the Medway. He “leaped on land” on the afternoon of 17 August 1806. Leaving his box of books and papers in Captain Derkheim’s care, to be taken on up to Wapping, he hurried to “a curious little Chapel” by the quayside at Lower Halstow, which still exists, overlooking the mournful expanse of the Kentish marshes towards Sheerness. He found it open and empty, and dropping to his knees “offered, I trust, as deep a prayer as ever without words or thoughts was sent up by a human Being”.

Going outside again, he surveyed the lapping waters and the tide running up through the baked mud and yellowing bulrushes of his native land. “Almost immediately after landing Health seemed to flow in upon me, like the mountain waters upon the dry stones of a vale-stream after Rains.”193 The following morning he was in London, at the Bell Inn in the Strand, wondering if he had enough money for a “decent Hat” and a pair of shoes.

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