Coleridge: Darker Reflections

11

The first of these was no less than a trip to Russia and the Black Sea. One of Sir Alexander’s primary duties in the defence of Malta was to obtain corn supplies, and each spring he sent a special mission to purchase corn in Greece, Turkey and the Crimea. He now requested Coleridge to consider undertaking the 1805 mission, in company with a Captain Leake, departing in January for a round trip of three or four months. “The confidence placed in me by Sir A. Ball is unlimited…but it will be a most anxious business – as shall have the trust and management of 70, or 80 thousand pounds, while I shall not have for my toils & perils more than 3 or 4 hundred pounds, exclusive of all my expenses in travelling etc.” For the moment he was undecided.¹⁰²

The Russian proposal finally forced Coleridge to turn to the question he had been avoiding for many months, not least at the bedside of Cecilia Bertozzi. What was he really doing in the Mediterranean? Did he intend to make a new life out there, to abandon once and for all the difficulties of his marriage, the affections of his children, the ambiguous dreams of happiness with Asra and the Wordsworths? Could he remake his career as a civil servant and diplomat, writing poetry and political reports, following Sir Alexander’s wartime star, drawing an ever-increasing salary, and settling in some exotic country villa shrouded in orange and lemon groves, waited upon by servants and some dusky, voluptuous Italian muse? Could this be a rebirth, a second life; or an ultimate self-abandonment, with the alluring demon of opium ever at his side?

It is clear that the answer hung in the balance for many weeks in the winter of 1804–5, and was not fully resolved until the following summer. But now for the first time he faced it. In a long letter of 12 December to his wife Sara, he set out the position. His health was radically improved, his work for the government was valuable and well paid, he could guarantee her an allowance of £100 a year and a continuance of his life assurance policy in her favour, as well as the £150 Wedgwood annuity. “I remain faithful to you and to my own Honour in all things.” He was “tranquil”, though never happy – “no visitations of mind or of fancy” – and he agonized always over his children – “My children! – my children!” – sometimes in “a flood of tears”. He had only agreed to consider the Russian mission “in a fit of Despair, when Life was a burthen to me”, and he would refuse it “on the whole, if I could get off with honour”. Yet all the same, he might stay in the Mediterranean, in Malta or Sicily or Sardinia. He admitted this in a sudden burst of explanation and self-contradiction, which well expressed his divided feelings.

If I could make up my mind to stay here, or to follow Sir A.B. in case that circumstances & changes in the political world should lead him to Sardinia, no doubt, I might have about £500 a year, & live mainly at the Palace. But O God! O God! if that, Sara! which we both know too well, were not unalterably my Lot, how gladly would I prefer the mere necessaries of Life in England, & these obtained by daily Effort. But since my Health has been restored to me, I have felt more than ever how unalterable it is!¹⁰³

One wonders how Sara Coleridge would have understood this. Her wayward husband’s “unalterable lot” could be taken as simply a reference to his opium addiction, which had been known to her ever since 1801. Or it could be a darker admission, of Coleridge’s depression and unhappiness, his emotional incompatibility with her, and still obsessive love for Asra which made any true return and reunion impossible. Perhaps indeed the two elements were inextricably involved for him, and he was trying to get her to accept this. He concluded his letter with a formal assurance that “whatever & wherever I am” he would make it his “first anxiety and prominent Duty” to contribute to her happiness; and signed “most anxiously and affectionately, your Friend and more than Friend, S. T. Coleridge”. But it could not have been a reassuring letter to receive.¹⁰⁴

Sitting up in his garret in the Treasury, gazing out at the “beautifully white sails of the Mediterranean (so carefully when in port put up into clean bags)”, Coleridge considered the same problem in the privacy of his Notebooks. He felt the “Quietness, Security within & without in Malta”.¹⁰⁵ He valued the regularity, the naval comradeship among the officers, the smooth sequence of time and command, “the rings of Russet smoke from the evening Gun, at Valletta”.¹⁰⁶ He was working; he was content; he saw a possible future for himself.

But was he happy? In a long, calm, reflective entry he considered it. “Days & weeks & months pass on; and now a year; and the sun, the Sea, the Breeze has its influences on me, and good and sensible men. – And I feel a pleasure upon me, & I am to the outward view of all cheerful, & have myself no distinct consciousness of the contrary; for I use my faculties, not indeed as once, yet freely. – But oh [Asra]! I am never happy, – never deeply gladdened – I know not, I have forgotten what the Joy is of which the Heart is full as of a deep & quiet fountain overflowing insensibly; or the gladness of Joy, when the fountain overflows ebullient – STC.”¹⁰⁷

That absence, surely, was his unalterable lot; and for the moment he rested within it, waiting upon events. Through the long nights he read deeply, Thomas More on Utopia, Sir Thomas Browne on religion, Harrington on government. No letters reached him from England.¹⁰⁸

On 18 January 1805, the eighty-year-old Public Secretary of Malta, Mr Macauley, died in his sleep in a thunderstorm. Coleridge was immediately offered and accepted the post of Acting Public Secretary, the second in diplomatic rank to the Governor, with a salary of £600 a year. The Russian mission was put aside, and Coleridge agreed to remain with Sir Alexander in Malta for the next three months or until the arrival of the new Public Secretary, Mr Chapman, on the springtime convoys in March or April. The post was distinguished but laborious, requiring regular work in Sir Alexander’s cabinet, the drafting of a steady stream of bandi or civil decrees, and attendance in the law courts.¹⁰⁹

Coleridge was pleased, for though it curtailed the opportunities for further travel and writing, it would sort out his finances, and give him valuable experience of public affairs. It also put off the problematic question of his return from the Mediterranean. He wrote cheerfully to Southey, who had become in effect the guardian of his children at Greta Hall: “I am and some 50 times a day subscribe myself, Segretario Publico dell’Isole di Malta, Gozo, e delle loro dipendenze. I live in a perfect Palace, & have all my meals with the Governor; but my profits will be much less, than if I had employed my time & efforts in my own literary pursuits. However, I gain new Insights; & if (as I doubt not, I shall) I return, having expended nothing, having paid all my prior debts…with Health, & some additional knowledge in Things & Languages, I shall surely not have lost a year.”¹¹⁰

But as he settled into his work, letters did begin to reach him from England, and the news that they brought was bad and began to throw his plans into disarray. First was the rumour that Mr Jackson, the landlord of Greta Hall, was considering selling the house in his absence, leaving his family and Southey’s without a home. Second was the bitter intelligence that his friend Major Adye had died of plague in Gibraltar and all his effects were burnt by quarantine officers. Thus one by one, most of Coleridge’s literary papers of the previous year had been destroyed. He had lost the entire travel journal for Beaumont, the letter to Wordsworth on “The Recluse”, an extended political essay for Stuart, and several long family letters. All back-up copies of these had also been lost from the frigates Arrow and Acheron, thrown overboard according to navy regulations during pursuit by French privateers.¹¹¹

Thus almost all his literary work in the first year at Malta (except for the four strategic papers) had been useless. Among them, incidentally, must have been the missing account of climbing Mount Etna. Later he felt that he was being “punished” for all his previous neglect, by “writing industriously to no purpose” for months on end. “No one not absent on a dreary Island so many leagues of sea from England can conceive the effect of these Accidents on the Spirits & inmost Soul. So help me Heaven! they have nearly broken my Heart.”¹¹²

So more and more Coleridge turned now to his Notebooks. They are extraordinarily rich for the winter and spring of 1804–5, despite the daily pressures of his duties as Public Secretary. While there are only six letters home between January and August 1805, there are over 300 Notebook entries for a similar period, amounting to several hundred manuscript pages, mainly in four leather or metalclasp pocket-books, much worn from carrying.¹¹³ Coleridge recorded his external life, visits to hospitals, workhouses, the theatre, and his regular talks with Sir Alexander about government, diplomacy and warfare. Even more vividly he recorded his inner life: dreams, psychological analysis, theories of perception, religious beliefs, superb visions of the Mediterranean landscape and skyscape, and long disquisitions on opium-taking and sexual fantasies.

Coleridge turned to these Notebooks in Malta, as consciously as he had done during the dark winters of the Lake District, as witnesses to his trials for the after times. “If I should perish without having the power of destroying these & my other pocket books, the history of my own mind for my own improvements: O friend! Truth! Truth! but yet Charity! Charity! I have never loved evil for its own sake; no! nor ever sought pleasure for its own sake, but only as the means of escaping from pains that coiled round my mental powers, as a serpent around the body & wings of an Eagle.”¹¹⁴

12

Coleridge was in a lively mood throughout the Christmas of 1804, planning to write “300 volumes”, allowing ten years for each. “You have ample Time, my dear fellow!…you can’t think of living less than 4,000 years, & that would nearly suffice for your present schemes.”¹¹⁵

He analysed his talkativeness as producing a “great Blaze of colours” that dazzled bystanders by containing too many ideas in two few words. “My illustrations swallow up my thesis – I feel too intensely the omnipresence of all in each, platonically speaking.” His brain-fibres glittered with “spiritual Light” like the phosphorescence “in sundry rotten mackerel!” Once started on a subject he went on and on, “from circle to circle till I break against the shore of my Hearer’s patience, or have any Concentricals dashed to nothing by a Snore”.

Yet at Malta he had tried to restrain himself and had earned, he believed, “the general character of being a quiet well-meaning man, rather dull indeed – & who would have thought, that he had been a Poet ‘O a very wretched Poetaster, Ma’am’”.¹¹⁶

If by day Coleridge gave the impression of a busy, punctilious bureaucrat, bustling between the Treasury, the palace and the Admiralty Court (where he argued cases in a wig and gown), dining cheerfully with the Governor and gossiping with senior clerks like Mr Underwood in the corridors, his night life was another existence altogether. It was solitary, introspective, and often intoxicated. On 27 December he started using cipher in his Notebooks, and entered bleakly: “No night without its guilt of opium and spirits.”¹¹⁷

After his autumn débâcle with Cecilia Bertozzi, he was much preoccupied with sexual matters. He dwelt on the link between mental and physical arousal, the sexual stimulation of dreams, the different sense of “Touch” in lips and fingers, and operations of “the mem(brum) virile in acts of (Es)sex”. He brilliantly intuited a whole modern theory of “erogenous zones” existing outside the genital area, which respond to sexual excitement. “Observe that in certain excited states of feeling the knees, ankle, side & soles of the feet, become organic. Query – the nipple in a woman’s breast, does that ever become the seat of a particular feeling, as one would guess by its dormancy & sudden awakings.”¹¹⁸ Most strikingly, he linked sexual confidence and fulfilment with more general feelings of well-being and spiritual optimism in life:

“Important metaphysical Hint: the influence of bodily vigour and strong Grasp of Touch facilitating the passion of Hope: eunuchs – in all degrees even to the full ensheathment and the both at once.”¹¹⁹ (This last entry was also in cipher, and might suggest a personal anxiety about impotence caused by opium.) Later in the spring he countered this in a beautiful entry about his own children, as proof of sexual power and as part of a living resource of social amelioration: “the immense importance of young Children to the keeping up the stock of Hope in the human species: they seem as immediately the secreting-organ of Hope in the great organized Body of the whole Human Race, in all men considered as component Atoms of Man, as young Leaves are the organs of supplying vital air to the atmosphere.”^120*

In January 1805 these night-speculations led to a devastating piece of psychological self-analysis, examining the patterns of hope and dread which had dominated his early life. “It is a most instructive part of my Life the fact, that I have been always preyed on by some Dread, and perhaps all my faulty actions have been the consequence of some Dread or other on my mind: from fear of Pain, or Shame, not from prospect of Pleasure.”

Coleridge ran through his boyhood horrors at Christ’s Hospital, his adolescent “short-lived Fit of Fears from sex”, his wholly “imaginative and imaginary Love” for Mary Evans. Then came the “stormy time” of Pantisocracy when “America really inspired Hope”, and his increasingly unhappy marriage. “Constant dread in my mind respecting Mrs Coleridge’s Temper, etc. – and finally stimulants in the fear & prevention of violent Bowel-attacks from mental agitation.” Finally came the “almost epileptic night-horrors in my sleep: & since then every error I have committed, has been the immediate effect of these bad most shocking Dreams – anything to prevent them.”

He summed it up in an extraordinary, domestic image of food: of a child’s comfort-food, sticky and enticing, but which is also red and bleeding like a wound. “All this interwoven with its minor consequences, that fill up the interspaces – the cherry juice running in between the cherries in a cherry pie: procrastination in the dread of this – & something else in consequence of that procrastination etc.” The entry ends with a desperate thought of Asra, how he had “concentred” his soul on a woman “almost as feeble in Hope as myself”.¹²¹ Self-pity and self-knowledge were finely balanced in these reflections, and the sinister percolating cherry juice gleams dark red like laudanum splashing into a wine glass and running down his throat.

But on other nights in January and February, Coleridge was also making superb, lucid entries on subjects as diverse as aesthetics, politics, theology or philosophy. Notes on Ball’s talk of Mediterranean strategy mix with discussion of the Platonic fathers, etymology, astronomy versus astrology, Roman Catholic superstitions, Captain Decatur’s naval adventures, the symbolism of wood-fires, the spring flora of Malta, or the attempt to assassinate the Bey of Tunis. Many of these topics would later appear in Coleridge’s books and lectures, so that this whole period of reading and self-immersion served a purpose not immediately evident to Coleridge and yet vital to his intellectual expansion and development.

Coleridge’s power to draw analogies and cross-references is continually astonishing. Reading Samuel Horsey’s critique of the Greek philosopher Athenagoras on the subject of childbirth (in A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of St Albans, 1783, a book he had picked up on the secondhand stalls of Queen’s Square in Valletta), Coleridge emerges with the concept of “organic form” which was to shape years of lecturing back in London. “Wherein then would Generation differ from Fabrication, or a child from a Statue or a Picture? It is surely the inducement of a Form on pre-existing material in consequence of the transmission of a Life…The difference therefore between Fabrication and Generation becomes clearly inducible: the Form of the latter is ab intra, evolved; the other ab extra, impressed.”¹²² From this distinction, as from his earlier observations on sailing-ships, a whole theory of imaginative “generation” would come.

One of his most persistent night-themes is the huge Mediterranean moon viewed from his garret window across Valletta harbour. To Coleridge it was still the magic moon of the “Ancient Mariner”, but now he turned to it with a new intensity, as a witness to his own sufferings. One midnight it was “blue at one edge from the deep utter Blue of the Sky, a mass of pearl-white Cloud below, distant and travelling to the Horizon.” He found himself praying to it, as to a divinity. “Consciously I stretched forth my arms to embrace the Sky and in a trance I had worshipped God in the Moon: the Spirit not the Form. I felt in how innocent a feeling Sabeism might have begun: O not only the Moon, but the depth of the Sky!” He recognized in this a profoundly religious instinct that was to grow with ever-greater force in the coming years: that he was not spiritually self-sufficient, and that he had a primitive, almost pagan, need for an external power. “O yes! – Me miserable! O yes! – Have Mercy on me, O something out of me! For there is no power (and if that can be, less strength) in aught within me! Mercy! Mercy!’¹²³

On another, calmer night the same feeling emerged more philosophically. Now the moon presaged a whole theory of poetic language, which would take its authority from the same recognition of transcendent human need deep within the spirit. Now it was language itself – the divine logos – which impelled Coleridge from a pagan Pantheism to the rebirth of a fundamental Christianity. The moon at Malta provided Coleridge with a religious revelation about divine power radiating through the natural universe. It was for him, with his fundamental and never-abandoned identity as a poet, essentially an articulating power, an expressive fiat as in the opening of the Book of Genesis.

In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering thro’ the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing any thing new. Even when the latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phenomenon were the dim Awaking of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature. It is still interesting as a Word, a Symbol! It is LOGOS, the Creator! and the Evolver!¹²⁴

13

All this time Coleridge continued his daylight work as Public Secretary. In February he was inspecting the hospital, every wall covered with grotesque crucifixes, and in the ward for venereal diseases a child of twelve in the same bed as an old man of seventy.¹²⁵ In March he was sailing round the harbour to inspect the defences with Lieutenant Pasley. Spain had now declared war against Britain, and the French fleet had broken out of Toulon. The convoy system was in shambles, and Nelson was making a sweep to the Azores. Communications were disrupted, and there was no sign of Mr Chapman (Coleridge’s replacement) who was somewhere in the Black Sea. The plague, which had carried off Major Adye at Gibraltar, now threatened Valletta and beach landings were expected imminently in Sicily or southern Italy.

Back in England the Wordsworths were deeply worried. They had planned to leave Grasmere in 1805, and settle wherever they could persuade Coleridge to join them on his return, which they expected in the spring. But they had had no news for three months, “no tidings of poor Coleridge, for Heaven’s sake”, and feared the worst from war or pestilence.¹²⁶ Daniel Stuart had gazetted Coleridge’s appointment as Public Secretary in the Courier, but waited in vain for further dispatches from him.

But the disaster that struck came from a wholly unexpected quarter. At one o’clock on 31 March 1805 Coleridge was summoned from the Treasury by Sir Alexander to attend a diplomatic reception. As he entered the packed drawing-room, Lady Ball turned to him and asked if he knew Captain John Wordsworth. “Is he not a Brother of Mr Wordsworth, you so often talk of?” John Wordsworth’s ship, the Abergavenny, had been wrecked in a storm off Weymouth, with the loss of all cargo, three hundred men and the captain himself. Lady Ball faltered, as she saw Coleridge go pale. “Yes, it is his brother,” he replied, and staggered from the room. He walked back to his garret, supported by the Sergeant-at-Arms and pursued by Sir Alexander. As he got to his door, he collapsed. Later he would say that the shock was so great that he “fell down on the ground in a convulsive fit” in front of fifty people in the “great Saloon of the Palace” itself.¹²⁷

It was an expressive exaggeration. He was ill for a fortnight, and shaken in a way that only the Wordsworths could have understood. William wrote to Sir George Beaumont: “We have had no tidings of Coleridge. I tremble for the moment when he is to hear of my brother’s death; it will distress him to the heart, – and his poor body cannot bear sorrow. He loved my brother, and he knows how we at Grasmere loved him.”¹²⁸ For the Wordsworths, who had also invested heavily in John’s ship, his death was to change all their plans for the future and tighten the little Grasmere circle, “the Concern”, in ways that subtly affected their commitment to Coleridge.

For Coleridge himself it was news that haunted and terrified him, with intimations of failure, loss and physical horror. “O dear John: and so ended thy dreams of Tarns & mountain Becks, & obscure vales in the breasts and necks of Mountains. So thy dream of living with or among thy Brother and his. – O heavens! Dying in all its Shapes, shrieks; and confusion; and mad Hope; and Drowning more deliberate than Suicide; – these, these were the Dorothy, the Mary, the Sara Hutchinson, to kiss the cold drops from thy Brow, & to close thy Eyes! – Never yet has any Loss gone so far into the Life of Hope, with me. I now only fear.”¹²⁹

The violence of his reaction can also be explained by the role he had sometimes imagined for John, as his own alter ego in Asra’s heart, capable of bringing her one day a solid, companionable love, which he could not match. If this seems a strange, almost masochistic displacement, it was genuine and indeed typical of Coleridge. “O blessed Sara, you whom in my imagination at one time I so often connected with him, by an effort of agonizing Virtue, willing it with cold sweat-drops on my Brow!”¹³⁰ At some level, Coleridge felt it should have been him who had died in John’s place.

The news of John Wordsworth’s death also brought to a head the question of Coleridge’s return to England. William confidently expected that it would be immediate: “he has engagements with the Governor: if these do not prevent him I am sure he will return the first minute he can after hearing the news. I am as sure of this as if I heard him say so.”¹³¹ But he could not hear the silent night-voice of Coleridge’s Notebooks, which was more than ever uncertain. “Lord Nelson is pursuing the French Fleet & the Convoy is to be deferred. I felt glad – how can I endure that it should depart without me? Yet if I go, wither am I to go? Merciful Providence! what a cloud is spread before me: a cloud is my only guide by day and by night: I have no pillar of Fire…”¹³²

It was the same “procrastination” that had greeted the news of the death of his child, little Berkeley, long ago in Germany. But now it was his whole future life that seemed at issue. Part of him longed to go back to his children, to Asra and the Wordsworths; part of him would do anything to avoid a reunion with Mrs Coleridge; and part of him simply luxuriated in the easy, expansive living of the Mediterranean, the orange trees coming into blossom (“a prodigality of beauty”), the talkative dinners with Ball and the navy officers, the guilty opium sessions at night, the drowsy sexual dreams, the endless reading and philosophizing. Above all, perhaps, his suspended exile in Malta allowed him to fantasize about Asra: “O Sara! gladly if my miserable Destiny would relax, gladly would I think of thee and me, as of two Birds of passage, reciprocally resting on each other in order to support the long flight, the awful Journey.”¹³³

Throughout April his opium-taking increased, and he struggled with boils and fever. Sometimes his thoughts turned to suicide – “Die my Soul, die! – Suicide – rather than this, the worst state of Degradation!–”¹³⁴; and sometimes he even beat himself, “hands, breast or forehead, in the paroxysms of Self-reproof”.¹³⁵ Eventually the convoy left without him, and he resumed work as Public Secretary more busily than ever. The note of pure pleasure quickly returned, as on the afternoon he walked up to join Sir Alexander for a weekend at San Antonio in the gardens. “Having had showers (23 April) I smelt the orange blossom long before I reached St Antonio. When I entered it was overpowering: the Trees were indeed oversnowed with Blossoms, and the ground snowed with the fallen leaves: the Bees on them, & the golden ripe fruit on the inner branches glowing.”¹³⁶

He wrote to Stuart that his work occupied him “from 8 o’clock in the morning to 5 in the afternoon, having besides the most anxious duty of writing public Letters and Memorials”. He was bitterly disappointed at having missed the spring convoy, and all sea-voyages were now perilous; but he was planning to return overland by Naples, Trieste and Germany, to outflank the French armies now pressing down on Austria and northern Italy. “I have resolved, let the struggle cost what it may, & even at the forfeiture of Sir A. Ball’s Good will, to return home at the latter end of May.” He wrote similarly to Wordsworth: “O dear Friends! Death has come amongst us!…I mean to return in the latter end of May at all events, and have wept like a child that the convoy is off without me, but my office of Public Secretary makes it impossible.”¹³⁷

But in fact this resolution was not to be carried out for a further year. Perhaps the only hint of his divided feelings came in his evident attachment to Ball and the satisfaction in working for him. “Sir A. B. behaves to me with really personal fondness, and with almost fatherly attention – I am one of his Family, whenever my Health permits me to leave my own House.”¹³⁸