Richard Holmes – Coleridge: Darker Reflections (страница 13)

Captain Pasley, who had also pulled back with his regiment to Sicily, wrote to a fellow-officer, “I was happy to meet our friend Coleridge at Naples, certainly few men are more interesting. He is now at Rome, where he stayed. Not withstanding advices of the English Resident there [Jackson] to retire, I hope the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling may never contemplate the roof of a French prison: but from his natural indolence I cannot be too sanguine of his taking himself off in time.”¹⁶⁴ Coleridge’s book box was also shipped back, and eventually finished up where it had started, in Valletta with Stoddart. Coleridge was alone with his shirts, his guidebooks, and two remaining notebooks, in the Eternal City.

It seems to have suited him very well. Within a matter of days he had introduced himself with great success into the circle of two notable expatriate groups, one literary and the other painterly, who frequented the artistic quarter round the Spanish Steps. The first was a group of German writers who gathered at the splendid residence of Wilhelm von Humboldt, directly overlooking the Trinita dei Monti. Humboldt was a distinguished young diplomat in his mid-thirties, brother of the famous South American traveller. He had been appointed Prussian Minister to the Court of Pius VII, and held a salon with many German university visitors where Coleridge, an honorary graduate of Göttingen, immediately felt in his element.

Humboldt had formed a life-long friendship with Schiller at Jena University, and developed advanced theories of linguistics and philology, publishing learned papers on Basque and Javanese dialects. His notion of a “language world” was calculated to appeal to Coleridge, and his famous binary concept of “the Dual” (as opposed to two singulars and/or a plural) was much in Coleridge’s metaphysical style. Humboldt later championed ideals of “academic freedom”, and helped to found Berlin University. He was a patron of both arts and sciences, and among his protégés at the Trinita dei Monti was the brilliant young Romantic poet and critic, Johann Ludwig Tieck.

Coleridge formed an animated friendship with Tieck, discussing Goethe and A. W. Schlegel, and the latest philosophical work of Schelling (who had also been a professor at Jena) which they compared with that of the mystic Jacob Boehme. It was probably now that Coleridge first came to grips with Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), which rekindled his ambition to write his own general philosophical treatise at some later date. Tieck’s sister, Sophie Bernhardi, later wrote to Schlegel of the remarkable Englishman at Rome, who knew so much current German literature and who admired Schlegel’s own work on Shakespeare “unbelievably so”. Coleridge in turn admired Tieck, translated one of his poems,¹⁶⁵ greatly valued his hospitality and “kindness”, and met him again years later in London with fond recollections of their Roman hours together.¹⁶⁶

But Coleridge’s real intimacies were formed in the more bohemian circle of the painters. At the Cafe Greco on Strada de’ Condotti he fell in with a group that included George Wallis, Thomas Russell, and the 27-year-old American artist Washington Allston. Russell was an art student from Exeter, and Wallis a Scottish landscape painter travelling through Italy with his family, including a ten-year-old son grandly named Trajan Wallis, who delighted Coleridge with his precociousness. But it was Washington Allston, a dreamy young man, elegant and aristocratic, with wild black hair framing a pale abstracted face, to whom he most instinctively warmed.

Allston had grown up on a cotton plantation in South Carolina, and had the slow finesse of a Southern gentleman. Moneyed and leisurely, he had attended Harvard and gone on to study art in Paris and at the Royal Academy in London, where he knew Fuseli and Benjamin West. Melancholy and amusing, he said he had received his imaginative education through the stories of the black plantation workers, tales of “barbaric magic and superstition…ghosts and goblins…myths and legends to startle and alarm”.¹⁶⁷ He had a “tendency towards the marvellous” and loved to stay up all night talking. A friend said Allston could never paint the reflections of dawn sunlight on water, because he had never seen a sunrise.

Naturally, Allston espoused the Sublime school of painting, with its brooding landscapes and dramatic subjects. He preferred Gothic to Greek, and his beau-ideal was Titian and Veronese with their rich colours and mysterious allegories. He had painted scenes from Schiller’s plays, Mrs Radcliffe’s novels, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the Bible. The latter characteristically included “St Peter When He Heard the Cock Crow”. Leaving a fiancée behind in Boston, he had come to Rome in 1805, renting a studio by the Borghese Gardens, and a rustic summer lodging up in the Roman hills at Olevano.

One of the first things Coleridge ever heard him say was that a fellow-painter was too realistic and down to earth. “He works too much with the Pipe in his mouth – looks too much at the particular Thing, instead of overlooking – ubersehen.” Allston valued the ideal above all else, and Nathaniel Hawthorne would later put him into a short story to illustrate this quality pursued to excess, “The Artist of the Beautiful”. Like Coleridge, he had trouble finishing his work, and he was to spend over twenty-five years on his last canvas, a monumental picture of “Belshazzar’s Feast”, which was unfinished at his death.

He had just completed a large mythological canvas, “Diana and Her Nymphs in the Chase”, which appears to be much influenced by Claude Lorraine. Coleridge wrote a minute prose description of it, treating it in a way that delighted Allston, as a real landscape through which he could wander at will, slipping on the perilous bridge of moss-covered tree-trunk over a chasm – “take care, for heaven’s sake” – and watching the graceful undulations of a huge umbrella-pine “exhaling” movement, “for it rises indeed, even as smoke in calm weather”.¹⁶⁸

Allston and Coleridge were soon walking all over Rome together – to the Forum, the Castello San Angelo, the Borghese Gardens – talking and comparing notes. In between the Sublime, Coleridge was careful to keep an eye on the grotesque, like the stallholder in the Roman market who twisted the necks of some two hundred goldfinches, one after another, leaving them fluttering and gasping in a box, “meantime chit-chatting with a neighbour stallman, throwing his Head about, and sometimes using the neck-twisting gesture in help of his Oratory”.¹⁶⁹

Years later Allston would say that he owed more “intellectually” to Coleridge than to any other man in Italy. “He used to call Rome the silent city; but I never could think of it as such, while with him; for, meet him when or where I would, the fountain of his mind was never dry, but like the far-reaching aqueducts that once supplied this mistress of the world, its living streams seemed especially to flow for every classic ruin which we wandered. And when I recall some of our walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, I am almost tempted to dream that I once listened to Plato, in the groves of the Academy.”¹⁷⁰

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,