Richard Holmes – Coleridge: Darker Reflections (страница 14)
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
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.