Richard Holmes – Coleridge: Darker Reflections (страница 2)

He puzzled over their “obscure resemblance” to human shapes, to gestures of mental alertness, determination and attention. “The height of the naked mast above the sails, connected however with them by Pennant & Vane, associated I think, with the human form on a watch-tower: a general feeling – e.g. the Men on the tops of conical mountains…in Cumberland and Westmoreland.”²¹ This idea of the symbolic “watch-tower” haunted Coleridge. He later found that Nelson had described the navy in Malta as “the watch-tower of the Mediterranean”. Later still he used the image to describe Wordsworth’s dominance of the poetic horizon: “From the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self”.²² Wordsworth indeed, as a man-o’-war, in full sail.

But Coleridge’s notes press further. “Every one of these sails is known by the Intellect to have a strict & necessary action & reaction on all the rest, and the whole is made up of parts…” This technical knowledge of the complementary function of the sails produces the sense of unity which we call beauty: “this phantom of complete visual wholeness in an object, which visually does not form a whole, by the influence ab intra of the sense of its perfect Intellectual Beauty or Wholeness”.²³ This subtle aesthetic emerged on the deck of the Speedwell in the Bay of Biscay. From it Coleridge dashed into a bracket a formulation which would become central to his Biographia Literaria: “all Passion unifies as it were by natural Fusion”.

It is evident from such notes that Coleridge was recovering fast from the mood of helpless despondency that had beset him in past months. At night, down in the cabin, he still had his “Dreams of Terror & obscure forms”,²⁴ and sometimes awoke screaming as in the old, bad times at Keswick. In low moments he still thought mournfully of Asra too: “Why ain’t you here? This for ever: I have no rooted thorough thro feeling – & never exist wholly present to any Sight, to any sound, to any Emotion…feeling of yearning, that at times passes into Sickness.”²⁵ His poem to her, “Phantom”, dates from this part of the voyage.

All look and likeness caught from earth,

All accident of kin and birth,

Had pass’d away. There was no trace

Of aught on that illumined face,

Uprais’d beneath the rifted stone

But of one spirit all her own;

She, she herself, and only she,

Shone through her body visibly.²⁶

But his sense of excitement and stimulation was unmistakable. On 16 April the look-out “hailed the beautiful Coast of Portugal, & Oporto”, and Coleridge swarmed up on deck in his greatcoat, without bothering to put on his shoes. He began a long, enthusiastic letter to Robert Southey, sitting at his desk on the rudder case with the quacking ducks at his feet. He filled it with beautiful descriptions of the coastline and jokes about Mrs Carnosity. “We sail on at a wonderful rate, & considering we are in a Convoy, all have made a most lucky Voyage to Gibraltar if we are not becalmed, & taken in the Gut…”²⁷

His main complaint was his bunk at night, “Dejection & Discomfort”, and the wallowing motion of the following sea. “This damned Rocking…is troublesome & impertinent…like the presence & gossip of an old Aunt.”²⁸ But the magic of the ships made up for everything: “Oh with what envy I have gazed at our Commodore, the Leviathan of 74 guns, the majestic & beautiful creature: sailing right before us…upright, motionless, as a church with its Steeple – as tho it moved by its will, as tho its speed were spiritual…”²⁹

Three nights later he was sitting at his post under a bright moon – “how hard to describe that sort of Queen’s metal plating, which the Moonlight forms on the bottle-green Sea” – with Spain on his left hand and the Barbary Coast on his right. “This is Africa! That is Europe! There is division, sharp boundary, abrupt change! and what are they in Nature – two Mountain banks, that make a noble River of the interfluent Sea…no division, no Change, no Antithesis.”³⁰

As the Speedwell slipped into the Mediterranean, he mused on this strange difference between human and natural geography, how human associations form our landscapes and boundaries far more than Nature herself. The power of human association with physical places and objects was perhaps the foundation of biography – “a Pilgrimage to see a great man’s Shin Bone found unmouldered in his Coffin”. Yet surely in this biography was a form of stupid superstition. “A Shakespeare, a Milton, a Bruno, exist in the mind as pure Action, defecated of all that is material & passive.” He could look at the fabled mulberry tree that Shakespeare planted without emotion. Yet as he gazed out into the moonlit path between two continents, Coleridge recognized deeper feelings of connection within himself. “At certain times, uncalled and sudden, subject to no bidding of my own or others, these Thoughts would come upon me, like a Storm, & fill the Place with something more than Nature.”³¹

Coleridge planned to put his meditations into a traveller’s anthology, “Comforts and Consolations”,³² which was aimed at those who suffered from “speculative Gloom”. Perhaps partly inspired by Marcus Aurelius, it enshrined the significant idea that depression could be treated by stoic self-analysis, and the application of “the Reason, the Imagination, and the moral Feelings” to our own mental processes and mood-shifts. But writing to Southey he also mentioned the cheerfulness of unaccustomed abstemiousness: he was eating no meat, and despite his crate of fine wines, “marvellous Brandy, & Rum 20 years old” provided by Sir George Beaumont, was drinking nothing but lemonade. The abstinence also included opium, at least for the first fortnight.³³

5

At dawn on 19 April, Coleridge’s telescope picked out the great brown rock of Gibraltar’s “famous Apes Hill” detaching itself from the limestone sweeps and ridges of the Spanish coast. By the evening they were anchored under Europa Point and awaiting quarantine clearance – a rigid requirement in a zone of rapidly transmitted plagues and fevers, which killed off far more men than actual combat.

Coleridge was now entering a new world: colourful, hot, violent, polyglot, dominated by war and the rumours of war. People of every race and degree thronged the island – Jews, Arabs, Spaniards, Italians, Greeks. His first expedition along the quayside yielded a muleteer with the face of a monkey, a learned Jew in university dress, a Greek woman with earrings the size of “chain rings on a landing place for mooring boats”, a senior English officer with an “angel Face” woman on his arm, and “Soldiers of all Regiments & Runaway Sailors” of every nation.³⁴

Taken by Captain Findlay to Griffith’s Hotel, through a stinking labyrinth of backstreets, he found himself plunged into the active-service culture of the British navy abroad: patriotic, punctilious, hard-drinking, with its endless yarns about weather, battles and promotion. The first news he heard was of the previous Portsmouth convoy, largely wrecked in a foul-weather passage to the West Indies; and of Nelson’s dispatches intercepted by a French frigate.

He delivered letters of introduction to the navy chaplain, and to Major Adye, a young gunnery officer. Adye was a one-time pupil of his brother George’s, who sportingly volunteered to act as his guide to the rock. Then he spent the afternoon climbing over Europa Point, pleased to see the homely pink geraniums clinging to the walls among the exotic prickly pears. ‘Reluctantly I returned to a noisy Dinner of 17 Sea Captains, indifferent food, and burning Wines.”

Much discussion turned on Nelson’s Mediterranean strategy, and the importance of Malta for securing the trade routes into the eastern Mediterranean, the casus belli of 1803. “Struggle in the minds of the (native) inhabitants between their Dislike of English manners & their Dread of French Government. I find it a common opinion that if the Peace had continued the French would have monopolized the Commerce of the Levant.”³⁵ This was to become a topic of dominant importance during his time in Malta. Coleridge finally escorted Captain Findlay – “my now very tipsy Capt” – back to the Speedwell, and left him drinking with three other merchant masters in his cabin.

They spent five hectic days at Gibraltar. Coleridge togged himself out in sailor’s nankeen trousers and canvas shirt, and roamed all over the island, basking in the heat, drinking beer, making notes on plants, racial types, architecture, naval gossip and Mediterranean politics. In a packed letter to his newspaper editor Daniel Stuart, he leaped from subject to subject with all his old ebullience. The island was worth “a dozen plates by Hogarth”. The climate of the south would “re-create” him. Whole days were spent “scrambling about on the back of the Rock among the Monkeys: I am a match for them in climbing, but in Hops & flying leaps they beat me.”³⁶

Meanwhile Major Adye briefed him on military matters, and sent a Corporal to escort him round the cliff-side gun emplacements – “The Noise so deafening in these galleries on the discharge of Guns, that the Soldiers’ Ears have bled.” By contrast, he scrambled alone into the deep silence of St Michael’s Cave, with its massy natural pillars and huge stalactites “the models of Trees in stone”, and wondered at the subterranean chambers (an old fascination) where men had descended three or four hundred feet “till the Smoke of their torches became intolerable”.³⁷