Richard Holmes – Coleridge: Darker Reflections (страница 8)
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
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
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
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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
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: