Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
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
Sitting high up at Signal House, the very summit of Gibraltar, “which looks over the blue Sea-lake to Africa”, the magic of the Mediterranean south rose up to him in sight and sound and smell (the crushed tansy under his shoe). He thought how many mountains he had stood on in his life, and how the Rock was something profoundly new and mysterious, in all its warlike nameless shapes and intimations. “What a complex Thing! At its feet mighty ramparts establishing themselves in the Sea with their huge artillery – hollow trunks of Iron where Death and Thunder sleep; the gardens in deep Moats between lofty and massive walls; a Town of All Nations & all languages;…fences of the prickly aloe, strange Plant that does not seem to be alive, but to have been a thing fantastically carved in wood & coloured, some Hieroglyph or temple Ornament of undiscovered meaning.”38
Coleridge was deeply excited by the Mediterranean,