Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
poor Cecilia Bertozzi…I was saved by that vision, wholly & exclusively by it, and sure I am, that nothing on earth but it could at that time have saved me.”88
But was he saved? Or had he delivered himself up into a far more subtle bondage, the cords of his old English dreams which he had hoped to break? There is no mention of more conventional loyalties, his marriage vows, his feelings for his children. It was almost as if Asra had prevented him from discovering something vital about his own sexual nature, had saved him not from sin but from self-knowledge. She had preserved his “Innocence and Peace of Mind”, not his purity.
Perhaps Coleridge no longer wanted real women at all, or only in his opium dreams, singing like Abyssinian maids of Mount Abora. Were these his “cruelly unlike Thoughts” on the way to visit Cecilia? He wrote gloomily: “I tremble to think what I was at that moment on the very brink of being surprised into – by the prejudices of the shame of sex, as much as by the force of its ordinary Impulses.”89 Perhaps those ordinary impulses were being destroyed.
Whatever really happened between Coleridge and Cecilia Bertozzi, the end of October 1804 marked a turning point in Sicily. His birthday entry of 21 October was miserable, lamenting his “habit of bedrugging the feelings, & bodily movements, & habit of dreaming”. He had “fled like a cowed Dog” from the thought of his age, “so completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month…I am not worthy to live…I have done nothing! Not even layed up any material, any inward stores – of after action!”90
In fact he had just sent off the large packet of work to Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont (including now a Sicilian journal) in the care of Major Adye, who was returning to England via Gibraltar. And he was planning a trip to Messina and Naples. Daniel Stuart was beginning to use his Malta papers for leaders in the Courier in London, while Wordsworth was tracing his journeys in imagination in Book X of The Prelude, re-dedicating the poem to Coleridge the wanderer.
Oh! Wrap him in your Shades, ye Giant Woods,
On Etna’s side, and thou, O flowery Vale
Of Enna! Is there not some nook of thine,
From the first playtime of the infant earth
Kept sacred to restorative delights?
Wordsworth was blissfully imagining Coleridge, “a Visitant on Etna’s top”, a “lonely wanderer” with “a heart more ripe” for pleasure, drawing inspiration from Aresthusa’s fountain (on the quayside at Syracuse) and “divine” nourishment from Theocritus’s bees who fed the exiled Comates.91 He hoped he would linger there as a happy votary, “and not a Captive, pining for his home”. Nonetheless, Wordsworth also expected Coleridge to return as promised by the following spring, and sort out his marriage and his domestic arrangements.
Coleridge clambered over the ruins of the Greek amphitheatre above Leckie’s villa, but was most drawn to the area of caves and limestone quarries with its famous “Ear of Dionysus” and the “Quarry of the Capuchins”, which with its groves and flowering cliffs appeared a sort of miniature garden of Eden. (Yet it was here that 7,000 captive Athenian soldiers died in a kind of concentration camp in 413 BC.)92 Serious archaeology did not begin until a generation later, but in this autumn of 1804 the most beautiful of all Sicilian statues, the headless Landolina Venus with her shining marble breasts and large voluptuous limbs, was dug out of the earth like a spirit returning from the underworld.
Coleridge described the ruins and the caves in detail, with Etna’s cone hovering above the Epipoli ridge in its “floating mantle of white smoke”; and he took a boat to Tremiglia where Neptune was buried under a bay tree, “with vines wreathing about it: Sleep, Shade, & Quiet!”93 Standing high above the bay of Syracuse, surrounded by these buried antiquities and strange portents, he watched the sun go down into the sea, and wrote one of his most haunting Mediterranean fragments, “A Sunset”. Its thirteen lines end with a shiver of Delphic prophesy, as if the classically haunted landscape would soon release its violent gods and heroes once again as the sun disappears.
Abrupt, as Spirits vanish, he is sunk!
A soul-like breeze possesses all the wood. The boughs, the sprays have stood
As motionless as stands the ancient trunk!
But every leaf through all the forest flutters,
And deep the cavern of the fountain mutters.94
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Despite the affair with Cecilia Bertozzi, or perhaps because of it, Coleridge was now anxious to press on to Naples. He was restless in Syracuse, decayed and baroque, with its corruption and gossip, and the oppressive omnipresence of its Catholic priests. “I found no one native with whom I could talk of anything but the weather and the opera: ignorant beyond belief – the churches take up the third part of the whole city, & the Priests are numerous as the Egyptian Plague.”95
On 23 October, Sir Alexander sent him a letter of recommendation to Hugh Elliott, the British Minister at the Court of King Ferdinand in Naples. It shows that Coleridge was already held in high esteem, and puts his private feelings of worthlessness in a more generous perspective.
My dear Sir, I beg to introduce to your Excellency Mr Coleridge whose literary fame I make no doubt is well known to you. He possesses great genius, a fine imagination and good judgement, and these qualities are made perfect by an excellent heart and good moral character. He has injured his health by intense study, and he is recommended to travel for its re-establishment. You will have much pleasure in his conversation…96
But on 5 November, just as he was preparing to board a carriage for Messina, Coleridge was dramatically drawn back into his new role as public servant and all further wanderings were cut short. A diplomatic incident took place in Syracuse harbour, and Leckie deputed Coleridge, as Sir Alexander’s personal emissary, to deal with it. As unexpected as it might seem, Coleridge became part of the British naval war machine.
Four days previously a French privateer had sailed into Syracuse with two captured British merchantmen, claiming the rights of a neutral port to unload its prizes. A British navy cutter, L’Hirondelle, was immediately dispatched from Valletta to dispute the claim, and anchored alongside the privateer with broadside cannons run out, “tompions” uncovered and trained on the French ship. Both captains appealed to the Sicilian Governor, while threatening to blow each other out of the water. Officially the matter turned on the validity of the privateer’s papers, and whether it had the right to take prizes on the high seas under the normal articles of war between the two sovereign states, or whether it was simply a pirate flying the French flag for its own convenience. Unofficially, as so often in these incidents, everything depended on what political pressure could be brought to bear.
Leckie seems to have realized early on that the privateer’s papers were in fact valid, so he took Coleridge with him to make the best of a bad job. The priority was to defuse an ugly situation at the harbour front, where the British Captain Skinner soon found himself surrounded by a hostile crowd. When Leckie and Coleridge arrived at seven in the evening, bloodshed seemed imminent. “On stepping out of the carriage I found by the Torches that about 300 Soldiers were drawn up on the shore opposite the English Cutter, and that the walls etc. were manned: Mr Skinner and two of his Officers were on the rampart, and the Governor and a crowd of Syracusan nobles with him at the distance of two or three yards from Mr Skinner.”97 The Governor “talked, or rather screamed, indeed incessantly”.