Richard Holmes - Coleridge - Darker Reflections

Aboard the Speedwell , at midnight on 13 May, he turned towards his Creator for help: “O dear God! give me strength of Soul to make one thorough trial – if I land at Malta – spite all horrors to go through one month of unstimulated Nature – yielding to nothing but manifest danger of Life – O great God! Grant me grace truly to look into myself, & to begin the serious work of Self-amendment…Have Mercy on me Father & God!…who with undeviating Laws Eternal yet carest for the falling of the feather from the Sparrow’s wing.” 53

Crawling back on deck, he found they were in sight of Sardinia. A hawk with battered plumage flew overhead, and settled on the bowsprit, until the sailors shot at it. It flew off heavily among the other ships, and Coleridge listened to the firing from further and further away, as each crew refused it hospitality in turn. “Poor Hawk! O strange Lust of Murder in Man! – It is not cruelty: it is mere non-feeling from non-thinking.” 54He ate rhubarb for his bowels, and was cosseted by “the good Mrs Ireland”, never again referred to as “Mrs Carnosity”.

Gradually his thoughts grew calmer. “Scarcely a day passes but something new in fact or illustration rises up in me, like Herbs and Flowers in a Garden in early Spring; but the combining Power, the power to do, the manly effective Will, that is dead or slumbers most diseasedly – Well I will pray for the Hour when I ‘may quit the tiresome sea & dwell on Shore’…” He sat at the rudder-case and wrote notes on the moon, the notion of Sublimity, and the nature of poetry. “Poetry – a rationalized Dream – dealing out to manifold Forms our own Feelings – that never perhaps were attached by us consciously to our own Personal Selves”. 55

By 17 May Coleridge was quite restored, “uncommonly well”, and observing the noble blue peak of Mount Etna rising out of the eastern waters. By dawn on the 18th the Speedwell was in clear sight of Malta, and Mrs Ireland was confiding in him that she expected to be met by her lover. 56Captain Findlay put on all sail, and by 4 p.m. they were sliding under the huge sandstone fortifications of Valletta harbour ahead of the Maidstone. Observing the great battlements and citadel, originally built by the Knights of Malta to withstand the Great Siege of 1565, Coleridge felt like Aeneas arriving at Carthage.

Leaving his boxes to be unloaded, he disembarked in the first cutter and clambered breathlessly up the long stairs of Old Bakery Street, feeling like his own Mariner, “light as a blessed Ghost”. He was glad to be alive. He made straight for the Casa de St Foix, the house of John Stoddart, the Chief Advocate of Malta. It stood at the top of the street, a large building in orange freestone, with brightly painted wooden casements and enclosed balconies, commanding a dramatic view over the Marsamxett harbour. Round it spread a labyrinth of tilting streets, enclosed by huge bastions, which echoed with the bustle and shout of Maltese street-vendors, the barking of dogs, the clanging of church bells and rumble of donkeycarts. Music poured from the taverns, as the innkeepers and prostitutes prepared to welcome the new influx of British sailors.

Coleridge was stunned by the noise and activity. “They are the noisiest race under Heaven…sudden shot-up explosive Bellows – no cries in London would give you the faintest idea of it. When you pass by a fruit stall, the fellow will put his Hand like a speaking trumpet to his mouth & shoot such a Thunder bolt of Sound full at you.” 57

After two hours of confusion and delay among the servants, Stoddart finally appeared and greeted him with a further “explosion of surprise and welcome”. He was given rooms and promised introductions. So began Coleridge’s sixteen-month sojourn on the tiny, rocky, Mediterranean outpost.

Initially, Coleridge’s plans were uncertain. He would restore his health, travel to Sicily perhaps, keep a journal, maybe find a temporary post in the colonial administration. He would write essays on art or politics, and send articles to Stuart. He would let the Mediterranean sun bleach out his heartache and his opium sickness. What actually fixed these plans was his meeting with the civilian governor of Malta, Sir Alexander Ball. It was, Coleridge later wrote, “that daily and familiar intercourse with him, which made the fifteen months from May 1804 to October 1805, in many respects, the most memorable and instructive period of my life”. 58It was also, perhaps, the most unlikely of all his friendships, for Ball was, par excellence , the man of action, a wartime admiral, confidant of Nelson, hero of the battle of Aboukir Bay, and forceful administrator and strategist.

Coleridge first met Ball on 20 May, when he called officially at the Governor’s palace, to deliver letters of recommendation to him and General Villettes, the military commander. The great palace with its huge shadowy inner courtyard, planted with palm trees, rather overawed him. The meeting in a vast chamber hung with crimson silk and Italian religious pictures was coldly formal. “A very polite man; but no hopes, I see clearly, of any situation.” 59Ball was a tall, avuncular figure, with a high domed forehead and small observant eyes, who said little. But the following day Coleridge was invited out to his country palace at San Antonio.

Coleridge rode out with unaccustomed punctuality at 6 a.m., and breakfasted with Ball in a garden full of orange and lemon trees. This time, a Mr Lane, the tutor of Ball’s son, was present and the conversation became more general. It was later that Ball, riding back alone with Coleridge to Valletta through the little stony lanes overlooking the harbour, began to talk of the role of luck in naval actions and life generally.

Turning to his visitor, Ball suddenly asked if he thought the old proverb was true, that “Fortune Favours Fools”. It could have been meant as a joke, but to his surprise Coleridge launched into a brilliant monologue on notions of chance, accident, contingency and superstition; and contrasted these with the underlying patterns of scientific law and human skills. In what sense, he asked, could it be said that Humphry Davy’s discoveries in chemistry were lucky? In what sense that a great commander’s victories were fortunate? 60

Ball was impressed, and probably also amused. He began to tell Coleridge his own life story, and on this conversation Coleridge later felt was founded “the friendship and confidence, with which he afterwards honoured me”. It was one of the “most delightful mornings” he ever passed. Very soon he was riding with the Governor over most of the island, and the Coleridgean floodgates were opened, day after day in June. But Coleridge also listened, and Ball’s anecdotes and opinions came to fill his Malta Notebooks. Years later, in 1809, they became the basis for a biographical study – both of Ball and Nelson – in which the notion of leadership and courage, of command and self-command, is philosophically examined. 61

Besides dealing with the civil administration of Malta, most pressing being the matters of law decrees and corn supplies, Ball was also engaged in a continuous debate with Nelson off Toulon, and the War Office in London, over the exact objectives of British strategy in the Mediterranean, as the war unfolded. Ball’s central idea was that Britain should permanently occupy both Malta and Sicily, with a view to controlling the sea-routes via Egypt to India. By mid-June he had enlisted Coleridge in this top-level and highly confidential discussion, commissioning him to draft a series of “position papers” setting forth arguments with the addition of whatever Coleridge could glean from books, pamphlets or newspapers.

This was work well adapted to Coleridge’s experience as a leader writer for Daniel Stuart on the Courier. Over the next weeks he produced four long papers, the first of which, “The French in the Mediterranean”, was dispatched to Nelson on 7 July 1804. Others followed on “Algeria”, “Malta”, and “Egypt”, which were forwarded to Granville Penn in Downing Street, for presentation to the secretary of state for war, during the summer. A fifth paper on “Sicily” was completed in September. 62It was evidently this work which convinced Ball of Coleridge’s real abilities; not merely a poet of genius, he would crisply inform the British Ambassador in Naples. Coleridge was given official rooms in the Governor’s palace and a salary, all within five weeks of his arrival in Malta.