Captain Pasley, who had also pulled back with his regiment to Sicily, wrote to a fellow-officer, “I was happy to meet our friend Coleridge at Naples, certainly few men are more interesting. He is now at Rome, where he stayed. Not withstanding advices of the English Resident there [Jackson] to retire, I hope the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling may never contemplate the roof of a French prison: but from his natural indolence I cannot be too sanguine of his taking himself off in time.”164 Coleridge’s book box was also shipped back, and eventually finished up where it had started, in Valletta with Stoddart. Coleridge was alone with his shirts, his guidebooks, and two remaining notebooks, in the Eternal City.
It seems to have suited him very well. Within a matter of days he had introduced himself with great success into the circle of two notable expatriate groups, one literary and the other painterly, who frequented the artistic quarter round the Spanish Steps. The first was a group of German writers who gathered at the splendid residence of Wilhelm von Humboldt, directly overlooking the Trinita dei Monti. Humboldt was a distinguished young diplomat in his mid-thirties, brother of the famous South American traveller. He had been appointed Prussian Minister to the Court of Pius VII, and held a salon with many German university visitors where Coleridge, an honorary graduate of Göttingen, immediately felt in his element.
Humboldt had formed a life-long friendship with Schiller at Jena University, and developed advanced theories of linguistics and philology, publishing learned papers on Basque and Javanese dialects. His notion of a “language world” was calculated to appeal to Coleridge, and his famous binary concept of “the Dual” (as opposed to two singulars and/or a plural) was much in Coleridge’s metaphysical style. Humboldt later championed ideals of “academic freedom”, and helped to found Berlin University. He was a patron of both arts and sciences, and among his protégés at the Trinita dei Monti was the brilliant young Romantic poet and critic, Johann Ludwig Tieck.
Coleridge formed an animated friendship with Tieck, discussing Goethe and A. W. Schlegel, and the latest philosophical work of Schelling (who had also been a professor at Jena) which they compared with that of the mystic Jacob Boehme. It was probably now that Coleridge first came to grips with Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), which rekindled his ambition to write his own general philosophical treatise at some later date. Tieck’s sister, Sophie Bernhardi, later wrote to Schlegel of the remarkable Englishman at Rome, who knew so much current German literature and who admired Schlegel’s own work on Shakespeare “unbelievably so”. Coleridge in turn admired Tieck, translated one of his poems,165 greatly valued his hospitality and “kindness”, and met him again years later in London with fond recollections of their Roman hours together.166
But Coleridge’s real intimacies were formed in the more bohemian circle of the painters. At the Cafe Greco on Strada de’ Condotti he fell in with a group that included George Wallis, Thomas Russell, and the 27-year-old American artist Washington Allston. Russell was an art student from Exeter, and Wallis a Scottish landscape painter travelling through Italy with his family, including a ten-year-old son grandly named Trajan Wallis, who delighted Coleridge with his precociousness. But it was Washington Allston, a dreamy young man, elegant and aristocratic, with wild black hair framing a pale abstracted face, to whom he most instinctively warmed.
Allston had grown up on a cotton plantation in South Carolina, and had the slow finesse of a Southern gentleman. Moneyed and leisurely, he had attended Harvard and gone on to study art in Paris and at the Royal Academy in London, where he knew Fuseli and Benjamin West. Melancholy and amusing, he said he had received his imaginative education through the stories of the black plantation workers, tales of “barbaric magic and superstition…ghosts and goblins…myths and legends to startle and alarm”.167 He had a “tendency towards the marvellous” and loved to stay up all night talking. A friend said Allston could never paint the reflections of dawn sunlight on water, because he had never seen a sunrise.
Naturally, Allston espoused the Sublime school of painting, with its brooding landscapes and dramatic subjects. He preferred Gothic to Greek, and his beau-ideal was Titian and Veronese with their rich colours and mysterious allegories. He had painted scenes from Schiller’s plays, Mrs Radcliffe’s novels, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the Bible. The latter characteristically included “St Peter When He Heard the Cock Crow”. Leaving a fiancée behind in Boston, he had come to Rome in 1805, renting a studio by the Borghese Gardens, and a rustic summer lodging up in the Roman hills at Olevano.
One of the first things Coleridge ever heard him say was that a fellow-painter was too realistic and down to earth. “He works too much with the Pipe in his mouth – looks too much at the particular Thing, instead of overlooking – ubersehen.” Allston valued the ideal above all else, and Nathaniel Hawthorne would later put him into a short story to illustrate this quality pursued to excess, “The Artist of the Beautiful”. Like Coleridge, he had trouble finishing his work, and he was to spend over twenty-five years on his last canvas, a monumental picture of “Belshazzar’s Feast”, which was unfinished at his death.
He had just completed a large mythological canvas, “Diana and Her Nymphs in the Chase”, which appears to be much influenced by Claude Lorraine. Coleridge wrote a minute prose description of it, treating it in a way that delighted Allston, as a real landscape through which he could wander at will, slipping on the perilous bridge of moss-covered tree-trunk over a chasm – “take care, for heaven’s sake” – and watching the graceful undulations of a huge umbrella-pine “exhaling” movement, “for it rises indeed, even as smoke in calm weather”.168
Allston and Coleridge were soon walking all over Rome together – to the Forum, the Castello San Angelo, the Borghese Gardens – talking and comparing notes. In between the Sublime, Coleridge was careful to keep an eye on the grotesque, like the stallholder in the Roman market who twisted the necks of some two hundred goldfinches, one after another, leaving them fluttering and gasping in a box, “meantime chit-chatting with a neighbour stallman, throwing his Head about, and sometimes using the neck-twisting gesture in help of his Oratory”.169
Years later Allston would say that he owed more “intellectually” to Coleridge than to any other man in Italy. “He used to call Rome the silent city; but I never could think of it as such, while with him; for, meet him when or where I would, the fountain of his mind was never dry, but like the far-reaching aqueducts that once supplied this mistress of the world, its living streams seemed especially to flow for every classic ruin which we wandered. And when I recall some of our walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, I am almost tempted to dream that I once listened to Plato, in the groves of the Academy.”170
This was Allston in the American Sublime style perhaps, but it suggests why Coleridge found him congenial company. When the French army arrived at the outskirts of Rome in February, the two men simply sauntered off to Allston’s bucolic retreat up at Olevano under the trees. They remained there for some five weeks, sketching, talking, sampling the Albano wine, and discussing art history and aesthetics. Coleridge’s sketches were verbal ones, describing the green panorama of the Olevano valley – “a Labyrinth of sweet Walks, glens, green Lanes, with Hillsides” – much as it still is. While Allston painted, Coleridge lounged, making notes on chiaroscuro, painter’s easels, goddesses, ruins and harmony.
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In March, primroses came out and it snowed on the blossom of the almond trees.171 Coleridge seems to have been perfectly happy, suspended briefly from all sense of duty or guilt; and Allston asked him to sit for a half-length portrait, relaxed and meditative, in a window overlooking the valley. His face looks puffy and pale, yet handsome and almost raffish, with an extravagant tangle of silk scarves knotted casually round his neck. The mouth is full, and the eyes gaze into the distance with the hint of a smile. The Public Secretary has reverted to his persona of footloose artist on his travels. Coleridge later said it was one of his best
likenesses, perhaps partly because it was unfinished.172
But Allston felt he had not captured his friend’s animation, and some ten years after he would try again. He would also try to describe Coleridge in verse, comparing his nightlong talks to a great ship, launched out into the dark of “the Human Soul” but radiating light over the shadowy waters:
…For oft we seemed
As on some starless sea, – all dark above,
All dark below, – yet, onward as we drove,
To plough up light that ever round us streamed.173
They returned to Rome in March for the Easter celebrations, and found the city now occupied by the French army. But Napoleon had not yet ordered the expulsion of English nationals, and Coleridge continued to visit the galleries and the Sistine Chapel, making notes on Michelangelo, Raphael and the Apollo Belvedere, apparently unperturbed. He regarded the French with increasing contempt. On one occasion, he was delivering a learned analysis of the monumental statue of Moses by Michelangelo, which is part of Julius II’s tomb in San Pietro. Coleridge observed that the Moses was remarkable for its beard and horns, which could be interpreted as an ancient sun-sign from Greek, Abyssinian and Middle Eastern mythologies, symbolizing a “darker power than the conscious intellect of man”, and the equivalent to the horned figure of Pan.
At this juncture, two elegant French officers swaggered into the church, and leeringly remarked that Moses wore the beard of a goat and the horns of a cuckold. Coleridge thought this a typical example of “degraded” French wit, not only because it exhibited their taste for “burlesque and travesty”, but because it indicated an inability to grasp a “unified” symbolic pattern as opposed to vulgar and fragmentary “generalizations”. The French were “passive Slaves of Association”. That was why they would never match German literary criticism, or British naval strategy. They saw everything in fixed “parts” without a sense of the fluid “whole”: they had fancy without imagination, wit without intuition.174
He had the same criticism of Bernini’s baroque hemisphere of Papal statues outside St Peter’s: “a great genius bewildered – and lost by an excess of fancy over imagination”.175 Other entries in his Notebooks show him trying to forge a new language of art criticism, obviously in conversation with Allston. How can one use terms like “truth”, “beauty” the “ideal” with proper philosophical accuracy; “without possibility of misconception”?176 And why were direct images from nature always so symbolically powerful? There was a shopkeeper’s sign near the Castello St Angelo, advertising “Aqua Vita, Rosoli, Spiriti, e Tabacchi”, but broken off its wall and “more than half veiled by tall nettles”. Why did this produce the exact image “of a deserted City”?177
But Coleridge was now running short of funds. He gave up his lodgings, and moved in with Wallis’s family, borrowing money from Thomas Russell. Russell would later recall his “destitute condition” and increasing moods of depression.178 Bad dreams and opium returned, and the sense of indecision. “A Kettle is on the slow Fire; & I turn from my Book, & loiter from going to my bed, in order to see whether it will boil: & on that my Hope hovers – on the Candle burning in the socket – or will this or that Person come this evening.“179 Once again he was being forced to meet the necessity of returning home. But still he did not write, and back in England it was only through Stoddart’s letters that there were rumours of him in Rome, being “much noticed” among the German and American colony.
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On 18 May 1806, Coleridge finally set out with Russell for the port of Livorno, making a leisurely journey by vetturino, and stopping off to visit the waterfall at Terni and the galleries of Perugia and Florence. At Pisa he saw the leaning tower by moonlight, “something of a supernatural look”, but was more interested by “the perfect cleanliness & good order” of the two hospitals for men and women. He contemplated the “great door of open iron work” to the wards, through which all must pass.
He was transfixed by the huge fresco in the Camposanto at Pisa, said to be by Giotto and his pupils, “The Triumph of Death”. The faded condition of the tempera, the flat glimmering of human forms without colour or perspective, all processing towards inevitable death, impressed him even more than Dante. He was haunted by it, and over a decade later recalled his impressions at length in a set of Philosophical Lectures. The frescoes presented that sense of inexhaustible and hypnotic power, “which we are reminded of when in the South of Europe we look at the deep blue sky…The same unwearied form presents itself, yet still we look on, sinking deeper and deeper, and therein offering homage to the infinity of our souls which no mere form can satisfy.”180
At Pisa he had less Platonic detachment, and felt that he was now drifting into Death’s cortège. By the time he reached Livorno on 7 June, he was in a mood of “black” despair equal to any experienced in Malta. While Russell looked for a ship to take them back, Coleridge plunged into a suicidal state of gloom, dreading the dangers of the voyage, and dreading even more its safe completion. Nothing could more clearly reveal his reluctance to leave the South, which he had so long half-hidden from himself, disguising it as his duty to Ball, or the difficulties of travel, or his new friendship with Allston. Now all his thoughts turned to his children, the one thing he felt he could not abandon. “O my Children, my Children! I gave you life once, unconscious of the Life I was giving; and you as unconsciously have given Life to me…Many months past I should have essayed whether Death is what I groan for, absorption and transfiguration of Consciousness…Even this moment I could commit Suicide but for you, my Darlings.”181
Even the thought of returning to the Wordsworths and Asra was no comfort. “Of Wordsworths – of Sara Hutchinson: that is passed – or of remembered thoughts to make a Hell of.” He felt racked with pain and self-disgust: “no other Refuge than Poisons that degrade the Being, while they suspend the torment”.182 Grimly, he went out and purchased a brass enema and pipe.
It was not easy to find a ship, as the navy had suspended its operations off Italy, and neutral merchantmen were nervous of taking British nationals. They shuttled between inns at Livorno, Pisa and Florence, making enquiries and spending the last of their money. Allston’s recommendation to Pietro Benevuti, the Professor of Painting at the Florentine Academy, came to nothing as Coleridge was for once beyond the point of projecting his charm in bad Italian. But at last they found an American sailor, Captain Derkheim of “the Gosport”, and Coleridge summoned sufficient energy to convince the Captain that they were cargo worthy of passage on credit. Captain Derkheim later said he had heard nothing like Coleridge since leaving the Niagara Falls.183
The effort of it all was so great that Coleridge awoke the next day screaming and trying to vomit, his right arm paralysed. It gradually wore off, but he believed he had suffered a “manifest stroke of Palsy”. Trying to calm himself, he finally sat and wrote a long letter to Allston at the Cafe Greco in Rome. He did not mention opium, but wrote frankly about his depression, his dangerous illness, and his thoughts of his children.
“But for them I would try my chance. But they pluck out the wingfeathers from the mind.” He praised young Russell for his “Kindness & tender-heartedness to me”; and worried about the Wallis family still in Rome. His farewell to Allston expressed passionate friendship, and a sense of star-crossed destiny as he prepared to leave. “My dear Allston! somewhat from increasing age, but much more from calamity & intense pre-affections my heart is not open to more than kind good wishes in general; to you & to you alone since I have left England, I have felt more; and had I not known the Wordsworths, should have loved & esteemed you first and most: and as it is, next to them I love & honour you. Heaven knows, a part of such a Wreck as my Head & Heart is scarcely worth your acceptance.”184
By 22 June, Coleridge and Russell were back at Pisa, waiting at the Globe Inn for a storm to disperse before boarding. It seems that it was too dangerous to linger in Livorno itself, because of possible arrest by French troops, and Captain Derkheim had a
lready had to pass them off as American nationals. Coleridge would later embroider a much more dramatic story that Napoleon had issued a personal warrant for his arrest, and his “escape” from Rome to Livorno had been arranged through “the kindness of a noble Benedictine, and the gracious connivance of that good old man, the present Pope”.185
A warrant had certainly been issued for the British consul in Rome, Mr Jackson, and a general order to expel British nationals from Italy in May, which was why Coleridge was worried about the Wallis family. But the tale of a hectic personal pursuit was really a fiction, designed to cover up the otherwise inexplicable time he had remained in Italy with Allston, undecided about returning to England at all.186
Coleridge would soon present this whole latter part of his sojourn in the Mediterranean as a sequence of events almost entirely beyond his control: “retained” against his will by Sir Alexander Ball, “duped” by the consul at Naples Mr Elliot, and forced to live in hiding among the bohemians of Rome while pursued by Napoleon’s vengeful officers. In truth, he had acted much more wilfully, delaying and taking casual risks which would have appalled his family and friends.
The true chaos of his existence over the past eighteen months came to a head at Pisa. He was holed up in a cheap inn with an art student, virtually penniless, having a few books and presents in an old box, a supply of opium and an enema, and two precious Notebooks. He was in imminent danger of arrest, disguised as an American, and deeply uncertain if he wanted to return to England to take up his old life and identity. Once again he felt the best solution would have been if he had died in John Wordsworth’s place. “O dear John Wordsworth! Ah that I could but have died for you: & you have gone home, married S. Hutchinson, & protected my Poor little ones. O how very, very gladly would I have accepted the conditions.’187
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