Coleridge: Darker Reflections. Richard Holmes
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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