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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.

Coleridge: Darker Reflections

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