Читать книгу Coleridge: Darker Reflections - Richard Holmes - Страница 8

Up on deck, he chatted to the sailors he always admired – “a neat handed Fellow who could shave himself in a storm without drawing blood”²⁰ – and recorded sextant readings, compass-bearings, cloud formations, star patterns and semaphore messages through the squadron. Above all he recorded the huge, beautiful complexity of the ship’s sails. They were constantly re-set throughout the fleet to form an endless series of visual harmonies. On Saturday, 14 April, he made no less than eleven pages of notes on these sail shapes. What interested him was their aesthetic values, their painterly suggestions of form and function, of energy transferred between curve and straight line. “The harmony of the Lines – the ellipses & semicircles of the bellying Sails of the Hull, with the variety of the one and the contingency of the other.”

He puzzled over their “obscure resemblance” to human shapes, to gestures of mental alertness, determination and attention. “The height of the naked mast above the sails, connected however with them by Pennant & Vane, associated I think, with the human form on a watch-tower: a general feeling – e.g. the Men on the tops of conical mountains…in Cumberland and Westmoreland.”²¹ This idea of the symbolic “watch-tower” haunted Coleridge. He later found that Nelson had described the navy in Malta as “the watch-tower of the Mediterranean”. Later still he used the image to describe Wordsworth’s dominance of the poetic horizon: “From the dread watch-tower of man’s absolute self”.²² Wordsworth indeed, as a man-o’-war, in full sail.

But Coleridge’s notes press further. “Every one of these sails is known by the Intellect to have a strict & necessary action & reaction on all the rest, and the whole is made up of parts…” This technical knowledge of the complementary function of the sails produces the sense of unity which we call beauty: “this phantom of complete visual wholeness in an object, which visually does not form a whole, by the influence ab intra of the sense of its perfect Intellectual Beauty or Wholeness”.²³ This subtle aesthetic emerged on the deck of the Speedwell in the Bay of Biscay. From it Coleridge dashed into a bracket a formulation which would become central to his Biographia Literaria: “all Passion unifies as it were by natural Fusion”.

It is evident from such notes that Coleridge was recovering fast from the mood of helpless despondency that had beset him in past months. At night, down in the cabin, he still had his “Dreams of Terror & obscure forms”,²⁴ and sometimes awoke screaming as in the old, bad times at Keswick. In low moments he still thought mournfully of Asra too: “Why ain’t you here? This for ever: I have no rooted thorough thro feeling – & never exist wholly present to any Sight, to any sound, to any Emotion…feeling of yearning, that at times passes into Sickness.”²⁵ His poem to her, “Phantom”, dates from this part of the voyage.

All look and likeness caught from earth,

All accident of kin and birth,

Had pass’d away. There was no trace

Of aught on that illumined face,

Uprais’d beneath the rifted stone

But of one spirit all her own;

She, she herself, and only she,

Shone through her body visibly.²⁶

But his sense of excitement and stimulation was unmistakable. On 16 April the look-out “hailed the beautiful Coast of Portugal, & Oporto”, and Coleridge swarmed up on deck in his greatcoat, without bothering to put on his shoes. He began a long, enthusiastic letter to Robert Southey, sitting at his desk on the rudder case with the quacking ducks at his feet. He filled it with beautiful descriptions of the coastline and jokes about Mrs Carnosity. “We sail on at a wonderful rate, & considering we are in a Convoy, all have made a most lucky Voyage to Gibraltar if we are not becalmed, & taken in the Gut…”²⁷

His main complaint was his bunk at night, “Dejection & Discomfort”, and the wallowing motion of the following sea. “This damned Rocking…is troublesome & impertinent…like the presence & gossip of an old Aunt.”²⁸ But the magic of the ships made up for everything: “Oh with what envy I have gazed at our Commodore, the Leviathan of 74 guns, the majestic & beautiful creature: sailing right before us…upright, motionless, as a church with its Steeple – as tho it moved by its will, as tho its speed were spiritual…”²⁹

Three nights later he was sitting at his post under a bright moon – “how hard to describe that sort of Queen’s metal plating, which the Moonlight forms on the bottle-green Sea” – with Spain on his left hand and the Barbary Coast on his right. “This is Africa! That is Europe! There is division, sharp boundary, abrupt change! and what are they in Nature – two Mountain banks, that make a noble River of the interfluent Sea…no division, no Change, no Antithesis.”³⁰

As the Speedwell slipped into the Mediterranean, he mused on this strange difference between human and natural geography, how human associations form our landscapes and boundaries far more than Nature herself. The power of human association with physical places and objects was perhaps the foundation of biography – “a Pilgrimage to see a great man’s Shin Bone found unmouldered in his Coffin”. Yet surely in this biography was a form of stupid superstition. “A Shakespeare, a Milton, a Bruno, exist in the mind as pure Action, defecated of all that is material & passive.” He could look at the fabled mulberry tree that Shakespeare planted without emotion. Yet as he gazed out into the moonlit path between two continents, Coleridge recognized deeper feelings of connection within himself. “At certain times, uncalled and sudden, subject to no bidding of my own or others, these Thoughts would come upon me, like a Storm, & fill the Place with something more than Nature.”³¹

Coleridge planned to put his meditations into a traveller’s anthology, “Comforts and Consolations”,³² which was aimed at those who suffered from “speculative Gloom”. Perhaps partly inspired by Marcus Aurelius, it enshrined the significant idea that depression could be treated by stoic self-analysis, and the application of “the Reason, the Imagination, and the moral Feelings” to our own mental processes and mood-shifts. But writing to Southey he also mentioned the cheerfulness of unaccustomed abstemiousness: he was eating no meat, and despite his crate of fine wines, “marvellous Brandy, & Rum 20 years old” provided by Sir George Beaumont, was drinking nothing but lemonade. The abstinence also included opium, at least for the first fortnight.³³