coiled round my mental powers, as a serpent around the body & wings of an Eagle.”114
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Coleridge was in a lively mood throughout the Christmas of 1804, planning to write “300 volumes”, allowing ten years for each. “You have ample Time, my dear fellow!…you can’t think of living less than 4,000 years, & that would nearly suffice for your present schemes.”115
He analysed his talkativeness as producing a “great Blaze of colours” that dazzled bystanders by containing too many ideas in two few words. “My illustrations swallow up my thesis – I feel too intensely the omnipresence of all in each, platonically speaking.” His brain-fibres glittered with “spiritual Light” like the phosphorescence “in sundry rotten mackerel!” Once started on a subject he went on and on, “from circle to circle till I break against the shore of my Hearer’s patience, or have any Concentricals dashed to nothing by a Snore”.
Yet at Malta he had tried to restrain himself and had earned, he believed, “the general character of being a quiet well-meaning man, rather dull indeed – & who would have thought, that he had been a Poet ‘O a very wretched Poetaster, Ma’am’”.116
If by day Coleridge gave the impression of a busy, punctilious bureaucrat, bustling between the Treasury, the palace and the Admiralty Court (where he argued cases in a wig and gown), dining cheerfully with the Governor and gossiping with senior clerks like Mr Underwood in the corridors, his night life was another existence altogether. It was solitary, introspective, and often intoxicated. On 27 December he started using cipher in his Notebooks, and entered bleakly: “No night without its guilt of opium and spirits.”117
After his autumn débâcle with Cecilia Bertozzi, he was much preoccupied with sexual matters. He dwelt on the link between mental and physical arousal, the sexual stimulation of dreams, the different sense of “Touch” in lips and fingers, and operations of “the mem(brum) virile in acts of (Es)sex”. He brilliantly intuited a whole modern theory of “erogenous zones” existing outside the genital area, which respond to sexual excitement. “Observe that in certain excited states of feeling the knees, ankle, side & soles of the feet, become organic. Query – the nipple in a woman’s breast, does that ever become the seat of a particular feeling, as one would guess by its dormancy & sudden awakings.”118 Most strikingly, he linked sexual confidence and fulfilment with more general feelings of well-being and spiritual optimism in life:
“Important metaphysical Hint: the influence of bodily vigour and strong Grasp of Touch facilitating the passion of Hope: eunuchs – in all degrees even to the full ensheathment and the both at once.”119 (This last entry was also in cipher, and might suggest a personal anxiety about impotence caused by opium.) Later in the spring he countered this in a beautiful entry about his own children, as proof of sexual power and as part of a living resource of social amelioration: “the immense importance of young Children to the keeping up the stock of Hope in the human species: they seem as immediately the secreting-organ of Hope in the great organized Body of the whole Human Race, in all men considered as component Atoms of Man, as young Leaves are the organs of supplying vital air to the atmosphere.”120*
In January 1805 these night-speculations led to a devastating piece of psychological self-analysis, examining the patterns of hope and dread which had dominated his early life. “It is a most instructive part of my Life the fact, that I have been always preyed on by some Dread, and perhaps all my faulty actions have been the consequence of some Dread or other on my mind: from fear of Pain, or Shame, not from prospect of Pleasure.”
Coleridge ran through his boyhood horrors at Christ’s Hospital, his adolescent “short-lived Fit of Fears from sex”, his wholly “imaginative and imaginary Love” for Mary Evans. Then came the “stormy time” of Pantisocracy when “America really inspired Hope”, and his increasingly unhappy marriage. “Constant dread in my mind respecting Mrs Coleridge’s Temper, etc. – and finally stimulants in the fear & prevention of violent Bowel-attacks from mental agitation.” Finally came the “almost epileptic night-horrors in my sleep: & since then every error I have committed, has been the immediate effect of these bad most shocking Dreams – anything to prevent them.”
He summed it up in an extraordinary, domestic image of food: of a child’s comfort-food, sticky and enticing, but which is also red and bleeding like a wound. “All this interwoven with its minor consequences, that fill up the interspaces – the cherry juice running in between the cherries in a cherry pie: procrastination in the dread of this – & something else in consequence of that procrastination etc.” The entry ends with a desperate thought of Asra, how he had “concentred” his soul on a woman “almost as feeble in Hope as myself”.121 Self-pity and self-knowledge were finely balanced in these reflections, and the sinister percolating cherry juice gleams dark red like laudanum splashing into a wine glass and running down his throat.
But on other nights in January and February, Coleridge was also making superb, lucid entries on subjects as diverse as aesthetics, politics, theology or philosophy. Notes on Ball’s talk of Mediterranean strategy mix with discussion of the Platonic fathers, etymology, astronomy versus astrology, Roman Catholic superstitions, Captain Decatur’s naval adventures, the symbolism of wood-fires, the spring flora of Malta, or the attempt to assassinate the Bey of Tunis. Many of these topics would later appear in Coleridge’s books and lectures, so that this whole period of reading and self-immersion served a purpose not immediately evident to Coleridge and yet vital to his intellectual expansion and development.
Coleridge’s power to draw analogies and cross-references is continually astonishing. Reading Samuel Horsey’s critique of the Greek philosopher Athenagoras on the subject of childbirth (in A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of St Albans, 1783, a book he had picked up on the secondhand stalls of Queen’s Square in Valletta), Coleridge emerges with the concept of “organic form” which was to shape years of lecturing back in London. “Wherein then would Generation differ from Fabrication, or a child from a Statue or a Picture? It is surely the inducement of a Form on pre-existing material in consequence of the transmission of a Life…The difference therefore between Fabrication and Generation becomes clearly inducible: the Form of the latter is ab intra, evolved; the other ab extra, impressed.”122 From this distinction, as from his earlier observations on sailing-ships, a whole theory of imaginative “generation” would come.
One of his most persistent night-themes is the huge Mediterranean moon viewed from his garret window across Valletta harbour. To Coleridge it was still the magic moon of the “Ancient Mariner”, but now he turned to it with a new intensity, as a witness to his own sufferings. One midnight it was “blue at one edge from the deep utter Blue of the Sky, a mass of pearl-white Cloud below, distant and travelling to the Horizon.” He found himself praying to it, as to a divinity. “Consciously I stretched forth my arms to embrace the Sky and in a trance I had worshipped God in the Moon: the Spirit not the Form. I felt in how innocent a feeling Sabeism might have begun: O not only the Moon, but the depth of the Sky!” He recognized in this a profoundly religious instinct that was to grow with ever-greater force in the coming years: that he was not spiritually self-sufficient, and that he had a primitive, almost pagan, need for an external power. “O yes! – Me miserable! O yes! – Have Mercy on me,
