by the hesitant plashing of the Eagle Fountain (1623) in the gardens – produced one of Coleridge’s most memorable images of that summer. He is no longer a bird, but a fish. “STC – The Fish gasps on the glittering mud, the mud of this once full stream, now only moist enough to be glittering mud. The tide will flow back, time enough to lift me up with straws & withered sticks and bear me down into the ocean. O me! that being what I have been I should be what I am!”145
The heat began to increase in July, and at 4 a.m. one morning there was an earthquake, which seemed to him like the premonition of some great battle. Typically, Coleridge was awake, and saw his old friend the moon above the Garrison Battery, almost at the full, but very strange with a “reddish smoke-colour” like a god of war.146 With the heat came increasing noise, or at least sensitivity to it and Coleridge was regularly woken in the Treasury by trumpets of the “accursed Reveille” in the square below and the “malignant torture” of the parade drums, which attacked his head “like a party of yelling drinking North American Indians attacking a Crazy Fort with a tired Garrison”.147
The Public Secretary’s temper frayed even with the ordinary Maltese, whose carts thundered down the steps of Valletta, whose children screamed (“horrid fiendliness – for fun!”), and whose boatmen howled. “But it goes through everything – their Street-Cries, their Priests, their Advocates: their very Pigs yell rather than squeak.” The dogs howled all night, and the “Cats in their amours” were like imps in hell. “He who has only heard caterwauling on English Roofs can have no idea of a cat-serenade in Malta.”
This note of comic exasperation suggests perhaps the real, underlying stresses of Coleridge’s daily work, and the typically drawn state of bureaucratic nerves in wartime. It led to various frictions in the Treasury. Mr Underwood, in particular, was irritated beyond measure by Coleridge’s ceaseless literary talk and maddening tendency to produce exquisite Italian sonnets from his pile of official paper, innocently repeating the same translation to every visitor, as something “he had just thrown off”.148
The heat also produced lugubrious stories, such as the one about the consul’s clerk in Tripoli, who got out of bed in the middle of the night to drink water, remembered with horror the danger of scorpions when walking in the dark with bare feet, “went back & slipped his feet into his Shoes, in one of which a Scorpion was, & bit him mortally”. Coleridge thought this narrative so neat, that it was actually an “invention”.149
Relations nevertheless remained generally good. Vittori Barzoni discussed each edition of the Malta Gazette with the Public Secretary, and later described Coleridge as an outstanding personality with whom he had “the closest intimacy”.150 Captain Decatur of the US navy relished his company, and when he was about to sail to a new Mediterranean station, sent from his ship outside Valletta harbour a warm note of farewell which also captures the urgency of these months: “I am extremely near the shore, & have not time to be lengthy, & have only to beg you will believe me since whom [sic] I assure there is no man’s good opinion whom I would set a higher value on. PS. Should you come out, make a sign & I shall heave to immediately.”151
By the end of July 1805, Coleridge was able to send his wife a draft for £110 from his accumulated salary, which with the Wedgwood annuity put Sara in the best financial position she had been in for some time. The threatened loss of the family home at Greta Hall had also dissolved, since the prospective buyer had withdrawn.
Coleridge’s actual return to England remained as problematic as ever, though he tried to appear more decisive than he felt. “I have been hoping and expecting to get away from England for 5 months past, and Mr Chapman not arriving, Sir Alexander’s Importunities have always overpowered me, tho my gloom has increased at each disappointment. I am determined however to go in less than a month.”152 By contrast he emphasized the importance of his work in the wartime administration. “My office, as Public Secretary, the next civil dignity to the Governor, is at times a very busy one…I often subscribe my name 150 times a day…& administer half as many Oaths, besides which I have the public memorials to write, & worse than all constant matters of Arbitration.” Sir Alexander, despite his importunities, is still described as “indeed exceedingly kind to me”. From his point of view, of course, Coleridge was sticking honourably to his post.
In August the heat went up to 88° in the shade and 140° in full sunlight. The buildings were full of sweating men and splitting furniture, with cracking boards and exploding tea-chests. “Captain Lamb’s tea chest went off, as loud as a Pistol…the Cooper’s shop (where there is at present a large quantity of Mahogany & English oak) presents to the Ear a successive Let-off of Fireworks.” Up at San Antonio all the floorboards in Sir Alexander’s beautiful new dining-room split, one by one, with startling cracks, as they sat at dinner.
Curiously the heat suited Coleridge, and once again he found himself wishing that Asra, and all the Wordsworths and his children, were with him. “I have the prickly Heat on my Body, but without…annoying me, & I am better than I have been in a long time. In short, if my mind & heart were at ease, if my children + SH + WDMW were with me, & they were well, I should be more than well. I should luxuriate, like a Negro, in the Oven of the Shade and the Blaze of the Sunshine.”153
Assuming that Coleridge had already left Malta, Wordsworth in fact was expecting Coleridge to appear at any moment in London, probably at Daniel Stuart’s Courier offices. He scotched a “rumour” that the appointment as Public Secretary was permanent, and was making a first tentative plan for them all to reunite at Sir George Beaumont’s new estate in Leicestershire. He had finished the Prelude and was anxious for Coleridge’s opinion.154
But as August progressed a new mood of despondency descended on Coleridge. He walked at 5 a.m. on the roof of San Antonio, “deeply depressed”, and gazed out at the pitiless beauty of the sea, “the Horizon dusky crimson” and the many boats swaying at anchor. He watched the wild dogs “reviving in the moonlight, & playing & gamboling in flocks”. Boils returned on his arm, and he drank “Castor oil in Gin & Water”, and had an “epileptic” return of his sexual dreams – “alas! alas! the consequences – stimulos”.155
On 21 August he wrote to Mrs Coleridge, and this time the tone of exhaustion and disenchantment is unmistakable. “Malta, alas! it is a barren Rock: the Sky, the Sea, the Bays, the buildings are all beautiful. But no rivers, no brooks, no hedges, no green fields, almost no trees, & the few that are unlovely.” He now felt it would have been better if he had remained “independent”, and continued with his own writing. His position seemed ridiculous rather than important: “for the living in a huge palace all to myself, like a mouse in a Cathedral on a Fair on Market day, and the being hailed ‘Most Illustrious Lord, the Public Secretary’ are no pleasures to me who have no ambition.”
Sir Alexander had always “contrived, in one way or another” to prevent his return, but now it was assured for September. He had the Governor’s “solemn promise” that as soon as he had completed a series of public Letters “& examined into the Law-forms of the Island”, he would be sent home on a convoy via Naples. Sir Alexander would also use his best interest with Hugh Elliott, the British Ambassador in Naples, to send him back officially with dispatches, which would “frank him
