deliver letters of recommendation to him and General Villettes, the military commander. The great palace with its huge shadowy inner courtyard, planted with palm trees, rather overawed him. The meeting in a vast chamber hung with crimson silk and Italian religious pictures was coldly formal. “A very polite man; but no hopes, I see clearly, of any situation.”59 Ball was a tall, avuncular figure, with a high domed forehead and small observant eyes, who said little. But the following day Coleridge was invited out to his country palace at San Antonio.
Coleridge rode out with unaccustomed punctuality at 6 a.m., and breakfasted with Ball in a garden full of orange and lemon trees. This time, a Mr Lane, the tutor of Ball’s son, was present and the conversation became more general. It was later that Ball, riding back alone with Coleridge to Valletta through the little stony lanes overlooking the harbour, began to talk of the role of luck in naval actions and life generally.
Turning to his visitor, Ball suddenly asked if he thought the old proverb was true, that “Fortune Favours Fools”. It could have been meant as a joke, but to his surprise Coleridge launched into a brilliant monologue on notions of chance, accident, contingency and superstition; and contrasted these with the underlying patterns of scientific law and human skills. In what sense, he asked, could it be said that Humphry Davy’s discoveries in chemistry were lucky? In what sense that a great commander’s victories were fortunate?60
Ball was impressed, and probably also amused. He began to tell Coleridge his own life story, and on this conversation Coleridge later felt was founded “the friendship and confidence, with which he afterwards honoured me”. It was one of the “most delightful mornings” he ever passed. Very soon he was riding with the Governor over most of the island, and the Coleridgean floodgates were opened, day after day in June. But Coleridge also listened, and Ball’s anecdotes and opinions came to fill his Malta Notebooks. Years later, in 1809, they became the basis for a biographical study – both of Ball and Nelson – in which the notion of leadership and courage, of command and self-command, is philosophically examined.61
Besides dealing with the civil administration of Malta, most pressing being the matters of law decrees and corn supplies, Ball was also engaged in a continuous debate with Nelson off Toulon, and the War Office in London, over the exact objectives of British strategy in the Mediterranean, as the war unfolded. Ball’s central idea was that Britain should permanently occupy both Malta and Sicily, with a view to controlling the sea-routes via Egypt to India. By mid-June he had enlisted Coleridge in this top-level and highly confidential discussion, commissioning him to draft a series of “position papers” setting forth arguments with the addition of whatever Coleridge could glean from books, pamphlets or newspapers.
This was work well adapted to Coleridge’s experience as a leader writer for Daniel Stuart on the Courier. Over the next weeks he produced four long papers, the first of which, “The French in the Mediterranean”, was dispatched to Nelson on 7 July 1804. Others followed on “Algeria”, “Malta”, and “Egypt”, which were forwarded to Granville Penn in Downing Street, for presentation to the secretary of state for war, during the summer. A fifth paper on “Sicily” was completed in September.62 It was evidently this work which convinced Ball of Coleridge’s real abilities; not merely a poet of genius, he would crisply inform the British Ambassador in Naples. Coleridge was given official rooms in the Governor’s palace and a salary, all within five weeks of his arrival in Malta.
On 5 July he wrote triumphantly to Sotheby, “I have hitherto lived with Dr Stoddart, but tomorrow shall take up residence at the Palace, in a suite of delightfully cool & commanding Rooms which Sir Alexander was so kind as not merely to offer me but to make me feel that he wished me to accept the Offer…Sir A.B. is a very extraordinary man – indeed a great man. And he is really the abstract Idea of a wise & good Governor.”63
As Coleridge got into the new routine of his work, his health improved and his spirits soared. He breakfasted, dined and took evening coffee with the Governor, meeting foreign diplomats and navy staff, and making contact with leading Maltese figures like Vittorio Barsoni, the influential editor of the Malta Gazette. “I have altered my whole system,” he wrote to his wife in July: he was getting up to swim before sun-rise, eating regular meals, spending a few shillings on summer clothes and ice-creams, and filling his Notebooks with Italian lessons and Ball’s table-talk.
With ceaseless, extrovert activity he was able to keep opium at bay, avoid depression, and even stop longing so obsessively for Asra to be with him – a shift of feeling he hoped to put into “a poem in 2 parts”.64 He found “Salvation in never suffering myself to be idle ten minutes together; but either to be actually composing, or walking, or in Company. – For the moment I begin to think, my feelings drive me almost to agony and madness; and then comes on the dreadful Smothering on my chest etc.”65
To Stuart he wrote, that “after being near death, I hope I shall return in Spirit a regenerated Creature”; and also with his finances much improved. He started sending confidential copies of the “position papers” for the Courier to publish anonymously (a rather daring form of unofficial “leaks”): “some Sibylline Leaves, which I wrote for Sir A.B. who sent them to the Ministry – they will give you my Ideas on the importance of the Island…you will of course take them – only not in the same words.” If he survived, he would become “a perfect man of business”, and already he considered himself “a sort of diplomatic Understrapper hid in Sir Alexander’s Palace”. In the rocky, sun-beaten island (“86 in the Shade”), he was starting to flourish again.
8
In mid-July 1804 Sir Alexander moved his family and staff four miles inland, to the summer residence at San Antonio, with its high cool rooms, exotic gardens, and magnificent panoramas over Citta Vecchia (Medina) and the eastern approaches. The diplomatic understrapper went with them, now admitted to real intimacy, and was given a fine room immediately under the tower from where he could turn his telescope over much of the island.66
There was a holiday atmosphere, and in the early mornings he wandered for hours in the high stony pastures, never out of the sound of “Steeple Clock and Churchbells”, chewing the pods of locust trees “full of an austere dulcacid Juice, that reminds me of a harsh Pear”. He was continually amazed by the gorgeous variety of trees and shrubs in the San Antonio garden, a sort of oasis among the rocky landscape, where he sat making notes. He listed pomegranate, prickly pear, pepper tree, oleander, date (“with its Wheel of Plumage”), myrtle, butterfly-flower, walnut, mulberry, orange and lemon.67 He wished he had a copy of Linnaeus to look them all up in.
Coleridge was happier at San Antonio in the summer of 1804 than he had been for many months. He had “manifest strength and spirits”.68 Beside the work for Sir Alexander, he wrote the long-promised letter to Wordsworth laying out the philosophical structure for “The Recluse”, completed a travel journal of the Malta voyage for the Beaumonts (which he later intended to publish), and laid his plans for an autumn expedition to Sicily and Naples.
His Notebooks contain exquisite observations on wildlife, such as his description of the brilliantly coloured green lizards with their bright gold spots and “darting and angular” movements. Some of these approach the condition of prose-poems, meditations on the relations between man and animal, which foreshadow
