Sometime after 15 October he abandoned the plan to sail to Trieste and return overland, perhaps on hearing news of the defeat, on 20 October, of the Austrian army at the Ulm. By mid-November he had sailed to Naples, probably on a troop ship belonging to General Craig’s convoy, and dined with Hugh Elliott at the British Embassy.
All the news then was of the Battle of Trafalgar, which had been fought on 21 October (Coleridge’s 33rd birthday), achieving a great strategic victory. But when news of Nelson’s death reached Naples, Coleridge walked through the streets and found many Englishmen openly in tears, coming up to him to shake hands and completely overcome with an emotion which he instinctively shared.160 Ball had received a final dispatch from Nelson at Valletta four days before the engagement, describing his daring battle plan to cut through the centre of the huge French squadron in a double line astern. Nelson told Ball that his young officers had christened it “the Nelson touch”, and added with a characteristic insouciance, “I hope it is touch and taken!” The only record of this dispatch remained unpublished in Ball’s private papers, but similar stories circulated widely, the kind of thing that made all Nelson’s officers adore him and filled Coleridge with admiration.161
There was now much confusion in Naples, and Coleridge was not after all “franked home” with official papers by Elliot. So instead he made a leisurely expedition into Calabria with Captain Pasley. He visited Virgil’s tomb and contemplated Vesuvius. In late December he was offered a carriage-trip to Rome, for a fortnight as he supposed, and leaving his boxes of books and papers with an embassy friend, set out on Christmas Day. Almost immediately on his arrival, he heard from Mr Jackson, the English consul, of the battle of Austerlitz and the French armies sweeping southwards into Italy. “To stay, or not to stay?” he noted calmly. He decided to stay, and once again found himself marooned by circumstances. He made no attempt to continue his journey until the spring, and still he wrote no letters home.
The absence of news frightened the Wordsworths and infuriated Southey. Dorothy wrote to Lady Beaumont on Christmas Day: “Poor Coleridge was with us two years ago at this time…We hear no further tidings of him, and I cannot help being very uneasy and anxious: though without any evil, many causes might delay him; yet it is a long time since he left Malta. The weather is dreadful for a sea voyage. O my dear friend, what a fearful thing a windy night is now at our house! I am too often haunted with dreadful images of Shipwrecks and the Sea when I am in bed and hear a stormy wind, and now that we are thinking so much of Coleridge it is worse than ever.”162
The truth seems to be that Coleridge, with plenty of money and several letters of recommendation and credit, was embarked on a leisurely tour of the Roman sites and galleries.* One long note on the Spanish Steps suggests that he was staying in the English quarter beneath the Trinita dei Monti (where Keats would die of tuberculosis sixteen years later). Rather than face the prospect of England, he had decided to risk capture by the French armies who were steadily descending through northern Italy. While most English visitors fled back to Naples, and General Craig’s expedition sailed ignominiously back to Sicily, Coleridge was quietly making notes on the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. “Ideal = the subtle hieroglyphical felt-by-all, though not without abstruse and difficult analysis detected & understood…Take as an instance of the true Ideal Michel Angelo’s despairing Woman at the bottom of the Last Judgement.”163
Captain Pasley, who had also pulled back with his regiment to Sicily, wrote to a fellow-officer, “I was happy to meet our friend Coleridge at Naples, certainly few men are more interesting. He is now at Rome, where he stayed. Not withstanding advices of the English Resident there [Jackson] to retire, I hope the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling may never contemplate the roof of a French prison: but from his natural indolence I cannot be too sanguine of his taking himself off in time.”164 Coleridge’s book box was also shipped back, and eventually finished up where it had started, in Valletta with Stoddart. Coleridge was alone with his shirts, his guidebooks, and two remaining notebooks, in the Eternal City.
It seems to have suited him very well. Within a matter of days he had introduced himself with great success into the circle of two notable expatriate groups, one literary and the other painterly, who frequented the artistic quarter round the Spanish Steps. The first was a group of German writers who gathered at the splendid residence of Wilhelm von Humboldt, directly overlooking the Trinita dei Monti. Humboldt was a distinguished young diplomat in his mid-thirties, brother of the famous South American traveller. He had been appointed Prussian Minister to the Court of Pius VII, and held a salon with many German university visitors where Coleridge, an honorary graduate of Göttingen, immediately felt in his element.
Humboldt had formed a life-long friendship with Schiller at Jena University, and developed advanced theories of linguistics and philology, publishing learned papers on Basque and Javanese dialects. His notion of a “language world” was calculated to appeal to Coleridge, and his famous binary concept of “the Dual” (as opposed to two singulars and/or a plural) was much in Coleridge’s metaphysical style. Humboldt later championed ideals of “academic freedom”, and helped to found Berlin University. He was a patron of both arts and sciences, and among his protégés at the Trinita dei Monti was the brilliant young Romantic poet and critic, Johann Ludwig Tieck.
Coleridge formed an animated friendship with Tieck, discussing Goethe and A. W. Schlegel, and the latest philosophical work of Schelling (who had also been a professor at Jena) which they compared with that of the mystic Jacob Boehme. It was probably now that Coleridge first came to grips with Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), which rekindled his ambition to write his own general philosophical treatise at some later date. Tieck’s sister, Sophie Bernhardi, later wrote to Schlegel of the remarkable Englishman at Rome, who knew so much current German literature and who admired Schlegel’s own work on Shakespeare “unbelievably so”. Coleridge in turn admired Tieck, translated one of his poems,165 greatly valued his hospitality and “kindness”, and met him again years later in London with fond recollections of their Roman hours together.166
But Coleridge’s real intimacies were formed in the more bohemian circle of the painters. At the Cafe Greco on Strada de’ Condotti he fell in with a group that included George Wallis, Thomas Russell, and the 27-year-old American artist Washington Allston. Russell was an art student from Exeter, and Wallis a Scottish landscape painter travelling through Italy with his family, including a ten-year-old son grandly named Trajan Wallis, who delighted Coleridge with his precociousness. But it was Washington Allston, a dreamy young man, elegant and aristocratic, with wild black hair framing a pale abstracted face, to whom he most instinctively warmed.
Allston had grown up on a cotton plantation in South Carolina, and had the slow finesse of a Southern gentleman. Moneyed and leisurely, he had attended Harvard and gone on to study art in Paris and at the Royal Academy in London, where he knew Fuseli and Benjamin West. Melancholy and amusing, he said he had received his imaginative education through the stories of the black plantation workers, tales of “barbaric magic and superstition…ghosts and goblins…myths and legends to startle and alarm”.167 He had a “tendency towards the marvellous” and loved to stay up all night talking. A friend said Allston could never paint the reflections of dawn sunlight on water, because he had never seen a sunrise.
Naturally, Allston espoused the Sublime school of painting, with