The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume II Part 215

The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume II Part 215

[63] mountains' side] Hills MS. 1795.

[75-86] intermingled with all these I observed a great number of men in Black Robes who appeared now marshalling the various Groups and now collecting with scrupulous care the Tenths of everything that grew within their reach. I stood wondering a while what these Things might be when one of these men approached me and with a reproachful Look bade me uncover my Head for the Place into which I had entered was the Temple of _Religion_. MS. 1795.

[80] shape] form 1817.

[92-3] of water he purified me, and then led MS. 1795.

[94-9] chilled and its hollow echoes beneath my feet affrighted me, till at last we entered a large Hall where not even a Lamp glimmered. Around its walls I observed a number of phosphoric Inscriptions MS. 1795.

[96-102] _large hall_ where not even a single lamp glimmered. It was made half visible by the wan phosphoric rays which proceeded from inscriptions on the walls, in letters of the same pale and sepulchral light. I could read them, methought; but though each one of the _words_ 1817.

[106] _me_. The fallible becomes infallible, and the infallible remains fallible. Read and believe: these are MYSTERIES! In the middle of _the vast_ 1817.

[106] MYSTERIES 1829.

[108] _vacant_. No definite thought, no distinct image was afforded me: all was uneasy and obscure feeling. I _prostrated_ 1817.

[118] SUPERSt.i.tION 1817.

[132] RELIGION 1817, 1829.

[141] _parts_ of each to the other, _and of_ 1817, 1829.

[146] _was_ 1817, 1829.

[161] SENSUALITY 1817, 1829.

[163] BLASPHEMY 1817, 1829.

[173] NATURE 1817, 1829.

[180] _Superst.i.tion_ 1817, 1829. spake] spoke 1817, 1829.

[196] glimpse] glance 1817, 1829.

[199] SUPERSt.i.tION 1817, 1829.

APPENDIX III

[Vide _ante_ p. 237.]

APOLOGETIC PREFACE TO 'FIRE, FAMINE, AND SLAUGHTER'[1097:1]

At the house of a gentleman[1097:2] who by the principles and corresponding virtues of a sincere Christian consecrates a cultivated genius and the favourable accidents of birth, opulence, and splendid connexions, it was my good fortune to meet, in a dinner-party, with more men of celebrity in science or polite 5 literature than are commonly found collected round the same table. In the course of conversation, one of the party reminded an ill.u.s.trious poet [Scott], then present, of some verses which he had recited that morning, and which had appeared in a newspaper under the name of a War-Eclogue, in which Fire, 10 Famine, and Slaughter were introduced as the speakers. The gentleman so addressed replied, that he was rather surprised that none of us should have noticed or heard of the poem, as it had been, at the time, a good deal talked of in Scotland. It may be easily supposed that my feelings were at this moment 15 not of the most comfortable kind. Of all present, one only [Sir H. Davy] knew, or suspected me to be the author; a man who would have established himself in the first rank of England's living poets[1097:3], if the Genius of our country had not decreed that he should rather be the first in the first rank of its philosophers 20 and scientific benefactors. It appeared the general wish to hear the lines. As my friend chose to remain silent, I chose to follow his example, and Mr. . . . . [Scott] recited the poem.

This he could do with the better grace, being known to have ever been not only a firm and active Anti-Jacobin and 25 Anti-Gallican, but likewise a zealous admirer of Mr. Pitt, both as a good man and a great statesman. As a poet exclusively, he had been amused with the Eclogue; as a poet he recited it; and in a spirit which made it evident that he would have read and repeated it with the same pleasure had his own name been 30 attached to the imaginary object or agent.

After the recitation our amiable host observed that in his opinion Mr. . . . . had over-rated the merits of the poetry; but had they been tenfold greater, they could not have compensated for that malignity of heart which could alone have 35 prompted sentiments so atrocious. I perceived that my ill.u.s.trious friend became greatly distressed on my account; but fortunately I was able to preserve fort.i.tude and presence of mind enough to take up the subject without exciting even a suspicion how nearly and painfully it interested me. 40

What follows is the substance of what I then replied, but dilated and in language less colloquial. It was not my intention, I said, to justify the publication, whatever its author's feelings might have been at the time of composing it. That they are calculated to call forth so severe a reprobation from a good man, 45 is not the worst feature of such poems. Their moral deformity is aggravated in proportion to the pleasure which they are capable of affording to vindictive, turbulent, and unprincipled readers. Could it be supposed, though for a moment, that the author seriously wished what he had thus wildly imagined, 50 even the attempt to palliate an inhumanity so monstrous would be an insult to the hearers. But it seemed to me worthy of consideration, whether the mood of mind and the general state of sensations in which a poet produces such vivid and fantastic images, is likely to co-exist, or is even compatible with, that 55 gloomy and deliberate ferocity which a serious wish to realize them would pre-suppose. It had been often observed, and all my experience tended to confirm the observation, that prospects of pain and evil to others, and in general all deep feelings of revenge, are commonly expressed in a few words, ironically tame, 60 and mild. The mind under so direful and fiend-like an influence seems to take a morbid pleasure in contrasting the intensity of its wishes and feelings with the slightness or levity of the expressions by which they are hinted; and indeed feelings so intense and solitary, if they were not precluded (as in almost 65 all cases they would be) by a const.i.tutional activity of fancy and a.s.sociation, and by the specific joyousness combined with it, would a.s.suredly themselves preclude such activity. Pa.s.sion, in its own quality, is the antagonist of action; though in an ordinary and natural degree the former alternates with the latter, 70 and thereby revives and strengthens it. But the more intense and insane the pa.s.sion is, the fewer and the more fixed are the correspondent forms and notions. A rooted hatred, an inveterate thirst of revenge, is a sort of madness, and still eddies round its favourite object, and exercises as it were a perpetual tautology 75 of mind in thoughts and words which admit of no adequate subst.i.tutes. Like a fish in a globe of gla.s.s, it moves restlessly round and round the scanty circ.u.mference, which it cannot leave without losing its vital element.

There is a second character of such imaginary representations 80 as spring from a real and earnest desire of evil to another, which we often see in real life, and might even antic.i.p.ate from the nature of the mind. The images, I mean, that a vindictive man places before his imagination, will most often be taken from the realities of life: they will be images of pain and 85 suffering which he has himself seen inflicted on other men, and which he can fancy himself as inflicting on the object of his hatred. I will suppose that we had heard at different times two common sailors, each speaking of some one who had wronged or offended him: that the first with apparent violence 90 had devoted every part of his adversary's body and soul to all the horrid phantoms and fantastic places that ever Quevedo dreamt of, and this in a rapid flow of those outrageous and wildly combined execrations, which too often with our lower cla.s.ses serve for escape-valves to carry off the excess of their pa.s.sions, 95 as so much superfluous steam that would endanger the vessel if it were retained. The other, on the contrary, with that sort of calmness of tone which is to the ear what the paleness of anger is to the eye, shall simply say, 'If I chance to be made boatswain, as I hope I soon shall, and can but once get that 100 fellow under my hand (and I shall be upon the watch for him), I'll tickle his pretty skin! I won't hurt him! oh no! I'll only cut the -- -- to the liver!' I dare appeal to all present, which of the two they would regard as the least deceptive symptom of deliberate malignity? nay, whether it would surprise them 105 to see the first fellow, an hour or two afterwards, cordially shaking hands with the very man the fractional parts of whose body and soul he had been so charitably disposing of; or even perhaps risking his life for him? What language Shakespeare considered characteristic of malignant disposition we see in the 110 speech of the good-natured Gratiano, who spoke 'an infinite deal of nothing more than any man in all Venice';

----Too wild, too rude and bold of voice!

the skipping spirit, whose thoughts and words reciprocally ran away with each other; 115

----O be them d.a.m.n'd, inexorable dog!

And for thy life let justice be accused!

and the wild fancies that follow, contrasted with Shylock's tranquil 'I stand here for Law'.

Or, to take a case more a.n.a.logous to the present subject, 120 should we hold it either fair or charitable to believe it to have been Dante's serious wish that all the persons mentioned by him (many recently departed, and some even alive at the time,) should actually suffer the fantastic and horrible punishments to which he has sentenced them in his h.e.l.l and Purgatory? 125 Or what shall we say of the pa.s.sages in which Bishop Jeremy Taylor antic.i.p.ates the state of those who, vicious themselves, have been the cause of vice and misery to their fellow-creatures?

Could we endure for a moment to think that a spirit, like Bishop Taylor's, burning with Christian love; that a man 130 const.i.tutionally overflowing with pleasurable kindliness; who scarcely even in a casual ill.u.s.tration introduces the image of woman, child, or bird, but he embalms the thought with so rich a tenderness, as makes the very words seem beauties and fragments of poetry from Euripides or Simonides;--can we 135 endure to think, that a man so natured and so disciplined, did at the time of composing this horrible picture, attach a sober feeling of reality to the phrases? or that he would have described in the same tone of justification, in the same luxuriant flow of phrases, the tortures about to be inflicted on a living 140 individual by a verdict of the Star-Chamber? or the still more atrocious sentences executed on the Scotch anti-prelatists and schismatics, at the command, and in some instances under the very eye of the Duke of Lauderdale, and of that wretched bigot who afterwards dishonoured and forfeited the throne of Great 145 Britain? Or do we not rather feel and understand, that these violent words were mere bubbles, flashes and electrical apparitions, from the magic cauldron of a fervid and ebullient fancy, constantly fuelled by an unexampled opulence of language?

Were I now to have read by myself for the first time the poem 150 in question, my conclusion, I fully believe, would be, that the writer must have been some man of warm feelings and active fancy; that he had painted to himself the circ.u.mstances that accompany war in so many vivid and yet fantastic forms, as proved that neither the images nor the feelings were the result 155 of observation, or in any way derived from realities. I should judge that they were the product of his own seething imagination, and therefore impregnated with that pleasurable exultation which is experienced in all energetic exertion of intellectual power; that in the same mood he had generalized the causes of 160 the war, and then personified the abstract and christened it by the name which he had been accustomed to hear most often a.s.sociated with its management and measures. I should guess that the minister was in the author's mind at the moment of composition as completely ?pa???, ??a??sa????, as Anacreon's 165 gra.s.shopper, and that he had as little notion of a real person of flesh and blood,

Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, [_Paradise Lost_, II. 668.]

as Milton had in the grim and terrible phantom (half person, half allegory) which he has placed at the gates of h.e.l.l. I 170 concluded by observing, that the poem was not calculated to excite pa.s.sion in any mind, or to make any impression except on poetic readers; and that from the culpable levity betrayed at the close of the eclogue by the grotesque union of epigrammatic wit with allegoric personification, in the allusion to the 175 most fearful of thoughts, I should conjecture that the 'rantin'

Bardie', instead of really believing, much less wishing, the fate spoken of in the last line, in application to any human individual, would shrink from pa.s.sing the verdict even on the Devil himself, and exclaim with poor Burns, 180

But fare ye weel, auld Nickie-ben!

Oh! wad ye tak a thought an' men!

Ye aiblins might--I dinna ken-- Still hae a stake-- I'm wae to think upon yon den, 185 Ev'n for your sake!

I need not say that these thoughts, which are here dilated, were in such a company only rapidly suggested. Our kind host smiled, and with a courteous compliment observed, that the defence was too good for the cause. My voice faltered 190 a little, for I was somewhat agitated; though not so much on my own account as for the uneasiness that so kind and friendly a man would feel from the thought that he had been the occasion of distressing me. At length I brought out these words: 'I must now confess, sir! that I am author of that poem. It 195 was written some years ago. I do not attempt to justify my past self, young as I then was; but as little as I would now write a similar poem, so far was I even then from imagining that the lines would be taken as more or less than a sport of fancy. At all events, if I know my own heart, there was 200 never a moment in my existence in which I should have been more ready, had Mr. Pitt's person been in hazard, to interpose my own body, and defend his life at the risk of my own.'

I have prefaced the poem with this anecdote, because to have printed it without any remark might well have been understood 205 as implying an unconditional approbation on my part, and this after many years' consideration. But if it be asked why I republished it at all, I answer, that the poem had been attributed at different times to different other persons; and what I had dared beget, I thought it neither manly nor honourable not to 210 dare father. From the same motives I should have published perfect copies of two poems, the one ent.i.tled The Devil's Thoughts, and the other, The Two Round s.p.a.ces on the Tombstone, but that the three first stanzas of the former, which were worth all the rest of the poem, and the best stanza of the 215 remainder, were written by a friend [Southey] of deserved celebrity; and because there are pa.s.sages in both which might have given offence to the religious feelings of certain readers.

I myself indeed see no reason why vulgar superst.i.tions and absurd conceptions that deform the pure faith of a Christian 220 should possess a greater immunity from ridicule than stories of witches, or the fables of Greece and Rome. But there are those who deem it profaneness and irreverence to call an ape an ape, if it but wear a monk's cowl on its head; and I would rather reason with this weakness than offend it. 225

The pa.s.sage from Jeremy Taylor to which I referred is found in his second Sermon on Christ's Advent to Judgment; which is likewise the second in his year's course of sermons. Among many remarkable pa.s.sages of the same character in those discourses, I have selected this as the most so. 'But when this 230 Lion of the tribe of Judah shall appear, then Justice shall strike, and Mercy shall not hold her hands; she shall strike sore strokes, and Pity shall not break the blow. As there are treasures of good things, so hath G.o.d a treasure of wrath and fury, and scourges and scorpions; and then shall be produced the shame 235 of l.u.s.t and the malice of Envy, and the groans of the oppressed and the persecutions of the saints, and the cares of Covetousness and the troubles of Ambition, and the insolencies of traitors and the violences of rebels, and the rage of anger and the uneasiness of impatience, and the restlessness of unlawful desires; and by 240 this time the monsters and diseases will be numerous and intolerable, when G.o.d's heavy hand shall press the sanies and the intolerableness, the obliquity and the unreasonableness, the amazement and the disorder, the smart and the sorrow, the guilt and the punishment, out from all our sins, and pour them 245 into one chalice, and mingle them with an infinite wrath, and make the wicked drink off all the vengeance, and force it down their unwilling throats with the violence of devils and accursed spirits.'

That this Tartarean drench displays the imagination rather 250 than the discretion of the compounder; that, in short, this pa.s.sage and others of the same kind are in a bad taste, few will deny at the present day. It would, doubtless, have more behoved the good bishop not to be wise beyond what is written on a subject in which Eternity is opposed to Time, and a Death 255 threatened, not the negative, but the positive Opposite of Life; a subject, therefore, which must of necessity be indescribable to the human understanding in our present state. But I can neither find nor believe that it ever occurred to any reader to ground on such pa.s.sages a charge against Bishop Taylor's 260 humanity, or goodness of heart. I was not a little surprised therefore to find, in the Pursuits of Literature and other works, so horrible a sentence pa.s.sed on Milton's moral character, for a pa.s.sage in his prose writings, as nearly parallel to this of Taylor's as two pa.s.sages can well be conceived to be. All his 265 merits, as a poet, forsooth--all the glory of having written the Paradise Lost, are light in the scale, nay, kick the beam, compared with the atrocious malignity of heart, expressed in the offensive paragraph. I remembered, in general, that Milton had concluded one of his works on Reformation, written in the 270 fervour of his youthful imagination, in a high poetic strain, that wanted metre only to become a lyrical poem. I remembered that in the former part he had formed to himself a perfect ideal of human virtue, a character of heroic, disinterested zeal and devotion for Truth, Religion, and public Liberty, in act and in 275 suffering, in the day of triumph and in the hour of martyrdom.

Such spirits, as more excellent than others, he describes as having a more excellent reward, and as distinguished by a transcendant glory: and this reward and this glory he displays and particularizes with an energy and brilliance that announced the 280 Paradise Lost as plainly, as ever the bright purple clouds in the east announced the coming of the Sun. Milton then pa.s.ses to the gloomy contrast, to such men as from motives of selfish ambition and the l.u.s.t of personal aggrandizement should, against their own light, persecute truth and the true religion, and 285 wilfully abuse the powers and gifts entrusted to them, to bring vice, blindness, misery and slavery, on their native country, on the very country that had trusted, enriched and honoured them.

Such beings, after that speedy and appropriate removal from their sphere of mischief which all good and humane men must 290 of course desire, will, he takes for granted by parity of reason, meet with a punishment, an ignominy, and a retaliation, as much severer than other wicked men, as their guilt and its consequences were more enormous. His description of this imaginary punishment presents more distinct pictures to the 295 fancy than the extract from Jeremy Taylor; but the thoughts in the latter are incomparably more exaggerated and horrific.

All this I knew; but I neither remembered, nor by reference and careful re-perusal could discover, any other meaning, either in Milton or Taylor, but that good men will be rewarded, and 300 the impenitent wicked, punished, in proportion to their dispositions and intentional acts in this life; and that if the punishment of the least wicked be fearful beyond conception, all words and descriptions must be so far true, that they must fall short of the punishment that awaits the transcendantly wicked. Had 305 Milton stated either his ideal of virtue, or of depravity, as an individual or individuals actually existing? Certainly not!

Is this representation worded historically, or only hypothetically? a.s.suredly the latter! Does he express it as his own wish that after death they should suffer these tortures? or as 310 a general consequence, deduced from reason and revelation, that such will be their fate? Again, the latter only! His wish is expressly confined to a speedy stop being put by Providence to their power of inflicting misery on others! But did he name or refer to any persons living or dead? No! But the 315 calumniators of Milton daresay (for what will calumny not dare say?) that he had Laud and Strafford in his mind, while writing of remorseless persecution, and the enslavement of a free country from motives of selfish ambition. Now what if a stern anti-prelatist should daresay, that in speaking of the insolencies of 320 traitors and the violences of rebels, Bishop Taylor must have individualised in his mind Hampden, Hollis, Pym, Fairfax, Ireton, and Milton? And what if he should take the liberty of concluding, that, in the after-description, the Bishop was feeding and feasting his party-hatred, and with those individuals before 325 the eyes of his imagination enjoying, trait by trait, horror after horror, the picture of their intolerable agonies? Yet this bigot would have an equal right thus to criminate the one good and great man, as these men have to criminate the other.

Milton has said, and I doubt not but that Taylor with equal 330 truth could have said it, 'that in his whole life he never spake against a man even that his skin should be grazed.' He a.s.serted this when one of his opponents (either Bishop Hall or his nephew) had called upon the women and children in the streets to take up stones and stone him (Milton). It is known that 335 Milton repeatedly used his interest to protect the royalists; but even at a time when all lies would have been meritorious against him, no charge was made, no story pretended, that he had ever directly or indirectly engaged or a.s.sisted in their persecution. Oh! methinks there are other and far better feelings 340 which should be acquired by the perusal of our great elder writers. When I have before me, on the same table, the works of Hammond and Baxter; when I reflect with what joy and dearness their blessed spirits are now loving each other; it seems a mournful thing that their names should be perverted to 345 an occasion of bitterness among us, who are enjoying that happy mean which the human too-much on both sides was perhaps necessary to produce. 'The tangle of delusions which stifled and distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the parasite-weeds that fed on its very roots have been 350 plucked up with a salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant care, the gradual improvement, the cautious unhazardous labours of the industrious though contented gardener--to prune, to strengthen, to engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the slug and 355 the caterpillar. But far be it from us to undervalue with light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence, to which the blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext. We antedate the feelings, in order to 360 criminate the authors, of our present liberty, light and toleration.' (_The Friend_, No. IV. Sept. 7, 1809.) [1818, i. 105.]

If ever two great men might seem, during their whole lives, to have moved in direct opposition, though neither of them has at any time introduced the name of the other, Milton and 365 Jeremy Taylor were they. The former commenced his career by attacking the Church-Liturgy and all set forms of prayer.

The latter, but far more successfully, by defending both.

Milton's next work was against the Prelacy and the then existing Church-Government--Taylor's in vindication and 370 support of them. Milton became more and more a stern republican, or rather an advocate for that religious and moral aristocracy which, in his day, was called republicanism, and which, even more than royalism itself, is the direct antipode of modern jacobinism.

Taylor, as more and more sceptical concerning the fitness of 375 men in general for power, became more and more attached to the prerogatives of monarchy. From Calvinism, with a still decreasing respect for Fathers, Councils, and for Church-antiquity in general, Milton seems to have ended in an indifference, if not a dislike, to all forms of ecclesiastic government, and to 380 have retreated wholly into the inward and spiritual church-communion of his own spirit with the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. Taylor, with a growing reverence for authority, an increasing sense of the insufficiency of the Scriptures without the aids of tradition and the consent of 385 authorized interpreters, advanced as far in his approaches (not indeed to Popery, but) to Roman-Catholicism, as a conscientious minister of the English Church could well venture. Milton would be and would utter the same to all on all occasions: he would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the 390 truth. Taylor would become all things to all men, if by any means he might benefit any; hence he availed himself, in his popular writings, of opinions and representations which stand often in striking contrast with the doubts and convictions expressed in his more philosophical works. He appears, indeed, 395 not too severely to have blamed that management of truth (istam falsitatem dispensativam) authorized and exemplified by almost all the fathers: Integrum omnino doctoribus et coetus Christiani antist.i.tibus esse, ut dolos versent, falsa veris intermisceant et imprimis religionis hostes fallant, dummodo 400 veritatis commodis et utilitati inserviant.