Anima Poetae Part 11

Each man having a spark (to use the old metaphor) of the Divinity, yet a whole fire-grate of humanity--each, therefore, will legislate for the whole, and spite of the _De gustibus non est disputandum_, even in trifles--and, till corrected by experience, at least, in this endless struggle of presumption, really occasioned by the ever-working spark of the Universal, in the disappointments and baffled attempts of each, all are disposed to [admit] the _jus extrinsec.u.m_ of Spinoza, and recognise that reason as the highest which may not be understood as the best, but of which the concrete possession is felt to be the strongest. Then come society, habit, education, misery, intrigue, oppression, then _revolution_, and the circle begins anew. Each man will universalise his notions, and, yet, each is variously finite. To _reconcile_, therefore, is truly the work of the inspired! This is the true _Atonement_--that is, to reconcile the struggles of the infinitely various finite with the _permanent_.

[Sidenote: A MEASURE IN SELF-REPROOF]

Do not be too much discouraged, if any virtue _should_ be mixed, in your consciousness, with affectation and imperfect sincerity, and some vanity. Disapprove of this, and continue the practice of the good feeling, even though mixed, and it will _gradually_ purify itself.

_Probatum est_. Disapprove, be _ashamed_ of the thought, of its always continuing thus, but do not harshly quarrel with your present self, for all virtue subsists in and by pleasure. S. T. C. Sunday evening, October 14, 1804.

But a great deal of this is const.i.tutional. That const.i.tution which predisposes to certain virtues, the [Greek: Doron Theon], has this [Greek: temenos Nemeseos] in it. It is the dregs of sympathy, and while we are _weak_ and dependent on each other, and each is forced to think often for himself, sympathy will have its dregs, and the strongest, who have least of these, have the dregs of other virtues to strain off.

[Sidenote: THE OPERA]

All the objections to the opera are equally applicable to tragedy and comedy without music, and all proceed on the false principle that theatrical representations are _copies_ of nature, whereas they are imitations.

[Sidenote: A SALVE FOR WOUNDED VANITY]

When you are hara.s.sed, disquieted, and have little dreams of resentment, and mock triumphs in consequence of the clearest perceptions of unkind treatment and strange misconceptions and illogicalities, palpably from bad pa.s.sion, in any person connected with you, suspect a sympathy in yourself with some of these bad pa.s.sions--vanity, for instance. Though a sense of wounded justice is possible, nay, probably, forms a part of your uneasy feelings, yet this of itself would yield, at the first moment of reflection, to pity for the wretched state of a man too untranquil and perpetually selfish to love anything for itself or without some end of vanity or ambition--who detests all poetry, tosses about in the impotence of desires disproportionate to his powers, and whose whole history of his whole life is a tale of disappointment in circ.u.mstances where the hope and pretension was always unwise, often presumptuous and insolent. Surely an intuition of this restless and no-end-having mood of mind would at once fill a hearer having no sympathy with these pa.s.sions with tender melancholy, virtuously mixed with grateful unpharisaic self-complacency. But a patient _almost_, but not quite, recovered from madness, yet on its confines, finds in the notions of madness that which irritates and haunts and makes unhappy.

[Sidenote: OFFICIAL DISTRUST]

Malta, Friday, Nov. 23, 1804.

One of the heart-depressing habits and temptations of men in power, as governors, &c., is to make _instruments_ of their fellow-creatures, and the moment they find a man of honour and talents, instead of loving and esteeming him, they wish to _use him_. Hence that self-betraying side-and-down look of cunning; and they justify and inveterate the habit by believing that every individual who approaches has selfish designs on them.

[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]

Days and weeks and months pa.s.s on, and now a year--and the sea, the sea, and the breeze have their influences on me, and [so, too, has the a.s.sociation with] good and sensible men. I feel a pleasure upon me, and I am, to the outward view, cheerful, and have myself no distinct consciousness of the contrary, for I use my faculties, not, indeed, at once, but freely. But, oh! I am never happy, never deeply gladdened. I know not--I have forgotten--what the _joy_ is of which the heart is full, as of a deep and quiet fountain overflowing insensibly, or the gladness of joy, when the fountain overflows ebullient.

The most common appearance in wintry weather is that of the sun under a sharp, defined level line of a stormy cloud, that stretches one-third or half round the circle of the horizon, thrice the height of the s.p.a.ce that intervenes between it and the horizon, which last is about half again as broad as the sun. [At length] out comes the sun, a ma.s.s of bra.s.sy light, himself lost and diffused in his [own] strong splendour.

Compare this with the beautiful summer _set_ of colours without cloud.

Even in the most tranquil dreams, one is much less a mere spectator [than in reveries or day-dreams]. One seems always about to do, [to be]

suffering, or thinking or talking. I do not recollect [in dreams] that state of feeling, so common when awake, of thinking on one subject and looking at another; or [of looking] at a whole prospect, till at last, perhaps, or by intervals, at least, you only look pa.s.sively at the prospect.

[Sidenote: MULTUM IN PARVO]

At Dresden there is a cherry-stone engraved with eighty-five portraits.

Christ and the Twelve Apostles form one group, the table and supper all drawn by the letters of the text--at once portraits and language. This is a universal particular language--Roman Catholic language with a vengeance.

The beautifully _white_ sails of the Mediterranean, so carefully, when in port, put up into clean bags; and the interesting circ.u.mstance of the Speronara's sailing without a compa.s.s--by an obscure sense of time.

[Sidenote: THROUGH DOUBT TO FAITH]

So far from deeming it, in a religious point of view, criminal to spread doubts of G.o.d, immortality and virtue (that 3 = 1) in the minds of individuals, I seem to see in it a duty--lest men by taking the _words_ for granted never attain the feeling or the true _faith_. They only forbear, that is, even to suspect that the idea is erroneous or the communicators deceivers, but do not _believe_ the idea itself. Whereas to _doubt_ has more of faith, nay even to disbelieve, than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting-trotters.

[Sidenote: AN APOLOGY FOR COTTLE]

The Holy Ghost, say the harmonists, left all the solecisms, Hebraisms, and low Judaic prejudices as evidences of the credibility of the Apostles. So, too, the Theophneusty left Cottle his Bristolisms, not to take away the credit from him and give it to the Muses.

[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]

His fine mind met vice and vicious thoughts by accident only, as a poet running through terminations in the heat of composing a rhyme-poem on the purest and best subjects, startles and half-vexedly turns away from a foul or impure word.

The gracious promises and sweetnesses and aids of religion are alarming and distressful to a trifling, light, fluttering gay child of fashion and vanity, as its threats and reproaches and warnings--as a little bird which fears as much when you come to give it food as when you come with a desire to kill or imprison it.

That is a striking legend of Caracciolo and his floating corse, that came to ask the King of Naples' pardon.

Final causes answer to why? not to how? and who ever supposed that they did?

O those crinkled, ever-varying circles which the moonlight makes in the not calm, yet not wavy sea! Quarantine, Malta, Sat.u.r.day, Nov. 10, 1804.

[Sidenote: THE CREATIVE POWER OF WORDS AND IMAGES]

Hard to express that sense of the a.n.a.logy or likeness of a thing which enables a symbol to represent it so that we think of the thing itself, yet knowing that the thing is not present to us. Surely on this universal fact of words and images depends, by more or less mediations, the imitation, instead of the _copy_ which is ill.u.s.trated, in very nature Shaksperianised--that Proteus essence that could a.s.sume the very form, but yet known and felt not to be the thing by that difference of the substance which made every atom of the form another thing, that likeness not ident.i.ty--an exact web, every line of direction miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the other silk.

[Sidenote: SHAKSPERE AND MALONE]

Rival editors have recourse to necromancy to know from Shakspere himself who of them is the fittest to edit and ill.u.s.trate him. Describe the meeting, the ceremonies of conjuration, the appearance of the spirit, the effect on the rival invokers. When they have resumed courage, the arbiter appointed by them asks the question. They listen, Malone leaps up while the rest lay their heads at the same instant that the arbiter re-echoes the words of the spirit, "Let Malone!" The spirit shudders, then exclaims in the dread and angry utterance of the dead, "No! no! Let me alone, I said, inexorable b.o.o.bies!"

O that eternal bricker-up of Shakspere! Registers, memorandum-books--and that Bill, Jack and Harry, Tom, Walter and Gregory, Charles, d.i.c.k and Jim, lived at that house, but that nothing more is known of them. But, oh! the importance when half-a-dozen players'-bills can be made to stretch through half-a-hundred or more of pages, though there is not one word in them that by any force can be made either to ill.u.s.trate the times or life or writings of Shakspere, or, indeed, of any time. And, yet, no edition but this gentleman's name _burs_ upon it--_burglossa_ with a vengeance. Like the genitive plural of a Greek adjective, it is Malone, Malone, Malone, [Greek: Malon, Malon, Malon].

[Edmund Malone's _Variorum_ edition of Shakspere was published in 1790.]

[Sidenote: OF THE FROWARDNESS OF WOMAN December 11, 1804]

It is a remark that I have made many times, and many times, I guess, shall repeat, that women are infinitely fonder of clinging to and beating about, hanging upon and keeping up, and reluctantly letting fall any doleful or painful or unpleasant subject, than men of the same cla.s.s and rank.

[Sidenote: NE QUID NIMIS]

A young man newly arrived in the West Indies, who happened to be sitting next to a certain Captain Reignia, observed by way of introducing a conversation, "It is a very fine day, sir!" "Yes, sir," was the abrupt reply, "and be d.a.m.ned to it; it is never otherwise in this d.a.m.ned rascally climate."