More Pages from a Journal Part 10

A not insignificant advantage of loyalty to our Divine Director will be a more correct and generally a more lenient criticism of our fellow-creatures. We shall cease to judge them by standards which are not applicable to them. Much that we might erroneously consider wrong we shall discern to be a necessary effort to secure stability or even to preserve sanity. We shall pardon deviation from the obvious path. The boat which crosses the river may traverse obliquely the direct line to the point for which it is making, and if we reflect that perhaps a strong current besets it we shall not call the steersman a fool.

THE RIDDLE

Men had sinned against the G.o.ds, and had even denied their existence. Zeus had a mind to destroy them, but at last resolved to inflict on them a punishment worse than death. He sent Hermes to one of the chief cities with a scroll on which a few magic letters were written, and the wise men declared they contained a riddle.

Its solution would bring immortal happiness. The whole human race, neglecting all ordinary pursuits, applied itself ceaselessly to the solution of the mystery. Professors were appointed to lecture on it, it was attacked on all sides by induction, deduction, and by flights of inspiration, but n.o.body was able to unravel it. At last a child, seeing the perplexity in which her father and mother were, took one of the copies of the scroll which were hung in all the public buildings of the city, and secretly set off to consult a distant oracle of Phoebus Apollo of which she had heard. She had to traverse thirsty deserts, and not till she was nearly dead did she reach the shrine. She told her story and handed in her scroll to a priestess, who disappeared in an inner chamber. In a few minutes the temple of the Sun-G.o.d was filled with blazing light, the child prostrated herself on the floor, and she heard the words, THERE IS NO RIDDLE. She lifted herself up, and, fortified with some food given her by the priestess, began her journey home. She was just able to struggle through the city gates and deliver the message before she fell down lifeless. It was not believed; the Secret, the Secret, everybody upheld it, the professors lectured, the mad inquisition and guesses continued, and the vengeance of Zeus is not yet satisfied.

AN EPOCH

I was no longer young: in fact I was well over sixty. The winter had been dark and tedious. For some reason or other I had not been able to read much, and I began to think there were signs of the coming end. Suddenly, with hardly any warning, spring burst upon us. Day after day we had clear, warm sunshine which deepened every contrast of colour, and at intervals we were blessed with refreshing rains. I spent most of my time out of doors on the edge of a favourite wood. All my life I had been a lover of the country, and had believed, if this is the right word, that the same thought, spirit, life, G.o.d, which was in everything I beheld, was also in me.

But my creed had been taken over from books; it was accepted as an intellectual proposition. Most of us are satisfied with this kind of belief, and even call it religion. We are more content the more definite the object becomes, no matter whether or not it is in any intimate relationship with us, and we do not see that the moment G.o.d can be named he ceases to be G.o.d.

One morning when I was in the wood something happened which was nothing less than a transformation of myself and the world, although I 'believed' nothing new. I was looking at a great, spreading, bursting oak. The first tinge from the greenish-yellow buds was just visible. It seemed to be no longer a tree away from me and apart from me. The enclosing barriers of consciousness were removed and the text came into my mind, Thou in me and I in thee. The distinction of self and not-self was an illusion. I could feel the rising sap; in me also sprang the fountain of life up-rushing from its roots, and the joy of its outbreak at the extremity of each twig right up to the summit was my own: that which kept me apart was nothing. I do not argue; I cannot explain; it will be easy to prove me absurd, but nothing can shake me. Thou in me and I in thee.

Death! what is death? There is no death: IN THEE it is impossible, absurd.

BELIEF

He has vanished, the G.o.d of the Church and the Schools: He has gone for us all except children and fools; Where He dwelt is the uttermost limit of cold, And a fathomless depth is the Heaven of old.

I turn from my books, and behold! I'm aware There's a girl in the room, just a girl over there.

She stole in while I mused; and she watches the verge Of a low-lying cloud whence a star doth emerge.

A touch on her shoulder; I whisper a word, One more, and I know that the heavenly Lord Still loves and rejoices His creatures to meet: My faith still survives, for I kneel at her feet.

EXTRACTS FROM A DIARY ON THE QUANTOCKS

Spring 18--.

Walked from Holford to my lodgings on the hill. Never remember to have lived in such quietude. The cottage stands half a mile away from any house. Woke very early the next morning and went down to Alfoxden House, where Wordsworth and Dorothy lived a century ago.

Here also came Coleridge. It was almost too much to remember that they had trodden those paths. I could hardly believe they were not there, and yet they were dead--such a strange overcoming sense of presence and yet of vanishedness.

A certain degree of ignorance is necessary for a summary essay on creatures of this order. The expression of Dorothy's soul is spread over large surfaces. Some people require much s.p.a.ce and time, and the striking events of a life are often not those which are most significant. It is in small, spontaneous actions and their reiteration that character plainly appears. After prolonged acquaintance with Dorothy we see that she was great and we love her reverentially and pa.s.sionately. She could look at a beautiful thing for an hour without reflection, but absorbed in its pure beauty--a most rare gift. For how long can we watch a birch tree against the sky? Here are two extracts from her journal in the very place where I now am. They are dated 26th January and 24th February 1798, in the winter it will be noticed. 'Sat in the sunshine. The distant sheep-bells; the sound of the stream; the woodman winding along the half-marked road with his laden pony; locks of wool still spangled with the dewdrops; the blue-grey sea, shaded with immense ma.s.ses of cloud, not streaked; the sheep glittering in the sunshine.' . . .

'Went to the hill-top. Sat a considerable time overlooking the country towards the sea. The air blew pleasantly around us. . . .

Scattered farmhouses, half-concealed by green, mossy orchards; fresh straw lying at the doors; haystacks in the fields. Brown fallows; the springing wheat, like a shade of green over the brown earth; and the choice meadow plots, full of sheep and lambs, of a soft and vivid green; a few wreaths of blue smoke, spreading along the ground; the oaks and beeches in the hedges retaining their yellow leaves; the distant prospect on the land side, islanded with sunshine; the sea, like a basin full to the margin; the dark, fresh- ploughed fields; the turnips, of a lively, rough green.' That bit about the farmhouses reminds me of two very early lines of Wordsworth which are a prophecy of his peculiar quality:-

'Calm is all nature as a resting wheel';

and

'By secret villages and lonely farms.'

(first version.)

The image in the first line looks rude and unpoetical, but will be felt by anybody who has strolled observantly through a farmyard--say on a Sunday summer afternoon--and has noticed a disused wheel leaning against a wall. Wordsworth shows himself not afraid of the commonplace. A great object may gain by comparison with one which is superficially lower or even mean--nature with a cart-wheel.

Went over the hills to Bicknoller--a sunny, hazy day--and the Bristol Channel was in a mist. The note of the cuckoo was unceasing. Down in the valley at Bicknoller the hedges and banks of the lanes are in the most ardent stage of spring. Everything is pressing forward with joyous impetuosity, and yet is satisfied with what it is at the present moment and is completely at rest in it.

Along this path to Bicknoller the Ancient Mariner was begun. The most wonderful piece of criticism on record is perhaps that of Mrs.

Barbauld on the poem. She objected to it because it had no moral.

Coleridge replied: 'In my judgment the poem had too much; and the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the sh.e.l.ls aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he MUST kill the aforesaid merchant, BECAUSE one of the date-sh.e.l.ls had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son.'

To the first draft of Youth and Age, written in 1823, there is a little prose introduction, a reminiscence of the Quantocks, which is a lovely example of the way in which one sensation gains by description in terms of another. ' . . . At earliest dawn . . .

the first skylark . . . was a Song-Fountain, dashing up and sparkling to the Ear's eye, in full column or ornamented shaft of sound in the order of Gothic Extravaganza, out of sight, over the Cornfields on the descent of the Mountain on the other side--out of sight, tho' twice I beheld its mute shoot downward in the sunshine like a falling star of silver.'

Coleridge! Coleridge! How empty do the sweeping judgments pa.s.sed on him appear if we recollect that by Wordsworth, Dorothy, Charles and Mary Lamb, he was honoured and fervently loved. If a man is loved by any human being condemnation is rash, and we ought at least to be silent.

Wandered about Holford. The apple-trees are in full blossom. One of them was a particularly exquisite survival of youth in old age.

Its head was a white-and-pink ma.s.s, but it leaned almost horizontally, battered and weather-worn.

Thunder off and on all day till the afternoon. A low grey mist covered the whole sky at five o'clock, and the landscape was uninteresting, but in ten minutes the mist thinned a little, so that the sun came through it and lighted up the torn vapour.

Went over to East Quantock's Head and came back across the hill. It was a dark day; the sky was overcast, and the moors were very lonely. The thought of London and other big cities over the horizon somewhat marred the solitude. Nevertheless there are the deserts of Arabia and Africa, the regions of the North and South Poles, the Ocean, and, encompa.s.sing the globe itself, silent, infinite s.p.a.ce.

To Nether Stowey and Tom Poole's house. In the hideous church is a monument to him fairly appreciative, but disfigured by sn.o.bbism.

'His originality and grasp of mind,' says the inscription, 'counterbalanced the deficiencies of early education and secured him the friendship,' etc. His 'originality and grasp of mind'--his soul, that is to say, managed, when put in the scale, to turn it against those deficiencies which are made good to youths providentially directed to Eton and Oxford. According to the slab in the church, Poole died 8th September 1837, seventy-two years old.

The house in which he lived in his later years is a pleasant place, but has been tortured into modern gentility. His revolving grate, which he turned round when he went out, has been replaced by an approved cast-iron 'register.' He was called 'Justice Poole' in the country round. Afterwards to Coleridge's cottage--small, somewhat squalid rooms. Pity, pity, almost to tears. The second edition of his poems was published while he was here in 1797. In a note added to Religious Musings in that edition he declares his belief in the Millennium; that 'all who in past ages have endeavoured to ameliorate the state of man, will rise and enjoy the fruits and flowers, the imperceptible seeds of which they had sown in their former life; and that the wicked will, during the same period, be suffering the remedies adapted to their several bad habits.' This period is to be 'followed by the pa.s.sing away of this earth, and by our entering the state of pure intellect; when all creation shall rest from its labours.' The 'coadjutors of G.o.d' in Religious Musings are Milton, Newton, Hartley, and Priestley. In the beginning of 1798 Coleridge was preaching at the Unitarian Chapel at Shrewsbury. But on the 13th November 1797, at half-past four in the afternoon (let us be particular in dating such an event), he and Dorothy and her brother began their walk over these Quantock hills, and The Ancient Mariner was born. These are the facts, and rash indeed would anybody be who should attempt to deduce anything from them. Of all foolish criticism there is none more foolish than that which treats the mental movement of men like Coleridge or Wordsworth as if it were in an imaginary straight line. Excepting lines 123- 270, composed in the latter part of 1796, Coleridge wrote his contribution to Joan of Arc between 1794 and 1795. The Rose and Kisses were written in 1793, and On a Discovery Made Too Late in 1794. Could anybody, not knowing the dates, have believed that these three poems last-named, if not written before the Joan of Arc, were contemporaneous with it? In the Joan of Arc Coleridge is immature and led astray by politics, religion, and philosophy, but in the three little poems where he has subjects akin to him he is perfect, and could have done nothing better ten years later. Still more remarkable, Lewti, in its earliest form, cannot have been written later than 1794, for it was originally addressed to Mary Evans, from whom Coleridge parted in December 1794. As an example of the survival of his poetic power take Love's First Hope, written probably in 1824:

'O fair is Love's first hope to gentle mind!

As Eve's first star thro' fleecy cloudlet peeping; And sweeter than the gentle south-west wind, O'er willowy meads, and shadow'd waters creeping, And Ceres' golden field;--the sultry hind Meets it with brow uplift, and stays his reaping.'

Coleridge was indebted to Sir Philip Sidney for the third and fourth lines, excepting 'o'er willowy meads,' but these three words and the first and last two lines are his own. Not only does his genius survive, but emotion as pure and deep as that of the Nether Stowey days or those preceding. There is no trace of the interval between them and those of 1824.