Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

The Inspiration of the Scriptures.

'Tell me first, why it [plenary inspiration] should not be received! Why should I not believe the Scriptures throughout dictated, in word and thought, by an infallible Intelligence?'

I admit the fairness of the retort; and eagerly and earnestly do I answer: For every reason that makes me prize and revere these Scriptures ;—prize them, love them, revere them, beyond all other books! Why should I not? Because the Doctrine in question petrifies at once the whole body of Holy Writ with all its harmonies and symmetrical gradations,-the flexile and the rigid, the supporting hard and the clothing soft, the blood which is the life, -the intelligencing nerves, and the rudely woven, but soft and springy, cellular substance, in which all are embedded and lightly bound together. This breathing organism, this glorious panharmonicon, which I had seen stand on its feet as a man, and with a man's voice given to it, the Doctrine in question turns at once into a colossal Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many men, and speaks in their names, and yet is but one voice, and the same ;— and no man uttered it, and never in a human heart was it conceived. Why should I not? Because the Doctrine evacuates of all sense and efficacy the sure and constant tradition, that all the several books bound up together in our precious family Bibles were composed in different and widely distant ages, under the greatest diversity of circumstances, and degrees of light and information, and yet that the composers, whether as uttering or as recording what was uttered and what was done, were all actuated by a pure and holy Spirit, one and the same . . . one Spirit working diversely, now awakening strength, and now glorifying itself in weakness, now giving power and direction to knowledge, and now taking away the sting from error !

...

Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord; curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof-sang Deborah. Was it that she called to mind any personal wrongs-rapine or insult-that she or the house of Lapidoth had received from Jabin or Sisera? No; she had dwelt under her palm tree in the depth of the mountain. But she was a mother in Israel; and with a mother's heart, and with the vehemency of a mother's and a patriot's love, she had shot the light of love from her eyes, and poured the blessings of love from her lips, on the people that had jeoparded their lives unto the death against the oppressors; and the bitterness, awakened and borne aloft by the same love, she precipitated in curses on the selfish and coward recreants who came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord, against the mighty. As long as I have the image of Deborah before my eyes, and while I throw myself back into the age, country, circumstances, of this Hebrew Bonduca in the not yet tamed chaos of the spiritual creation ;-as long as I contemplate the impasstoned, high-souled, heroic woman in all the prominence and individuality of will and character,-I feel as if I were among the first ferments of the great affections-the proplastic waves of the microcosmic chaos, swelling up against-and yet towards-the outspread wings of the dove that lies brooding on the troubled waters. So long all is well,-all replete with instruction and example. In the fierce and inordinate I am made to know and be grateful for the clearer and purer radiance which shines on a Christian's paths, neither blunted by the preparatory

veil, nor crimsoned in its struggle through the all-enwrapping mists of the world's ignorance: whilst in the selfoblivion of these heroes of the Old Testament, their elevation above all low and individual interests,-above all, in the entire and vehement devotion of their total being to the service of their divine Master, I find a lesson of humility, a ground of humiliation, and a shaming, yet rousing, example of faith and fealty. But let me once be persuaded that all these heart-awakening utterances of human hearts-of men of like faculties and passions with myself, mourning, rejoicing, suffering, triumphing— are but as a Divina Commedia of a superhuman-O bear with me, if I say-Ventriloquist ;-that the royal Harper, to whom I have so often submitted myself as a many-stringed instrument for his fire-tipt fingers to traverse, while every several nerve of emotion, passion, thought, that thrids the flesh-and-blood of our common humanity, responded to the touch,- that this sweet Psalmist of Israel was himself as mere an instrument as his harp, an automaton poet, mourner, and supplicant ;-all is gone,-all sympathy, at least, and all example. I listen in awe and fear, but likewise in perplexity and confusion of spirit.

(From Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, 1840.)

Taste, an Ethical Quality.

Modern poetry is characterised by the poets' anxiety to be always striking. There is the same march in the Greek and Latin poets. Claudian, who had powers to have been anything-observe in him this anxious, craving vanity! Every line, nay, every word, stops, looks full in your face, and asks and begs for praise! As in a Chinese painting, there are no distances, no perspective, but all is in the foreground; and this is nothing but vanity. I am pleased to think that, when a mere stripling, I had formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad feeling.

(From Anima Poeta, 1895, p. 165.)

The Night is at Hand. (1828.)

The sweet prattle of the chimes-counsellors pleading in the court of Love-then the clock, the solemn sentence of the mighty judge-long pause between each pregnant, inappellable word, too deeply weighed to be reversed in the High-Justice-Court of Time and Fate. A more richly solemn sound than this eleven o'clock at Antwerp I never heard-dead enough to be opaque as central gold, yet clear enough to be the mountain air.

(From Anima Poeta, 1895, p. 307.)

For a brief but accurate and exhaustive biography, see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell (a reprint of the Introductory Memoir to the Poetical Works, 1893; Macmillan, 1894); and for a list of authorities on the life of S. T. Coleridge, vide ibid., page [ix.]. For an attempt to systematise Coleridge's philosophical teaching, see Spiritual Philosophy, by T. H. Green (1865). The question of Coleridge's indebtedness to German metaphysics is ably and temperately discussed by the late Professor Hort in Cambridge Essays (1856), and by Principal Shairp in Studies in Poetry and Philosophy (1868). For an unfavourable estimate of his originality and independence as a thinker, see New Essays towards a Critical Method, by J. M. Robertson (1897, pp. 154-161). For a general estimate of Coleridge as thinker and poet, see Mill's Dissertations (1859, vol. i.); Coleridge, by H. D. Traill (Men of Letters' series, 1884); Brandl's S. T. Coleridge and the English Romantic School (1887); and 'Coleridge' in Pater's Appreciations (1890). See also the essay in Mr Swinburne's edition of Christabel (1869), and the introductions to editions or selections of the poems by Mr Stopford Brooke (1895), Dr Garnett (1897), and Mr Andrew Lang (1898).

ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE.

Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849), eldest son of the preceding, was born at Bristol and educated by the Rev. John Dawes at Ambleside and at Merton College, Oxford. He obtained a secondclass in the final schools, was elected probationary Fellow of Oriel, but at the end of the first year was rejected on the score of intemperance (1820). He spent the next two years in London writing for the London Magazine, &c., attempted school-keeping at Ambleside, retired to Grasmere, and in 1831 removed to Leeds, where he wrote a series of lives of the Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire, republished (1833) as Biographia Borealis. The first of two projected volumes of Poems was also published at Leeds (1833). The rest of his life was spent at Grasmere and (1840-49) at the Nab Cottage, Rydal. His last work was a Life of Massinger prefixed to an edition of Massinger and Ford. His days were spent in fitful study, lonely reverie, and wanderings over the Lake Country. His intemperance notwithstanding, 'Li'le Hartley' (he was very short) was admired and loved by all who knew him. 'Untimely old,' he retained to the last the warmth and the simplicity of boyhood. His Poems (e.g. Leonard and Susan) and a dramatic fragment, Prometheus, were published with a Memoir by his brother Derwent (1800-83; first Principal of St Mark's College, Chelsea) in 1851 (2 vols.). Essays and Marginalia (2 vols.) were also published in 1851. His poetry is never without a certain tender grace, but it is in the sonnet that he reached eminence. The following is one of two famous sonnets on 'Prayer':

There is an awful quiet in the air,

And the sad earth, with moist imploring eye,
Looks wide and wakeful at the pondering sky,
Like Patience slow subsiding to Despair.
But see, the blue smoke as a voiceless prayer,
Sole witness of a secret sacrifice,
Unfolds its tardy wreaths, and multiplies
Its soft chameleon breathings in the rare

Capacious ether, so it fades away,

And nought is seen beneath the pendent blue,
The undistinguishable waste of day.

So have I dream'd!-Oh, may the dream be true!—
That praying souls are purged from mortal hue,
And grow as pure as He to whom they pray.

Sara Coleridge (1802-52), sister of the preceding, was brought up in Southey's house. In 1822 she translated Dobrizhöffer's Latin Account of the Abipones, and in 1825 the 'Loyal Servant's' Chevalier Bayard. She married her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1829). Her original works were Pretty Lessons for Good Children (1834) and Phantasmion, a fairy-tale (1837); but her intellectual powers are best shown in her essay on Rationalism appended to her father's Aids to Reflection in 1843, and her Introduction' to the Biographia Literaria (1847). Her Memoirs and Letters were published by her daughter in 1873.

Charles Lamb

was born on the 10th of February 1775, in Crown Office Row, in the Temple, London, where his father was clerk and confidential servant to Samuel Salt, a wealthy bencher of the Inner Temple. To John Lamb and his wife there were born in the Temple seven children, of whom three only survived their early childhood-Charles, his sister Mary, ten years older than himself, and a yet older brother, John. Charles received his first schooling at a humble academy out of Fetter Lane, but at seven years of age he obtained through his father's patron a presentation to Christ's Hospital, where he remained for the next seven years. His school experiences and the friendships he formed, notably that with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, three years his senior, are familiar to all readers of the Essays of Elia. At the age of fourteen he left school with a fair amount of scholarship and an intensified love of reading. He might have stayed and become a 'Grecian,' and so proceeded to the university. But the exhibitions were given on the understanding that the holder was to take holy orders, and Lamb's unsurmountable stammer barred him from that profession.

Lamb left Christ's Hospital in November 1789. At that time his brother John held a post in the South Sea House, of which Salt was a deputygovernor, and Charles was soon presented through the kind offices of this friend to a humble situation in the same company; but early in 1792 he obtained promotion in the shape of a clerkship in the accountant's office of the India House, where he remained for more than thirty years. In this same year Salt died. The occupation of his old clerk and servant was at an end; and with his legacies from his employer, Charles's salary, and whatever Mary Lamb could earn by needlework, in which she was proficient, the family of four (for the brother John was living a comfortable bachelor life elsewhere) retired to humble lodgings. In 1796 we find them in Little Queen Street, Holborn, and it was there that the terrible disaster occurred, destined to mould the career and character of Charles Lamb for the whole of his future life. There was a strain of inherited insanity in the children. The father, who had married late in life, was growing old and childish ; the mother was an invalid, and the stress and anxiety of the many duties devolving on Mary Lamb began to tell upon her reason. In an attack of mania, induced by a slight altercation with a little apprentice girl at work in the room, Mary Lamb snatched up a knife from the dinner-table, and stabbed her mother, who had interposed in the girl's behalf. Charles was himself present, and wrested the knife from his sister's hand; and with him the whole direction of affairs for the sister's future remained. After the inquest Mary would in the natural course have been transferred

for life to a public asylum; but, by the intervention of friends, the brother's guardianship was accepted by the authorities as an alternative. To carry out this trust Charles Lamb from that moment devoted his life, sacrificing to it all other ties and ambitions, and never flagging in duty and tenderness for thirty-eight years. Charles removed with his old father to Pentonville, where at successive lodgings they remained until the father's death. Mary Lamb remained subject to attacks of temporary aberration for the rest of her life, the attacks being usually foreseen; and at such seasons she was removed to some suitable asylum. The length and frequency of these periods of absence increased, until the closing years of her brother's life, when she was exiled from him during the greater part of each year. In the meantime Charles Lamb had fallen in love, but renounced all hope of marriage when the duty of tending his otherwise homeless sister had appeared to him paramount. The history of his brief attachment, to which there is frequent pathetic allusion in his writings, is obscure. Anne Simmons, who appears in his earliest sonnets as Anna, and in his essays as Alice W., lived with her mother in the village of Widford in Hertfordshire-the scene of Lamb's early romance of Rosamund Gray; and Lamb made her acquaintance during his frequent visits to his grandmother, Mrs Field, housekeeper at Blakesware (immortalised in one of the loveliest of his essays as 'Blakesmoor, in Hertfordshire'). Anne, who afterwards married Mr Bartram, a London silversmith, is referred to under that name in the essay 'Dream-Children.'

Lamb's earliest poems, written in 1795, were prompted by this deep attachment. Two sonnets on this theme, with two others on different topics, were included in S. T. Coleridge's earliest volume of poems, issued at Bristol in 1796. Next year a second edition of Coleridge's poems appeared, 'to which are now added poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd;' Lloyd being a young man of kindred poetic tastes, whose acquaintance Lamb had made through Coleridge. Here, as before, the poetic influence under which Lamb wrote was the same that had so strangely moved Coleridge while still at Christ's Hospital-the graceful and pensive sonnets of W. L. Bowles. In the following year Lamb and Lloyd made a second venture in a slight volume of their own (Blank Verse, by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, 1798); and here for the first time Lamb's individuality made itself felt in the touching and now famous verses on the Old Familiar Faces'-like so many of his memorable utterances in prose and verse, full of autobiographical allusion, and yet gaining rather than losing in permanence of charm through the circumstance. It was, however, in prose, not in verse, that he was to find his true strength. In the same year as Blank Verse he published his little prose romance, The Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret; and four years

later his John Woodvil-the fruit of that study of the dramatic poetry of the Elizabethan period, in the revived study of which he was to bear so large a part. Lamb had little or no dramatic faculty. The play was crude and valueless as a drama, but with detached passages reflecting much of the music and quaintness of Fletcher and Jonson.

Meantime Lamb and his sis were wandering from lodging to lodging, too en forced to leave through the rumour of Mary Lamb's malady which followed them wherever they went. They had lived at more than one house in Pentonville--they were in Southampton Buildings in 1800 and 1801-and then removed to Lamb's old familiar neighbourhood, where they continued for sixteen years. The

[graphic][merged small][merged small]

early years of their residence in the Temple were among the hardest and saddest of their lives. They were very poor; Charles's experiments in literature had as yet brought him neither money nor reputation; and the gradual accession of new friends that might have brightened their path had the drawback of bringing Charles face to face with social temptations which he could not resist. A very moderate indulgence in wine or spirits seems to have speedily affected him, and his shyness and his impediment of speech made him eagerly resort to what for the moment made him forget both. 'We are very poor,' writes Mary Lamb in 1804; and again in 1805, 'It has been sad and heavy times with us lately.' In Lamb's anxiety to raise a few pounds, rather than from any confidence in his dramatic faculty, he began to write a farce, which the proprietors of Drury Lane accepted, and produced in December 1806.

·

It was the now famous farce Mr H.-famous, however, not for its success, but for its failure. His love for things dramatic soon found a more profitable outlet in a commission from William Godwin to contribute to his 'Juvenile Library,' then in course of publication. For this series Charles and Mary wrote in 1807 their wellknown Tales from Shakespeare Mary Lamb making the version of the comedies, Charles that of the tragedies. This was Lamb's first success. It brought him sixty guineas, and, what was more valuable, hope for the future, and the increased confidence and recognition of his growing circle of friends. As one consequence of the success, the brother and sister composed jointly two other children's books-Mrs Leicester's School (1807) and the Poetry for Children (1809). Charles also told for children the story of the Odyssey, under the title of The Adventures of Ulysses. Another more important consequence was a commission from the Longmans to edit a volume of selections from the Elizabethan dramatists. The volume at once exhibited Lamb, to those who had eyes to see, as one of the most profound, subtle, and original of English poetical critics. Three years later a conviction of the same fact would be deepened in those who knew that the unsigned articles in Leigh Hunt's Reflector, on Hogarth and the tragedies of Shakespeare, were from the same hand, and that a prose writer of new and unique quality was showing above the dull level of the conventional essayist.

In 1817 Lamb and his sister left the Temple for rooms in Great Russell Street, Covent Garden. Next year an enterprising young publisher induced him to collect his scattered verse and prose in two neat volumes, as the Works of Charles Lamb, and this publication naturally paved the way for his being invited to join the staff of the London Magazine, then newly started. Lamb was required to contribute light prose essays, and was wisely allowed a free hand. His first essay appeared in August 1820, 'Recollections of the old South Sea House,' the public office in which his first small salary was earned, and where his elder brother had remained a high-placed and prosperous clerk. Lamb signed his first paper Elia, borrowing for a joke the name of a foreigner who had been fellow-clerk with him in the office. The signature was continued through Lamb's successive contributions to the magazine; and as he placed it on the title-page (without his own) of the first collected edition of the essays in 1823, it became indissolubly connected with the work. The series came to an end, as far as the London Magazine was concerned, in 1825. The Last Essays of Elia were collected in a second volume in 1833.

In August 1823 Charles and Mary quitted their rooms over the brazier's in Russell Street, and made their first experiment as householders in a cottage in Colebrooke Row, Islington, with the New River (into which George Dyer walked in

broad daylight) flowing within a few feet of their front door. Moreover, they were now on the eve of making a pleasant addition to their household in the form of a young friend, the orphan daughter of an Italian teacher of languages at Cambridge. Charles and Mary Lamb virtually adopted Emma Isola, and she was treated as a member of their family until her marriage with Edward Moxon the publisher, in 1833.

Early in 1825 Lamb, who had been for some time failing in health, was allowed to resign his post in the India House, the directors liberally granting him as pension two-thirds of his then salary. Having now no tie to any particular neighbourhood, the brother and sister were free to wander. They took lodgings-and subsequently a house--at Enfield; but Mary Lamb's health becoming gradually worse and requiring constant supervision, they parted with their furniture and gave up housekeeping. They finally removed to the neighbouring village of Edmonton, where, in a small cottage hard by the church, they spent their last year together. It was a melancholy year. Lamb's own health was suffering. They had lost their young friend Emma Isola. The absence of settled occupation had not brought Lamb all the comfort he had looked for the separation from his London friends, and now the almost continuous mental alienation of his sister, left him companionless, and with the death of Coleridge in the summer of 1834 the chief attractions of his life were gone. In December of the same year, while taking one day his usual walk on the London Road, he stumbled and fell, slightly injuring his face. The wound was in itself trifling, but erysipelas ensued, under which he rapidly sank, and he passed quietly away, without pain, on the 29th of December. He was buried in Edmonton churchyard. His sister survived him nearly thirteen years, and was buried by his side in May 1847.

Lamb's place in literature is unique and unchallengeable. As a personality he is more intimately known to us than any other figure in literature, unless it be Samuel Johnson. He is familiar to us through his works, which throughout are composed in the form of personal confidences; through his many friends who have loved to make known his every mood and trait; and through his letters, the most fascinating body of correspondence in our language. It is a dangerous thing to say, but it may be doubted whether, outside a necessarily limited circle, his works are read so much for their own sakes as for the light they throw upon the character of their author. It is the harmonious concord of dissonances in Lamb that is the secret of his attraction. The profound and imaginative character of his criticism, which at its best is unerring, and with it the reckless humour of the Bohemian and the farçeur; the presence of one lamentable weakness serving to throw into stronger relief the patient strength of his life-struggle; his

loyalty and generosity to his friends, even when they abused it most; and all this flowing from one of the most beautiful acts of devotion in the records of self-sacrifice: the wild fun of Trinculo and Stephano, alternating with the tenderness of Miranda and Ferdinand, or the profound philosophic musings of Prospero-and all these, like Ariel, now flaming distinctly,' now 'meeting and joining it is this wondrous blending of opposites that has made Lamb, save to the complexioned' and matter-of-fact, one of the most dearly loved among English men of letters, and with every sign that this love is one which no changes of taste are likely to diminish.

To Hester.

When maidens such as Hester die,
Their place ye may not well supply,
Though ye among a thousand try,
With vain endeavour.

A month or more hath she been dead,
Yet cannot I by force be led
To think upon the wormy bed,
And her together.

A springy motion in her gait,
A rising step, did indicate

Of pride and joy no common rate,
That flush'd her spirit.

I know not by what name beside
I shall it call:-if 'twas not pride,
It was a joy to that allied,

She did inherit.

Her parents held the Quaker rule, Which doth the human feeling cool, But she was train'd in Nature's school, Nature had blest her.

A waking eye, a prying mind,

A heart that stirs, is hard to bind,
A hawk's keen sight ye cannot blind,
Ye could not Hester.

My sprightly neighbour, gone before
To that unknown and silent shore,
Shall we not meet, as heretofore,

Some summer morning,

When from thy cheerful eyes a ray
Hath struck a bliss upon the day,
A bliss that would not go away,
A sweet forewarning?

The Old Familiar Faces.

sour

I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days—
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies-
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a love once, fairest among women;
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her-
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man ;
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.

Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood.
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces-
How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

Sonnet on 'Innocence.'

We were two pretty babes, the youngest she,
The youngest, and the loveliest far, I ween,
And INNOCENCE her name. The time has been,
We two did love each other's company;
Time was, we two had wept to have been apart.
But when by show of seeming good beguil'd,

I left the garb and manners of a child,
And my first love for man's society,
Defiling with the world my virgin heart—
My loved companion dropped a tear, and fled,
And hid in deepest shades her awful head.
Beloved, who shall tell me where thou art-
In what delicious Eden to be found-
That I may seek thee the wide world around?
Lines in my own Album.'

Fresh clad from heaven in robes of white,

A young probationer of light,

Thou wert, my soul, an Album bright.

A spotless leaf; but thought and care,
And friend and foe, in foul or fair,
Have written strange defeatures' there;
And Time with heaviest hand of all,

Like that fierce writing on the wall,
Hath stamp'd sad dates, he can't recall;

And error, gilding worst designs

Like speckled snake that strays and shines-
Betrays his path by crooked lines;

And vice hath left his ugly blot ;
And good resolves, a moment hot,
Fairly began-but finish'd not;

And fruitless, late remorse doth trace-
Like Hebrew lore, a backward pace—
Her irrecoverable race.

Disjointed numbers, sense unknit,
Huge reams of folly, shreds of wit,
Compose the mingled mass of it.
My scalded eyes no longer brook
Upon this ink-blurr'd thing to look-
Go, shut the leaves, and clasp the book.

On an Infant Dying as soon as Born.
I saw where in the shroud did lurk
A curious frame of Nature's work.
A flow'ret crushed in the bud,
A nameless piece of Babyhood,
Was in her cradle-coffin lying;
Extinct with scarce the sense of dying:
So soon to exchange the imprisoning womb
For darker closets of the tomb !

She did but ope an eye, and put

A clear beam forth, then straight up shut

« НазадПродовжити »