The Life and Times of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Complete Autobiographical Works. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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СКАЧАТЬ is equally intelligible in its motive, as dramatic in its effect.

      But what is there to account for the prodigy of the tempest at Bertram’s shipwreck? It is a mere supernatural effect, without even a hint of any supernatural agency; a prodigy, without any circumstance mentioned that is prodigious; and a miracle introduced without a ground, and ending without a result. Every event and every scene of the play might have taken place as well if Bertram and his vessel had been driven in by a common hard gale, or from want of provisions. The first act would have indeed lost its greatest and most sonorous picture; a scene for the sake of a scene, without a word spoken; as such, therefore, (a rarity without a precedent), we must take it, and be thankful! In the opinion of not a few, it was, in every sense of the word, the best scene in the play. I am quite certain it was the most innocent: and the steady, quiet uprightness of the flame of the wax-candles, which the monks held over the roaring billows amid the storm of wind and rain, was really miraculous.

      The Sicilian sea coast: a convent of monks: night: a most portentous, unearthly storm: a vessel is wrecked contrary to all human expectation, one man saves himself by his prodigious powers as a swimmer, aided by the peculiarity of his destination —

      “PRIOR. —— — All, all did perish

      FIRST MONK. — Change, change those drenched weeds —

      PRIOR. — I wist not of them — every soul did perish —

      Enter third Monk hastily.

      “THIRD MONK. — No, there was one did battle with the storm

      With careless desperate force; full many times

      His life was won and lost, as tho’ he recked not —

      No hand did aid him, and he aided none —

      Alone he breasted the broad wave, alone

      That man was saved.”

      Well! This man is led in by the monks, supposed dripping wet, and to very natural inquiries he either remains silent, or gives most brief and surly answers, and after three or four of these half-line courtesies, “dashing off the monks” who had saved him, he exclaims in the true sublimity of our modern misanthropic heroism —

      “Off! ye are men — there’s poison in your touch.

      But I must yield, for this” (what?) “hath left me strengthless.”

      So end the three first scenes. In the next (the Castle of St. Aldobrand,) we find the servants there equally frightened with this unearthly storm, though wherein it differed from other violent storms we are not told, except that Hugo informs us, page 9 —

      “PIET. — Hugo, well met. Does e’en thy age bear

      Memory of so terrible a storm?

      HUGO. — They have been frequent lately.

      PIET. — They are ever so in Sicily.

      HUGO. — So it is said. But storms when I was young

      Would still pass o’er like Nature’s fitful fevers,

      And rendered all more wholesome. Now their rage,

      Sent thus unseasonable and profitless,

      Speaks like the threats of heaven.”

      A most perplexing theory of Sicilian storms is this of old Hugo! and what is very remarkable, not apparently founded on any great familiarity of his own with this troublesome article. For when Pietro asserts the “ever more frequency” of tempests in Sicily, the old man professes to know nothing more of the fact, but by hearsay. “So it is said.” — But why he assumed this storm to be unseasonable, and on what he grounded his prophecy, (for the storm is still in full fury), that it would be profitless, and without the physical powers common to all other violent sea-winds in purifying the atmosphere, we are left in the dark; as well concerning the particular points in which he knew it, during its continuance, to differ from those that he had been acquainted with in his youth. We are at length introduced to the Lady Imogine, who, we learn, had not rested “through” the night; not on account of the tempest, for

      “Long ere the storm arose, her restless gestures

      Forbade all hope to see her blest with sleep.”

      Sitting at a table, and looking at a portrait, she informs us — First, that portrait-painters may make a portrait from memory,

      “The limner’s art may trace the absent feature.”

      For surely these words could never mean, that a painter may have a person sit to him who afterwards may leave the room or perhaps the country? Secondly, that a portrait-painter can enable a mourning lady to possess a good likeness of her absent lover, but that the portrait-painter cannot, and who shall —

      “Restore the scenes in which they met and parted?”

      The natural answer would have been — Why the scene-painter to be sure! But this unreasonable lady requires in addition sundry things to be painted that have neither lines nor colours —

      “The thoughts, the recollections, sweet and bitter,

      Or the Elysian dreams of lovers when they loved.”

      Which last sentence must be supposed to mean; when they were present, and making love to each other. — Then, if this portrait could speak, it would “acquit the faith of womankind.” How? Had she remained constant? No, she has been married to another man, whose wife she now is. How then? Why, that, in spite of her marriage vow, she had continued to yearn and crave for her former lover —

      “This has her body, that her mind:

      Which has the better bargain?”

      The lover, however, was not contented with this precious arrangement, as we shall soon find. The lady proceeds to inform us that during the many years of their separation, there have happened in the different parts of the world, a number of “such things;” even such, as in a course of years always have, and till the Millennium, doubtless always will happen somewhere or other. Yet this passage, both in language and in metre, is perhaps amongst the best parts of the play. The lady’s love companion and most esteemed attendant, Clotilda, now enters and explains this love and esteem by proving herself a most passive and dispassionate listener, as well as a brief and lucky querist, who asks by chance, questions that we should have thought made for the very sake of the answers. In short, she very much reminds us of those puppet-heroines, for whom the showman contrives to dialogue without any skill in ventriloquism. This, notwithstanding, is the best scene in the Play, and though crowded with solecisms, corrupt diction, and offences against metre, would possess merits sufficient to outweigh them, if we could suspend the moral sense during the perusal. It tells well and passionately the preliminary circumstances, and thus overcomes the main difficulty of most first acts, to wit, that of retrospective narration. It tells us of her having been honourably addressed by a noble youth, of rank and fortune vastly superior to her own: of their mutual love, heightened on her part by gratitude; of his loss of his sovereign’s favour; his disgrace; attainder; and flight; that he (thus degraded) sank into a vile ruffian, the chieftain of a murderous banditti; and that from the habitual indulgence of the most reprobate habits and ferocious passions, he had become so changed, СКАЧАТЬ