Samuel Coleridge - The Complete Essays, Lectures & Letters of S. T. Coleridge (Illustrated)

“D. JOHN. — Some wine, sirrah! Here’s to Don Pedro’s ghost — he should

have been welcome.

“D. LOP. — The rascal is afraid of you after death.

(One knocks hard at the door.)

“D. JOHN. — (to the servant) — Rise and do your duty.

“SERV. — Oh the devil, the devil! (Marble ghost enters.)

“D. JOHN. — Ha! ‘tis the ghost! Let’s rise and receive him! Come,

Governour, you are welcome, sit there; if we had thought you would

have come, we would have staid for you.

Here, Governour, your health! Friends, put it about! Here’s

excellent meat, taste of this ragout. Come, I’ll help you, come

eat, and let old quarrels be forgotten. (The ghost threatens him

with vengeance.)

“D. JOHN. — We are too much confirmed — curse on this dry discourse.

Come, here’s to your mistress, you had one when you were living:

not forgetting your sweet sister. (devils enter.)

“D. JOHN. — Are these some of your retinue? Devils, say you? I’m

sorry I have no burnt brandy to treat ‘em with, that’s drink fit

for devils,” etc.

Nor is the scene from which we quote interesting, in dramatic probability alone; it is susceptible likewise of a sound moral; of a moral that has more than common claims on the notice of a too numerous class, who are ready to receive the qualities of gentlemanly courage, and scrupulous honour, (in all the recognised laws of honour,) as the substitutes of virtue, instead of its ornaments. This, indeed, is the moral value of the play at large, and that which places it at a world’s distance from the spirit of modern jacobinism. The latter introduces to us clumsy copies of these showy instrumental qualities, in order to reconcile us to vice and want of principle; while the Atheista Fulminato presents an exquisite portraiture of the same qualities, in all their gloss and glow, but presents them for the sole purpose of displaying their hollowness, and in order to put us on our guard by demonstrating their utter indifference to vice and virtue, whenever these and the like accomplishments are contemplated for themselves alone.

Eighteen years ago I observed, that the whole secret of the modern jacobinical drama, (which, and not the German, is its appropriate designation,) and of all its popularity, consists in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things in their causes and effects: namely, in the excitement of surprise by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour (those things rather which pass amongst us for such) in persons and in classes where experience teaches us least to expect them; and by rewarding with all the sympathies which are the due of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem.

This of itself would lead me back to BERTRAM, or the CASTLE OF ST. ALDOBRAND; but, in my own mind, this tragedy was brought into connection with THE LIBERTINE, (Shadwell’s adaptation of the Atheista Fulminato to the English stage in the reign of Charles the Second,) by the fact, that our modern drama is taken, in the substance of it, from the first scene of the third act of THE LIBERTINE. But with what palpable superiority of judgment in the original! Earth and hell, men and spirits are up in arms against Don John; the two former acts of the play have not only prepared us for the supernatural, but accustomed us to the prodigious. It is, therefore, neither more nor less than we anticipate when the Captain exclaims: “In all the dangers I have been, such horrors I never knew. I am quite unmanned:” and when the Hermit says, that he had “beheld the ocean in wildest rage, yet ne’er before saw a storm so dreadful, such horrid flashes of lightning, and such claps of thunder, were never in my remembrance.” And Don John’s burst of startling impiety 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