Anima Poetae Part 14

[Sidenote: THE BRIGHT BLUE SEA]

How often I have occasion to notice with pure delight the depth of the exceeding blueness of the Mediterranean from my window! It is often, indeed, purple; but I am speaking of its blueness--a perfect blue, so very pure an one. The sea is like a night-sky; and but for its _planities_, it were as if the night-sky were a thing that turned round and lay in the day-time under the paler Heaven. And it is on this expanse that the vessels have the fine white dazzling cotton sails.

[Sidenote: THE BIRTH OF THE IDEA]

Centuries before their mortal incarnation, Jove was wont to manifest to the G.o.ds the several creations as they emerged from the divine ideal.

Now it was reported in heaven that an unusually fair creation of a woman was emerging, and Venus, fearful that her son should become enamoured as of yore with Psyche (what time he wandered alone, his bow unslung, and using his darts only to cut out her name on rocks and trees, or, at best, to shoot hummingbirds and birds of Paradise to make feather-chaplets for her hair, and the world, meanwhile, grown loveless, hardened into the Iron Age), entreats Jove to secrete this form [of perilous beauty]. But Cupid, who had heard the report, and fondly expected a re-manifestation of Psyche, hid himself in the hollow of the sacred oak beneath which the Father of G.o.ds had withdrawn as to an unapproachable adytum, and beheld the Idea emerging in its _First Glory_. Forthwith the wanton was struck blind by the splendour ere yet the blaze had defined itself with form, and now his arrows strike but vaguely.

[Sidenote: THE CONVERSION OF CERES]

I have somewhere read, or I have dreamt, a wild tale of Ceres' loss of Proserpine, and her final recovery of her daughter by means of Christ when He descended into h.e.l.l, at which time she met Him and abjured all wors.h.i.+p for the future.

It were a quaint mythological conceit to feign that the G.o.ds of Greece and Rome were some of the _best_ of the fallen spirits, and that of their number _Apollo_, Mars, and the Muses were converted to Christianity, and became different saints.

[Sidenote: AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD]

The ribbed flame--its s.n.a.t.c.hes of impatience, that half-seem, and only _seem_ that half, to baffle its upward rush--the eternal unity of individualities whose essence is in their distinguishableness, even as thought and _fancies_ in the mind; the points of so many cherubic swords s.n.a.t.c.hed back, but never discouraged, still fountaining upwards:--flames self-s.n.a.t.c.hed up heavenward, if earth supply the fuel, heaven the dry light air--themselves still making the current that will fan and spread them--yet all their force in vain, if of itself--and light dry air, heaped fuel, fanning breeze as idle, if no inward spark lurks there, or lurks unkindled. Such a spark, O man! is thy Free Will--the star whose beams are Virtue!

CHAPTER IV

_1805_

Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea!

And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.

S. T. C.

[Sidenote: THE SENSE OF MAGNITUDE Tuesday, Jan. 15, 1805]

This evening there was the most perfect and the brightest halo circling the roundest and brightest moon I ever beheld. So bright was the halo, so compact, so entire a circle, that it gave the whole of its area, the moon itself included, the appearance of a solid opaque body, an enormous planet. It was as if this planet had a circular trough of some light-reflecting fluid for its rim (that is the halo) and its centre (that is the moon) a small circular basin of some fluid that still more copiously reflected, or that even emitted light; and as if the interspatial area were somewhat equally substantial but sullen. Thence I have found occasion to meditate on the nature of the sense of magnitude and its absolute dependence on the idea of _substance_; the consequent difference between magnitude and s.p.a.ciousness, the dependence of the idea on double-touch, and thence to evolve all our feelings and ideas of magnitude, magnitudinal sublimity, &c., from a scale of our own bodies.

For why, if form const.i.tuted the sense, that is, if it were pure vision, as a perceptive sense abstracted from _feeling_ in the organ of vision, why do I seek for mountains, when in the flattest countries the clouds present so many and so much more romantic and _s.p.a.cious_ forms, and the coal-fire so many, so much more varied and lovely forms? And whence arises the pleasure from musing on the latter? Do I not, more or less consciously, fancy myself a Lilliputian to whom these would be mountains, and so, by this fact.i.tious scale, make them mountains, my pleasure being consequently playful, a voluntary poem in hieroglyphics or picture-writing--"_phantoms_ of sublimity," which I continue to know to be _phantoms_? And form itself, is not its main agency exerted in individualising the thing, making it _this_ and _that_, and thereby facilitating the shadowy measurement of it by the scale of my own body?

Yon long, not unvaried, ridge of hills, that runs out of sight each way, it is _s.p.a.cious_, and the pleasure derivable from it is from its _running_, its _motion_, its a.s.similation to action; and here the scale is taken from my life and soul, and not from my body. s.p.a.ce is the Hebrew name for G.o.d, and it is the most perfect image of _soul, pure soul_, being to us nothing but unresisted action. Whenever action is resisted, limitation begins--and limitation is the first const.i.tuent of body--the more omnipresent it is in a given s.p.a.ce, the more that s.p.a.ce is _body_ or matter--and thus all body necessarily presupposes soul, inasmuch as all resistance presupposes action. Magnitude, therefore, is the intimate blending, the most perfect union, through its whole sphere, in every minutest part of it, of action and resistance to action. It is s.p.a.ciousness in which s.p.a.ce is filled up--that is, as we well say, transmitted by incorporate accession, not destroyed. In all limited things, that is, in _all forms_, it is at least fantastically stopped, and, thus, from the positive _grasp_ to the mountain, from the mountain to the cloud, from the cloud to the blue depth of sky, which, as on the top of Etna, in a serene atmosphere, seems to go _behind_ the sun, all is _graduation_, that precludes division, indeed, but not distinction; and he who endeavours to overturn a distinction by showing that there is no chasm, by the old sophism of the _c.u.mulus_ or the horse's tail, is still diseased with the _formication_,[B] the (what is the nosological name of it? the hairs or dancing infinites of black specks seeming always to be before the eye), the araneosis of corpuscular materialism.--S. T. C.

[Sidenote: STRAY THOUGHTS FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]

The least things, how they evidence the superiority of English artisans!

Even the Maltese wafers, for instance, that stick to your mouth and fingers almost so as to make it impossible to get them off without squeezing them into a little pellet, and yet will not stick to the paper.

Everyone of tolerable education feels the _imitability_ of Dr. Johnson's and other-such's style, the inimitability of Shakspere's, &c. Hence, I believe, arises the partiality of thousands for Johnson. They can imagine _themselves_ doing the same. Vanity is at the bottom of it. The number of imitators proves this in some measure.

Of the feelings of the English at the sight of a convoy from England.

Man cannot be selfish--that part of me (my beloved) which is distant, in s.p.a.ce, excites the same feeling as the "ich"[C] distant from me in time. My friends are indeed my soul!

[Sidenote: Jan. 22, 1805.]

I had not moved from my seat, and wanted the stick of sealing-wax, nearly a whole one, for another letter. I could not find it, it was not on the table--had it dropped on the ground? I searched and searched everywhere, my pockets, my fobs, impossible places--literally it had vanished, and where was it? It had stuck to my _elbow_, I having leaned upon it ere it had grown cold! A curious accident, and in no way similar to that of the butcher and his steel in his mouth which he was seeking for. Mine was true accident.

The maxims which govern the Courts of Admiralty, their "betwixt and between" of positive law and the dictates of right reason, resemble the half-way _inter jus et aequitatem_ of Roman jurisprudence. It were worth while to examine the advantages of this as far as it is a real _modification_, its disadvantages as far as it appears a _jumble_.

Seeing a nice bed of glowing embers with one junk of firewood well placed, like the remains of an old edifice, and another well-nigh mouldered one corresponding to it, I felt an impulse to put on three pieces of wood that exactly completed the perishable architecture, though it was eleven o'clock, though I was that instant going to bed, and there could be, in common ideas, no possible use in it. Hence I seem (for I write not having yet gone to bed) to suspect that this disease of totalising, of perfecting, may be the bottom impulse of many, many actions, in which it never is brought forward as an avowed or even agnised as a conscious motive.

Mem.--to collect facts for a comparison between a _wood_ and a _coal_ fire, as to sights and sounds and bodily feeling.

I have read somewhere of a sailor who dreamt that an encounter with the enemy was about to take place, and that he should discover cowardice during action. Accordingly he awakes his brother the Captain, and bids him prepare for an engagement. At daybreak a s.h.i.+p is discovered on the horizon and the sailor, mindful of his dream, procures himself to be tied to a post. At the close of the day he is released unwounded but dead from fright. Apply this incident to Miss Edgeworth's Tales, and all similar attempts to cure faults by detailed forewarnings, which leave on the similarly faulty an impression of fatality that extinguishes hope.

What precedes to the voice follows to the eye, as 000.1 and 100. A, B, C--were they men, you would say that "C" went first, but being letters, things of voice and ear in their original, we say that "A" goes first.

There are many men who, following, made 1 = 1000, being placed at head, become useless cyphers, mere finery for form's sake.

[Sidenote: Feb. 1, 1805, Friday, Malta]

Of the millions that use the pen, how many (query) understand the story of this machine, the action of the slit, eh? I confess, ridiculous as it must appear to those who do understand it, that I have not been able to answer the question off-hand to myself, having only this moment thought of it.

[Sidenote: Feb. 3, 1805]

The gentlest form of Death, a Sylphid Death, pa.s.sed by, beheld a sleeping baby--became, Narcissus-like, enamoured of its own self in the sweet counterfeit, seized it and carried it off as a mirror close by the green Paradise--but the reviving air awakened the babe, and 'twas death that died at the sudden loss.

[Sidenote: THE FRENCH LANGUAGE AND POETRY Feb. 4, 1805]

I cannot admit that any language can be unfit for poetry, or that there is any language in which a divinely inspired architect may not sustain the lofty edifice of verse on its two pillars of sublimity and pathos.

Yet I have heard Frenchmen, nay, even Englishmen, a.s.sert that of the German, which contains perhaps an hundred pa.s.sages equal to the--

Und ein Gott ist, ein heiliger Wille lebt, Wie auch der menschliche w.a.n.ke;--

and I have heard both German and Englishmen (and these, too, men of true feeling and genius, and so many of them that such company of my betters makes me not ashamed to the having myself been guilty of this injustice) a.s.sert that the French language is insusceptible of poetry in its higher and purer sense, of poetry which excites emotion not merely creates amus.e.m.e.nt, which demands continuous admiration, not regular recurrence of conscious surprise, and the effect of which is love and joy.

Unfortunately the manners, religion and government of France, and the circ.u.mstances of its emergence from the polyarchy of feudal barony, have given a bad taste to the Parisians--so bad a one as doubtless to have mildewed many an opening blossom. I cannot say that I know and can name any one French writer that can be placed among the greater poets, but when I read the inscription over the Chartreuse--

C'est ici que la Mort et la Verite Elevent leurs flambeaux terribles; C'est de cette demeure au monde inaccessible Que l'on pa.s.se a l'Eternite