The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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offends against time and place, as in a history or epic poem. To censure it in a monody or sonnet is almost as absurd as to dislike a circle for being round. Why then write sonnets or monodies? Because they give me pleasure when, perhaps, nothing else could. After the more violent emotions of sorrow, the mind demands amusement, and can find it in employment alone; but full of its late sufferings, it can endure no employment not in some measure connected with them. Forcibly to turn away our attention to general subjects is a painful and most often an unavailing effort.
’But O! how grateful to a wounded heart
The tale of misery to impart
From others’ eyes bid artless sorrows flow,
And raise esteem upon the base of woe.’
(Shaw.)
The communicativeness of our nature leads us to describe our own sorrows; in the endeavour to describe them, intellectual activity is exerted; and from intellectual activity there results a pleasure, which is gradually associated, and mingles as a corrective, with the painful subject of the description. ‘True,’ (it may be answered) ‘but how are the PUBLIC interested in your sorrows or your description’?’ We are for ever attributing personal unities to imaginary aggregates. — What is the PUBLIC, but a term for a number of scattered individuals? Of whom as many will be interested in these sorrows, as have experienced the same or similar.
’Holy be the lay
Which mourning soothes the mourner on his way.’
If I could judge of others by myself, I should not hesitate to affirm, that the most interesting passages in our most interesting poems are those in which the author developes his own feelings. The sweet voice of Cona never sounds so sweetly, as when it speaks of itself; and I should almost suspect that man of an unkindly heart, who could read the opening of the third book of ‘Paradise Lost’ without peculiar emotion. By a law of nature, he, who labours under a strong feeling, is impelled to seek for sympathy; but a poet’s feelings are all strong. — Quicquid amat valde amat. — Akenside therefore speaks with philosophical accuracy when he classes love and poetry as producing the same effects:
’Love and the wish of poets when their tongue
Would teach to others’ bosoms, what so charms
Their own.’
‘Pleasures of Imagination’.
There is one species of egotism which is truly disgusting; not that which leads to communicate our feelings to others, but that which would reduce the feelings of others; to an identity with our own.
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