A SAILOR'S FORTUNE - ESSAY II

Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit

by Samuel T. Coleridge

A SAILOR'S FORTUNE - ESSAY II, CONFESSIONS OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT by Samuel T. Coleridge
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Quod me non movet aestimatione:
Verum est [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] mei sodalis.
CATULL. xii.

(Translation.)--It interests not by any conceit of its value; but it
is a remembrance of my honoured friend.

The philosophic ruler, who secured the favours of fortune by seeking
wisdom and knowledge in preference to them, has pathetically
observed--"The heart knoweth its own bitterness; and there is a joy
in which the stranger intermeddleth not." A simple question founded
on a trite proverb, with a discursive answer to it, would scarcely
suggest to an indifferent person any other notion than that of a mind
at ease, amusing itself with its own activity. Once before (I
believe about this time last year), I had taken up the old memorandum
book, from which I transcribed the preceding essay, and they had then
attracted my notice by the name of the illustrious chemist mentioned
in the last illustration. Exasperated by the base and cowardly
attempt that had been made to detract from the honours due to his
astonishing genius, I had slightly altered the concluding sentences,
substituting the more recent for his earlier discoveries; and without
the most distant intention of publishing what I then wrote, I had
expressed my own convictions for the gratification of my own
feelings, and finished by tranquilly paraphrasing into a chemical
allegory the Homeric adventure of Menelaus with Proteus. Oh! with
what different feelings, with what a sharp and sudden emotion did I
re-peruse the same question yester-morning, having by accident opened
the book at the page upon which it was written. I was moved; for it
was Admiral Sir Alexander Ball who first proposed the question to me,
and the particular satisfaction which he expressed had occasioned me
to note down the substance of my reply. I was moved; because to this
conversation I was indebted for the friendship and confidence with
which he afterwards honoured me, and because it recalled the memory
of one of the most delightful mornings I ever passed; when, as we
were riding together, the same person related to me the principal
events of his own life, and introduced them by adverting to this
conversation. It recalled too the deep impression left on my mind by
that narrative--the impression that I had never known any analogous
instance, in which a man so successful had been so little indebted to
fortune, or lucky accidents, or so exclusively both the architect and
builder of his own success. The sum of his history may be comprised
in this one sentence--Haec, sab numine, nobismet fecimas, sapientia
duce, fortune permittente. (i.e. These things under God, we have
done for ourselves, through the guidance of wisdom, and with the
permission of fortune.) Luck gave him nothing: in her most generous
moods, she only worked with him as with a friend, not for him as for
a fondling; but more often she simply stood neuter, and suffered him
to work for himself. Ah! how could I be otherwise than affected by
whatever reminded me of that daily and familiar intercourse with him,
which made the fifteen months from May, 1804, to October, 1805, in
many respects the most memorable and instructive period of my life?
Ah! how could I be otherwise than most deeply affected, when there
was still lying on my table the paper which the day before had
conveyed to me the unexpected and most awful tidings of this man's
death? his death in the fulness of all his powers, in the rich autumn
of ripe yet undecaying manhood! I once knew a lady who, after the
loss of a lovely child, continued for several days in a state of
seeming indifference, the weather at the same time, as if in unison
with her, being calm, though gloomy; till one morning a burst of
sunshine breaking in upon her, and suddenly lighting up the room
where she was sitting, she dissolved at once into tears, and wept
passionately. In no very dissimilar manner did the sudden gleam of
recollection at the sight of this memorandum act on myself. I had
been stunned by the intelligence, as by an outward blow, till this
trifling incident startled and disentranced me; the sudden pang
shivered through my whole frame; and if I repressed the outward shows
of sorrow, it was by force that I repressed them, and because it is
not by tears that I ought to mourn for the loss of Sir Alexander
Ball.

He was a man above his age; but for that very reason the age has the
more need to have the master-features of his character portrayed and
preserved. This I feel it my duty to attempt, and this alone; for
having received neither instructions nor permission from the family
of the deceased, I cannot think myself allowed to enter into the
particulars of his private history, strikingly as many of them would
illustrate the elements and composition of his mind. For he was
indeed a living confutation of the assertion attributed to the Prince
of Conde, that no man appeared great to his valet de chambre--a
saying which, I suspect, owes its currency less to its truth than to
the envy of mankind, and the misapplication of the word great, to
actions unconnected with reason and free will. It will be sufficient
for my purpose to observe that the purity and strict propriety of his
conduct, which precluded rather than silenced calumny, the evenness
of his temper, and his attentive and affectionate manners in private
life, greatly aided and increased his public utility; and, if it
should please Providence that a portion of his spirit should descend
with his mantle, the virtues of Sir Alexander Ball, as a master, a
husband, and a parent, will form a no less remarkable epoch in the
moral history of the Maltese than his wisdom, as a governor, has made
in that of their outward circumstances. That the private and
personal qualities of a first magistrate should have political
effects will appear strange to no reflecting Englishman, who has
attended to the workings of men's minds during the first ferment of
revolutionary principles, and must therefore have witnessed the
influence of our own sovereign's domestic character in counteracting
them. But in Malta there were circumstances which rendered such an
example peculiarly requisite and beneficent. The very existence for
so many generations of an order of lay celibates in that island, who
abandoned even the outward shows of an adherence to their vow of
chastity, must have had pernicious effects on the morals of the
inhabitants. But when it is considered too that the Knights of Malta
had been for the last fifty years or more a set of useless idlers,
generally illiterate, for they thought literature no part of a
soldier's excellence; and yet effeminate, for they were soldiers in
name only; when it is considered that they were, moreover, all of
them aliens, who looked upon themselves not merely as of a superior
rank to the native nobles, but as beings of a different race (I had
almost said species) from the Maltese collectively; and finally, that
these men possessed exclusively the government of the island; it may
be safely concluded that they were little better than a perpetual
influenza, relaxing and diseasing the hearts of all the families
within their sphere of influence. Hence the peasantry, who
fortunately were below their reach, notwithstanding the more than
childish ignorance in which they were kept by their priests, yet
compared with the middle and higher classes, were both in mind and
body as ordinary men compared with dwarfs. Every respectable family
had some one knight for their patron, as a matter of course; and to
him the honour of a sister or a daughter was sacrificed, equally as a
matter of course. But why should I thus disguise the truth? Alas!
in nine instances out of ten, this patron was the common paramour of
every female in the family. Were I composing a state memorial I
should abstain from all allusion to moral good or evil, as not having
now first to learn, that with diplomatists and with practical
statesmen of every denomination, it would preclude all attention to
its other contents, and have no result but that of securing for its
author's name the official private mark of exclusion or dismission,
as a weak or suspicions person. But among those for whom I am now
writing, there are, I trust, many who will think it not the feeblest
reason for rejoicing in our possession of Malta, and not the least
worthy motive for wishing its retention, that one source of human
misery and corruption has been dried up. Such persons will hear the
name of Sir Alexander Ball with additional reverence, as of one who
has made the protection of Great Britain a double blessing to the
Maltese, and broken "THE BONDS OF INIQUITY" as well as unlocked the
fetters of political oppression.

When we are praising the departed by our own firesides, we dwell most
fondly on those qualities which had won our personal affection, and
which sharpen our individual regrets. But when impelled by a loftier
and more meditative sorrow, we would raise a public monument to their
memory, we praise them appropriately when we relate their actions
faithfully; and thus preserving their example for the imitation of
the living alleviate the loss, while we demonstrate its magnitude.
My funeral eulogy of Sir Alexander Ball must therefore he a narrative
of his life; and this friend of mankind will be defrauded of honour
in proportion as that narrative is deficient and fragmentary. It
shall, however, be as complete as my information enables, and as
prudence and a proper respect for the feelings of the living permit
me to render it. His fame (I adopt the words of our elder writers)
is so great throughout the world that he stands in no need of an
encomium; and yet his worth is much greater these his fame. It is
impossible not to speak great things of him, and yet it will be very
difficult to speak what he deserves. But custom requires that
something should be said; it is a duty and a debt which we owe to
ourselves and to mankind, not less than to his memory; and I hope his
great soul, if it hath any knowledge of what is done here below, will
not be offended at the smallness even of my offering.

Ah, how little, when among the subjects of The Friend I promised
"Characters met with in Real Life," did I anticipate the sad event,
which compels one to weave on a cypress branch those sprays of laurel
which I had destined for his bust, not his monument! He lived as we
should all live; and, I doubt not, left the world as we should all
wish to leave it. Such is the power of dispensing blessings, which
Providence has attached to the truly great and good, that they cannot
even die without advantage to their fellow-creatures; for death
consecrates their example, and the wisdom, which might have been
slighted at the council-table, becomes oracular from the shrine.
Those rare excellences, which make our grief poignant, make it
likewise profitable; and the tears which wise men shed for the
departure of the wise, are among those that are preserved in heaven.
It is the fervent aspiration of my spirit, that I may so perform the
task which private gratitude and public duty impose on me, that "as
God hath cut this tree of paradise down from its seat of earth, the
dead trunk may yet support a part of the declining temple, or at
least serve to kindle the fire on the altar."