Wednesday 23 December 2015

Scandal!




At some point in 1814 Coleridge wrote that word—scandal— in his notebook, and followed it up with the following Latin verses:
——gravior terras infestat Echidna
Cum sua vipereæ jaculantur toxica linguæ
Atque homini fit homo serpens; O prodiga culpae
Germina, naturaeque utero fatalia monstra!
Queis nimis innocuo volupe est in sanguine rictus
Tingere, fratemasque fibras, cognataque pasci
Viscera, et arrosae deglubere funera famoe;
Quae morum ista lues? [Notebooks, 4201]
Coburn's edition notes 'the Latin verses are untraced', but also records that they are not original to Coleridge. He found them in Jeremy Taylor's The Worthy Communicant (1674) 4:3, where they are quoted as part of the chapter 'Of Speaking Good of our Neighbours'. The Latin means:
... a heavier burden than this infests the Earth, Echidna,
When you all shoot poison into your own language
And man is snake to man; oh an egregious fault
Germinates, monstrous portents from the womb of nature!
Who takes easy pleasure with the blood of the innocent
Dyed red with it, the fraternal flesh, the ancestral farmhouse
Viscera chewed, skin flayed off, reputation murdered;
What is the moral of this plague?
So: neither editors of Coleridge nor editors of Taylor seem to know where this is quoted from. It's certainly tricky. My hunch is: it's from Boninus Mombrizius' (fairly loose and moralising) Latin verse translation of Hesiod's Theogony, from 1474; though since Mombrizius text doesn't seem to be online, it'll take me a little longer than usual to check. The original Greek runs as follows (in the Project Perseus translation):
And in a hollow cave she bore another monster, irresistible, in no wise like either to mortal men or to the undying gods, even the goddess fierce Echidna who is half a nymph with glancing eyes and fair cheeks, and half again a huge snake, great and awful, with speckled skin, eating raw flesh beneath the secret parts of the holy earth. And there she has a cave deep down under a hollow rock far from the deathless gods and mortal men. There, then, did the gods appoint her a glorious house to dwell in: and she keeps guard in Arima beneath the earth, grim Echidna, a nymph who dies not nor grows old all her days. [Theogony, 299-306]
More relevant (since STC almost certainly didn't know the original source of the lines, and merely copied them out of his edition of Taylor) is the context in the The Worthy Communicant itself. The lines are pendant to the following passage:
God opens His mouth and His heart and His bowels, His bosom and His treasures to us in this holy sacrament, and calls to us to draw water as from a river; and can we come to drink of the pleasant streams that we may have only moisture enough to talk much and long against the honour of our brother or our sister? can it be imagined that Christ, who never spake an ill word, should take thee into His arms, and feast thee at His table, and dwell in thy heart, and lodge thee in His bosom, who makest thyself all one with the devil, whose office and work it is to be an accuser of the brethren? No, Christ never will feast serpents at His table', persons who have stings instead of tongues, and venom in all the moisture of their mouth, and reproach is all their language.
Did the passage, or more pointedly the Latin verse, catch STC's eye because he felt some particular woman had been bad mouthing him? The next entry in the Notebooks [4202] consists of speculative title-pages for a proposed long-poem: The National Independence, or the Vision of the Maid of Orleans: a Vision, under which STC wrote out one Latin epigraph (from 'Poetae hades Vinculis', a poet bound in hell), crossed that out, then wrote another passage from Claudian, and crossed that out too.


The three lines of Claudian mean 'It was those triumphs that set Justice on her throne and taught us all that divine help will be forthcoming. From such victories let the after-ages learn that virtue need fear no enemy and that there is no safe-place for the guilty'. They are from the Panegyricus de Quarto Consulatu Honorii Augusti ('Panegyric on the Fourth Consulship of the Emperor Honorius'), 98-100: Latin text of the whole poem here, and English translation, via Loeb, here. The 'Poet Bound in Hell' lines have been assumed by some critics to be by Coleridge himself, but actually they're from a Latin poem called the Laudes Herculis, once thought to have been written by Claudian, but by 1814 not considered part of the Claudian canon ('To most of the editions is subjoined a spurious poem, intitled Laudes Herculis, written in a strain of respectable mediocrity, but unlike Claudian in all respects'; 'Of Claudian', The Classical Journal 30 (1814), 13). Hence STC's invented pseudonym. (The actual pseudo-Claudian passage begins at the emicat omnis/In laudes mox turba tuas, longoque relicta...; the Coelitus afflatu, o Virgo armigera—is, I think, Coleridge's own addition, to bring a passage originally in praise of Hercules into line with a vision of Joan of Arc). The Latin there means: 'Inspired by the heavens as you are, Virgin-Warrior—the people leap up in praise of you, running over the same fields that have been so long neglected through fear; they rejoice to see the land free again, their homes defended again from the enemy, the woods available to their flocks, and meadows now free from lamentation.'

The 'Scandal!' lines hardly fit with these other two, in tone or content, so I suppose he jotted them in his Notebook because they struck him for some other reason.

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