Radical sympathy and retributive violence: the sublime of terror in “The Destiny of Nations”

Abstract

In this article, I argue that naturalistic additions to the text known as “The Destiny of Nations” adopt a realistic yet artfully drawn sublime of human pathos influenced by the work of Friedrich Schiller. Represented within this sublime of pathos, the terrors and suffering of war act as a crucible in which feelings of sympathy and benevolence can be developed. As such, Coleridge diverges from Edmund Burke's insistence that the sublime is a solitary passion by marking sublime terror with a very clear social and political function. The context for this invocation of sympathy is Unitarian radicalism, where humans pass towards perfectibility by making affective links with others: Joan of Arc is a Unitarian heroine insofar as she feels for the victims of history with exemplary intensity. However, although “The Destiny of Nations” takes the ethical perfectibility of the Unitarian subject as its guiding principle, the poem also contains reflections on evil and vengeful punishment that are at odds with Unitarian optimism and rationalism. These darker elements illustrate that, in exploring the terrors of war, Coleridge was coming to an increasingly more pessimistic perspective that was eroding the very foundations of his ethical, religious and political beliefs at the time.

Notes

1. This lack of emotional valence can be seen pre‐eminently in the ultra‐formalist scale of definitions based on relations between part and whole, given in the mid‐1810s, e.g. the notes on “Definitions of Aesthetic Terms” (Shorter Works 1: 350–2).

2. I am indebted to the second anonymous reviewer for highlighting this last point.

3. Unless otherwise indicated, poems are cited by line number.

4. Given that there is no line numbering in Tytler's translation of The Robbers, the text has been cited as follows: act.scene.page number.

5. Benevolence should be carefully distinguished from sensibility. As Coleridge himself complains in his “Lecture on the Slave‐Trade”: “true Benevolence is a rare quality among us. Sensibility indeed we have to spare.” The latter is always defined as a feeling entertained for its own sake (i.e. ultimately for oneself), whilst the former is a genuine outreach of feeling towards another. Sensibility, not least because of its persistent association with physical sensation, does not rise up the stages of Hartley's schema, but remains bound to a kind of self‐love: “her own sorrows … sit enthroned … while the miseries of our fellow creatures dwindle into pygmy forms” (1795 Lectures 249, my emphasis).

6. Also, especially given that Joan of Arc is a female prophet, the strong symbolic presence of the family acted ideologically as a regulating and restraining check on Joan's passions. See Mee 50.

7. Of course, Coleridge's language is resolutely masculine, dwelling on “the sublime of man,” the notion of fraternity, and so forth. Perhaps this can be explained precisely by Joan's excess of feeling, as opposed to the knowledge in “Religious Musings” – although this does not change the fact that the feeling, sympathy and compassion are a necessary and continued foundation for moral sense. Hence, there would be a general binary between the contemporary Unitarian hero, gendered masculine with full moral enlightenment, and Joan of Arc as heroine, possessing the radical intensity of sympathy which is the undeveloped germ of the former. This would certainly fit in with Joan of Arc's proleptic position as a French revolutionary in “The Destiny of Nations,” where she maintains the liberal spirit of her nation even though she does not have full knowledge of historical process: “Much hast thou seen, nor all canst understand – / But this be thy best omen – Save thy Country!” (455–6).

8. Burke's analysis of tragedy through an Aristotelian idiom of sympathy, as Frans de Bruyn argues, is extended in Reflections on the Revolution in France (192–9). Of course, when Burke deploys sympathy and pathos in the Reflections to buttress reverence rather than provoke universal benevolence his political intentions are very different from Coleridge's.