[In the following essay, Chandler explicates Lamb's largely neglected poetic response to atheism entitled “Living without God in the World.”]

Mystery of God! thou brave and beauteous world,
Made fair with light and shade and stars and flowers,
Made fearful and august with woods and rocks,
Jagg'd precipice, black mountain, sea in storms,
Sun, over all, that no co-rival owns,
But thro' Heaven's pavement rides as in despite
Or mockery of the littleness of man!
I see a mighty arm, by man unseen,
Resistless, not to be controul'd, that guides,
In solitude of unshared energies,
All these thy ceaseless miracles, O world!
Arm of the world, I view thee, and I muse
On Man, who trusting in his mortal strength,
Leans on a shadowy staff, a staff of dreams.
We consecrate our total hopes and fears
To idols, flesh and blood, our love, (heaven's due)
Our praise and admiration; praise bestowed
By man on man, and acts of worship done
To a kindred nature, certes do reflect
Some portion of the glory and rays oblique
Upon the politic worshipper,—so man
Extracts a pride from his humility.
Some braver spirits of the modern stamp
Affect a Godhead nearer: these talk loud
Of mind, and independant [sic.] intellect,
Of energies omnipotent in man,
And man of his own fate artificer;
Yea of his own life Lord, and of the days
Of his abode on earth, when time shall be,
That life immortal shall become an art,
Or Death, by chymic practices deceived,
Forego the scent, which for six thousand years
Like a good hound he has followed, or at length
More manners learning, and a decent sense
And reverence of a philosophic world,
Relent, and leave to prey on carcasses.
But these are fancies of a few: the rest,
Atheists, or Deists only in the name,
By word or deed deny a God. They eat
Their daily bread, and draw the breath of heaven
Without or thought or thanks; heaven's roof to them
Is but a painted ceiling hung with lamps,
No more, that lights them to their purposes.
They wander ‘loose about’, they nothing see,
Themselves except, and creatures like themselves,
Short-liv'd, short-sighted, impotent to save.
So on their dissolute spirits, soon or late,
Destruction cometh ‘like an armed man’,
Or like a dream of murder in the night,
Withering their mortal faculties, and breaking
The bones of all their pride.

In 1799 the above fifty-odd lines of blank verse by Lamb¹ appeared in Robert Southey's Annual Anthology under the title ‘Living Without God in the World’.² Some of them had already appeared in a note to Charles Lloyd's Lines suggested by the Fast, appointed on Wednesday, February 27, 1799, Lloyd introducing them as a ‘striking extract, from some lines, intended as a satire on the Godwinian jargon’, and quoting from a manuscript different from that supplied to Southey.³ In a letter to Southey of 28 November 1798, Lamb had stated: ‘I can have no objection to your printing “Mystery of God” with my name, and all due acknowledgments for the honor and favor of the communication; indeed tis a poem that can dishonor no name.’⁴ The Annual Anthology lines thus pose immediate problems. Are ‘Mystery of God’ and the ‘lines, intended as a satire on the Godwinian jargon’ the same poem? What relation do either bear to ‘Living Without God in the World’? These questions will be returned to in the conclusion to this article. The bibliographic history can be concluded by noting that Lamb chose not to publish the poem again (did he think it a failure?), but that in 1829 it was located and published by the editors of the pirated Galignani (Paris) edition of The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery, Lamb, and Kirke White;⁵ this was the second published appearance of the poem.

‘Living Without God in the World’ has received little scholarly attention, despite being the poem of Lamb's that most obviously requires exegesis. The only extended critical treatment the poem has received appears to be Nicholas Roe's, first included in his article ‘Remembering Émile Legouis’, then, slightly reduced, in his book, The Politics of Nature.⁶ Roe's main concern was the date and context of the poem, for both of which he furnished a precise explanation: the poem was probably ‘an immediate response’,⁷ ‘an explicit reply’⁸ to James Gillray's well-known ‘New Morality’ cartoon published in August 1798. The cartoon showed a wide cross-section of British radicals and freethinkers—men as diverse as Fox, Godwin, Thelwall, Paine, Priestley, Coleridge, and Lamb himself—paying homage to the minor French ‘philosopher’ La Reveillère Lepaux. Roe's evidence for ‘Living Without God in the World’ being ‘an explicit reply’ to this rested on four assertions: first, that the poem attacks Godwin, which it certainly does; secondly that the poem attacks Paine and the ‘secular reformists’,⁹ which is dubious; thirdly that Lamb's statement ‘We consecrate our total hopes and fears / To idols’ (ll. 15-16) ‘effectively gloss[es] Gillray's image’;¹⁰ fourthly that the title ‘Living Without God in the World’ was suggested by George Canning's poem that accompanied the cartoon and described the assembled throng as ‘Men without a God!’. Obviously only the latter two would directly associate the poem with the cartoon, and both, to my mind, are unconvincing. In the conclusion to this article I suggest that the section of ‘Living Without God in the World’ that (implicitly) attacks Godwin may very well have been written as early as 1796, but the question of the poem's date can be reasonably held in abeyance while its literary genetics are examined. Of all Lamb's poems, this is the one that most benefits from such a study.

The (published) title is the obvious point at which to begin; it is—pace Roe—a quotation, and a quotation from a particularly revealing text: the preface to Joseph Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever. Priestley's attack on Hume and his followers advanced the claims that ‘An atheist cannot have that sense of personal dignity and importance that a theist has’,¹¹ and that a theist who has considered his principles must be ‘a being of unspeakably greater dignity and value’.¹² Priestley then continued:

This, however, from the nature of the thing, must depend upon the attention that a theist gives to his principles, and to the situation in which he believes himself to be placed. And therefore, it is very possible that a merely nominal believer in a God may be a practical atheist, and worse than a mere speculative one, living as without God in the world, intirely thoughtless of his being, perfections, and providence.¹³

Distinguishing between ‘speculative’ and ‘practical’ atheists, Priestley makes a distinction that had been memorably pointed out by Richardson in Clarissa: Belford writes to Lovelace ‘we are not atheists, except in practice’.¹⁴ In a letter to Coleridge of 31 May 1796 Lamb declared of Priestley: ‘I love & honor him almost profanely’.¹⁵ On 2 January 1797 he wrote ‘I wish I could get more of Priestly's [sic] works’,¹⁶ and a week later he again referred to Priestley ‘whom I sin in almost adoring’.¹⁷ These sentiments readily explain Lamb's choice of title, which to the knowing would have specifically aligned the ensuing poem with Priestley's Unitarian polemic against atheism—more particularly ‘practical’ atheism.¹⁸ What must be kept in mind, however, is that the title was (apparently) Lamb's retrospective addition to the poem, possibly attached as much as two and a half years after much of it was written. It does not prove that the poem was begun with a corresponding programmatic intention—indeed, I shall argue that it was not—but it is invaluable as a pointer to what Lamb finally felt that the poem was doing, and the way in which he wanted it read.

The opening lines are surely not the most obvious introduction to an attack on ‘practical’ atheists:

Mystery of God! thou brave and beauteous world,
Made fair with light and shade and stars and flowers,
Made fearful and august with woods and rocks,
Jagg'd precipice, black mountain, sea in storms,
Sun, over all, that no co-rival owns,
But thro' Heaven's pavement rides as in despite
Or mockery of the littleness of man!

(ll. 1-7)

Taking lines 2-4 first, it can be observed that they are concerned with a distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, a fairly standard distinction after Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1756. But Burke was not the first to make the distinction, and he was importantly anticipated by Mark Akenside, whose enormously successful poem The Pleasures of Imagination, published in 1744, distinguished between the ‘Sublime’ and the ‘Fair’ (i 145-6).¹⁹ ‘Fair’, in this sense, was a key word in The Pleasures of Imagination and it seems a telling point that Lamb uses it here. By 1800 Lamb was using ‘akensidish’ as an adjective, which suggests that he had thoroughly assimilated the earlier poet's work.²⁰The Pleasures of Imagination was in fact a poem that almost any young literary man at that time would have known. Coleridge was thoroughly acquainted with it by the mid-1790s, and used several lines from Akenside's poem as a motto for his ‘Religious Musings’.²¹ More significant from Lamb's point of view, Blank Verse, by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb (1798) carried a motto from The Pleasures of Imagination (probably Lloyd's choice—see below). Most suggestive of the opening of ‘Living Without God in the World’ is a passage in the first Book of Akenside's, where Akenside describes how God:

                                                                                                    deep retired
In his unfathom'd essence, view'd the forms,
The forms eternal of created things;
The radiant sun, the moon's nocturnal lamp,
The mountains, woods, and streams, the rolling globe …
                                                                      … in time complete
What he admired and loved, his vital smile
Unfolded into being. Hence the breath
Of life informing each organic frame;
Hence the green earth, and wild resounding waves;
Hence light and shade alternate, warmth and cold,
And clear autumnal skies and vernal showers,
And all the fair variety of things.

(i 64-8, 71-8)

Here are found the ‘light and shade’, mountains, woods, stormy sea, and sun of Lamb's lines. Akenside's ‘fair variety’, later described as the ‘kindred power of … discordant things’ (iii 307), was what Lamb wanted to evoke. Moreover the Akenside passage explains as efficiently as any paraphrase why Lamb introduced his evocation of the ‘fair variety’ with the exclamation ‘Mystery of God!’. Despite a striking correspondence, The Pleasures of Imagination is obviously not the sort of clear-cut ‘source’ for Lamb's opening lines that Priestley is for the poem's title. Nevertheless, these lines are closer to The Pleasures of Imagination than to any other poem that Lamb can be proved or conjectured to have known, the (considerable) significance of this being that Akenside was a Deist, and The Pleasures of Imagination a thinly veiled manifesto for his Platonic Deism, with a conclusion that stated:

                                                  the men
Whom Nature's works can charm, with God himself
Hold converse; grow familiar day by day,
With his conceptions, act upon his plan …

(iii 629-32)

‘Nature's works’ thus displace the Bible. Coleridge could greatly admire The Pleasures of Imagination in the mid-1790s, but then he was not above the suspicion of holding Deist views; Thomas Poole, meeting him in autumn 1794, found him ‘In religion … a Unitarian, if not a Deist’.²² Priestley, however, had ‘repeatedly stepped forwards [sic.] to defend the common cause [revealed religion] against not only the open attacks, but the most artful insinuations of Deism’²³ and Lamb's failure to develop his opening is best read as an anxiety about his proximity to Akenside's Deism. This is confirmed by the disproportionate emphasis he places on the sun, which seems at first to be another example of the ‘akensidish’ sublime, but then to mutate into a more orthodox vanitas symbol. This shift is important, for the poem's opening lines implicitly suggest that nature should be celebrated for its ability to fill the human spectator with lofty conceptions—Akenside's position exactly—and it was surely not without a struggle, or at least a sense of retreat, that Lamb contrived to end this sentence with a deflating reminder of the ‘littleness of man’.

Lamb's sentiments regarding the sun are suggestive because they are directly opposed to those expressed by Edward Young in Night Thoughts (1742-6). In Night the Ninth, Young had associated the highest religious emotion with contemplation of the night sky: ‘O majestick Night!’, he sung, ‘fated to survive the transient Sun!’ (ix 551, 553).²⁴ There is a clear tendency to demean the sun, as when Young prays ‘Loose me from Earth's Inclosure, from the Sun's / Contracted Circle set my Heart at large’ (ix 588-9), or states ‘One Sun by Day; by Night Ten thousand shine; / And light us deep into the Deity’ (ix 748-9). Elsewhere he even describes the sun as a ‘Rude Drunkard’ (v 191). These sentiments were repeated even more emphatically by Mrs. Barbauld, the best-known Unitarian poet of the late eighteenth century, in her major religious poem, ‘A Summer Evening's Meditation’ (1773), which took the line ‘One Sun by Day …’ as a motto.²⁵ Lamb had certainly read Night Thoughts by 9 June 1796 when he wrote to Coleridge, commenting on the latter's ‘Religious Musings’, ‘is not that thought & those words in Young, “Stands in the Sun?”? or is it only such as Young in one of his better moments might have writ?’,²⁶ and he probably knew Barbauld's poetry through Coleridge, who was a passionate admirer.²⁷ Young and Barbauld faulted the sun for limiting the human observer's ennobling imaginative engagement with the grandeur of God's works, but Lamb bluntly rejects such a flattering view, presumably understanding it as a Deistic conceit. For him the sun, far from restricting man's spiritual strength, proves man's weakness, his ‘littleness’. As Charles Lloyd wrote in a poem of 1797, ‘Man's strength is weakness; him / It booteth most to feel that he is frail’.²⁸ By immediately following his initial rapt response to the ‘brave and beauteous world’ Lamb's sentiments respecting the sun pose an obvious question: should perception of the natural world ennoble or humble man? The opening sentence of ‘Living Without God in the World’, which seems to pull first in the one, then in the other direction, reveals Lamb as uneasy on this point. In the context of eighteenth century English poetry his predicament derives most obviously from Night Thoughts, where Young had memorably described man as:

Midway from Nothing to the Deity!
A beam etherial sully'd, and absorpt!
Tho' sully'd, and dishonour'd, still Divine!
Dim Miniature of Greatness absolute!
An Heir of Glory! a frail Child of Dust!
Helpless Immortal! Insect infinite!
A Worm! a God!

(i 74-80)

If Young, then, enters ‘Living Without God in the World’ in an oppositional sense as the debaser of the sun, he stays as the framer of a dilemma faced by Lamb. Indeed Night Thoughts was undoubtedly the major influence on Lamb's poem, and the following lines seem to derive fairly directly from Young's religious ‘epic’:

I see a mighty arm, by man unseen,
Resistless, not to be controul'd, that guides,
In solitude of unshared energies,
All these thy ceaseless miracles, O world!

(ll. 8-11)

The arm of God, quite often referred to in the Old Testament, is there evoked in the context of God's martial might—his destructive potential. Lamb's ‘mighty arm’, associated with the ‘ceaseless miracles’ of nature, has a distinct provenance in Night Thoughts. In Night the Ninth—to which we have already seen Lamb responding—Young asks how, in the face of the night sky, man can ask for miracles ‘To give his tott'ring Faith a solid Base’: ‘When Mankind falls asleep, / A Miracle is sent’ (ix 1248-9). Young then continues:

But, Miracles apart, who sees Him not,
Nature's Controuler, Author, Guide, and End?
Who turns his Eye on Nature's Midnight-Face,
But must inquire—‘What hand behind the Scene,
What Arm Almighty, put these wheeling Globes
In Motion, and wound up the vast Machine?
Who rounded in his Palm these spacious Orbs?
Who bowl'd them flaming thro' the dark Profound … ?’

(ix 1272-9)

So similar in context to Lamb's poem as this is, it is surely reasonable to assume that the regular miracle of Young's night sky, leading the spectator to imagine the ‘Arm Almighty’ ‘behind the Scene’, lies behind Lamb's imaginative glimpse of ‘a mighty arm’ that ‘guides’ the world's ‘ceaseless miracles’. Of course it is only fair to note that Young, unlike Lamb, imagines the ‘Arm Almighty’ more as an image of ‘Nature's … Author’ than of ‘Nature's Controuler [and] Guide’, but the point of the Night Thoughts passage is that these are inseparable, as the sequence ‘Controuler, Author, Guide’ suggests. Although Lamb's slight revision of emphasis seems to point to his desire to avoid any possible suspicion of Deism (despite Young's opposition to Deism, Night Thoughts contains many Deist-sounding statements²⁹), it must be stressed that Lamb's emphasis on his privileged insight—‘I see a mighty arm, by man unseen’—is much more characteristic of Akenside than Young. Indeed immediately after the passage from The Pleasures of Imagination quoted above, Akenside had continued ‘But not alike to every mortal eye / Is this great scene unveil'd’ (i 79-80), proceeding to affirm that the privilege of reading ‘The world's harmonious volume’ as a ‘transcript’ of God was the preserve of the few (i 100-101). Tellingly, though, in line 12 of ‘Living Without God in the World’ the significance of the ‘mighty arm’ shades off towards its Biblical sense as Lamb again arrives at a conventional statement of man's feebleness and misplaced pride. In the process he virtually eradicates any notion of an ‘akensidish’ spiritual hierarchy (confirmed in the transition ‘We consecrate our total hopes and fears / To idols …’). The ‘arm of the world’ now might be compared, for example, with God's asking Job ‘Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?’,³⁰ while the ultimate paradigm for the succeeding view of ‘Man’ is the parable of the foolish man who built his house upon the sand.³¹ The thematic movement of the first seven lines is thus repeated. At first the ‘mighty arm’ seems to signal an experience of privileged, spiritually-ennobling insight, but it quickly comes to highlight man's common ‘littleness’. This time the shift is decisive: no more is heard of the ennobling observation of God in nature.

The succeeding image of man leaning ‘on a shadowy staff’ descends from the Bible via Young. In one of the most celebrated passages³² of Night Thoughts, Young had advised Lorenzo, his addressee, against ‘Here presuming on the Rights of Heaven’ (iii 142):

For Transport dost Thou call on every Hour,
Lorenzo? At thy Friend's expence be wise;
Lean not on Earth; 'twill pierce thee to the Heart;
A broken Reed, at best; but, oft, a spear;
On its sharp point Peace bleeds, and Hope expires.

(iii 143-7)

Young adapted this image from a passage in Isaiah in which Egypt is characterised as a ‘broken reed’.³³ The scriptural passage, which Lamb probably knew, of course, makes explicit what is implicit in Young: the ‘leaner’ imagines the ‘broken reed’ to be a ‘staff’. Young's adaptation was much to Lamb's purposes, for although in Lamb we find man leaning not ‘on Earth’ but on his own ‘mortal strength’ the sense in each case is the same. In Isaiah the false ‘staff’—contrasted with God, the true ‘staff’—pierces the hand of the ‘leaner’, and Young develops this to create a parallel with the spear that pierced Christ's side.³⁴ Lamb dispenses with this part of the image, leaving the issue of painful awakening from delusion to the final lines of his poem, and describing first just what sort of a false ‘staff’ human beings will trust.

‘Living Without God in the World’ continues: ‘We consecrate our total hopes and fears / To idols …’. The plural pronoun comes as something of a surprise, and there is undoubtedly an awkward crux here, the most obvious explanation being that there is a ‘join’ at this point; this is a hypothesis that will be returned to. Roe has characterised this passage as an ‘effective gloss’ of the ‘New Morality’ cartoon, but the sentiment is too conventional to prove such a specific connection, and Lamb's (hypothetical) reasons for wanting crudely and reductively to paraphrase the message of a print that had attacked his (and Godwin's, and others) allegiance to the radical French philosophes are not explained. Given the extent to which Lamb turned to the vast quarry of Night Thoughts in the first part of the poem, it may be suggested that Young could equally easily lie behind this passage. The false reverence that man gives to the merely human is a (one might say obsessively) reiterated sentiment in Young's poem, and it underlies much of Night the Sixth. Night the Fourth, however, contains the passage that is perhaps most likely to have been in Lamb's mind, given the subsequent development of his own poem. In this passage Young accuses those apostles of false ‘Reason’ who destroy ‘Faith’ and thence ‘tenfold Terror give to Death’ (iv 764). He then continues:

Learn hence what Honours, what loud Pœans due
To those, who push our Antidote [that is faith] aside;
Those boasted Friends to Reason, and to Man,
Whose fatal Love stabs every Joy, and leaves
Death's Terror heighten'd gnawing on his Heart.
These pompous Sons of Reason Idoliz'd,
And Vilify'd at once; of Reason dead,
Then Deify'd, as Monarchs were of old,
What Conduct plants proud Laurels on their Brow?

(iv 766-74)

Young proceeds to illustrate how the ‘Sons of Reason’ make idols out of the productions of their own intellect; in other words, just as they are idols, so are they idolaters. Lamb rather emphasises what is only lightly implied in Young: that the act of idolising the ‘Sons of Reason’ ‘reflect[s] / Some portion of the glory and rays oblique / Upon the politic worshipper’. Roe comments that ‘Lamb turns … to the secular reformists whose politics were based upon the rights of man and the “kindred nature” of humanity. In The Rights of Man Paine had used the American Revolution to prove that regenerated mankind “sees his species, not with the inhuman idea of a natural enemy, but as kindred; and the example shows to the artificial world, that man must go back to Nature for information”’.³⁵ In the passage which Roe cites Paine was not, in fact, concerned with the American Revolution but with the conditions that preceded it. In America, Paine argues, Europeans had encountered ‘Nature … in magnitude’; both the grandeur and the physical challenges of that ‘Nature’ had made them more inclined to meet ‘not as enemies but as brothers’.³⁶ The relevance to ‘Living Without God in the World’ is obscure, for Lamb is there concerned not with the act of brotherhood (close communal relations were, after all, part and parcel of the apostolic church), but with the act of worshipping other human beings, and, more broadly, human reason. The Night Thoughts passage, with its specific attack on the ‘Sons of Reason’, actually seems to provide an allusive bridge to Lamb's attack on the Godwinians in the following lines, clarifying a movement of thought that is perhaps not very clear in his poem.

William Godwin, well known as a speculative atheist, and the most prominent ‘Son of Reason’ in Lamb's intellectual world, published his Political Justice in 1793. This included a discussion of the problem of population increase, to which Godwin added an argument that he said ‘must be considered in some degree as a deviation into the land of conjecture’:

Let us … return to the sublime conjecture of Franklin, that ‘mind will one day become omnipotent over matter.’ If over all other matter, why not over the matter of our own bodies? If over matter at ever so great a distance, why not over matter which, however ignorant we may be of the tie that connects it with the thinking principle, we always carry about with us, and which is in all cases the medium of communication between that principle and the external universe? In a word, why may not man be one day immortal?³⁷

In the context of ‘Living Without God in the World’ there is no need to go further into the details of Godwin's argument. Lamb was concerned with sarcastically describing the presumption of the idea as a whole, not giving it the respect of dissection and evaluation. Limitations of space must prevent a detailed discussion of lines 23-26, but the passage becomes clear enough in the light of the quoted extract from Political Justice, and the elucidation of ‘source’ material for Lamb's mild satire would be a project of rapidly diminishing returns. This was the passage that Lloyd quoted as ‘a satire on the Godwinian jargon’. Satire there may be, but there is virtually no ‘Godwinian jargon’ beyond the line ‘Of mind, and independent intellect’. In fact the phrase ‘independent intellect’ seems careless rather than pointed, for this was Godwin's solution to the ‘evils attendant’ on cohabitation:

… in order to the human understanding's being successfully cultivated, it is necessary that the intellectual operations of men should be independent of each other, and that we should avoid all those practices that are calculated to melt our opinions into a common mould.³⁸

The idea of ‘independent intellect’ thus has nothing to do with that aspect of Godwin's thinking that Lamb was really concerned with, namely the presumptuous supposition that man might be ‘one day immortal’.

The passage on the Godwinians seems disproportionately long in a poem entitled ‘Living Without God in the World’ and, by extension, supposedly describing / attacking ‘practical’ atheists. Whatever the textual explanation, however, one does not need to read very far in Night Thoughts to understand why Lamb felt he could include it in a poem in which Young's presence is everywhere felt. In Night Thoughts man's refusal to admit to, and confront, the issue of his mortality receives its grandest treatment in eighteenth century literature. In Night the Third Young even details the horror of the ‘shocking Thought’ of what it would actually be like to live perpetually on earth, to ‘Live ever in the Womb’ (iii 325, 328). And Night Thoughts clarifies just why Godwin's thinking about death was so insulting and irrelevant from a Christian perspective. In line 31 of his poem Lamb explains the Godwinians' views as merely a ‘deception’ of hungry ‘Death’, but Christ destroyed ‘Death’: as Young exultantly sings in Night the Fourth, ‘Who is the King of Glory? He who slew / The ravenous Foe, that gorg'd all human Race!’ (iv 280-1). For all this, though, line 37—‘But these are fancies of a few …’—seems designed to characterize the passage on the Godwinians as a digression, and from line 37 ‘Living Without God in the World’ finally gets to grips with the ‘practical’ Atheists, thus explaining Lamb's choice of title. As the title appears to have been a late addition to the poem, it is reasonable to suppose that Lamb grafted this passage on to the existing lines on the Godwinians, attempting to give the growing poem a rather broader application.

In describing ‘the rest’ as ‘Atheists, or Deists only in the name’ (l. 38) Lamb repeated and endorsed a traditional critique of Deists which denied that Deism could be a resting place for thought. In his enormously successful manual of eighteenth century theology, A Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God, Samuel Clarke had maintained, for example, that:

A constant and sincere observance of all the Laws of Reason, and Obligations of Natural Religion, will unavoidably lead a Man to Christianity … all Others, who pretend to be Deists without coming up to this, can have no fixt and settled Principles at all; upon which they can either argue or act consistently; but must of necessity sink into downright Atheism. …³⁹

This became the standard orthodox position; in typically bluff fashion Johnson told Boswell that ‘no honest man could be a Deist; for no man could be so after a fair examination of the proofs of Christianity’.⁴⁰ If Lamb had found the idea nowhere else, he would have discovered it in Priestley, who in his Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, for example, claimed:

Whenever … I shall hear of the conversion of a speculative atheist to serious deism (an event which has never yet come to my knowledge) I shall have little doubt of his soon becoming a serious christian. As, on the other hand, the same turn of mind that makes a man an unbeliever in christianity has, in fact, generally carried men on to a proper atheism.⁴¹

He would also have found it in Night Thoughts, where in Night the Seventh Young states ‘An honest Deist, where the Gospel shines, / Matur'd to nobler, in the Christian ends’ (vii 1349-50). Lamb thus followed Priestley and Young, who in turn followed a well-established orthodoxy in denying that one could be a Deist in any morally valid way. Important to keep in mind is the fact that in the tense political situation of the 1790s Unitarianism was itself often regarded as a significant step towards Deism, and hence towards atheism. This is illustrated in the very title of a sermon that Joseph Toulmin, a prominent Unitarian, preached in July 1797, and that was published the same year: The Injustice of Classing Unitarians with Deists and Infidels. A Discourse Written with Reference to Some Reflections from the Pens of Bishops Newton, Hurd, and Horsley, Doctors White, Knox, and Fuller, Mrs Piozzi, and Others. Lamb, like Toulmin, doubtless felt angered at this common ‘injustice’, and, again like Toulmin, he attempted to distance himself from Deism.

Lamb imagines the ‘Deists’ as ‘practical’ atheists, ‘hav[ing] no fixt and settled Principles at all’:

                                                                      They eat
Their daily bread, and draw the breath of heaven
Without or thought or thanks; heaven's roof to them
Is but a painted ceiling hung with lamps,
No more, that lights them to their purposes.
They wander ‘loose about’ …

(ll. 39-44)⁴²

Most interesting here are the lines on the pseudo-Deists' perception of ‘heaven's roof’ for they link back to the first part of the poem where the question of man's (proper) response to the natural world is raised. The pseudo-Deists' view of the night sky is obviously opposed to that which Young celebrates in Night Thoughts, but Young himself had offered the contrast, breaking off his interpretation of the night sky to caution Lorenzo, his addressee:

In thy nocturnal Rove, one Moment halt,
'Twixt Stage and Stage, of Riot, and Cabal;
And lift thine Eye …
To yonder Stars: For other Ends they shine,
Than to light Revellers from Shame to Shame …

(ix 675-80)

Lamb derives a description from Young's accusation, but the sense remains the same. Moreover Lamb appears to allude to Mrs Barbauld's ‘Summer Evening's Meditation’, a poem, as noted already, heavily influenced by Young. Barbauld had described the stars as ‘For ever streaming o'er the azure deep / To point our path, and light us to our home’ (ll. 38-9),⁴³ and Lamb seems to parody her phrase in his ‘that lights them to their purposes’.⁴⁴

‘Living Without God in the World’ ends with a chilling prophecy respecting the ‘practical’ atheists:

So on their dissolute spirits, soon or late,
Destruction cometh ‘like an armed man’,
Or like a dream of murder in the night,
Withering their mortal faculties, and breaking
The bones of all their pride.

(ll. 47-51)

Of this conclusion Roe remarks ‘The closing lines of the poem prophesy imminent destruction, coming like the ‘armed man’ of Proverbs 24:34 … the poem concludes with an oblique reference to the horrors of [Lamb's] own recent experience …’.⁴⁵ The ‘recent experience’—which in Roe's dating of the poem would have been almost two years earlier—was the manslaughter of Lamb's mother by his deranged sister. This occurred on 22 September 1796, not, it may be added, at night.

The reference to Proverbs is certain, but the passage is worth quoting at length to bring out the full import of the allusion:

30 I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding;

31 And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down.

32 Then I saw, and considered it well: I looked upon it, and received instruction.

33 Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep:

34 So shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth; and thy want as an armed man.

Lamb quotes from an attack on the slothful and ignorant. This is particularly interesting given his expressed view of Deists, for this view was predicated on the notion that Deists had not thought through their position. Moreover Priestley firmly associated all types of atheism with intellectual slothfulness: ‘we pass our time in a kind of reverie, or absence of thought, inattentive to the most obvious connections and consequences … with a total listlessness and unconcern, a man may rest any where’, he writes in the Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever.⁴⁶ Lamb's meaning is helped out when the following line is considered.

In his ‘Destruction … / … like a dream of murder in the night’ it is hard, if not impossible, given the context, to believe that Lamb wanted to ‘obliquely refer’ to the fatal stabbing of his mother. For anyone who does want to read the line as a reference to a real incident, the death of Coleridge's father fits better: John Coleridge dreamed that ‘Death’ appeared to him and touched him with his dart—and then died the following night.⁴⁷ But the line probably has a largely literary provenance. Indeed one could very well start with Lamb's sonnet, ‘Was it some sweet Delight of Faery’, probably written in 1795, in which he imagined ‘Despair’ armed with a ‘murdering knife’.⁴⁸ Further, there are three suggestive ‘dream[s] of murder’ in Shakespeare, almost certainly familiar to Lamb. In Richard III Richard dreams that the ghosts of his victims appear and curse him; he wakes up and exclaims that he is afflicted by ‘coward conscience’ (V iii 180).⁴⁹ In Julius Caesar Calphurnia dreams of her husband's murder the night before it occurs, but Caesar refuses to take her advice not to go to the Senate. In Macbeth one of Duncan's sons, observed by Macbeth, shouts ‘Murther’ in his sleep (II ii 22). He and his brother awake, and one of them exclaims ‘God bless us!’ (II ii 26), to which Macbeth is unable to add ‘Amen’, despite his effort to do so. Macbeth, an extreme type of ‘practical’ atheist, then realises that he has cut himself off from God's mercy and that his crime will only bring him misery. All these Shakespearean ‘dream[s] of murder’ carried an appropriate significance that could very easily have brought them to Lamb's mind. Moreover, all are associated in some way with ‘armed m[e]n’. Richard tells Ratcliffe that the dream ‘struck more terror to the soul of Richard / Than can … ten thousand soldiers, / Armed in proof’ (V iii 218-20). Caesar is stabbed to death by the conspirators, and in the immediately preceding scene in Macbeth Macbeth sets off to kill Duncan after his famous ‘Is this a dagger …’ speech (II i 33ff). Taken together, these Shakespearean ‘dream[s] of murder in the night’ certainly repeat and reinforce the sense of the Proverbs passage: they mark irreversible turning points. Lamb describes that climactic moment in which the ‘practical’ atheist, having refused to believe, becomes incapable of belief, yet also realises the pointlessness of his existence. It is a state well illustrated in Macbeth's haunting ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow’ speech. The final lines appear to take up an idea from the earlier ‘We consecrate our total hopes and fears / To idols, flesh and blood’. The ‘practical’ atheist does not physically die before he has seen his ‘flesh and blood’ idol—ultimately himself—‘wither’ and ‘break’. The man he has imagined himself to be must perish before the man God knows him to be dies. He really has been leaning on a ‘staff of dreams’.

In following the thematic movement of ‘Living Without God in the World’ it has been suggested that both internal and external evidence point to more than one period of composition. At the heart of the published poem there seems to lurk an ur-poem which was specifically a satire on Godwin and his followers. Quite possibly this was considerably longer than the extract which survives in ‘Living Without God in the World’. It can be conjectured that Lloyd had a manuscript copy of this ur-poem, from which he quoted in his Lines suggested by the Fast, thus preserving a valuable fragment. The ur-poem was possibly written as early as summer 1796, when Lamb was eagerly expecting Coleridge to resume publication of The Watchman. ‘Why sleep the Watchman's answers to that Godwin?’, he wrote to Coleridge impatiently on 6 July,⁵⁰ having already expressed the hope that he could be a contributor to the new Watchman.⁵¹ Indeed there is some striking, but overlooked, evidence that he submitted a poem, for on 10 December 1796 he wrote to Coleridge:

Thy Watchman's, thy bellman's, verses, I do retort upon thee, thou libellous varlet,—why, you cried the hours yourself, and who made you so proud? But I submit, to show my humility, most implicitly to your dogmas. I reject entirely the copy of verses you reject.⁵²

Edwin Marrs here notes that ‘the rejected verses’ are unidentified, but suggests Lamb's poem ‘To a Young Lady Going out to India’ as a possibility.⁵³ This seems most unlikely, for the clear implication—‘you cried the hours yourself’—is that the rejected poem was comparable in aim to Coleridge's Watchman, therefore a ‘present state of society’ piece.⁵⁴ The further suggestion, surely, is that the rejected poem had been submitted for the planned (but never published) new Watchman, and that Lamb is now getting in a little dig at Coleridge for abandoning his duties as a ‘watchman’, while he, Lamb, had been acting as one. Very few of Lamb's surviving poems could be characterised as ‘cr[ying] the hours’, but ‘Living Without God in the World’ undoubtedly best fulfils the description. Given Lamb's eagerness for The Watchman to attack Godwin, it is a reasonable conjecture that his ‘Watchman's … verses’, criticised by Coleridge on this occasion, correspond to the ‘satire on the Godwinian jargon’ later known to Lloyd. Indeed it is striking, if this was the case, that Lloyd and Southey were responsible for the eventual publication of these ‘verses’, for both would certainly have taken a delight in promoting something of Lamb's that Coleridge had ‘rejected’. Moreover, Lamb's pledge to Coleridge that he would ‘reject entirely’ the poem was, to a certain extent, borne out if these ‘verses’ were the original of ‘Living Without God in the World’. Lloyd and Southey ensured that they were published, but Lamb himself, as noted already, excluded ‘Living Without God in the World’ from his collected poems.

If the central section of ‘Living Without God in the World’ was written in 1796, critically mauled by Coleridge, then laid aside for some considerable time before reworking, the awkward transitions in the finished poem, particularly that between lines 14 and 15, are understandable. Lamb's attempt(s) to salvage part, or perhaps all, of the earlier poem, and to expand upon it, can be studied in the Annual Anthology text. Probably he began by adding the final fifteen lines, for this would have produced a poem that was coherent and rounded—indeed somewhat more coherent than the final version. Lamb's intention, one assumes, was to broaden the base of his satire and add an appropriate memento mori. At any time after this revision was planned the usefulness of taking a title from Priestley's attack on atheism could have occurred to him. It is worth reading the poem as it would have stood at this (conjectured) stage, for the exercise highlights how awkwardly assimilated the opening lines are. What was Lamb's purpose in attaching these prefacing lines? Did they previously comprise part, or all, of a separate poem (perhaps the ‘Mystery of God’ that Southey saw in 1798)?

Taking the second question first, it is hard to believe that Lamb told Southey he could publish an independent ‘Mystery of God’, then assimilated part or all of that poem into the longer ‘Living Without God in the World’ and asked him to publish that instead. It is surely more reasonable to suppose that the 1798 ‘Mystery of God’ does, more or less, correspond to the final Annual Anthology poem, but as ‘Mystery of God’ is quite inapt as a title for this, it is probable that it was a nonce title. This, however, merely provides a terminus ad quem for the addition to the satirical lines, and does not disqualify the possibility that the additional lines had previously comprised part or all of a separate poem. I think the question must be kept open; but, either way, Lamb's reasons for attaching them to the satirical lines can be profitably explored. The best explanation that I can offer is that he was responding to Charles Lloyd's contributions to their slim collaborative volume, Blank Verse, of early 1798. As noted already, this collection entered the world with a significant motto from Akenside, and the choice can be assumed to be Lloyd's, for his contributions are clearly influenced by The Pleasures of Imagination, while Lamb's are not (it might be added that Lloyd certainly wrote the dedication, which was to Southey). In these poems Lloyd frequently counterbalances the inevitable misery the good man must feel at the evils in society with the ‘akensidish’ delights that the same man can experience in the face of nature. Yet in the most thoughtful piece, ‘London. A Poem’, he confesses that this consolation is somewhat problematic, and, in any case, only available to a few (Akenside's spiritual hierarchy again). The key passage is worth quoting at length because it also shows Lloyd responding to just that passage of The Pleasures of Imagination which lies behind the opening of ‘Living Without God in the World’:

Methinks he acts the purposes of life,
And fills the measure of his destiny
With best approved wisdom, who retires
To some majestic solitude; his mind
Rais'd by those visions of eternal love,
The rock, the vale, the forest, and the lake,
The sky, the sea, and everlasting hills.
He best performs the purposes of life,
And fills the measure of his destiny,
Who holds high converse with the present God
(Not mystically meant), and feels him ever
Made manifest to his transfigur'd soul.
But few there are who know to prize such bliss.
And he who thus would raise his mortal being
Must shake weak nature off, and be content
To live a lonely uncompanion'd thing,
Exil'd from human loves and sympathies.(55)

While his satirical lines on the Godwinians and ‘practical’ atheists presented a uniformly gloomy view of mankind, Lloyd's ‘present state of society’ poems seem to have inspired Lamb to recast his material in a manner a little reminiscent of Keats' change of heart with regard to Hyperion. Drawing on Akenside, or having already drawn on him, he decided to present himself as one ‘Who holds high converse with the present God’, thus establishing, indeed recommending, the point of view from which the Godwinians and ‘practical’ Atheists were to be attacked. The ensuing problems have been examined in detail. Lamb was uneasy about Akenside's Deism (particularly so, one assumes, if these lines were purpose-written to preface an attack on ‘Atheists, or Deists only in the name’), so instinctively turned to Night Thoughts and the Bible instead. This left the ‘akensidish’ voice in a sort of limbo, its authority isolated, threatened, and of uncertain relevance. The result is that ‘Living Without God in the World’ is hardly what Coleridge would later call ‘a legitimate poem … the parts of which mutually support and explain each other’,⁵⁶ but, like Michelangelo's unfinished slaves that wrestle to free themselves from the unworked material of their being, the poem has a fascination of its own, and takes us close, particularly in those first fourteen lines, to the flux and reflux of the creative process.

Notes

1. This article is based on a lecture read to the Charles Lamb Society on 6 December 1996. I am grateful to the Society for the privilege of being invited to speak, and the opportunity afforded to discuss my ideas on ‘Living Without God in the World’.

2. The Annual Anthology (2 vols., Bristol, 1799-1800), i. 90-2. The poem, unlike many others in the Anthology, appeared with a full signature.

3. Lines suggested by the Fast … (Birmingham, 1799), p. 3. A collation follows: 23 modern stamp] modern sort 24 nearer:] nearer; 25 intellect,] intellect; 26 Of energies] And energies man,] man; 27 man of] man, of fate artificer;] fate, Artificer, 28-9 Yea of his own life Lord, and of the days / Of his abode on earth, when time shall be,] Yea, of his own life, Lord! When time shall be 30 art] Art 31 Death, by chymic practises deceived] Death by chemic practices deceiv'd 32 years] years, 33 he has followed, or] he's follow'd; and 34 sense] sense, 35 philosophic world] philosophic world 36 Relent, and leave] Relent and cease

4. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr. (3 vols., Ithaca, NY, 1975-8) (hereafter Marrs), i. 150.

5. ‘Living Without God in the World’ appears at p. 26 of the Lamb section (each poet's works had separate pagination).

6. ‘Remembering Émile Legouis’, CLB [Charles Lamb Bulletin] NS 68 (1988) 265-8 (hereafter Roe); The Politics of Nature (Basingstoke, 1992), pp. 66-70.

7. Roe 266.

8. Roe 267-8.

9. Roe 267.

10. Roe 268.

11. Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (Bath, 1780) (hereafter Priestley), p. x.

12. Priestley xii.

13. Priestley xii-xiii.

14. Clarissa ed. John Butt (4 vols., London and New York, 1932), iii. 314.

15. Marrs i. 12.

16. Marrs i. 84.

17. Marrs i. 88.

18. Lamb follows Priestley in attacking both types of atheism, but his title would seem to place the emphasis on ‘practical’ atheism. Note that after the long digression on Godwinian ‘speculative’ atheism, Lamb checks himself here with the reminder that ‘these are fancies of a few’ (l. 37).

19. Quotations from The Pleasures of Imagination are taken from The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside ed. George Gilfillan (Edinburgh, 1857).

20. Marrs i. 222, 226.

21. It is worth adding that James Gillman later used a significant quotation from The Pleasures of Imagination as a motto for his Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1838).

22. Jack Simmons, Southey (London, 1945), p. 43.

23. Quoted from Christopher Moody's review of Priestley's Discourses on the Evidences of Revealed Religion, Monthly Review, NS 16 (1795) 383.

24. Quotations from Night Thoughts are taken from Stephen Cornford's edition (Cambridge, 1989), hereafter Cornford.

25. Akenside, too, was (as Browning described Shelley) a ‘Sun-treader’ though he does not display the same tendency to demean the sun. See in particular The Pleasures of Imagination i 183ff.

26. Marrs i. 18. Interestingly, the answer to Lamb's question is ‘no’. Edwin Marrs' suggestion that Night Thoughts v 190-1 was in Lamb's mind (Marrs i. 24) is mistaken. Lamb was actually thinking of a passage in The Pleasures of Imagination where the ‘high-born soul’ is described ‘hovering round the sun’ (i 183-95) which certainly is the source of Coleridge's lines; he was probably confusing it with Night Thoughts vii 1354. Lamb's confusion of Night Thoughts and The Pleasures of Imagination on this occasion is very suggestive for the sort of reading of ‘Living Without God in the World’ that I am attempting.

27. The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (6 vols., Oxford, 1956-71) (hereafter Griggs), i. 197, 201, 341, 393.

28. Blank Verse, by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb (London, 1798) (hereafter Blank Verse) 12.

29. See for example the passage in Night the Ninth where Young, describing the night sky, exclaims ‘Divine Instructor! Thy first Volume, This, / For Man's Perusal; All in Capitals! / … fairly writ / In Language universal, to Mankind …’ (ix 1659-65).

30. Job 40:10.

31. Matthew 7:26-7, Luke 6:49.

32. Cornford 19.

33. Isaiah 36:6. Stephen Cornford mistakenly annotates this with reference to Isaiah 42:3 (Cornford 330).

34. See Young's reference to the spear that pierced Christ's side as the pen that writes the names of the elect in the Book of Life, Night Thoughts iv 312-17.

35. Roe 267.

36. Political Writings ed. Bruce Kuklick (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 152-3 (Introduction to The Rights of Man, Part II).

37. Political Justice (2 vols., London, 1793), ii. 862.

38. Political Justice (2 vols., London, 1796), ii. 497. Although dated 1796, this edition was published on 26 November 1795 (Don Locke, A Fantasy of Reason: The Life and Thought of William Godwin (London, 1980), p. 91). In the 1793 edition the corresponding passage referred to ‘individual’ rather than ‘independent’ ‘intellectual operations’ (i. 848). It is worth remarking the proximity of the passage on the ‘evils attendant’ on cohabitation to Godwin's ‘conjecture’ on immortality which appears in the following chapter (in the 1796 edition at ii. 511). Perhaps Lamb looked at the latter passage in disgust, then flicked back a few pages, alighted on the former passage, and subsequently associated the two. For another theory, see Roe 267.

39. 8th edition (London, 1732), pp. 158-9.

40. Boswell's Life of Johnson ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (6 vols., Oxford, 1934-50), ii. 8. In (partial) contradiction of this assertion Boswell mentioned Hume, certainly no Deist, thus demonstrating a very typical eighteenth century tendency to bracket together atheists and Deists.

41. Priestley xvi-xvii.

42. Roe points out that ‘loose about’ is from Milton's Samson Agonistes, 1. 675 (Roe 268).

43. Text quoted from The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens, Georgia, and London, 1994).

44. The simplest explanation for this would be that Lamb was faulting the ‘practical’ atheists for not responding to the night sky in the way that Barbauld had memorably urged, but it is also possible that Lamb was (consciously or subconsciously) expressing hostility to the (clear) Deistic tendency of Barbauld's poem.

45. Roe 268.

46. Priestley xvi-xvii.

47. Griggs i. 355.

48. Poems, by S. T. Coleridge, Second Edition. To which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd (Bristol, 1797), p. 217. Lamb was doubtless recalling Collins' ‘Distress with Dagger keen’ (‘Ode to Pity’ 4).

49. All Shakespeare quotations are from the (second) Arden edition.

50. Marrs i. 40.

51. Marrs i. 12.

52. Marrs i. 77.

53. Marrs i. 79.

54. In the second number of The Watchman Coleridge published an extract of ‘Religious Musings’ under the title ‘The Present State of Society’.

55. Blank Verse 61-2. Fielding's ‘Man of the Hill’ (in Tom Jones) is brought to mind, but for the thematic movement of this passage see The Task i 220-51, where Cowper considers first the merits, then the demerits, of living in a remote cottage.

56. Biographia Literaria ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (2 vols., Princeton, 1983), ii. 13.