Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Title: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Editor: Henry Nelson Coleridge
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8489]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPECIMENS OF THE TABLE TALK OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE ***
[The Greek transliterations throughout this file are either missing or
very suspect.]
[Illustration: F. Finden sculp.
_London, John Murray, Albernarle St. 1837_]
[autographed:
Dear Sir,
Your obliged servant.
S. T. Coleridge]
SPECIMENS
OF THE
TABLE TALK
OF
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
TO
JAMES GILLMAN, ESQUIRE,
OF THE GROVE, HIGHGATE, AND TO
MRS. GILLMAN,
This Volume IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED.
PREFACE.
* * * * *
It is nearly fifteen years since I was, for the first time, enabled to
become a frequent and attentive visitor in Mr. Coleridge's domestic
society. His exhibition of intellectual power in living discourse struck me
at once as unique and transcendant; and upon my return home, on the very
first evening which I spent with him after my boyhood, I committed to
writing, as well as I could, the principal topics of his conversation in
his own words. I had no settled design at that time of continuing the work,
but simply made the note in something like a spirit of vexation that such a
strain of music as I had just heard, should not last forever. What I did
once, I was easily induced by the same feeling to do again; and when, after
many years of affectionate communion between us, the painful existence of
my revered relative on earth was at length finished in peace, my occasional
notes of what he had said in my presence had grown to a mass, of which this
volume contains only such parts as seem fit for present publication. I
know, better than any one can tell me, how inadequately these specimens
represent the peculiar splendour and individuality of Mr. Coleridge's
conversation. How should it be otherwise? Who could always follow to the
turning-point his long arrow-flights of thought? Who could fix those
ejaculations of light, those tones of a prophet, which at times have made
me bend before him as before an inspired man? Such acts of spirit as these
were too subtle to be fettered down on paper; they live--if they can live
any where--in the memories alone of those who witnessed them. Yet I would
fain hope that these pages will prove that all is not lost;--that something
of the wisdom, the learning, and the eloquence of a great man's social
converse has been snatched from forgetfulness, and endowed with a permanent
shape for general use. And although, in the judgment of many persons, I may
incur a serious responsibility by this publication; I am, upon the whole,
willing to abide the result, in confidence that the fame of the loved and
lamented speaker will lose nothing hereby, and that the cause of Truth and
of Goodness will be every way a gainer. This sprig, though slight and
immature, may yet become its place, in the Poet's wreath of honour, among
flowers of graver hue.
If the favour shown to several modern instances of works nominally of the
same description as the present were alone to be considered, it might seem
that the old maxim, that nothing ought to be said of the dead but what is
good, is in a fair way of being dilated into an understanding that every
thing is good that has been said by the dead. The following pages do not, I
trust, stand in need of so much indulgence. Their contents may not, in
every particular passage, be of great intrinsic importance; but they can
hardly be without some, and, I hope, a worthy, interest, as coming from the
lips of one at least of the most extraordinary men of the age; whilst to
the best of my knowledge and intention, no living person's name is
introduced, whether for praise or for blame, except on literary or
political grounds of common notoriety. Upon the justice of the remarks here
published, it would be out of place in me to say any thing; and a
commentary of that kind is the less needed, as, in almost every instance,
the principles upon which the speaker founded his observations are
expressly stated, and may be satisfactorily examined by themselves. But,
for the purpose of general elucidation, it seemed not improper to add a few
notes, and to make some quotations from Mr. Coleridge's own works; and in
doing so, I was in addition actuated by an earnest wish to call the
attention of reflecting minds in general to the views of political, moral,
and religious philosophy contained in those works, which, through an
extensive, but now decreasing, prejudice, have hitherto been deprived of
that acceptance with the public which their great preponderating merits
deserve, and will, as I believe, finally obtain. And I can truly say, that
if, in the course of the perusal of this little work, any one of its
readers shall gain a clearer insight into the deep and pregnant principles,
in the light of which Mr. Coleridge was accustomed to regard God and the
World,--I shall look upon the publication as fortunate, and consider myself
abundantly rewarded for whatever trouble it has cost me.
A cursory inspection will show that this volume lays no claim to be ranked
with those of Boswell in point of dramatic interest. Coleridge differed
not more from Johnson in every characteristic of intellect, than in the
habits and circumstances of his life, during the greatest part of the time
in which I was intimately conversant with him. He was naturally very fond
of society, and continued to be so to the last; but the almost unceasing
ill health with which he was afflicted, after fifty, confined him for many
months in every year to his own room, and, most commonly, to his bed. He
was then rarely seen except by single visiters; and few of them would feel
any disposition upon such occasions to interrupt him, whatever might have
been the length or mood of his discourse. And indeed, although I have been
present in mixed company, where Mr. Coleridge has been questioned and
opposed, and the scene has been amusing for the moment--I own that it was
always much more delightful to me to let the river wander at its own sweet
will, unruffled by aught but a certain breeze of emotion which the stream
itself produced. If the course it took was not the shortest, it was
generally the most beautiful; and what you saw by the way was as worthy of
note as the ultimate object to which you were journeying. It is possible,
indeed, that Coleridge did not, in fact, possess the precise gladiatorial
power of Johnson; yet he understood a sword-play of his own; and I have,
upon several occasions, seen him exhibit brilliant proofs of its
effectiveness upon disputants of considerable pretensions in their
particular lines. But he had a genuine dislike of the practice in himself
or others, and no slight provocation could move him to any such exertion.
He was, indeed, to my observation, more distinguished from other great men
of letters by his moral thirst after the Truth--the ideal truth--in his
own mind, than by his merely intellectual qualifications. To leave the
everyday circle of society, in which the literary and scientific rarely--
the rest never--break through the spell of personality;--where Anecdote
reigns everlastingly paramount and exclusive, and the mildest attempt to
generalize the Babel of facts, and to control temporary and individual
phenomena by the application of eternal and overruling principles, is
unintelligible to many, and disagreeable to more;--to leave this species
of converse--if converse it deserves to be called--and pass an entire day
with Coleridge, was a marvellous change indeed. It was a Sabbath past
expression deep, and tranquil, and serene. You came to a man who had
travelled in many countries and in critical times; who had seen and felt
the world in most of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes and
weaknesses; one to whom all literature and genial art were absolutely
subject, and to whom, with a reasonable allowance as to technical details,
all science was in a most extraordinary degree familiar. Throughout a
long-drawn summer's day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but
clear and musical, tones, concerning things human and divine; marshalling
all history, harmonizing all experiment, probing the depths of your
consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and of terror to the
imagination; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mind, that
you might, for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very act of
conversion. And this he would do, without so much as one allusion to
himself, without a word of reflection on others, save when any given act
fell naturally in the way of his discourse,--without one anecdote that was
not proof and illustration of a previous position;--gratifying no passion,
indulging no caprice, but, with a calm mastery over your soul, leading you
onward and onward for ever through a thousand windings, yet with no pause,
to some magnificent point in which, as in a focus, all the party-coloured
rays of his discourse should converge in light. In all this he was, in
truth, your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that
he was other than a fellow student and the companion of your way,--so
playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate the glance
of his pleasant eye!
There were, indeed, some whom Coleridge tired, and some whom he sent
asleep. It would occasionally so happen, when the abstruser mood was strong
upon him, and the visiter was narrow and ungenial. I have seen him at times
when you could not incarnate him,--when he shook aside your petty questions
or doubts, and burst with some impatience through the obstacles of common
conversation. Then, escaped from the flesh, he would soar upwards into an
atmosphere almost too rare to breathe, but which seemed proper to _him_,
and there he would float at ease. Like enough, what Coleridge then said,
his subtlest listener would not understand as a man understands a
newspaper; but upon such a listener there would steal an influence, and an
impression, and a sympathy; there would be a gradual attempering of his
body and spirit, till his total being vibrated with one pulse alone, and
thought became merged in contemplation;--
And so, his senses gradually wrapt
In a half sleep, he'd dream of better worlds,
And dreaming hear thee still, O singing lark,
That sangest like an angel in the clouds!
But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the general character of
Mr. Coleridge's conversation was abstruse or rhapsodical. The contents of
the following pages may, I think, be taken as pretty strong presumptive
evidence that his ordinary manner was plain and direct enough; and even
when, as sometimes happened, he seemed to ramble from the road, and to
lose himself in a wilderness of digressions, the truth was, that at that
very time he was working out his fore-known conclusion through an almost
miraculous logic, the difficulty of which consisted precisely in the very
fact of its minuteness and universality. He took so large a scope, that,
if he was interrupted before he got to the end, he appeared to have been
talking without an object; although, perhaps, a few steps more would have
brought you to a point, a retrospect from which would show you the
pertinence of all he had been saying. I have heard persons complain that
they could get no answer to a question from Coleridge. The truth is, he
answered, or meant to answer, so fully that the querist should have no
second question to ask. In nine cases out of ten he saw the question was
short or misdirected; and knew that a mere _yes_ or _no_ answer could not
embrace the truth--that is, the whole truth--and might, very probably, by
implication, convey error. Hence that exhaustive, cyclical mode of
discoursing in which he frequently indulged; unfit, indeed, for a dinner-
table, and too long-breathed for the patience of a chance visiter,--but
which, to those who knew for what they came, was the object of their
profoundest admiration, as it was the source of their most valuable
instruction. Mr. Coleridge's affectionate disciples learned their lessons
of philosophy and criticism from his own mouth. He was to them as an old
master of the Academy or Lyceum. The more time he took, the better pleased
were such visiters; for they came expressly to listen, and had ample proof
how truly he had declared, that whatever difficulties he might feel, with
pen in hand, in the expression of his meaning, he never found the smallest
hitch or impediment in the utterance of his most subtle reasonings by word
of mouth. How many a time and oft have I felt his abtrusest thoughts steal
rhythmically on my soul, when chanted forth by him! Nay, how often have I
fancied I heard rise up in answer to his gentle touch, an interpreting
music of my own, as from the passive strings of some wind-smitten lyre!
Mr. Coleridge's conversation at all times required attention, because what
he said was so individual and unexpected. But when he was dealing deeply
with a question, the demand upon the intellect of the hearer was very
great; not so much for any hardness of language, for his diction was always
simple and easy; nor for the abstruseness of the thoughts, for they
generally explained, or appeared to explain, themselves; but preeminently
on account of the seeming remoteness of his associations, and the exceeding
subtlety of his transitional links. Upon this point it is very happily,
though, according to my observation, too generally, remarked, by one whose
powers and opportunities of judging were so eminent that the obliquity of
his testimony in other respects is the more unpardonable;--"Coleridge, to
many people--and often I have heard the complaint--seemed to wander; and he
seemed then to wander the most, when, in fact, his resistance to the
wandering instinct was greatest,--viz. when the compass and huge circuit,
by which his illustrations moved, travelled farthest into remote regions,
before they began to revolve. Long before this coming round commenced, most
people had lost him, and naturally enough supposed that he had lost
himself. They continued to admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but
did not see their relations to the dominant theme. * * * * However, I can
assert, upon my long and intimate knowledge of Coleridge's mind, that logic
the most severe was as inalienable from his modes of thinking, as grammar
from his language." [Footnote: Tait's Mag. Sept. 1834, p. 514.] True: his
mind was a logic-vice; let him fasten it on the tiniest flourish of an
error, he never slacked his hold, till he had crushed body and tail to
dust. He was _always_ ratiocinating in his own mind, and therefore
sometimes seemed incoherent to the partial observer. It happened to him as
to Pindar, who in modern days has been called a rambling rhapsodist,
because the connections of his parts, though never arbitrary, are so fine
that the vulgar reader sees them not at all. But they are there
nevertheless, and may all be so distinctly shown, that no one can doubt
their existence; and a little study will also prove that the points of
contact are those which the true genius of lyric verse naturally evolved,
and that the entire Pindaric ode, instead of being the loose and lawless
out-burst which so many have fancied, is, without any exception, the most
artificial and highly wrought composition which Time has spared to us from
the wreck of the Greek Muse. So I can well remember occasions, in which,
after listening to Mr. Coleridge for several delightful hours, I have gone
away with divers splendid masses of reasoning in my head, the separate
beauty and coherency of which I deeply felt, but how they had produced, or
how they bore upon, each other, I could not then perceive. In such cases I
have mused sometimes even for days afterwards upon the words, till at
length, spontaneously as it seemed, "the fire would kindle," and the
association, which had escaped my utmost efforts of comprehension before,
flash itself all at once upon my mind with the clearness of noon-day light.
It may well be imagined that a style of conversation so continuous and
diffused as that which I have just attempted to describe, presented
remarkable difficulties to a mere reporter by memory. It is easy to
preserve the pithy remark, the brilliant retort, or the pointed anecdote;
these stick of themselves, and their retention requires no effort of mind.
But where the salient angles are comparatively few, and the object of
attention is a long-drawn subtle discoursing, you can never recollect,
except by yourself thinking the argument over again. In so doing, the order
and the characteristic expressions will for the most part spontaneously
arise; and it is scarcely credible with what degree of accuracy language
may thus be preserved, where practice has given some dexterity, and long
familiarity with the speaker has enabled, or almost forced, you to catch
the outlines of his manner. Yet with all this, so peculiar were the flow
and breadth of Mr. Coleridge's conversation, that I am very sensible how
much those who can best judge will have to complain of my representation of
it. The following specimens will, I fear, seem too fragmentary, and
therefore deficient in one of the most distinguishing properties of that
which they are designed to represent; and this is true. Yet the reader will
in most instances have little difficulty in understanding the course which
the conversation took, although my recollections of it are thrown into
separate paragraphs for the sake of superior precision. As I never
attempted to give dialogue--indeed, there was seldom much dialogue to give
--the great point with me was to condense what I could remember on each
particular topic into intelligible _wholes_ with as little injury to the
living manner and diction as was possible. With this explanation, I must
leave it to those who still have the tones of "that old man eloquent"
ringing in their ears, to say how far I have succeeded in this delicate
enterprise of stamping his winged words with perpetuity.
In reviewing the contents of the following pages, I can clearly see that I
have admitted some passages which will be pronounced illiberal by those
who, in the present day, emphatically call themselves liberal--_the_
liberal. I allude of course to Mr. Coleridge's remarks on the Reform Bill
and the Malthusian economists. The omission of such passages would probably
have rendered this publication more generally agreeable, and my disposition
does not lead me to give gratuitous offence to any one. But the opinions of
Mr. Coleridge on these subjects, however imperfectly expressed by me, were
deliberately entertained by him; and to have omitted, in so miscellaneous a
collection as this, what he was well known to have said, would have argued
in me a disapprobation or a fear, which I disclaim. A few words, however,
may be pertinently employed here in explaining the true bearing of
Coleridge's mind on the politics of our modern days. He was neither a Whig
nor a Tory, as those designations are usually understood; well enough
knowing that, for the most part, half-truths only are involved in the
Parliamentary tenets of one party or the other. In the common struggles of
a session, therefore, he took little interest; and as to mere personal
sympathies, the friend of Frere and of Poole, the respected guest of
Canning and of Lord Lansdowne, could have nothing to choose. But he threw
the weight of his opinion--and it was considerable--into the Tory or
Conservative scale, for these two reasons:--First, generally, because he
had a deep conviction that the cause of freedom and of truth is now
seriously menaced by a democratical spirit, growing more and more rabid
every day, and giving no doubtful promise of the tyranny to come; and
secondly, in particular, because the national Church was to him the ark of
the covenant of his beloved country, and he saw the Whigs about to coalesce
with those whose avowed principles lead them to lay the hand of spoliation
upon it. Add to these two grounds, some relics of the indignation which the
efforts of the Whigs to thwart the generous exertions of England in the
great Spanish war had formerly roused within him; and all the constituents
of any active feeling in Mr. Coleridge's mind upon matters of state are, I
believe, fairly laid before the reader. The Reform question in itself gave
him little concern, except as he foresaw the present attack on the Church
to be the immediate consequence of the passing of the Bill; "for let the
form of the House of Commons," said he, "be what it may, it will be, for
better or for worse, pretty much what the country at large is; but once
invade that truly national and essentially popular institution, the Church,
and divert its funds to the relief or aid of individual charity or public
taxation--how specious soever that pretext may be--and you will never
thereafter recover the lost means of perpetual cultivation. Give back to
the Church what the nation originally consecrated to its use, and it ought
then to be charged with the education of the people; but half of the
original revenue has been already taken by force from her, or lost to her
through desuetude, legal decision, or public opinion; and are those whose
very houses and parks are part and parcel of what the nation designed for
the general purposes of the Clergy, to be heard, when they argue for making
the Church support, out of her diminished revenues, institutions, the
intended means for maintaining which they themselves hold under the
sanction of legal robbery?" Upon this subject Mr. Coleridge did indeed feel
very warmly, and was accustomed to express himself accordingly. It weighed
upon his mind night and day, and he spoke upon it with an emotion, which I
never saw him betray upon any topic of common politics, however decided his
opinion might be. In this, therefore, he was _felix opportunitate mortis;
non enim vidit_----; and the just and honest of all parties will heartily
admit over his grave, that as his principles and opinions were untainted by
any sordid interest, so he maintained them in the purest spirit of a
reflective patriotism, without spleen, or bitterness, or breach of social
union.
It would require a rare pen to do justice to the constitution of
Coleridge's mind. It was too deep, subtle, and peculiar, to be fathomed by
a morning visiter. Few persons knew much of it in any thing below the
surface; scarcely three or four ever got to understand it in all its
marvellous completeness. Mere personal familiarity with this extraordinary
man did not put you in possession of him; his pursuits and aspirations,
though in their mighty range presenting points of contact and sympathy for
all, transcended in their ultimate reach the extremest limits of most men's
imaginations. For the last thirty years of his life, at least, Coleridge
was really and truly a philosopher of the antique cast. He had his esoteric
views; and all his prose works from the "Friend" to the "Church and State"
were little more than feelers, pioneers, disciplinants for the last and
complete exposition of them. Of the art of making hooks he knew little, and
cared less; but had he been as much an adept in it as a modern novelist, he
never could have succeeded in rendering popular or even tolerable, at
first, his attempt to push Locke and Paley from their common throne in
England. A little more working in the trenches might have brought him
closer to the walls with less personal damage; but it is better for
Christian philosophy as it is, though the assailant was sacrificed in the
bold and artless attack. Mr. Coleridge's prose works had so very limited a
sale, that although published in a technical sense, they could scarcely be
said to have ever become _publici juris_. He did not think them such
himself, with the exception, perhaps, of the "Aids to Reflection," and
generally made a particular remark if he met any person who professed or
showed that he had read the "Friend" or any of his other books. And I have
no doubt that had he lived to complete his great work on "Philosophy
reconciled with Christian Religion," he would without scruple have used in
that work any part or parts of his preliminary treatises, as their
intrinsic fitness required. Hence in every one of his prose writings there
are repetitions, either literal or substantial, of passages to be found in
some others of those writings; and there are several particular positions
and reasonings, which he considered of vital importance, reiterated in the
"Friend," the "Literary Life," the "Lay Sermons," the "Aids to Reflection,"
and the "Church and State." He was always deepening and widening the
foundation, and cared not how often he used the same stone. In thinking
passionately of the principle, he forgot the authorship--and sowed beside
many waters, if peradventure some chance seedling might take root and bear
fruit to the glory of God and the spiritualization of Man.
His mere reading was immense, and the quality and direction of much of it
well considered, almost unique in this age of the world. He had gone
through most of the Fathers, and, I believe, all the Schoolmen of any
eminence; whilst his familiarity with all the more common departments of
literature in every language is notorious. The early age at which some of
these acquisitions were made, and his ardent self-abandonment in the
strange pursuit, might, according to a common notion, have seemed adverse
to increase and maturity of power in after life: yet it was not so; he
lost, indeed, for ever the chance of being a popular writer; but Lamb's
_inspired charity-boy_ of twelve years of age continued to his dying day,
when sixty-two, the eloquent centre of all companies, and the standard of
intellectual greatness to hundreds of affectionate disciples far and near.
Had Coleridge been master of his genius, and not, alas! mastered by it;--
had he less romantically fought a single-handed fight against the whole
prejudices of his age, nor so mercilessly racked his fine powers on the
problem of a universal Christian philosophy,--he might have easily won all
that a reading public can give to a favourite, and have left a name--not
greater nor more enduring indeed--but--better known, and more prized, than
now it is, amongst the wise, the gentle, and the good, throughout all ranks
of society. Nevertheless, desultory as his labours, fragmentary as his
productions at present may seem to the cursory observer--my undoubting
belief is, that in the end it will be found that Coleridge did, in his
vocation, the day's work of a giant. He has been melted into the very heart
of the rising literatures of England and America; and the principles he has
taught are the master-light of the moral and intellectual being of men,
who, if they shall fail to save, will assuredly illustrate and condemn, the
age in which they live. As it is, they 'bide their time.
Coleridge himself--blessings on his gentle memory!--Coleridge was a frail
mortal. He had indeed his peculiar weaknesses as well as his unique powers;
sensibilities that an averted look would rack, a heart which would have
beaten calmly in the tremblings of an earthquake. He shrank from mere
uneasiness like a child, and bore the preparatory agonies of his death-
attack like a martyr. Sinned against a thousand times more than sinning, he
himself suffered an almost life-long punishment for his errors, whilst the
world at large has the unwithering fruits of his labours, his genius, and
his sacrifice. _Necesse est tanquam immaturam mortem ejus defleam; si tamen
fas est aut flere, aut omnino mortem vocare, qua tanti viri mortalitas
magis finita quam vita est. Vivit enim, vivetque semper, atque etiam latius
in memoria hominum et sermone versabitur, postquam ab oculis recessit._
* * * * *
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest child of the Reverend John
Coleridge, Vicar of the Parish of Ottery St. Mary, in the county of Devon,
and master of Henry the Eighth's Free Grammar School in that town. His
mother's maiden name was Ann Bowdon. He was born at Ottery on the 21st of
October, 1772, "about eleven o'clock in the forenoon," as his father the
vicar has, with rather a curious particularity, entered it in the register.
He died on the 25th of July, 1834, in Mr. Gillman's house, in the Grove,
Highgate, and is buried in the old church-yard, by the road side.
[Greek: ----]
H. N. C.
CONTENTS
* * * * *
Character of Othello
Schiller's Robbers
Shakspeare
Scotch Novels
Lord Byron
John Kemble
Mathews
Parliamentary Privilege
Permanency and Progression of Nations
Kant's Races of Mankind
Materialism
Ghosts
Character of the Age for Logic
Plato and Xenophon
Greek Drama
Kotzebue
Burke
St. John's Gospel
Christianity
Epistle to the Hebrews
The Logos
Reason and Understanding
Kean
Sir James Mackintosh
Sir H. Davy
Robert Smith
Canning
National Debt
Poor Laws
Conduct of the Whigs
Reform of the House of Commons
Church of Rome
Zendavesta
Pantheism and Idolatry
Difference between Stories of Dreams and Ghosts
Phantom Portrait
Witch of Endor
Socinianism
Plato and Xenophon
Religions of the Greeks
Egyptian Antiquities
Milton
Virgil
Granville Penn and the Deluge
Rainbow
English and Greek Dancing
Greek Acoustics
Lord Byron's Versification and Don Juan
Parental Control in Marriage
Marriage of Cousins
Differences of Character
Blumenbach and Kant's Races
Iapetic and Semitic
Hebrew
Solomon
Jewish History
Spinozistic and Hebrew Schemes
Roman Catholics
Energy of Man and other Animals
Shakspeare _in minimis_
Paul Sarpi
Bartram's Travels
The Understanding
Parts of Speech
Grammar
Magnetism
Electricity
Galvanism
Spenser
Character of Othello
Hamlet
Polonius
Principles and Maxims
Love
Measure for Measure
Ben Jonson
Beaumont and Fletcher
Version of the Bible
Craniology
Spurzheim
Bull and Waterland
The Trinity
Scale of Animal Being
Popedom
Scanderbeg
Thomas à Becket
Pure Ages of Greek, Italian, and English
Luther
Baxter
Algernon Sidney's Style
Ariosto and Tasso
Prose and Poetry
The Fathers
Rhenferd
Jacob Behmen
Non-perception of Colours
Restoration
Reformation
William III.
Berkeley
Spinosa
Genius
Envy
Love
Jeremy Taylor
Hooker
Ideas
Knowledge
Painting
Prophecies of the Old Testament
Messiah
Jews
The Trinity
Conversion of the Jews
Jews in Poland
Mosaic Miracles
Pantheism
Poetic Promise
Nominalists and Realists
British Schoolmen
Spinosa
Fall of Man
Madness
Brown and Darwin
Nitrous Oxide
Plants
Insects
Men
Dog
Ant and Bee
Black, Colonel
Holland and the Dutch
Religion Gentilizes
Women and Men
Biblical Commentators
Walkerite Creed
Horne Tooke
Diversions of Purley
Gender of the Sun in German
Horne Tooke
Jacobins
Persian and Arabic Poetry
Milesian Tales
Sir T. Monro
Sir S. Raffles
Canning
Shakspeare
Milton
Homer
Reason and Understanding
Words and Names of Things
The Trinity
Irving
Abraham
Isaac
Jacob
Origin of Acts
Love
Lord Eldon's Doctrine as to Grammar Schools
Democracy
The Eucharist
St. John, xix. 11.
Divinity of Christ
Genuineness of Books of Moses
Mosaic Prophecies
Talent and Genius
Motives and Impulses
Constitutional and functional Life
Hysteria
Hydro-carbonic Gas
Bitters and Tonics
Specific Medicines
Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians
Oaths
Flogging
Eloquence of Abuse
The Americans
Book of Job
Translation of the Psalms
Ancient Mariner
Undine
Martin
Pilgrim's Progress
Prayer
Church-singing
Hooker
Dreams
Jeremy Taylor
English Reformation
Catholicity
Gnosis
Tertullian
St. John
Principles of a Review
Party Spirit
Southey's Life of Bunyan
Laud
Puritans and Cavaliers
Presbyterians, Independents, and Bishops
Study of the Bible
Rabelais
Swift
Bentley
Burnet
Giotto
Painting
Seneca
Plato
Aristotle
Duke of Wellington
Monied Interest
Canning
Bourrienne
Jews
The Papacy and the Reformation
Leo X.
Thelwall
Swift
Stella
Iniquitous Legislation
Spurzheim and Craniology
French Revolution, 1830
Captain B. Hall and the Americans
English Reformation
Democracy
Idea of a State
Church
Government
French Gendarmerie
Philosophy of young Men at the present Day
Thucydides and Tacitus
Poetry
Modern Metre
Logic
Varro
Socrates
Greek Philosophy
Plotinus
Tertullian
Scotch and English Lakes
Love and Friendship opposed
Marriage
Characterlessness of Women
Mental Anarchy
Ear and Taste for Music different
English Liturgy
Belgian Revolution
Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Bacon
The Reformation
House of Commons
Government
Earl Grey
Government
Popular Representation
Napier
Buonaparte
Southey
Patronage of the Fine Arts
Old Women
Pictures
Chillingworth
Superstition of Maltese, Sicilians, and Italians
Asgill
The French
The Good and the True
Romish Religion
England and Holland
Iron
Galvanism
Heat
National Colonial Character, and Naval Discipline
England
Holland and Belgium
Greatest Happiness Principle
Hobbism
The Two Modes of Political Action
Truths and Maxims
Drayton and Daniel
Mr. Coleridge's System of Philosophy
Keenness and Subtlety
Duties and Needs of an Advocate
Abolition of the French Hereditary Peerage
Conduct of Ministers on the Reform Bill
Religion
Union with Ireland
Irish Church
A State
Persons and Things
History
Beauty
Genius
Church
State
Dissenters
Gracefulness of Children
Dogs
Ideal Tory and Whig
The Church
Ministers and the Reform Bill
Disfranchisement
Genius feminine
Pirates
Astrology
Alchemy
Reform Bill
Crisis
John, Chap. III. Ver. 4.
Dictation and Inspiration
Gnosis
New Testament Canon
Unitarianism--Moral Philosophy
Moral Law of Polarity
Epidemic Disease
Quarantine
Harmony
Intellectual Revolutions
Modern Style
Genius of the Spanish and Italians
Vico
Spinosa
Colours
Destruction of Jerusalem
Epic Poem
Vox Populi Vox Dei
Black
Asgill and Defoe
Horne Tooke
Fox and Pitt
Horner
Adiaphori
Citizens and Christians
Professor Park
English Constitution
Democracy
Milton and Sidney
De Vi Minimorum
Hahnemann
Luther
Sympathy of old Greek and Latin with English
Roman Mind
War
Charm for Cramp
Greek
Dual, neuter pleural *sic*, and verb singular
Theta
Talented
Homer
Valcknaer
Principles and Facts
Schmidt
Puritans and Jacobins
Wordsworth
French Revolution
Infant Schools
Mr. Coleridge's Philosophy
Sublimity
Solomon
Madness
C. Lamb
Faith and Belief
Dobrizhoffer
Scotch and English
Criterion of Genius
Dryden and Pope
Milton's disregard of Painting
Baptismal Service
Jews' Division of the Scripture
Sanskrit
Hesiod
Virgil
Genius Metaphysical
Don Quixote
Steinmetz
Keats
Christ's Hospital
Bowyer
St. Paul's Melita
English and German
Best State of Society
Great Minds Androgynous
Philosopher's Ordinary Language
Juries
Barristers' and Physicians' Fees
Quacks
Cæsarean Operation
Inherited Disease
Mason's Poetry
Northern and Southern States of the American Union
All and the Whole
Ninth Article
Sin and Sins
Old Divines
Preaching extempore
Church of England
Union with Ireland
Faust
Michael Scott, Goethe, Schiller, and Wordsworth
Beaumont and Fletcher
Ben Jonson
Massinger
House of Commons appointing the officers of the Army and Navy
Penal Code in Ireland
Churchmen
Coronation Oaths
Divinity
Professions and Trades
Modern Political Economy
National Debt
Property Tax
Duty of Landholders
Massinger
Shakspeare
Hieronimo
Love's Labour Lost
Gifford's Massinger
Shakspeare
The Old Dramatists
Statesmen
Burke
Prospect of Monarchy or Democracy
The Reformed House of Commons
United States of America
Captain B. Hall
Northern and Southern States
Democracy with Slavery
Quakers
Land and Money
Methods of Investigation
Church of Rome
Celibacy of the Clergy
Roman Conquest of Italy
Wedded Love in Shakspeare and his Contemporary Dramatists
Tennyson's Poems
Rabelais and Luther
Wit and Madness
Colonization
Machinery
Capital
Roman Conquest
Constantine
Papacy and the Schoolmen
Civil War of the Seventeenth Century
Hampden's Speech
Reformed House of Commons
Food
Medicine
Poison
Obstruction
Wilson
Shakspeare's Sonnets
Wickliffe
Love
Luther
Reverence for Ideal Truths
Johnson the Whig
Asgill
James I.
Sir P. Sidney
Things are finding their Level
German
Goethe
God's Providence
Man's Freedom
Dom Miguel and Dom Pedro
Working to better one's condition
Negro Emancipation
Fox and Pitt
Revolution
Virtue and Liberty
Epistle to the Romans
Erasmus
Luther
Negro Emancipation
Hackett's Life of Archbishop Williams
Charles I.
Manners under Edward III. Richard II. and Henry VIII.
Hypothesis
Suffiction
Theory
Lyell's Geology
Gothic Architecture
Gerard's Douw's "Schoolmaster" and Titian's "Venus"
Sir J. Scarlett
Mandeville's Fable of the Bees
Bestial Theory
Character of Bertram
Beaumont and Fletcher's Dramas
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides
Milton
Style
Cavalier Slang
Junius
Prose and Verse
Imitation and Copy
Dr. Johnson
Boswell
Burke
Newton
Milton
Painting
Music
Poetry
Public Schools
Scott and Coleridge
Nervous Weakness
Hooker and Bull
Faith
Quakers
Philanthropists
Jews
Sallust
Thucydides
Herodotus
Gibbon
Key to the Decline of the Roman Empire
Dr. Johnson's Political Pamphlets
Taxation
Direct Representation
Universal Suffrage
Right of Women to vote
Horne Tooke
Etymology of the final _Ive_
"The Lord" in the English Version of the Psalms, etc.
Scotch Kirk and Irving
Milton's Egotism
Claudian
Sterne
Humour and Genius
Great Poets good Men
Diction of the Old and New Testament Version
Hebrew
Vowels and Consonants
Greek Accent and Quantity
Consolation in Distress
Mock Evangelicals
Autumn Day
Rosetti on Dante
Laughter: Farce and Tragedy
Baron Von Humboldt
Modern Diplomatists
Man cannot be stationary
Fatalism and Providence
Characteristic Temperament of Nations
Greek Particles
Latin Compounds
Propertius
Tibullus
Lucan
Statius
Valerius Flaccus
Claudian
Persius
Prudentius
Hermesianax
Destruction of Jerusalem
Epic Poem
German and English
Paradise Lost
Modern Travels
The Trinity
Incarnation
Redemption
Education
Elegy
Lavacrum Pallados
Greek and Latin Pentameter
Milton's Latin Poems
Poetical Filter
Gray and Cotton
Homeric Heroes in Shakspeare
Dryden
Dr. Johnson
Scott's Novels
Scope of Christianity
Times of Charles I.
Messenger of the Covenant
Prophecy
Logic of Ideas and of Syllogisms
W. S. Lander's Poetry
Beauty
Chronological Arrangement of Works
Toleration
Norwegians
Articles of Faith
Modern Quakerism
Devotional Spirit
Sectarianism
Origen
Some Men like Musical Glasses
Sublime and Nonsense
Atheist
Proof of Existence of God
Kant's attempt
Plurality of Worlds
A Reasoner
Shakspeare's Intellectual Action
Crabbe and Southey
Peter Simple and Tom Cringle's Log
Chaucer
Shakspeare
Ben Jonson
Beaumont and Fletcher
Daniel
Massinger
Lord Byron and H. Walpole's "Mysterious Mother"
Lewis's Jamaica Journal
Sicily
Malta
Sir Alexander Ball
Cambridge Petition to admit Dissenters
Corn Laws
Christian Sabbath
High Prizes and Revenues of the Church
Sir Charles Wetherell's Speech
National Church
Dissenters
Papacy
Universities
Schiller's Versification
German Blank Verse
Roman Catholic Emancipation
Duke of Wellington
Coronation Oath
Corn Laws
Modern Political Economy
Socinianism
Unitarianism
Fancy and Imagination
Mr. Coleridge's System
Biographia Literaria
Dissenters
Lord Brooke
Barrow and Dryden
Peter Wilkins and Stothard
Fielding and Richardson
Bishop Sandford
Roman Catholic Religion
Euthanasia
Recollections, by Mr. Justice Coleridge
Address to a God-child
TABLE TALK
December 29, 1822
CHARACTER OF OTHELLO--SCHILLER'S ROBBERS-SHAKSPEARE
--SCOTCH NOVELS--LORD BYRON--JOHN KEMMBLE--MATHEWS
Othello must not be conceived as a negro, but a high and chivalrous Moorish
chief. Shakspeare learned the sprit of the character from the Spanish
poetry, which was prevalent in England in his time.[1]
Jelousy does not strike me as the point in his passion; I take it to be
rather an agony that the creature, whom he had believed angelic, with whom
he had garnered up his heart, and whom he could not help still loving,
should be proved impure and worthless. It was the struggle _not_ to
love her. It was a moral indignation and regret that virture should so
fall:--"But yet the _pity_ of it, Iago!--O Iago! the _pity_ of it,
Iago!" In addition to this, his hourour was concerned: Iago would not have
succeeded but by hinting that this honour was compromised. There is no
ferocity in Othello; his mind is majestic and composed. He deliberately
determines to die; and speaks his last speech with a view of showing his
attachment to the Venetian state, though it had superseded him.
[Footnote 1:
Caballaeros Granadinos,
Aunque Moros, hijos d'algo--ED.]
* * * * *
Schiller has the material Sublime; to produce an effect he sets you a
whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames,
or locks up a father in an old tower.[1] But Shakspeare drops a
handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow.
[Footnote 1:
This expression--"material sublime"--like a hundred others
which have slipped into general use, came originally from Mr. Coleridege,
and was by him, in the first instatnce, applied to Schiller's Robbers--
See Act iv, sc. 5.--ED.]
Lear is the most tremendous effort of Shakspeare as a poet; Hamlet as a
philosopher or meditater; and Othello is the union of the two. There is
something gigantic and unformed in the former two; but in the latter, every
thing assumes its due place and proportion, and the whole mature powers of
his mind are displayed in admirable equilibrium.
I think Old Mortality and Guy Mannering the best of the Scotch novels.
It seems, to my ear, that there is a sad want of harmony in Lord Byron's
verses. Is it not unnatural to be always connecting very great intellectual
power with utter depravity? Does such a combination often really exist in
rerum naturae?
I always had a great liking--I may say, a sort of nondescript reverence--
for John Kemble. What a quaint creature he was! I remember a party, in
which he was discoursing in his measured manner after dinner, when the
servant announced his carriage. He nodded, and went on. The announcement
took place twice afterwards; Kemble each time nodding his head a little
more impatiently, but still going on. At last, and for the fourth time, the
servant entered, and said,--"Mrs. Kemble says, sir, she has the
rheumat_ise_, and cannot stay." "Add_ism!_" dropped John, in a
parenthesis, and proceeded quietly in his harangue.
* * * * *
Kemble would correct any body, at any time, and in any place. Dear Charles
Mathews--a true genius in his line, in my judgment--told me he was once
performing privately before the King. The King was much pleased with the
imitation of Kemble, and said,--"I liked Kemble very much. He was one of my
earliest friends. I remember once he was talking, and found himself out of
snuff. I offered him my box. He declined taking any--'he, a poor actor,
could not put his fingers into a royal box.' I said, 'Take some, pray; you
will obl_ee_ge me.' Upon which Kemble replied,--'It would become your royal
mouth better to say, obl_i_ge me;' and took a pinch."
* * * * *
It is not easy to put me out of countenance, or interrupt the feeling of
the time by mere external noise or circumstance; yet once I was thoroughly
_done up_, as you would say. I was reciting, at a particular house, the
"Remorse;" and was in the midst of Alhadra's description of the death of
her husband, [1] when a scrubby boy, with a shining face set in dirt, burst
open the door and cried out,--"Please, ma'am, master says, Will you ha'; or
will you _not_ ha', the pin-round?"
[Footnote 1:
"ALHADRA. This night your chieftain arm'd himself,
And hurried from me. But I follow'd him
At distance, till I saw him enter _there_!
NAOMI. The cavern?
ALHADRA. Yes, the mouth of yonder cavern.
After a while I saw the son of Valdez
Rush by with flaring torch: he likewise enter'd.
There was another and a longer pause;
And once, methought, I heard the clash of swords!
And soon the son of Valdez re-appear'd:
He flung his torch towards the moon in sport,
And seem'd as he were mirthful! I stood listening,
Impatient for the footsteps of my husband.
NAOMI. Thou calledst him?
ALHADRA. I crept into the cavern--
'Twas dark and very silent. What saidst thou?
No! No! I did not dare call Isidore,
Lest I should hear no answer! A brief while,
Belike, I lost all thought and memory
Of that for which I came! After that pause,
O Heaven! I heard a groan, and follow'd it;
And yet another groan, which guided me
Into a strange recess--and there was light,
A hideous light! his torch lay on the ground;
Its flame burnt dimly o'er a chasm's brink:
I spake; and whilst I spake, a feeble groan
Came from that chasm! it was his last--his death-groan!
NAOMI. Comfort her, Allah!
ALHADRA. I stood in unimaginable trance
And agony that cannot be remember'd,
Listening with horrid hope to hear a groan!
But I had heard his last;--my husband's death-groan!
NAOMI. Haste! let us onward!
ALHADRA. I look'd far down the pit--
My sight was bounded by a jutting fragment;
And it was stain'd with blood. Then first I shriek'd;
My eyeballs burnt, my brain grew hot as fire,
And all the hanging drops of the wet roof
Turn'd into blood--I saw them turn to blood!
And I was leaping wildly down the chasm,
When on the further brink I saw his sword,
And it said, Vengeance!--Curses on my tongue!
The moon hath moved in heaven, and I am here,
And he hath not had vengeance!--Isidore!
Spirit of Isidore, thy murderer lives!
Away, away!"--Act iv. sc. 3.]
_January_ 1. 1823.
PARLIAMENTARY PRIVILEGE.---PERMANENCY AND PROGRESSION OF NATIONS.--KANT'S
RACES OF MANKIND.
Privilege is a substitution for Law, where, from the nature of the
circumstances, a law cannot act without clashing with greater and more
general principles. The House of Commons must, of course, have the power of
taking cognizance of offences against its own rights. Sir Francis Burdett
might have been properly sent to the Tower for the speech he made in the
House [1]; but when afterwards he published it in Cobbett, and they took
cognizance of it as a breach of privilege, they violated the plain
distinction between privilege and law.
As a speech in the House, the House could alone animadvert upon it,
consistently with the effective preservation of its most necessary
prerogative of freedom of debate; but when that speech became a book, then
the law was to look to it; and there being a law of libel, commensurate
with every possible object of attack in the state, privilege, which acts,
or ought to act, only as a substitute for other laws, could have nothing to
do with it. I have heard that one distinguished individual said,--"That he,
for one, would not shrink from affirming, that if the House of Commons
chose to _burn_ one of their own members in Palace Yard, it had an inherent
power and right by the constitution to do so." This was said, if at all, by
a moderate-minded man; and may show to what atrocious tyranny some persons
may advance in theory, under shadow of this word privilege.
[Footnote 1:
March 12. 1810. Sir Francis Burdett made a motion in the House of
Commons for the discharge of Mr. Gale Jones, who had been committed to
Newgate by a resolution of the House on the 21st of February preceding.
Sir Francis afterwards published, in Cobbett's Political Register, of the
24th of the same month of March, a "Letter to his Constituents, denying
the power of the House of Commons to imprison the people of England,"
and he accompanied the letter with an argument in support of his position.
On the 27th of March a complaint of breach of privilege, founded on this
publication, was made in the House by Mr. (now Sir Thomas) Lethbridge,
and after several long debates, a motion that Sir Francis Burdett should
be committed to the Tower was made on the 5th of April, 1810, by Sir
Robert Salisbury, and carried by a majority of 38.--ED.]
* * * * *
There are two principles in every European and Christian state:
Permanency and Progression.[1]
In the civil wars of the seventeenth century in England, which are as new
and fresh now as they were a hundred and sixty years ago, and will be so
for ever to us, these two principles came to a struggle. It was natural
that the great and the good of the nation should he found in the ranks of
either side. In the Mohammedan states, there is no principle of permanence;
and, therefore, they sink directly. They existed, and could only exist, in
their efforts at progression; when they ceased to conquer, they fell in
pieces. Turkey would long since have fallen, had it not been supported by
the rival and conflicting interests of Christian Europe. The Turks have no
church; religion and state are one; hence there is no counterpoise, no
mutual support. This is the very essence of their Unitarianism. They have
no past; they are not an historical people; they exist only in the present.
China is an instance of a permanency without progression. The Persians are
a superior race: they have a history and a literature; they were always
considered by the Greeks as quite distinct from the other barbarians. The
Afghans are a remarkable people. They have a sort of republic. Europeans
and Orientalists may be well represented by two figures standing back to
back: the latter looking to the east, that is, backwards; the former
looking westward, or forwards.
[Footnote 1:
See this position stated and illustrated in detail in Mr. Coleridge's work,
"On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the Idea of
each," p. 21. 2d edit. 1830. Well acquainted as I am with the fact f the
comparatively small acceptation which Mr. Coleridge's prose works have ever
found in the literary world, and with the reasons, and, what is more, with
the causes, of it, I still wonder that this particular treatise has not
been more noticed: first, because it is a little book; secondly, because it
is, or at least nineteen-twentieths of it are, written in a popular style;
and thirdly, because it is the only work, that I know or have ever heard
mentioned, that even attempts a solution of the difficulty in which an
ingenious enemy of the church of England may easily involve most of its
modern defenders in Parliament, or through the press, upon their own
principles and admissions. Mr. Coleridge himself prized this little work
highly, although he admitted its incompleteness as a composition:--"But I
don't care a rush about it," he said to me, "as an author. The saving
distinctions are plainly stated in it, and I am sure nothing is wanted to
make them _tell_, but that some kind friend should steal them from their
obscure hiding-place, and just tumble them down before the public as _his
own_."--ED.]
* * * * *
Kant assigns three great races of mankind. If two individuals of distinct
races cross, a third, or _tertium aliquid_, is _invariably_ produced,
different from either, as a white and a negro produce a mulatto. But when
different varieties of the same race cross, the offspring is according to
what we call chance; it is now like one, now like the other parent. Note
this, when you see the children of any couple of distinct European
complexions,--as English and Spanish, German and Italian, Russian and
Portuguese, and so on.
_January_ 3. 1823.
MATERIALISM.--GHOSTS.
Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are
beasts; the first and wisest of beasts, it may be; but still true beasts.
[1] We shall only differ in degree, and not in kind; just as the elephant
differs from the slug. But by the concession of all the materialists of all
the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts--and this
also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the
possession of a soul within us that makes the difference.
[Footnote 1:
"Try to conceive a _man_ without the ideas of God, eternity, freedom, will,
absolute truth; of the good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite. An
_animal_ endowed with a memory of appearances and facts might remain. But
the _man_ will have vanished, and you have instead a creature more subtle
than any beast of the field, but likewise cursed above every beast of the
field; upon the belly must it go, and dust must it eat all the days of its
life."--_Church and State_, p. 54. n.]
* * * * *
Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice, and you will be
convinced at once. After the narrative of the creation of the earth and
brute animals, Moses seems to pause, and says:--"And God said, Let us make
man in _our image_, after _our likeness_." And in the next chapter, he
repeats the narrative:--"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;" and then he
adds these words,--"_and man became a living soul_." Materialism will never
explain those last words.
* * * * *
Define a vulgar ghost with reference to all that is called ghost-like. It
is visibility without tangibility; which is also the definition of a
shadow. Therefore, a vulgar ghost and a shadow would be the same; because
two different things cannot properly have the same definition. A _visible
substance_ without susceptibility of impact, I maintain to be an absurdity.
Unless there be an external substance, the bodily eye _cannot_ see it;
therefore, in all such cases, that which is supposed to be seen is, in
fact, _not_ seen, but is an image of the brain. External objects naturally
produce sensation; but here, in truth, sensation produces, as it were, the
external object. In certain states of the nerves, however, I do believe
that the eye, although not consciously so directed, may, by a slight
convulsion, see a portion of the body, as if opposite to it. The part
actually seen will by common association seem the whole; and the whole body
will then constitute an external object, which explains many stories of
persons seeing themselves lying dead. Bishop Berkeley once experienced
this. He had the presence of mind to ring the bell, and feel his pulse;
keeping his eye still fixed on his own figure right opposite to him. He was
in a high fever, and the brain image died away as the door opened. I
observed something very like it once at Grasmere; and was so conscious of
the cause, that I told a person what I was experiencing, whilst the image
still remained.
Of course, if the vulgar ghost be really a shadow, there must be some
substance of which it is the shadow. These visible and intangible shadows,
without substances to cause them, are absurd.
January 4. 1828.
CHARACTER OF THE AGE FOR LOGIC.--PLATO AND XENOPHON.----GREEK DRAMA.----
KOTZEBUE.--BURKE.--PLAGIARISTS.
This is not a logical age. A friend lately gave me some political pamphlets
of the times of Charles I. and the Cromwellate. In them the premisses are
frequently wrong, but the deductions are almost always legitimate; whereas,
in the writings of the present day, the premisses are commonly sound, but
the conclusions false. I think a great deal of commendation is due to the
University of Oxford for preserving the study of logic in the schools. It
is a great mistake to suppose geometry any substitute for it.
* * * * *
Negatively, there may be more of the philosophy of Socrates in the
Memorabilia of Xenophon than in Plato: that is, there is less of what does
not belong to Socrates; but the general spirit of, and impression left by,
Plato, are more Socratic.[1]
[Footnote 1:
See p. 26. Mr. Coleridge meant in both these passages, that Xenophon had
preserved the most of the _man_ Socrates; that he was the best Boswell; and
that Socrates, as a _persona dialogi_, was little more than a poetical
phantom in Plato's hands. On the other hand, he says that Plato is more
_Socratic_, that is, more of a philosopher in the Socratic _mode_ of
reasoning (Cicero calls the Platonic writings generally, _Socratici
libri_); and Mr. C. also says, that in the metaphysical disquisitions Plato
is Pythagorean, meaning, that he worked on the supposed ideal or
transcendental principles of the extraordinary founder of the Italian
school.]
* * * * *
In Æschylus religion appears terrible, malignant, and persecuting:
Sophocles is the mildest of the three tragedians, but the persecuting
aspect is still maintained: Euripides is like a modern Frenchman, never so
happy as when giving a slap at the gods altogether.
* * * * *
Kotzebue represents the petty kings of the islands in the Pacific Ocean
exactly as so many Homeric chiefs. Riches command universal influence, and
all the kings are supposed to be descended from the gods.
* * * * *
I confess I doubt the Homeric genuineness of [Greek: dakruoen gelaschsa].
[1] It sounds to me much more like a prettiness of Bion or Moschus.
[Footnote 1:
[Greek: hos eipon, alochoio thilaes en chersin ethaeke paid eon hae d ara
min chaeodei dexato cholpo, dachruoen gelasasa.]--Illiad. Z. vi. 482]
* * * * *
The very greatest writers write best when calm, and exerting themselves
upon subjects unconnected with party. Burke rarely shows all his powers,
unless where he is in a passion. The French Revolution was alone a subject
fit for him. We are not yet aware of all the consequences of that event. We
are too near it.
* * * * *
Goldsmith did every thing happily.
* * * * *
You abuse snuff! Perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose.
* * * * *
A rogue is a roundabout fool; a fool _in circumbendibus_.
* * * * *
_Omne ignotum pro magnifico_. A dunghill at a distance sometimes smells
like musk, and a dead dog like elder-flowers.
* * * * *
Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from,--as pickpockets are
observed commonly to walk with their hands in their breeches' pockets.
_January 6_. 1823.
ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL.--CHRISTIANITY--EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS.--THE LOGOS.--
REASON AND UNDERSTANDING.
St. John had a twofold object in his Gospel and his Epistles,--to prove the
divinity, and also the actual human nature and bodily suffering, of Jesus
Christ,--that he was God and Man. The notion that the effusion of blood and
water from the Saviour's side was intended to prove the real _death_ of the
sufferer originated, I believe, with some modern Germans, and seems to me
ridiculous: there is, indeed, a very small quantity of water occasionally
in the præcordia: but in the pleura, where wounds are not generally mortal,
there is a great deal. St. John did not mean, I apprehend, to insinuate
that the spear-thrust made the _death_, merely as such, certain or evident,
but that the effusion showed the human nature. "I saw it," he would say,
"with my own eyes. It was real blood, composed of lymph and crassamentum,
and not a mere celestial ichor, as the Phantasmists allege."
* * * * *
I think the verse of the three witnesses (1 John, v. 7.) spurious, not only
because the balance of external authority is against it, as Porson seems to
have shown; but also, because, in my way of looking at it, it spoils the
reasoning.
* * * * *
St. John's logic is Oriental, and consists chiefly in position and
parallel; whilst St. Paul displays all the intricacies of the Greek system.
* * * * *
Whatever may be thought of the genuineness or authority of any part of the
book of Daniel, it makes no difference in my belief in Christianity; for
Christianity is within a man, even as he is a being gifted with reason; it
is associated with your mother's chair, and with the first-remembered tones
of her blessed voice.
* * * * *
I do not believe St. Paul to be the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
Luther's conjecture is very probable, that it was by Apollos, an
Alexandrian Jew. The plan is too studiously regular for St. Paul. It was
evidently written during the yet existing glories of the Temple. For three
hundred years the church did not affix St. Paul's name to it; but its
apostolical or catholic character, independently of its genuineness as to
St. Paul, was never much doubted.
* * * * *
The first three Gospels show the history, that is, the fulfilment of the
prophecies in the facts. St. John declares explicitly the doctrine,
oracularly, and without comment, because, being pure reason, it can only be
proved by itself. For Christianity proves itself, as the sun is seen by its
own light. Its evidence is involved in its existence. St. Paul writes more
particularly for the dialectic understanding; and proves those doctrines,
which were capable of such proof, by common logic.
* * * * *
St. John used the term [Greek: ho Logos] technically. Philo-Judæus had so
used it several years before the probable date of the composition of this
Gospel; and it was commonly understood amongst the Jewish Rabbis at that
time, and afterwards, of the manifested God.
* * * * *
Our translators, unfortunately, as I think, render the clause [Greek: pros
ton Theos] "_with_ God;" that would be right, if the Greek were [Greek: syn
to Theo].[1]
By the preposition [Greek: pros] in this place, is meant the utmost
possible _proximity_, without _confusion_; likeness, without sameness. The
Jewish Church understood the Messiah to be a divine person. Philo expressly
cautions against any one's supposing the Logos to be a mere
personification, or symbol. He says, the Logos is a substantial, self-
existent Being. The Gnostics, as they were afterwards called, were a kind
of Arians; and thought the Logos was an after-birth. They placed [Greek:
Abyssos] and [Greek: Sigae] (the Abyss and Silence) before him. Therefore
it was that St. John said, with emphasis, [Greek: en archae aen ho Logos]--
"In the _beginning_ was the Word." He was begotten in the first
simultaneous burst of Godhead, if such an expression may be pardoned, in
speaking of eternal existence.
[Footnote 1: John, ch. i. v. 1, 2.]
* * * * *
The Understanding suggests the materials of reasoning: the Reason decides
upon them. The first can only say,--This _is_, or _ought_ to be so. The
last says,--It _must_ be so.[1]
[Footnote 1:
I have preserved this, and several other equivalent remarks, out of a
dutiful wish to popularize, by all the honest means in my power, this
fundamental distinction; a thorough mastery of which Mr. Coleridge
considered necessary to any sound system of psychology; and in the denial
or neglect of which, he delighted to point out the source of most of the
vulgar errors in philosophy and religion. The distinction itself is
implied throughout almost all Mr. C.'s works, whether in verse or prose;
but it may be found minutely argued in the "Aids to Reflection," p. 206,
&c. 2d edit. 1831.--ED.]
_April_ 27. 1823.
KEAN.--SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH.--SIR H. DAVY.--ROBERT SMITH.--CANNING.--
NATIONAL DEBT.--POOR LAWS.
Kean is original; but he copies from himself. His rapid descents from the
hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great
effect, are often unreasonable. To see him act, is like reading Shakspeare
by flashes of lightning. I do not think him thorough-bred gentleman enough
to play Othello.
* * * * *
Sir James Mackintosh is the king of the men of talent. He is a most elegant
converger. How well I remember his giving breakfast to me and Sir Humphry
Davy, at that time an unknown young man, and our having a very spirited
talk about Locke and Newton, and so forth! When Davy was gone, Mackintosh
said to me, "That's a very extraordinary young man; but he is gone wrong on
some points." But Davy was, at that time at least, a man of genius; and I
doubt if Mackintosh ever heartily appreciated an eminently original man. He
is uncommonly powerful in his own line; but it is not the line of a first-
rate man. After all his fluency and brilliant erudition, you can rarely
carry off any thing worth preserving. You might not improperly write on his
forehead, "Warehouse to let!" He always dealt too much in generalities for
a lawyer. He is deficient in power in applying his principles to the points
in debate. I remember Robert Smith had much more logical ability; but Smith
aimed at conquest by any gladiatorial shift; whereas Mackintosh was
uniformly candid in argument. I am speaking now from old recollections.
* * * * *
Canning is very irritable, surprisingly so for a wit who is always giving
such hard knocks. He should have put on an ass's skin before he went into
parliament. Lord Liverpool is the single stay of this ministry; but he is
not a man of a directing mind. He cannot ride on the whirlwind. He serves
as the isthmus to connect one half of the cabinet with the other. He always
gives you the common sense of the matter, and in that it is that his
strength in debate lies.
* * * * *
The national debt has, in fact, made more men rich than have a right to be
so, or, rather, any ultimate power, in case of a struggle, of actualizing
their riches. It is, in effect, like an ordinary, where three hundred
tickets have been distributed, but where there is, in truth, room only for
one hundred. So long as you can amuse the company with any thing else, or
make them come in successively, all is well, and the whole three hundred
fancy themselves sure of a dinner; but if any suspicion of a hoax should
arise, and they were all to rush into the room at once, there would be two
hundred without a potato for their money; and the table would be occupied
by the landholders, who live on the spot.
* * * * *
Poor-laws are the inevitable accompaniments of an extensive commerce and a
manufacturing system. In Scotland, they did without them, till Glasgow and
Paisley became great manufacturing places, and then people said, "We must
subscribe for the poor, or else we shall have poor-laws." That is to say,
they enacted for themselves a poor-law in order to avoid having a poor-law
enacted for them. It is absurd to talk of Queen Elizabeth's act as creating
the poor-laws of this country. The poor-rates are the consideration paid
by, or on behalf of, capitalists for having labour at demand. It is the
price, and nothing else. The hardship consists in the agricultural interest
having to pay an undue proportion of the rates; for although, perhaps, in
the end, the land becomes more valuable, yet, at the first, the landowners
have to bear all the brunt. I think there ought to be a fixed revolving
period for the equalization of rates.
_April_ 28. 1823.
CONDUCT OF THE WHIGS.--REFORM OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.
The conduct of the Whigs is extravagantly inconsistent. It originated in
the fatal error which Fox committed, in persisting, after the first three
years of the French Revolution, when every shadow of freedom in France had
vanished, in eulogizing the men and measures of that shallow-hearted
people. So he went on gradually, further and further departing from all the
principles of English policy and wisdom, till at length he became the
panegyrist, through thick and thin, of a military frenzy, under the
influence of which the very name of liberty was detested. And thus it was
that, in course of time, Fox's party became the absolute abettors of the
Buonapartean invasion of Spain, and did all in their power to thwart the
generous efforts of this country to resist it. Now, when the invasion is by
a Bourbon, and the cause of the Spanish nation neither united nor, indeed,
sound in many respects, the Whigs would precipitate this country into a
crusade to fight up the cause of a faction.
I have the honour of being slightly known to my lord Darnley. In 1808-9, I
met him accidentally, when, after a few words of salutation, he said to me,
"Are you mad, Mr. Coleridge?"--"Not that I know, my lord," I replied; "what
have I done which argues any derangement of mind?"--"Why, I mean," said he,
"those letters of yours in the Courier, 'On the Hopes and Fears of a People
invaded by foreign Armies.' The Spaniards are absolutely conquered; it is
absurd to talk of their chance of resisting."--"Very well, my lord," I
said, "we shall see. But will your lordship permit me, in the course of a
year or two, to retort your question upon you, if I should have grounds for
so doing?"--"Certainly!" said he; "that is fair!" Two years afterwards,
when affairs were altered in Spain, I met Lord Darnley again, and, after
some conversation, ventured to say to him, "Does your lordship recollect
giving me leave to retort a certain question upon you about the Spaniards?
Who is mad now?"--"Very true, very true, Mr. Coleridge," cried he: "you are
right. It is very extraordinary. It was a very happy and hold guess." Upon
which I remarked, "I think '_guess_' is hardly a fair term. For, has any
thing happened that has happened, from any other causes, or under any other
conditions, than such as I laid down Beforehand?" Lord Darnley, who was
always very courteous to me, took this with a pleasant nod of his head.
* * * * *
Many votes are given for reform in the House of Commons, which are not
honest. Whilst it is well known that the measure will not he carried in
parliament, it is as well to purchase some popularity by voting for it.
When Hunt and his associates, before the Six Acts, created a panic, the
ministers lay on their oars for three or four months, until the general
cry, even from the opposition, was, "Why don't the ministers come forward
with some protective measure?" The present Ministry exists on the weakness
and desperate character of the Opposition. The sober part of the nation are
afraid of the latter getting into power, lest they should redeem some of
their pledges.
* * * * *
_April_ 29. 1823.
CHURCH OF ROME.
The present adherents of the church of Rome are not, in my judgment,
Catholics. We are the Catholics. We can prove that we hold the doctrines of
the primitive church for the first three hundred years. The council of
Trent made the Papists what they are. [1] A foreign Romish bishop has
declared, that the Protestants of his acquaintance were more like what he
conceived the enlightened Catholics to have been before the council of
Trent, than the best of the latter in his days. Perhaps you will say, this
bishop was not a _good Catholic_.[2] I cannot answer for that. The course
of Christianity and the Christian church may not unaptly be likened to a
mighty river, which filled a wide channel, and bore along with its waters
mud, and gravel, and weeds, till it met a great rock in the middle of its
stream. By some means or other, the water flows purely, and separated from
the filth, in a deeper and narrower course on one side of the rock, and the
refuse of the dirt and troubled water goes off on the other in a broader
current, and then cries out, "_We_ are the river!"
[Footnote 1: See Aids to Reflection, p. 180. note.]
[Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge named him, but the name was strange to me, and I
have been unable to recover it--ED.]
* * * * *
A person said to me lately, "But you will, for civility's sake, _call_ them
_Catholics_, will you not?" I answered, that I would not; for I would not
tell a lie upon any, much less upon so solemn an occasion. "The adherents
of the church of Rome, I repeat, are not _Catholic_ Christians. If they
are, then it follows that we Protestants are heretics and schismatics, as,
indeed, the Papists very logically, from their own premisses, call us. And
'_Roman_ Catholics' makes no difference. Catholicism is not capable of
degrees or local apportionments. There can be but one body of Catholics,
_ex vi termini_. To talk strictly of _Irish_ or _Scotch Roman_ Catholics is
a mere absurdity."
* * * * *
It is common to hear it said, that, if the legal disabilities are removed,
the Romish church will lose ground in this country. I think the reverse:
the Romish religion is, or, in certain hands, is capable of being made, so
flattering to the passions and self-delusion of men, that it is impossible
to say how far it would spread, amongst the higher orders of society
especially, if the secular disadvantages now attending its profession were
removed.[1]
[Footnote 1:
Here, at least, the prophecy has been fulfilled. The wisdom of our
ancestors, in the reign of King William III., would have been jealous of
the daily increase in the numbers of the Romish church in England, of which
every attentive observer must be aware. See _Sancti Dominici Pallium_, in
vol. ii. p. 80. of Mr. Coleridge's Poems.-Ed.]
April 30. 1823.
ZENDAVESTA.--PANTHEISM AND IDOLATRY.
The Zendavesta must, I think, have been copied in parts from the writings
of Moses. In the description of the creation, the first chapter of Genesis
is taken almost literally, except that the sun is created _before_ the
light, and then the herbs and the plants after the sun; which are precisely
the two points they did not understand, and therefore altered as errors.[1]
There are only two acts of creation, properly so called, in the Mosaic
account,--the material universe and man. The intermediate acts seem more as
the results of secondary causes, or, at any rate, of a modification of
prepared materials.
[Footnote 1:
The Zend, or Zendavesta, is the sacred book ascribed to Zoroaster, or
Zerdusht, the founder or reformer of the Magian religion. The modern
edition or paraphrase of this work, called the Sadda, written in the
Persian of the day, was, I believe, composed about three hundred years ago
--Ed.]
* * * * *
Pantheism and idolatry naturally end in each other; for all extremes meet.
The Judaic religion is the exact medium, the true compromise.
_May_ 1. 1823.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STORIES OF DREAMS AND GHOSTS.
--PHANTOM PORTRAIT.--WITCH
OF ENDOR.--SOCINIANISM.
There is a great difference in the credibility to be attached to stories of
dreams and stories of ghosts. Dreams have nothing in them which are absurd
and nonsensical; and, though most of the coincidences may be readily
explained by the diseased system of the dreamer, and the great and
surprising power of association, yet it is impossible to say whether an
inner sense does not really exist in the mind, seldom developed, indeed,
but which may have a power of presentiment. [1]
All the external senses have their correspondents in the mind; the eye can
see an object before it is distinctly apprehended;--why may there not be a
corresponding power in the soul? The power of prophecy might have been
merely a spiritual excitation of this dormant faculty. Hence you will
observe that the Hebrew seers sometimes seem to have required music, as in
the instance of Elisha before Jehoram:--"But now bring me a minstrel. And
it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came
upon him." [2] Every thing in nature has a tendency to move in cycles; and
it would be a miracle if, out of such myriads of cycles moving
concurrently, some coincidences did not take place. No doubt, many such
take place in the daytime; but then our senses drive out the remembrance of
them, and render the impression hardly felt; but when we sleep, the mind
acts without interruption. Terror and the heated imagination will, even in
the daytime, create all sorts of features, shapes, and colours out of a
simple object possessing none of them in reality.
But ghost stories are absurd. Whenever a real ghost appears,--by which I
mean some man or woman dressed up to frighten another,--if the supernatural
character of the apparition has been for a moment believed, the effects on
the spectator have always been most terrible,--convulsion, idiocy, madness,
or even death on the spot. Consider the awful descriptions in the Old
Testament of the effects of a spiritual presence on the prophets and seers
of the Hebrews; the terror, the exceeding great dread, the utter loss of
all animal power. But in our common ghost stories, you always find that the
seer, after a most appalling apparition, as you are to believe, is quite
well the next day. Perhaps, he may have a headach; but that is the outside
of the effect produced. Alston, a man of genius, and the best painter yet
produced by America, when he was in England told me an anecdote which
confirms what I have been saying. It was, I think, in the university of
Cambridge, near Boston, that a certain youth took it into his wise head to
endeavour to convert a Tom-Painish companion of his by appearing as a ghost
before him. He accordingly dressed himself up in the usual way, having
previously extracted the ball from the pistol which always lay near the
head of his friend's bed. Upon first awaking, and seeing the apparition,
the youth who was to be frightened, A., very coolly looked his companion
the ghost in the face, and said, "I know you. This is a good joke; but you
see I am not frightened. Now you may vanish!" The ghost stood still.
"Come," said A., "that is enough. I shall get angry. Away!" Still the ghost
moved not. "By ----," ejaculated A., "if you do not in three minutes go
away, I'll shoot you." He waited the time, deliberately levelled the
pistol, fired, and, with a scream at the immobility of the figure, became
convulsed, and afterwards died. The very instant he believed it _to be_ a
ghost, his human nature fell before it.
[Footnote 1:
See this point suggested and reasoned with extraordinary subtlety in the
third essay (marked C), in the Appendix to the Statesman's Manual, Or first
Lay Sermon, p. 19, &c. One beautiful paragraph I will venture to quote:--
"Not only may we expect that men of strong religious feelings, but little
religious knowledge, will occasionally be tempted to regard such
occurrences as supernatural visitations; but it ought not to surprise us if
such dreams should sometimes be confirmed by the event, as though they had
actually possessed a character of divination. For who shall decide how far
a perfect reminiscence of past experiences (of many, perhaps, that had
escaped our reflex consciousness at the time)--who shall determine to what
extent this reproductive imagination, unsophisticated by the will, and
undistracted by intrusions from the senses, may or may not be concentred
and sublimed into foresight and presentiment? There would be nothing herein
either to foster superstition on the one hand, or to justify contemptuous
disbelief on the other. Incredulity is but Credulity seen from behind,
bowing and nodding assent to the Habitual and the Fashionable"-ED.]
[Footnote 2: 2 Kings, iii. 15., and see 1 Sam. x. 5.--ED.]
* * * * *
[What follows in the text within commas was written about this time, and
communicated to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge.--ED.]
"Last Thursday my uncle, S. T. C., dined with us, and several men came to
meet him. I have heard him more brilliant, but he was very fine, and
delighted every one very much. It is impossible to carry off, or commit to
paper, his long trains of argument; indeed, it is not always possible to
understand them, he lays the foundation so deep, and views every question
in so original a manner. Nothing can be finer than the principles which he
lays down in morals and religion. His deep study of Scripture is very
astonishing; the rest of the party were but as children in his hands, not
merely in general views of theology, but in nice verbal criticism. He
thinks it clear that St. Paul did not write the Epistle to the Hebrews, but
that it must have been the work of some Alexandrian Greek, and he thinks
Apollos. It seemed to him a desirable thing for Christianity that it should
have been written by some other person than St. Paul; because, its
inspiration being unquestioned, it added another independent teacher and
expounder of the faith.
"We fell upon ghosts, and he exposed many of the stories physically and
metaphysically. He seemed to think it impossible that you should really see
with the bodily eye what was impalpable, unless it were a shadow; and if
what you fancied you saw with the bodily eye was in fact only an impression
on the imagination, then you were seeing something _out of your senses_,
and your testimony was full of uncertainty. He observed how uniformly, in
all the best-attested stories of spectres, the appearance might be
accounted for from the disturbed state of the mind or body of the seer, as
in the instances of Dion and Brutus. Upon some one's saying that he
_wished_ to believe these stories true, thinking that they constituted a
useful subsidiary testimony of another state of existence, Mr. C. differed,
and said, he thought it a dangerous testimony, and one not wanted: it was
Saul, with the Scriptures and the Prophet before him, calling upon the
witch of Endor to certify him of the truth! He explained very ingeniously,
yet very naturally, what has often startled people in ghost stories--such
as Lord Lyttelton's--namely, that when a real person has appeared, habited
like the phantom, the ghost-seer has immediately seen two, the real man and
the phantom. He said that such must be the case. The man under the morbid
delusion sees with the eye of the imagination, and sees with the bodily eye
too; if no one were really present, he would see the spectre with one, and
the bed-curtains with the other. When, therefore, a real person comes, he
sees the real man as he would have seen any one else in the same place, and
he sees the spectre not a whit the less: being perceptible by different
powers of vision, so to say, the appearances do not interfere with each
other.
"He told us the following story of the Phantom Portrait [1]:--
"A stranger came recommended to a merchant's house at Lubeck. He was
hospitably received; but, the house being full, he was lodged at night in
an apartment handsomely furnished, but not often used. There was nothing
that struck him particularly in the room when left alone, till he happened
to cast his eyes on a picture, which immediately arrested his attention. It
was a single head; but there was something so uncommon, so frightful and
unearthly, in its expression, though by no means ugly, that he found
himself irresistibly attracted to look at it. In fact, he could not tear
himself from the fascination of this portrait, till his imagination was
filled by it, and his rest broken. He retired to bed, dreamed, and awoke
from time to time with the head glaring on him. In the morning, his host
saw by his looks that he had slept ill, and inquired the cause, which was
told. The master of the house was much vexed, and said that the picture
ought to have been removed, that it was an oversight, and that it always
was removed when the chamber was used. The picture, he said, was, indeed,
terrible to every one; but it was so fine, and had come into the family in
so curious a way, that he could not make up his mind to part with it, or to
destroy it. The story of it was this:--'My father,' said he, 'was at
Hamburgh on business, and, whilst dining at a coffee-house, he observed a
young man of a remarkable appearance enter, seat himself alone in a corner,
and commence a solitary meal. His countenance bespoke the extreme of mental
distress, and every now and then he turned his head quickly round, as if he
heard something, then shudder, grow pale, and go on with his meal after an
effort as before. My father saw this same man at the same place for two or
three successive days; and at length became so much interested about him,
that he spoke to him. The address was not repulsed, and the stranger seemed
to find some comfort in the tone of sympathy and kindness which my father
used. He was an Italian, well informed, poor but not destitute, and living
economically upon the profits of his art as a painter. Their intimacy
increased; and at length the Italian, seeing my father's involuntary
emotion at his convulsive turnings and shuddering, which continued as
formerly, interrupting their conversation from time to time, told him his
story. He was a native of Rome, and had lived in some familiarity with, and
been much patronized by, a young nobleman; but upon some slight occasion
they had fallen out, and his patron, besides using many reproachful
expressions, had struck him. The painter brooded over the disgrace of the
blow. He could not challenge the nobleman, on account of his rank; he
therefore watched for an opportunity, and assassinated him. Of course he
fled from his country, and finally had reached Hamburgh. He had not,
however, passed many weeks from the night of the murder, before, one day,
in the crowded street, he heard his name called by a voice familiar to him:
he turned short round, and saw the face of his victim looking at him with a
fixed eye. From that moment he had no peace: at all hours, in all places,
and amidst all companies, however engaged he might be, he heard the voice,
and could never help looking round; and, whenever he so looked round, he
always encountered the same face staring close upon him. At last, in a mood
of desperation, he had fixed himself face to face, and eye to eye, and
deliberately drawn the phantom visage as it glared upon him; and _this_ was
the picture so drawn. The Italian said he had struggled long, but life was
a burden which he could now no longer bear; and he was resolved, when he
had made money enough to return to Rome, to surrender himself to justice,
and expiate his crime on the scaffold. He gave the finished picture to my
father, in return for the kindness which he had shown to him.'"
[Footnote 1:
This is the story which Mr. Washington Irving has dressed up very prettily
in the first volume of his "Tales of a Traveller," pp. 84-119.; professing
in his preface that he could not remember whence he had derived the
anecdote.--ED.]
* * * * *
I have no doubt that the Jews believed generally in a future state,
independently of the Mosaic law. The story of the witch of Endor is a proof
of it. What we translate "_witch_," or "familiar spirit," is, in the
Hebrew, Ob, that is, a bottle or bladder, and means a person whose belly is
swelled like a leathern bottle by divine inflation. In the Greek it is
[Greek: engastrimuthos], a ventriloquist. The text (1 Sam. ch. xxviii.) is
a simple record of the facts, the solution of which the sacred historian
leaves to the reader. I take it to have been a trick of ventriloquism, got
up by the courtiers and friends of Saul, to prevent him, if possible, from
hazarding an engagement with an army despondent and oppressed with bodings
of defeat. Saul is not said to have seen Samuel; the woman only pretends to
see him. And then what does this Samuel do? He merely repeats the prophecy
known to all Israel, which the true Samuel had uttered some years before.
Read Captain Lyon's account of the scene in the cabin with the Esquimaux
bladder, or conjurer; it is impossible not to be reminded of the witch of
Endor. I recommend you also to look at Webster's admirable treatise on
Witchcraft.
* * * * *
The pet texts of a Socinian are quite enough for his confutation with acute
thinkers. If Christ had been a mere man, it would have been ridiculous in
_him_ to call himself "the Son of man;" but being God and man, it then
became, in his own assumption of it, a peculiar and mysterious title. So,
if Christ had been a mere man, his saying, "My Father is greater than I,"
(John, xv. 28.) would have been as unmeaning. It would be laughable enough,
for example, to hear me say, "My 'Remorse' succeeded, indeed, but
Shakspeare is a greater dramatist than I." But how immeasurably more
foolish, more monstrous, would it not be for a _man_, however honest, good,
or wise, to say, "But Jehovah is greater than I!"
_May_ 8. 1824.
PLATO AND XENOPHON.--RELIGIONS OF THE GREEKS.--EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES.--
MILTON.--VIRGIL.
Plato's works are logical exercises for the mind. Little that is positive
is advanced in them. Socrates may be fairly represented by Plato in the
more moral parts; but in all the metaphysical disquisitions it is
Pythagoras. Xenophon's representation of his master is quite different.[1]
[Footnote 1: See p. 9. n.--ED.]
* * * * *
Observe the remarkable contrast between the religion of the tragic and
other poets of Greece. The former are always opposed in heart to the
popular divinities. In fact, there are the popular, the sacerdotal, and the
mysterious religions of Greece, represented roughly by Homer, Pindar, and
Æschylus. The ancients had no notion of a _fall_ of man, though they had of
his gradual degeneracy. Prometheus, in the old mythus, and for the most
part in AEschylus, is the Redeemer and the Devil jumbled together.
* * * * *
I cannot say I expect much from mere Egyptian antiquities. Almost every
thing really, that is, intellectually, great in that country seems to me of
Grecian origin.
* * * * *
I think nothing can be added to Milton's definition or rule of poetry,--
that it ought to be simple, sensuous, and impassioned; that is to say,
single in conception, abounding in sensible images, and informing them all
with the spirit of the mind.
Milton's Latin style is, I think, better and easier than his English. His
style, in prose, is quite as characteristic of him as a philosophic
republican, as Cowley's is of _him_ as a first-rate gentleman.
If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?
* * * * *
_June_ 2. 1824.
CRANVILLE PENN AND THE DELUGE.--RAINBOW.
I confess I have small patience with Mr. Granville Penn's book against
Professor Buckland. Science will be superseded, if every phenomenon is to
be referred in this manner to an actual miracle. I think it absurd to
attribute so much to the Deluge. An inundation, which left an olive-tree
standing, and bore up the ark peacefully on its bosom, could scarcely have
been the sole cause of the rents and dislocations observable on the face of
the earth. How could the tropical animals, which have been discovered in
England and in Russia in a perfectly natural state, have been transported
thither by such a flood? Those animals must evidently have been natives of
the countries in which they have been found. The climates must have been
altered. Assume a sudden evaporation upon the retiring of the Deluge to
have caused an intense cold, the solar heat might not be sufficient
afterwards to overcome it. I do not think that the polar cold is adequately
explained by mere comparative distance from the sun.
* * * * *
You will observe, that there is no mention of rain previously to the
Deluge. Hence it may be inferred, that the rainbow was exhibited for the
first time after God's covenant with Noah. However, I only suggest this.
* * * * *
The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and
Heaven, of Futurity.
_June_ 5. 1824.
ENGLISH AND GREEK DANCING.--GREEK ACOUSTICS.
The fondness for dancing in English women is the reaction of their reserved
manners. It is the only way in which they can throw themselves forth in
natural liberty. We have no adequate conception of the perfection of the
ancient tragic dance. The pleasure which the Greeks received from it had
for its basis Difference and the more unfit the vehicle, the more lively
was the curiosity and intense the delight at seeing the difficulty
overcome.
* * * * *
The ancients certainly seem to have understood some principles in acoustics
which we have lost, or, at least, they applied them better. They contrived
to convey the voice distinctly in their huge theatres by means of pipes,
which created no echo or confusion. Our theatres--Drury Lane and Covent
Garden--are fit for nothing: they are too large for acting, and too small
for a bull-fight.
* * * * *
_June_ 7. 1824.
LORD BYRON'S VERSIFICATION, AND DON JUAN.
How lamentably the _art_ of versification is neglected by most of the
poets of the present day!--by Lord Byron, as it strikes me, in particular,
among those of eminence for other qualities. Upon the whole, I think the
part of Don Juan in which Lambro's return to his home, and Lambro himself,
are described, is the best, that is, the most individual, thing in all I
know of Lord B.'s works. The festal abandonment puts one in mind of
Nicholas Poussin's pictures.[1]
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge particularly noticed, for its classical air, the 32d stanza
of this Canto (the third):--
"A band of children, round a snow-white ram,
There wreathe his venerable horns with flowers,
While, peaceful as if still an unwean'd lamb,
The patriarch of the flock all gently cowers
His sober head, majestically tame,
Or eats from out the palm, or playful lowers
His brow, as if in act to butt, and then
Yielding to their small hands, draws back again."
But Mr. C. said that _then_, and _again_, made no rhyme to his ear. Why
should not the old form _agen_ be lawful in verse? We wilfully abridge
ourselves of the liberty which our great poets achieved and sanctioned for
us in innumerable instances.--ED.]
_June_ 10. 1824.
PARENTAL CONTROL IN MARRIAGE.--MARRIAGE OF
COUSINS.--DIFFERENCE OF CHARACTER.
Up to twenty-one, I hold a father to have power over his children as to
marriage; after that age, authority and influence only. Show me one couple
unhappy merely on account of their limited circumstances, and I will show
you ten that are wretched from other causes.
* * * * *
If the matter were quite open, I should incline to disapprove the
intermarriage of first cousins; but the church has decided otherwise on the
authority of Augustine, and that seems enough upon such a point.
* * * * *
You may depend upon it, that a slight contrast of character is very
material to happiness in marriage.
_February_ 24. 1827.
BLUMENBACH AND KANT'S RACES.--IAPETIC AND SEMITIC.--HEBREW.--SOLOMON.
Blumenbach makes five races; Kant, three. Blumenbach's scale of dignity may
be thus figured:--
1. Caucasian or European.
2. Malay ================= 2. American
3. Negro ========================== 3. Mongolian, Asiatic
There was, I conceive, one great Iapetic original of language, under which
Greek, Latin, and other European dialects, and, perhaps, Sanscrit, range as
species. The Iapetic race, [Greek: Iaones]; separated into two branches;
one, with a tendency to migrate south-west,--Greeks, Italians, &c.; and the
other north-west,--Goths, Germans, Swedes, &c. The Hebrew is Semitic.
* * * * *
Hebrew, in point of force and purity, seems at its height in Isaiah. It is
most corrupt in Daniel, and not much less so in Ecclesiastes; which I
cannot believe to have been actually composed by Solomon, but rather
suppose to have been so attributed by the Jews, in their passion for
ascribing all works of that sort to their _grand monurque_.
_March_ 10. 1827.
JEWISH HISTORY.--SPINOZISTIC AND HEBREW SCHEMES.
The people of all other nations, but the Jewish, seem to look backwards and
also to exist for the present; but in the Jewish scheme every thing is
prospective and preparatory; nothing, however trifling, is done for itself
alone, but all is typical of something yet to come.
* * * * *
I would rather call the book of Proverbs Solomonian than as actually a work
of Solomon's. So I apprehend many of the Psalms to be Davidical only, not
David's own compositions.
* * * * *
You may state the Pantheism of Spinosa, in contrast with the Hebrew or
Christian scheme, shortly, as thus:--
Spinosism.
W-G = 0; _i.e._ the World without God is an impossible idea.
G-W = 0; _i.e._ God without the World is so likewise.
Hebrew or Christian scheme.
W-G = 0; _i.e._ The same as Spinosa's premiss.
But G-W = G; _i.e._ God without the World is God the self-subsistent.
* * * * *
_March_ 12. 1827.
ROMAN CATHOLICS.--ENERGY OF MAN AND OTHER ANIMALS.--SHAKSPEARE _IN
MINIMIS_.--PAUL SARPI.--BARTRAM'S TRAVELS.
I have no doubt that the real object closest to the hearts of the leading
Irish Romanists is the destruction of the Irish Protestant church, and the
re-establishment of their own. I think more is involved in the manner than
the matter of legislating upon the civil disabilities of the members of the
church of Rome; and, for one, I should he willing to vote for a removal of
those disabilities, with two or three exceptions, upon a solemn declaration
being made legislatively in parliament, that at no time, nor under any
circumstances, could or should a branch of the Romish hierarchy, as at
present constituted, become an estate of this realm.[1]
[Footnote 1: See Church and State, second part, p. 189.]
* * * * *
Internal or mental energy and external or corporeal modificability are in
inverse proportions. In man, internal energy is greater than in any other
animal; and you will see that he is less changed by climate than any
animal. For the highest and lowest specimens of man are not one half as
much apart from each other as the different kinds even of dogs, animals of
great internal energy themselves.
* * * * *
For an instance of Shakspeare's power _in minimis_, I generally quote James
Gurney's character in King John. How individual and comical he is with the
four words allowed to his dramatic life! [1] And pray look at Skelton's
Richard Sparrow also!
Paul Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent deserves your study. It is
very interesting.
[Footnote 1:
"_Enter Lady FALCONBRIDGE and JAMES GURNEY._
BAST. O me! it is my mother:--How now, good lady?
What brings you here to court so hastily?
LADY F. Where is that slave, thy brother? where is he?
That holds in chase mine honour up and down?
BAST. My brother Robert? Old Sir Robert's son?
Colbrand the giant, that same mighty man?
Is it Sir Robert's son that you seek so?
LADY F. Sir Robert's son! Ay, thou unreverend boy,
Sir Robert's son: why scorn'st thou at Sir Robert?
He is Sir Robert's son; and so art thou.
BAST. James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave a while?
GUR. _Good leave, good Philip._
BAST. Philip?--Sparrow! James,
There's toys abroad; anon I'll tell thee more.
[_Exit_ GURNEY."
The very _exit Gurney_ is a stroke of James's character.--ED.]]
* * * * *
The latest book of travels I know, written in the spirit of the old
travellers, is Bartram's account of his tour in the Floridas. It is a work
of high merit every way.[1]
[Footnote 1:
"Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida,
the Cherokee Country, the extensive territories of the Muscogulges, or
Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, &c. By William
Bartram." Philadelphia, 1791. London, 1792. 8vo. The expedition was made at
the request of Dr. Fothergill, the Quaker physician, in 1773, and was
particularly directed to botanical discoveries.--ED.]
* * * * *
_March_ 13. 1827.
THE UNDERSTANDING.
A pun will sometimes facilitate explanation, as thus;--the Understanding is
that which _stands under_ the phenomenon, and gives it objectivity. You
know _what_ a thing is by it. It is also worthy of remark, that the Hebrew
word for the understanding, _Bineh_, comes from a root meaning _between_ or
_distinguishing_.
* * * * *
_March_ 18. 1827.
PARTS OF SPEECH.--GRAMMAR.
There are seven parts of speech, and they agree with the five grand and
universal divisions into which all things finite, by which I mean to
exclude the idea of God, will be found to fall; that is, as you will often
see it stated in my writings, especially in the Aids to Reflection[1]:--
Prothesis.
1.
Thesis. Mesothesis. Antithesis.
2. 4. 3.
Synthesis.
5.
Conceive it thus:--
1. Prothesis, the noun-verb, or verb-substantive, _I am_, which is the
previous form, and implies identity of being and act.
2. Thesis, the noun.
3. Antithesis, the verb.
Note, each of these may be converted; that is, they are only opposed to
each other.
4. Mesothesis, the infinitive mood, or the indifference of the verb and
noun, it being either the one or the other, or both at the same time, in
different relations.
5. Synthesis, the participle, or the community of verb and noun; being and
acting at once.
Now, modify the noun by the verb, that is, by an act, and you have--
6. The adnoun, or adjective.
Modify the verb by the noun, that is, by being, and you have--
7. The adverb.
Interjections are parts of sound, not of speech. Conjunctions are the same
as prepositions; but they are prefixed to a sentence, or to a member of a
sentence, instead of to a single word.
The inflections of nouns are modifications as to place; the inflections of
verbs, as to time.
The genitive case denotes dependence; the dative, transmission. It is
absurd to talk of verbs governing. In Thucydides, I believe, every case has
been found absolute.[2]
Dative:--[Greek: ----]
Thuc.VIII. 24. This is the Latin usage.
Accusative.--I do not remember an instance of the proper accusative
absolute in Thucydides; but it seems not uncommon in other authors:
[Greek: ----]
Yet all such instances may be nominatives; for I cannot find an example of
the accusative absolute in the masculine or feminine gender, where the
difference of inflexion would show the case.--ED.]
The inflections of the tenses of a verb are formed by adjuncts of the verb
substantive. In Greek it is obvious. The E is the prefix significative of a
past time.
[Footnote 1: P. 170. 2d edition.]
[Footnote 2:
Nominative absolute:--[Greek: theon de phozos ae anthropon nomos, oudeis
apeirge, to men krinontes en homoio kai sezein kai mae--ton de
hamartaematon.]--Thuc. II. 53.]
_June 15. 1827.
MAGNETISM.--ELECTRICITY.--GALVANISM.
Perhaps the attribution or analogy may seem fanciful at first sight, but I
am in the habit of realizing to myself Magnetism as length; Electricity as
breadth or surface; and Galvanism as depth.
_June 24. 1827._
SPENSER.--CHARACTER Of OTHELLO.--HAMLET.--POLONIUS.--PRINCIPLES AND
MAXIMS.--LOVE.--MEASURE FOR MEASURE.--BEN JONSON.--BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.--
VERSION OF THE BIBLE.--SPURZHEIM.--CRANIOLOGY.
Spenser's Epithalamion is truly sublime; and pray mark the swan-like
movement of his exquisite Prothalamion. [1] His attention to metre and
rhythm is sometimes so extremely minute as to be painful even to my ear,
and you know how highly I prize good versification.
[Footnote 1:
How well I remember this Midsummer-day! I shall never pass such another.
The sun was setting behind Caen Wood, and the calm of the evening was so
exceedingly deep that it arrested Mr. Coleridge's attention. We were alone
together in Mr. Gillman's drawing-room, and Mr. C. left off talking, and
fell into an almost trance-like state for ten minutes whilst contemplating
the beautiful prospect before us. His eyes swam in tears, his head inclined
a little forward, and there was a slight uplifting of the fingers, which
seemed to tell me that he was in prayer. I was awestricken, and remained
absorbed in looking at the man, in forgetfulness of external nature, when
he recovered himself, and after a word or two fell by some secret link of
association upon Spenser's poetry. Upon my telling him that I did not very
well recollect the Prothalamion: "Then I must read you a bit of it," said
he; and, fetching the book from the next room, he recited the whole of it
in his finest and most musical manner. I particularly bear in mind the
sensible diversity of tone and rhythm with which he gave:--
"Sweet Thames! run softly till I end my song,"
the concluding line of each of the ten strophes of the poem.
When I look upon the scanty memorial, which I have alone preserved of this
afternoon's converse, I am tempted to burn these pages in despair. Mr.
Coleridge talked a volume of criticism that day, which, printed verbatim as
he spoke it, would have made the reputation of any other person but
himself. He was, indeed, particularly brilliant and enchanting; and I left
him at night so thoroughly _magnetized_, that I could not for two or three
days afterwards reflect enough to put any thing on paper,--ED.]
* * * * *
I have often told you that I do not think there is any jealousy, properly
so called, in the character of Othello. There is no predisposition to
suspicion, which I take to be an essential term in the definition of the
word. Desdemona very truly told Emilia that he was not jealous, that is, of
a jealous habit, and he says so as truly of himself. Iago's suggestions,
you see, are quite new to him; they do not correspond with any thing of a
like nature previously in his mind. If Desdemona had, in fact, been guilty,
no one would have thought of calling Othello's conduct that of a jealous
man. He could not act otherwise than he did with the lights he had; whereas
jealousy can never be strictly right. See how utterly unlike Othello is to
Leontes, in the Winter's Tale, or even to Leonatus, in Cymbeline! The
jealousy of the first proceeds from an evident trifle, and something like
hatred is mingled with it; and the conduct of Leonatus in accepting the
wager, and exposing his wife to the trial, denotes a jealous temper already
formed.
* * * * *
Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing
habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or
opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and
at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems
reason itself, should he impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his
object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.
* * * * *
A Maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is merely
retrospective: an Idea, or, if you like, a Principle, carries knowledge
within itself, and is prospective. Polonius is a man of maxims. Whilst he
is descanting on matters of past experience, as in that excellent speech to
Laertes before he sets out on his travels, he is admirable; but when he
comes to advise or project, he is a mere dotard. [1] You see Hamlet, as the
man of ideas, despises him.
[Footnote 1: Act i. sc. 3]
* * * * *
A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that eye placed in
the back of his head.
* * * * *
In the scene with Ophelia, in the third act,[1] Hamlet is beginning with
great and unfeigned tenderness; but, perceiving her reserve and coyness,
fancies there are some listeners, and then, to sustain his part, breaks out
into all that coarseness.
Love is the admiration and cherishing of the amiable qualities of the
beloved person, upon the condition of yourself being the object of their
action. The qualities of the sexes correspond. The man's courage is loved
by the woman, whose fortitude again is coveted by the man. His vigorous
intellect is answered by her infallible tact. Can it be true, what is so
constantly affirmed, that there is no sex in souls?--I doubt it, I doubt it
exceedingly. [2]
[Footnote 1: Sc. 1.]
[Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge was a great master in the art of love, but he
had not studied in Ovid's school. Hear his account of the matter:--
"Love, truly such, is itself not the most common thing in the world, and
mutual love still less so. But that enduring personal attachment, so
beautifully delineated by Erin's sweet melodist, and still more touchingly,
perhaps, in the well-known ballad, 'John Anderson, my Jo, John,' in
addition to a depth and constancy of character of no every-day occurrence,
supposes a peculiar sensibility and tenderness of nature; a constitutional
communicativeness and utterancy of heart and soul; a delight in the detail
of sympathy, in the outward and visible signs of the sacrament within,--to
count, as it were, the pulses of the life of love. But, above all, it
supposes a soul which, even in the pride and summer-tide of life, even in
the lustihood of health and strength, had felt oftenest and prized highest
that which age cannot take away, and which in all our lovings is _the_
love; I mean, that willing sense of the unsufficingness of the self for
itself, which predisposes a generous nature to see, in the total being of
another, the supplement and completion of its own; that quiet perpetual
seeking which the presence of the beloved object modulates, not suspends,
where the heart momently finds, and, finding again, seeks on; lastly, when
'life's changeful orb has passed the full,' a confirmed faith in the
nobleness of humanity, thus brought home and pressed, as it were, to the
very bosom of hourly experience; it supposes, I say, a heartfelt reverence
for worth, not the less deep because divested of its solemnity by habit, by
familiarity, by mutual infirmities, and even by a feeling of modesty which
will arise in delicate minds, when they are conscious of possessing the
same, or the correspondent, excellence in their own characters. In short,
there must be a mind, which, while it feels the beautiful and the excellent
in the beloved as its own, and by right of love appropriates it, can call
goodness its playfellow; and dares make sport of time and infirmity, while,
in the person of a thousand-foldly endeared partner, we feel for aged
virtue the caressing fondness that belongs to the innocence of childhood,
and repeat the same attentions and tender courtesies which had been
dictated by the same affection to the same object when attired in feminine
loveliness or in manly beauty." (Poetical Works, vol. ii. p. 120.)--ED.]
Measure for Measure is the single exception to the delightfulness of
Shakspeare's plays. It is a hateful work, although Shakspearian throughout.
Our feelings of justice are grossly wounded in Angelo's escape. Isabella
herself contrives to be unamiable, and Claudio is detestable.
* * * * *
I am inclined to consider The Fox as the greatest of Ben Jonson's works.
But his smaller works are full of poetry.
* * * * *
Monsieur Thomas and the little French Lawyer are great favourites of mine
amongst Beaumont and Fletcher's plays. How those plays overflow with wit!
And yet I scarcely know a more deeply tragic scene any where than that in
Rollo, in which Edith pleads for her father's life, and then, when she
cannot prevail, rises up and imprecates vengeance on his murderer. [1]
[Footnote 1: Act iii. sc. 1.:--
"ROLLO. Hew off her hands!
HAMOND. Lady, hold off!
EDITH. No! hew 'em;
Hew off my innocent hands, as he commands you!
They'll hang the faster on for death's convulsion.--
Thou seed of rocks, will nothing move thee, then?
Are all my tears lost, all my righteous prayers
Drown'd in thy drunken wrath? I stand up thus, then,
Thou boldly bloody tyrant,
And to thy face, in heav'n's high name defy thee!
And may sweet mercy, when thy soul sighs for it,--
When under thy black mischiefs thy flesh trembles,--
When neither strength, nor youth, nor friends, nor gold,
Can stay one hour; when thy most wretched conscience,
Waked from her dream of death, like fire shall melt thee,--
When all thy mother's tears, thy brother's wounds,
Thy people's fears, and curses, and my loss,
My aged father's loss, shall stand before thee--
ROLLO. Save him, I say; run, save him, save her father;
Fly and redeem his head!
EDITH. May then that pity," &c.]
* * * * *
Our version of the Bible is to be loved and prized for this, as for a
thousand other things,--that it has preserved a purity of meaning to many
terms of natural objects. Without this holdfast, our vitiated imaginations
would refine away language to mere abstractions. Hence the French have lost
their poetical language; and Mr. Blanco White says the same thing has
happened to the Spanish.
* * * * *
I have the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim one of
the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but where I saw them
I mostly forget.[1]
[Footnote 1:
There was no man whose opinion in morals, or even in a matter of general
conduct in life, if you furnished the pertinent circumstances, I would have
sooner adopted than Mr. Coleridge's; but I would not take him as a guide
through streets or fields or earthly roads. He had much of the geometrician
about him; but he could not find his way. In this, as in many other
peculiarities of more importance, he inherited strongly from his learned
and excellent father, who deserves, and will, I trust, obtain, a separate
notice for himself when his greater son's life comes to be written. I
believe the beginning of Mr. C.'s liking for Dr. Spurzheim was the hearty
good humour with which the Doctor bore the laughter of a party, in the
presence of which he, unknowing of his man, denied any _Ideality_, and
awarded an unusual share of _Locality_, to the majestic silver-haired head
of my dear uncle and father-in-law. But Mr. Coleridge immediately shielded
the craniologist under the distinction preserved in the text, and perhaps,
since that time, there may be a couple of organs assigned to the latter
faculty.--ED.]
* * * * *
Craniology is worth some consideration, although it is merely in its
rudiments and guesses yet. But all the coincidences which have been
observed could scarcely be by accident. The confusion and absurdity,
however, will be endless until some names or proper terms are discovered
for the organs, which are not taken from their mental application or
significancy. The forepart of the head is generally given up to the higher
intellectual powers; the hinder part to the sensual emotions.
* * * * *
Silence does not always mark wisdom. I was at dinner, some time ago, in
company with a man, who listened to me and said nothing for a long time;
but he nodded his head, and I thought him intelligent. At length, towards
the end of the dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and
my man had no sooner seen them, than he burst forth with--"Them's the
jockies for me!" I wish Spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head.
* * * * *
Some folks apply epithets as boys do in making Latin verses. When I first
looked upon the Falls of the Clyde, I was unable to find a word to express
my feelings. At last, a man, a stranger to me, who arrived about the same
time, said:--"How majestic!"--(It was the precise term, and I turned round
and was saying--"Thank you, Sir! that _is_ the exact word for it"--when he
added, _eodem flatu_)--"Yes! how very _pretty_!"
* * * * *
_July_ 8. 1827.
BULL AND WATERLAND.--THE TRINITY.
Bull and Waterland are the classical writers on the Trinity.[1]
In the Trinity there is, 1. Ipseity. 2. Alterity. 3. Community. You may
express the formula thus:--
God, the absolute Will or Identity, = Prothesis. The Father = Thesis. The
Son = Antithesis. The Spirit = Synthesis.
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians was
very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin Defensio Fidei Nicaenae,
using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome.
He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's
work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he
felt proud of the church of England, and in good humour with the church of
Rome.--ED.]
* * * * *
The author of the Athanasian Creed is unknown. It is, in my judgment,
heretical in the omission, or implicit denial, of the Filial subordination
in the Godhead, which is the doctrine of the Nicene Creed, and for which
Bull and Waterland have so fervently and triumphantly contended; and by not
holding to which, Sherlock staggered to and fro between Tritheism and
Sabellianism. This creed is also tautological, and, if not persecuting,
which I will not discuss, certainly containing harsh and ill-conceived
language.
* * * * *
How much I regret that so many religious persons of the present day think
it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as a token
to each other. They must _improve_ this and that text, and they must do so
and so in a _prayerful_ way; and so on. Why not use common language? A
young lady the other day urged upon me that such and such feelings were the
_marrow_ of all religion; upon which I recommended her to try to walk to
London upon her marrow-bones only.
* * * * *
_July_ 9. 1827.
SCALE OF ANIMAL BEING.
In the very lowest link in the vast and mysterious chain of Being, there is
an effort, although scarcely apparent, at individualization; but it is
almost lost in the mere nature. A little higher up, the individual is
apparent and separate, but subordinate to any thing in man. At length, the
animal rises to be on a par with the lowest power of the human nature.
There are some of our natural desires which only remain in our most perfect
state on earth as means of the higher powers' acting.[1]
[Footnote 1:
These remarks seem to call for a citation of that wonderful passage,
transcendant alike in eloquence and philosophic depth, which the readers of
the Aids to Reflection have long since laid up in cedar:--
"Every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves
death behind it or under it. The metal at its height of being seems a mute
prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic semblance of which it
crystallizes. The blossom and flower, the acme of vegetable life, divides
into correspondent organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive
motions and approximations seems impatient of that fixture, by which it is
differenced in kind from the flower-shaped Psyche that flutters with free
wing above it. And wonderfully in the insect realm doth the irritability,
the proper seat of instinct, while yet the nascent sensibility is
subordinate thereto,--most wonderfully, I say, doth the muscular life in
the insect, and the musculo-arterial in the bird, imitate and typically
rehearse the adaptive understanding, yea, and the moral affections and
charities of man. Let us carry ourselves back, in spirit, to the mysterious
week, the teeming work-days of the Creator, as they rose in vision before
the eye of the inspired historian "of the generations of the heaven and
earth, in the days that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." And
who that hath watched their ways with an understanding heart, could, as the
vision evolving still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and
loyal bee; the home building, wedded, and divorceless swallow; and, above
all, the manifoldly intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealth and
confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband-folk, that fold in
their tiny flocks on the honied leaf, and the virgin sisters with the holy
instincts of maternal love, detached and in selfless purity, and not say to
himself, Behold the shadow of approaching Humanity, the sun rising from
behind, in the kindling morn of creation! Thus all lower natures find their
highest good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher and better.
All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. And shall man
alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward
life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that
grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it,
in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are
yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as substances that appear
as shadows are preferable to shadows mistaken for substance? No! it must be
a higher good to make you happy. While you labour for any thing below your
proper humanity, you seek a happy life in the region of death. Well saith
the moral poet:--
'Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how mean a thing is man!'"
P. 105. 2d ed.--ED.]
July 12. 1827.
POPEDOM.--SCANDERBEG.--THOMAS À BECKET.--PURE AGES OF GREEK, ITALIAN, AND
ENGLISH.--LUTHER.--BAXTER.--ALGERNON SIDNEY'S STYLE.--ARIOSTO AND TASSO.--
PROSE AND POETRY.--THE FATHERS.--RHENFERD.--JACOB BEHMEN.
What a grand subject for a history the Popedom is! The Pope ought never to
have affected temporal sway, but to have lived retired within St. Angelo,
and to have trusted to the superstitious awe inspired by his character and
office. He spoiled his chance when he meddled in the petty Italian
politics.
* * * * *
Scanderbeg would be a very fine subject for Walter Scott; and so would
Thomas à Becket, if it is not rather too much for him. It involves in
essence the conflict between arms, or force, and the men of letters.
* * * * *
Observe the superior truth of language, in Greek, to Theocritus
inclusively; in Latin, to the Augustan age exclusively; in Italian, to
Tasso exclusively; and in English, to Taylor and Barrow inclusively.
* * * * *
Luther is, in parts, the most evangelical writer I know, after the apostles
and apostolic men.
* * * * *
Pray read with great attention Baxter's Life of himself. It is an
inestimable work. [1] I may not unfrequently doubt Baxter's memory, or even
his competence, in consequence of his particular modes of thinking; but I
could almost as soon doubt the Gospel verity as his veracity.
[Footnote 1:
This, a very thick folio of the old sort, was one of Mr. Coleridge's text
books for English church history. He used to say that there was _no_
substitute for it in a course of study for a clergyman or public man, and
that the modern political Dissenters, who affected to glory in Baxter as a
leader, would read a bitter lecture on themselves in every page of it. In a
marginal note I find Mr. C. writing thus: "Alas! in how many respects does
my lot resemble Baxter's! But how much less have my bodily evils been, and
yet how very much greater an impediment have I suffered them to be! But
verily Baxter's labours seem miracles of supporting grace."--ED.]
* * * * *
I am not enough read in Puritan divinity to know the particular objections
to the surplice, over and above the general prejudice against the _retenta_
of Popery. Perhaps that was the only ground,--a foolish one enough.
In my judgment Bolingbroke's style is not in any respect equal to that of
Cowley or Dryden. Read Algernon Sidney; his style reminds you as little of
books as of blackguards. What a gentleman he was!
* * * * *
Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful seems to me a poor thing; and
what he says upon Taste is neither profound nor accurate.
* * * * *
Well! I am for Ariosto against Tasso; though I would rather praise Aristo's
poetry than his poem.
* * * * *
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose
and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;--poetry = the
_best_ words in the best order.
* * * * *
I conceive Origen, Jerome, and Augustine to be the three great fathers in
respect of theology, and Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, and Chrysostom in
respect of rhetoric.
* * * * *
Rhenferd possessed the immense learning and robust sense of Selden, with
the acuteness and wit of Jortin.
* * * * *
Jacob Behmen remarked, that it was not wonderful that there were separate
languages for England, France, Germany, &c.; but rather that there was not
a different language for every degree of latitude. In confirmation of
which, see the infinite variety of languages amongst the barbarous tribes
of South America.
_July_ 20. 1827.
NON-PERCEPTION OF COLOURS.
What is said of some persons not being able to distinguish colours, I
believe. It may proceed from general weakness, which will render the
differences imperceptible, just as the dusk or twilight makes all colours
one. This defect is most usual in the blue ray, the negative pole.
* * * * *
I conjecture that when finer experiments have been applied, the red,
yellow, and orange rays will be found as capable of communicating magnetic
action as the other rays, though, perhaps, under different circumstances.
Remember this, if you are alive twenty years hence, and think of me.
_July_ 21. 1827.
RESTORATION.--REFORMATION.
The elements had been well shaken together during the civil wars and
interregnum under the Long Parliament and Protectorate; and nothing but the
cowardliness and impolicy of the Nonconformists, at the Restoration, could
have prevented a real reformation on a wider basis. But the truth is, by
going over to Breda with their stiff flatteries to the hollow-hearted King,
they put Sheldon and the bishops on the side of the constitution.
* * * * *
The Reformation in the sixteenth century narrowed Reform. As soon as men
began to call themselves names, all hope of further amendment was lost.
_July_ 23. 1827.
WILLIAM III.--BERKELEY.--SPINOSA.--GENIUS.--ENVY.--LOVE.
William the Third was a greater and much honester man than any of his
ministers. I believe every one of them, except Shrewsbury, has now been
detected in correspondence with James.
* * * * *
Berkeley can only be confuted, or answered, by one sentence. So it is with
Spinosa. His premiss granted, the deduction is a chain of adamant.
* * * * *
Genius may co-exist with wildness, idleness, folly, even with crime; but
not long, believe me, with selfishness, and the indulgence of an envious
disposition. Envy is *[Greek: kakistos kai dikaiotatos theos], as I once
saw it expressed somewhere in a page of Stobaeus: it dwarfs and withers its
worshippers.
* * * * *
The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other
than for the desire of the man.[1]
[Footnote 1:
"A woman's friendship," I find written by Mr. C. on a page dyed red with an
imprisoned rose-leaf, "a woman's friendship borders more closely on love
than man's. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly
acts; whilst women ask fewer proofs, and more signs and expressions of
attachment."--ED.]
August 29. 1827.
JEREMY TAYLOR.--HOOKER.--IDEAS.--KNOWLEDGE.
Jeremy Taylor is an excellent author for a young man to study, for the
purpose of imbibing noble principles, and at the same time of learning to
exercise caution and thought in detecting his numerous errors.
* * * * *
I must acknowledge, with some hesitation, that I think Hooker has been a
little over-credited for his judgment.
Take as an instance of an idea the continuity and coincident distinctness
of nature; or this,--vegetable life is always striving to be something that
it is not; animal life to be itself.[1] Hence, in a plant the parts, as the
root, the stem, the branches, leaves, &c. remain after they have each
produced or contributed to produce a different _status_ of the whole plant:
in an animal nothing of the previous states remains distinct, but is
incorporated into, and constitutes progressively, the very self.
[Footnote 1:
The reader who has never studied Plato, Bacon, Kant, or Coleridge in their
philosophic works, will need to be told that the word Idea is not used in
this passage in the sense adopted by "Dr. Holofernes, who in a lecture on
metaphysics, delivered at one of the Mechanics' Institutions, explodes all
_ideas_ but those of sensation; whilst his friend, deputy Costard, has no
_idea_ of a better-flavoured haunch of venison, than he dined off at the
London Tavern last week. He admits (for the deputy has travelled) that the
French have an excellent _idea_ of cooking in general; but holds that their
most accomplished _maîtres de cuisine_ have no more _idea_ of dressing a
turtle, than the Parisian gourmands themselves have any _real idea_ of the
true _taste_ and _colour_ of the fat." Church and State, p. 78. No! what
Mr. Coleridge meant by an idea in this place may be expressed in various
ways out of his own works. I subjoin a sufficient definition from the
Church and State, p. 6. "That which, contemplated _objectively_, (that is,
as existing _externally_ to the mind,) we call a law; the same contemplated
_subjectively_, (that is, as existing in a subject or mind,) is an idea.
Hence Plato often names Ideas, Laws; and Lord Bacon, the British Plato,
describes the laws of the material universe as the ideas in nature. "Quod
in natura _naturata_ Lex, in natura _naturante_ Idea dicitur." A more
subtle limitation of the word may be found in the last paragraph of Essay
(E) in the Appendix to the Statesman's Manual.--ED.]
* * * * *
To know any thing for certain is to have a clear insight into the
inseparability of the predicate from the subject (the matter from the
form), and _vice versâ_. This is a verbal definition,--a _real_ definition
of a thing absolutely known is impossible. I _know_ a circle, when I
perceive that the equality of all possible radii from the centre to the
circumference is inseparable from the idea of a circle.
_August_ 30. 1827.
PAINTING.
Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.
April 13. 1830.
PROPHECIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.--MESSIAH.--JEWS.--THE TRINITY.
If the prophecies of the Old Testament are not rightly interpreted of Jesus
our Christ, then there is no prediction whatever contained in it of that
stupendous event--the rise and establishment of Christianity--in comparison
with which all the preceding Jewish history is as nothing. With the
exception of the book of Daniel, which the Jews themselves never classed
among the prophecies, and an obscure text of Jeremiah, there is not a
passage in all the Old Testament which favours the notion of a temporal
Messiah. What moral object was there, for which such a Messiah should come?
What could he have been but a sort of virtuous Sesostris or Buonaparte?
* * * * *
I know that some excellent men--Israelites without guile--do not, in fact,
expect the advent of any Messiah; but believe, or suggest, that it may
possibly have been God's will and meaning, that the Jews should remain a
quiet light among the nations for the purpose of pointing at the doctrine
of the unity of God. To which I say, that this truth of the essential unity
of God has been preserved, and gloriously preached, by Christianity alone.
The Romans never shut up their temples, nor ceased to worship a hundred or
a thousand gods and goddesses, at the bidding of the Jews; the Persians,
the Hindus, the Chinese, learned nothing of this great truth from the Jews.
But from Christians they did learn it in various degrees, and are still
learning it. The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the
light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but
itself.
* * * * *
It has been objected to me, that the vulgar notions of the Trinity are at
variance with this doctrine; and it was added, whether as flattery or
sarcasm matters not, that few believers in the Trinity thought of it as I
did. To which again humbly, yet confidently, I reply, that my superior
light, if superior, consists in nothing more than this,--that I more
clearly see that the doctrine of Trinal Unity is an absolute truth
transcending my human means of understanding it, or demonstrating it. I may
or may not be able to utter the formula of my faith in this mystery in more
logical terms than some others; but this I say, Go and ask the most
ordinary man, a professed believer in this doctrine, whether he believes in
and worships a plurality of Gods, and he will start with horror at the bare
suggestion. He may not be able to explain his creed in exact terms; but he
will tell you that he _does_ believe in one God, and in one God only,--
reason about it as you may.
* * * * *
What all the churches of the East and West, what Romanist and Protestant
believe in common, that I call Christianity. In no proper sense of the word
can I call Unitarians and Socinians believers in Christ; at least, not in
the only Christ of whom I have read or know any thing.
April 14, 1830.
CONVERSION OF THE JEWS.--JEWS IN POLAND.
There is no hope of converting the Jews in the way and with the spirit
unhappily adopted by our church; and, indeed, by all other modern churches.
In the first age, the Jewish Christians undoubtedly considered themselves
as the seed of Abraham, to whom the promise had been made; and, as such, a
superior order. Witness the account of St. Peter's conduct in the Acts [1],
and the Epistle to the Galatians.[2] St. Paul protested against this, so
far as it went to make Jewish observances compulsory on Christians who were
not of Jewish blood, and so far as it in any way led to bottom the religion
on the Mosaic covenant of works; but he never denied the birthright of the
chosen seed: on the contrary, he himself evidently believed that the Jews
would ultimately be restored; and he says,--If the Gentiles have been so
blest by the rejection of the Jews, how much rather shall they be blest by
the conversion and restoration of Israel! Why do we expect the Jews to
abandon their national customs and distinctions? The Abyssinian church said
that they claimed a descent from Abraham; and that, in virtue of such
ancestry, they observed circumcision: but declaring withal, that they
rejected the covenant of works, and rested on the promise fulfilled in
Jesus Christ. In consequence of this appeal, the Abyssinians were permitted
to retain their customs.
If Rhenferd's Essays were translated--if the Jews were made acquainted with
the real argument--if they were addressed kindly, and were not required to
abandon their distinctive customs and national type, but were invited to
become Christians _as of the seed of Abraham_--I believe there would be a
Christian synagogue in a year's time. As it is, the Jews of the lower
orders are the very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty
in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and
exclusive occupation. A learned Jew once said to me, upon this subject:--"O
Sir! make the inhabitants of Hollywell Street and Duke's Place Israelites
first, and then we may debate about making them Christians."[3]
In Poland, the Jews are great landholders, and are the worst of tyrants.
They have no kind of sympathy with their labourers and dependants. They
never meet them in common worship. Land, in the hand of a large number of
Jews, instead of being, what it ought to be, the organ of permanence, would
become the organ of rigidity, in a nation; by their intermarriages within
their own pale, it would be in fact perpetually entailed. Then, again, if a
popular tumult were to take place in Poland, who can doubt that the Jews
would be the first objects of murder and spoliation?
[Footnote 1: Chap. xv.]
[Footnote 2 : Chap. ii.]
[Footnote 3:
Mr. Coleridge had a very friendly acquaintance with several learned Jews in
this country, and he told me that, whenever he had fallen in with a Jew of
thorough education and literary habits, he had always found him possessed
of a strong natural capacity for metaphysical disquisitions. I may mention
here the best known of his Jewish friends, one whom he deeply respected,
Hyman Hurwitz.--ED.]
April 17. 1830.
MOSAIC MIRACLES.--PANTHEISM.
In the miracles of Moses, there is a remarkable intermingling of acts,
which we should now-a-days call simply providential, with such as we should
still call miraculous. The passing of the Jordan, in the 3d chapter of the
book of Joshua, is perhaps the purest and sheerest miracle recorded in the
Bible; it seems to have been wrought for the miracle's sake, and so thereby
to show to the Jews--the descendants of those who had come out of Egypt--
that the _same_ God who had appeared to their fathers, and who had by
miracles, in many respects providential only, preserved them in the
wilderness, was _their_ God also. The manna and quails were ordinary
provisions of Providence, rendered miraculous by certain laws and qualities
annexed to them in the particular instance. The passage of the Red Sea was
effected by a strong wind, which, we are told, drove hack the waters; and
so on. But then, again, the death of the first-born was purely miraculous.
Hence, then, both Jews and Egyptians might take occasion to learn, that it
was _one and the same God_ who interfered specially, and who governed all
generally.
* * * * *
Take away the first verse of the hook of Genesis, and then what immediately
follows is an exact history or sketch of Pantheism. Pantheism was taught in
the mysteries of Greece; of which the Samothracian or Cabeiric were
probably the purest and the most ancient.
_April_ 18. 1830.
POETIC PROMISE.
In the present age it is next to impossible to predict from specimens,
however favourable, that a young man will turn out a great poet, or rather
a poet at all. Poetic taste, dexterity in composition, and ingenious
imitation, often produce poems that are very promising in appearance. But
genius, or the power of doing something new, is another thing. Mr.
Tennyson's sonnets, such as I have seen, have many of the characteristic
excellencies of those of Wordsworth and Southey.
_April 19. 1830._
It is a small thing that the patient knows of his own state; yet some
things he _does_ know better than his physician.
* * * * *
I never had, and never could feel, any horror at death, simply as death.
* * * * *
Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.
_April 30. 1830._
NOMINALISTS AND REALISTS.--BRITISH SCHOOLMEN.--SPINOSA.
The result of my system will be, to show, that, so far from the world being
a goddess in petticoats, it is rather the Devil in a strait waistcoat.
* * * * *
The controversy of the Nominalists and Realists was one of the greatest and
most important that ever occupied the human mind. They were both right, and
both wrong. They each maintained opposite poles of the same truth; which
truth neither of them saw, for want of a higher premiss. Duns Scotus was
the head of the Realists; Ockham,[1] his own disciple, of the Nominalists.
Ockham, though certainly very prolix, is a most extraordinary writer.
[Footnote 1:
John Duns Scotus was born in 1274, at Dunstone in the parish of Emildune,
near Alnwick. He was a fellow of Merton College, and Professor of Divinity
at Oxford. After acquiring an uncommon reputation at his own university, he
went to Paris, and thence to Cologne, and there died in 1308, at the early
age of thirty-four years. He was called the Subtle Doctor, and found time
to compose works which now fill twelve volumes in folio. See the Lyons
edition, by Luke Wadding, in 1639.
William Ockham was an Englishman, and died about 1347; but the place and
year of his birth are not clearly ascertained. He was styled the Invincible
Doctor, and wrote bitterly against Pope John XXII. We all remember Butler's
account of these worthies:--
"He knew what's what, and that's as high
As metaphysic wit can fly;
In school divinity as able
As he that hight Irrefragable,
A second Thomas, or at once
To name them all, another _Dunse_;
Profound in all the Nominal
And Real ways beyond them all;
For he a rope of sand could twist
As tough as learned Sorbonist."
HUDIBRAS. Part I. Canto I. v. 149.
The Irrefragable Doctor was Alexander Hales, a native of Gloucestershire,
who died in 1245. Amongst his pupils at Paris, was Fidanza, better known by
the name of Bonaventura, the Seraphic Doctor. The controversy of the
Realists and the Nominalists cannot he explained in a note; but in
substance the original point of dispute may be thus stated. The Realists
held _generally_ with Aristotle, that there were universal _ideas_ or
essences impressed upon matter, and covëal with, and inherent in, their
objects. Plato held that these universal forms existed as exemplars in the
divine mind previously to, and independently of, matter; but both
maintained, under one shape or other, the real existence of universal
forms. On the other hand, Zeno and the old Stoics denied the existence of
these universals, and contended that they were no more than mere tenms and
nominal representatives of their particular objects. The Nominalists were
the followers of Zeno, and held that universal forms are merely modes of
conception, and exist solely in and for the mind. It does not require much
reflection to see how great an influence these different systems might have
upon the enunciation of the higher doctrines of Christianity.--ED.]
* * * * *
It is remarkable, that two thirds of the eminent schoolmen were of British
birth. It was the schoolmen who made the languages of Europe what they now
are. We laugh at the quiddities of those writers now, but, in truth, these
quiddities are just the parts of their language which we have rejected;
whilst we never think of the mass which we have adopted, and have in daily
use.
* * * * *
One of the scholastic definitions of God is this,--_Deus est, cui omne quod
est est esse omne quod est:_ as long a sentence made up of as few words,
and those as oligosyllabic, as any I remember. By the by, that
_oligosyllabic_ is a word happily illustrative of its own meaning, _ex
opposito_.
* * * * *
Spinosa, at the very end of his life, seems to have gained a glimpse of the
truth. In the last letter published in his works, it appears that he began
to suspect his premiss. His _unica substantia_ is, in fact, a mere notion,
--a _subject_ of the mind, and no _object_ at all.
* * * * *
Plato's works are preparatory exercises for the mind. He leads you to see,
that propositions involving in themselves contradictory conceptions, are
nevertheless true; and which, therefore, must belong to a higher logic--
that of ideas. They are contradictory only in the Aristotelian logic, which
is the instrument of the understanding. I have read most of the works of
Plato several times with profound attention, but not all his writings. In
fact, I soon found that I had read Plato by anticipation. He was a
consummate genius.[1]
[Footnote 1:
"This is the test and character of a truth so affirmed (--a truth of the
reason, an Idea)--that in its own proper form it is _inconceivable_. For to
_conceive_, is a function of the understanding, which can he exercised only
on subjects subordinate thereto. And yet to the forms of the understanding
all truth must be reduced, that is to be fixed as an object of reflection,
and to be rendered _expressible_. And here we have a second test and sign
of a truth so affirmed, that it can come forth out of the moulds of the
understanding only in the disguise of two contradictory conceptions, each
of which is partially true, and the conjunction of both conceptions becomes
the representative or _expression_ (--the _exponent_) of a truth beyond
conception and inexpressible. Examples: _before_ Abraham WAS, I AM. God is
a circle, the centre of which is every where, and the circumference no
where. The soul is all in every part." Aids to Reflection, n. 224.n. See
also _Church and State_, p. 12.--ED.]
* * * * *
My mind is in a state of philosophical doubt as to animal magnetism. Von
Spix, the eminent naturalist, makes no doubt of the matter, and talks
coolly of giving doses of it. The torpedo affects a third or external
object, by an exertion of its own will: such a power is not properly
electrical; for electricity acts invariably under the same circumstances. A
steady gaze will make many persons of fair complexions blush deeply.
Account for that. [1]
[Footnote 1:
I find the following remarkable passage in p. 301. vol. i. of the richly
annotated copy of Mr. Southey's Life of Wesley, which Mr. C. bequeathed as
his "darling book and the favourite of his library" to its great and
honoured author and donor:--
"The coincidence throughout of all these Methodist cases with those of the
Magnetists makes me wish for a solution that would apply to all. Now this
sense or appearance of a sense of the distant, both in time and space, is
common to almost all the _magnetic_ patients in Denmark, Germany, France,
and North Italy, to many of whom the same or a similar solution could not
apply. Likewise, many cases have been recorded at the same time, in
different countries, by men who had never heard of each other's names, and
where the simultaneity of publication proves the independence of the
testimony. And among the Magnetisers and Attesters are to be found names of
men, whose competence in respect of integrity and incapability of
intentional falsehood is fully equal to that of Wesley, and their
competence in respect of physio- and psychological insight and attainments
incomparably greater. Who would dream, indeed, of comparing Wesley with a
Cuvier, Hufeland, Blumenbach, Eschenmeyer, Reil, &c.? Were I asked, what
_I_ think, my answer would be,--that the evidence enforces scepticism and a
_non liquet_;--too strong and consentaneous for a candid mind to be
satisfied of its falsehood, or its solvibility on the supposition of
imposture or casual coincidence;--too fugacious and unfixable to support
any theory that supposes the always potential, and, under certain
conditions and circumstances, occasionally active, existence of a
correspondent faculty in the human soul. And nothing less than such an
hypothesis would be adequate to the _satisfactory_ explanation of the
facts;--though that of a _metastasis_ of specific functions of the nervous
energy, taken in conjunction with extreme nervous excitement, _plus_ some
delusion, _plus_ some illusion, _plus_ some imposition, _plus_ some chance
and accidental coincidence, might determine the direction in which the
scepticism should vibrate. Nine years has the subject of Zoo-magnetism been
before me. I have traced it historically, collected a mass of documents in
French, German, Italian, and the Latinists of the sixteenth century, have
never neglected an opportunity of questioning eye-witnesses, _ex. gr._
Tieck, Treviranus, De Prati, Meyer, and others of literary or medical
celebrity, and I remain where I was, and where the first perusal of Klug's
work had left me, without having moved an inch backward or forward. The
reply of Treviranus, the famous botanist, to me, when he was in London, is
worth recording:--'Ich habe gesehen was (ich weiss das) ich nicht würde
geglaubt haben auf _ihren_ erzählung,' &c. 'I have seen what I am certain I
would not have believed on your telling; and in all reason, therefore, I
can neither expect nor wish that you should believe on _mine_.'"--ED.]
_May_ 1. 1830.
FALL OF MAN.--MADNESS.--BROWN AND DARWIN.--NITROUS OXIDE.
A Fall of some sort or other--the creation, as it were, of the non-
absolute--is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without
this hypothesis, man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is
explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight.
* * * * *
Madness is not simply a bodily disease. It is the sleep of the spirit with
certain conditions of wakefulness; that is to say, lucid intervals. During
this sleep, or recession of the spirit, the lower or bestial states of life
rise up into action and prominence. It is an awful thing to be eternally
tempted by the perverted senses. The reason may resist--it does resist--for
a long time; but too often, at length, it yields for a moment, and the man
is mad for ever. An act of the will is, in many instances, precedent to
complete insanity. I think it was Bishop Butler who said, that he was "all
his life struggling against the devilish suggestions of his senses," which
would have maddened him, if he had relaxed the stern wakefulness of his
reason for a single moment.
* * * * *
Brown's and Darwin's theories are both ingenious; but the first will not
account for sleep, and the last will not account for death: considerable
defects, you must allow.
* * * * *
It is said that every excitation is followed by a commensurate exhaustion.
That is not so. The excitation caused by inhaling nitrous oxide is an
exception at least; it leaves no exhaustion on the bursting of the bubble.
The operation of this gas is to prevent the decarbonating of the blood;
and, consequently, if taken excessively, it would produce apoplexy. The
blood becomes black as ink. The voluptuous sensation attending the
inhalation is produced by the compression and resistance.
_May_ 2. 1830.
PLANTS.--INSECTS.--MEN.--DOG.--ANT AND BEE.
Plants exist _in_ themselves. Insects _by_, or by means of, themselves.
Men, _for_ themselves. The perfection of irrational animals is that which
is best for _them_; the perfection of man is that which is absolutely best.
There is growth only in plants; but there is irritability, or, a better
word, instinctivity, in insects.
* * * * *
You may understand by _insect_, life in sections--diffused generally over
all the parts.
* * * * *
The dog alone, of all brute animals, has a [*Greek: storgae], or affection
_upwards_ to man.
* * * * *
The ant and the bee are, I think, much nearer man in the understanding or
faculty of adapting means to proximate ends than the elephant.[1]
[Footnote 1:
I remember Mr. C. was accustomed to consider the ant, as the most
intellectual, and the dog as the most affectionate, of the irrational
creatures, so far as our present acquaintance with the facts of natural
history enables us to judge.--ED.]
_May_ 3. 1830.
BLACK COLONEL.
What an excellent character is the black Colonel in Mrs. Bennett's "Beggar
Girl!"[1]
If an inscription be put upon my tomb, it may be that I was an enthusiastic
lover of the church; and as enthusiastic a hater of those who have betrayed
it, be they who they may.[2]
[Footnote 1:
This character was frequently a subject of pleasant description and
enlargement with Mr. Coleridge, and he generally passed from it to a high
commendation of Miss Austen's novels, as being in their way perfectly
genuine and individual productions.--ED.]
[Footnote 2:
This was a strong way of expressing a deep-rooted feeling. A better and a
truer character would be, that Coleridge was a lover of the church, and a
defender of the faith! This last expression is the utterance of a
conviction so profound that it can patiently wait for time to prove its
truth.--ED.]
_May_ 4. 1830.
HOLLAND AND THE DUTCH.
Holland and the Netherlands ought to be seen once, because no other country
is like them. Every thing is artificial. You will be struck with the
combinations of vivid greenery, and water, and building; but every thing is
so distinct and rememberable, that you would not improve your conception by
visiting the country a hundred times over. It is interesting to see a
country and a nature _made_, as it were, by man, and to compare it with
God's nature.[1]
If you go, remark, (indeed you will be forced to do so in spite of
yourself,) remark, I say, the identity (for it is more than proximity) of a
disgusting dirtiness in all that concerns the dignity of, and reverence
for, the human person; and a persecuting painted cleanliness in every thing
connected with property. You must not walk in their gardens; nay, you must
hardly look into them.
[Footnote 1:
In the summer of 1828, Mr. Coleridge made an excursion with Mr. Wordsworth
in Holland, Flanders, and up the Rhine, as far as Bergen. He came back
delighted, especially with his stay near Bonn, but with an abiding disgust
at the filthy habits of the people. Upon Cologne, in particular, he avenged
himself in two epigrams. See Poet. Works, vol. ii. p. 144.--ED.]
* * * * *
The Dutch seem very happy and comfortable, certainly; but it is the
happiness of _animals_. In vain do you look for the sweet breath of hope
and advancement among them. [1]In fact, as to their villas and gardens,
they are not to be compared to an ordinary London merchant's box.
[Footnote 1:
"For every gift of noble origin
Is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breath."
_Wordsworth._]
_May 5. 1830._
RELIGION GENTILIZES.--WOMEN AND MEN.--BIBLICAL COMMENTATORS.--WALKERITE
CREED.
You may depend upon it, religion is, in its essence, the most gentlemanly
thing in the world. It will _alone_ gentilize, if unmixed with cant; and I
know nothing else that will, _alone_. Certainly not the army, which is
thought to be the grand embellisher of manners.
* * * * *
A woman's head is usually over ears in her heart. Man seems to have been
designed for the superior being of the two; but as things are, I think
women are generally better creatures than men. They have, taken
universally, weaker appetites and weaker intellects, but they have much
stronger affections. A man with a bad heart has been sometimes saved by a
strong head; but a corrupt woman is lost for ever.
* * * * *
I never could get much information out of the biblical commentators.
Cocceius has told me the most; but he, and all of them, have a notable
trick of passing _siccissimis pedibus_ over the parts which puzzle a man of
reflection.
The Walkerite creed, or doctrine of the New Church, as it is called,
appears to be a miscellany of Calvinism and Quakerism; but it is hard to
understand it.
* * * * *
_May_ 7, 1830.
HORNE TOOKE.----DIVERSIONS OF PURLEY.----GENDER OF THE SUN IN GERMAN.
Horne Tooke was pre-eminently a ready-witted man. He had that clearness
which is founded on shallowness. He doubted nothing; and, therefore, gave
you all that he himself knew, or meant, with great completeness. His voice
was very fine, and his tones exquisitely discriminating. His mind had no
progression or developement. All that is worth any thing (and that is but
little) in the Diversions of Purley is contained in a short pamphlet-letter
which he addressed to Mr. Dunning; then it was enlarged to an octavo, hut
there was not a foot of progression beyond the pamphlet; at last, a quarto
volume, 1 believe, came out; and yet, verily, excepting newspaper lampoons
and political insinuations, there was no addition to the argument of the
pamphlet, It shows a base and unpoetical mind to convert so beautiful, so
divine, a subject as language into the vehicle or make-weight of political
squibs. All that is true in Horne Tooke's book is taken from Lennep, who
gave it for so much as it was worth, and never pretended to make a system
of it. Tooke affects to explain the origin and whole philosophy of language
by what is, in fact, only a mere accident of the history of one language,
or one or two languages. His abuse of Harris is most shallow and unfair.
Harris, in the Hermes, was dealing--not very profoundly, it is true,--with
the philosophy of language, the moral, physical, and metaphysical causes
and conditions of it, &c. Horne Tooke, in writing about the formation of
words only, thought he was explaining the philosophy of language, which is
a very different thing. In point of fact, he was very shallow in the Gothic
dialects. I must say, all that _decantata fabula_ about the genders of the
sun and moon in German seems to me great stuff. Originally, I apprehend, in
the _Platt-Deutsch_ of the north of Germany there were only two definite
articles--_die_ for masculine and feminine, and _das_ for neuter. Then it
was _die sonne_, in a masculine sense, as we say with the same word as
article, _the_ sun. Luther, in constructing the _Hoch-Deutsch_ (for really
his miraculous and providential translation of the Bible was the
fundamental act of construction of the literary German), took for his
distinct masculine article the _der_ of the _Ober-Deutsch_, and thus
constituted the three articles of the present High German, _der, die, das_.
Naturally, therefore, it would then have been, _der sonne_; but here the
analogy of the Greek grammar prevailed, and as _sonne_ had the arbitrary
feminine termination of the Greek, it was left with its old article _die_,
which, originally including masculine and feminine both, had grown to
designate the feminine only. To the best of my recollection, the
Minnesingers and all the old poets always use the sun as masculine; and,
since Luther's time, the poets feel the awkwardness of the classical gender
affixed to the sun so much, that they more commonly introduce Phoebus or
some other synonyme instead. I must acknowledge my doubts, whether, upon
more accurate investigation, it can be shown that there ever was a nation
that considered the sun in itself, and apart from language, as the feminine
power. The moon does not so clearly demand a feminine as the sun does a
masculine sex: it might be considered negatively or neuter;--yet if the
reception of its light from the sun were known, that would have been a good
reason for making her feminine, as being the recipient body.
* * * * *
As our _the_ was the German _die_, so I believe our _that_ stood for _das_,
and was used as a neuter definite article.
The _Platt-Deutsch_ was a compact language like the English, not admitting
much agglutination. The _Ober-Deutsch_ was fuller and fonder of
agglutinating words together, although it was not so soft in its sounds.
_May 8. 1830._
HORNE TOOKE.--JACOBINS.
Horne Tooke said that his friends might, if they pleased, go as far as
Slough,--he should go no farther than Hounslow; but that was no reason why
he should not keep them company so far as their roads were the same. The
answer is easy. Suppose you know, or suspect, that a man is about to commit
a robbery at Slough, though you do not mean to be his accomplice, have you
a moral right to walk arm in arm with him to Hounslow, and, by thus giving
him your countenance, prevent his being taken up? The history of all the
world tells us, that immoral means will ever intercept good ends.
* * * * *
Enlist the interests of stern morality and religious enthusiasm in the
cause of political liberty, as in the time of the old Puritans, and it will
be irresistible; but the Jacobins played the whole game of religion, and
morals, and domestic happiness into the hands of the aristocrats. Thank
God! that they did so. England was saved from civil war by their enormous,
their providential, blundering.
* * * * *
Can a politician, a statesman, slight the feelings and the convictions of
the whole matronage of his country? The women are as influential upon such
national interests as the men.
* * * * *
Horne Tooke was always making a butt of Mr. Godwin; who, nevertheless, had
that in him which Tooke could never have understood. I saw a good deal of
Tooke at one time: he left upon me the impression of his being a keen, iron
man.
_May_ 9. 1830.
PERSIAN AND ARABIC POETRY.--MILESIAN TALES.
I must acknowledge I never could see much merit in the Persian poetry,
which I have read in translation. There is not a ray of imagination in it,
and but a glimmering of fancy. It is, in fact, so far as I know, deficient
in truth. Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must
be good sense, at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but
it must be a house, at least. The Arabian Nights' Tales are a different
thing --they are delightful, but I cannot help surmising that there is a
good deal of Greek fancy in them. No doubt we have had a great loss in the
Milesian Tales.[1] The book of Job is pure Arab poetry of the highest and
most antique cast.
Think of the sublimity, I should rather say the profundity, of that
passage in Ezekiel, [2]"Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered,
O Lord God, thou knowest." I know nothing like it.
[Footnote 1:
The Milesiacs were so called, because written or composed by Aristides of
Miletus, and also because the scene of all or most of them was placed in
that rich and luxurious city. Harpocration cites the sixth book of this
collection. Nothing, I believe, is now known of the age or history of this
Aristides, except what may be inferred from the fact that Lucius Cornelius
Sisenna translated the tales into Latin, as we learn from Ovid:--
Junxit Aristides _Milesia crimina_ secum--
and afterwards,
Vertit Aristidem Sisenna, nec obfuit illi
Historiae turpes inseruisse jocos:--
_Fasti_, ii. 412-445.
and also from the incident mentioned in the _Plutarchian_ life of Crassus,
that after the defeat at Carrhae, a copy of the Milesiacs of Aristides was
found in the baggage of a Roman officer, and that Surena (who, by the by,
if history has not done him injustice, was not a man to be over scrupulous
in such a case,) caused the book to be brought into the senate house of
Seleucia, and a portion of it read aloud, for the purpose of insulting the
Romans, who, even during war, he said, could not abstain from the perusal
of such _infamous compositions_,--c. 32. The immoral character of these
tales, therefore, may be considered pretty clearly established; they were
the Decameron and Heptameron of antiquity.--ED.]
[Footnote 2: Chap. xxxvii. v. 3.]
_May_ 11. 1830.
SIR T. MONRO.--SIR S. RAFFLES.--CANNING.
Sir Thomas Monro and Sir Stamford Raffles were both great men; but I
recognise more genius in the latter, though, I believe, the world says
otherwise.
* * * * *
I never found what I call an idea in any speech or writing of ----'s.
Those enormously prolix harangues are a proof of weakness in the higher
intellectual grasp. Canning had a sense of the beautiful and the good; ---
rarely speaks but to abuse, detract, and degrade. I confine myself to
institutions, of course, and do not mean personal detraction. In my
judgment, no man can rightly apprehend an abuse till he has first mastered
the idea of the use of an institution. How fine, for example, is the idea
of the unhired magistracy of England, taking in and linking together the
duke to the country gentleman in the primary distribution of justice, or
in the preservation of order and execution of law at least throughout the
country! Yet some men never seem to have thought of it for one moment, but
as connected with brewers, and barristers, and tyrannical Squire Westerns!
From what I saw of Homer, I thought him a superior man, in real
intellectual greatness.
* * * * *
Canning flashed such a light around the constitution, that it was difficult
to see the ruins of the fabric through it.
_May_ 12. 1830.
SHAKSPEARE.--MILTON.--HOMER.
Shakspeare is the Spinosistic deity--an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is
the deity of prescience; he stands _ab extra_, and drives a fiery chariot
and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in.
Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the
individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the
Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed,--
epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is
diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out. No one can understand
Shakspeare's superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, all
that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of
his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shakspeare's
own. His rhythm is so perfect, that you may be almost sure that you do not
understand the real force of a line, if it does not run well as you read
it. The necessary mental pause after every hemistich or imperfect line is
always equal to the time that would have been taken in reading the complete
verse.
* * * * *
I have no doubt whatever that Homer is a mere concrete name for the
rhapsodies of the Iliad.[1] Of course there was _a_ Homer, and twenty
besides. I will engage to compile twelve books with characters just as
distinct and consistent as those in the Iliad, from the metrical ballads,
and other chronicles of England, about Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Table. I say nothing about moral dignity, but the mere consistency of
character. The different qualities were traditional. Tristram is always
courteous, Lancelot invincible, and so on. The same might be done with the
Spanish romances of the Cid. There is no subjectivity whatever in the
Homeric poetry. There is a subjectivity of the poet, as of Milton, who is
himself before himself in everything he writes; and there is a subjectivity
of the _persona_, or dramatic character, as in all Shakspeare's great
creations, Hamlet, Lear, &c.
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge was a decided Wolfian in the Homeric question; but he had
never read a word of the famous Prolegomena, and knew nothing of Wolf's
reasoning, but what I told him of it in conversation. Mr. C. informed me,
that he adopted the conclusion contained in the text upon the first perusal
of Vico's Scienza Nuova; "not," he said, "that Vico has reasoned it out
with such learning and accuracy as you report of Wolf, but Vico struck out
all the leading hints, and I soon filled up the rest out of my own head."--
ED.]
_May_ 14. 1830.
REASON AND UNDERSTANDING.--WORDS AND NAMES OF THINGS.
Until you have mastered the fundamental difference, in kind, between the
reason and the understanding as faculties of the human mind, you cannot
escape a thousand difficulties in philosophy. It is pre-eminently the
_Gradus ad Philosophiam_.
* * * * *
The general harmony between the operations of the mind and heart, and the
words which express them in almost all languages, is wonderful; whilst the
endless discrepancies between the names of _things_ is very well deserving
notice. There are nearly a hundred names in the different German dialects
for the alder-tree. I believe many more remarkable instances are to be
found in Arabic. Indeed, you may take a very pregnant and useful
distinction between _words_ and mere arbitrary _names of things_.
_May 15. 1830._
THE TRINITY.--IRVING.
The Trinity is, 1. the Will; 2. the Reason, or Word; 3. the Love, or Life.
As we distinguish these three, so we must unite them in one God. The union
must be as transcendant as the distinction.
Mr. Irving's notion is tritheism,--nay, rather in terms, tri-daemonism. His
opinion about the sinfulness of the humanity of our Lord is absurd, if
considered in one point of view; for body is not carcass. How can there be
a sinful carcass? But what he says is capable of a sounder interpretation.
Irving caught many things from me; but he would never attend to any thing
which he thought he could not use in the pulpit. I told him the certain
consequence would be, that he would fall into grievous errors. Sometimes he
has five or six pages together of the purest eloquence, and then an
outbreak of almost madman's babble.[1]
[Footnote 1:
The admiration and sympathy which Mr. Coleridge felt and expressed towards
the late Mr. Irving, at his first appearance in London, were great and
sincere; and his grief at the deplorable change which followed was in
proportion. But, long after the tongues shall have failed and been
forgotten, Irving's name will live in the splendid eulogies of his friend.
See _Church and State_, p. 180. n.--ED.]
_May 16. 1830._
ABRAHAM.--ISAAC.--JACOB.
How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three
patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure, if ever man could, without impropriety,
be called, or supposed to be, "the friend of God," Abraham was that man. We
are not surprised that Abimelech and Ephron seem to reverence him so
profoundly. He was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to God; in
other respects, he takes fire, like an Arah sheikh, at the injuries
suffered by Lot, and goes to war with the combined kinglings immediately.
* * * * *
Isaac is, as it were, a faint shadow of his father Abraham. Born in
possession of the power and wealth which his father had acquired, he is
always peaceful and meditative; and it is curious to observe his timid and
almost childish imitation of Abraham's stratagem about his wife. [1] Isaac
does it before-hand, and without any apparent necessity.
[Footnote 1: Gen. xxvi. 6.]
* * * * *
Jacob is a regular Jew, and practises all sorts of tricks and wiles, which,
according to our modern notions of honour, we cannot approve. But you will
observe that all these tricks are confined to matters of prudential
arrangement, to worldly success and prosperity (for such, in fact, was the
essence of the birthright); and I think we must not exact from men of an
imperfectly civilized age the same conduct as to mere temporal and bodily
abstinence which we have a right to demand from Christians. Jacob is always
careful not to commit any violence; he shudders at bloodshed. See his
demeanour after the vengeance taken on the Schechemites. [1] He is the
exact compound of the timidity and gentleness of Isaac, and of the
underhand craftiness of his mother Rebecca. No man could be a bad man who
loved as he loved Rachel. I dare say Laban thought none the worse of Jacob
for his plan of making the ewes bring forth ring-streaked lambs.
[Footnote 1: Gen. xxxiv.]
_May 17. 1830._
ORIGIN OF ACTS.--LOVE.
If a man's conduct cannot be ascribed to the angelic, nor to the bestial
within him, what is there left for us to refer to it, but the fiendish?
Passion without any appetite is fiendish.
* * * * *
The best way to bring a clever young man, who has become sceptical and
unsettled, to reason, is to make him _feel_ something in any way. Love, if
sincere and unworldly, will, in nine instances out of ten, bring him to a
sense and assurance of something real and actual; and that sense alone will
make him _think_ to a sound purpose, instead of dreaming that he is
thinking.
* * * * *
"Never marry but for love," says William Penn in his Reflexions and Maxims;
"but see that thou lovest what is lovely."
_May 18. 1830._
LORD ELDON'S DOCTRINE AS TO GRAMMAR SCHOOLS.--DEMOCRACY.
Lord Eldon's doctrine, that grammar schools, in the sense of the reign of
Edward VI. and Queen Elizabeth, must necessarily mean schools for teaching
Latin and Greek, is, I think, founded on an insufficient knowledge of the
history and literature of the sixteenth century. Ben Jonson uses the term
"grammar" without any reference to the learned languages.
* * * * *
It is intolerable when men, who have no other knowledge, have not even a
competent understanding of that world in which they are always living, and
to which they refer every thing.
* * * * *
Although contemporary events obscure past events in a living man's life,
yet as soon as he is dead, and his whole life is a matter of history, one
action stands out as conspicuously as another.
A democracy, according to the prescript of pure reason, would, in fact, be
a church. There would he focal points in it, but no superior.
_May 20. 1830._
THE EUCHARIST.--ST. JOHN, xix. 11.--GENUINENESS OF BOOKS OF MOSES.--
DIVINITY OF CHRIST.--MOSAIC PROPHECIES.
No doubt, Chrysostom, and the other rhetorical fathers, contributed a good
deal, by their rash use of figurative language, to advance the
superstitious notion of the eucharist; but the beginning had been much
earlier. [1] In Clement, indeed, the mystery is treated as it was treated
by Saint John and Saint Paul; but in Hermas we see the seeds of the error,
and more clearly in Irenaeus; and so it went on till the idea was changed
into an idol.
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge made these remarks upon my quoting Selden's well-known saying
(Table Talk), "that transubstantiation was nothing but rhetoric turned into
logic."--ED.]
* * * * *
The errors of the Sacramentaries, on the one hand, and of the Romanists on
the other, are equally great. The first have volatilized the eucharist into
a metaphor; the last have condensed it into an idol.
Jeremy Taylor, in his zeal against transubstantiation, contends that the
latter part of the sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel has no reference to
the eucharist. If so, St. John wholly passes over this sacred mystery; for
he does not include it in his notice of the last supper. Would not a total
silence of this great apostle and evangelist upon this mystery be strange?
A mystery, I say; for it _is_ a mystery; it is the only mystery in our
religious worship. When many of the disciples left our Lord, and apparently
on the very ground that this saying was hard, he does not attempt to detain
them by any explanation, but simply adds the comment, that his words were
spirit. If he had really meant that the eucharist should he a mere
commemorative celebration of his death, is it conceivable that he would let
these disciples go away from him upon such a gross misunderstanding? Would
he not have said, "You need not make a difficulty; I only mean so and so?"
* * * * *
Arnauld, and the other learned Romanists, are irresistible against the low
sacramentary doctrine.
* * * * *
The sacrament of baptism applies itself, and has reference to the faith or
conviction, and is, therefore, only to be performed once;--it is the light
of man. The sacrament of the eucharist is a symbol of _all_ our religion;--
it is the life of man. It is commensurate with our will, and we must,
therefore, want it continually.
* * * * *
The meaning of the expression, [Greek: ei m_e _en soi didomenon an_othen],
"except it were given thee _from above_," in the 19th chapter of St. John,
ver. 11., seems to me to have been generally and grossly mistaken. It is
commonly understood as importing that Pilate could have no power to deliver
Jesus to the Jews, unless it had been given him _by God_, which, no doubt,
is true; but if that is the meaning, where is the force or connection of
the following clause, [Greek: dia touto], "_therefore_ he that delivered me
unto thee hath the greater sin?" In what respect were the Jews more sinful
in delivering Jesus up, _because_ Pilate could do nothing except by God's
leave? The explanation of Erasmus and Clarke, and some others, is very dry-
footed. I conceive the meaning of our Lord to have been simply this, that
Pilate would have had no power or jurisdiction--[Greek: exousian]--over
him, if it had not been given by the Sanhedrin, the [Greek: an_o boul_e],
and _therefore_ it was that the Jews had the greater sin. There was also
this further peculiar baseness and malignity in the conduct of the Jews.
The mere assumption of Messiahship, as such, was no crime in the eyes of
the Jews; they hated Jesus, because he would not be _their sort_ of
Messiah: on the other hand, the Romans cared not for his declaration that
he was the Son of God; the crime in _their_ eyes was his assuming to be a
king. Now, here were the Jews accusing Jesus before the Roman governor of
_that_ which, in the first place, they knew that Jesus denied in the sense
in which they urged it, and which, in the next place, had the charge been
true, would have been so far from a crime in their eyes, that the very
gospel history itself, as well as all the history to the destruction of
Jerusalem, shows it would have been popular with the whole nation. They
wished to destroy him, and for that purpose charge him falsely with a crime
which yet was no crime in their own eyes, if it had been true; but only so
as against the Roman domination, which they hated with all their souls, and
against which they were themselves continually conspiring!
* * * * *
Observe, I pray, the manner and sense in which the high-priest understands
the plain declaration of our Lord, that he was the Son of God. [Footnote:
Matt. xxvi. v. 63. Mark, xiv. 61.] "I adjure thee by the living God, that
thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God," or "the Son of
the Blessed," as it is in Mark. Jesus said, "I am,--and hereafter ye shall
see the Son of man (or me) sitting on the right hand of power, and coming
in the clouds of heaven." Does Caiaphas take this explicit answer as if
Jesus meant that he was full of God's spirit, or was doing his commands, or
walking in his ways, in which sense Moses, the prophets, nay, all good men,
were and are the sons of God? No, no! He tears his robes in sunder, and
cries out, "He hath spoken blasphemy. What further need have we of
witnesses? Behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy." What blasphemy, I
should like to know, unless the assuming to be the "Son of God" was
assuming to be of the _divine nature_?
* * * * *
One striking proof of the genuineness of the Mosaic books is this,--they
contain precise prohibitions--by way of predicting the consequences of
disobedience--of all those things which David and Solomon actually did, and
gloried in doing,--raising cavalry, making a treaty with Egypt, laying up
treasure, and polygamising. Now, would such prohibitions have been
fabricated in those kings' reigns, or afterwards? Impossible.
* * * * *
The manner of the predictions of Moses is very remarkable. He is like a man
standing on an eminence, and addressing people below him, and pointing to
things which he can, and they cannot, see. He does not say, You will act in
such and such a way, and the consequences will be so and so; but, So and so
will take place, because you will act in such a way!
May 21. 1830.
TALENT AND GENIUS.--MOTIVES AND IMPULSES.
Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the
action of reason and imagination, rarely or never.
* * * * *
Motives imply weakness, and the existence of evil and temptation. The
angelic nature would act from impulse alone. A due mean of motive and
impulse is the only practicable object of our moral philosophy.
_May_ 23. 1830.
CONSTITUTIONAL AND FUNCTIONAL LIFE.--HYSTERIA.--HYDRO-CARBONIC GAS.--
BITTERS AND TONICS.--SPECIFIC MEDICINES.
It is a great error in physiology not to distinguish between what may be
called the general or fundamental life--the _principium vitae_, and the
functional life--the life in the functions. Organization must presuppose
life as anterior to it: without life, there could not be or remain any
organization; but then there is also _a_ life in the organs, or functions,
distinct from the other. Thus, a flute presupposes,--demands the existence
of a musician as anterior to it, without whom no flute could ever have
existed; and yet again, without the instrument there can be no music.
* * * * *
It often happens that, on the one hand, the _principium vitae_, or
constitutional life, may be affected without any, or the least imaginable,
affection of the functions; as in inoculation, where one pustule only has
appeared, and no other perceptible symptom, and yet this has so entered
into the constitution, as to indispose it to infection under the most
accumulated and intense contagion; and, on the other hand, hysteria,
hydrophobia, and gout will disorder the functions to the most dreadful
degree, and yet often leave the life untouched. In hydrophobia, the mind is
quite sound; but the patient feels his muscular and cutaneous life forcibly
removed from under the control of his will.
* * * * *
Hysteria may be fitly called _mimosa_, from its counterfeiting so many
diseases,--even death itself.
* * * * *
Hydro-carbonic gas produces the most death-like exhaustion, without any
previous excitement. I think this gas should be inhaled by way of
experiment in cases of hydrophobia.
There is a great difference between bitters and tonics. Where weakness
proceeds from excess of irritability, there bitters act beneficially;
because all bitters are poisons, and operate by stilling, and depressing,
and lethargizing the irritability. But where weakness proceeds from the
opposite cause of relaxation, there tonics are good; because they brace up
and tighten the loosened string. Bracing is a correct metaphor. Bark goes
near to be a combination of a bitter and a tonic; but no perfect medical
combination of the two properties is yet known.
* * * * *
The study of specific medicines is too much disregarded now. No doubt the
hunting after specifics is a mark of ignorance and weakness in medicine,
yet the neglect of them is proof also of immaturity; for, in fact, all
medicines will be found specific in the perfection of the science.
_May_ 25. 1830.
EPISTLES TO THE EPHESIANS AND COLOSSIANS.--OATHS.
The Epistle to the Ephesians is evidently a catholic epistle, addressed to
the whole of what might be called St. Paul's diocese. It is one of the
divinest compositions of man. It embraces every doctrine of Christianity;--
first, those doctrines peculiar to Christianity, and then those precepts
common to it with natural religion. The Epistle to the Colossians is the
overflowing, as it were, of St. Paul's mind upon the same subject.
* * * * *
The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to
make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in
my judgment, a sin to do so. The Jews' oath is an adjuration by the judge
to the witness: "In the name of God, I ask you." There is an express
instance of it in the high-priest's adjuring or exorcising Christ by the
living God, in the twenty-sixth chapter of Matthew, and you will observe
that our Lord answered the appeal.[1]
You may depend upon it, the more oath-taking, the more lying, generally
among the people.
[Footnote 1:
See this instance cited, and the whole history and moral policy of the
common system of judicial swearing examined with clearness and good
feeling, in Mr. Tyler's late work on Oaths.--ED.]
May 27. 1830.
FLOGGING.--ELOQUENCE OF ABUSE.
I had _one_ just flogging. When I was about thirteen, I went to a
shoemaker, and begged him to take me as his apprentice. He, being an honest
man, immediately brought me to Bowyer, who got into a great rage, knocked
me down, and even pushed Crispin rudely out of the room. Bowyer asked me
why I had made myself such a fool? to which I answered, that I had a great
desire to be a shoemaker, and that I hated the thought of being a
clergyman. "Why so?" said he.--"Because, to tell you the truth, sir," said
I, "I am an infidel!" For this, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me,--
wisely, as I think,--soundly, as I know. Any whining or sermonizing would
have gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I
was laughed at, and got heartily ashamed of my folly.
* * * * *
How rich the Aristophanic Greek is in the eloquence of abuse!--
[Greek:
'O Bdelyre, kanaischunte, kai tolmaere su,
Kai miare, kai pammiare, kai miarotate.][1]
We are not behindhand in English. Fancy my calling you, upon a fitting
occasion,--Fool, sot, silly, simpleton, dunce, blockhead, jolterhead,
clumsy-pate, dullard, ninny, nincompoop, lackwit, numpskull, ass, owl,
loggerhead, coxcomb, monkey, shallow-brain, addle-head, tony, zany, fop,
fop-doodle; a maggot-pated, hare-brained, muddle-pated, muddle-headed,
Jackan-apes! Why I could go on for a minute more!
[Footnote 1: In The Frogs.--ED.]
_May_ 28. 1830.
THE AMERICANS.
I deeply regret the anti-American articles of some of the leading reviews.
The Americans regard what is said of them in England a thousand times more
than they do any thing said of them in any other country. The Americans are
excessively pleased with any kind or favourable expressions, and never
forgive or forget any slight or abuse. It would be better for them if they
were a trifle thicker-skinned.
* * * * *
The last American war was to us only something to talk or read about; but
to the Americans it was the cause of misery in their own homes.
* * * * *
I, for one, do not call the sod under my feet my country. But language,
religion, laws, government, blood,--identity in these makes men of one
country.
_May_ 29. 1830.
BOOK OF JOB.
The Book of Job is an Arab poem, antecedent to the Mosaic dispensation. It
represents the mind of a good man not enlightened by an actual revelation,
but seeking about for one. In no other book is the desire and necessity for
a Mediator so intensely expressed. The personality of God, the I AM of the
Hebrews, is most vividly impressed on the book, in opposition to pantheism.
* * * * *
I now think, after many doubts, that the passage, "I know that my Redeemer
liveth," &c. may fairly be taken as a burst of determination, a _quasi_
prophecy. [1] "I know not _how_ this can be; but in spite of all my
difficulties, this I _do_ know, that I shall be recompensed."
[Footnote 1: Chap. xix. 25, 26.]
* * * * *
It should be observed, that all the imagery in the speeches of the men is
taken from the East, and is no more than a mere representation of the forms
of material nature. But when God speaks, the tone is exalted; and almost
all the images are taken from Egypt, the crocodile, the war-horse, and so
forth. Egypt was then the first monarchy that had a splendid court.
* * * * *
Satan, in the prologue, does not mean the devil, our Diabolus. There is no
calumny in his words. He is rather the _circuitor_, the accusing spirit, a
dramatic attorney-general. But after the prologue, which was necessary to
bring the imagination into a proper state for the dialogue, we hear no more
of this Satan.
* * * * *
Warburton's notion, that the Book of Job was of so late a date as Ezra, is
wholly groundless. His only reason is this appearance of Satan.
_May_ 30. 1830.
TRANSLATION OF THE PSALMS.
I wish the Psalms were translated afresh; or, rather, that the present
version were revised. Scores of passages are utterly incoherent as they now
stand. If the primary visual images had been oftener preserved, the
connection and force of the sentences would have been better perceived.[1]
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge, like so many of the elder divines of the Christian church,
had an _affectionate_ reverence for the moral and evangelical portion of
the Book of Psalms. He told me that, after having studied every page of the
Bible with the deepest attention, he had found no other part of Scripture
come home so closely to his inmost yearnings and necessities. During many
of his latter years he used to read ten or twelve verses every evening,
ascertaining (for his knowledge of Hebrew was enough for that) the exact
visual image or first radical meaning of every noun substantive; and he
repeatedly expressed to me his surprise and pleasure at finding that in
nine cases out of ten the bare primary sense, if literally rendered, threw
great additional light on the text. He was not disposed to allow the
prophetic or allusive character so largely as is done by Horne and others;
but he acknowledged it in some instances in the fullest manner. In
particular, he rejected the local and temporary reference which has been
given to the 110th Psalm, and declared his belief in its deep mystical
import with regard to the Messiah. Mr. C. once gave me the following note
upon the _22d_ Psalm written by him, I believe, many years previously, but
which, he said, he approved at that time. It will find as appropriate a
niche here as any where else:--
"I am much delighted and instructed by the hypothesis, which I think
probable, that our Lord in repeating _Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani_, really
recited the whole or a large part of the 22d Psalm. It is impossible to
read that psalm without the liveliest feelings of love, gratitude, and
sympathy. It is, indeed, a wonderful prophecy, whatever might or might not
have been David's notion when he composed it. Whether Christ did audibly
repeat the whole or not, it is certain. I think, that he did it mentally,
and said aloud what was sufficient to enable his followers to do the same.
Even at this day to repeat in the same manner but the first line of a
common hymn would be understood as a reference to the whole. Above all, I
am thankful for the thought which suggested itself to my mind, whilst I was
reading this beautiful psalm, namely, that we should not exclusively think
of Christ as the Logos united to human nature, but likewise as a perfect
man united to the Logos. This distinction is most important in order to
conceive, much more, appropriately to _feel_, the conduct and exertions of
Jesus."--ED.]
_May_ 31. 1830.
ANCIENT MARINER.--UNDINE.--MARTIN.--PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.
Mrs. Barbauld once told me that she admired the Ancient Mariner very much,
but that there were two faults in it,--it was improbable, and had no moral.
As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question; but as
to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgment the poem had too
much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the
obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or
cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no
more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to
eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a
genie starts up, and says he _must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, _because_
one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's
son.[1]
I took the thought of "_grinning for joy_," in that poem, from my
companion's remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon, and
were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction,
till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me,--"You grinned
like an idiot!" He had done the same.
[Footnote 1:
"There he found, at the foot of a great walnut-tree, a fountain of a very
clear running water, and alighting, tied his horse to a branch of a tree,
and sitting clown by the fountain, took some biscuits and dates out of his
portmanteau, and, as he ate his dates, threw the shells about on both sides
of him. When he had done eating, being a good Mussulman, he washed his
hands, his face, and his feet, and said his prayers. He had not made an
end, but was still on his knees, when he saw a genie appear, all white with
age, and of a monstrous bulk; who, advancing towards him with a cimetar in
his hand, spoke to him in a terrible voice thus:--'Rise up, that I may kill
thee with this cimetar as you have killed my son!' and accompanied these
words with a frightful cry. The merchant being as much frightened at the
hideous shape of the monster as at these threatening words, answered him
trembling:--'Alas! my good lord, of what crime can I be guilty towards you
that you should take away my life?'--'I will,' replies the genie, 'kill
thee, as thou hast killed my son!'--'O heaven!' says the merchant, 'how
should I kill your son? I did not know him, nor ever saw him.'--'Did not
you sit down when you came hither?' replies the genie. 'Did not you take
dates out of your portmanteau, and, as you ate them, did not you throw the
shells about on both sides?'--'I did all that you say,' answers the
merchant, 'I cannot deny it.'--'If it be so,' replied the genie, 'I tell
thee that thou hast killed my son; and the way was thus: when you threw the
nutshells about, my son was passing by, and you threw one of them into his
eye, which killed him, _therefore_ I must kill thee.'--'Ah! my good lord,
pardon me!' cried the merchant.--'No pardon,' answers the genie, 'no mercy!
Is it not just to kill him that has killed another?'--'I agree to it,' says
the merchant, 'but certainly I never killed your son, and if I have, it was
unknown to me, and I did it innocently; therefore I beg you to pardon me,
and suffer me to live.'--'No, no,' says the genie, persisting in his
resolution, 'I must kill thee, since thou hast killed my son;' and then
taking the merchant by the arm, threw him with his face upon the ground,
and lifted up his cimetar to cut off his head!"--The Merchant and the
Genie. First night.--Ed.]
* * * * *
Undine is a most exquisite work. It shows the general want of any sense for
the fine and the subtle in the public taste, that this romance made no deep
impression. Undine's character, before she receives a soul, is marvellously
beautiful.[1]
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge's admiration of this little romance was unbounded. He read it
several times in German, and once in the English translation, made in
America, I believe; the latter he thought inadequately done. Mr. C. said
that there was something in Undine even beyond Scott,--that Scott's best
characters and conceptions were _composed_; by which I understood him to
mean that Baillie Nicol Jarvie, for example, was made up of old
particulars, and received its individuality from the author's power of
fusion, being in the result an admirable product, as Corinthian brass was
said to be the conflux of the spoils of a city. But Undine, he said, was
one and single in projection, and had presented to his imagination, what
Scott had never done, an absolutely new idea--ED.]
* * * * *
It seems to me, that Martin never looks at nature except through bits of
stained glass. He is never satisfied with any appearance that is not
prodigious. He should endeavour to school his imagination into the
apprehension of the true idea of the Beautiful.[1]
The wood-cut of Slay-good[2] is admirable, to be sure; but this new edition
of the Pilgrim's Progress is too fine a book for it. It should be much
larger, and on sixpenny coarse paper.
The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without
slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy
the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in
very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more
necessary it is to be plain.
This wonderful work is one of the few books which may be read over
repeatedly at different times, and each time with a new and a different
pleasure. I read it once as a theologian--and let me assure you, that there
is great theological acumen in the work--once with devotional feelings--and
once as a poet. I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could
be painted in such exquisitely delightful colours.[3]
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge said this, after looking at the engravings of Mr. Martin's
two pictures of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and the Celestial City,
published in the beautiful edition of the Pilgrim's Progress by Messrs.
Murray and Major, in 1830. I wish Mr. Martin could have heard the poet's
lecture: he would have been flattered, and at the same time, I believe,
instructed; for in the philosophy of painting Coleridge was a master.--ED.]
[Footnote 2:
P. 350., by S. Mosses from a design by Mr. W. Harvey. "When they came to
the place where he was, they found him with one _Feeble-mind_ in his hand,
whom his servants had brought unto him, having taken him in the way. Now
the giant was rifling him, with a purpose, after that, to pick his bones;
for he was of the nature of flesh eaters."--ED.]
[Footnote 3:
I find written on a blank leaf of my copy of this edition of the P.'s P.
the following note by Mr. C.:--"I know of no book, the Bible excepted as
above all comparison, which I, according to _my_ judgment and experience,
could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth
according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim's Progress.
It is, in my conviction, incomparably the best _summa theologiae
evangalicae_ ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired." June 14.
1830.--ED.]
_June_ 1. 1830.
PRAYER.--CHURCH-SINGING.--HOOKER.--DREAMS.
There are three sorts of prayer:--1. Public; 2. Domestic; 3. Solitary. Each
has its peculiar uses and character. I think the church ought to publish
and authorise a directory of forms for the latter two. Yet I fear the
execution would be inadequate. There is a great decay of devotional unction
in the numerous books of prayers put out now-a-days. I really think the
hawker was very happy, who blundered New Form of Prayer into New _former_
Prayers.[1]
I exceedingly regret that our church pays so little attention to the
subject of congregational singing. See how it is! In that particular part
of the public worship in which, more than in all the rest, the common
people might, and ought to, join,--which, by its association with music, is
meant to give a fitting vent and expression to the emotions,--in that part
we all sing as Jews; or, at best, as mere men, in the abstract, without a
Saviour. You know my veneration for the Book of Psalms, or most of it; but
with some half dozen exceptions, the Psalms are surely not adequate
vehicles of Christian thanksgiving
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