]
[Footnote 2: Tractatus Politici, c.
[Footnote 2: Tractatus Politici, c.
Coleridge - Table Talk
--DISSENTERS.
Even to a church,--the only pure democracy, because in it persons are alone
considered, and one person _a priori_ is equal to another person,--even to
a church, discipline is an essential condition. But a state regards
classes, and classes as they represent classified property; and to
introduce a system of representation which must inevitably render all
discipline impossible, what is it but madness-the madness of ignorant
vanity, and reckless obstinacy?
* * * * *
I have known, and still know, many Dissenters, who profess to have a zeal
for Christianity; and I dare say they have. But I have known very few
Dissenters indeed, whose hatred to the Church of England was not a much
more active principle of action with them than their love for Christianity.
The Wesleyans, in uncorrupted parts of the country, are nearly the only
exceptions. There never was an age since the days of the apostles, in which
the catholic spirit of religion was so dead, and put aside for love of
sects and parties, as at present.
* * * * *
_January_ 1. 1832.
GRACEFULNESS OF CHILDREN. --DOGS.
How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance!
* * * * *
There seems a sort of sympathy between the more generous dogs and little
children. I believe an instance of a little child being attacked by a large
dog is very rare indeed.
_January_ 28. 1832.
IDEAL TORY AND WHIG.
The ideal Tory and the ideal Whig (and some such there have really been)
agreed in the necessity and benefit of an exact balance of the three
estates: but the Tory was more jealous of the balance being deranged by the
people; the Whig, of its being deranged by the Crown. But this was a habit,
a jealousy only; they both agreed in the ultimate preservation of the
balance; and accordingly they might each, under certain circumstances,
without the slightest inconsistency, pass from one side to the other, as
the ultimate object required it. This the Tories did at the Revolution, but
remained Tories as before.
I have half a mind to write a critical and philosophical essay on Whiggism,
from Dryden's Achitophel (Shaftesbury), the first Whig, (for, with Dr.
Johnson's leave, the devil is no such cattle,) down to ----, who, I trust,
in God's mercy to the interests of peace, union, and liberty in this
nation, will be the last. In it I would take the last years of Queen Anne's
reign as the zenith, or palmy state, of Whiggism in its divinest _avatar_
of common sense, or of the understanding, vigorously exerted in the right
direction on the right and proper objects of the understanding; and would
then trace the rise, the occasion, the progress, and the necessary
degeneration of the Whig spirit of compromise, even down to the profound
ineptitudes of their party in these days. A clever fellow might make
something of this hint. How Asgill would have done it!
_February_ 22. 1832.
THE CHURCH.
The church is the last relic of our nationality. Would to God that the
bishops and the clergy in general could once fully understand that the
Christian church and the national church are as little to be confounded as
divided! I think the fate of the Reform Bill, in itself, of comparatively
minor importance; the fate of the national church occupies my mind with
greater intensity.
_February_ 24. 1832.
MINISTERS AND THE REFORM BILL.
I could not help smiling, in reading the report of Lord Grey's speech in
the House of Lords, the other night, when he asked Lord Wicklow whether he
seriously believed that he, Lord Grey, or any of the ministers, intended to
subvert the institutions of the country. Had I been in Lord Wicklow's
place, I should have been tempted to answer this question something in the
following way:--"Waiving the charge in an offensive sense of personal
consciousness against the noble earl, and all but one or two of his
colleagues, upon my honour, and in the presence of Almighty God, I answer,
Yes! You have destroyed the freedom of parliament; you have done your best
to shut the door of the House of Commons to the property, the birth, the
rank, the wisdom of the people, and have flung it open to their passions
and their follies. You have disfranchised the gentry, and the real
patriotism of the nation: you have agitated and exasperated the mob, and
thrown the balance of political power into the hands of that class (the
shopkeepers) which, in all countries and in all ages, has been, is now, and
ever will be, the least patriotic and the least conservative of any. You
are now preparing to destroy for ever the constitutional independence of
the House of Lords; you are for ever displacing it from its supremacy as a
co-ordinate estate of the realm; and whether you succeed in passing your
bill by actually swamping our votes by a batch of new peers, or by
frightening a sufficient number of us out of our opinions by the threat of
one,--equally you will have superseded the triple assent which the
constitution requires to the enactment of a valid law, and have left the
king alone with the delegates of the populace! "
_March_ 3. 1832.
DISFRANCHISEMENT.
I am afraid the Conservative party see but one half of the truth. The mere
extension of the franchise is not the evil; I should be glad to see it
greatly extended;--there is no harm in that _per se_; the mischief is that
the franchise is nominally extended, but to such classes, and in such a
manner, that a practical disfranchisement of all above, and a discontenting
of all below, a favoured class are the unavoidable results.
_March_ 17. 1832.
GENIUS FEMININE. ----PIRATES.
----'s face is almost the only exception I know to the observation, that
something feminine--not _effeminate_, mind--is discoverable in the
countenances of all men of genius. Look at that face of old Dampier, a
rough sailor, but a man of exquisite mind. How soft is the air of his
countenance, how delicate the shape of his temples!
* * * * *
I think it very absurd and misplaced to call Raleigh and Drake, and others
of our naval heroes of Elizabeth's age, pirates. No man is a _pirate_,
unless his contemporaries agree to call him so. Drake said,--"The subjects
of the king of Spain have done their best to ruin my country: _ergo_, I
will try to ruin the king of Spain's country. " Would it not be silly to
call the Argonauts pirates in our sense of the word?
_March_ 18. 1832.
ASTROLOGY. --ALCHEMY.
It is curious to mark how instinctively the reason has always pointed out
to men the ultimate end of the various sciences, and how immediately
afterwards they have set to work, like children, to realize that end by
inadequate means. Now they applied to their appetites, now to their
passions, now to their fancy, now to the understanding, and lastly, to the
intuitive reason again. There is no doubt but that astrology of some sort
or other would be the last achievement of astronomy: there must he chemical
relations between the planets; the difference of their magnitudes compared
with that of their distances is not explicable otherwise; but this, though,
as it were, blindly and unconsciously seen, led immediately to fortune-
telling and other nonsense. So alchemy is the theoretic end of chemistry:
there must be a common law, upon which all can become each and each all;
but then the idea was turned to the coining of gold and silver.
_March_ 20. 1832.
REFORM BILL. --CRISIS.
I have heard but two arguments of any weight adduced in favour of passing
this Reform Bill, and they are in substance these:--1. We will blow your
brains out if you don't pass it. 2. We will drag you through a horsepond if
you don't pass it; and there is a good deal of force in both.
* * * * *
Talk to me of your pretended crisis! Stuff! A vigorous government would in
one month change all the data for your reasoning. Would you have me believe
that the events of this world are fastened to a revolving cycle with God at
one end and the Devil at the other, and that the Devil is now uppermost!
Are you a Christian, and talk about a crisis in that fatalistic sense!
_March_ 31. 1832.
JOHN, CHAP. III. VER. 4. --DICTATION AND INSPIRATION. --GNOSIS--NEW
TESTAMENT CANON.
I certainly understand the [Greek: ti emoi kai soi gynai] in the second
chapter[1] of St. John's Gospel, as having a _liquid increpationis_ in it--
a mild reproof from Jesus to Mary for interfering in his ministerial acts
by requests on her own account.
I do not think that [Greek: gynai] was ever used by child to parent as a
common mode of address: between husband and wife it was; but I cannot think
that [Greek: m_eter] and [Greek: gynai] were equivalent terms in the mouth
of a son speaking to his mother. No part of the Christopaedia is found in
John or Paul; and after the baptism there is no recognition of any maternal
authority in Mary. See the two passages where she endeavours to get access
to him when he is preaching:--"Whosoever shall do the will of God, the
same is my brother, and my sister, and my mother"[2] and also the
recommendation of her to the care of John at the crucifixion.
[Footnote 1: Verse 4. ]
[Footnote 2: Mark, ch. iii. ver. 35. ]
* * * * *
There may be dictation without inspiration, and inspiration without
dictation; they have been and continue to be grievously confounded. Balaam
and his ass were the passive organs of dictation; but no one, I suppose,
will venture to call either of those worthies inspired. It is my profound
conviction that St. John and St. Paul were divinely inspired; but I totally
disbelieve the dictation of any one word, sentence, or argument throughout
their writings. Observe, there was revelation. All religion is revealed;--
_revealed_ religion is, in my judgment, a mere pleonasm. Revelations of
facts were undoubtedly made to the prophets; revelations of doctrines were
as undoubtedly made to John and Paul;--but is it not a mere matter of our
very senses that John and Paul each dealt with those revelations, expounded
them, insisted on them, just exactly according to his own natural strength
of intellect, habit of reasoning, moral, and even physical temperament? We
receive the books ascribed to John and Paul as their books on the judgment
of men, for whom no miraculous discernment is pretended; nay, whom, in
their admission and rejection of other books, we believe to have erred.
Shall we give less credence to John and Paul themselves? Surely the heart
and soul of every Christian give him sufficient assurance that, in all
things that concern him as a _man_, the words that he reads are spirit and
truth, and could only proceed from Him who made both heart and soul. --
Understand the matter so, and all difficulty vanishes: you read without
fear, lest your faith meet with some shock from a passage here and there
which you cannot reconcile with immediate dictation, by the Holy Spirit of
God, without an absurd violence offered to the text. You read the Bible as
the best of all books, but still as a book; and make use of all the means
and appliances which learning and skill, under the blessing of God, can
afford towards rightly apprehending the general sense of it--not solicitous
to find out doctrine in mere epistolary familiarity, or facts in clear _ad
hominem et pro tempore_ allusions to national traditions.
* * * * *
Tertullian, I think, says he had seen the autograph copies of some of the
apostles' writings. The truth is, the ancient Church was not guided by the
mere fact of the genuineness of a writing in pronouncing it canonical;--
its catholicity was the test applied to it. I have not the smallest doubt
that the Epistle of Barnabas is genuine; but it is not catholic; it is
full of the [Greek: gn_osis], though of the most simple and pleasing sort.
I think the same of Hermas. The Church would never admit either into the
canon, although the Alexandrians always read the Epistle of Barnabas in
their churches for three hundred years together. It was upwards of three
centuries before the Epistle to the Hebrews was admitted, and this on
account of its [Greek: gn_osis]; at length, by help of the venerable
prefix of St. Paul's name, its admirers, happily for us, succeeded.
* * * * *
So little did the early bishops and preachers think their Christian faith
wrapped up in, and solely to be learned from, the New Testament,--indeed,
can it be said that there was any such collection for three hundred years?
--that I remember a letter from ----[1] to a friend of his, a bishop in the
East, in which he most evidently speaks of the _Christian_ Scriptures as of
works of which the bishop knew little or nothing.
[Footnote 1: I have lost the name which Mr. Coleridge mentioned. --ED. ]
_April_ 4. 1832.
UNITARIANISM. --MORAL PHILOSOPHY.
I make the greatest difference between _ans_ and _isms_. I should deal
insincerely with you, if I said that I thought Unitarianism was
Christianity. No; as I believe and have faith in the doctrine, it is not
the truth in Jesus Christ; but God forbid that I should doubt that you, and
many other Unitarians, as you call yourselves, are, in a practical sense,
very good Christians. We do not win heaven by logic.
By the by, what do you mean by exclusively assuming the title of
Unitarians? As if Tri-Unitarians were not necessarily Unitarians, as much
(pardon the illustration) as an apple-pie must of course be a pie! The
schoolmen would, perhaps, have called you Unicists; but your proper name is
Psilanthropists--believers in the mere human nature of Christ.
Upon my word, if I may say so without offence, I really think many forms of
Pantheistic Atheism more agreeable to an imaginative mind than Unitarianism
as it is professed in terms: in particular, I prefer the Spinosistic scheme
infinitely. The early Socinians were, to be sure, most unaccountable
logicians; but, when you had swallowed their bad reasoning, you came to a
doctrine on which the _heart_, at least, might rest for some support. They
adored Jesus Christ. Both Laelius and Faustus Socinus laid down the
adorability of Jesus in strong terms. I have nothing, you know, to do with
their logic. But Unitarianism is, in effect, the worst of one kind of
Atheism, joined to the worst of one kind of Calvinism, like two asses tied
tail to tail. It has no covenant with God; and looks upon prayer as a sort
of self-magnetizing--a getting of the body and temper into a certain
_status_, desirable _per se_, but having no covenanted reference to the
Being to whom the prayer is addressed.
* * * * *
The sum total of moral philosophy is found in this one question, Is _Good_
a superfluous word,--or mere lazy synonyme for the pleasurable, and its
causes;--at most, a mere modification to express degree, and comparative
duration of pleasure? --Or the question may be more unanswerably stated
thus, Is _good_ superfluous as a word exponent of a _kind_? --If it be, then
moral philosophy is but a subdivision of physics. If not, then the writings
of Paley and all his predecessors and disciples are false and _most_
pernicious; and there is an emphatic propriety in the superlative, and in a
sense which of itself would supply and exemplify the difference between
_most_ and _very_.
_April_ 5. 1832.
MORAL LAW OF POLARITY.
It is curious to trace the operation of the moral law of polarity in the
history of politics, religion, &c. When the maximum of one tendency has
been attained, there is no gradual decrease, but a direct transition to its
minimum, till the opposite tendency has attained its maximum; and then you
see another corresponding revulsion. With the Restoration came in all at
once the mechanico-corpuscular philosophy, which, with the increase of
manufactures, trade, and arts, made every thing in philosophy, religion,
and poetry objective; till, at length, attachment to mere external
worldliness and forms got to its maximum,--when out burst the French
revolution; and with it every thing became immediately subjective, without
any object at all. The Rights of Man, the Sovereignty of the People, were
subject and object both. We are now, I think, on the turning point again.
This Reform seems the _ne plus ultra_ of that tendency of the public mind
which substitutes its own undefined notions or passions for real objects
and historical actualities. There is not one of the ministers--except the
one or two revolutionists among them--who has ever given us a hint,
throughout this long struggle, as to _what_ he really does believe will be
the product of the bill; what sort of House of Commons it will make for the
purpose of governing this empire soberly and safely. No; they have
actualized for a moment a wish, a fear, a passion, but not an idea.
_April_ 1. 1832.
EPIDEMIC DISEASE. --QUARANTINE.
There are two grand divisions under which all contagious diseases may be
classed:--1. Those which spring from organized living beings, and from the
life in them, and which enter, as it were, into the life of those in whom
they reproduce themselves--such as small-pox and measles. These become so
domesticated with the habit and system, that they are rarely received
twice. 2. Those which spring from dead organized, or unorganized matter,
and which may be comprehended under the wide term _malaria_.
You may have passed a stagnant pond a hundred times without injury: you
happen to pass it again, in low spirits and chilled, precisely at the
moment of the explosion of the gas: the malaria strikes on the cutaneous or
veno-glandular system, and drives the blood from the surface; the shivering
fit comes on, till the musculo-arterial irritability re-acts, and then the
hot fit succeeds; and, unless bark or arsenic--particularly bark, because
it is a bitter as well as a tonic--be applied to strengthen the veno-
glandular, and to moderate the musculo-arterial, system, a man may have the
ague for thirty years together.
But if, instead of being exposed to the solitary malaria of a pond, a man,
travelling through the Pontine Marshes, permits his animal energies to
flag, and surrenders himself to the drowsiness which generally attacks him,
then blast upon blast strikes upon the cutaneous system, and passes through
it to the musculo-arterial, and so completely overpowers the latter that it
cannot re-act, and the man dies at once, instead of only catching an ague.
There are three factors of the operation of an epidemic or atmospheric
disease. The first and principal one is the predisposed state of the body;
secondly, the specific _virus_ in the atmosphere; and, thirdly, the
accidental circumstances of weather, locality, food, occupation, &c.
Against the second of these we are powerless: its nature, causes, and
sympathies are too subtle for our senses to find data to go upon. Against
the first, medicine may act profitably. Against the third, a wise and
sagacious medical police ought to be adopted; but, above all, let every man
act like a Christian, in all charity, and love, and brotherly kindness, and
sincere reliance on God's merciful providence.
Quarantine cannot keep out an atmospheric disease; but it can, and does
always, increase the predisposing causes of its reception.
_April_ 10. 1832.
HARMONY.
All harmony is founded on a relation to rest--on relative rest. Take a
metallic plate, and strew sand on it; sound an harmonic chord over the
sand, and the grains will whirl about in circles, and other geometrical
figures, all, as it were, depending on some point of sand relatively at
rest. Sound a discord, and every grain will whisk about without any order
at all, in no figures, and with no points of rest.
The clerisy of a nation, that is, its learned men, whether poets, or
philosophers, or scholars, are these points of relative rest. There could
be no order, no harmony of the whole, without them.
April 21. 1832.
INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTIONS. --MODERN STYLE.
There have been three silent revolutions in England:--first, when the
professions fell off from the church; secondly, when literature fell off
from the professions; and, thirdly, when the press fell off from
literature.
* * * * *
Common phrases are, as it were, so stereotyped now by conventional use,
that it is really much easier to write on the ordinary politics of the day
in the common newspaper style, than it is to make a good pair of shoes.
An apprentice has as much to learn now to be a shoemaker as ever he had;
but an ignorant coxcomb, with a competent want of honesty, may very
effectively wield a pen in a newspaper office, with infinitely less pains
and preparation than were necessary formerly.
_April_ 23. 1832.
GENIUS OF THE SPANISH AND ITALIANS. --VICO. --SPINOSA.
The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at
all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their
literature. The genius of the Italians, on the contrary, is acute,
profound, and sensual, but not subtle; hence what they think to be humorous
is merely witty.
* * * * *
To estimate a man like Vico, or any great man who has made discoveries and
committed errors, you ought to say to yourself--"He did so and so in the
year 1720, a Papist, at Naples. Now, what would he not have done if he had
lived now, and could have availed himself of all our vast acquisitions in
physical science? "
* * * * *
After the _Scienza Nuova_[1] read Spinosa, _De Monarchia ex rationis
praescripto_[2]. They differed--Vico in thinking that society tended to
monarchy; Spinosa in thinking it tended to democracy. Now, Spinosa's ideal
democracy was realized by a contemporary--not in a nation, for that is
impossible, but in a sect--I mean by George Fox and his Quakers. [3]
[Footnote 1:
See Michelet's Principes de la Philosophie de l'Histoire, &c. Paris, 1827.
An admirable analysis of Vico. --ED.
]
[Footnote 2: Tractatus Politici, c. vi. ]
[Footnote 3: Spinosa died in 1677; Fox in 1681. --ED. ]
_April_ 24. 1832.
COLOURS.
Colours may best be expressed by a heptad, the largest possible formula for
things finite, as the pentad is the smallest possible form. Indeed, the
heptad of things finite is in all cases reducible to the pentad. The
adorable tetractys, or tetrad, is the formula of God; which, again, is
reducible into, and is, in reality, the same with, the Trinity. Take
colours thus:--
Prothesis,
Red, or Colour [Greek: kat exoch_en].
^
/1\
/ \
Mesothesis, or Indifference of / \
Red and Yellow = Orange. 4/ \5 Indigo, Violet = Indifference
/Synthesis\ of Red and Blue.
/--6 \
Thesis = Yellow. 2 3 Blue = Antithesis.
\Green indi-/
\componi- /
\ble /
\ /
\ /
To which you must add \7/ which is spurious or artificial
v synthesis of Yellow and Blue.
Green,
decom-
ponible
_April_ 28. 1832.
DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM. --EPIC POEM.
The destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now remaining for an epic
poem; a subject which, like Milton's Fall of Man, should interest all
Christendom, as the Homeric War of Troy interested all Greece. There would
be difficulties, as there are in all subjects; and they must he mitigated
and thrown into the shade, as Milton has done with the numerous
difficulties in the Paradise Lost. But there would be a greater assemblage
of grandeur and splendour than can now be found in any other theme. As for
the old mythology, _incredulus odi;_ and yet there must be a mythology, or
a _quasi_-mythology, for an epic poem. Here there would be the completion
of the prophecies--the termination of the first revealed national religion
under the violent assault of Paganism, itself the immediate forerunner and
condition of the spread of a revealed mundane religion; and then you would
have the character of the Roman and the Jew, and the awfulness, the
completeness, the justice. I schemed it at twenty-five; but, alas!
_venturum expectat_.
_April_ 29. 1832.
VOX POPULI, VOX DEI. --BLACK.
I never said that the _vox populi_ was of course the _vox Dei_. It may be;
but it may be, and with equal probability, _a priori_, _vox Diaboli_. That
the voice of ten millions of men calling for the same thing is a spirit, I
believe; but whether that be a spirit of Heaven or Hell, I can only know by
trying the thing called for by the prescript of reason and God's will.
* * * * *
Black is the negation of colour in its greatest energy. Without lustre, it
indicates or represents vacuity, as, for instance, in the dark mouth of a
cavern; add lustre, and it will represent the highest degree of solidity,
as in a polished ebony box.
* * * * *
In finite forms there is no real and absolute identity. God alone is
identity. In the former, the prothesis is a bastard prothesis, a _quasi_
identity only.
April 30. 1832.
ASGILL AND DEFOE.
I know no genuine Saxon English superior to Asgill's. I think his and
Defoe's irony often finer than Swift's.
May 1. 1832.
HORNE TOOKE. --FOX AND PITT
Horne Tooke's advice to the Friends of the People was profound:--"If you
wish to be powerful, pretend to be powerful. "
* * * * *
Fox and Pitt constantly played into each other's hands. Mr. Stuart, of the
Courier, who was very knowing in the politics of the day, soon found out
the gross lies and impostures of that club as to its numbers, and told Fox
so. Yet, instead of disclaiming them and exposing the pretence, as he ought
to have done, Fox absolutely exaggerated their numbers and sinister
intentions; and Pitt, who also knew the lie, took him at his word, and
argued against him triumphantly on his own premisses.
Fox's Gallicism, too, was a treasury of weapons to Pitt. He could never
conceive the French right without making the English wrong. Ah! I
remember--
--it vex'd my soul to see
So grand a cause, so proud a realm
With Goose and Goody at the helm;
Who long ago had fall'n asunder
But for their rivals' baser blunder,
The coward whine and Frenchified
Slaver and slang of the other side!
_May_ 2. 1832.
HORNER.
I cannot say that I thought Mr. Horner a man of genius. He seemed to me to
be one of those men who have not very extended minds, but who know what
they know very well--shallow streams, and clear because they are shallow.
There was great goodness about him.
_May_ 3. 1832.
ADIAPHORI. --CITIZENS AND CHRISTIANS.
------ is one of those men who go far to shake my faith in a future state
of existence; I mean, on account of the difficulty of knowing where to
place him. I could not bear to roast him; he is not so bad as all that
comes to: but then, on the other hand, to have to sit down with such a
fellow in the very lowest pothouse of heaven is utterly inconsistent with
the belief of that place being a place of happiness for me.
* * * * *
In two points of view I reverence man; first, as a citizen, a part of, or
in order to, a nation; and, secondly, as a Christian. If men are neither
the one nor the other, but a mere aggregation of individual bipeds, who
acknowledge no national unity, nor believe with me in Christ, I have no
more personal sympathy with them than with the dust beneath my feet.
May 21. 1832.
PROFESSOR PARK. --ENGLISH CONSTITUTION--DEMOCRACY. --MILTON AND SIDNEY.
Professor Park talks[1] about its being very _doubtful_ whether the
constitution described by Blackstone ever in fact existed. In the same
manner, I suppose, it is doubtful whether the moon is made of green cheese,
or whether the souls of Welchmen do, in point of fact, go to heaven on the
backs of mites. Blackstone's was the age of shallow law. Monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy, as _such_, exclude each the other: but if the
elements are to interpenetrate, how absurd to call a lump of sugar
hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon! nay, to take three lumps, and call the first
hydrogen; the second, oxygen; and the third, carbon! Don't you see that
each is in all, and all in each?
The democracy of England, before the Reform Bill, was, where it ought to
be, in the corporations, the vestries, the joint-stock companies, &c. The
power, in a democracy, is in focal points, without a centre; and in
proportion as such democratical power is strong, the strength of the
central government ought to be intense--otherwise the nation will fall to
pieces.
We have just now incalculably increased the democratical action of the
people, and, at the same time, weakened the executive power of the
government.
[Footnote 1:
In his "Dogmas of the Constitution, four Lectures on the Theory
and Practice of the Constitution, delivered at the King's College, London,"
1832. Lecture I. There was a stiffness, and an occasional uncouthness
in Professor Park's style; but his two works, the one just mentioned,
and his "Contre-Projet to the Humphreysian Code," are full of original
views and vigorous reasonings. To those who wished to see the profession
of the law assume a more scientific character than for the most part it has
hitherto done in England, the early death of John James Park was a very
great loss. --ED. ]
* * * * *
It was the error of Milton, Sidney, and others of that age, to think it
possible to construct a purely aristocratical government, defecated of all
passion, and ignorance, and sordid motive. The truth is, such a government
would be weak from its utter want of sympathy with the people to be
governed by it.
_May_ 25. 1832.
DE VI MINIMORUM. --HAHNEMANN. --LUTHER.
Mercury strongly illustrates the theory _de vi minimorum_. Divide five
grains into fifty doses, and they may poison you irretrievably. I don't
believe in all that Hahnemann says; but he is a fine fellow, and, like most
Germans, is not altogether wrong, and like them also, is never altogether
right.
* * * * *
Six volumes of translated selections from Luther's works, two being from
his Letters, would be a delightful work. The translator should be a man
deeply imbued with his Bible, with the English writers from Henry the
Seventh to Edward the Sixth, the Scotch divines of the 16th century, and
with the old racy German. [1]
Hugo de Saint Victor, Luther's favourite divine, was a wonderful man, who,
in the 12th century, the jubilant age of papal dominion, nursed the lamp of
Platonic mysticism in the spirit of the most refined Christianity. [2]
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge was fond of pressing this proposed publication:--"I can
scarcely conceive," he says in the Friend, "a more delightful volume than
might be made from Luther's letters, especially those that were written
from the Warteburg, if they were translated in the simple, sinewy,
idiomatic, _hearty_ mother tongue of the original. A difficult task I
admit, and scarcely possible for any man, however great his talents in
other respects, whose favourite reading has not lain among the English
writers from Edward the Sixth to Charles the First. " Vol. i. p. 235. n. --
ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
This celebrated man was a Fleming, and a member of the Augustinian society
of St. Victor. He died at Paris in 1142, aged forty-four. His age
considered, it is sufficient praise for him that Protestants and Romanists
both claim him for their own on the subject of transubstantiation. --ED. ]
_June_ 9. 1832.
SYMPATHY OF OLD GREEK AND LATIN WITH ENGLISH. --ROMAN MIND. --WAR.
If you take Sophocles, Catullus, Lucretius, the better parts of Cicero, and
so on, you may, just with two or three exceptions arising out of the
different idioms as to cases, translate page after page into good mother
English, word by word, without altering the order; but you cannot do so
with Virgil or Tibullus: if you attempt it, you will make nonsense.
* * * * *
There is a remarkable power of the picturesque in the fragments we have of
Ennius, Actius, and other very old Roman writers. This vivid manner was
lost in the Augustan age.
* * * * *
Much as the Romans owed to Greece in the beginning, whilst their mind was,
as it were, tuning itself to an after-effort of its own music, it suffered
more in proportion by the influence of Greek literature subsequently, when
it was already mature and ought to have worked for itself. It then became a
superfetation upon, and not an ingredient in, the national character. With
the exception of the stern pragmatic historian and the moral satirist, it
left nothing original to the Latin Muse. [1]
A nation, to be great, ought to be compressed in its increment by nations
more civilized than itself--as Greece by Persia; and Rome by Etruria, the
Italian states, and Carthage. I remember Commodore Decatur saying to me at
Malta, that he deplored the occupation of Louisiana by the United States,
and wished that province had been possessed by England. He thought that if
the United States got hold of Canada by conquest or cession, the last
chance of his country becoming a great compact nation would be lost.
[Footnote 1:
Perhaps it left letter-writing also. Even if the Platonic epistles are
taken as genuine, which Mr. Coleridge, to my surprise, was inclined to
believe, they can hardly interfere, I think, with the uniqueness of the
truly incomparable collections from the correspondence of Cicero and
Pliny. --ED. ]
* * * * *
War in republican Rome was the offspring of its intense aristocracy of
spirit, and stood to the state in lieu of trade. As long as there was any
thing _ab extra_ to conquer, the state advanced: when nothing remained but
what was Roman, then, as a matter of course, civil war began.
_June_ 10. 1832.
CHARM FOR CRAMP.
When I was a little hoy at the Blue-coat School, there was a charm for
one's foot when asleep; and I believe it had been in the school since its
foundation, in the time of Edward the Sixth. The march of intellect has
probably now exploded it. It ran thus:--
Foot! foot! foot! is fast asleep!
Thumb! thumb! thumb! in spittle we steep:
Crosses three we make to ease us,
Two for the thieves, and one for Christ Jesus!
And the same charm served for a cramp in the leg, with the following
substitution:--
The devil is tying a knot in my leg!
Mark, Luke, and John, unloose it I beg! --
Crosses three, &c.
And really upon getting out of bed, where the cramp most frequently
occurred, pressing the sole of the foot on the cold floor, and then
repeating this charm with the acts configurative thereupon prescribed, I
can safely affirm that I do not remember an instance in which the cramp did
not go away in a few seconds.
I should not wonder if it were equally good for a stitch in the side; but I
cannot say I ever tried it for _that_.
July 7. 1832.
GREEK. --DUAL, NEUTER PLURAL, AND VERB SINGULAR. --THETA.
It is hardly possible to conceive a language more perfect than the Greek.
If you compare it with the modern European tongues, in the points of the
position and relative bearing of the vowels and consonants on each other,
and of the variety of terminations, it is incalculably before all in the
former particulars, and only equalled in the last by German. But it is in
variety of termination alone that the German surpasses the other modern
languages as to sound; for, as to position, Nature seems to have dropped an
acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made
all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of
termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian
prose is excessively monotonous.
* * * * *
It is very natural to have a dual, duality being a conception quite
distinct from plurality. Most very primitive languages have a dual, as the
Greek, Welch, and the native Chilese, as you will see in the Abbe Raynal.
The neuter plural governing, as they call it, a verb singular is one of the
many instances in Greek of the inward and metaphysic grammar resisting
successfully the tyranny of formal grammar. In truth, there may be
_Multeity_ in things; but there can only be _Plurality_ in persons.
Observe also that, in fact, a neuter noun in Greek has no real nominative
case, though it has a formal one, that is to say, the same word with the
accusative. The reason is--a _thing_ has no subjectivity, or nominative
case: it exists only as an object in the accusative or oblique case.
It is extraordinary that the Germans should not have retained or assumed
the two beautifully discriminated sounds of the soft and hard _theta_; as
in _thy thoughts_--_the thin ether that_, &c. How particularly fine the
hard _theta_ is in an English termination, as in that grand word--Death--
for which the Germans gutturize a sound that puts you in mind of nothing
but a loathsome toad.
_July_ 8. 1832.
TALENTED.
I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable _talented_, stealing out of
the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications
of the day. Why not _shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced,_ &c. ? The formation
of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very
peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is to justify such
attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the
proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from
America. [1]
[Footnote 1:
See "_eventuate_," in Mr. Washington Irving's "Tour On the Prairies,"
_passim_. --ED. ]
* * * * *
Never take an iambus as a Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do
very well. Edith and Rotha are my favourite names for women.
_July_ 9. 1832.
HOMER. --VALCKNAER.
I have the firmest conviction that _Homer_ is a mere traditional synonyme
with, or figure for, the Iliad. You cannot conceivefor a moment any thing
about the poet, as you call him, apart from that poem. Difference in men
there was in a degree, but not in kind; one man was, perhaps, a better poet
than another; but he was a poet upon the same ground and with the same
feelings as the rest.
The want of adverbs in the Iliad is very characteristic. With more adverbs
there would have been some subjectivity, or subjectivity would have made
them.
The Greeks were then just on the verge of the bursting forth of
individuality.
Valckenaer's treatise[1] on the interpolation of the Classics by the later
Jews and early Christians is well worth your perusal as a scholar and
critic.
[Footnote 1: _Diatribe de Aristobulo Judaeo_. --ED.
Even to a church,--the only pure democracy, because in it persons are alone
considered, and one person _a priori_ is equal to another person,--even to
a church, discipline is an essential condition. But a state regards
classes, and classes as they represent classified property; and to
introduce a system of representation which must inevitably render all
discipline impossible, what is it but madness-the madness of ignorant
vanity, and reckless obstinacy?
* * * * *
I have known, and still know, many Dissenters, who profess to have a zeal
for Christianity; and I dare say they have. But I have known very few
Dissenters indeed, whose hatred to the Church of England was not a much
more active principle of action with them than their love for Christianity.
The Wesleyans, in uncorrupted parts of the country, are nearly the only
exceptions. There never was an age since the days of the apostles, in which
the catholic spirit of religion was so dead, and put aside for love of
sects and parties, as at present.
* * * * *
_January_ 1. 1832.
GRACEFULNESS OF CHILDREN. --DOGS.
How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance!
* * * * *
There seems a sort of sympathy between the more generous dogs and little
children. I believe an instance of a little child being attacked by a large
dog is very rare indeed.
_January_ 28. 1832.
IDEAL TORY AND WHIG.
The ideal Tory and the ideal Whig (and some such there have really been)
agreed in the necessity and benefit of an exact balance of the three
estates: but the Tory was more jealous of the balance being deranged by the
people; the Whig, of its being deranged by the Crown. But this was a habit,
a jealousy only; they both agreed in the ultimate preservation of the
balance; and accordingly they might each, under certain circumstances,
without the slightest inconsistency, pass from one side to the other, as
the ultimate object required it. This the Tories did at the Revolution, but
remained Tories as before.
I have half a mind to write a critical and philosophical essay on Whiggism,
from Dryden's Achitophel (Shaftesbury), the first Whig, (for, with Dr.
Johnson's leave, the devil is no such cattle,) down to ----, who, I trust,
in God's mercy to the interests of peace, union, and liberty in this
nation, will be the last. In it I would take the last years of Queen Anne's
reign as the zenith, or palmy state, of Whiggism in its divinest _avatar_
of common sense, or of the understanding, vigorously exerted in the right
direction on the right and proper objects of the understanding; and would
then trace the rise, the occasion, the progress, and the necessary
degeneration of the Whig spirit of compromise, even down to the profound
ineptitudes of their party in these days. A clever fellow might make
something of this hint. How Asgill would have done it!
_February_ 22. 1832.
THE CHURCH.
The church is the last relic of our nationality. Would to God that the
bishops and the clergy in general could once fully understand that the
Christian church and the national church are as little to be confounded as
divided! I think the fate of the Reform Bill, in itself, of comparatively
minor importance; the fate of the national church occupies my mind with
greater intensity.
_February_ 24. 1832.
MINISTERS AND THE REFORM BILL.
I could not help smiling, in reading the report of Lord Grey's speech in
the House of Lords, the other night, when he asked Lord Wicklow whether he
seriously believed that he, Lord Grey, or any of the ministers, intended to
subvert the institutions of the country. Had I been in Lord Wicklow's
place, I should have been tempted to answer this question something in the
following way:--"Waiving the charge in an offensive sense of personal
consciousness against the noble earl, and all but one or two of his
colleagues, upon my honour, and in the presence of Almighty God, I answer,
Yes! You have destroyed the freedom of parliament; you have done your best
to shut the door of the House of Commons to the property, the birth, the
rank, the wisdom of the people, and have flung it open to their passions
and their follies. You have disfranchised the gentry, and the real
patriotism of the nation: you have agitated and exasperated the mob, and
thrown the balance of political power into the hands of that class (the
shopkeepers) which, in all countries and in all ages, has been, is now, and
ever will be, the least patriotic and the least conservative of any. You
are now preparing to destroy for ever the constitutional independence of
the House of Lords; you are for ever displacing it from its supremacy as a
co-ordinate estate of the realm; and whether you succeed in passing your
bill by actually swamping our votes by a batch of new peers, or by
frightening a sufficient number of us out of our opinions by the threat of
one,--equally you will have superseded the triple assent which the
constitution requires to the enactment of a valid law, and have left the
king alone with the delegates of the populace! "
_March_ 3. 1832.
DISFRANCHISEMENT.
I am afraid the Conservative party see but one half of the truth. The mere
extension of the franchise is not the evil; I should be glad to see it
greatly extended;--there is no harm in that _per se_; the mischief is that
the franchise is nominally extended, but to such classes, and in such a
manner, that a practical disfranchisement of all above, and a discontenting
of all below, a favoured class are the unavoidable results.
_March_ 17. 1832.
GENIUS FEMININE. ----PIRATES.
----'s face is almost the only exception I know to the observation, that
something feminine--not _effeminate_, mind--is discoverable in the
countenances of all men of genius. Look at that face of old Dampier, a
rough sailor, but a man of exquisite mind. How soft is the air of his
countenance, how delicate the shape of his temples!
* * * * *
I think it very absurd and misplaced to call Raleigh and Drake, and others
of our naval heroes of Elizabeth's age, pirates. No man is a _pirate_,
unless his contemporaries agree to call him so. Drake said,--"The subjects
of the king of Spain have done their best to ruin my country: _ergo_, I
will try to ruin the king of Spain's country. " Would it not be silly to
call the Argonauts pirates in our sense of the word?
_March_ 18. 1832.
ASTROLOGY. --ALCHEMY.
It is curious to mark how instinctively the reason has always pointed out
to men the ultimate end of the various sciences, and how immediately
afterwards they have set to work, like children, to realize that end by
inadequate means. Now they applied to their appetites, now to their
passions, now to their fancy, now to the understanding, and lastly, to the
intuitive reason again. There is no doubt but that astrology of some sort
or other would be the last achievement of astronomy: there must he chemical
relations between the planets; the difference of their magnitudes compared
with that of their distances is not explicable otherwise; but this, though,
as it were, blindly and unconsciously seen, led immediately to fortune-
telling and other nonsense. So alchemy is the theoretic end of chemistry:
there must be a common law, upon which all can become each and each all;
but then the idea was turned to the coining of gold and silver.
_March_ 20. 1832.
REFORM BILL. --CRISIS.
I have heard but two arguments of any weight adduced in favour of passing
this Reform Bill, and they are in substance these:--1. We will blow your
brains out if you don't pass it. 2. We will drag you through a horsepond if
you don't pass it; and there is a good deal of force in both.
* * * * *
Talk to me of your pretended crisis! Stuff! A vigorous government would in
one month change all the data for your reasoning. Would you have me believe
that the events of this world are fastened to a revolving cycle with God at
one end and the Devil at the other, and that the Devil is now uppermost!
Are you a Christian, and talk about a crisis in that fatalistic sense!
_March_ 31. 1832.
JOHN, CHAP. III. VER. 4. --DICTATION AND INSPIRATION. --GNOSIS--NEW
TESTAMENT CANON.
I certainly understand the [Greek: ti emoi kai soi gynai] in the second
chapter[1] of St. John's Gospel, as having a _liquid increpationis_ in it--
a mild reproof from Jesus to Mary for interfering in his ministerial acts
by requests on her own account.
I do not think that [Greek: gynai] was ever used by child to parent as a
common mode of address: between husband and wife it was; but I cannot think
that [Greek: m_eter] and [Greek: gynai] were equivalent terms in the mouth
of a son speaking to his mother. No part of the Christopaedia is found in
John or Paul; and after the baptism there is no recognition of any maternal
authority in Mary. See the two passages where she endeavours to get access
to him when he is preaching:--"Whosoever shall do the will of God, the
same is my brother, and my sister, and my mother"[2] and also the
recommendation of her to the care of John at the crucifixion.
[Footnote 1: Verse 4. ]
[Footnote 2: Mark, ch. iii. ver. 35. ]
* * * * *
There may be dictation without inspiration, and inspiration without
dictation; they have been and continue to be grievously confounded. Balaam
and his ass were the passive organs of dictation; but no one, I suppose,
will venture to call either of those worthies inspired. It is my profound
conviction that St. John and St. Paul were divinely inspired; but I totally
disbelieve the dictation of any one word, sentence, or argument throughout
their writings. Observe, there was revelation. All religion is revealed;--
_revealed_ religion is, in my judgment, a mere pleonasm. Revelations of
facts were undoubtedly made to the prophets; revelations of doctrines were
as undoubtedly made to John and Paul;--but is it not a mere matter of our
very senses that John and Paul each dealt with those revelations, expounded
them, insisted on them, just exactly according to his own natural strength
of intellect, habit of reasoning, moral, and even physical temperament? We
receive the books ascribed to John and Paul as their books on the judgment
of men, for whom no miraculous discernment is pretended; nay, whom, in
their admission and rejection of other books, we believe to have erred.
Shall we give less credence to John and Paul themselves? Surely the heart
and soul of every Christian give him sufficient assurance that, in all
things that concern him as a _man_, the words that he reads are spirit and
truth, and could only proceed from Him who made both heart and soul. --
Understand the matter so, and all difficulty vanishes: you read without
fear, lest your faith meet with some shock from a passage here and there
which you cannot reconcile with immediate dictation, by the Holy Spirit of
God, without an absurd violence offered to the text. You read the Bible as
the best of all books, but still as a book; and make use of all the means
and appliances which learning and skill, under the blessing of God, can
afford towards rightly apprehending the general sense of it--not solicitous
to find out doctrine in mere epistolary familiarity, or facts in clear _ad
hominem et pro tempore_ allusions to national traditions.
* * * * *
Tertullian, I think, says he had seen the autograph copies of some of the
apostles' writings. The truth is, the ancient Church was not guided by the
mere fact of the genuineness of a writing in pronouncing it canonical;--
its catholicity was the test applied to it. I have not the smallest doubt
that the Epistle of Barnabas is genuine; but it is not catholic; it is
full of the [Greek: gn_osis], though of the most simple and pleasing sort.
I think the same of Hermas. The Church would never admit either into the
canon, although the Alexandrians always read the Epistle of Barnabas in
their churches for three hundred years together. It was upwards of three
centuries before the Epistle to the Hebrews was admitted, and this on
account of its [Greek: gn_osis]; at length, by help of the venerable
prefix of St. Paul's name, its admirers, happily for us, succeeded.
* * * * *
So little did the early bishops and preachers think their Christian faith
wrapped up in, and solely to be learned from, the New Testament,--indeed,
can it be said that there was any such collection for three hundred years?
--that I remember a letter from ----[1] to a friend of his, a bishop in the
East, in which he most evidently speaks of the _Christian_ Scriptures as of
works of which the bishop knew little or nothing.
[Footnote 1: I have lost the name which Mr. Coleridge mentioned. --ED. ]
_April_ 4. 1832.
UNITARIANISM. --MORAL PHILOSOPHY.
I make the greatest difference between _ans_ and _isms_. I should deal
insincerely with you, if I said that I thought Unitarianism was
Christianity. No; as I believe and have faith in the doctrine, it is not
the truth in Jesus Christ; but God forbid that I should doubt that you, and
many other Unitarians, as you call yourselves, are, in a practical sense,
very good Christians. We do not win heaven by logic.
By the by, what do you mean by exclusively assuming the title of
Unitarians? As if Tri-Unitarians were not necessarily Unitarians, as much
(pardon the illustration) as an apple-pie must of course be a pie! The
schoolmen would, perhaps, have called you Unicists; but your proper name is
Psilanthropists--believers in the mere human nature of Christ.
Upon my word, if I may say so without offence, I really think many forms of
Pantheistic Atheism more agreeable to an imaginative mind than Unitarianism
as it is professed in terms: in particular, I prefer the Spinosistic scheme
infinitely. The early Socinians were, to be sure, most unaccountable
logicians; but, when you had swallowed their bad reasoning, you came to a
doctrine on which the _heart_, at least, might rest for some support. They
adored Jesus Christ. Both Laelius and Faustus Socinus laid down the
adorability of Jesus in strong terms. I have nothing, you know, to do with
their logic. But Unitarianism is, in effect, the worst of one kind of
Atheism, joined to the worst of one kind of Calvinism, like two asses tied
tail to tail. It has no covenant with God; and looks upon prayer as a sort
of self-magnetizing--a getting of the body and temper into a certain
_status_, desirable _per se_, but having no covenanted reference to the
Being to whom the prayer is addressed.
* * * * *
The sum total of moral philosophy is found in this one question, Is _Good_
a superfluous word,--or mere lazy synonyme for the pleasurable, and its
causes;--at most, a mere modification to express degree, and comparative
duration of pleasure? --Or the question may be more unanswerably stated
thus, Is _good_ superfluous as a word exponent of a _kind_? --If it be, then
moral philosophy is but a subdivision of physics. If not, then the writings
of Paley and all his predecessors and disciples are false and _most_
pernicious; and there is an emphatic propriety in the superlative, and in a
sense which of itself would supply and exemplify the difference between
_most_ and _very_.
_April_ 5. 1832.
MORAL LAW OF POLARITY.
It is curious to trace the operation of the moral law of polarity in the
history of politics, religion, &c. When the maximum of one tendency has
been attained, there is no gradual decrease, but a direct transition to its
minimum, till the opposite tendency has attained its maximum; and then you
see another corresponding revulsion. With the Restoration came in all at
once the mechanico-corpuscular philosophy, which, with the increase of
manufactures, trade, and arts, made every thing in philosophy, religion,
and poetry objective; till, at length, attachment to mere external
worldliness and forms got to its maximum,--when out burst the French
revolution; and with it every thing became immediately subjective, without
any object at all. The Rights of Man, the Sovereignty of the People, were
subject and object both. We are now, I think, on the turning point again.
This Reform seems the _ne plus ultra_ of that tendency of the public mind
which substitutes its own undefined notions or passions for real objects
and historical actualities. There is not one of the ministers--except the
one or two revolutionists among them--who has ever given us a hint,
throughout this long struggle, as to _what_ he really does believe will be
the product of the bill; what sort of House of Commons it will make for the
purpose of governing this empire soberly and safely. No; they have
actualized for a moment a wish, a fear, a passion, but not an idea.
_April_ 1. 1832.
EPIDEMIC DISEASE. --QUARANTINE.
There are two grand divisions under which all contagious diseases may be
classed:--1. Those which spring from organized living beings, and from the
life in them, and which enter, as it were, into the life of those in whom
they reproduce themselves--such as small-pox and measles. These become so
domesticated with the habit and system, that they are rarely received
twice. 2. Those which spring from dead organized, or unorganized matter,
and which may be comprehended under the wide term _malaria_.
You may have passed a stagnant pond a hundred times without injury: you
happen to pass it again, in low spirits and chilled, precisely at the
moment of the explosion of the gas: the malaria strikes on the cutaneous or
veno-glandular system, and drives the blood from the surface; the shivering
fit comes on, till the musculo-arterial irritability re-acts, and then the
hot fit succeeds; and, unless bark or arsenic--particularly bark, because
it is a bitter as well as a tonic--be applied to strengthen the veno-
glandular, and to moderate the musculo-arterial, system, a man may have the
ague for thirty years together.
But if, instead of being exposed to the solitary malaria of a pond, a man,
travelling through the Pontine Marshes, permits his animal energies to
flag, and surrenders himself to the drowsiness which generally attacks him,
then blast upon blast strikes upon the cutaneous system, and passes through
it to the musculo-arterial, and so completely overpowers the latter that it
cannot re-act, and the man dies at once, instead of only catching an ague.
There are three factors of the operation of an epidemic or atmospheric
disease. The first and principal one is the predisposed state of the body;
secondly, the specific _virus_ in the atmosphere; and, thirdly, the
accidental circumstances of weather, locality, food, occupation, &c.
Against the second of these we are powerless: its nature, causes, and
sympathies are too subtle for our senses to find data to go upon. Against
the first, medicine may act profitably. Against the third, a wise and
sagacious medical police ought to be adopted; but, above all, let every man
act like a Christian, in all charity, and love, and brotherly kindness, and
sincere reliance on God's merciful providence.
Quarantine cannot keep out an atmospheric disease; but it can, and does
always, increase the predisposing causes of its reception.
_April_ 10. 1832.
HARMONY.
All harmony is founded on a relation to rest--on relative rest. Take a
metallic plate, and strew sand on it; sound an harmonic chord over the
sand, and the grains will whirl about in circles, and other geometrical
figures, all, as it were, depending on some point of sand relatively at
rest. Sound a discord, and every grain will whisk about without any order
at all, in no figures, and with no points of rest.
The clerisy of a nation, that is, its learned men, whether poets, or
philosophers, or scholars, are these points of relative rest. There could
be no order, no harmony of the whole, without them.
April 21. 1832.
INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTIONS. --MODERN STYLE.
There have been three silent revolutions in England:--first, when the
professions fell off from the church; secondly, when literature fell off
from the professions; and, thirdly, when the press fell off from
literature.
* * * * *
Common phrases are, as it were, so stereotyped now by conventional use,
that it is really much easier to write on the ordinary politics of the day
in the common newspaper style, than it is to make a good pair of shoes.
An apprentice has as much to learn now to be a shoemaker as ever he had;
but an ignorant coxcomb, with a competent want of honesty, may very
effectively wield a pen in a newspaper office, with infinitely less pains
and preparation than were necessary formerly.
_April_ 23. 1832.
GENIUS OF THE SPANISH AND ITALIANS. --VICO. --SPINOSA.
The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at
all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their
literature. The genius of the Italians, on the contrary, is acute,
profound, and sensual, but not subtle; hence what they think to be humorous
is merely witty.
* * * * *
To estimate a man like Vico, or any great man who has made discoveries and
committed errors, you ought to say to yourself--"He did so and so in the
year 1720, a Papist, at Naples. Now, what would he not have done if he had
lived now, and could have availed himself of all our vast acquisitions in
physical science? "
* * * * *
After the _Scienza Nuova_[1] read Spinosa, _De Monarchia ex rationis
praescripto_[2]. They differed--Vico in thinking that society tended to
monarchy; Spinosa in thinking it tended to democracy. Now, Spinosa's ideal
democracy was realized by a contemporary--not in a nation, for that is
impossible, but in a sect--I mean by George Fox and his Quakers. [3]
[Footnote 1:
See Michelet's Principes de la Philosophie de l'Histoire, &c. Paris, 1827.
An admirable analysis of Vico. --ED.
]
[Footnote 2: Tractatus Politici, c. vi. ]
[Footnote 3: Spinosa died in 1677; Fox in 1681. --ED. ]
_April_ 24. 1832.
COLOURS.
Colours may best be expressed by a heptad, the largest possible formula for
things finite, as the pentad is the smallest possible form. Indeed, the
heptad of things finite is in all cases reducible to the pentad. The
adorable tetractys, or tetrad, is the formula of God; which, again, is
reducible into, and is, in reality, the same with, the Trinity. Take
colours thus:--
Prothesis,
Red, or Colour [Greek: kat exoch_en].
^
/1\
/ \
Mesothesis, or Indifference of / \
Red and Yellow = Orange. 4/ \5 Indigo, Violet = Indifference
/Synthesis\ of Red and Blue.
/--6 \
Thesis = Yellow. 2 3 Blue = Antithesis.
\Green indi-/
\componi- /
\ble /
\ /
\ /
To which you must add \7/ which is spurious or artificial
v synthesis of Yellow and Blue.
Green,
decom-
ponible
_April_ 28. 1832.
DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM. --EPIC POEM.
The destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now remaining for an epic
poem; a subject which, like Milton's Fall of Man, should interest all
Christendom, as the Homeric War of Troy interested all Greece. There would
be difficulties, as there are in all subjects; and they must he mitigated
and thrown into the shade, as Milton has done with the numerous
difficulties in the Paradise Lost. But there would be a greater assemblage
of grandeur and splendour than can now be found in any other theme. As for
the old mythology, _incredulus odi;_ and yet there must be a mythology, or
a _quasi_-mythology, for an epic poem. Here there would be the completion
of the prophecies--the termination of the first revealed national religion
under the violent assault of Paganism, itself the immediate forerunner and
condition of the spread of a revealed mundane religion; and then you would
have the character of the Roman and the Jew, and the awfulness, the
completeness, the justice. I schemed it at twenty-five; but, alas!
_venturum expectat_.
_April_ 29. 1832.
VOX POPULI, VOX DEI. --BLACK.
I never said that the _vox populi_ was of course the _vox Dei_. It may be;
but it may be, and with equal probability, _a priori_, _vox Diaboli_. That
the voice of ten millions of men calling for the same thing is a spirit, I
believe; but whether that be a spirit of Heaven or Hell, I can only know by
trying the thing called for by the prescript of reason and God's will.
* * * * *
Black is the negation of colour in its greatest energy. Without lustre, it
indicates or represents vacuity, as, for instance, in the dark mouth of a
cavern; add lustre, and it will represent the highest degree of solidity,
as in a polished ebony box.
* * * * *
In finite forms there is no real and absolute identity. God alone is
identity. In the former, the prothesis is a bastard prothesis, a _quasi_
identity only.
April 30. 1832.
ASGILL AND DEFOE.
I know no genuine Saxon English superior to Asgill's. I think his and
Defoe's irony often finer than Swift's.
May 1. 1832.
HORNE TOOKE. --FOX AND PITT
Horne Tooke's advice to the Friends of the People was profound:--"If you
wish to be powerful, pretend to be powerful. "
* * * * *
Fox and Pitt constantly played into each other's hands. Mr. Stuart, of the
Courier, who was very knowing in the politics of the day, soon found out
the gross lies and impostures of that club as to its numbers, and told Fox
so. Yet, instead of disclaiming them and exposing the pretence, as he ought
to have done, Fox absolutely exaggerated their numbers and sinister
intentions; and Pitt, who also knew the lie, took him at his word, and
argued against him triumphantly on his own premisses.
Fox's Gallicism, too, was a treasury of weapons to Pitt. He could never
conceive the French right without making the English wrong. Ah! I
remember--
--it vex'd my soul to see
So grand a cause, so proud a realm
With Goose and Goody at the helm;
Who long ago had fall'n asunder
But for their rivals' baser blunder,
The coward whine and Frenchified
Slaver and slang of the other side!
_May_ 2. 1832.
HORNER.
I cannot say that I thought Mr. Horner a man of genius. He seemed to me to
be one of those men who have not very extended minds, but who know what
they know very well--shallow streams, and clear because they are shallow.
There was great goodness about him.
_May_ 3. 1832.
ADIAPHORI. --CITIZENS AND CHRISTIANS.
------ is one of those men who go far to shake my faith in a future state
of existence; I mean, on account of the difficulty of knowing where to
place him. I could not bear to roast him; he is not so bad as all that
comes to: but then, on the other hand, to have to sit down with such a
fellow in the very lowest pothouse of heaven is utterly inconsistent with
the belief of that place being a place of happiness for me.
* * * * *
In two points of view I reverence man; first, as a citizen, a part of, or
in order to, a nation; and, secondly, as a Christian. If men are neither
the one nor the other, but a mere aggregation of individual bipeds, who
acknowledge no national unity, nor believe with me in Christ, I have no
more personal sympathy with them than with the dust beneath my feet.
May 21. 1832.
PROFESSOR PARK. --ENGLISH CONSTITUTION--DEMOCRACY. --MILTON AND SIDNEY.
Professor Park talks[1] about its being very _doubtful_ whether the
constitution described by Blackstone ever in fact existed. In the same
manner, I suppose, it is doubtful whether the moon is made of green cheese,
or whether the souls of Welchmen do, in point of fact, go to heaven on the
backs of mites. Blackstone's was the age of shallow law. Monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy, as _such_, exclude each the other: but if the
elements are to interpenetrate, how absurd to call a lump of sugar
hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon! nay, to take three lumps, and call the first
hydrogen; the second, oxygen; and the third, carbon! Don't you see that
each is in all, and all in each?
The democracy of England, before the Reform Bill, was, where it ought to
be, in the corporations, the vestries, the joint-stock companies, &c. The
power, in a democracy, is in focal points, without a centre; and in
proportion as such democratical power is strong, the strength of the
central government ought to be intense--otherwise the nation will fall to
pieces.
We have just now incalculably increased the democratical action of the
people, and, at the same time, weakened the executive power of the
government.
[Footnote 1:
In his "Dogmas of the Constitution, four Lectures on the Theory
and Practice of the Constitution, delivered at the King's College, London,"
1832. Lecture I. There was a stiffness, and an occasional uncouthness
in Professor Park's style; but his two works, the one just mentioned,
and his "Contre-Projet to the Humphreysian Code," are full of original
views and vigorous reasonings. To those who wished to see the profession
of the law assume a more scientific character than for the most part it has
hitherto done in England, the early death of John James Park was a very
great loss. --ED. ]
* * * * *
It was the error of Milton, Sidney, and others of that age, to think it
possible to construct a purely aristocratical government, defecated of all
passion, and ignorance, and sordid motive. The truth is, such a government
would be weak from its utter want of sympathy with the people to be
governed by it.
_May_ 25. 1832.
DE VI MINIMORUM. --HAHNEMANN. --LUTHER.
Mercury strongly illustrates the theory _de vi minimorum_. Divide five
grains into fifty doses, and they may poison you irretrievably. I don't
believe in all that Hahnemann says; but he is a fine fellow, and, like most
Germans, is not altogether wrong, and like them also, is never altogether
right.
* * * * *
Six volumes of translated selections from Luther's works, two being from
his Letters, would be a delightful work. The translator should be a man
deeply imbued with his Bible, with the English writers from Henry the
Seventh to Edward the Sixth, the Scotch divines of the 16th century, and
with the old racy German. [1]
Hugo de Saint Victor, Luther's favourite divine, was a wonderful man, who,
in the 12th century, the jubilant age of papal dominion, nursed the lamp of
Platonic mysticism in the spirit of the most refined Christianity. [2]
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge was fond of pressing this proposed publication:--"I can
scarcely conceive," he says in the Friend, "a more delightful volume than
might be made from Luther's letters, especially those that were written
from the Warteburg, if they were translated in the simple, sinewy,
idiomatic, _hearty_ mother tongue of the original. A difficult task I
admit, and scarcely possible for any man, however great his talents in
other respects, whose favourite reading has not lain among the English
writers from Edward the Sixth to Charles the First. " Vol. i. p. 235. n. --
ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
This celebrated man was a Fleming, and a member of the Augustinian society
of St. Victor. He died at Paris in 1142, aged forty-four. His age
considered, it is sufficient praise for him that Protestants and Romanists
both claim him for their own on the subject of transubstantiation. --ED. ]
_June_ 9. 1832.
SYMPATHY OF OLD GREEK AND LATIN WITH ENGLISH. --ROMAN MIND. --WAR.
If you take Sophocles, Catullus, Lucretius, the better parts of Cicero, and
so on, you may, just with two or three exceptions arising out of the
different idioms as to cases, translate page after page into good mother
English, word by word, without altering the order; but you cannot do so
with Virgil or Tibullus: if you attempt it, you will make nonsense.
* * * * *
There is a remarkable power of the picturesque in the fragments we have of
Ennius, Actius, and other very old Roman writers. This vivid manner was
lost in the Augustan age.
* * * * *
Much as the Romans owed to Greece in the beginning, whilst their mind was,
as it were, tuning itself to an after-effort of its own music, it suffered
more in proportion by the influence of Greek literature subsequently, when
it was already mature and ought to have worked for itself. It then became a
superfetation upon, and not an ingredient in, the national character. With
the exception of the stern pragmatic historian and the moral satirist, it
left nothing original to the Latin Muse. [1]
A nation, to be great, ought to be compressed in its increment by nations
more civilized than itself--as Greece by Persia; and Rome by Etruria, the
Italian states, and Carthage. I remember Commodore Decatur saying to me at
Malta, that he deplored the occupation of Louisiana by the United States,
and wished that province had been possessed by England. He thought that if
the United States got hold of Canada by conquest or cession, the last
chance of his country becoming a great compact nation would be lost.
[Footnote 1:
Perhaps it left letter-writing also. Even if the Platonic epistles are
taken as genuine, which Mr. Coleridge, to my surprise, was inclined to
believe, they can hardly interfere, I think, with the uniqueness of the
truly incomparable collections from the correspondence of Cicero and
Pliny. --ED. ]
* * * * *
War in republican Rome was the offspring of its intense aristocracy of
spirit, and stood to the state in lieu of trade. As long as there was any
thing _ab extra_ to conquer, the state advanced: when nothing remained but
what was Roman, then, as a matter of course, civil war began.
_June_ 10. 1832.
CHARM FOR CRAMP.
When I was a little hoy at the Blue-coat School, there was a charm for
one's foot when asleep; and I believe it had been in the school since its
foundation, in the time of Edward the Sixth. The march of intellect has
probably now exploded it. It ran thus:--
Foot! foot! foot! is fast asleep!
Thumb! thumb! thumb! in spittle we steep:
Crosses three we make to ease us,
Two for the thieves, and one for Christ Jesus!
And the same charm served for a cramp in the leg, with the following
substitution:--
The devil is tying a knot in my leg!
Mark, Luke, and John, unloose it I beg! --
Crosses three, &c.
And really upon getting out of bed, where the cramp most frequently
occurred, pressing the sole of the foot on the cold floor, and then
repeating this charm with the acts configurative thereupon prescribed, I
can safely affirm that I do not remember an instance in which the cramp did
not go away in a few seconds.
I should not wonder if it were equally good for a stitch in the side; but I
cannot say I ever tried it for _that_.
July 7. 1832.
GREEK. --DUAL, NEUTER PLURAL, AND VERB SINGULAR. --THETA.
It is hardly possible to conceive a language more perfect than the Greek.
If you compare it with the modern European tongues, in the points of the
position and relative bearing of the vowels and consonants on each other,
and of the variety of terminations, it is incalculably before all in the
former particulars, and only equalled in the last by German. But it is in
variety of termination alone that the German surpasses the other modern
languages as to sound; for, as to position, Nature seems to have dropped an
acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made
all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of
termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian
prose is excessively monotonous.
* * * * *
It is very natural to have a dual, duality being a conception quite
distinct from plurality. Most very primitive languages have a dual, as the
Greek, Welch, and the native Chilese, as you will see in the Abbe Raynal.
The neuter plural governing, as they call it, a verb singular is one of the
many instances in Greek of the inward and metaphysic grammar resisting
successfully the tyranny of formal grammar. In truth, there may be
_Multeity_ in things; but there can only be _Plurality_ in persons.
Observe also that, in fact, a neuter noun in Greek has no real nominative
case, though it has a formal one, that is to say, the same word with the
accusative. The reason is--a _thing_ has no subjectivity, or nominative
case: it exists only as an object in the accusative or oblique case.
It is extraordinary that the Germans should not have retained or assumed
the two beautifully discriminated sounds of the soft and hard _theta_; as
in _thy thoughts_--_the thin ether that_, &c. How particularly fine the
hard _theta_ is in an English termination, as in that grand word--Death--
for which the Germans gutturize a sound that puts you in mind of nothing
but a loathsome toad.
_July_ 8. 1832.
TALENTED.
I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable _talented_, stealing out of
the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications
of the day. Why not _shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced,_ &c. ? The formation
of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very
peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is to justify such
attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the
proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from
America. [1]
[Footnote 1:
See "_eventuate_," in Mr. Washington Irving's "Tour On the Prairies,"
_passim_. --ED. ]
* * * * *
Never take an iambus as a Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do
very well. Edith and Rotha are my favourite names for women.
_July_ 9. 1832.
HOMER. --VALCKNAER.
I have the firmest conviction that _Homer_ is a mere traditional synonyme
with, or figure for, the Iliad. You cannot conceivefor a moment any thing
about the poet, as you call him, apart from that poem. Difference in men
there was in a degree, but not in kind; one man was, perhaps, a better poet
than another; but he was a poet upon the same ground and with the same
feelings as the rest.
The want of adverbs in the Iliad is very characteristic. With more adverbs
there would have been some subjectivity, or subjectivity would have made
them.
The Greeks were then just on the verge of the bursting forth of
individuality.
Valckenaer's treatise[1] on the interpolation of the Classics by the later
Jews and early Christians is well worth your perusal as a scholar and
critic.
[Footnote 1: _Diatribe de Aristobulo Judaeo_. --ED.
