Sir Francis Burdett made a motion in the House of
Commons for the discharge of Mr.
Commons for the discharge of Mr.
Coleridge - Table Talk
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 a 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
Caesarean 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 AEschylus 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 praecordia: 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-Judaeus 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.
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 a 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
Caesarean 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 AEschylus 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 praecordia: 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-Judaeus 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.
