whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with _your uncertainty!
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with _your uncertainty!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Pressed by this, Spurzheim has, at length, been guilty of
some sheer quackery; and ventures to say that he has actually discovered a
different material in the different parts or organs of the brain, so that
he can tell a piece of benevolence from a bit of destructiveness, and so
forth. Observe, also, that it is constantly found, that so far from there
being a concavity in the interior surface of the cranium answering to the
convexity apparent on the exterior--the interior is convex too. Dr. Baillie
thought there was something in the system, because the notion of the brain
being an extendible net helped to explain those cases where the intellect
remained after the solid substance of the brain was dissolved in water. [1]
That a greater or less development of the forepart of the head is generally
coincidedent with more or less of reasoning power, is certain. The line
across the forehead, also, denoting musical power, is very common.
[Footnote 1:
"The very marked, _positive_ as well as comparative, magnitude and
prominence of the bump, entitled _benevolence_ (see Spurzheim's _map of the
human skull_) on the head of the late Mr. John Thurtell, has woefully
unsettled the faith of many ardent phrenologists, and strengthened the
previous doubts of a still greater number into utter disbelief. On _my_
mind this fact (for a _fact_ it is) produced the directly contrary effect;
and inclined me to suspect, for the first time, that there may be some
truth in the Spurzheimian scheme. Whether future craniologists may not see
cause to _new-name_ this and one or two others of these convex gnomons, is
quite a different question. At present, and according to the present use of
words, any such change would be premature; and we must be content to say,
that Mr. Thurtell's benevolence was insufficiently modified by the
unprotrusive and unindicated convolutes of the brain, that secrete honesty
and common sense. The organ of destructiveness was indirectly _potentiated_
by the absence or imperfect development of the glands of reason and
conscience in this '_unfortunate gentleman. '"--_Aids to Reflection_, p.
143. n. ]
_August_ 20. 1830.
FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1830. --CAPTAIN R. AND THE AMERICANS.
The French must have greatly improved under the influence of a free and
regular government (for such it, in general, has been since the
restoration), to have conducted themselves with so much moderation in
success as they seem to have done, and to be disposed to do.
* * * * *
I must say I cannot see much in Captain B. Hall's account of the Americans,
but weaknesses--some of which make me like the Yankees all the better. How
much more amiable is the American fidgettiness and anxiety about the
opinion of other nations, and especially of the English, than the
sentiments of the rest of the world. [1]
As to what Captain Hall says about the English loyalty to the person of the
King--I can only say, I feel none of it. I respect the man while, and only
while, the king is translucent through him: I reverence the glass case for
the Saint's sake within; except for that it is to me mere glazier's work,--
putty, and glass, and wood.
[Footnote 1:
"There exists in England a _gentlemanly_ character, a _gentlemanly_
feeling, very different even from that which is most like it,--the
character of a well-born Spaniard, and unexampled in the rest of Europe.
This feeling _originated_ in the fortunate circumstance, that the titles of
our English nobility follow the law of their property, and are inherited by
the eldest sons only. From this source, under the influences of our
constitution and of our astonishing trade, it has diffused itself in
different modifications through the whole country. The uniformity of our
dress among all classes above that of the day labourer, while it has
authorized all ranks to assume the appearance of gentlemen, has at the same
time inspired the wish to conform their manners, and still more their
ordinary actions in social intercourse, to their notions of the gentlemanly
the most commonly received attribute of which character is a certain
generosity in trifles. On the other hand, the encroachments of the lower
classes on the higher, occasioned and favoured by this resemblance in
exteriors, by this absence of any cognizable marks of distinction, have
rendered each class more reserved and jealous in their general communion;
and, far more than our climate or natural temper, have caused that
haughtiness and reserve in our outward demeanour, which is so generally
complained of among foreigners. Far be it from me to depreciate the value
of this gentlemanly feeling: I respect it under all its forms and
varieties, from the House of Commons * to the gentleman in the one-shilling
gallery. It is always the ornament of virtue, and oftentimes a support; but
it is a wretched substitute for it. Its _worth_, as a moral good, is by no
means in proportion to its _value_ as a social advantage. These
observations are not irrelevant: for to the want of reflection that this
diffusion of gentlemanly feeling among us is not the growth of our moral
excellence, but the effect of various accidental advantages peculiar to
England; to our not considering that it is unreasonable and uncharitable to
expect the same consequences, where the same causes have not existed to
produce them; and lastly, to our prorieness to regard the absence of this
character (which, as I have before said, does, for the greater part, and in
the common apprehension, consist in a certain frankness and generosity in
the detail of action) as decisive against the sum total of personal or
national worth; we must, I am convinced, attribute a large portion of that
conduct, which in many instances has left the inhabitants of countries
conquered or appropriated by Great Britain doubtful whether the various
solid advantages which they have derived from our protection and just
government were not bought dearly by the wounds inflicted on their feelings
and prejudices, by the contemptuous and insolent demeanour of the English,
as individuals. "--_Friend_, vol. iii. p, 322.
This was written long before the Reform Act. --ED. ]
_September 8. 1830. _
ENGLISH REFORMATION.
The fatal error into which the peculiar character of the English
Reformation threw our Church, has borne bitter fruit ever since,--I mean
that of its clinging to court and state, instead of cultivating the people.
The church ought to be a mediator between the people and the government,
between the poor and the rich. As it is, I fear the Church has let the
hearts of the common people be stolen from it. See how differently the
Church of Rome--wiser in its generation--has always acted in this
particular. For a long time past the Church of England seems to me to have
been blighted with prudence, as it is called. I wish with all my heart we
had a little zealous imprudence.
_September 19. 1830. _
DEMOCRACY. ----IDEA OF A STATE. ----CHURCH.
It has never yet been seen, or clearly announced, that democracy, as such,
is no proper element in the constitution of a state. The idea of a state is
undoubtedly a government [Greek: ek ton aristou]--an aristocracy. Democracy
is the healthful life-blood which circulates through the veins and
arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear
externally, and as the mere blood itself.
A state, in idea, is the opposite of a church. A state regards classes, and
not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but
external accidents, as property, birth, &c. But a church does the reverse
of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as
individual persons, allowing no gradation of ranks, but such as greater or
less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A church is,
therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy. The church, so considered, and
the state, exclusively of the church, constitute together the idea of a
state in its largest sense.
_September_ 20. 1830.
GOVERNMENT. ----FRENCH GEND'ARMERIE.
All temporal government must rest on a compromise of interests and abstract
rights. Who would listen to the county of Bedford, if it were to declare
itself disannexed from the British empire, and to set up for itself?
* * * * *
The most desirable thing that can happen to France, with her immense army
of gensd'armes, is, that the service may at first become very irksome to
the men themselves, and ultimately, by not being called into real service,
fall into general ridicule, like our trained bands. The evil in France, and
throughout Europe, seems now especially to be, the subordination of the
legislative power to the direct physical force of the people. The French
legislature was weak enough before the late revolution; now it is
absolutely powerless, and manifestly depends even for its existence on the
will of a popular commander of an irresistible army. There is now in France
a daily tendency to reduce the legislative body to a mere deputation from
the provinces and towns.
September 21. 1830.
PHILOSOPHY OF YOUNG MEN AT THE PRESENT DAY.
I do not know whether I deceive myself, but it seems to me that the young
men, who were my contemporaries, fixed certain principles in their minds,
and followed them out to their legitimate consequences, in a way which I
rarely witness now. No one seems to have any distinct convictions, right or
wrong; the mind is completely at sea, rolling and pitching on the waves of
facts and personal experiences. Mr. ---- is, I suppose, one of the rising
young men of the day; yet he went on talking, the other evening, and making
remarks with great earnestness, some of which were palpably irreconcilable
with each other. He told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute
ground of, principles; to which I said, that unless he had a principle of
selection, he would not have taken notice of those facts upon which he
grounded his principle. You must have a lantern in your hand to give light,
otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you cannot find
them; and if you could, you could not arrange them. "But then," said Mr.
----, "_that_ principle of selection came from facts! "--"To be sure! " I
replied; "but there must have been again an antecedent light to see those
antecedent facts. The relapse may be carried in imagination backwards for
ever,--but go back as you may, you cannot come to a man without a previous
aim or principle. " He then asked me what I had to say to Bacon's induction:
I told him I had a good deal to say, if need were; but that it was perhaps
enough for the occasion to remark, that what he was evidently taking for
the Baconian _in_duction was mere _de_duction--a very different thing. [1]
[Footnote 1:
As far as I can judge, the most complete and masterly thing ever done by
Mr. Coleridge in prose, is the analysis and reconcilement of the Platonic
and Baconian methods of philosophy, contained in the third volume of the
Friend, from p. 176 to 216. No edition of the Novum Organum should ever be
published without a transcript of it. --ED. ]
_September_ 22. 1830.
THUCYDIDES AND TACITUS. ----POETRY. ----MODERN METRE.
The object of Thucydides was to show the ills resulting to Greece from the
separation and conflict of the spirits or elements of democracy and
oligarchy. The object of Tacitus was to demonstrate the desperate
consequences of the loss of liberty on the minds and hearts of men.
* * * * *
A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as
to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write
from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory.
* * * * *
Really the metre of some of the modern poems I have read, bears about the
same relation to metre properly understood, that dumb bells do to music;
both are for exercise, and pretty severe too, I think.
* * * * *
Nothing ever left a stain on that gentle creature's mind, which looked upon
the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, which
shines and takes no pollution. All things are shadows to him, except those
which move his affections.
September 23. 1830.
LOGIC.
There are two kinds of logic: 1. Syllogistic. 2. Criterional. How any one
can by any spinning make out more than ten or a dozen pages about the
first, is inconceivable to me; all those absurd forms of syllogisms are one
half pure sophisms, and the other half mere forms of rhetoric.
All syllogistic logic is--1. _Se_clusion; 2. _In_clusion; 3. _Con_clusion;
which answer to the understanding, the experience, and the reason. The
first says, this _ought_ to be; the second adds, this _is_; and the last
pronounces, this must be so. The criterional logic, or logic of premisses,
is, of course, much the most important; and it has never yet been treated.
* * * * *
The object of rhetoric is persuasion,--of logic, conviction,--of grammar,
significancy. A fourth term is wanting, the rhematic, or logic of
sentences.
_September_ 24. 1830.
VARRO. --SOCRATES. --GREEK PHILOSOPHY. --PLOTINUS. --TERTULLIAN.
What a loss we have had in Varro's mythological and critical works! It is
said that the works of Epicurus are probably amongst the Herculanean
manuscripts. I do not feel much interest about them, because, by the
consent of all antiquity, Lucretius has preserved a complete view of his
system. But I regret the loss of the works of the old Stoics, Zeno and
others, exceedingly.
* * * * *
Socrates, as such, was only a poetical character to Plato, who worked upon
his own ground. The several disciples of Socrates caught some particular
points from him, and made systems of philosophy upon them according to
their own views. Socrates himself had no system.
* * * * *
I hold all claims set up for Egypt having given birth to the Greek
philosophy, to be groundless. It sprang up in Greece itself, and began with
physics only.
Then it took in the idea of a living cause, and made pantheism out of the
two. Socrates introduced ethics, and taught duties; and then, finally,
Plato asserted or re-asserted the idea of a God the maker of the world. The
measure of human philosophy was thus full, when Christianity came to add
what before was wanting--assurance. After this again, the Neo-Platonists
joined theurgy with philosophy, which ultimately degenerated into magic and
mere mysticism.
Plotinus was a man of wonderful ability, and some of the sublimest passages
I ever read are in his works.
I was amused the other day with reading in Tertullian, that spirits or
demons dilate and contract themselves, and wriggle about like worms--
lumbricix similes.
_September_ 26. 1830.
SCOTCH AND ENGLISH LAKES.
The five finest things in Scotland are--1. Edinburgh; 2. The antechamber of
the Fall of Foyers; 3. The view of Loch Lomond from Inch Tavannach, the
highest of the islands; 4. The Trosachs; 5. The view of the Hebrides from a
point, the name of which I forget. But the intervals between the fine
things in Scotland are very dreary;--whereas in Cumberland and Westmoreland
there is a cabinet of beauties,--each thing being beautiful in itself, and
the very passage from one lake, mountain, or valley, to another, is itself
a beautiful thing again. The Scotch lakes are so like one another, from
their great size, that in a picture you are obliged to read their names;
but the English lakes, especially Derwent Water, or rather the whole vale
of Keswick, is so rememberable, that, after having been once seen, no one
ever requires to be told what it is when drawn. This vale is about as large
a basin as Loch Lomond; the latter is covered with water; but in the former
instance, we have two lakes with a charming river to connect them, and
lovely villages at the foot of the mountain, and other habitations, which
give an air of life and cheerfulness to the whole place.
* * * * *
The land imagery of the north of Devon is most delightful.
_September_ 27. 1830.
LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP OPPOSED. --MARRIAGE. --CHARACTERLESSNESS OF WOMEN.
A person once said to me, that he could make nothing of love, except that
it was friendship accidentally combined with desire. Whence I concluded
that he had never been in love. For what shall we say of the feeling which
a man of sensibility has towards his wife with her baby at her breast! How
pure from sensual desire! yet how different from friendship!
Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy,
or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make
up one whole.
Luther has sketched the most beautiful picture of the nature, and ends, and
duties of the wedded life I ever read. St. Paul says it is a great symbol,
not mystery, as we translate it. [1]
[Footnote 1:
Greek: ---- ]
* * * * *
"Most women have no character at all," said Pope[1] and meant it for
satire. Shakspeare, who knew man and woman much better, saw that it, in
fact, was the perfection of woman to be characterless.
Every one wishes a Desdemona or Ophelia for a wife,--creatures who, though
they may not always understand you, do always feel you, and feel with you.
[Footnote 1:
"Nothing so true as what you once let fall--
'Most women have no character at all,'--
Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,
And best distinguish'd by black, brown, and fair. "
_Epist. to a Lady_, v. I. ],
_September_ 28. 1830.
MENTAL ANARCHY.
Why need we talk of a fiery hell? If the will, which is the law of our
nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason,
no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel,
from the anarchy of our powers. It would be conscious madness--a horrid
thought!
October 5. 1830.
EAR AND TASTE FOR MUSIC DIFFERENT. ----ENGLISH LITURGY. ----BELGIAN
REVOLUTION.
In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
* * * * *
An ear for music is a very different thing from a taste for music. I have
no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the
intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad. Naldi, a good
fellow, remarked to me once at a concert, that I did not seem much
interested with a piece of Rossini's which had just been performed. I said,
it sounded to me like nonsense verses. But I could scarcely contain myself
when a thing of Beethoven's followed.
* * * * *
I never distinctly felt the heavenly superiority of the prayers in the
English liturgy, till I had attended some kirks in the country parts of
Scotland, I call these strings of school boys or girls which we meet near
London--walking advertisements.
* * * * *
The Brussels riot--I cannot bring myself to dignify it with a higher name
--is a wretched parody on the last French revolution. Were I King William,
I would banish the Belgians, as Coriolanus banishes the Romans in
Shakspeare. [1]
It is a wicked rebellion without one just cause.
[Footnote 1:
"You common cry of curs!
whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with _your uncertainty! _"
Act iii. sc. 3. ]
_October_ 8. 1830.
GALILEO, NEWTON, KEPLER, BACON.
Galileo was a great genius, and so was Newton; but it would take two or
three Galileos and Newtons to make one Kepler. [1] It is in the order of
Providence, that the inventive, generative, constitutive mind--the Kepler--
should come first; and then that the patient and collective mind--the
Newton--should follow, and elaborate the pregnant queries and illumining
guesses of the former. The laws of the planetary system are, in fact, due
to Kepler. There is not a more glorious achievement of scientific genius
upon record, than Kepler's guesses, prophecies, and ultimate apprehension
of the law[2] of the mean distances of the planets as connected with the
periods of their revolutions round the sun. Gravitation, too, he had fully
conceived; but, because it seemed inconsistent with some received
observations on light, he gave it up, in allegiance, as he says, to Nature.
Yet the idea vexed and haunted his mind; _"Vexat me et lacessit,"_ are his
words, I believe.
We praise Newton's clearness and steadiness. He was clear and steady, no
doubt, whilst working out, by the help of an admirable geometry, the idea
brought forth by another. Newton had his ether, and could not rest in--he
could not conceive--the idea of a law. He thought it a physical thing after
all. As for his chronology, I believe, those who are most competent to
judge, rely on it less and less every day. His lucubrations on Daniel and
the Revelations seem to me little less than mere raving.
[Footnote 1:
Galileo Galilei was born at Pisa, on the 15th of February, 1564. John
Kepler was born at Weil, in the duchy of Wirtemberg, on the 2lst of
December, 1571. --ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
Namely, that the squares of their times vary as the cubes of their
distances,--ED. ]
* * * * *
Personal experiment is necessary, in order to correct our own observation
of the experiments which Nature herself makes for us--I mean, the phenomena
of the universe. But then observation is, in turn, wanted to direct and
substantiate the course of experiment. Experiments alone cannot advance
knowledge, without observation; they amuse for a time, and then pass off
the scene and leave no trace behind them.
* * * * *
Bacon, when like himself--for no man was ever more inconsistent--says,
_"Prudens qiuestio--dimidium scientiae est. "_
_October_ 20. 1830.
THE REFORMATION.
At the Reformation, the first reformers were beset with an almost morbid
anxiety not to be considered heretical in point of doctrine. They knew that
the Romanists were on the watch to fasten the brand of heresy upon them
whenever a fair pretext could be found; and I have no doubt it was the
excess of this fear which at once led to the burning of Servetus, and also
to the thanks offered by all the Protestant churches, to Calvin and the
Church of Geneva, for burning him.
_November_ 21. 1830.
HOUSE OF COMMONS.
---- never makes a figure in quietude. He astounds the vulgar with a
certain enormity of exertion; he takes an acre of canvass, on which he
scrawls every thing. He thinks aloud; every thing in his mind, good, bad,
or indifferent, out it comes; he is like the Newgate gutter, flowing with
garbage, dead dogs, and mud. He is preeminently a man of many thoughts,
with no ideas: hence he is always so lengthy, because he must go through
every thing to see any thing.
* * * * *
It is a melancholy thing to live when there is no vision in the land. Where
are our statesmen to meet this emergency? I see no reformer who asks
himself the question, _What_ is it that I propose to myself to effect in
the result?
Is the House of Commons to be re-constructed on the principle of a
representation of interests, or of a delegation of men? If on the former,
we may, perhaps, see our way; if on the latter, you can never, in reason,
stop short of universal suffrage; and in that case, I am sure that women
have as good a right to vote as men. [1]
[Footnote 1:
In Mr. Coleridge's masterly analysis and confutation of the physiocratic
system of the early French revolutionists, in the Friend, he has the
following passage in the nature of a _reductio ad absurdum_. "Rousseau,
indeed, asserts that there is an inalienable sovereignty inherent in every
human being possessed of reason; and from this the framers of the
Constitution of 1791 deduce, that the people itself is its own sole
rightful legislator, and at most dare only recede so far from its right as
to delegate to chosen deputies the power of representing and declaring the
general will. But this is wholly without proof; for it has been already
fully shown, that, according to the principle out of which this consequence
is attempted to be drawn, it is not the actual man, but the abstract reason
alone, that is the sovereign and rightful lawgiver. The confusion of two
things so different is so gross an error, that the Constituent Assembly
could scarce proceed a step in their declaration of rights, without some
glaring inconsistency. Children are excluded from all political power; are
they not human beings in whom the faculty of reason resides? Yes! but|in
_them_ the faculty is not yet adequately developed. But are not gross
ignorance, inveterate superstition, and the habitual tyranny of passion and
sensuality, equally preventives of the developement, equally impediments to
the rightful exercise, of the reason, as childhood and early youth? Who
would not rely on the judgment of a well-educated English lad, bred in a
virtuous and enlightened family, in preference to that of a brutal Russian,
who believes that he can scourge his wooden idol into good humour, or
attributes to himself the merit of perpetual prayer, when he has fastened
the petitions, which his priest has written for him, on the wings of a
windmill? Again: women are likewise excluded; a full half, and that
assuredly the most innocent, the most amiable half, of the whole human race
is excluded, and this too by a Constitution which boasts to have no other
foundations but those of universal reason! Is reason, then, an affair of
sex? No! but women are commonly in a state of dependence, and are not
likely to exercise their reason with freedom. Well! and does not this
ground of exclusion apply with equal or greater force to the poor, to the
infirm, to men in embarrassed circumstances, to all, in short, whose
maintenance, be it scanty, or be it ample, depends on the will of others?
How far are we to go? Where must we stop? What classes should we admit?
Whom must we disfranchise? The objects concerning whom we are to determine
these questions, are all human beings, and differenced from each other by
_degrees_ only, these degrees, too, oftentimes changing. Yet the principle
on which the whole system rests, is that reason is not susceptible of
degree. Nothing, therefore, which subsists wholly in degrees, the changes
of which do not obey any necessary law, can be the object of pure science,
or determinate by mere reason,"--Vol. i. p. 341, ED. ]
_March_ 20. 1831.
GOVERNMENT. --EARL GREY.
Government is not founded on property, taken merely as such, in the
abstract; it is founded on _unequal_ property; the inequality is an
essential term in the position. The phrases--higher, middle, and lower
classes, with reference to this point of representation--are delusive; no
such divisions as classes actually exist in society. There is an
indissoluble blending and interfusion of persons from top to bottom; and no
man can trace a line of separation through them, except such a confessedly
unmeaning and unjustifiable line of political empiricism as 10_l_.
householders. I cannot discover a ray of principle in the government plan,
--not a hint of the effect of the change upon the balance of the estates of
the realm,--not a remark on the nature of the constitution of England, and
the character of the property of so many millions of its inhabitants. Half
the wealth of this country is purely artificial,--existing only in and on
the credit given to it by the integrity and honesty of the nation. This
property appears, in many instances, a heavy burthen to the numerical
majority of the people, and they believe that it causes all their distress:
and they are now to have the maintenance of this property committed to
their good faith--the lamb to the wolves!
Necker, you remember, asked the people to come and help him against the
aristocracy. The people came fast enough at his bidding; but, somehow or
other, they would not go away again when they had done their work. I hope
Lord Grey will not see himself or his friends in the woeful case of the
conjuror, who, with infinite zeal and pains, called up the devils to do
something for him. They came at the word, thronging about him, grinning,
and howling, and dancing, and whisking their long tails in diabolic glee;
but when they asked him what he wanted of them, the poor wretch, frightened
out his of wits, could only stammer forth,--"I pray you, my friends, be
gone down again! " At which the devils, with one voice, replied,--
"Yes! yes! we'll go down! we'll go down! --
But we'll take _you_ with us to swim or to drown! "[1]
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge must have been thinking of that "very pithy and profitable"
ballad by the Laureate, wherein is shown how a young man "would read
unlawful books, and how he was punished:"--
"The _young_ man, he began to read
He knew not what, but he would proceed,
When there was heard a sound at the door,
Which as he read on grew more and more.
"And more and more the knocking grew,
The young man knew not what to do:
But trembling in fear he sat within,
_Till the door was broke, and the devil came in_.
"'What would'st thou with me? ' the wicked one cried;
But not a word the young man replied;
Every hair on his head was standing upright,
And his limbs like a palsy shook with affright.
"'What would'st thou with me? ' cried the author of ill;
But the wretched young man was silent still," &c.
The catastrophe is very terrible, and the moral, though addressed by the
poet to young men only, is quite as applicable to old men, as the times
show.
"Henceforth let all young men take heed
How in a conjuror's books they read! "
_Southey's Minor Poems_, vol. iii. p. 92. --ED. ]
* * * * *
_June_ 25. 1831.
GOVERNMENT. --POPULAR REPRESENTATION.
The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the
government of a nation, are,--1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to
acquirers; and; 3. Hope to all.
* * * * *
A nation is the unity of a people. King and parliament are the unity made
visible. The king and the peers are as integral portions of this manifested
unity as the commons. [1]
In that imperfect state of society in which our system of representation
began, the interests of the country were pretty exactly commensurate with
its municipal divisions. The counties, the towns, and the seaports,
accurately enough represented the only interests then existing; that is
say,--the landed, the shop-keeping or manufacturing, and the mercantile.
But for a century past, at least, this division has become notoriously
imperfect, some of the most vital interests of the empire being now totally
unconnected with any English localities. Yet now, when the evil and the
want are known, we are to abandon the accommodations which the necessity of
the case had worked out for itself, and begin again with a rigidly
territorial plan of representation! The miserable tendency of all is to
destroy our nationality, which consists, in a principal degree, in our
representative government, and to convert it into a degrading delegation of
the populace. There is no unity for a people but in a representation of
national interests; a delegation from the passions or wishes of the
individuals themselves is a rope of sand. Undoubtedly it is a great evil,
that there should be such an evident discrepancy between the law and the
practice of the constitution in the matter of the representation. Such a
direct, yet clandestine, contravention of solemn resolutions and
established laws is immoral, and greatly injurious to the cause of legal
loyalty and general subordination in the minds of the people. But then a
statesman should consider that these very contraventions of law in practice
point out to him the places in the body politic which need a remodelling of
the law. You acknowledge a certain necessity for indirect representation in
the present day, and that such representation has been instinctively
obtained by means contrary to law; why then do you not approximate the
useless law to the useful practice, instead of abandoning both law and
practice for a completely new system of your own?
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge was very fond of quoting George Withers's fine lines:--
"Let not your king and parliament in one,
Much less apart, mistake themselves for that
Which is most worthy to be thought upon:
Nor think _they_ are, essentially, The STATE.
Let them not fancy that th' authority
And privileges upon them bestown,
Conferr'd are to set up a majesty,
A power, or a glory, of their own!
But let them know, 't was for a deeper life,
Which they but _represent_--
That there's on earth a yet auguster thing,
Veil'd though it be, than parliament and king! "--ED. ]
* * * * *
The malignant duplicity and unprincipled tergiversations of the specific
Whig newspapers are to me detestable. I prefer the open endeavours of those
publications which seek to destroy the church, and introduce a republic in
effect: there is a sort of honesty in _that_ which I approve, though I
would with joy lay down my life to save my country from the consummation
which is so evidently desired by that section of the periodical press.
_June_ 26. 1831.
NAPIER. --BUONAPARTE. --SOUTHEY.
I have been exceedingly impressed with the evil precedent of Colonel
Napier's History of the Peninsular War. It is a specimen of the true French
military school; not a thought for the justice of the war,--not a
consideration of the damnable and damning iniquity of the French invasion.
All is looked at as a mere game of exquisite skill, and the praise is
regularly awarded to the most successful player. How perfectly ridiculous
is the prostration of Napier's mind, apparently a powerful one, before the
name of Buonaparte! I declare I know no book more likely to undermine the
national sense of right and wrong in matters of foreign interference than
this work of Napier's.
If A. has a hundred means of doing a certain thing, and B. has only one or
two, is it very wonderful, or does it argue very transcendant superiority,
if A. surpasses B. ? Buonaparte was the child of circumstances, which he
neither originated nor controlled. He had no chance of preserving his power
but by continual warfare. No thought of a wise tranquillization of the
shaken elements of France seems ever to have passed through his mind; and I
believe that at no part of his reign could be have survived one year's
continued peace. He never had but one obstacle to contend with--physical
force; commonly the least difficult enemy a general, subject to courts-
martial and courts of conscience, has to overcome.
* * * * *
Southey's History[1] is on the right side, and starts from the right point;
but he is personally fond of the Spaniards, and in bringing forward their
nationality in the prominent manner it deserves, he does not, in my
judgment, state with sufficient clearness the truth, that the nationality
of the Spaniards was not founded on any just ground of good government or
wise laws, but was, in fact, very little more than a rooted antipathy to
all strangers as such.
In this sense every thing is national in Spain. Even their so called
Catholic religion is exclusively national in a genuine Spaniard's mind; he
does not regard the religious professions of the Frenchman or Italian at
all in the same light with his own.
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge said that the conclusion of this great work was the finest
specimen of historic eulogy he had ever read in English;--that it was more
than a campaign to the duke's fame. --ED. ]
_July_ 7. 1831.
PATRONAGE OF THE FINE ARTS. --OLD WOMEN.
The darkest despotisms on the Continent have done more for the growth and
elevation of the fine arts than the English government. A great musical
composer in Germany and Italy is a great man in society, and a real dignity
and rank are universally conceded to him. So it is with a sculptor, or
painter, or architect. Without this sort of encouragement and patronage
such arts as music and painting will never come into great eminence. In
this country there is no general reverence for the fine arts; and the
sordid spirit of a money-amassing philosophy would meet any proposition for
the fostering of art, in a genial and extended sense, with the commercial
maxim,--_Laissez faire_. Paganini, indeed, will make a fortune, because he
can actually sell the tones of his fiddle at so much a scrape; but Mozart
himself might have languished in a garret for any thing that would have
been done for him here.
* * * * *
There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I
knew were to be divided:--1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That
old witch.
_July_ 24. 1831.
PICTURES. [1]
Observe the remarkable difference between Claude and Teniers in their power
of painting vacant space. Claude makes his whole landscape a _plenum:_ the
air is quite as substantial as any other part of the scene. Hence there are
no true distances, and every thing presses at once and equally upon the
eye. There is something close and almost suffocating in the atmosphere of
some of Claude's sunsets. Never did any one paint air, the thin air, the
absolutely apparent vacancy between object and object, so admirably as
Teniers. That picture of the Archers[2] exemplifies this excellence. See
the distances between those ugly louts! how perfectly true to the fact!
But oh! what a wonderful picture is that Triumph of Silenus! [3] It is the
very revelry of hell. Every evil passion is there that could in any way be
forced into juxtaposition with joyance. Mark the lust, and, hard by, the
hate. Every part is pregnant with libidinous nature without one spark of
the grace of Heaven. The animal is triumphing--not over, but--in the
absence, in the non-existence, of the spiritual part of man. I could fancy
that Rubens had seen in a vision--
All the souls that damned be
Leap up at once in anarchy,
Clap their hands, and dance for glee!
That landscape[4] on the other side is only less magnificent than dear Sir
George Beaumont's, now in the National Gallery. It has the same charm.
Rubens does not take for his subjects grand or novel conformations of
objects; he has, you see, no precipices, no forests, no frowning castles,--
nothing that a poet would take at all times, and a painter take in these
times. No; he gets some little ponds, old tumble-down cottages, that
ruinous chateau, two or three peasants, a hay-rick, and other such humble
images, which looked at in and by themselves convey no pleasure and excite
no surprise; but he--and he Peter Paul Rubens alone--handles these every-
day ingredients of all common landscapes as they are handled in nature; he
throws them into a vast and magnificent whole, consisting of heaven and
earth and all things therein. He extracts the latent poetry out of these
common objects,--that poetry and harmony which every man of genius
perceives in the face of nature, and which many men of no genius are taught
to perceive and feel after examining such a picture as this. In other
landscape painters the scene is confined and as it were imprisoned;--in
Rubens the landscape dies a natural death; it fades away into the apparent
infinity of space.
So long as Rubens confines himself to space and outward figure--to the mere
animal man with animal passions--he is, I may say, a god amongst painters.
His satyrs, Silenuses, lions, tigers, and dogs, are almost godlike; but the
moment he attempts any thing involving or presuming the spiritual, his gods
and goddesses, his nymphs and heroes, become beasts, absolute, unmitigated
beasts.
[Footnote 1:
All the following remarks in this section were made at the exhibition of
ancient masters at the British Gallery in Pall Mall. The recollection of
those two hours has made the rooms of that Institution a melancholy place
for me. Mr.
some sheer quackery; and ventures to say that he has actually discovered a
different material in the different parts or organs of the brain, so that
he can tell a piece of benevolence from a bit of destructiveness, and so
forth. Observe, also, that it is constantly found, that so far from there
being a concavity in the interior surface of the cranium answering to the
convexity apparent on the exterior--the interior is convex too. Dr. Baillie
thought there was something in the system, because the notion of the brain
being an extendible net helped to explain those cases where the intellect
remained after the solid substance of the brain was dissolved in water. [1]
That a greater or less development of the forepart of the head is generally
coincidedent with more or less of reasoning power, is certain. The line
across the forehead, also, denoting musical power, is very common.
[Footnote 1:
"The very marked, _positive_ as well as comparative, magnitude and
prominence of the bump, entitled _benevolence_ (see Spurzheim's _map of the
human skull_) on the head of the late Mr. John Thurtell, has woefully
unsettled the faith of many ardent phrenologists, and strengthened the
previous doubts of a still greater number into utter disbelief. On _my_
mind this fact (for a _fact_ it is) produced the directly contrary effect;
and inclined me to suspect, for the first time, that there may be some
truth in the Spurzheimian scheme. Whether future craniologists may not see
cause to _new-name_ this and one or two others of these convex gnomons, is
quite a different question. At present, and according to the present use of
words, any such change would be premature; and we must be content to say,
that Mr. Thurtell's benevolence was insufficiently modified by the
unprotrusive and unindicated convolutes of the brain, that secrete honesty
and common sense. The organ of destructiveness was indirectly _potentiated_
by the absence or imperfect development of the glands of reason and
conscience in this '_unfortunate gentleman. '"--_Aids to Reflection_, p.
143. n. ]
_August_ 20. 1830.
FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1830. --CAPTAIN R. AND THE AMERICANS.
The French must have greatly improved under the influence of a free and
regular government (for such it, in general, has been since the
restoration), to have conducted themselves with so much moderation in
success as they seem to have done, and to be disposed to do.
* * * * *
I must say I cannot see much in Captain B. Hall's account of the Americans,
but weaknesses--some of which make me like the Yankees all the better. How
much more amiable is the American fidgettiness and anxiety about the
opinion of other nations, and especially of the English, than the
sentiments of the rest of the world. [1]
As to what Captain Hall says about the English loyalty to the person of the
King--I can only say, I feel none of it. I respect the man while, and only
while, the king is translucent through him: I reverence the glass case for
the Saint's sake within; except for that it is to me mere glazier's work,--
putty, and glass, and wood.
[Footnote 1:
"There exists in England a _gentlemanly_ character, a _gentlemanly_
feeling, very different even from that which is most like it,--the
character of a well-born Spaniard, and unexampled in the rest of Europe.
This feeling _originated_ in the fortunate circumstance, that the titles of
our English nobility follow the law of their property, and are inherited by
the eldest sons only. From this source, under the influences of our
constitution and of our astonishing trade, it has diffused itself in
different modifications through the whole country. The uniformity of our
dress among all classes above that of the day labourer, while it has
authorized all ranks to assume the appearance of gentlemen, has at the same
time inspired the wish to conform their manners, and still more their
ordinary actions in social intercourse, to their notions of the gentlemanly
the most commonly received attribute of which character is a certain
generosity in trifles. On the other hand, the encroachments of the lower
classes on the higher, occasioned and favoured by this resemblance in
exteriors, by this absence of any cognizable marks of distinction, have
rendered each class more reserved and jealous in their general communion;
and, far more than our climate or natural temper, have caused that
haughtiness and reserve in our outward demeanour, which is so generally
complained of among foreigners. Far be it from me to depreciate the value
of this gentlemanly feeling: I respect it under all its forms and
varieties, from the House of Commons * to the gentleman in the one-shilling
gallery. It is always the ornament of virtue, and oftentimes a support; but
it is a wretched substitute for it. Its _worth_, as a moral good, is by no
means in proportion to its _value_ as a social advantage. These
observations are not irrelevant: for to the want of reflection that this
diffusion of gentlemanly feeling among us is not the growth of our moral
excellence, but the effect of various accidental advantages peculiar to
England; to our not considering that it is unreasonable and uncharitable to
expect the same consequences, where the same causes have not existed to
produce them; and lastly, to our prorieness to regard the absence of this
character (which, as I have before said, does, for the greater part, and in
the common apprehension, consist in a certain frankness and generosity in
the detail of action) as decisive against the sum total of personal or
national worth; we must, I am convinced, attribute a large portion of that
conduct, which in many instances has left the inhabitants of countries
conquered or appropriated by Great Britain doubtful whether the various
solid advantages which they have derived from our protection and just
government were not bought dearly by the wounds inflicted on their feelings
and prejudices, by the contemptuous and insolent demeanour of the English,
as individuals. "--_Friend_, vol. iii. p, 322.
This was written long before the Reform Act. --ED. ]
_September 8. 1830. _
ENGLISH REFORMATION.
The fatal error into which the peculiar character of the English
Reformation threw our Church, has borne bitter fruit ever since,--I mean
that of its clinging to court and state, instead of cultivating the people.
The church ought to be a mediator between the people and the government,
between the poor and the rich. As it is, I fear the Church has let the
hearts of the common people be stolen from it. See how differently the
Church of Rome--wiser in its generation--has always acted in this
particular. For a long time past the Church of England seems to me to have
been blighted with prudence, as it is called. I wish with all my heart we
had a little zealous imprudence.
_September 19. 1830. _
DEMOCRACY. ----IDEA OF A STATE. ----CHURCH.
It has never yet been seen, or clearly announced, that democracy, as such,
is no proper element in the constitution of a state. The idea of a state is
undoubtedly a government [Greek: ek ton aristou]--an aristocracy. Democracy
is the healthful life-blood which circulates through the veins and
arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear
externally, and as the mere blood itself.
A state, in idea, is the opposite of a church. A state regards classes, and
not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but
external accidents, as property, birth, &c. But a church does the reverse
of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as
individual persons, allowing no gradation of ranks, but such as greater or
less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A church is,
therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy. The church, so considered, and
the state, exclusively of the church, constitute together the idea of a
state in its largest sense.
_September_ 20. 1830.
GOVERNMENT. ----FRENCH GEND'ARMERIE.
All temporal government must rest on a compromise of interests and abstract
rights. Who would listen to the county of Bedford, if it were to declare
itself disannexed from the British empire, and to set up for itself?
* * * * *
The most desirable thing that can happen to France, with her immense army
of gensd'armes, is, that the service may at first become very irksome to
the men themselves, and ultimately, by not being called into real service,
fall into general ridicule, like our trained bands. The evil in France, and
throughout Europe, seems now especially to be, the subordination of the
legislative power to the direct physical force of the people. The French
legislature was weak enough before the late revolution; now it is
absolutely powerless, and manifestly depends even for its existence on the
will of a popular commander of an irresistible army. There is now in France
a daily tendency to reduce the legislative body to a mere deputation from
the provinces and towns.
September 21. 1830.
PHILOSOPHY OF YOUNG MEN AT THE PRESENT DAY.
I do not know whether I deceive myself, but it seems to me that the young
men, who were my contemporaries, fixed certain principles in their minds,
and followed them out to their legitimate consequences, in a way which I
rarely witness now. No one seems to have any distinct convictions, right or
wrong; the mind is completely at sea, rolling and pitching on the waves of
facts and personal experiences. Mr. ---- is, I suppose, one of the rising
young men of the day; yet he went on talking, the other evening, and making
remarks with great earnestness, some of which were palpably irreconcilable
with each other. He told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute
ground of, principles; to which I said, that unless he had a principle of
selection, he would not have taken notice of those facts upon which he
grounded his principle. You must have a lantern in your hand to give light,
otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you cannot find
them; and if you could, you could not arrange them. "But then," said Mr.
----, "_that_ principle of selection came from facts! "--"To be sure! " I
replied; "but there must have been again an antecedent light to see those
antecedent facts. The relapse may be carried in imagination backwards for
ever,--but go back as you may, you cannot come to a man without a previous
aim or principle. " He then asked me what I had to say to Bacon's induction:
I told him I had a good deal to say, if need were; but that it was perhaps
enough for the occasion to remark, that what he was evidently taking for
the Baconian _in_duction was mere _de_duction--a very different thing. [1]
[Footnote 1:
As far as I can judge, the most complete and masterly thing ever done by
Mr. Coleridge in prose, is the analysis and reconcilement of the Platonic
and Baconian methods of philosophy, contained in the third volume of the
Friend, from p. 176 to 216. No edition of the Novum Organum should ever be
published without a transcript of it. --ED. ]
_September_ 22. 1830.
THUCYDIDES AND TACITUS. ----POETRY. ----MODERN METRE.
The object of Thucydides was to show the ills resulting to Greece from the
separation and conflict of the spirits or elements of democracy and
oligarchy. The object of Tacitus was to demonstrate the desperate
consequences of the loss of liberty on the minds and hearts of men.
* * * * *
A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as
to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write
from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory.
* * * * *
Really the metre of some of the modern poems I have read, bears about the
same relation to metre properly understood, that dumb bells do to music;
both are for exercise, and pretty severe too, I think.
* * * * *
Nothing ever left a stain on that gentle creature's mind, which looked upon
the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, which
shines and takes no pollution. All things are shadows to him, except those
which move his affections.
September 23. 1830.
LOGIC.
There are two kinds of logic: 1. Syllogistic. 2. Criterional. How any one
can by any spinning make out more than ten or a dozen pages about the
first, is inconceivable to me; all those absurd forms of syllogisms are one
half pure sophisms, and the other half mere forms of rhetoric.
All syllogistic logic is--1. _Se_clusion; 2. _In_clusion; 3. _Con_clusion;
which answer to the understanding, the experience, and the reason. The
first says, this _ought_ to be; the second adds, this _is_; and the last
pronounces, this must be so. The criterional logic, or logic of premisses,
is, of course, much the most important; and it has never yet been treated.
* * * * *
The object of rhetoric is persuasion,--of logic, conviction,--of grammar,
significancy. A fourth term is wanting, the rhematic, or logic of
sentences.
_September_ 24. 1830.
VARRO. --SOCRATES. --GREEK PHILOSOPHY. --PLOTINUS. --TERTULLIAN.
What a loss we have had in Varro's mythological and critical works! It is
said that the works of Epicurus are probably amongst the Herculanean
manuscripts. I do not feel much interest about them, because, by the
consent of all antiquity, Lucretius has preserved a complete view of his
system. But I regret the loss of the works of the old Stoics, Zeno and
others, exceedingly.
* * * * *
Socrates, as such, was only a poetical character to Plato, who worked upon
his own ground. The several disciples of Socrates caught some particular
points from him, and made systems of philosophy upon them according to
their own views. Socrates himself had no system.
* * * * *
I hold all claims set up for Egypt having given birth to the Greek
philosophy, to be groundless. It sprang up in Greece itself, and began with
physics only.
Then it took in the idea of a living cause, and made pantheism out of the
two. Socrates introduced ethics, and taught duties; and then, finally,
Plato asserted or re-asserted the idea of a God the maker of the world. The
measure of human philosophy was thus full, when Christianity came to add
what before was wanting--assurance. After this again, the Neo-Platonists
joined theurgy with philosophy, which ultimately degenerated into magic and
mere mysticism.
Plotinus was a man of wonderful ability, and some of the sublimest passages
I ever read are in his works.
I was amused the other day with reading in Tertullian, that spirits or
demons dilate and contract themselves, and wriggle about like worms--
lumbricix similes.
_September_ 26. 1830.
SCOTCH AND ENGLISH LAKES.
The five finest things in Scotland are--1. Edinburgh; 2. The antechamber of
the Fall of Foyers; 3. The view of Loch Lomond from Inch Tavannach, the
highest of the islands; 4. The Trosachs; 5. The view of the Hebrides from a
point, the name of which I forget. But the intervals between the fine
things in Scotland are very dreary;--whereas in Cumberland and Westmoreland
there is a cabinet of beauties,--each thing being beautiful in itself, and
the very passage from one lake, mountain, or valley, to another, is itself
a beautiful thing again. The Scotch lakes are so like one another, from
their great size, that in a picture you are obliged to read their names;
but the English lakes, especially Derwent Water, or rather the whole vale
of Keswick, is so rememberable, that, after having been once seen, no one
ever requires to be told what it is when drawn. This vale is about as large
a basin as Loch Lomond; the latter is covered with water; but in the former
instance, we have two lakes with a charming river to connect them, and
lovely villages at the foot of the mountain, and other habitations, which
give an air of life and cheerfulness to the whole place.
* * * * *
The land imagery of the north of Devon is most delightful.
_September_ 27. 1830.
LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP OPPOSED. --MARRIAGE. --CHARACTERLESSNESS OF WOMEN.
A person once said to me, that he could make nothing of love, except that
it was friendship accidentally combined with desire. Whence I concluded
that he had never been in love. For what shall we say of the feeling which
a man of sensibility has towards his wife with her baby at her breast! How
pure from sensual desire! yet how different from friendship!
Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy,
or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make
up one whole.
Luther has sketched the most beautiful picture of the nature, and ends, and
duties of the wedded life I ever read. St. Paul says it is a great symbol,
not mystery, as we translate it. [1]
[Footnote 1:
Greek: ---- ]
* * * * *
"Most women have no character at all," said Pope[1] and meant it for
satire. Shakspeare, who knew man and woman much better, saw that it, in
fact, was the perfection of woman to be characterless.
Every one wishes a Desdemona or Ophelia for a wife,--creatures who, though
they may not always understand you, do always feel you, and feel with you.
[Footnote 1:
"Nothing so true as what you once let fall--
'Most women have no character at all,'--
Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,
And best distinguish'd by black, brown, and fair. "
_Epist. to a Lady_, v. I. ],
_September_ 28. 1830.
MENTAL ANARCHY.
Why need we talk of a fiery hell? If the will, which is the law of our
nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason,
no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel,
from the anarchy of our powers. It would be conscious madness--a horrid
thought!
October 5. 1830.
EAR AND TASTE FOR MUSIC DIFFERENT. ----ENGLISH LITURGY. ----BELGIAN
REVOLUTION.
In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
* * * * *
An ear for music is a very different thing from a taste for music. I have
no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the
intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad. Naldi, a good
fellow, remarked to me once at a concert, that I did not seem much
interested with a piece of Rossini's which had just been performed. I said,
it sounded to me like nonsense verses. But I could scarcely contain myself
when a thing of Beethoven's followed.
* * * * *
I never distinctly felt the heavenly superiority of the prayers in the
English liturgy, till I had attended some kirks in the country parts of
Scotland, I call these strings of school boys or girls which we meet near
London--walking advertisements.
* * * * *
The Brussels riot--I cannot bring myself to dignify it with a higher name
--is a wretched parody on the last French revolution. Were I King William,
I would banish the Belgians, as Coriolanus banishes the Romans in
Shakspeare. [1]
It is a wicked rebellion without one just cause.
[Footnote 1:
"You common cry of curs!
whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with _your uncertainty! _"
Act iii. sc. 3. ]
_October_ 8. 1830.
GALILEO, NEWTON, KEPLER, BACON.
Galileo was a great genius, and so was Newton; but it would take two or
three Galileos and Newtons to make one Kepler. [1] It is in the order of
Providence, that the inventive, generative, constitutive mind--the Kepler--
should come first; and then that the patient and collective mind--the
Newton--should follow, and elaborate the pregnant queries and illumining
guesses of the former. The laws of the planetary system are, in fact, due
to Kepler. There is not a more glorious achievement of scientific genius
upon record, than Kepler's guesses, prophecies, and ultimate apprehension
of the law[2] of the mean distances of the planets as connected with the
periods of their revolutions round the sun. Gravitation, too, he had fully
conceived; but, because it seemed inconsistent with some received
observations on light, he gave it up, in allegiance, as he says, to Nature.
Yet the idea vexed and haunted his mind; _"Vexat me et lacessit,"_ are his
words, I believe.
We praise Newton's clearness and steadiness. He was clear and steady, no
doubt, whilst working out, by the help of an admirable geometry, the idea
brought forth by another. Newton had his ether, and could not rest in--he
could not conceive--the idea of a law. He thought it a physical thing after
all. As for his chronology, I believe, those who are most competent to
judge, rely on it less and less every day. His lucubrations on Daniel and
the Revelations seem to me little less than mere raving.
[Footnote 1:
Galileo Galilei was born at Pisa, on the 15th of February, 1564. John
Kepler was born at Weil, in the duchy of Wirtemberg, on the 2lst of
December, 1571. --ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
Namely, that the squares of their times vary as the cubes of their
distances,--ED. ]
* * * * *
Personal experiment is necessary, in order to correct our own observation
of the experiments which Nature herself makes for us--I mean, the phenomena
of the universe. But then observation is, in turn, wanted to direct and
substantiate the course of experiment. Experiments alone cannot advance
knowledge, without observation; they amuse for a time, and then pass off
the scene and leave no trace behind them.
* * * * *
Bacon, when like himself--for no man was ever more inconsistent--says,
_"Prudens qiuestio--dimidium scientiae est. "_
_October_ 20. 1830.
THE REFORMATION.
At the Reformation, the first reformers were beset with an almost morbid
anxiety not to be considered heretical in point of doctrine. They knew that
the Romanists were on the watch to fasten the brand of heresy upon them
whenever a fair pretext could be found; and I have no doubt it was the
excess of this fear which at once led to the burning of Servetus, and also
to the thanks offered by all the Protestant churches, to Calvin and the
Church of Geneva, for burning him.
_November_ 21. 1830.
HOUSE OF COMMONS.
---- never makes a figure in quietude. He astounds the vulgar with a
certain enormity of exertion; he takes an acre of canvass, on which he
scrawls every thing. He thinks aloud; every thing in his mind, good, bad,
or indifferent, out it comes; he is like the Newgate gutter, flowing with
garbage, dead dogs, and mud. He is preeminently a man of many thoughts,
with no ideas: hence he is always so lengthy, because he must go through
every thing to see any thing.
* * * * *
It is a melancholy thing to live when there is no vision in the land. Where
are our statesmen to meet this emergency? I see no reformer who asks
himself the question, _What_ is it that I propose to myself to effect in
the result?
Is the House of Commons to be re-constructed on the principle of a
representation of interests, or of a delegation of men? If on the former,
we may, perhaps, see our way; if on the latter, you can never, in reason,
stop short of universal suffrage; and in that case, I am sure that women
have as good a right to vote as men. [1]
[Footnote 1:
In Mr. Coleridge's masterly analysis and confutation of the physiocratic
system of the early French revolutionists, in the Friend, he has the
following passage in the nature of a _reductio ad absurdum_. "Rousseau,
indeed, asserts that there is an inalienable sovereignty inherent in every
human being possessed of reason; and from this the framers of the
Constitution of 1791 deduce, that the people itself is its own sole
rightful legislator, and at most dare only recede so far from its right as
to delegate to chosen deputies the power of representing and declaring the
general will. But this is wholly without proof; for it has been already
fully shown, that, according to the principle out of which this consequence
is attempted to be drawn, it is not the actual man, but the abstract reason
alone, that is the sovereign and rightful lawgiver. The confusion of two
things so different is so gross an error, that the Constituent Assembly
could scarce proceed a step in their declaration of rights, without some
glaring inconsistency. Children are excluded from all political power; are
they not human beings in whom the faculty of reason resides? Yes! but|in
_them_ the faculty is not yet adequately developed. But are not gross
ignorance, inveterate superstition, and the habitual tyranny of passion and
sensuality, equally preventives of the developement, equally impediments to
the rightful exercise, of the reason, as childhood and early youth? Who
would not rely on the judgment of a well-educated English lad, bred in a
virtuous and enlightened family, in preference to that of a brutal Russian,
who believes that he can scourge his wooden idol into good humour, or
attributes to himself the merit of perpetual prayer, when he has fastened
the petitions, which his priest has written for him, on the wings of a
windmill? Again: women are likewise excluded; a full half, and that
assuredly the most innocent, the most amiable half, of the whole human race
is excluded, and this too by a Constitution which boasts to have no other
foundations but those of universal reason! Is reason, then, an affair of
sex? No! but women are commonly in a state of dependence, and are not
likely to exercise their reason with freedom. Well! and does not this
ground of exclusion apply with equal or greater force to the poor, to the
infirm, to men in embarrassed circumstances, to all, in short, whose
maintenance, be it scanty, or be it ample, depends on the will of others?
How far are we to go? Where must we stop? What classes should we admit?
Whom must we disfranchise? The objects concerning whom we are to determine
these questions, are all human beings, and differenced from each other by
_degrees_ only, these degrees, too, oftentimes changing. Yet the principle
on which the whole system rests, is that reason is not susceptible of
degree. Nothing, therefore, which subsists wholly in degrees, the changes
of which do not obey any necessary law, can be the object of pure science,
or determinate by mere reason,"--Vol. i. p. 341, ED. ]
_March_ 20. 1831.
GOVERNMENT. --EARL GREY.
Government is not founded on property, taken merely as such, in the
abstract; it is founded on _unequal_ property; the inequality is an
essential term in the position. The phrases--higher, middle, and lower
classes, with reference to this point of representation--are delusive; no
such divisions as classes actually exist in society. There is an
indissoluble blending and interfusion of persons from top to bottom; and no
man can trace a line of separation through them, except such a confessedly
unmeaning and unjustifiable line of political empiricism as 10_l_.
householders. I cannot discover a ray of principle in the government plan,
--not a hint of the effect of the change upon the balance of the estates of
the realm,--not a remark on the nature of the constitution of England, and
the character of the property of so many millions of its inhabitants. Half
the wealth of this country is purely artificial,--existing only in and on
the credit given to it by the integrity and honesty of the nation. This
property appears, in many instances, a heavy burthen to the numerical
majority of the people, and they believe that it causes all their distress:
and they are now to have the maintenance of this property committed to
their good faith--the lamb to the wolves!
Necker, you remember, asked the people to come and help him against the
aristocracy. The people came fast enough at his bidding; but, somehow or
other, they would not go away again when they had done their work. I hope
Lord Grey will not see himself or his friends in the woeful case of the
conjuror, who, with infinite zeal and pains, called up the devils to do
something for him. They came at the word, thronging about him, grinning,
and howling, and dancing, and whisking their long tails in diabolic glee;
but when they asked him what he wanted of them, the poor wretch, frightened
out his of wits, could only stammer forth,--"I pray you, my friends, be
gone down again! " At which the devils, with one voice, replied,--
"Yes! yes! we'll go down! we'll go down! --
But we'll take _you_ with us to swim or to drown! "[1]
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge must have been thinking of that "very pithy and profitable"
ballad by the Laureate, wherein is shown how a young man "would read
unlawful books, and how he was punished:"--
"The _young_ man, he began to read
He knew not what, but he would proceed,
When there was heard a sound at the door,
Which as he read on grew more and more.
"And more and more the knocking grew,
The young man knew not what to do:
But trembling in fear he sat within,
_Till the door was broke, and the devil came in_.
"'What would'st thou with me? ' the wicked one cried;
But not a word the young man replied;
Every hair on his head was standing upright,
And his limbs like a palsy shook with affright.
"'What would'st thou with me? ' cried the author of ill;
But the wretched young man was silent still," &c.
The catastrophe is very terrible, and the moral, though addressed by the
poet to young men only, is quite as applicable to old men, as the times
show.
"Henceforth let all young men take heed
How in a conjuror's books they read! "
_Southey's Minor Poems_, vol. iii. p. 92. --ED. ]
* * * * *
_June_ 25. 1831.
GOVERNMENT. --POPULAR REPRESENTATION.
The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the
government of a nation, are,--1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to
acquirers; and; 3. Hope to all.
* * * * *
A nation is the unity of a people. King and parliament are the unity made
visible. The king and the peers are as integral portions of this manifested
unity as the commons. [1]
In that imperfect state of society in which our system of representation
began, the interests of the country were pretty exactly commensurate with
its municipal divisions. The counties, the towns, and the seaports,
accurately enough represented the only interests then existing; that is
say,--the landed, the shop-keeping or manufacturing, and the mercantile.
But for a century past, at least, this division has become notoriously
imperfect, some of the most vital interests of the empire being now totally
unconnected with any English localities. Yet now, when the evil and the
want are known, we are to abandon the accommodations which the necessity of
the case had worked out for itself, and begin again with a rigidly
territorial plan of representation! The miserable tendency of all is to
destroy our nationality, which consists, in a principal degree, in our
representative government, and to convert it into a degrading delegation of
the populace. There is no unity for a people but in a representation of
national interests; a delegation from the passions or wishes of the
individuals themselves is a rope of sand. Undoubtedly it is a great evil,
that there should be such an evident discrepancy between the law and the
practice of the constitution in the matter of the representation. Such a
direct, yet clandestine, contravention of solemn resolutions and
established laws is immoral, and greatly injurious to the cause of legal
loyalty and general subordination in the minds of the people. But then a
statesman should consider that these very contraventions of law in practice
point out to him the places in the body politic which need a remodelling of
the law. You acknowledge a certain necessity for indirect representation in
the present day, and that such representation has been instinctively
obtained by means contrary to law; why then do you not approximate the
useless law to the useful practice, instead of abandoning both law and
practice for a completely new system of your own?
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge was very fond of quoting George Withers's fine lines:--
"Let not your king and parliament in one,
Much less apart, mistake themselves for that
Which is most worthy to be thought upon:
Nor think _they_ are, essentially, The STATE.
Let them not fancy that th' authority
And privileges upon them bestown,
Conferr'd are to set up a majesty,
A power, or a glory, of their own!
But let them know, 't was for a deeper life,
Which they but _represent_--
That there's on earth a yet auguster thing,
Veil'd though it be, than parliament and king! "--ED. ]
* * * * *
The malignant duplicity and unprincipled tergiversations of the specific
Whig newspapers are to me detestable. I prefer the open endeavours of those
publications which seek to destroy the church, and introduce a republic in
effect: there is a sort of honesty in _that_ which I approve, though I
would with joy lay down my life to save my country from the consummation
which is so evidently desired by that section of the periodical press.
_June_ 26. 1831.
NAPIER. --BUONAPARTE. --SOUTHEY.
I have been exceedingly impressed with the evil precedent of Colonel
Napier's History of the Peninsular War. It is a specimen of the true French
military school; not a thought for the justice of the war,--not a
consideration of the damnable and damning iniquity of the French invasion.
All is looked at as a mere game of exquisite skill, and the praise is
regularly awarded to the most successful player. How perfectly ridiculous
is the prostration of Napier's mind, apparently a powerful one, before the
name of Buonaparte! I declare I know no book more likely to undermine the
national sense of right and wrong in matters of foreign interference than
this work of Napier's.
If A. has a hundred means of doing a certain thing, and B. has only one or
two, is it very wonderful, or does it argue very transcendant superiority,
if A. surpasses B. ? Buonaparte was the child of circumstances, which he
neither originated nor controlled. He had no chance of preserving his power
but by continual warfare. No thought of a wise tranquillization of the
shaken elements of France seems ever to have passed through his mind; and I
believe that at no part of his reign could be have survived one year's
continued peace. He never had but one obstacle to contend with--physical
force; commonly the least difficult enemy a general, subject to courts-
martial and courts of conscience, has to overcome.
* * * * *
Southey's History[1] is on the right side, and starts from the right point;
but he is personally fond of the Spaniards, and in bringing forward their
nationality in the prominent manner it deserves, he does not, in my
judgment, state with sufficient clearness the truth, that the nationality
of the Spaniards was not founded on any just ground of good government or
wise laws, but was, in fact, very little more than a rooted antipathy to
all strangers as such.
In this sense every thing is national in Spain. Even their so called
Catholic religion is exclusively national in a genuine Spaniard's mind; he
does not regard the religious professions of the Frenchman or Italian at
all in the same light with his own.
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge said that the conclusion of this great work was the finest
specimen of historic eulogy he had ever read in English;--that it was more
than a campaign to the duke's fame. --ED. ]
_July_ 7. 1831.
PATRONAGE OF THE FINE ARTS. --OLD WOMEN.
The darkest despotisms on the Continent have done more for the growth and
elevation of the fine arts than the English government. A great musical
composer in Germany and Italy is a great man in society, and a real dignity
and rank are universally conceded to him. So it is with a sculptor, or
painter, or architect. Without this sort of encouragement and patronage
such arts as music and painting will never come into great eminence. In
this country there is no general reverence for the fine arts; and the
sordid spirit of a money-amassing philosophy would meet any proposition for
the fostering of art, in a genial and extended sense, with the commercial
maxim,--_Laissez faire_. Paganini, indeed, will make a fortune, because he
can actually sell the tones of his fiddle at so much a scrape; but Mozart
himself might have languished in a garret for any thing that would have
been done for him here.
* * * * *
There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I
knew were to be divided:--1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That
old witch.
_July_ 24. 1831.
PICTURES. [1]
Observe the remarkable difference between Claude and Teniers in their power
of painting vacant space. Claude makes his whole landscape a _plenum:_ the
air is quite as substantial as any other part of the scene. Hence there are
no true distances, and every thing presses at once and equally upon the
eye. There is something close and almost suffocating in the atmosphere of
some of Claude's sunsets. Never did any one paint air, the thin air, the
absolutely apparent vacancy between object and object, so admirably as
Teniers. That picture of the Archers[2] exemplifies this excellence. See
the distances between those ugly louts! how perfectly true to the fact!
But oh! what a wonderful picture is that Triumph of Silenus! [3] It is the
very revelry of hell. Every evil passion is there that could in any way be
forced into juxtaposition with joyance. Mark the lust, and, hard by, the
hate. Every part is pregnant with libidinous nature without one spark of
the grace of Heaven. The animal is triumphing--not over, but--in the
absence, in the non-existence, of the spiritual part of man. I could fancy
that Rubens had seen in a vision--
All the souls that damned be
Leap up at once in anarchy,
Clap their hands, and dance for glee!
That landscape[4] on the other side is only less magnificent than dear Sir
George Beaumont's, now in the National Gallery. It has the same charm.
Rubens does not take for his subjects grand or novel conformations of
objects; he has, you see, no precipices, no forests, no frowning castles,--
nothing that a poet would take at all times, and a painter take in these
times. No; he gets some little ponds, old tumble-down cottages, that
ruinous chateau, two or three peasants, a hay-rick, and other such humble
images, which looked at in and by themselves convey no pleasure and excite
no surprise; but he--and he Peter Paul Rubens alone--handles these every-
day ingredients of all common landscapes as they are handled in nature; he
throws them into a vast and magnificent whole, consisting of heaven and
earth and all things therein. He extracts the latent poetry out of these
common objects,--that poetry and harmony which every man of genius
perceives in the face of nature, and which many men of no genius are taught
to perceive and feel after examining such a picture as this. In other
landscape painters the scene is confined and as it were imprisoned;--in
Rubens the landscape dies a natural death; it fades away into the apparent
infinity of space.
So long as Rubens confines himself to space and outward figure--to the mere
animal man with animal passions--he is, I may say, a god amongst painters.
His satyrs, Silenuses, lions, tigers, and dogs, are almost godlike; but the
moment he attempts any thing involving or presuming the spiritual, his gods
and goddesses, his nymphs and heroes, become beasts, absolute, unmitigated
beasts.
[Footnote 1:
All the following remarks in this section were made at the exhibition of
ancient masters at the British Gallery in Pall Mall. The recollection of
those two hours has made the rooms of that Institution a melancholy place
for me. Mr.
