No doubt, they imitate the ease of
gentlemanly conversation better than Shakspeare, who was unable _not_ to be
too much associated to succeed perfectly in this.
gentlemanly conversation better than Shakspeare, who was unable _not_ to be
too much associated to succeed perfectly in this.
Coleridge - Table Talk
I do not know where I could put
my hand upon a book containing so much sense and sound constitutional
doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson's Works; and what party in this
country would read so severe a lecture in it as our modern Whigs!
A close reasoner and a good writer in general may be known by his pertinent
use of connectives. Read that page of Johnson; you cannot alter one
conjunction without spoiling the sense. It is a linked strain throughout.
In your modern books, for the most part, the sentences in a page have the
same connection with each other that marbles have in a bag; they touch
without adhering.
Asgill evidently formed his style upon Johnson's, but he only imitates one
part of it. Asgill never rises to Johnson's eloquence. The latter was a
sort of Cobbett-Burke.
James the First thought that, because all power in the state seemed to
proceed _from_ the crown, all power therefore remained in the crown;--as
if, because the tree sprang from the seed, the stem, branches, leaves, and
fruit were all contained in the seed. The constitutional doctrine as to the
relation which the king bears to the other components of the state is in
two words this:--He is a representative of the whole of that, of which he
is himself a part.
[Footnote 1:
Dryden's Ben Jochanan, in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel. He was
born in 1649, and died in 1703. He was a clergyman. In 1686, when the army
was encamped on Hounslow Heath, he published "A humble and hearty Address
to all English Protestants in the present Army. " For this he was tried and
sentenced to be pilloried in three places, pay a fine, and be whipped from
Newgate to Tyburn. An attempt was also made to degrade him from his orders,
but this failed through an informality. After the Revolution he was
preferred. --ED. ]
_May_ 17. 1833.
SIR P. SIDNEY. --THINGS ARE FINDING THEIR LEVEL.
When Sir Philip Sidney saw the enthusiasm which agitated every man, woman,
and child in the Netherlands against Philip and D'Alva, he told Queen
Elizabeth that it was the spirit of God, and that it was invincible. What
is the spirit which seems to move and unsettle every other man in England
and on the Continent at this time? Upon my conscience, and judging by St.
John's rule, I think it is a special spirit of the devil--and a very vulgar
devil too!
* * * * *
Your modern political economists say that it is a principle in their
science--that all things _find_ their level;--which I deny; and say, on
the contrary, that the true principle is, that all things are _finding_
their level like water in a storm.
_May_ 18. 1833.
GERMAN. --GOETHE. --GOD'S PROVIDENCE. --MAN'S FREEDOM.
German is inferior to English in modifications of expression of the
affections, but superior to it in modifications of expression of all
objects of the senses.
* * * * *
Goethe's small lyrics are delightful. He showed good taste in not
attempting to imitate Shakspeare's Witches, which are threefold,--Fates,
Furies, and earthly Hags o' the caldron.
* * * * *
Man does not move in cycles, though nature does. Man's course is like that
of an arrow; for the portion of the great cometary ellipse which he
occupies is no more than a needle's length to a mile.
In natural history, God's freedom is shown in the law of necessity. In
moral history, God's necessity or providence is shown in man's freedom.
_June_ 8. 1833.
DOM MIGUEL AND DOM PEDRO. --WORKING TO BETTER ONE'S CONDITION. --NEGRO
EMANCIPATION. --FOX AND PITT. --REVOLUTION.
There can be no doubt of the gross violations of strict neutrality by this
government in the Portuguese affair; but I wish the Tories had left the
matter alone, and not given room to the people to associate them with that
scoundrel Dom Miguel. You can never interest the common herd in the
abstract question; with them it is a mere quarrel between the men; and
though Pedro is a very doubtful character, he is not so bad as his brother;
and, besides, we are naturally interested for the girl.
* * * * *
It is very strange that men who make light of the direct doctrines of the
Scriptures, and turn up their noses at the recommendation of a line of
conduct suggested by religious truth, will nevertheless stake the
tranquillity of an empire, the lives and properties of millions of men and
women, on the faith of a maxim of modern political economy! And this, too,
of a maxim true only, if at all, of England or a part of England, or some
other country;--namely, that the desire of bettering their condition will
induce men to labour even more abundantly and profitably than servile
compulsion,--to which maxim the past history and present state of all Asia
and Africa give the lie. Nay, even in England at this day, every man in
Manchester, Birmingham, and in other great manufacturing towns, knows that
the most skilful artisans, who may earn high wages at pleasure, are
constantly in the habit of working but a few days in the week, and of
idling the rest. I believe St.
Monday is very well kept by the workmen in London. The love of indolence is
universal, or next to it.
* * * * *
Must not the ministerial plan for the West Indies lead necessarily to a
change of property, either by force or dereliction? I can't see any way of
escaping it.
* * * * *
You are always talking of the _rights_ of the negroes. As a rhetorical mode
of stimulating the people of England _here_, I do not object; but I utterly
condemn your frantic practice of declaiming about their rights to the
blacks themselves. They ought to be forcibly reminded of the state in which
their brethren in Africa still are, and taught to be thankful for the
providence which has placed them within reach of the means of grace. I know
no right except such as flows from righteousness; and as every Christian
believes his righteousness to be imputed, so must his right be an imputed
right too. It must flow out of a duty, and it is under that name that the
process of humanization ought to begin and to be conducted throughout.
* * * * *
Thirty years ago, and more, Pitt availed himself, with great political
dexterity, of the apprehension, which Burke and the conduct of some of the
clubs in London had excited, and endeavoured to inspire into the nation a
panic of property. Fox, instead of exposing the absurdity of this by
showing the real numbers and contemptible weakness of the disaffected, fell
into Pitt's trap, and was mad enough to exaggerate even Pitt's surmises.
The consequence was, a very general apprehension throughout the country of
an impending revolution, at a time when, I will venture to say, the people
were more heart-whole than they had been for a hundred years previously.
After I had travelled in Sicily and Italy, countries where there were real
grounds for fear, I became deeply impressed with the difference. Now, after
a long continuance of high national glory and influence, when a revolution
of a most searching and general character is actually at work, and the old
institutions of the country are all awaiting their certain destruction or
violent modification--the people at large are perfectly secure, sleeping or
gambolling on the very brink of a volcano.
_June_ 15. 1833.
VIRTUE AND LIBERTY. --EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. --ERASMUS. ----LUTHER.
The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the
vigour of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first
is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty.
* * * * *
I think St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans the most profound work in
existence; and I hardly believe that the writings of the old Stoics, now
lost, could have been deeper. Undoubtedly it is, and must be, very obscure
to ordinary readers; but some of the difficulty is accidental, arising from
the form in which the Epistle appears. If we could now arrange this work in
the way in which we may be sure St. Paul would himself do, were he now
alive, and preparing it for the press, his reasoning would stand out
clearer. His accumulated parentheses would be thrown into notes, or
extruded to the margin. You will smile, after this, if I say that I think I
understand St. Paul; and I think so, because, really and truly, I recognize
a cogent consecutiveness in the argument--the only evidence I know that you
understand any book. How different is the style of this intensely
passionate argument from that of the catholic circular charge called the
Epistle to the Ephesians! --and how different that of both from the style of
the Epistles to Timothy and Titus, which I venture to call [Greek:
epistolal panloeideiz]
Erasmus's paraphrase of the New Testament is clear and explanatory; but you
cannot expect any thing very deep from Erasmus. The only fit commentator on
Paul was Luther--not by any means such a gentleman as the Apostle, but
almost as great a genius.
_June_ 17. 1833.
NEGRO EMANCIPATION.
Have you been able to discover any principle in this Emancipation Bill for
the Slaves, except a principle of fear of the abolition party struggling
with a dread of causing some monstrous calamity to the empire at large?
Well! I will not prophesy; and God grant that this tremendous and
unprecedented act of positive enactment may not do the harm to the cause of
humanity and freedom which I cannot but fear! But yet, what can be hoped,
when all human wisdom and counsel are set at nought, and religious faith--
the only miraculous agent amongst men--is not invoked or regarded! and that
most unblest phrase--the Dissenting _interest_--enters into the question!
_June_ 22. 1833.
HACKET'S LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP WILLIAMS. --CHARLES I. --MANNERS UNDER EDWARD
III. , RICHARD II. , AND HENRY VIII.
What a delightful and instructive hook Bishop Hacket's Life of Archbishop
Williams is! You learn more from it of that which is valuable towards an
insight into the times preceding the Civil War than from all the ponderous
histories and memoirs now composed about that period.
* * * * *
Charles seems to have been a very disagreeable personage during James's
life. There is nothing dutiful in his demeanour.
* * * * *
I think the spirit of the court and nobility of Edward III. and Richard II.
was less gross than that in the time of Henry VIII. ; for in this latter
period the chivalry had evaporated, and the whole coarseness was left by
itself. Chaucer represents a very high and romantic style of society
amongst the gentry.
_June_ 29. 1833.
HYPOTHESIS. --SUFFICTION. --THEORY. --LYELL'S GEOLOGY. --GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE.
--GERARD DOUW's "SCHOOLMASTER" AND TITIAN'S "VENUS. "--SIR J. SCARLETT.
It seems to me a great delusion to call or suppose the imagination of a
subtle fluid, or molecules penetrable with the same, a legitimate
hypothesis. It is a mere _suffiction_. Newton took the fact of bodies
falling to the centre, and upon that built up a legitimate hypothesis. It
was a subposition of something certain. But Descartes' vortices were not an
hypothesis; they rested on no fact at all; and yet they did, in a clumsy
way, explain the motions of the heavenly bodies. But your subtle fluid is
pure gratuitous assumption; and for what use? It explains nothing.
Besides, you are endeavouring to deduce power from mass, in which you
expressly say there is no power but the _vis inertiae_: whereas, the whole
analogy of chemistry proves that power produces mass.
* * * * *
The use of a theory in the real sciences is to help the investigator to a
complete view of all the hitherto discovered facts relating to the science
in question; it is a collected view, [Greek: the_orhia], of all he yet
knows in _one_. Of course, whilst any pertinent facts remain unknown, no
theory can be exactly true, because every new fact must necessarily, to a
greater or less degree, displace the relation of all the others. A theory,
therefore, only helps investigation; it cannot invent or discover. The only
true theories are those of geometry, because in geometry all the premisses
are true and unalterable. But, to suppose that, in our present exceedingly
imperfect acquaintance with the facts, any theory in chemistry or geology
is altogether accurate, is absurd:--it cannot be true.
Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He
affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is
equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not
embracing the whole truth. So it is with the rectilinearity or undulatory
motion of light;--I believe both; though philosophy has as yet but
imperfectly ascertained the conditions of their alternate existence, or the
laws by which they are regulated.
* * * * *
Those who deny light to be matter do not, therefore, deny its corporeity.
* * * * *
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is
no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it
depends much more on execution for its effect. I was more than ever
impressed with the marvellous sublimity and transcendant beauty of King's
College Chapel. [1] It is quite unparalleled.
I think Gerard Douw's "Schoolmaster," in the Fitzwilliam Museum, the finest
thing of the sort I ever saw;--whether you look at it at the common
distance, or examine it with a glass, the wonder is equal. And that
glorious picture of the Venus--so perfectly beautiful and perfectly
innocent--as if beauty and innocence could not be dissociated! The French
thing below is a curious instance of the inherent grossness of the French
taste. Titian's picture is made quite bestial.
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge visited Cambridge upon the occasion of the scientific meeting
there in June, 1833. --"My emotions," he said, "at revisiting the university
were at first, overwhelming. I could not speak for an hour; yet my feelings
were upon the whole very pleasurable, and I have not passed, of late years
at least, three days of such great enjoyment and healthful excitement of
mind and body. The bed on which I slept--and slept soundly too--was, as
near as I can describe it, a couple of sacks full of potatoes tied
together. I understand the young men think it hardens them. Truly I lay
down at night a man, and arose in the morning a bruise. " He told me "that
the men were much amused at his saying that the fine old Quaker philosopher
Dalton's face was like All Souls' College. " The two persons of whom he
spoke with the greatest interest were Mr. Faraday and Mr. Thirlwall; saying
of the former, "that he seemed to have the true temperament of genius, that
carrying-on of the spring and freshness of youthful, nay, boyish feelings,
into the matured strength of manhood! " For, as Mr. Coleridge had long
before expressed the same thought,--"To find no contradiction in the union
of old and new; to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all his works with
feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative
fiat, this characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and
may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the
powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with
the appearances which everyday for perhaps forty years had rendered
familiar;
'With sun and moon and stars throughout the year,
And man and woman;'--
this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which
distinguish genius from talent. And therefore is it the prime merit of
genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent
familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling
concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant
accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence. Who has not
a thousand times seen snow fall on water? Who has not watched it with a new
feeling, from the time that he has read Burns's comparison of sensual
pleasure
'To snow that falls upon a river,
A moment white--then gone for ever! '"
_Biog. Lit_. vol. i, p. 85. --ED. ]
* * * * *
I think Sir James Scarlett's speech for the defendant, in the late action
of Cobbett v. The Times, for a libel, worthy of the best ages of Greece or
Rome; though, to be sure, some of his remarks could not have been very
palatable to his clients.
* * * * *
I am glad you came in to punctuate my discourse, which I fear has gone on
for an hour without any stop at all.
_July_ 1. 1833.
MANDEVILLE'S FABLE OF THE BEES. --BESTIAL THEORY. --CHARACTER OF BERTRAM. --
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER'S DRAMAS. --AESCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES,--MILTON.
If I could ever believe that Mandeville really meant any thing more by his
Fable of the Bees than a _bonne bouche_ of solemn raillery, I should like
to ask those man-shaped apes who have taken up his suggestions in earnest,
and seriously maintained them as bases for a rational account of man and
the world--how they explain the very existence of those dexterous cheats,
those superior charlatans, the legislators and philosophers, who have known
how to play so well upon the peacock-like vanity and follies of their
fellow mortals.
By the by, I wonder some of you lawyers (_sub rosa_, of course) have not
quoted the pithy lines in Mandeville upon this registration question:--
"The lawyers, of whose art the basis
Was raising feuds and splitting cases,
_Oppos'd all Registers_, that cheats
Might make more work with dipt estates;
As 'twere unlawful that one's own
Without a lawsuit should be known!
They put off hearings wilfully,
To finger the refreshing fee;
And to defend a wicked cause
Examined and survey'd the laws,
As burglars shops and houses do,
To see where best they may break through. "
There is great Hudibrastic vigour in these lines; and those on the doctors
are also very terse.
* * * * *
Look at that head of Cline, by Chantrey! Is that forehead, that nose, those
temples and that chin, akin to the monkey tribe? No, no. To a man of
sensibility no argument could disprove the bestial theory so convincingly
as a quiet contemplation of that fine bust.
* * * * *
I cannot agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon
Bertram in "All's Well that ends Well. " He was a young nobleman in feudal
times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth
and appetite for pleasure and liberty natural to such a character so
circumstanced. Of course he had never regarded Helena otherwise than as a
dependant in the family; and of all that which she possessed of goodness
and fidelity and courage, which might atone for her inferiority in other
respects, Bertram was necessarily in a great measure ignorant. And after
all, her _prima facie_ merit was the having inherited a prescription from
her old father the doctor, by which she cures the king,--a merit, which
supposes an extravagance of personal loyalty in Bertram to make conclusive
to him in such a matter as that of taking a wife. Bertram had surely good
reason to look upon the king's forcing him to marry Helena as a very
tyrannical act. Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very
delicate, and it required all Shakspeare's consummate skill to interest us
for her; and he does this chiefly by the operation of the other
characters,--the Countess, Lafeu, &c. We get to like Helena from their
praising and commending her so much.
* * * * *
In Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedies the comic scenes are rarely so
interfused amidst the tragic as to produce a unity of the tragic on the
whole, without which the intermixture is a fault. In Shakspeare, this is
always managed with transcendant skill. The Fool in Lear contributes in a
very sensible manner to the tragic wildness of the whole drama. Beaumont
and Fletcher's serious plays or tragedies are complete hybrids,--neither
fish nor flesh,--upon any rules, Greek, Roman, or Gothic: and yet they are
very delightful notwithstanding.
No doubt, they imitate the ease of
gentlemanly conversation better than Shakspeare, who was unable _not_ to be
too much associated to succeed perfectly in this.
When I was a boy, I was fondest of AEschylus; in youth and middle age I
preferred Euripides; now in my declining years I admire Sophocles. I can
now at length see that Sophocles is the most perfect. Yet he never rises to
the sublime simplicity of AEschylus--simplicity of design, I mean--nor
diffuses himself in the passionate outpourings of Euripides. I understand
why the ancients called Euripides the most tragic of their dramatists: he
evidently embraces within the scope of the tragic poet many passions,--
love, conjugal affection, jealousy, and so on, which Sophocles seems to
have considered as incongruous with the ideal statuesqueness of the tragic
drama. Certainly Euripides was a greater poet in the abstract than
Sophocles. His choruses may be faulty as choruses, but how beautiful and
affecting they are as odes and songs! I think the famous [Greek: Euippoy
Xene], in Oedipus Coloneus[1] cold in comparison with many of the odes of
Euripides, as that song of the chorus in the Hippolytus--[Greek: "Eoos,"
Eoos[2]] and so on; and I remember a choric ode in the Hecuba, which always
struck me as exquisitely rich and finished; I mean, where the chorus speaks
of Troy and the night of the capture. [3]
There is nothing very surprising in Milton's preference of Euripides,
though so unlike himself. It is very common--very natural--for men to
_like_ and even admire an exhibition of power very different in kind from
any thing of their own. No jealousy arises. Milton preferred Ovid too, and
I dare say he admired both as a man of sensibility admires a lovely woman,
with a feeling into which jealousy or envy cannot enter. With Aeschylus or
Sophocles he might perchance have matched himself.
In Euripides you have oftentimes a very near approach to comedy, and I
hardly know any writer in whom you can find such fine models of serious and
dignified conversation.
[Footnote 1:
Greek:
Euippoy, Xege, tmsde chosas
Tchoy ta chzatista gas esaula
tdn axgaeta Kolanon'--ch. t. l. v. 668]
[Footnote 2:
Greek:
"Exos" Exos, o chat' ommatton
s tazeos pothon eisagog glycheian
Psucha chariu ous epithtzateusei
mae moi tote sen chacho phaneiaes
maeo arruthmos elthois--x. t. l v. 527]
[Footnote 3:
I take it for granted that Mr. Coleridge alluded to the chorus,--
[Greek: Su men, _o patrhis Ilias
t_on aporhth_et_on polis
ouketi lexei toion El-
lan_on nephos amphi se krhuptei,
dorhi d_e, dorhi perhsan--k. t. l. ] v. 899.
Thou, then, oh, natal Troy! no more
The city of the unsack'd shalt be,
So thick from dark Achaia's shore
The cloud of war hath covered thee.
Ah! not again
I tread thy plain--
The spear--the spear hath rent thy pride;
The flame hath scarr'd thee deep and wide;
Thy coronal of towers is shorn,
And thou most piteous art--most naked and forlorn!
I perish'd at the noon of night!
When sleep had seal'd each weary eye;
When the dance was o'er,
And harps no more
Rang out in choral minstrelsy.
In the dear bower of delight
My husband slept in joy;
His shield and spear
Suspended near,
Secure he slept: that sailor band
Full sure he deem'd no more should stand
Beneath the walls of Troy.
And I too, by the taper's light,
Which in the golden mirror's haze
Flash'd its interminable rays,
Bound up the tresses of my hair,
That I Love's peaceful sleep might share.
I slept; but, hark! that war-shout dread,
Which rolling through the city spread;
And this the cry,--"When, Sons of Greece,
When shall the lingering leaguer cease;
When will ye spoil Troy's watch-tower high,
And home return? "--I heard the cry,
And, starting from the genial bed,
Veiled, as a Doric maid, I fled,
And knelt, Diana, at thy holy fane,
A trembling suppliant--all in vain. ]
JULY 3. 1833.
STYLE. --CAVALIER SLANG. --JUNTOS. --PROSE AND VERSE. --IMITATION AND COPY.
The collocation of words is so artificial in Shakspeare and Milton, that
you may as well think of pushing a[1] brick out of a wall with your
forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of their finished
passages. [2]
A good lecture upon style might he composed, by taking on the one hand the
slang of L'Estrange, and perhaps, even of Roger North,[3] which became so
fashionable after the Restoration as a mark of loyalty; and on the other,
the Johnsonian magniloquence or the balanced metre of Junius; and then
showing how each extreme is faulty, upon different grounds.
It is quite curious to remark the prevalence of the Cavalier slang style in
the divines of Charles the Second's time. Barrow could not of course adopt
such a mode of writing throughout, because he could not in it have
communicated his elaborate thinkings and lofty rhetoric; but even Barrow
not unfrequently lets slip a phrase here and there in the regular Roger
North way--much to the delight, no doubt, of the largest part of his
audience and contemporary readers. See particularly, for instances of this,
his work on the Pope's supremacy. South is full of it.
The style of Junius is a sort of metre, the law of which is a balance of
thesis and antithesis. When he gets out of this aphorismic metre into a
sentence of five or six lines long, nothing can exceed the slovenliness of
the English. Horne Tooke and a long sentence seem the only two antagonists
that were too much for him. Still the antithesis of Junius is a real
antithesis of images or thought; but the antithesis of Johnson is rarely
more than verbal.
The definition of good prose is--proper words in their proper places;--of
good verse--the most proper words in their proper places. The propriety is
in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended
meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in
general, a fault. In the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page
after page, understanding the author perfectly, without once taking notice
of the medium of communication;--it is as if he had been speaking to you
all the while. But in verse you must do more;--there the words, the
_media_, must be beautiful, and ought to attract your notice--yet not so
much and so perpetually as to destroy the unity which ought to result from
the whole poem. This is the general rule, but, of course, subject to some
modifications, according to the different kinds of prose or verse. Some
prose may approach towards verse, as oratory, and therefore a more studied
exhibition of the _media_ may be proper; and some verse may border more on
mere narrative, and there the style should be simpler. But the great thing
in poetry is, _quocunque modo_, to effect a unity of impression upon the
whole; and a too great fulness and profusion of point in the parts will
prevent this. Who can read with pleasure more than a hundred lines or so of
Hudibras at one time? Each couplet or quatrain is so whole in itself, that
you can't connect them. There is no fusion,--just as it is in Seneca.
[Footnote 1:
They led me to the sounding shore--
Heavens! as I passed the crowded way,
My bleeding lord before me lay--
I saw--I saw--and wept no more,
Till, as the homeward breezes bore
The bark returning o'er the sea,
My gaze, oh Ilion, turn'd on thee!
Then, frantic, to the midnight air,
I cursed aloud the adulterous pair:--
"They plunge me deep in exile's woe;
They lay my country low:
Their love--no love! but some dark spell,
In vengeance breath'd, by spirit fell.
Rise, hoary sea, in awful tide,
And whelm that vessel's guilty pride;
Nor e'er, in high Mycene's hall,
Let Helen boast in peace of mighty Ilion's fall. "
The translation was given to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge. --ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
"The amotion or transposition will alter the thought, or the feeling, or at
least the tone. They are as pieces of mosaic work, from which you cannot
strike the smallest block without making a hole in the picture. "--
_Quarterly Review_, No. CIII. p. 7. ]
[Footnote 3:
But Mr. Coleridge took a great distinction between North and the other
writers commonly associated with him. In speaking of the Examen and the
Life of Lord North, in the Friend, Mr. C. calls them "two of the most
interesting biographical works in our language, both for the weight of the
matter, and the _incuriosa felicitas_ of the style. The pages are all alive
with the genuine idioms of our mother tongue. A fastidious taste, it is
true, will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call
_slang_, which not a few of our writers, shortly after the Restoration of
Charles the Second, seem to have affected as a mark of loyalty. These
instances, however, are but a trifling drawback. They are not _sought for_,
as is too often and too plainly done by L'Estrange, Collyer, Tom Brown, and
their imitators. North never goes out of his way, either to seek them, or
to avoid them; and, in the main, his language gives us the very nerve,
pulse, and sinew of a hearty, healthy, conversational _English_. "--Vol. ii.
p. 307. --ED. ]
* * * * *
Imitation is the mesothesis of likeness and difference. The difference is
as essential to it as the likeness; for without the difference, it would be
copy or facsimile. But to borrow a term from astronomy, it is a librating
mesothesis: for it may verge more to likeness as in painting, or more to
difference, as in sculpture.
JULY 4. 1833.
DR. JOHNSON. --BOSWELL. --BURKE. --NEWTON. --MILTON.
Dr. Johnson's fame now rests principally upon Boswell. It is impossible not
to be amused with such a book. But his _bow-wow_ manner must have had a
good deal to do with the effect produced;--for no one, I suppose, will set
Johnson before Burke,--and Burke was a great and universal talker;--yet now
we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in Boswell. The fact
is, Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very
discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the
sharp short things that Johnson almost always did, which produce a more
decided effect at the moment, and which are so much more easy to carry
off. [1] Besides, as to Burke's testimony to Johnson's powers, you must
remember that Burke was a great courtier; and after all, Burke said and
wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than
writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life. [2]
[Footnote 1:
Burke, I am persuaded, was not so continuous a talker as Coleridge. Madame
de Stael told a nephew of the latter, at Coppet, that Mr. C. was a master
of monologue, _mais qu'il ne savait pas le dialogue_. There was a spice of
vindictiveness in this, the exact history of which is not worth explaining.
And if dialogue must be cut down in its meaning to small talk, I, for one,
will admit that Coleridge, amongst his numberless qualifications, possessed
it not. But I am sure that he could, when it suited him, converse as well
as any one else, and with women he frequently did converse in a very
winning and popular style, confining them, however, as well as he could, to
the detail of facts or of their spontaneous emotions. In general, it was
certainly otherwise. "You must not be surprised," he said to me, "at my
talking so long to you--I pass so much of my time in pain and solitude, yet
everlastingly thinking, that, when you or any other persons call on me, I
can hardly help easing my mind by pouring forth some of the accumulated
mass of reflection and feeling, upon an apparently interested recipient. "
But the principal reason, no doubt, was the habit of his intellect, which
was under a law of discoursing upon all subjects with reference to ideas or
ultimate ends. You might interrupt him when you pleased, and he was patient
of every sort of conversation except mere personality, which he absolutely
hated. --ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
This was said, I believe, to the late Sir James Mackintosh. --ED. ]
* * * * *
Newton _was_ a great man, but you must excuse me if I think that it would
take many Newtons to make one Milton.
_July_ 6. 1833.
PAINTING. ----MUSIC. ----POETRY.
It is a poor compliment to pay to a painter to tell him that his figure
stands out of the canvass, or that you start at the likeness of the
portrait. Take almost any daub, cut it out of the canvass, and place the
figure looking into or out of a window, and any one may take it for life.
Or take one of Mrs. Salmon's wax queens or generals, and you will very
sensibly feel the difference between a copy, as they are, and an imitation,
of the human form, as a good portrait ought to be. Look at that flower vase
of Van Huysum, and at these wax or stone peaches and apricots! The last are
likest to their original, but what pleasure do they give? None, except to
children. [1]
Some music is above me; most music is beneath me. I like Beethoven and
Mozart--or else some of the aerial compositions of the elder Italians, as
Palestrina[2] and Carissimi. --And I love Purcell.
The best sort of music is what it should be--sacred; the next best, the
military, has fallen to the lot of the Devil.
Good music never tires me, nor sends me to sleep. I feel physically
refreshed and strengthened by it, as Milton says he did.
I could write as good verses now as ever I did, if I were perfectly free
from vexations, and were in the _ad libitum_ hearing of fine music, which
has a sensible effect in harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as
it were, lubricating my inventive faculty. The reason of my not finishing
Christabel is not, that I don't know how to do it--for I have, as I always
had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I
could not carry on with equal success the execution of the idea, an
extremely subtle and difficult one.
Besides, after this continuation of Faust, which they tell me is very poor,
who can have courage to attempt[3] a reversal of the judgment of all
criticism against continuations? Let us except Don Quixote, however,
although the second part of that transcendant work is not exactly _uno
flatu_ with the original conception.
[Footnote 1:
This passage, and those following, will evidence, what the readers even of
this little work must have seen, that Mr. Coleridge had an eye, almost
exclusively, for the ideal or universal in painting and music. He knew
nothing of the details of handling in the one, or of rules of composition
in the other. Yet he was, to the best of my knowledge, an unerring judge of
the merits of any serious effort in the fine arts, and detected the leading
thought or feeling of the artist, with a decision which used sometimes to
astonish me. Every picture which I have looked at in company with him,
seems now, to my mind, translated into English. He would sometimes say,
after looking for a minute at a picture, generally a modern one, "There's
no use in stopping at this; for I see the painter had no idea. It is mere
mechanical drawing. Come on; _here_ the artist _meant_ something for the
mind. " It was just the same with his knowledge of music. His appetite for
what he thought good was literally inexhaustible. He told me he could
listen to fine music for twelve hours together, and go away _refreshed_.
But he required in music either thought or feeling; mere addresses to the
sensual ear he could not away with; hence his utter distaste for Rossini,
and his reverence for Beethoven and Mozart--ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was born about 1529, and died in 1594. I
believe he may be considered the founder or reformer of the Italian church
music. His masses, motets, and hymns are tolerably well known amongst
lovers of the old composers; but Mr. Coleridge used to speak with delight
of some of Palestrina's madrigals which he heard at Rome.
Giacomo Carissimi composed about the years 1640--1650. His style has been
charged with effeminacy; but Mr. C. thought it very graceful and chaste.
Henry Purcell needs no addition in England. --ED. ]
[Footnote 3:
"The thing attempted in Christabel is the most difficult of execution in
the whole field of romance--witchery by daylight--and the success is
complete. "--_Quarterly Review_, No. CIII. p. 29. ]
_July 8. 1833. _
PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
I am clear for public schools as the general rule; but for particular
children private education may be proper. For the purpose of moving at ease
in the best English society,--mind, I don't call the London exclusive
clique the best English society,--the defect of a public education upon the
plan of our great schools and Oxford and Cambridge is hardly to be
supplied. But the defect is visible positively in some men, and only
negatively in others. The first _offend_ you by habits and modes of
thinking and acting directly attributable to their private education; in
the others you only regret that the freedom and facility of the established
and national mode of bringing up is not _added_ to their good qualities.
* * * * *
I more than doubt the expediency of making even
elementary mathematics a part of the routine in the
system of the great schools. It is enough, I think,
that encouragement and facilities should be given; and
I think more will be thus effected than by compelling
all. Much less would I incorporate the German or
French, or any modern language, into the school labours.
I think that a great mistake. [1]
[Footnote 1:
"One constant blunder"--I find it so pencilled by Mr. C. on a margin--"of
these New-Broomers--these Penny Magazine sages and philanthropists, in
reference to our public schools, is to confine their view to what
schoolmasters teach the boys, with entire oversight of all that the boys
are excited to learn from each other and of themselves--with more geniality
even because it is not a part of their compelled school knowledge. An Eton
boy's knowledge of the St. Lawrence, Mississippi, Missouri, Orellana, &c.
will be, generally, found in exact proportion to his knowledge of the
Ilissus, Hebrus, Orontes, &c. ; inasmuch as modern travels and voyages are
more entertaining and fascinating than Cellarius; or Robinson Crusoe,
Dampier, and Captain Cook, than the Periegesis. Compare the _lads_
themselves from Eton and Harrow, &c. with the alumni of the New-Broom
Institution, and not the lists of school-lessons; and be that comparison
the criterion. --ED. ]
August 4, 1833.
SCOTT AND COLERIDGE.
Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious, opposites in
this;--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a
host of historical or biographical associations,--just as a bright pan of
brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees;--whereas, for
myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain
of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of
similar features.
my hand upon a book containing so much sense and sound constitutional
doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson's Works; and what party in this
country would read so severe a lecture in it as our modern Whigs!
A close reasoner and a good writer in general may be known by his pertinent
use of connectives. Read that page of Johnson; you cannot alter one
conjunction without spoiling the sense. It is a linked strain throughout.
In your modern books, for the most part, the sentences in a page have the
same connection with each other that marbles have in a bag; they touch
without adhering.
Asgill evidently formed his style upon Johnson's, but he only imitates one
part of it. Asgill never rises to Johnson's eloquence. The latter was a
sort of Cobbett-Burke.
James the First thought that, because all power in the state seemed to
proceed _from_ the crown, all power therefore remained in the crown;--as
if, because the tree sprang from the seed, the stem, branches, leaves, and
fruit were all contained in the seed. The constitutional doctrine as to the
relation which the king bears to the other components of the state is in
two words this:--He is a representative of the whole of that, of which he
is himself a part.
[Footnote 1:
Dryden's Ben Jochanan, in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel. He was
born in 1649, and died in 1703. He was a clergyman. In 1686, when the army
was encamped on Hounslow Heath, he published "A humble and hearty Address
to all English Protestants in the present Army. " For this he was tried and
sentenced to be pilloried in three places, pay a fine, and be whipped from
Newgate to Tyburn. An attempt was also made to degrade him from his orders,
but this failed through an informality. After the Revolution he was
preferred. --ED. ]
_May_ 17. 1833.
SIR P. SIDNEY. --THINGS ARE FINDING THEIR LEVEL.
When Sir Philip Sidney saw the enthusiasm which agitated every man, woman,
and child in the Netherlands against Philip and D'Alva, he told Queen
Elizabeth that it was the spirit of God, and that it was invincible. What
is the spirit which seems to move and unsettle every other man in England
and on the Continent at this time? Upon my conscience, and judging by St.
John's rule, I think it is a special spirit of the devil--and a very vulgar
devil too!
* * * * *
Your modern political economists say that it is a principle in their
science--that all things _find_ their level;--which I deny; and say, on
the contrary, that the true principle is, that all things are _finding_
their level like water in a storm.
_May_ 18. 1833.
GERMAN. --GOETHE. --GOD'S PROVIDENCE. --MAN'S FREEDOM.
German is inferior to English in modifications of expression of the
affections, but superior to it in modifications of expression of all
objects of the senses.
* * * * *
Goethe's small lyrics are delightful. He showed good taste in not
attempting to imitate Shakspeare's Witches, which are threefold,--Fates,
Furies, and earthly Hags o' the caldron.
* * * * *
Man does not move in cycles, though nature does. Man's course is like that
of an arrow; for the portion of the great cometary ellipse which he
occupies is no more than a needle's length to a mile.
In natural history, God's freedom is shown in the law of necessity. In
moral history, God's necessity or providence is shown in man's freedom.
_June_ 8. 1833.
DOM MIGUEL AND DOM PEDRO. --WORKING TO BETTER ONE'S CONDITION. --NEGRO
EMANCIPATION. --FOX AND PITT. --REVOLUTION.
There can be no doubt of the gross violations of strict neutrality by this
government in the Portuguese affair; but I wish the Tories had left the
matter alone, and not given room to the people to associate them with that
scoundrel Dom Miguel. You can never interest the common herd in the
abstract question; with them it is a mere quarrel between the men; and
though Pedro is a very doubtful character, he is not so bad as his brother;
and, besides, we are naturally interested for the girl.
* * * * *
It is very strange that men who make light of the direct doctrines of the
Scriptures, and turn up their noses at the recommendation of a line of
conduct suggested by religious truth, will nevertheless stake the
tranquillity of an empire, the lives and properties of millions of men and
women, on the faith of a maxim of modern political economy! And this, too,
of a maxim true only, if at all, of England or a part of England, or some
other country;--namely, that the desire of bettering their condition will
induce men to labour even more abundantly and profitably than servile
compulsion,--to which maxim the past history and present state of all Asia
and Africa give the lie. Nay, even in England at this day, every man in
Manchester, Birmingham, and in other great manufacturing towns, knows that
the most skilful artisans, who may earn high wages at pleasure, are
constantly in the habit of working but a few days in the week, and of
idling the rest. I believe St.
Monday is very well kept by the workmen in London. The love of indolence is
universal, or next to it.
* * * * *
Must not the ministerial plan for the West Indies lead necessarily to a
change of property, either by force or dereliction? I can't see any way of
escaping it.
* * * * *
You are always talking of the _rights_ of the negroes. As a rhetorical mode
of stimulating the people of England _here_, I do not object; but I utterly
condemn your frantic practice of declaiming about their rights to the
blacks themselves. They ought to be forcibly reminded of the state in which
their brethren in Africa still are, and taught to be thankful for the
providence which has placed them within reach of the means of grace. I know
no right except such as flows from righteousness; and as every Christian
believes his righteousness to be imputed, so must his right be an imputed
right too. It must flow out of a duty, and it is under that name that the
process of humanization ought to begin and to be conducted throughout.
* * * * *
Thirty years ago, and more, Pitt availed himself, with great political
dexterity, of the apprehension, which Burke and the conduct of some of the
clubs in London had excited, and endeavoured to inspire into the nation a
panic of property. Fox, instead of exposing the absurdity of this by
showing the real numbers and contemptible weakness of the disaffected, fell
into Pitt's trap, and was mad enough to exaggerate even Pitt's surmises.
The consequence was, a very general apprehension throughout the country of
an impending revolution, at a time when, I will venture to say, the people
were more heart-whole than they had been for a hundred years previously.
After I had travelled in Sicily and Italy, countries where there were real
grounds for fear, I became deeply impressed with the difference. Now, after
a long continuance of high national glory and influence, when a revolution
of a most searching and general character is actually at work, and the old
institutions of the country are all awaiting their certain destruction or
violent modification--the people at large are perfectly secure, sleeping or
gambolling on the very brink of a volcano.
_June_ 15. 1833.
VIRTUE AND LIBERTY. --EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. --ERASMUS. ----LUTHER.
The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the
vigour of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first
is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty.
* * * * *
I think St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans the most profound work in
existence; and I hardly believe that the writings of the old Stoics, now
lost, could have been deeper. Undoubtedly it is, and must be, very obscure
to ordinary readers; but some of the difficulty is accidental, arising from
the form in which the Epistle appears. If we could now arrange this work in
the way in which we may be sure St. Paul would himself do, were he now
alive, and preparing it for the press, his reasoning would stand out
clearer. His accumulated parentheses would be thrown into notes, or
extruded to the margin. You will smile, after this, if I say that I think I
understand St. Paul; and I think so, because, really and truly, I recognize
a cogent consecutiveness in the argument--the only evidence I know that you
understand any book. How different is the style of this intensely
passionate argument from that of the catholic circular charge called the
Epistle to the Ephesians! --and how different that of both from the style of
the Epistles to Timothy and Titus, which I venture to call [Greek:
epistolal panloeideiz]
Erasmus's paraphrase of the New Testament is clear and explanatory; but you
cannot expect any thing very deep from Erasmus. The only fit commentator on
Paul was Luther--not by any means such a gentleman as the Apostle, but
almost as great a genius.
_June_ 17. 1833.
NEGRO EMANCIPATION.
Have you been able to discover any principle in this Emancipation Bill for
the Slaves, except a principle of fear of the abolition party struggling
with a dread of causing some monstrous calamity to the empire at large?
Well! I will not prophesy; and God grant that this tremendous and
unprecedented act of positive enactment may not do the harm to the cause of
humanity and freedom which I cannot but fear! But yet, what can be hoped,
when all human wisdom and counsel are set at nought, and religious faith--
the only miraculous agent amongst men--is not invoked or regarded! and that
most unblest phrase--the Dissenting _interest_--enters into the question!
_June_ 22. 1833.
HACKET'S LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP WILLIAMS. --CHARLES I. --MANNERS UNDER EDWARD
III. , RICHARD II. , AND HENRY VIII.
What a delightful and instructive hook Bishop Hacket's Life of Archbishop
Williams is! You learn more from it of that which is valuable towards an
insight into the times preceding the Civil War than from all the ponderous
histories and memoirs now composed about that period.
* * * * *
Charles seems to have been a very disagreeable personage during James's
life. There is nothing dutiful in his demeanour.
* * * * *
I think the spirit of the court and nobility of Edward III. and Richard II.
was less gross than that in the time of Henry VIII. ; for in this latter
period the chivalry had evaporated, and the whole coarseness was left by
itself. Chaucer represents a very high and romantic style of society
amongst the gentry.
_June_ 29. 1833.
HYPOTHESIS. --SUFFICTION. --THEORY. --LYELL'S GEOLOGY. --GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE.
--GERARD DOUW's "SCHOOLMASTER" AND TITIAN'S "VENUS. "--SIR J. SCARLETT.
It seems to me a great delusion to call or suppose the imagination of a
subtle fluid, or molecules penetrable with the same, a legitimate
hypothesis. It is a mere _suffiction_. Newton took the fact of bodies
falling to the centre, and upon that built up a legitimate hypothesis. It
was a subposition of something certain. But Descartes' vortices were not an
hypothesis; they rested on no fact at all; and yet they did, in a clumsy
way, explain the motions of the heavenly bodies. But your subtle fluid is
pure gratuitous assumption; and for what use? It explains nothing.
Besides, you are endeavouring to deduce power from mass, in which you
expressly say there is no power but the _vis inertiae_: whereas, the whole
analogy of chemistry proves that power produces mass.
* * * * *
The use of a theory in the real sciences is to help the investigator to a
complete view of all the hitherto discovered facts relating to the science
in question; it is a collected view, [Greek: the_orhia], of all he yet
knows in _one_. Of course, whilst any pertinent facts remain unknown, no
theory can be exactly true, because every new fact must necessarily, to a
greater or less degree, displace the relation of all the others. A theory,
therefore, only helps investigation; it cannot invent or discover. The only
true theories are those of geometry, because in geometry all the premisses
are true and unalterable. But, to suppose that, in our present exceedingly
imperfect acquaintance with the facts, any theory in chemistry or geology
is altogether accurate, is absurd:--it cannot be true.
Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He
affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is
equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not
embracing the whole truth. So it is with the rectilinearity or undulatory
motion of light;--I believe both; though philosophy has as yet but
imperfectly ascertained the conditions of their alternate existence, or the
laws by which they are regulated.
* * * * *
Those who deny light to be matter do not, therefore, deny its corporeity.
* * * * *
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is
no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it
depends much more on execution for its effect. I was more than ever
impressed with the marvellous sublimity and transcendant beauty of King's
College Chapel. [1] It is quite unparalleled.
I think Gerard Douw's "Schoolmaster," in the Fitzwilliam Museum, the finest
thing of the sort I ever saw;--whether you look at it at the common
distance, or examine it with a glass, the wonder is equal. And that
glorious picture of the Venus--so perfectly beautiful and perfectly
innocent--as if beauty and innocence could not be dissociated! The French
thing below is a curious instance of the inherent grossness of the French
taste. Titian's picture is made quite bestial.
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge visited Cambridge upon the occasion of the scientific meeting
there in June, 1833. --"My emotions," he said, "at revisiting the university
were at first, overwhelming. I could not speak for an hour; yet my feelings
were upon the whole very pleasurable, and I have not passed, of late years
at least, three days of such great enjoyment and healthful excitement of
mind and body. The bed on which I slept--and slept soundly too--was, as
near as I can describe it, a couple of sacks full of potatoes tied
together. I understand the young men think it hardens them. Truly I lay
down at night a man, and arose in the morning a bruise. " He told me "that
the men were much amused at his saying that the fine old Quaker philosopher
Dalton's face was like All Souls' College. " The two persons of whom he
spoke with the greatest interest were Mr. Faraday and Mr. Thirlwall; saying
of the former, "that he seemed to have the true temperament of genius, that
carrying-on of the spring and freshness of youthful, nay, boyish feelings,
into the matured strength of manhood! " For, as Mr. Coleridge had long
before expressed the same thought,--"To find no contradiction in the union
of old and new; to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all his works with
feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative
fiat, this characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and
may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the
powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with
the appearances which everyday for perhaps forty years had rendered
familiar;
'With sun and moon and stars throughout the year,
And man and woman;'--
this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which
distinguish genius from talent. And therefore is it the prime merit of
genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent
familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling
concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant
accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence. Who has not
a thousand times seen snow fall on water? Who has not watched it with a new
feeling, from the time that he has read Burns's comparison of sensual
pleasure
'To snow that falls upon a river,
A moment white--then gone for ever! '"
_Biog. Lit_. vol. i, p. 85. --ED. ]
* * * * *
I think Sir James Scarlett's speech for the defendant, in the late action
of Cobbett v. The Times, for a libel, worthy of the best ages of Greece or
Rome; though, to be sure, some of his remarks could not have been very
palatable to his clients.
* * * * *
I am glad you came in to punctuate my discourse, which I fear has gone on
for an hour without any stop at all.
_July_ 1. 1833.
MANDEVILLE'S FABLE OF THE BEES. --BESTIAL THEORY. --CHARACTER OF BERTRAM. --
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER'S DRAMAS. --AESCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES,--MILTON.
If I could ever believe that Mandeville really meant any thing more by his
Fable of the Bees than a _bonne bouche_ of solemn raillery, I should like
to ask those man-shaped apes who have taken up his suggestions in earnest,
and seriously maintained them as bases for a rational account of man and
the world--how they explain the very existence of those dexterous cheats,
those superior charlatans, the legislators and philosophers, who have known
how to play so well upon the peacock-like vanity and follies of their
fellow mortals.
By the by, I wonder some of you lawyers (_sub rosa_, of course) have not
quoted the pithy lines in Mandeville upon this registration question:--
"The lawyers, of whose art the basis
Was raising feuds and splitting cases,
_Oppos'd all Registers_, that cheats
Might make more work with dipt estates;
As 'twere unlawful that one's own
Without a lawsuit should be known!
They put off hearings wilfully,
To finger the refreshing fee;
And to defend a wicked cause
Examined and survey'd the laws,
As burglars shops and houses do,
To see where best they may break through. "
There is great Hudibrastic vigour in these lines; and those on the doctors
are also very terse.
* * * * *
Look at that head of Cline, by Chantrey! Is that forehead, that nose, those
temples and that chin, akin to the monkey tribe? No, no. To a man of
sensibility no argument could disprove the bestial theory so convincingly
as a quiet contemplation of that fine bust.
* * * * *
I cannot agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon
Bertram in "All's Well that ends Well. " He was a young nobleman in feudal
times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth
and appetite for pleasure and liberty natural to such a character so
circumstanced. Of course he had never regarded Helena otherwise than as a
dependant in the family; and of all that which she possessed of goodness
and fidelity and courage, which might atone for her inferiority in other
respects, Bertram was necessarily in a great measure ignorant. And after
all, her _prima facie_ merit was the having inherited a prescription from
her old father the doctor, by which she cures the king,--a merit, which
supposes an extravagance of personal loyalty in Bertram to make conclusive
to him in such a matter as that of taking a wife. Bertram had surely good
reason to look upon the king's forcing him to marry Helena as a very
tyrannical act. Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very
delicate, and it required all Shakspeare's consummate skill to interest us
for her; and he does this chiefly by the operation of the other
characters,--the Countess, Lafeu, &c. We get to like Helena from their
praising and commending her so much.
* * * * *
In Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedies the comic scenes are rarely so
interfused amidst the tragic as to produce a unity of the tragic on the
whole, without which the intermixture is a fault. In Shakspeare, this is
always managed with transcendant skill. The Fool in Lear contributes in a
very sensible manner to the tragic wildness of the whole drama. Beaumont
and Fletcher's serious plays or tragedies are complete hybrids,--neither
fish nor flesh,--upon any rules, Greek, Roman, or Gothic: and yet they are
very delightful notwithstanding.
No doubt, they imitate the ease of
gentlemanly conversation better than Shakspeare, who was unable _not_ to be
too much associated to succeed perfectly in this.
When I was a boy, I was fondest of AEschylus; in youth and middle age I
preferred Euripides; now in my declining years I admire Sophocles. I can
now at length see that Sophocles is the most perfect. Yet he never rises to
the sublime simplicity of AEschylus--simplicity of design, I mean--nor
diffuses himself in the passionate outpourings of Euripides. I understand
why the ancients called Euripides the most tragic of their dramatists: he
evidently embraces within the scope of the tragic poet many passions,--
love, conjugal affection, jealousy, and so on, which Sophocles seems to
have considered as incongruous with the ideal statuesqueness of the tragic
drama. Certainly Euripides was a greater poet in the abstract than
Sophocles. His choruses may be faulty as choruses, but how beautiful and
affecting they are as odes and songs! I think the famous [Greek: Euippoy
Xene], in Oedipus Coloneus[1] cold in comparison with many of the odes of
Euripides, as that song of the chorus in the Hippolytus--[Greek: "Eoos,"
Eoos[2]] and so on; and I remember a choric ode in the Hecuba, which always
struck me as exquisitely rich and finished; I mean, where the chorus speaks
of Troy and the night of the capture. [3]
There is nothing very surprising in Milton's preference of Euripides,
though so unlike himself. It is very common--very natural--for men to
_like_ and even admire an exhibition of power very different in kind from
any thing of their own. No jealousy arises. Milton preferred Ovid too, and
I dare say he admired both as a man of sensibility admires a lovely woman,
with a feeling into which jealousy or envy cannot enter. With Aeschylus or
Sophocles he might perchance have matched himself.
In Euripides you have oftentimes a very near approach to comedy, and I
hardly know any writer in whom you can find such fine models of serious and
dignified conversation.
[Footnote 1:
Greek:
Euippoy, Xege, tmsde chosas
Tchoy ta chzatista gas esaula
tdn axgaeta Kolanon'--ch. t. l. v. 668]
[Footnote 2:
Greek:
"Exos" Exos, o chat' ommatton
s tazeos pothon eisagog glycheian
Psucha chariu ous epithtzateusei
mae moi tote sen chacho phaneiaes
maeo arruthmos elthois--x. t. l v. 527]
[Footnote 3:
I take it for granted that Mr. Coleridge alluded to the chorus,--
[Greek: Su men, _o patrhis Ilias
t_on aporhth_et_on polis
ouketi lexei toion El-
lan_on nephos amphi se krhuptei,
dorhi d_e, dorhi perhsan--k. t. l. ] v. 899.
Thou, then, oh, natal Troy! no more
The city of the unsack'd shalt be,
So thick from dark Achaia's shore
The cloud of war hath covered thee.
Ah! not again
I tread thy plain--
The spear--the spear hath rent thy pride;
The flame hath scarr'd thee deep and wide;
Thy coronal of towers is shorn,
And thou most piteous art--most naked and forlorn!
I perish'd at the noon of night!
When sleep had seal'd each weary eye;
When the dance was o'er,
And harps no more
Rang out in choral minstrelsy.
In the dear bower of delight
My husband slept in joy;
His shield and spear
Suspended near,
Secure he slept: that sailor band
Full sure he deem'd no more should stand
Beneath the walls of Troy.
And I too, by the taper's light,
Which in the golden mirror's haze
Flash'd its interminable rays,
Bound up the tresses of my hair,
That I Love's peaceful sleep might share.
I slept; but, hark! that war-shout dread,
Which rolling through the city spread;
And this the cry,--"When, Sons of Greece,
When shall the lingering leaguer cease;
When will ye spoil Troy's watch-tower high,
And home return? "--I heard the cry,
And, starting from the genial bed,
Veiled, as a Doric maid, I fled,
And knelt, Diana, at thy holy fane,
A trembling suppliant--all in vain. ]
JULY 3. 1833.
STYLE. --CAVALIER SLANG. --JUNTOS. --PROSE AND VERSE. --IMITATION AND COPY.
The collocation of words is so artificial in Shakspeare and Milton, that
you may as well think of pushing a[1] brick out of a wall with your
forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of their finished
passages. [2]
A good lecture upon style might he composed, by taking on the one hand the
slang of L'Estrange, and perhaps, even of Roger North,[3] which became so
fashionable after the Restoration as a mark of loyalty; and on the other,
the Johnsonian magniloquence or the balanced metre of Junius; and then
showing how each extreme is faulty, upon different grounds.
It is quite curious to remark the prevalence of the Cavalier slang style in
the divines of Charles the Second's time. Barrow could not of course adopt
such a mode of writing throughout, because he could not in it have
communicated his elaborate thinkings and lofty rhetoric; but even Barrow
not unfrequently lets slip a phrase here and there in the regular Roger
North way--much to the delight, no doubt, of the largest part of his
audience and contemporary readers. See particularly, for instances of this,
his work on the Pope's supremacy. South is full of it.
The style of Junius is a sort of metre, the law of which is a balance of
thesis and antithesis. When he gets out of this aphorismic metre into a
sentence of five or six lines long, nothing can exceed the slovenliness of
the English. Horne Tooke and a long sentence seem the only two antagonists
that were too much for him. Still the antithesis of Junius is a real
antithesis of images or thought; but the antithesis of Johnson is rarely
more than verbal.
The definition of good prose is--proper words in their proper places;--of
good verse--the most proper words in their proper places. The propriety is
in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended
meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in
general, a fault. In the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page
after page, understanding the author perfectly, without once taking notice
of the medium of communication;--it is as if he had been speaking to you
all the while. But in verse you must do more;--there the words, the
_media_, must be beautiful, and ought to attract your notice--yet not so
much and so perpetually as to destroy the unity which ought to result from
the whole poem. This is the general rule, but, of course, subject to some
modifications, according to the different kinds of prose or verse. Some
prose may approach towards verse, as oratory, and therefore a more studied
exhibition of the _media_ may be proper; and some verse may border more on
mere narrative, and there the style should be simpler. But the great thing
in poetry is, _quocunque modo_, to effect a unity of impression upon the
whole; and a too great fulness and profusion of point in the parts will
prevent this. Who can read with pleasure more than a hundred lines or so of
Hudibras at one time? Each couplet or quatrain is so whole in itself, that
you can't connect them. There is no fusion,--just as it is in Seneca.
[Footnote 1:
They led me to the sounding shore--
Heavens! as I passed the crowded way,
My bleeding lord before me lay--
I saw--I saw--and wept no more,
Till, as the homeward breezes bore
The bark returning o'er the sea,
My gaze, oh Ilion, turn'd on thee!
Then, frantic, to the midnight air,
I cursed aloud the adulterous pair:--
"They plunge me deep in exile's woe;
They lay my country low:
Their love--no love! but some dark spell,
In vengeance breath'd, by spirit fell.
Rise, hoary sea, in awful tide,
And whelm that vessel's guilty pride;
Nor e'er, in high Mycene's hall,
Let Helen boast in peace of mighty Ilion's fall. "
The translation was given to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge. --ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
"The amotion or transposition will alter the thought, or the feeling, or at
least the tone. They are as pieces of mosaic work, from which you cannot
strike the smallest block without making a hole in the picture. "--
_Quarterly Review_, No. CIII. p. 7. ]
[Footnote 3:
But Mr. Coleridge took a great distinction between North and the other
writers commonly associated with him. In speaking of the Examen and the
Life of Lord North, in the Friend, Mr. C. calls them "two of the most
interesting biographical works in our language, both for the weight of the
matter, and the _incuriosa felicitas_ of the style. The pages are all alive
with the genuine idioms of our mother tongue. A fastidious taste, it is
true, will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call
_slang_, which not a few of our writers, shortly after the Restoration of
Charles the Second, seem to have affected as a mark of loyalty. These
instances, however, are but a trifling drawback. They are not _sought for_,
as is too often and too plainly done by L'Estrange, Collyer, Tom Brown, and
their imitators. North never goes out of his way, either to seek them, or
to avoid them; and, in the main, his language gives us the very nerve,
pulse, and sinew of a hearty, healthy, conversational _English_. "--Vol. ii.
p. 307. --ED. ]
* * * * *
Imitation is the mesothesis of likeness and difference. The difference is
as essential to it as the likeness; for without the difference, it would be
copy or facsimile. But to borrow a term from astronomy, it is a librating
mesothesis: for it may verge more to likeness as in painting, or more to
difference, as in sculpture.
JULY 4. 1833.
DR. JOHNSON. --BOSWELL. --BURKE. --NEWTON. --MILTON.
Dr. Johnson's fame now rests principally upon Boswell. It is impossible not
to be amused with such a book. But his _bow-wow_ manner must have had a
good deal to do with the effect produced;--for no one, I suppose, will set
Johnson before Burke,--and Burke was a great and universal talker;--yet now
we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in Boswell. The fact
is, Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very
discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the
sharp short things that Johnson almost always did, which produce a more
decided effect at the moment, and which are so much more easy to carry
off. [1] Besides, as to Burke's testimony to Johnson's powers, you must
remember that Burke was a great courtier; and after all, Burke said and
wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than
writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life. [2]
[Footnote 1:
Burke, I am persuaded, was not so continuous a talker as Coleridge. Madame
de Stael told a nephew of the latter, at Coppet, that Mr. C. was a master
of monologue, _mais qu'il ne savait pas le dialogue_. There was a spice of
vindictiveness in this, the exact history of which is not worth explaining.
And if dialogue must be cut down in its meaning to small talk, I, for one,
will admit that Coleridge, amongst his numberless qualifications, possessed
it not. But I am sure that he could, when it suited him, converse as well
as any one else, and with women he frequently did converse in a very
winning and popular style, confining them, however, as well as he could, to
the detail of facts or of their spontaneous emotions. In general, it was
certainly otherwise. "You must not be surprised," he said to me, "at my
talking so long to you--I pass so much of my time in pain and solitude, yet
everlastingly thinking, that, when you or any other persons call on me, I
can hardly help easing my mind by pouring forth some of the accumulated
mass of reflection and feeling, upon an apparently interested recipient. "
But the principal reason, no doubt, was the habit of his intellect, which
was under a law of discoursing upon all subjects with reference to ideas or
ultimate ends. You might interrupt him when you pleased, and he was patient
of every sort of conversation except mere personality, which he absolutely
hated. --ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
This was said, I believe, to the late Sir James Mackintosh. --ED. ]
* * * * *
Newton _was_ a great man, but you must excuse me if I think that it would
take many Newtons to make one Milton.
_July_ 6. 1833.
PAINTING. ----MUSIC. ----POETRY.
It is a poor compliment to pay to a painter to tell him that his figure
stands out of the canvass, or that you start at the likeness of the
portrait. Take almost any daub, cut it out of the canvass, and place the
figure looking into or out of a window, and any one may take it for life.
Or take one of Mrs. Salmon's wax queens or generals, and you will very
sensibly feel the difference between a copy, as they are, and an imitation,
of the human form, as a good portrait ought to be. Look at that flower vase
of Van Huysum, and at these wax or stone peaches and apricots! The last are
likest to their original, but what pleasure do they give? None, except to
children. [1]
Some music is above me; most music is beneath me. I like Beethoven and
Mozart--or else some of the aerial compositions of the elder Italians, as
Palestrina[2] and Carissimi. --And I love Purcell.
The best sort of music is what it should be--sacred; the next best, the
military, has fallen to the lot of the Devil.
Good music never tires me, nor sends me to sleep. I feel physically
refreshed and strengthened by it, as Milton says he did.
I could write as good verses now as ever I did, if I were perfectly free
from vexations, and were in the _ad libitum_ hearing of fine music, which
has a sensible effect in harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as
it were, lubricating my inventive faculty. The reason of my not finishing
Christabel is not, that I don't know how to do it--for I have, as I always
had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I
could not carry on with equal success the execution of the idea, an
extremely subtle and difficult one.
Besides, after this continuation of Faust, which they tell me is very poor,
who can have courage to attempt[3] a reversal of the judgment of all
criticism against continuations? Let us except Don Quixote, however,
although the second part of that transcendant work is not exactly _uno
flatu_ with the original conception.
[Footnote 1:
This passage, and those following, will evidence, what the readers even of
this little work must have seen, that Mr. Coleridge had an eye, almost
exclusively, for the ideal or universal in painting and music. He knew
nothing of the details of handling in the one, or of rules of composition
in the other. Yet he was, to the best of my knowledge, an unerring judge of
the merits of any serious effort in the fine arts, and detected the leading
thought or feeling of the artist, with a decision which used sometimes to
astonish me. Every picture which I have looked at in company with him,
seems now, to my mind, translated into English. He would sometimes say,
after looking for a minute at a picture, generally a modern one, "There's
no use in stopping at this; for I see the painter had no idea. It is mere
mechanical drawing. Come on; _here_ the artist _meant_ something for the
mind. " It was just the same with his knowledge of music. His appetite for
what he thought good was literally inexhaustible. He told me he could
listen to fine music for twelve hours together, and go away _refreshed_.
But he required in music either thought or feeling; mere addresses to the
sensual ear he could not away with; hence his utter distaste for Rossini,
and his reverence for Beethoven and Mozart--ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was born about 1529, and died in 1594. I
believe he may be considered the founder or reformer of the Italian church
music. His masses, motets, and hymns are tolerably well known amongst
lovers of the old composers; but Mr. Coleridge used to speak with delight
of some of Palestrina's madrigals which he heard at Rome.
Giacomo Carissimi composed about the years 1640--1650. His style has been
charged with effeminacy; but Mr. C. thought it very graceful and chaste.
Henry Purcell needs no addition in England. --ED. ]
[Footnote 3:
"The thing attempted in Christabel is the most difficult of execution in
the whole field of romance--witchery by daylight--and the success is
complete. "--_Quarterly Review_, No. CIII. p. 29. ]
_July 8. 1833. _
PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
I am clear for public schools as the general rule; but for particular
children private education may be proper. For the purpose of moving at ease
in the best English society,--mind, I don't call the London exclusive
clique the best English society,--the defect of a public education upon the
plan of our great schools and Oxford and Cambridge is hardly to be
supplied. But the defect is visible positively in some men, and only
negatively in others. The first _offend_ you by habits and modes of
thinking and acting directly attributable to their private education; in
the others you only regret that the freedom and facility of the established
and national mode of bringing up is not _added_ to their good qualities.
* * * * *
I more than doubt the expediency of making even
elementary mathematics a part of the routine in the
system of the great schools. It is enough, I think,
that encouragement and facilities should be given; and
I think more will be thus effected than by compelling
all. Much less would I incorporate the German or
French, or any modern language, into the school labours.
I think that a great mistake. [1]
[Footnote 1:
"One constant blunder"--I find it so pencilled by Mr. C. on a margin--"of
these New-Broomers--these Penny Magazine sages and philanthropists, in
reference to our public schools, is to confine their view to what
schoolmasters teach the boys, with entire oversight of all that the boys
are excited to learn from each other and of themselves--with more geniality
even because it is not a part of their compelled school knowledge. An Eton
boy's knowledge of the St. Lawrence, Mississippi, Missouri, Orellana, &c.
will be, generally, found in exact proportion to his knowledge of the
Ilissus, Hebrus, Orontes, &c. ; inasmuch as modern travels and voyages are
more entertaining and fascinating than Cellarius; or Robinson Crusoe,
Dampier, and Captain Cook, than the Periegesis. Compare the _lads_
themselves from Eton and Harrow, &c. with the alumni of the New-Broom
Institution, and not the lists of school-lessons; and be that comparison
the criterion. --ED. ]
August 4, 1833.
SCOTT AND COLERIDGE.
Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious, opposites in
this;--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a
host of historical or biographical associations,--just as a bright pan of
brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees;--whereas, for
myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain
of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of
similar features.
