His death is
uncertainly
placed in the beginning
of the ninth century.
of the ninth century.
Coleridge - Table Talk
]
* * * * *
Gifford has done a great deal for the text of Massinger, but not as much as
might easily be done. His comparison of Shakspeare with his contemporary
dramatists is obtuse indeed. [1]
[Footnote 1:
See his _Introduction to Massinger, vol_. i. p. 79. , in which, amongst other
most extraordinary assertions, Mr. Gifford pronounces that _rhythmical
modulation is not one of Shakspeare's merits! _--ED. ]
* * * * *
In Shakspeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all
inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere;
yet, when the creation in its outline is once perfect, then he seems to
rest from his labour, and to smile upon his work, and tell himself that it
is very good. You see many scenes and parts of scenes which are simply
Shakspeare's, disporting himself in joyous triumph and vigorous fun after a
great achievement of his highest genius.
* * * * *
The old dramatists took great liberties in respect of bringing parties in
scene together, and representing one as not recognizing the other under
some faint disguise. Some of their finest scenes are constructed on this
ground. Shakspeare avails himself of this artifice only twice, I think,--in
Twelfth Night, where the two are with great skill kept apart till the end
of the play; and in the Comedy of Errors, which is a pure farce, and should
be so considered. The definition of a farce is, an improbability or even
impossibility granted in the outset, see what odd and laughable events will
fairly follow from it!
_April _8. 1833.
STATESMEN. --BURKE.
I never was much subject to violent political humours or accesses of
feelings. When I was very young, I wrote and spoke very enthusiastically,
but it was always on subjects connected with some grand general principle,
the violation of which I thought I could point out. As to mere details of
administration, I honestly thought that ministers, and men in office, must,
of course, know much better than any private person could possibly do; and
it was not till I went to Malta, and had to correspond with official
characters myself, that I fully understood the extreme shallowness and
ignorance with which men of some note too were able, after a certain
fashion, to carry on the government of important departments of the empire.
I then quite assented to Oxenstiern's saying, _Nescis, mi fili, quam parva
sapientia regitur mundus_.
* * * * *
Burke was, indeed, a great man. No one ever read history so philosophically
as he seems to have done. Yet, until he could associate his general
principles with some sordid interest, panic of property, jacobinism, &c. ,
he was a mere dinner bell. Hence you will find so many half truths in his
speeches and writings. Nevertheless, let us heartily acknowledge his
transcendant greatness. He would have been more influential if he had less
surpassed his contemporaries, as Fox and Pitt, men of much inferior minds
in all respects.
* * * * *
As a telegraph supposes a correspondent telescope, so a scientific lecture
requires a scientific audience.
_April _9. 1833.
PROSPECT OF MONARCHY OR DEMOCRACY. --THE REFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS.
I have a deep, though paradoxical, conviction that most of the European
nations are more or less on their way, unconsciously indeed, to pure
monarchy; that is, to a government in which, under circumstances of
complicated and subtle control, the reason of the people shall become
efficient in the apparent will of the king. [1] As it seems to me, the wise
and good in every country will, in all likelihood, become every day more
and more disgusted with the representative form of government, brutalized
as it is, and will be, by the predominance of democracy in England, France,
and Belgium. The statesmen of antiquity, we know, doubted the possibility
of the effective and permanent combination of the three elementary forms of
government; and, perhaps, they had more reason than we have been accustomed
to think.
[Footnote 1: This is backing Vico against Spinosa. It must, however, be
acknowledged that at present the prophet of democracy has a good right to
be considered the favourite. --ED. ]
* * * * *
You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill
prophecies that were made of it--low, vulgar, meddling with every thing,
assuming universal competency, flattering every base passion, and sneering
at every thing noble, refined, and truly national! The direct and personal
despotism will come on by and by, after the multitude shall have been
gratified with the ruin and the spoil of the old institutions of the land.
As for the House of Lords, what is the use of ever so much fiery spirit, if
there be no principle to guide and to sanctify it?
_April _10. 1833.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. --CAPTAIN B. HALL. --NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN STATES.
--DEMOCRACY WITH SLAVERY. --QUAKERS.
The possible destiny of the United States of America,--as a nation of a
hundred millions of freemen,--stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakspeare
and Milton, is an august conception. Why should we not wish to see it
realized? America would then be England viewed through a solar microscope;
Great Britain in a state of glorious magnification! How deeply to be
lamented is the spirit of hostility and sneering which some of the popular
books of travels have shown in treating of the Americans! They hate us, no
doubt, just as brothers hate; but they respect the opinion of an Englishman
concerning themselves ten times as much as that of a native of any other
country on earth. A very little humouring of their prejudices, and some
courtesy of language and demeanour on the part of Englishmen, would work
wonders, even as it is, with the public mind of the Americans.
* * * * *
Captain Basil Hall's book is certainly very entertaining and instructive;
but, in my judgment, his sentiments upon many points, and more especially
his mode of expression, are unwise and uncharitable. After all, are not
most of the things shown up with so much bitterness by him mere national
foibles, parallels to which every people has and must of necessity have?
* * * * *
What you say about the quarrel in the United States is sophistical. No
doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally, or
apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. In such cases
there is a hardship; but, in the long run, the matter is fully compensated
to the over-taxed class. For example, take the householders of London, who
complain so bitterly of the house and window taxes. Is it not pretty clear
that, whether such householder be a tradesman, who indemnifies himself in
the price of his goods,--or a letter of lodgings, who does so in his rent,
--or a stockholder, who receives it back again in his dividends,--or a
country gentleman, who has saved so much fresh levy on his land or his
other property,--one way or other, it comes at last pretty nearly to the
same thing, though the pressure for the time may be unjust and vexatious,
and fit to be removed? But when New England, which may be considered a
state in itself, taxes the admission of foreign manufactures in order to
cherish manufactures of its own, and thereby forces the Carolinians,
another state of itself, with which there is little intercommunion, which
has no such desire or interest to serve, to buy worse articles at a higher
price, it is altogether a different question, and is, in fact, downright
tyranny of the worst, because of the most sordid, kind. What would you
think of a law which should tax every person in Devonshire for the
pecuniary benefit of every person in Yorkshire? And yet that is a feeble
image of the actual usurpation of the New England deputies over the
property of the Southern States.
* * * * *
There are two possible modes of unity in a State; one by absolute
coordination of each to all, and of all to each; the other by
subordination of classes and offices. Now, I maintain that there never was
an instance of the first, nor can there be, without slavery as its
condition and accompaniment, as in Athens. The poor Swiss cantons are no
exception.
The mistake lies in confounding a state which must be based on classes and
interests and unequal property, with a church, which is founded on the
person, and has no qualification but personal merit. Such a community _may_
exist, as in the case of the Quakers; but, in order to exist, it must be
compressed and hedged in by another society--_mundus mundulus in mundo
immundo_.
* * * * *
The free class in a slave state is always, in one sense, the most patriotic
class of people in an empire; for their patriotism is not simply the
patriotism of other people, but an aggregate of lust of power and
distinction and supremacy.
_April _11. 1833.
LAND AND MONEY.
Land was the only species of property which, in the old time, carried any
respectability with it. Money alone, apart from some tenure of land, not
only did not make the possessor great and respectable, but actually made
him at once the object of plunder and hatred. Witness the history of the
Jews in this country in the early reigns after the Conquest.
* * * * *
I have no objection to your aspiring to the political principles of our old
Cavaliers; but embrace them all fully, and not merely this and that
feeling, whilst in other points you speak the canting foppery of the
Benthamite or Malthusian schools.
_April _14. 1833.
METHODS OF INVESTIGATION.
There are three ways of treating a subject:--
In the first mode, you begin with a definition, and that definition is
necessarily assumed as the truth. As the argument proceeds, the conclusion
from the first proposition becomes the base of the second, and so on. Now,
it is quite impossible that you can be sure that you have included all the
necessary, and none but the necessary, terms in your definition; as,
therefore, you proceed, the original speck of error is multiplied at every
remove; the same infirmity of knowledge besetting each successive
definition. Hence you may set out, like Spinosa, with all but the truth,
and end with a conclusion which is altogether monstrous; and yet the mere
deduction shall be irrefragable. Warburton's "Divine Legation" is also a
splendid instance of this mode of discussion, and of its inability to lead
to the truth: in fact, it is an attempt to adopt the mathematical series of
proof, in forgetfulness that the mathematician is sure of the truth of his
definition at each remove, because he _creates _it, as he can do, in pure
figure and number. But you cannot _make _any thing true which results from,
or is connected with, real externals; you can only _find _it out. The chief
use of this first mode of discussion is to sharpen the wit, for which
purpose it is the best exercitation.
2. The historical mode is a very common one: in it the author professes to
find out the truth by collecting the facts of the case, and tracing them
downwards; but this mode is worse than the other. Suppose the question is
as to the true essence and character of the English constitution. First,
where will you begin your collection of facts? where will you end it? What
facts will you select, and how do you know that the class of facts which
you select are necessary terms in the premisses, and that other classes of
facts, which you neglect, are not necessary? And how do you distinguish
phenomena which proceed from disease or accident from those which are the
genuine fruits of the essence of the constitution? What can be more
striking, in illustration of the utter inadequacy of this line of
investigation for arriving at the real truth, than the political treatises
and constitutional histories which we have in every library? A Whig proves
his case convincingly to the reader who knows nothing beyond his author;
then comes an old Tory (Carte, for instance), and ferrets up a hamperful of
conflicting documents and notices, which proves _his _case _per contra_. A.
takes this class of facts; B. takes that class: each proves something true,
neither proves _the_ truth, or any thing like _the _truth; that is, the
whole truth.
3. You must, therefore, commence with the philosophic idea of the thing,
the true nature of which you wish to find out and manifest. You must carry
your rule ready made, if you wish to measure aright. If you ask me how I
can know that this idea--my own invention--is the truth, by which the
phenomena of history are to be explained, I answer, in the same way exactly
that you know that your eyes were made to see with; and that is, because
you _do _see with them. If I propose to you an idea or self-realizing
theory of the constitution, which shall manifest itself as in existence
from the earliest times to the present,--which shall comprehend within it
_all _the facts which history has preserved, and shall give them a meaning
as interchangeably causals or effects;--if I show you that such an event or
reign was an obliquity to the right hand, and how produced, and such other
event or reign a deviation to the left, and whence originating,--that the
growth was stopped here, accelerated there,--that such a tendency is, and
always has been, corroborative, and such other tendency destructive, of the
main progress of the idea towards realization;--if this idea, not only like
a kaleidoscope, shall reduce all the miscellaneous fragments into order,
but shall also minister strength, and knowledge, and light to the true
patriot and statesmen for working out the bright thought, and bringing the
glorious embryo to a perfect birth;--then, I think, I have a right to say
that the idea which led to this is not only true, but the truth, the only
truth. To set up for a statesman upon historical knowledge only, is as
about as wise as to set up for a musician by the purchase of some score
flutes, fiddles, and horns. In order to make music, you must know how to
play; in order to make your facts speak truth, you must know what the truth
is which _ought_ to be proved,--the ideal truth,--the truth which was
consciously or unconsciously, strongly or weakly, wisely or blindly,
intended at all times. [1]
[Footnote 1:
I have preserved this passage, conscious, the while, how liable it is to be
misunderstood, or at least not understood. The readers of Mr. Coleridge's
works generally, or of his "Church and State" in particular, will have no
difficulty in entering into his meaning; namely, that no investigation in
the non-mathematical sciences can be carried on in a way deserving to be
called philosophical, unless the investigator have in himself a mental
initiative, or, what comes to the same thing, unless he set out with an
intuition of the ultimate aim or idea of the science or aggregation of
facts to be explained or interpreted. The analysis of the Platonic and
Baconian methods in "The Friend," to which I have before referred, and the
"Church and State," exhibit respectively a splendid vindication and example
of Mr. Coleridge's mode of reasoning on this subject. --ED. ]
_April _18. 1833.
CHURCH OF ROME. --CELIBACY OF THE CLERGY.
In my judgment, Protestants lose a great deal of time in a false attack
when they labour to convict the Romanists of false doctrines. Destroy the
_Papacy_, and help the priests to wives, and I am much mistaken if the
doctrinal errors, such as there really are, would not very soon pass away.
They might remain _in terminis_, but they would lose their sting and body,
and lapse back into figures of rhetoric and warm devotion, from which they,
most of them,--such as transubstantiation, and prayers for the dead and to
saints,--originally sprang. But, so long as the Bishop of Rome remains
Pope, and has an army of Mamelukes all over the world, we shall do very
little by fulminating against mere doctrinal errors. In the Milanese, and
elsewhere in the north of Italy, I am told there is a powerful feeling
abroad against the Papacy. That district seems to be something in the state
of England in the reign of our Henry the Eighth.
How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of
the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in
Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a
clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation
of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in
Spain, Italy, France, &c. prove it abundantly.
The Papal church has had three phases,--anti-Caesarean, extra-national,
anti-Christian.
_April _20. 1833.
ROMAN CONQUEST OF ITALY.
The Romans would never have subdued the Italian tribes if they had not
boldly left Italy and conquered foreign nations, and so, at last, crushed
their next-door neighbours by external pressure.
_April _24. 1833.
WEDDED LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS. --TENNYSON'S
POEMS.
Except in Shakspeare, you can find no such thing as a pure conception of
wedded love in our old dramatists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher,
it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. There is
scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose _abilities_ are not discussed
by the lady or her waiting-woman. In this, as in all things, how
transcendant over his age and his rivals was our sweet Shakspeare!
* * * * *
I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to
me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I
have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without
very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and
approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you
will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without
considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would,
with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson,--indeed without it he
can never be a poet in act,--is to write for the next two or three years in
none but one or two well-known and strictly defined metres, such as the
heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octo-syllabic measure of the
Allegro and Penseroso. He would, probably, thus get imbued with a
sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys
get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is,
I can scarcely scan some of his verses.
_May _1. 1833.
RABELAIS AND LUTHER. --WIT AND MADNESS.
I think with some interest upon the fact that Rabelais and Luther were born
in the same year. [1] Glorious spirits! glorious spirits!
----"Hos utinam inter
Heroas natum me! "
[Footnote 1:
They were both born within twelve months of each other, I believe; but
Luther's birth was in November, 1484, and that of Rabelais is generally
placed at the end of the year preceding. --ED. ]
* * * * *
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,"
says Dryden, and true so far as this, that genius of the highest kind
implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power, which detached from
the discriminative and reproductive power, might conjure a platted straw
into a royal diadem: but it would be at least as true, that great genius is
most alien from madness,--yea, divided from it by an impassable mountain,--
namely, the activity of thought and vivacity of the accumulative memory,
which are no less essential constituents of "great wit. "
_May _4. 1833.
COLONIZATION. --MACHINERY. --CAPITAL.
Colonization is not only a manifest expedient for, but an imperative duty
on, Great Britain. God seems to hold out his finger to us over the sea. But
it must be a national colonization, such as was that of the Scotch to
America; a colonization of hope, and not such as we have alone encouraged
and effected for the last fifty years, a colonization of despair.
* * * * *
The wonderful powers of machinery can, by multiplied production, render the
mere _arte facta _of life actually cheaper: thus money and all other things
being supposed the same in value, a silk gown is five times cheaper now
than in Queen Elizabeth's time; but machinery cannot cheapen, in any thing
like an equal degree, the immediate growths of nature or the immediate
necessaries of man. Now the _arte facta _are sought by the higher classes
of society in a proportion incalculably beyond that in which they are
sought by the lower classes; and therefore it is that the vast increase of
mechanical powers has not cheapened life and pleasure to the poor as it has
done to the rich. In some respects, no doubt, it has done so, as in giving
cotton dresses to maid-servants, and penny gin to all. A pretty benefit
truly!
* * * * *
I think this country is now suffering grievously under an excessive
accumulation of capital, which, having no field for profitable operation,
is in a state of fierce civil war with itself.
_May _6. 1833.
ROMAN CONQUEST. --CONSTANTINE. --PAPACY AND THE
SCHOOLMEN.
The Romans had no national clerisy; their priesthood was entirely a matter
of state, and, as far back as we can trace it, an evident stronghold of the
Patricians against the increasing powers of the Plebeians. All we know of
the early Romans is, that, after an indefinite lapse of years, they had
conquered some fifty or sixty miles round their city. Then it is that they
go to war with Carthage, the great maritime power, and the result of that
war was the occupation of Sicily. Thence they, in succession, conquered
Spain, Macedonia, Asia Minor, &c. , and so at last contrived to subjugate
Italy, partly by a tremendous back blow, and partly by bribing the Italian
States with a communication of their privileges, which the now enormously
enriched conquerors possessed over so large a portion of the civilized
world. They were ordained by Providence to conquer and amalgamate the
materials of Christendom. They were not a national people; they
were truly--
_Romanos rerum dominos--_
--and that's all.
* * * * *
Under Constantine the spiritual power became a complete reflex of the
temporal. There were four patriarchs, and four prefects, and so on. The
Clergy and the Lawyers, the Church and the State, were opposed.
* * * * *
The beneficial influence of the Papacy upon the whole has been much over-
rated by some writers; and certainly no country in Europe received less
benefit and more harm from it than England. In fact, the lawful kings and
parliaments of England were always essentially Protestant in feeling for a
national church, though they adhered to the received doctrines of the
Christianity of the day; and it was only the usurpers, John, Henry IV. ,
&c. , that went against this policy. All the great English schoolmen, Scotus
Erigena[1], Duns Scotus, Ockham, and others, those morning stars of the
Reformation, were heart and soul opposed to Rome, and maintained the Papacy
to be Antichrist. The Popes always persecuted, with rancorous hatred, the
national clerisies, the married clergy, and disliked the universities which
grew out of the old monasteries. The Papacy was, and is, essentially extra-
national, and was always so considered in this country, although not
believed to be anti-Christian.
[Footnote 1:
John Scotus, or Erigena, was born, according to different authors, in
Wales, Scotland, or Ireland; but I do not find any account making him an
Englishman of Saxon blood.
His death is uncertainly placed in the beginning
of the ninth century. He lived in well-known intimacy with Charles the
Bald, of France, who died about A. D. 874. He resolutely resisted the
doctrine of transubstantiation, and was publicly accused of heresy on that
account. But the king of France protected him--ED. ]
_May_ 8. 1833.
CIVIL WAR OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. --HAMPDEN'S SPEECH.
I know no portion of history which a man might write with so much pleasure
as that of the great struggle in the time of Charles I. , because he may
feel the profoundest respect for both parties. The side taken by any
particular person was determined by the point of view which such person
happened to command at the commencement of the inevitable collision, one
line seeming straight to this man, another line to another. No man of that
age saw _the_ truth, the whole truth; there was not light enough for that.
The consequence, of course, was a violent exaggeration of each party for
the time. The King became a martyr, and the Parliamentarians traitors, and
_vice versa_. The great reform brought into act by and under William the
Third combined the principles truly contended for by Charles and his
Parliament respectively: the great revolution of 1831 has certainly, to an
almost ruinous degree, dislocated those principles of government again. As
to Hampden's speech[1], no doubt it means a declaration of passive
obedience to the sovereign, as the creed of an English Protestant
individual: every man, Cromwell and all, would have said as much; it was
the antipapistical tenet, and almost vauntingly asserted on all occasions
by Protestants up to that time. But it implies nothing of Hampden's creed
as to the duty of Parliament.
[Footnote 1:
On his impeachment with the other four members, 1642. See the "Letter to
John Murray, Esq. _touching_ Lord Nugent," 1833. It is extraordinary that
Lord N. should not see the plain distinction taken by Hampden, between not
obeying an unlawful command, and rebelling against the King because of it.
He approves the one, and condemns the other. His words are, "to _yield
obedience to_ the commands of a King, if against the true religion, against
the ancient and fundamental laws of the land, is another sign of an ill
subject:"--"To _resist_ the lawful power of the King; to raise insurrection
against the King; admit him adverse in his religion; _to conspire against
his sacred person, or any ways to rebel, though commanding things against
our consciences in exercising religion, or against the rights and
privileges of the subject_, is an absolute sign of the disaffected and
traitorous subject. "--ED. ]
_May_ 10. 1833.
REFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS.
Well, I think no honest man will deny that the prophetic denunciations of
those who seriously and solemnly opposed the Reform Bill are in a fair way
of exact fulfilment! For myself, I own I did not expect such rapidity of
movement. I supposed that the first parliament would contain a large number
of low factious men, who would vulgarize and degrade the debates of the
House of Commons, and considerably impede public business, and that the
majority would be gentlemen more fond of their property than their
politics. But really the truth is something more than this. Think of
upwards of 160 members voting away two millions and a half of tax on
Friday[1], at the bidding of whom, shall I say? and then no less than 70 of
those very members rescinding their votes on the Tuesday next following,
nothing whatever having intervened to justify the change, except that they
had found out that at least seven or eight millions more must go also upon
the same principle, and that the revenue was cut in two! Of course I
approve the vote of rescission, however dangerous a precedent; but what a
picture of the composition of this House of Commons!
[Footnote 1:
On Friday, the 26th of April, 1833, Sir William Ingilby moved and carried a
resolution for reducing the duty on malt from 28s. 8d. to l0s. per quarter.
One hundred and sixty-two members voted with him. On Tuesday following, the
30th of April, seventy-six members only voted against the rescission of the
same resolution. --ED. ]
_May_ 13. 1833.
FOOD. --MEDICINE. --POISON. --OBSTRUCTION.
1. That which is digested wholly, and part of which is assimilated, and
part rejected, is--Food.
2. That which is digested wholly, and the whole of which is partly
assimilated, and partly not, is--Medicine.
3. That which is digested, but not assimilated, is--Poison.
4. That which is neither digested nor assimilated is--Mere Obstruction.
As to the stories of slow poisons, I cannot say whether there was any, or
what, truth in them; but I certainly believe a man may be poisoned by
arsenic a year after he has taken it. In fact, I think that is known to
have happened.
May 14. 1833.
WILSON. --SHAKSPEARE'S SONNETS. --LOVE.
Professor Wilson's character of Charles Lamb in the last Blackwood,
_Twaddle on Tweed-side_[1], is very sweet indeed, and gratified me much. It
does honour to Wilson, to his head and his heart.
[Footnote 1:
"Charles Lamb ought really not to abuse Scotland in the pleasant way he so
often does in the sylvan shades of Enfield; for Scotland loves Charles
Lamb; but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a
Cockney is a better man even than Christopher North. But what will not
Christopher forgive to genius and goodness! Even Lamb, bleating libels on
his native land. Nay, he learns lessons of humanity even from the mild
malice of Elia, and breathes a blessing on him and his household in their
bower of rest. "
Some of Mr. Coleridge's poems were first published with some of C. Lamb's
at Bristol in 1797. The remarkable words on the title-page have been aptly
cited in the New Monthly Magazine for February, 1835, p. 198. : "Duplex
nobis vinculum, et amicitiae et similium junctarumque Camcoenarum,--quod
utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longinquitas. " And even so it came
to pass after thirty seven years more had passed over their heads,--ED. ]
* * * * *
How can I wish that Wilson should cease to write what so often soothes and
suspends my bodily miseries, and my mental conflicts! Yet what a waste,
what a reckless spending, of talent, ay, and of genius, too, in his I know
not how many years' management of Blackwood! If Wilson cares for fame, for
an enduring place and prominence in literature, he should now, I think,
hold his hand, and say, as he well may,--
"Militavi non sine gloria:
Nunc arma defunctumque bello
Barbiton hic paries habebit. "
Two or three volumes collected out of the magazine by himself would be very
delightful. But he must not leave it for others to do; for some recasting
and much condensation would be required; and literary executors make sad
work in general with their testators' brains.
* * * * *
I believe it possible that a man may, under certain states of the moral
feeling, entertain something deserving the name of love towards a male
object--an affection beyond friendship, and wholly aloof from appetite. In
Elizabeth's and James's time it seems to have been almost fashionable to
cherish such a feeling; and perhaps we may account in some measure for it
by considering how very inferior the women of that age, taken generally,
were in education and accomplishment of mind to the men. Of course there
were brilliant exceptions enough; but the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher--
the most popular dramatists that ever wrote for the English stage--will
show us what sort of women it was generally pleasing to represent.
Certainly the language of the two friends, Musidorus and Pyrocles, in the
Arcadia, is such as we could not now use except to women; and in Cervantes
the same tone is sometimes adopted, as in the novel of the Curious
Impertinent. And I think there is a passage in the New Atlantis[1] of Lord
Bacon, in which he speaks of the possibility of such a feeling, but hints
the extreme danger of entertaining it, or allowing it any place in a moral
theory. I mention this with reference to Shakspeare's sonnets, which have
been supposed, by some, to be addressed to William Herbert, Earl of
Pembroke, whom Clarendon calls[2] the most beloved man of his age, though
his licentiousness was equal to his virtues.
I doubt this. I do not think that Shakespeare, merely because he was an
actor, would have thought it necessary to veil his emotions towards
Pembroke under a disguise, though he might probably have done so, if the
real object had perchance been a Laura or a Leonora. It seems to me that
the sonnets could only have come from a man deeply in love, and in love
with a woman; and there is one sonnet which, from its incongruity, I take
to be a purposed blind. These extraordinary sonnets form, in fact, a poem
of so many stanzas of fourteen lines each; and, like the passion which
inspired them, the sonnets are always the same, with a variety of
expression,--continuous, if you regard the lover's soul,--distinct, if you
listen to him, as he heaves them sigh after sigh.
These sonnets, like the Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, are
characterized by boundless fertility and laboured condensation of thought,
with perfection of sweetness in rhythm and metre. These are the essentials
in the budding of a great poet. Afterwards habit and consciousness of power
teach more ease--_praecipitandum liberum spiritum_.
[Footnote 1:
I cannot fix upon any passage in this work, to which it can be supposed
that Mr. Coleridge alluded, unless it be the speech of Joabin the Jew; but
it contains nothing coming up to the meaning in the text. The only approach
to it seems to be:--"As for masculine love, they have no touch of it; and
yet there are not so faithful and inviolate friendships in the world again
as are there; and to speak generally, as I said before, I have not read of
any such chastity in any people as theirs. "--ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
"William Earl of Pembroke was next, a man of another mould and making, and
of another fame and reputation with all men, being the most universally
beloved and esteemed of any man of that age. " . . . . . . . "He indulged to
himself the pleasures of all kinds, almost in all excesses. "--_Hist. of the
Rebellion_, book i. He died in 1630, aged fifty years. The dedication by T.
T. (Thomas Thorpe) is to "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr.
W. H. " and Malone is inclined to think that William Hughes is meant. As to
Mr. W. H. being the _only_ begetter of these sonnets, it must be observed,
that at least the last twenty-eight are beyond dispute addressed to a
woman. I suppose the twentieth sonnet was the particular one conceived by
Mr. C. to be a blind; but it seems to me that many others may be so
construed, if we set out with a conviction that the real object of the poet
was a woman. --ED. ]
* * * * *
Every one who has been in love, knows that the passion is strongest, and
the appetite weakest, in the absence of the beloved object, and that the
reverse is the case in her presence.
_May_ 15. 1833.
WICLIFFE. --LUTHER. --REVERENCE FOR IDEAL TRUTHS. --JOHNSON THE WHIG. --
ASGILL. --JAMES I.
Wicliffe's genius was, perhaps, not equal to Luther's; but really the more
I know of him from Vaughan and Le Bas, both of whose books I like, I think
him as extraordinary a man as Luther upon the whole. He was much sounder
and more truly catholic in his view of the Eucharist than Luther. And I
find, not without some pleasure, that my own view of it, which I was
afraid was original, was maintained in the tenth century, that is to say,
that the body broken had no reference to the human body of Christ, but to
the Caro Noumenon, or symbolical Body, the Rock that followed the
Israelites.
Whitaker beautifully says of Luther;--_Felix ille, quem Dominus eo honore
dignatus est, ut homines nequissimos suos haberet inimicos_.
* * * * *
There is now no reverence for any thing; and the reason is, that men
possess conceptions only, and all their knowledge is conceptional only.
Now as, to conceive, is a work of the mere understanding, and as all that
can be conceived may be comprehended, it is impossible that a man should
reverence that, to which he must always feel something in himself
superior. If it were possible to conceive God in a strict sense, that is,
as we conceive a horse or a tree, even God himself could not excite any
reverence, though he might excite fear or terror, or perhaps love, as a
tiger or a beautiful woman. But reverence, which is the synthesis of love
and fear, is only due from man, and, indeed, only excitable in man,
towards ideal truths, which are always mysteries to the understanding, for
the same reason that the motion of my finger behind my back is a mystery
to you now--your eyes not being made for seeing through my body. It is
the reason only which has a sense by which ideas can be recognized, and
from the fontal light of ideas only can a man draw intellectual power.
* * * * *
Samuel Johnson[1], whom, to distinguish him from the Doctor, we may call
the Whig, was a very remarkable writer. He may be compared to his
contemporary De Foe, whom he resembled in many points. He is another
instance of King William's discrimination, which was so much superior to
that of any of his ministers, Johnson was one of the most formidable
advocates for the Exclusion Bill, and he suffered by whipping and
imprisonment under James accordingly. Like Asgill, he argues with great
apparent candour and clearness till he has his opponent within reach, and
then comes a blow as from a sledge-hammer. 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.
* * * * *
Gifford has done a great deal for the text of Massinger, but not as much as
might easily be done. His comparison of Shakspeare with his contemporary
dramatists is obtuse indeed. [1]
[Footnote 1:
See his _Introduction to Massinger, vol_. i. p. 79. , in which, amongst other
most extraordinary assertions, Mr. Gifford pronounces that _rhythmical
modulation is not one of Shakspeare's merits! _--ED. ]
* * * * *
In Shakspeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all
inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere;
yet, when the creation in its outline is once perfect, then he seems to
rest from his labour, and to smile upon his work, and tell himself that it
is very good. You see many scenes and parts of scenes which are simply
Shakspeare's, disporting himself in joyous triumph and vigorous fun after a
great achievement of his highest genius.
* * * * *
The old dramatists took great liberties in respect of bringing parties in
scene together, and representing one as not recognizing the other under
some faint disguise. Some of their finest scenes are constructed on this
ground. Shakspeare avails himself of this artifice only twice, I think,--in
Twelfth Night, where the two are with great skill kept apart till the end
of the play; and in the Comedy of Errors, which is a pure farce, and should
be so considered. The definition of a farce is, an improbability or even
impossibility granted in the outset, see what odd and laughable events will
fairly follow from it!
_April _8. 1833.
STATESMEN. --BURKE.
I never was much subject to violent political humours or accesses of
feelings. When I was very young, I wrote and spoke very enthusiastically,
but it was always on subjects connected with some grand general principle,
the violation of which I thought I could point out. As to mere details of
administration, I honestly thought that ministers, and men in office, must,
of course, know much better than any private person could possibly do; and
it was not till I went to Malta, and had to correspond with official
characters myself, that I fully understood the extreme shallowness and
ignorance with which men of some note too were able, after a certain
fashion, to carry on the government of important departments of the empire.
I then quite assented to Oxenstiern's saying, _Nescis, mi fili, quam parva
sapientia regitur mundus_.
* * * * *
Burke was, indeed, a great man. No one ever read history so philosophically
as he seems to have done. Yet, until he could associate his general
principles with some sordid interest, panic of property, jacobinism, &c. ,
he was a mere dinner bell. Hence you will find so many half truths in his
speeches and writings. Nevertheless, let us heartily acknowledge his
transcendant greatness. He would have been more influential if he had less
surpassed his contemporaries, as Fox and Pitt, men of much inferior minds
in all respects.
* * * * *
As a telegraph supposes a correspondent telescope, so a scientific lecture
requires a scientific audience.
_April _9. 1833.
PROSPECT OF MONARCHY OR DEMOCRACY. --THE REFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS.
I have a deep, though paradoxical, conviction that most of the European
nations are more or less on their way, unconsciously indeed, to pure
monarchy; that is, to a government in which, under circumstances of
complicated and subtle control, the reason of the people shall become
efficient in the apparent will of the king. [1] As it seems to me, the wise
and good in every country will, in all likelihood, become every day more
and more disgusted with the representative form of government, brutalized
as it is, and will be, by the predominance of democracy in England, France,
and Belgium. The statesmen of antiquity, we know, doubted the possibility
of the effective and permanent combination of the three elementary forms of
government; and, perhaps, they had more reason than we have been accustomed
to think.
[Footnote 1: This is backing Vico against Spinosa. It must, however, be
acknowledged that at present the prophet of democracy has a good right to
be considered the favourite. --ED. ]
* * * * *
You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill
prophecies that were made of it--low, vulgar, meddling with every thing,
assuming universal competency, flattering every base passion, and sneering
at every thing noble, refined, and truly national! The direct and personal
despotism will come on by and by, after the multitude shall have been
gratified with the ruin and the spoil of the old institutions of the land.
As for the House of Lords, what is the use of ever so much fiery spirit, if
there be no principle to guide and to sanctify it?
_April _10. 1833.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. --CAPTAIN B. HALL. --NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN STATES.
--DEMOCRACY WITH SLAVERY. --QUAKERS.
The possible destiny of the United States of America,--as a nation of a
hundred millions of freemen,--stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakspeare
and Milton, is an august conception. Why should we not wish to see it
realized? America would then be England viewed through a solar microscope;
Great Britain in a state of glorious magnification! How deeply to be
lamented is the spirit of hostility and sneering which some of the popular
books of travels have shown in treating of the Americans! They hate us, no
doubt, just as brothers hate; but they respect the opinion of an Englishman
concerning themselves ten times as much as that of a native of any other
country on earth. A very little humouring of their prejudices, and some
courtesy of language and demeanour on the part of Englishmen, would work
wonders, even as it is, with the public mind of the Americans.
* * * * *
Captain Basil Hall's book is certainly very entertaining and instructive;
but, in my judgment, his sentiments upon many points, and more especially
his mode of expression, are unwise and uncharitable. After all, are not
most of the things shown up with so much bitterness by him mere national
foibles, parallels to which every people has and must of necessity have?
* * * * *
What you say about the quarrel in the United States is sophistical. No
doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally, or
apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. In such cases
there is a hardship; but, in the long run, the matter is fully compensated
to the over-taxed class. For example, take the householders of London, who
complain so bitterly of the house and window taxes. Is it not pretty clear
that, whether such householder be a tradesman, who indemnifies himself in
the price of his goods,--or a letter of lodgings, who does so in his rent,
--or a stockholder, who receives it back again in his dividends,--or a
country gentleman, who has saved so much fresh levy on his land or his
other property,--one way or other, it comes at last pretty nearly to the
same thing, though the pressure for the time may be unjust and vexatious,
and fit to be removed? But when New England, which may be considered a
state in itself, taxes the admission of foreign manufactures in order to
cherish manufactures of its own, and thereby forces the Carolinians,
another state of itself, with which there is little intercommunion, which
has no such desire or interest to serve, to buy worse articles at a higher
price, it is altogether a different question, and is, in fact, downright
tyranny of the worst, because of the most sordid, kind. What would you
think of a law which should tax every person in Devonshire for the
pecuniary benefit of every person in Yorkshire? And yet that is a feeble
image of the actual usurpation of the New England deputies over the
property of the Southern States.
* * * * *
There are two possible modes of unity in a State; one by absolute
coordination of each to all, and of all to each; the other by
subordination of classes and offices. Now, I maintain that there never was
an instance of the first, nor can there be, without slavery as its
condition and accompaniment, as in Athens. The poor Swiss cantons are no
exception.
The mistake lies in confounding a state which must be based on classes and
interests and unequal property, with a church, which is founded on the
person, and has no qualification but personal merit. Such a community _may_
exist, as in the case of the Quakers; but, in order to exist, it must be
compressed and hedged in by another society--_mundus mundulus in mundo
immundo_.
* * * * *
The free class in a slave state is always, in one sense, the most patriotic
class of people in an empire; for their patriotism is not simply the
patriotism of other people, but an aggregate of lust of power and
distinction and supremacy.
_April _11. 1833.
LAND AND MONEY.
Land was the only species of property which, in the old time, carried any
respectability with it. Money alone, apart from some tenure of land, not
only did not make the possessor great and respectable, but actually made
him at once the object of plunder and hatred. Witness the history of the
Jews in this country in the early reigns after the Conquest.
* * * * *
I have no objection to your aspiring to the political principles of our old
Cavaliers; but embrace them all fully, and not merely this and that
feeling, whilst in other points you speak the canting foppery of the
Benthamite or Malthusian schools.
_April _14. 1833.
METHODS OF INVESTIGATION.
There are three ways of treating a subject:--
In the first mode, you begin with a definition, and that definition is
necessarily assumed as the truth. As the argument proceeds, the conclusion
from the first proposition becomes the base of the second, and so on. Now,
it is quite impossible that you can be sure that you have included all the
necessary, and none but the necessary, terms in your definition; as,
therefore, you proceed, the original speck of error is multiplied at every
remove; the same infirmity of knowledge besetting each successive
definition. Hence you may set out, like Spinosa, with all but the truth,
and end with a conclusion which is altogether monstrous; and yet the mere
deduction shall be irrefragable. Warburton's "Divine Legation" is also a
splendid instance of this mode of discussion, and of its inability to lead
to the truth: in fact, it is an attempt to adopt the mathematical series of
proof, in forgetfulness that the mathematician is sure of the truth of his
definition at each remove, because he _creates _it, as he can do, in pure
figure and number. But you cannot _make _any thing true which results from,
or is connected with, real externals; you can only _find _it out. The chief
use of this first mode of discussion is to sharpen the wit, for which
purpose it is the best exercitation.
2. The historical mode is a very common one: in it the author professes to
find out the truth by collecting the facts of the case, and tracing them
downwards; but this mode is worse than the other. Suppose the question is
as to the true essence and character of the English constitution. First,
where will you begin your collection of facts? where will you end it? What
facts will you select, and how do you know that the class of facts which
you select are necessary terms in the premisses, and that other classes of
facts, which you neglect, are not necessary? And how do you distinguish
phenomena which proceed from disease or accident from those which are the
genuine fruits of the essence of the constitution? What can be more
striking, in illustration of the utter inadequacy of this line of
investigation for arriving at the real truth, than the political treatises
and constitutional histories which we have in every library? A Whig proves
his case convincingly to the reader who knows nothing beyond his author;
then comes an old Tory (Carte, for instance), and ferrets up a hamperful of
conflicting documents and notices, which proves _his _case _per contra_. A.
takes this class of facts; B. takes that class: each proves something true,
neither proves _the_ truth, or any thing like _the _truth; that is, the
whole truth.
3. You must, therefore, commence with the philosophic idea of the thing,
the true nature of which you wish to find out and manifest. You must carry
your rule ready made, if you wish to measure aright. If you ask me how I
can know that this idea--my own invention--is the truth, by which the
phenomena of history are to be explained, I answer, in the same way exactly
that you know that your eyes were made to see with; and that is, because
you _do _see with them. If I propose to you an idea or self-realizing
theory of the constitution, which shall manifest itself as in existence
from the earliest times to the present,--which shall comprehend within it
_all _the facts which history has preserved, and shall give them a meaning
as interchangeably causals or effects;--if I show you that such an event or
reign was an obliquity to the right hand, and how produced, and such other
event or reign a deviation to the left, and whence originating,--that the
growth was stopped here, accelerated there,--that such a tendency is, and
always has been, corroborative, and such other tendency destructive, of the
main progress of the idea towards realization;--if this idea, not only like
a kaleidoscope, shall reduce all the miscellaneous fragments into order,
but shall also minister strength, and knowledge, and light to the true
patriot and statesmen for working out the bright thought, and bringing the
glorious embryo to a perfect birth;--then, I think, I have a right to say
that the idea which led to this is not only true, but the truth, the only
truth. To set up for a statesman upon historical knowledge only, is as
about as wise as to set up for a musician by the purchase of some score
flutes, fiddles, and horns. In order to make music, you must know how to
play; in order to make your facts speak truth, you must know what the truth
is which _ought_ to be proved,--the ideal truth,--the truth which was
consciously or unconsciously, strongly or weakly, wisely or blindly,
intended at all times. [1]
[Footnote 1:
I have preserved this passage, conscious, the while, how liable it is to be
misunderstood, or at least not understood. The readers of Mr. Coleridge's
works generally, or of his "Church and State" in particular, will have no
difficulty in entering into his meaning; namely, that no investigation in
the non-mathematical sciences can be carried on in a way deserving to be
called philosophical, unless the investigator have in himself a mental
initiative, or, what comes to the same thing, unless he set out with an
intuition of the ultimate aim or idea of the science or aggregation of
facts to be explained or interpreted. The analysis of the Platonic and
Baconian methods in "The Friend," to which I have before referred, and the
"Church and State," exhibit respectively a splendid vindication and example
of Mr. Coleridge's mode of reasoning on this subject. --ED. ]
_April _18. 1833.
CHURCH OF ROME. --CELIBACY OF THE CLERGY.
In my judgment, Protestants lose a great deal of time in a false attack
when they labour to convict the Romanists of false doctrines. Destroy the
_Papacy_, and help the priests to wives, and I am much mistaken if the
doctrinal errors, such as there really are, would not very soon pass away.
They might remain _in terminis_, but they would lose their sting and body,
and lapse back into figures of rhetoric and warm devotion, from which they,
most of them,--such as transubstantiation, and prayers for the dead and to
saints,--originally sprang. But, so long as the Bishop of Rome remains
Pope, and has an army of Mamelukes all over the world, we shall do very
little by fulminating against mere doctrinal errors. In the Milanese, and
elsewhere in the north of Italy, I am told there is a powerful feeling
abroad against the Papacy. That district seems to be something in the state
of England in the reign of our Henry the Eighth.
How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of
the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in
Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a
clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation
of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in
Spain, Italy, France, &c. prove it abundantly.
The Papal church has had three phases,--anti-Caesarean, extra-national,
anti-Christian.
_April _20. 1833.
ROMAN CONQUEST OF ITALY.
The Romans would never have subdued the Italian tribes if they had not
boldly left Italy and conquered foreign nations, and so, at last, crushed
their next-door neighbours by external pressure.
_April _24. 1833.
WEDDED LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS. --TENNYSON'S
POEMS.
Except in Shakspeare, you can find no such thing as a pure conception of
wedded love in our old dramatists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher,
it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. There is
scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose _abilities_ are not discussed
by the lady or her waiting-woman. In this, as in all things, how
transcendant over his age and his rivals was our sweet Shakspeare!
* * * * *
I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to
me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I
have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without
very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and
approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you
will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without
considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would,
with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson,--indeed without it he
can never be a poet in act,--is to write for the next two or three years in
none but one or two well-known and strictly defined metres, such as the
heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octo-syllabic measure of the
Allegro and Penseroso. He would, probably, thus get imbued with a
sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys
get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is,
I can scarcely scan some of his verses.
_May _1. 1833.
RABELAIS AND LUTHER. --WIT AND MADNESS.
I think with some interest upon the fact that Rabelais and Luther were born
in the same year. [1] Glorious spirits! glorious spirits!
----"Hos utinam inter
Heroas natum me! "
[Footnote 1:
They were both born within twelve months of each other, I believe; but
Luther's birth was in November, 1484, and that of Rabelais is generally
placed at the end of the year preceding. --ED. ]
* * * * *
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,"
says Dryden, and true so far as this, that genius of the highest kind
implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power, which detached from
the discriminative and reproductive power, might conjure a platted straw
into a royal diadem: but it would be at least as true, that great genius is
most alien from madness,--yea, divided from it by an impassable mountain,--
namely, the activity of thought and vivacity of the accumulative memory,
which are no less essential constituents of "great wit. "
_May _4. 1833.
COLONIZATION. --MACHINERY. --CAPITAL.
Colonization is not only a manifest expedient for, but an imperative duty
on, Great Britain. God seems to hold out his finger to us over the sea. But
it must be a national colonization, such as was that of the Scotch to
America; a colonization of hope, and not such as we have alone encouraged
and effected for the last fifty years, a colonization of despair.
* * * * *
The wonderful powers of machinery can, by multiplied production, render the
mere _arte facta _of life actually cheaper: thus money and all other things
being supposed the same in value, a silk gown is five times cheaper now
than in Queen Elizabeth's time; but machinery cannot cheapen, in any thing
like an equal degree, the immediate growths of nature or the immediate
necessaries of man. Now the _arte facta _are sought by the higher classes
of society in a proportion incalculably beyond that in which they are
sought by the lower classes; and therefore it is that the vast increase of
mechanical powers has not cheapened life and pleasure to the poor as it has
done to the rich. In some respects, no doubt, it has done so, as in giving
cotton dresses to maid-servants, and penny gin to all. A pretty benefit
truly!
* * * * *
I think this country is now suffering grievously under an excessive
accumulation of capital, which, having no field for profitable operation,
is in a state of fierce civil war with itself.
_May _6. 1833.
ROMAN CONQUEST. --CONSTANTINE. --PAPACY AND THE
SCHOOLMEN.
The Romans had no national clerisy; their priesthood was entirely a matter
of state, and, as far back as we can trace it, an evident stronghold of the
Patricians against the increasing powers of the Plebeians. All we know of
the early Romans is, that, after an indefinite lapse of years, they had
conquered some fifty or sixty miles round their city. Then it is that they
go to war with Carthage, the great maritime power, and the result of that
war was the occupation of Sicily. Thence they, in succession, conquered
Spain, Macedonia, Asia Minor, &c. , and so at last contrived to subjugate
Italy, partly by a tremendous back blow, and partly by bribing the Italian
States with a communication of their privileges, which the now enormously
enriched conquerors possessed over so large a portion of the civilized
world. They were ordained by Providence to conquer and amalgamate the
materials of Christendom. They were not a national people; they
were truly--
_Romanos rerum dominos--_
--and that's all.
* * * * *
Under Constantine the spiritual power became a complete reflex of the
temporal. There were four patriarchs, and four prefects, and so on. The
Clergy and the Lawyers, the Church and the State, were opposed.
* * * * *
The beneficial influence of the Papacy upon the whole has been much over-
rated by some writers; and certainly no country in Europe received less
benefit and more harm from it than England. In fact, the lawful kings and
parliaments of England were always essentially Protestant in feeling for a
national church, though they adhered to the received doctrines of the
Christianity of the day; and it was only the usurpers, John, Henry IV. ,
&c. , that went against this policy. All the great English schoolmen, Scotus
Erigena[1], Duns Scotus, Ockham, and others, those morning stars of the
Reformation, were heart and soul opposed to Rome, and maintained the Papacy
to be Antichrist. The Popes always persecuted, with rancorous hatred, the
national clerisies, the married clergy, and disliked the universities which
grew out of the old monasteries. The Papacy was, and is, essentially extra-
national, and was always so considered in this country, although not
believed to be anti-Christian.
[Footnote 1:
John Scotus, or Erigena, was born, according to different authors, in
Wales, Scotland, or Ireland; but I do not find any account making him an
Englishman of Saxon blood.
His death is uncertainly placed in the beginning
of the ninth century. He lived in well-known intimacy with Charles the
Bald, of France, who died about A. D. 874. He resolutely resisted the
doctrine of transubstantiation, and was publicly accused of heresy on that
account. But the king of France protected him--ED. ]
_May_ 8. 1833.
CIVIL WAR OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. --HAMPDEN'S SPEECH.
I know no portion of history which a man might write with so much pleasure
as that of the great struggle in the time of Charles I. , because he may
feel the profoundest respect for both parties. The side taken by any
particular person was determined by the point of view which such person
happened to command at the commencement of the inevitable collision, one
line seeming straight to this man, another line to another. No man of that
age saw _the_ truth, the whole truth; there was not light enough for that.
The consequence, of course, was a violent exaggeration of each party for
the time. The King became a martyr, and the Parliamentarians traitors, and
_vice versa_. The great reform brought into act by and under William the
Third combined the principles truly contended for by Charles and his
Parliament respectively: the great revolution of 1831 has certainly, to an
almost ruinous degree, dislocated those principles of government again. As
to Hampden's speech[1], no doubt it means a declaration of passive
obedience to the sovereign, as the creed of an English Protestant
individual: every man, Cromwell and all, would have said as much; it was
the antipapistical tenet, and almost vauntingly asserted on all occasions
by Protestants up to that time. But it implies nothing of Hampden's creed
as to the duty of Parliament.
[Footnote 1:
On his impeachment with the other four members, 1642. See the "Letter to
John Murray, Esq. _touching_ Lord Nugent," 1833. It is extraordinary that
Lord N. should not see the plain distinction taken by Hampden, between not
obeying an unlawful command, and rebelling against the King because of it.
He approves the one, and condemns the other. His words are, "to _yield
obedience to_ the commands of a King, if against the true religion, against
the ancient and fundamental laws of the land, is another sign of an ill
subject:"--"To _resist_ the lawful power of the King; to raise insurrection
against the King; admit him adverse in his religion; _to conspire against
his sacred person, or any ways to rebel, though commanding things against
our consciences in exercising religion, or against the rights and
privileges of the subject_, is an absolute sign of the disaffected and
traitorous subject. "--ED. ]
_May_ 10. 1833.
REFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS.
Well, I think no honest man will deny that the prophetic denunciations of
those who seriously and solemnly opposed the Reform Bill are in a fair way
of exact fulfilment! For myself, I own I did not expect such rapidity of
movement. I supposed that the first parliament would contain a large number
of low factious men, who would vulgarize and degrade the debates of the
House of Commons, and considerably impede public business, and that the
majority would be gentlemen more fond of their property than their
politics. But really the truth is something more than this. Think of
upwards of 160 members voting away two millions and a half of tax on
Friday[1], at the bidding of whom, shall I say? and then no less than 70 of
those very members rescinding their votes on the Tuesday next following,
nothing whatever having intervened to justify the change, except that they
had found out that at least seven or eight millions more must go also upon
the same principle, and that the revenue was cut in two! Of course I
approve the vote of rescission, however dangerous a precedent; but what a
picture of the composition of this House of Commons!
[Footnote 1:
On Friday, the 26th of April, 1833, Sir William Ingilby moved and carried a
resolution for reducing the duty on malt from 28s. 8d. to l0s. per quarter.
One hundred and sixty-two members voted with him. On Tuesday following, the
30th of April, seventy-six members only voted against the rescission of the
same resolution. --ED. ]
_May_ 13. 1833.
FOOD. --MEDICINE. --POISON. --OBSTRUCTION.
1. That which is digested wholly, and part of which is assimilated, and
part rejected, is--Food.
2. That which is digested wholly, and the whole of which is partly
assimilated, and partly not, is--Medicine.
3. That which is digested, but not assimilated, is--Poison.
4. That which is neither digested nor assimilated is--Mere Obstruction.
As to the stories of slow poisons, I cannot say whether there was any, or
what, truth in them; but I certainly believe a man may be poisoned by
arsenic a year after he has taken it. In fact, I think that is known to
have happened.
May 14. 1833.
WILSON. --SHAKSPEARE'S SONNETS. --LOVE.
Professor Wilson's character of Charles Lamb in the last Blackwood,
_Twaddle on Tweed-side_[1], is very sweet indeed, and gratified me much. It
does honour to Wilson, to his head and his heart.
[Footnote 1:
"Charles Lamb ought really not to abuse Scotland in the pleasant way he so
often does in the sylvan shades of Enfield; for Scotland loves Charles
Lamb; but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a
Cockney is a better man even than Christopher North. But what will not
Christopher forgive to genius and goodness! Even Lamb, bleating libels on
his native land. Nay, he learns lessons of humanity even from the mild
malice of Elia, and breathes a blessing on him and his household in their
bower of rest. "
Some of Mr. Coleridge's poems were first published with some of C. Lamb's
at Bristol in 1797. The remarkable words on the title-page have been aptly
cited in the New Monthly Magazine for February, 1835, p. 198. : "Duplex
nobis vinculum, et amicitiae et similium junctarumque Camcoenarum,--quod
utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longinquitas. " And even so it came
to pass after thirty seven years more had passed over their heads,--ED. ]
* * * * *
How can I wish that Wilson should cease to write what so often soothes and
suspends my bodily miseries, and my mental conflicts! Yet what a waste,
what a reckless spending, of talent, ay, and of genius, too, in his I know
not how many years' management of Blackwood! If Wilson cares for fame, for
an enduring place and prominence in literature, he should now, I think,
hold his hand, and say, as he well may,--
"Militavi non sine gloria:
Nunc arma defunctumque bello
Barbiton hic paries habebit. "
Two or three volumes collected out of the magazine by himself would be very
delightful. But he must not leave it for others to do; for some recasting
and much condensation would be required; and literary executors make sad
work in general with their testators' brains.
* * * * *
I believe it possible that a man may, under certain states of the moral
feeling, entertain something deserving the name of love towards a male
object--an affection beyond friendship, and wholly aloof from appetite. In
Elizabeth's and James's time it seems to have been almost fashionable to
cherish such a feeling; and perhaps we may account in some measure for it
by considering how very inferior the women of that age, taken generally,
were in education and accomplishment of mind to the men. Of course there
were brilliant exceptions enough; but the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher--
the most popular dramatists that ever wrote for the English stage--will
show us what sort of women it was generally pleasing to represent.
Certainly the language of the two friends, Musidorus and Pyrocles, in the
Arcadia, is such as we could not now use except to women; and in Cervantes
the same tone is sometimes adopted, as in the novel of the Curious
Impertinent. And I think there is a passage in the New Atlantis[1] of Lord
Bacon, in which he speaks of the possibility of such a feeling, but hints
the extreme danger of entertaining it, or allowing it any place in a moral
theory. I mention this with reference to Shakspeare's sonnets, which have
been supposed, by some, to be addressed to William Herbert, Earl of
Pembroke, whom Clarendon calls[2] the most beloved man of his age, though
his licentiousness was equal to his virtues.
I doubt this. I do not think that Shakespeare, merely because he was an
actor, would have thought it necessary to veil his emotions towards
Pembroke under a disguise, though he might probably have done so, if the
real object had perchance been a Laura or a Leonora. It seems to me that
the sonnets could only have come from a man deeply in love, and in love
with a woman; and there is one sonnet which, from its incongruity, I take
to be a purposed blind. These extraordinary sonnets form, in fact, a poem
of so many stanzas of fourteen lines each; and, like the passion which
inspired them, the sonnets are always the same, with a variety of
expression,--continuous, if you regard the lover's soul,--distinct, if you
listen to him, as he heaves them sigh after sigh.
These sonnets, like the Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, are
characterized by boundless fertility and laboured condensation of thought,
with perfection of sweetness in rhythm and metre. These are the essentials
in the budding of a great poet. Afterwards habit and consciousness of power
teach more ease--_praecipitandum liberum spiritum_.
[Footnote 1:
I cannot fix upon any passage in this work, to which it can be supposed
that Mr. Coleridge alluded, unless it be the speech of Joabin the Jew; but
it contains nothing coming up to the meaning in the text. The only approach
to it seems to be:--"As for masculine love, they have no touch of it; and
yet there are not so faithful and inviolate friendships in the world again
as are there; and to speak generally, as I said before, I have not read of
any such chastity in any people as theirs. "--ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
"William Earl of Pembroke was next, a man of another mould and making, and
of another fame and reputation with all men, being the most universally
beloved and esteemed of any man of that age. " . . . . . . . "He indulged to
himself the pleasures of all kinds, almost in all excesses. "--_Hist. of the
Rebellion_, book i. He died in 1630, aged fifty years. The dedication by T.
T. (Thomas Thorpe) is to "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr.
W. H. " and Malone is inclined to think that William Hughes is meant. As to
Mr. W. H. being the _only_ begetter of these sonnets, it must be observed,
that at least the last twenty-eight are beyond dispute addressed to a
woman. I suppose the twentieth sonnet was the particular one conceived by
Mr. C. to be a blind; but it seems to me that many others may be so
construed, if we set out with a conviction that the real object of the poet
was a woman. --ED. ]
* * * * *
Every one who has been in love, knows that the passion is strongest, and
the appetite weakest, in the absence of the beloved object, and that the
reverse is the case in her presence.
_May_ 15. 1833.
WICLIFFE. --LUTHER. --REVERENCE FOR IDEAL TRUTHS. --JOHNSON THE WHIG. --
ASGILL. --JAMES I.
Wicliffe's genius was, perhaps, not equal to Luther's; but really the more
I know of him from Vaughan and Le Bas, both of whose books I like, I think
him as extraordinary a man as Luther upon the whole. He was much sounder
and more truly catholic in his view of the Eucharist than Luther. And I
find, not without some pleasure, that my own view of it, which I was
afraid was original, was maintained in the tenth century, that is to say,
that the body broken had no reference to the human body of Christ, but to
the Caro Noumenon, or symbolical Body, the Rock that followed the
Israelites.
Whitaker beautifully says of Luther;--_Felix ille, quem Dominus eo honore
dignatus est, ut homines nequissimos suos haberet inimicos_.
* * * * *
There is now no reverence for any thing; and the reason is, that men
possess conceptions only, and all their knowledge is conceptional only.
Now as, to conceive, is a work of the mere understanding, and as all that
can be conceived may be comprehended, it is impossible that a man should
reverence that, to which he must always feel something in himself
superior. If it were possible to conceive God in a strict sense, that is,
as we conceive a horse or a tree, even God himself could not excite any
reverence, though he might excite fear or terror, or perhaps love, as a
tiger or a beautiful woman. But reverence, which is the synthesis of love
and fear, is only due from man, and, indeed, only excitable in man,
towards ideal truths, which are always mysteries to the understanding, for
the same reason that the motion of my finger behind my back is a mystery
to you now--your eyes not being made for seeing through my body. It is
the reason only which has a sense by which ideas can be recognized, and
from the fontal light of ideas only can a man draw intellectual power.
* * * * *
Samuel Johnson[1], whom, to distinguish him from the Doctor, we may call
the Whig, was a very remarkable writer. He may be compared to his
contemporary De Foe, whom he resembled in many points. He is another
instance of King William's discrimination, which was so much superior to
that of any of his ministers, Johnson was one of the most formidable
advocates for the Exclusion Bill, and he suffered by whipping and
imprisonment under James accordingly. Like Asgill, he argues with great
apparent candour and clearness till he has his opponent within reach, and
then comes a blow as from a sledge-hammer. 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.
