[1]
I hardly know any thing more amusing than the honest German Jesuitry of
Dobrizhoffer.
I hardly know any thing more amusing than the honest German Jesuitry of
Dobrizhoffer.
Coleridge - Table Talk
[1]
A nation, to be great, ought to be compressed in its increment by nations
more civilized than itself--as Greece by Persia; and Rome by Etruria, the
Italian states, and Carthage. I remember Commodore Decatur saying to me at
Malta, that he deplored the occupation of Louisiana by the United States,
and wished that province had been possessed by England. He thought that if
the United States got hold of Canada by conquest or cession, the last
chance of his country becoming a great compact nation would be lost.
[Footnote 1:
Perhaps it left letter-writing also. Even if the Platonic epistles are
taken as genuine, which Mr. Coleridge, to my surprise, was inclined to
believe, they can hardly interfere, I think, with the uniqueness of the
truly incomparable collections from the correspondence of Cicero and
Pliny. --ED. ]
* * * * *
War in republican Rome was the offspring of its intense aristocracy of
spirit, and stood to the state in lieu of trade. As long as there was any
thing _ab extra_ to conquer, the state advanced: when nothing remained but
what was Roman, then, as a matter of course, civil war began.
_June_ 10. 1832.
CHARM FOR CRAMP.
When I was a little hoy at the Blue-coat School, there was a charm for
one's foot when asleep; and I believe it had been in the school since its
foundation, in the time of Edward the Sixth. The march of intellect has
probably now exploded it. It ran thus:--
Foot! foot! foot! is fast asleep!
Thumb! thumb! thumb! in spittle we steep:
Crosses three we make to ease us,
Two for the thieves, and one for Christ Jesus!
And the same charm served for a cramp in the leg, with the following
substitution:--
The devil is tying a knot in my leg!
Mark, Luke, and John, unloose it I beg! --
Crosses three, &c.
And really upon getting out of bed, where the cramp most frequently
occurred, pressing the sole of the foot on the cold floor, and then
repeating this charm with the acts configurative thereupon prescribed, I
can safely affirm that I do not remember an instance in which the cramp did
not go away in a few seconds.
I should not wonder if it were equally good for a stitch in the side; but I
cannot say I ever tried it for _that_.
July 7. 1832.
GREEK. --DUAL, NEUTER PLURAL, AND VERB SINGULAR. --THETA.
It is hardly possible to conceive a language more perfect than the Greek.
If you compare it with the modern European tongues, in the points of the
position and relative bearing of the vowels and consonants on each other,
and of the variety of terminations, it is incalculably before all in the
former particulars, and only equalled in the last by German. But it is in
variety of termination alone that the German surpasses the other modern
languages as to sound; for, as to position, Nature seems to have dropped an
acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made
all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of
termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian
prose is excessively monotonous.
* * * * *
It is very natural to have a dual, duality being a conception quite
distinct from plurality. Most very primitive languages have a dual, as the
Greek, Welch, and the native Chilese, as you will see in the Abbe Raynal.
The neuter plural governing, as they call it, a verb singular is one of the
many instances in Greek of the inward and metaphysic grammar resisting
successfully the tyranny of formal grammar. In truth, there may be
_Multeity_ in things; but there can only be _Plurality_ in persons.
Observe also that, in fact, a neuter noun in Greek has no real nominative
case, though it has a formal one, that is to say, the same word with the
accusative. The reason is--a _thing_ has no subjectivity, or nominative
case: it exists only as an object in the accusative or oblique case.
It is extraordinary that the Germans should not have retained or assumed
the two beautifully discriminated sounds of the soft and hard _theta_; as
in _thy thoughts_--_the thin ether that_, &c. How particularly fine the
hard _theta_ is in an English termination, as in that grand word--Death--
for which the Germans gutturize a sound that puts you in mind of nothing
but a loathsome toad.
_July_ 8. 1832.
TALENTED.
I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable _talented_, stealing out of
the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications
of the day. Why not _shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced,_ &c. ? The formation
of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very
peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is to justify such
attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the
proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from
America. [1]
[Footnote 1:
See "_eventuate_," in Mr. Washington Irving's "Tour On the Prairies,"
_passim_. --ED. ]
* * * * *
Never take an iambus as a Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do
very well. Edith and Rotha are my favourite names for women.
_July_ 9. 1832.
HOMER. --VALCKNAER.
I have the firmest conviction that _Homer_ is a mere traditional synonyme
with, or figure for, the Iliad. You cannot conceivefor a moment any thing
about the poet, as you call him, apart from that poem. Difference in men
there was in a degree, but not in kind; one man was, perhaps, a better poet
than another; but he was a poet upon the same ground and with the same
feelings as the rest.
The want of adverbs in the Iliad is very characteristic. With more adverbs
there would have been some subjectivity, or subjectivity would have made
them.
The Greeks were then just on the verge of the bursting forth of
individuality.
Valckenaer's treatise[1] on the interpolation of the Classics by the later
Jews and early Christians is well worth your perusal as a scholar and
critic.
[Footnote 1: _Diatribe de Aristobulo Judaeo_. --ED. ]
July 13. 1832.
PRINCIPLES AND FACTS. --SCHMIDT.
I have read all the famous histories, and, I believe, some history of every
country and nation that is, or ever existed; but I never did so for the
story itself as a story. The only thing interesting to me was the
principles to be evolved from, and illustrated by, the facts. [1] After I
had gotten my principles, I pretty generally left the facts to take care of
themselves. I never could remember any passages in books, or the
particulars of events, except in the gross. I can refer to them. To be
sure, I must be a different sort of man from Herder, who once was seriously
annoyed with himself, because, in recounting the pedigree of some German
royal or electoral family, he missed some one of those worthies and could
not recall the name.
[Footnote 1:
"The true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of
evidence which can _compel_ our belief; so many are the disturbing forces
which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the
first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own
circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the
present case; that there will never be wanting answers, and explanations,
and specious flatteries of hope, to persuade and perplex its government,
that the history of the past is inapplicable to _their_ case. And no
wonder, if we read history for the facts, instead of reading it for the
sake of the general principles, which are to the facts as the root and sap
of a tree to its leaves: and no wonder if history so read should find a
dangerous rival in novels; nay, if the latter should be preferred to the
former, on the score even of probability. I well remember that, when the
examples of former Jacobins, as Julius Caesar, Cromwell, and the like, were
adduced in France and England, at the commencement of the French consulate,
it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to fear a repetition
of usurpation and military despotism at the close of the _enlightened
eighteenth century_! Even so, in the very dawn of the late tempestuous day,
when the revolutions of Corcyra, the proscriptions of the reformers Marius,
Caesar, &c. , and the direful effects of the levelling tenets in the
peasants' war in Germany (differenced from the tenets of the first French
constitution only by the mode of wording them, the figures of speech being
borrowed in the one instance from theology, and in the other from modern
metaphysics), were urged on the convention and its vindicators; the magi of
the day, the true citizens of the world, the _plusquam perfecti_ of
patriotism, gave us set proofs that similar results were impossible, and
that it was an insult to so philosophical an age, to so enlightened a
nation, to dare direct the public eye towards them as to lights of
warning. "--_Statesman's Manual_, p. 14. ]
* * * * *
Schmidt[1] was a Romanist; but I have generally found him candid, as indeed
almost all the Austrians are. They are what is called _good Catholics_;
but, like our Charles the Second, they never let their religious bigotry
interfere with their political well-doing. Kaiser is a most pious son of
the church, yet he always keeps his papa in good order.
[Footnote 1:
Michael Ignatius Schmidt, the author of the History of the Germans. He
died in the latter end of the last century. --ED. ]
_July_ 20. 1832.
PURITANS AND JACOBINS.
It was God's mercy to our age that our Jacobins were infidels and a scandal
to all sober Christians. Had they been like the old Puritans, they would
have trodden church and king to the dust--at least for a time.
* * * * *
For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance,--that, with all my gastric
and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head of a mountain in
blue air and sunshine.
_July_ 21. 1832.
WORDSWORTH.
I have often wished that the first two books of the Excursion had been
published separately, under the name of "The Deserted Cottage. " They would
have formed, what indeed they are, one of the most beautiful poems in the
language.
* * * * *
Can dialogues in verse be defended? I cannot but think that a great
philosophical poet ought always to teach the reader himself as from
himself. A poem does not admit argumentation, though it does admit
development of thought. In prose there may be a difference; though I must
confess that, even in Plato and Cicero, I am always vexed that the authors
do not say what they have to say at once in their own persons. The
introductions and little urbanities are, to be sure, very delightful in
their way; I would not lose them; but I have no admiration for the practice
of ventriloquizing through another man's mouth.
* * * * *
I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen
books on the growth of an individual mind--superior, as I used to think,
upon the whole, to the Excursion. You may judge how I felt about them by my
own poem upon the occasion. [1] Then the plan laid out, and, I believe,
partly suggested by me, was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a
man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to
deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man,
--a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature,
and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of
the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of
society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the
high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of
the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal
the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being
subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing
how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and
restoration. Something of this sort was, I think, agreed on. It is, in
substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy.
[Footnote 1:
Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 206. It is not too much to say of this beautiful
poem, and yet it is difficult to say more, that it is at once worthy of the
poet, his subject, and his object:--
"An Orphic song indeed,
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts,
To their own music chanted. "--ED. ]
* * * * *
I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet
than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since
Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the
contemplative position, which is peculiarly--perhaps I might say
exclusively--fitted for him. His proper title is _Spectator ab extra_.
* * * * *
_July_ 23. 1832.
FRENCH REVOLUTION.
No man was more enthusiastic than I was for France and the Revolution: it
had all my wishes, none of my expectations. Before 1793, I clearly saw and
often enough stated in public, the horrid delusion, the vile mockery, of
the whole affair. [1]
When some one said in my brother James's presence[2] that I was a Jacobin,
he very well observed,--"No! Samuel is no Jacobin; he is a hot-headed
Moravian! " Indeed, I was in the extreme opposite pole.
[Footnote 1:
"Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams!
I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament,
From bleak Helvetia's icy cavern sent--
I hear thy groans upon her blood-stain'd streams!
Heroes, that for your peaceful country perish'd,
And ye that, fleeing, spot your mountain snows
With bleeding wounds; forgive me, that I cherish'd
One thought that ever blest your cruel foes!
To scatter rage and traitorous guilt,
Where Peace her jealous home had built;
A patriot race to disinherit
Of all that made her stormy wilds so dear:
And with inexpiable spirit
To taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer--
O France, that mockest Heaven, adult'rous, blind,
And patriot only in pernicious toils,
Are these thy boasts, champion of human-kind?
To mix with kings in the low lust of sway,
Yell in the hunt and share the murderous prey--
To insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils
From freemen torn--to tempt and to betray? --
The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain,
Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game
They burst their manacles, and wear the name
Of freedom, graven on a heavier chain!
O Liberty! with profitless endeavour
Have I pursued thee many a weary hour;
But thou nor swell'st the victor's train, nor ever
Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power.
Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee,
(Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee,)
Alike from priestcraft's harpy minions,
And factious blasphemy's obscener slaves,
_Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions,
The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves! _"
France, an Ode. Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 130. ]
[Footnote 2:
A soldier of the old cavalier stamp, to whom the King was the symbol of
the majesty, as the Church was of the life, of the nation, and who would
most assuredly have taken arms for one or the other against all the Houses
of Commons or committees of public safety in the world. --ED. ]
_July_ 24. 1832.
INFANT SCHOOLS.
I have no faith in act of parliament reform. All the great--the permanently
great--things that have been achieved in the world have been so achieved by
individuals, working from the instinct of genius or of goodness. The rage
now-a-days is all the other way: the individual is supposed capable of
nothing; there must be organization, classification, machinery, &c. , as if
the capital of national morality could be increased by making a joint stock
of it. Hence you see these infant schools so patronized by the bishops and
others, who think them a grand invention. Is it found that an infant-school
child, who has been bawling all day a column of the multiplication-table,
or a verse from the Bible, grows up a more dutiful son or daughter to its
parents? Are domestic charities on the increase amongst families under this
system? In a great town, in our present state of society, perhaps such
schools may be a justifiable expedient--a choice of the lesser evil; but as
for driving these establishments into the country villages, and breaking up
the cottage home education, I think it one of the most miserable mistakes
which the well-intentioned people of the day have yet made; and they have
made, and are making, a good many, God knows.
_July_ 25. 1832.
MR. COLERIDGE'S PHILOSOPHY. --SUBLIMITY. --SOLOMON. --MADNESS. --C. LAMB--
SFORZA's DECISION.
The pith of my system is to make the senses out of the mind--not the mind
out of the senses, as Locke did.
* * * * *
Could you ever discover any thing sublime, in our sense of the term, in the
classic Greek literature? never could. Sublimity is Hebrew by birth.
* * * * *
I should conjecture that the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes were written, or,
perhaps, rather collected, about the time of Nehemiah. The language is
Hebrew with Chaldaic endings. It is totally unlike the language of Moses on
the one hand, and of Isaiah on the other.
* * * * *
Solomon introduced the commercial spirit into his kingdom. I cannot think
his idolatry could have been much more, in regard to himself, than a state
protection or toleration of the foreign worship.
* * * * *
When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad. A
madman is properly so defined.
* * * * *
Charles Lamb translated my motto _Sermoni propriora_ by--_properer for a
sermon_!
* * * * *
I was much amused some time ago by reading the pithy decision of one of the
Sforzas of Milan, upon occasion of a dispute for precedence between the
lawyers and physicians of his capital;--_Paecedant fures--sequantur
carnifices_. I hardly remember a neater thing.
_July_ 28. 1832.
FAITH AND BELIEF.
The sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the
church; but the faith of the individual, centered in his heart, is or may
be collateral to them. [1]
Faith is subjective. I throw myself in adoration before God; acknowledge
myself his creature,--simple, weak, lost; and pray for help and pardon
through Jesus Christ: but when I rise from my knees, I discuss the doctrine
of the Trinity as I would a problem in geometry; in the same temper of
mind, I mean, not by the same process of reasoning, of course.
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge used very frequently to insist upon the distinction between
belief and faith. He once told me, with very great earnestness, that if he
were that moment convinced--a conviction, the possibility of which,
indeed, he could not realize to himself--that the New Testament was a
forgery from beginning to end--wide as the desolation in his moral
feelings would be, he should not abate one jot of his faith in God's power
and mercy through some manifestation of his being towards man, either in
time past or future, or in the hidden depths where time and space are not.
This was, I believe, no more than a vivid expression of what he always
maintained, that no man had attained to a full faith who did not
_recognize_ in the Scriptures a correspondency to his own nature, or see
that his own powers of reason, will, and understanding were preconfigured
to the reception of the Christian doctrines and promises. --ED. ]
_August_ 4. 1832.
DOBRIZHOFFER.
[1]
I hardly know any thing more amusing than the honest German Jesuitry of
Dobrizhoffer. His chapter on the dialects is most valuable. He is surprised
that there is no form for the infinitive, but that they say,--I wish, (go,
or eat, or drink, &c. ) interposing a letter by way of copula,--forgetting
his own German and the English, which are, in truth, the same. The
confident belief entertained by the Abipones of immortality, in connection
with the utter absence in their minds of the idea of a God, is very
remarkable. If Warburton were right, which he is not, the Mosaic scheme
would be the exact converse. My dear daughter's translation of this book[2]
is, in my judgment, unsurpassed for pure mother English by any thing I have
read for a long time.
[Footnote 1:
"He was a man of rarest qualities,
Who to this barbarous region had confined
A spirit with the learned and the wise
Worthy to take its place, and from mankind
Receive their homage, to the immortal mind
Paid in its just inheritance of fame.
But he to humbler thoughts his heart inclined:
From Gratz amid the Styrian hills he came,
And Dobrizhofter was the good man's honour'd name.
"It was his evil fortune to behold
The labours of his painful life destroyed;
His flock which he had brought within the fold
Dispers'd; the work of ages render'd void,
And all of good that Paraguay enjoy'd
By blind and suicidal power o'erthrown.
So he the years of his old age employ'd,
A faithful chronicler, in handing down
Names which he lov'd, and things well worthy to be known.
"And thus when exiled from the dear-loved scene,
In proud Vienna he beguiled the pain
Of sad remembrance: and the empress-queen,
That great Teresa, she did not disdain
In gracious mood sometimes to entertain
Discourse with him both pleasurable and sage;
And sure a willing ear she well might deign
To one whose tales may equally engage
The wondering mind of youth, the thoughtful heart of age.
"But of his native speech, because well-nigh
Disuse in him forgetfulness had wrought,
In Latin he composed his history;
A garrulous, but a lively tale, and fraught
With matter of delight, and food for thought.
And if he could in Merlin's glass have seen
By whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught,
The old man would have felt as pleased, I ween,
As when he won the ear of that great empress-queen.
"Little he deem'd, when with his Indian band
He through the wilds set forth upon his way,
A poet then unborn, and in a land
Which had proscribed his order, should one day
Take up from thence his moralizing lay,
And, shape a song that, with no fiction drest,
Should to his worth its grateful tribute pay,
And sinking deep in many an English breast,
Foster that faith divine that keeps the heart at rest. "
_Southey's Tale of Paraguay_, canto iii. st. 16. ]
[Footnote 2:
"An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, From the
Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer, eighteen Years a Missionary in that
Country. "--Vol. ii. p. 176. ]
_August_ 6. 1832.
SCOTCH AND ENGLISH. --CRITERION OF GENIUS. --DRYDEN AND POPE.
I have generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very
disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The Scotch
will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the English; the
English have a morbid habit of petting and praising foreigners of any sort,
to the unjust disparagement of their own worthies.
* * * * *
You will find this a good gage or criterion of genius,--whether it
progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel
and Zimri,--Shaftesbury and Buckingham; every line adds to or modifies the
character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse;
whereas, in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all
the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are
so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever
it may be that is satirized. In like manner compare Charles Lamb's
exquisite criticisms on Shakspeare with Hazlitt's round and round
imitations of them.
_August_ 7. 1832.
MILTON'S DISREGARD OF PAINTING.
It is very remarkable that in no part of his writings does Milton take any
notice of the great painters of Italy, nor, indeed, of painting as an art;
whilst every other page breathes his love and taste for music. Yet it is
curious that, in one passage in the Paradise Lost, Milton has certainly
copied the _fresco_ of the Creation in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. I mean
those lines,--
----"now half appear'd
The tawny lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds,
And rampant shakes his brinded mane;--"&c. [1]
an image which the necessities of the painter justified, but which was
wholly unworthy, in my judgment, of the enlarged powers of the poet. Adam
bending over the sleeping Eve in the Paradise Lost[2] and Dalilah
approaching Samson, in the Agonistes[3] are the only two proper pictures I
remember in Milton.
[Footnote 1: Par. Lost, book vii. ver. 463. ]
[Footnote 2:
----"so much the more
His wonder was to find unwaken'd Eve
With tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek,
As through unquiet rest: he on his side
Leaning, half raised, with looks of cordial love
Hung over her enamour'd, and beheld
Beauty, which, whether waking or asleep,
Shot forth peculiar graces; then, with voice
Mild, as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes,
Her hand soft touching, whisper'd thus: Awake,
My fairest," &c.
Book v. ver. 8. ]
[Footnote 3:
"But who is this, what thing of sea or land?
Female of sex it seems,
That so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay,
Comes this way sailing
Like a stately ship
Of Tarsus, bound for the isles
Of Javan or Gadire,
With all her bravery on, and tackle trim,
Sails fill'd, and streamers waving,
Courted by all the winds that hold them play;
An amber-scent of odorous perfume
Her harbinger, a damsel train behind! "]
August 9. 1832.
BAPTISMAL SERVICE. --JEWS' DIVISION OF THE SCRIPTURE. --SANSKRIT.
I think the baptismal service almost perfect. What seems erroneous
assumption in it to me, is harmless. None of the services of the church
affect me so much as this. I never could attend a christening without tears
bursting forth at the sight of the helpless innocent in a pious clergyman's
arms.
* * * * *
The Jews recognized three degrees of sanctity in their Scriptures:--first,
the writings of Moses, who had the [Greek: autopsia]; secondly, the
Prophets; and, thirdly, the Good Books. Philo, amusingly enough, places his
works somewhere between the second and third degrees.
* * * * *
The claims of the Sanskrit for priority to the Hebrew as a language are
ridiculous.
August 11. 1832.
HESIOD. --VIRGIL. --GENIUS METAPHYSICAL. --DON QUIXOTE.
I like reading Hesiod, meaning the Works and Days. If every verse is not
poetry, it is, at least, good sense, which is a great deal to say.
* * * * *
There is nothing real in the Georgies, except, to be sure, the verse. [1]
Mere didactics of practice, unless seasoned with the personal interests of
the time or author, are inexpressibly dull to me. Such didactic poetry as
that of the Works and Days followed naturally upon legislation and the
first ordering of municipalities.
[Footnote 1:
I used to fancy Mr. Coleridge _paulo iniquior Virgilio_, and told him so;
to which he replied, that, like all Eton men, I swore _per Maronem_. This
was far enough from being the case; but I acknowledge that Mr. C. 's
apparent indifference to the tenderness and dignity of Virgil excited my
surprise. --ED. ]
* * * * *
All genius is metaphysical; because the ultimate end of genius is ideal,
however it may be actualized by incidental and accidental circumstances.
* * * * *
Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the
imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard
the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. Sancho is the
common sense of the social man-animal, unenlightened and unsanctified by
the reason. You see how he reverences his master at the very time he is
cheating him.
_August_ 14. 1832.
STEINMETZ. --KEATS.
Poor dear Steinmetz is gone,--his state of sure blessedness accelerated;
or, it may be, he is buried in Christ, and there in that mysterious depth
grows on to the spirit of a just man made perfect! Could I for a moment
doubt this, the grass would become black beneath my feet, and this earthly
frame a charnel-house. I never knew any man so illustrate the difference
between the feminine and the effeminate.
* * * * *
A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. ---- and myself in a lane
near Highgate. ---- knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to
me, and staid a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came
back and said: "Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed
your hand! "--"There is death in that hand," I said to ----, when Keats was
gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself
distinctly.
_August_ 16. 1832.
CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. --BOWYER.
The discipline at Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan;--all
domestic ties were to be put aside. "Boy! " I remember Bowyer saying to me
once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, "Boy!
the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school
is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first
cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's
have no more crying! "
* * * * *
No tongue can express good Mrs. Bowyer. Val. Le Grice and I were once going
to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and Bowyer was thundering away at
us by way of prologue, when Mrs. B. looked in, and said, "Flog them
soundly, sir, I beg! " This saved us. Bowyer was so nettled at the
interruption that he growled out, "Away, woman! away! " and we were let off.
_August_ 28. 1832.
ST. PAUL'S MELITA.
The belief that Malta is the island on which St. Paul was wrecked is so
rooted in the common Maltese, and is cherished with such a superstitious
nationality, that the Government would run the chance of exciting a tumult,
if it, or its representatives, unwarily ridiculed it. The supposition
itself is quite absurd. Not to argue the matter at length, consider these
few conclusive facts:--The narrative speaks of the "barbarous people," and
"barbarians,"[1] of the island. Now, our Malta was at that time fully
peopled and highly civilized, as we may surely infer from Cicero and other
writers. [2] A viper comes out from the sticks upon the fire being lighted:
the men are not surprised at the appearance of the snake, but imagine first
a murderer, and then a god from the harmless attack. Now in our Malta there
are, I may say, no snakes at all; which, to be sure, the Maltese attribute
to St. Paul's having cursed them away. Melita in the Adriatic was a
perfectly barbarous island as to its native population, and was, and is
now, infested with serpents. Besides the context shows that the scene is in
the Adriatic.
[Footnote 1:
Acts xxviii. 2. and 4. Mr. C. seemed to think that the Greek words had
reference to something more than the fact of the islanders not speaking
Latin or Greek; the classical meaning of [Greek: Barbaroi]. -ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
Upwards of a century before the reign of Nero, Cicero speaks at
considerable length of our Malta in one of the Verrine orations. See Act.
ii. lib. iv. c. 46. "Insula est Melita, judices," &c. There was a town, and
Verres had established in it a manufactory of the fine cloth or cotton
stuffs, the _Melitensis vestis_, for which the island is uniformly
celebrated:--
"Fertilis est Melite sterili vicina Cocyrae
Insula, quam Libyci verberat unda freti. "
Ovid. Fast. iii. 567.
And Silius Italicus has--
----"telaque _superba_
_Lanigera_ Melite. "
Punic. xiv. 251.
Yet it may have been cotton after all--the present product of Malta. Cicero
describes an _ancient_ temple of Juno situated on a promontory near the
town, so famous and revered, that, even in the time of Masinissa, at least
150 years B. C. , that prince had religiously restored some relics which his
admiral had taken from it. The plunder of this very temple is an article of
accusation against Verres; and a deputation of Maltese (_legati
Melitenses_) came to Rome to establish the charge. These are all the facts,
I think, which can be gathered from Cicero; because I consider his
expression of _nudatae urbes_, in the working up of this article, a piece
of rhetoric. Strabo merely marks the position of Melita, and says that the
lap-dogs called [Greek: kunidia Melitaia] were sent from this island,
though some writers attribute them to the other Melite in the Adriatic,
(lib. vi. ) Diodorus, however, a Sicilian himself by birth, gives the
following remarkable testimony as to the state of the island in his time,
which, it will be remembered, was considerably before the date of St.
Paul's shipwreck. "There are three islands to the south of Sicily, each of
which has a city or town ([Greek: polin]), and harbours fitted for the safe
reception of ships. The first of these is Melite, distant about 800 stadia
from Syracuse, and possessing several harbours of surpassing excellence.
Its inhabitants are rich and luxurious ([Greek: tous katoikountas tais
ousiais eudaimonas]). There are artizans of every kind ([Greek: pantodapous
tais exgasias]); the best are those who weave cloth of a singular fineness
and softness. The houses are worthy of admiration for their superb
adornment with eaves and brilliant white-washing ([Greek: oikias axiologous
kai kateskeuasmenas philotimos geissois kai koniamasi pezittotezon]). "--
Lib. v. c. 12. Mela (ii. c. 7. ) and Pliny (iii. 14. ) simply mark the
position. --ED. ]
* * * * *
The Maltese seem to have preserved a fondness and taste for architecture
from the time of the knights--naturally enough occasioned by the
incomparable materials at hand. [1]
[Footnote 1:
The passage which I have cited from Diodorus shows that the origin was much
earlier. --ED. ]
_August_ 19. 1832.
ENGLISH AND GERMAN. --BEST STATE OF SOCIETY.
It may be doubted whether a composite language like the English is not a
happier instrument of expression than a homogeneous one like the German. We
possess a wonderful richness and variety of modified meanings in our Saxon
and Latin quasi-synonymes, which the Germans have not. For "the pomp and
_prodigality_ of Heaven," the Germans must have said "_the
spendthriftness_. "[1] Shakspeare is particularly happy in his use of the
Latin synonymes, and in distinguishing between them and the Saxon.
[Footnote 1: _Verschwendung_, I suppose.
A nation, to be great, ought to be compressed in its increment by nations
more civilized than itself--as Greece by Persia; and Rome by Etruria, the
Italian states, and Carthage. I remember Commodore Decatur saying to me at
Malta, that he deplored the occupation of Louisiana by the United States,
and wished that province had been possessed by England. He thought that if
the United States got hold of Canada by conquest or cession, the last
chance of his country becoming a great compact nation would be lost.
[Footnote 1:
Perhaps it left letter-writing also. Even if the Platonic epistles are
taken as genuine, which Mr. Coleridge, to my surprise, was inclined to
believe, they can hardly interfere, I think, with the uniqueness of the
truly incomparable collections from the correspondence of Cicero and
Pliny. --ED. ]
* * * * *
War in republican Rome was the offspring of its intense aristocracy of
spirit, and stood to the state in lieu of trade. As long as there was any
thing _ab extra_ to conquer, the state advanced: when nothing remained but
what was Roman, then, as a matter of course, civil war began.
_June_ 10. 1832.
CHARM FOR CRAMP.
When I was a little hoy at the Blue-coat School, there was a charm for
one's foot when asleep; and I believe it had been in the school since its
foundation, in the time of Edward the Sixth. The march of intellect has
probably now exploded it. It ran thus:--
Foot! foot! foot! is fast asleep!
Thumb! thumb! thumb! in spittle we steep:
Crosses three we make to ease us,
Two for the thieves, and one for Christ Jesus!
And the same charm served for a cramp in the leg, with the following
substitution:--
The devil is tying a knot in my leg!
Mark, Luke, and John, unloose it I beg! --
Crosses three, &c.
And really upon getting out of bed, where the cramp most frequently
occurred, pressing the sole of the foot on the cold floor, and then
repeating this charm with the acts configurative thereupon prescribed, I
can safely affirm that I do not remember an instance in which the cramp did
not go away in a few seconds.
I should not wonder if it were equally good for a stitch in the side; but I
cannot say I ever tried it for _that_.
July 7. 1832.
GREEK. --DUAL, NEUTER PLURAL, AND VERB SINGULAR. --THETA.
It is hardly possible to conceive a language more perfect than the Greek.
If you compare it with the modern European tongues, in the points of the
position and relative bearing of the vowels and consonants on each other,
and of the variety of terminations, it is incalculably before all in the
former particulars, and only equalled in the last by German. But it is in
variety of termination alone that the German surpasses the other modern
languages as to sound; for, as to position, Nature seems to have dropped an
acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made
all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of
termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian
prose is excessively monotonous.
* * * * *
It is very natural to have a dual, duality being a conception quite
distinct from plurality. Most very primitive languages have a dual, as the
Greek, Welch, and the native Chilese, as you will see in the Abbe Raynal.
The neuter plural governing, as they call it, a verb singular is one of the
many instances in Greek of the inward and metaphysic grammar resisting
successfully the tyranny of formal grammar. In truth, there may be
_Multeity_ in things; but there can only be _Plurality_ in persons.
Observe also that, in fact, a neuter noun in Greek has no real nominative
case, though it has a formal one, that is to say, the same word with the
accusative. The reason is--a _thing_ has no subjectivity, or nominative
case: it exists only as an object in the accusative or oblique case.
It is extraordinary that the Germans should not have retained or assumed
the two beautifully discriminated sounds of the soft and hard _theta_; as
in _thy thoughts_--_the thin ether that_, &c. How particularly fine the
hard _theta_ is in an English termination, as in that grand word--Death--
for which the Germans gutturize a sound that puts you in mind of nothing
but a loathsome toad.
_July_ 8. 1832.
TALENTED.
I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable _talented_, stealing out of
the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications
of the day. Why not _shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced,_ &c. ? The formation
of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very
peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is to justify such
attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the
proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from
America. [1]
[Footnote 1:
See "_eventuate_," in Mr. Washington Irving's "Tour On the Prairies,"
_passim_. --ED. ]
* * * * *
Never take an iambus as a Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do
very well. Edith and Rotha are my favourite names for women.
_July_ 9. 1832.
HOMER. --VALCKNAER.
I have the firmest conviction that _Homer_ is a mere traditional synonyme
with, or figure for, the Iliad. You cannot conceivefor a moment any thing
about the poet, as you call him, apart from that poem. Difference in men
there was in a degree, but not in kind; one man was, perhaps, a better poet
than another; but he was a poet upon the same ground and with the same
feelings as the rest.
The want of adverbs in the Iliad is very characteristic. With more adverbs
there would have been some subjectivity, or subjectivity would have made
them.
The Greeks were then just on the verge of the bursting forth of
individuality.
Valckenaer's treatise[1] on the interpolation of the Classics by the later
Jews and early Christians is well worth your perusal as a scholar and
critic.
[Footnote 1: _Diatribe de Aristobulo Judaeo_. --ED. ]
July 13. 1832.
PRINCIPLES AND FACTS. --SCHMIDT.
I have read all the famous histories, and, I believe, some history of every
country and nation that is, or ever existed; but I never did so for the
story itself as a story. The only thing interesting to me was the
principles to be evolved from, and illustrated by, the facts. [1] After I
had gotten my principles, I pretty generally left the facts to take care of
themselves. I never could remember any passages in books, or the
particulars of events, except in the gross. I can refer to them. To be
sure, I must be a different sort of man from Herder, who once was seriously
annoyed with himself, because, in recounting the pedigree of some German
royal or electoral family, he missed some one of those worthies and could
not recall the name.
[Footnote 1:
"The true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of
evidence which can _compel_ our belief; so many are the disturbing forces
which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the
first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own
circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the
present case; that there will never be wanting answers, and explanations,
and specious flatteries of hope, to persuade and perplex its government,
that the history of the past is inapplicable to _their_ case. And no
wonder, if we read history for the facts, instead of reading it for the
sake of the general principles, which are to the facts as the root and sap
of a tree to its leaves: and no wonder if history so read should find a
dangerous rival in novels; nay, if the latter should be preferred to the
former, on the score even of probability. I well remember that, when the
examples of former Jacobins, as Julius Caesar, Cromwell, and the like, were
adduced in France and England, at the commencement of the French consulate,
it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to fear a repetition
of usurpation and military despotism at the close of the _enlightened
eighteenth century_! Even so, in the very dawn of the late tempestuous day,
when the revolutions of Corcyra, the proscriptions of the reformers Marius,
Caesar, &c. , and the direful effects of the levelling tenets in the
peasants' war in Germany (differenced from the tenets of the first French
constitution only by the mode of wording them, the figures of speech being
borrowed in the one instance from theology, and in the other from modern
metaphysics), were urged on the convention and its vindicators; the magi of
the day, the true citizens of the world, the _plusquam perfecti_ of
patriotism, gave us set proofs that similar results were impossible, and
that it was an insult to so philosophical an age, to so enlightened a
nation, to dare direct the public eye towards them as to lights of
warning. "--_Statesman's Manual_, p. 14. ]
* * * * *
Schmidt[1] was a Romanist; but I have generally found him candid, as indeed
almost all the Austrians are. They are what is called _good Catholics_;
but, like our Charles the Second, they never let their religious bigotry
interfere with their political well-doing. Kaiser is a most pious son of
the church, yet he always keeps his papa in good order.
[Footnote 1:
Michael Ignatius Schmidt, the author of the History of the Germans. He
died in the latter end of the last century. --ED. ]
_July_ 20. 1832.
PURITANS AND JACOBINS.
It was God's mercy to our age that our Jacobins were infidels and a scandal
to all sober Christians. Had they been like the old Puritans, they would
have trodden church and king to the dust--at least for a time.
* * * * *
For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance,--that, with all my gastric
and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head of a mountain in
blue air and sunshine.
_July_ 21. 1832.
WORDSWORTH.
I have often wished that the first two books of the Excursion had been
published separately, under the name of "The Deserted Cottage. " They would
have formed, what indeed they are, one of the most beautiful poems in the
language.
* * * * *
Can dialogues in verse be defended? I cannot but think that a great
philosophical poet ought always to teach the reader himself as from
himself. A poem does not admit argumentation, though it does admit
development of thought. In prose there may be a difference; though I must
confess that, even in Plato and Cicero, I am always vexed that the authors
do not say what they have to say at once in their own persons. The
introductions and little urbanities are, to be sure, very delightful in
their way; I would not lose them; but I have no admiration for the practice
of ventriloquizing through another man's mouth.
* * * * *
I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen
books on the growth of an individual mind--superior, as I used to think,
upon the whole, to the Excursion. You may judge how I felt about them by my
own poem upon the occasion. [1] Then the plan laid out, and, I believe,
partly suggested by me, was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a
man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to
deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man,
--a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature,
and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of
the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of
society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the
high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of
the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal
the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being
subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing
how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and
restoration. Something of this sort was, I think, agreed on. It is, in
substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy.
[Footnote 1:
Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 206. It is not too much to say of this beautiful
poem, and yet it is difficult to say more, that it is at once worthy of the
poet, his subject, and his object:--
"An Orphic song indeed,
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts,
To their own music chanted. "--ED. ]
* * * * *
I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet
than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since
Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the
contemplative position, which is peculiarly--perhaps I might say
exclusively--fitted for him. His proper title is _Spectator ab extra_.
* * * * *
_July_ 23. 1832.
FRENCH REVOLUTION.
No man was more enthusiastic than I was for France and the Revolution: it
had all my wishes, none of my expectations. Before 1793, I clearly saw and
often enough stated in public, the horrid delusion, the vile mockery, of
the whole affair. [1]
When some one said in my brother James's presence[2] that I was a Jacobin,
he very well observed,--"No! Samuel is no Jacobin; he is a hot-headed
Moravian! " Indeed, I was in the extreme opposite pole.
[Footnote 1:
"Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams!
I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament,
From bleak Helvetia's icy cavern sent--
I hear thy groans upon her blood-stain'd streams!
Heroes, that for your peaceful country perish'd,
And ye that, fleeing, spot your mountain snows
With bleeding wounds; forgive me, that I cherish'd
One thought that ever blest your cruel foes!
To scatter rage and traitorous guilt,
Where Peace her jealous home had built;
A patriot race to disinherit
Of all that made her stormy wilds so dear:
And with inexpiable spirit
To taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer--
O France, that mockest Heaven, adult'rous, blind,
And patriot only in pernicious toils,
Are these thy boasts, champion of human-kind?
To mix with kings in the low lust of sway,
Yell in the hunt and share the murderous prey--
To insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils
From freemen torn--to tempt and to betray? --
The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain,
Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game
They burst their manacles, and wear the name
Of freedom, graven on a heavier chain!
O Liberty! with profitless endeavour
Have I pursued thee many a weary hour;
But thou nor swell'st the victor's train, nor ever
Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power.
Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee,
(Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee,)
Alike from priestcraft's harpy minions,
And factious blasphemy's obscener slaves,
_Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions,
The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves! _"
France, an Ode. Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 130. ]
[Footnote 2:
A soldier of the old cavalier stamp, to whom the King was the symbol of
the majesty, as the Church was of the life, of the nation, and who would
most assuredly have taken arms for one or the other against all the Houses
of Commons or committees of public safety in the world. --ED. ]
_July_ 24. 1832.
INFANT SCHOOLS.
I have no faith in act of parliament reform. All the great--the permanently
great--things that have been achieved in the world have been so achieved by
individuals, working from the instinct of genius or of goodness. The rage
now-a-days is all the other way: the individual is supposed capable of
nothing; there must be organization, classification, machinery, &c. , as if
the capital of national morality could be increased by making a joint stock
of it. Hence you see these infant schools so patronized by the bishops and
others, who think them a grand invention. Is it found that an infant-school
child, who has been bawling all day a column of the multiplication-table,
or a verse from the Bible, grows up a more dutiful son or daughter to its
parents? Are domestic charities on the increase amongst families under this
system? In a great town, in our present state of society, perhaps such
schools may be a justifiable expedient--a choice of the lesser evil; but as
for driving these establishments into the country villages, and breaking up
the cottage home education, I think it one of the most miserable mistakes
which the well-intentioned people of the day have yet made; and they have
made, and are making, a good many, God knows.
_July_ 25. 1832.
MR. COLERIDGE'S PHILOSOPHY. --SUBLIMITY. --SOLOMON. --MADNESS. --C. LAMB--
SFORZA's DECISION.
The pith of my system is to make the senses out of the mind--not the mind
out of the senses, as Locke did.
* * * * *
Could you ever discover any thing sublime, in our sense of the term, in the
classic Greek literature? never could. Sublimity is Hebrew by birth.
* * * * *
I should conjecture that the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes were written, or,
perhaps, rather collected, about the time of Nehemiah. The language is
Hebrew with Chaldaic endings. It is totally unlike the language of Moses on
the one hand, and of Isaiah on the other.
* * * * *
Solomon introduced the commercial spirit into his kingdom. I cannot think
his idolatry could have been much more, in regard to himself, than a state
protection or toleration of the foreign worship.
* * * * *
When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad. A
madman is properly so defined.
* * * * *
Charles Lamb translated my motto _Sermoni propriora_ by--_properer for a
sermon_!
* * * * *
I was much amused some time ago by reading the pithy decision of one of the
Sforzas of Milan, upon occasion of a dispute for precedence between the
lawyers and physicians of his capital;--_Paecedant fures--sequantur
carnifices_. I hardly remember a neater thing.
_July_ 28. 1832.
FAITH AND BELIEF.
The sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the
church; but the faith of the individual, centered in his heart, is or may
be collateral to them. [1]
Faith is subjective. I throw myself in adoration before God; acknowledge
myself his creature,--simple, weak, lost; and pray for help and pardon
through Jesus Christ: but when I rise from my knees, I discuss the doctrine
of the Trinity as I would a problem in geometry; in the same temper of
mind, I mean, not by the same process of reasoning, of course.
[Footnote 1:
Mr. Coleridge used very frequently to insist upon the distinction between
belief and faith. He once told me, with very great earnestness, that if he
were that moment convinced--a conviction, the possibility of which,
indeed, he could not realize to himself--that the New Testament was a
forgery from beginning to end--wide as the desolation in his moral
feelings would be, he should not abate one jot of his faith in God's power
and mercy through some manifestation of his being towards man, either in
time past or future, or in the hidden depths where time and space are not.
This was, I believe, no more than a vivid expression of what he always
maintained, that no man had attained to a full faith who did not
_recognize_ in the Scriptures a correspondency to his own nature, or see
that his own powers of reason, will, and understanding were preconfigured
to the reception of the Christian doctrines and promises. --ED. ]
_August_ 4. 1832.
DOBRIZHOFFER.
[1]
I hardly know any thing more amusing than the honest German Jesuitry of
Dobrizhoffer. His chapter on the dialects is most valuable. He is surprised
that there is no form for the infinitive, but that they say,--I wish, (go,
or eat, or drink, &c. ) interposing a letter by way of copula,--forgetting
his own German and the English, which are, in truth, the same. The
confident belief entertained by the Abipones of immortality, in connection
with the utter absence in their minds of the idea of a God, is very
remarkable. If Warburton were right, which he is not, the Mosaic scheme
would be the exact converse. My dear daughter's translation of this book[2]
is, in my judgment, unsurpassed for pure mother English by any thing I have
read for a long time.
[Footnote 1:
"He was a man of rarest qualities,
Who to this barbarous region had confined
A spirit with the learned and the wise
Worthy to take its place, and from mankind
Receive their homage, to the immortal mind
Paid in its just inheritance of fame.
But he to humbler thoughts his heart inclined:
From Gratz amid the Styrian hills he came,
And Dobrizhofter was the good man's honour'd name.
"It was his evil fortune to behold
The labours of his painful life destroyed;
His flock which he had brought within the fold
Dispers'd; the work of ages render'd void,
And all of good that Paraguay enjoy'd
By blind and suicidal power o'erthrown.
So he the years of his old age employ'd,
A faithful chronicler, in handing down
Names which he lov'd, and things well worthy to be known.
"And thus when exiled from the dear-loved scene,
In proud Vienna he beguiled the pain
Of sad remembrance: and the empress-queen,
That great Teresa, she did not disdain
In gracious mood sometimes to entertain
Discourse with him both pleasurable and sage;
And sure a willing ear she well might deign
To one whose tales may equally engage
The wondering mind of youth, the thoughtful heart of age.
"But of his native speech, because well-nigh
Disuse in him forgetfulness had wrought,
In Latin he composed his history;
A garrulous, but a lively tale, and fraught
With matter of delight, and food for thought.
And if he could in Merlin's glass have seen
By whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught,
The old man would have felt as pleased, I ween,
As when he won the ear of that great empress-queen.
"Little he deem'd, when with his Indian band
He through the wilds set forth upon his way,
A poet then unborn, and in a land
Which had proscribed his order, should one day
Take up from thence his moralizing lay,
And, shape a song that, with no fiction drest,
Should to his worth its grateful tribute pay,
And sinking deep in many an English breast,
Foster that faith divine that keeps the heart at rest. "
_Southey's Tale of Paraguay_, canto iii. st. 16. ]
[Footnote 2:
"An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, From the
Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer, eighteen Years a Missionary in that
Country. "--Vol. ii. p. 176. ]
_August_ 6. 1832.
SCOTCH AND ENGLISH. --CRITERION OF GENIUS. --DRYDEN AND POPE.
I have generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very
disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The Scotch
will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the English; the
English have a morbid habit of petting and praising foreigners of any sort,
to the unjust disparagement of their own worthies.
* * * * *
You will find this a good gage or criterion of genius,--whether it
progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel
and Zimri,--Shaftesbury and Buckingham; every line adds to or modifies the
character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse;
whereas, in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all
the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are
so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever
it may be that is satirized. In like manner compare Charles Lamb's
exquisite criticisms on Shakspeare with Hazlitt's round and round
imitations of them.
_August_ 7. 1832.
MILTON'S DISREGARD OF PAINTING.
It is very remarkable that in no part of his writings does Milton take any
notice of the great painters of Italy, nor, indeed, of painting as an art;
whilst every other page breathes his love and taste for music. Yet it is
curious that, in one passage in the Paradise Lost, Milton has certainly
copied the _fresco_ of the Creation in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. I mean
those lines,--
----"now half appear'd
The tawny lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds,
And rampant shakes his brinded mane;--"&c. [1]
an image which the necessities of the painter justified, but which was
wholly unworthy, in my judgment, of the enlarged powers of the poet. Adam
bending over the sleeping Eve in the Paradise Lost[2] and Dalilah
approaching Samson, in the Agonistes[3] are the only two proper pictures I
remember in Milton.
[Footnote 1: Par. Lost, book vii. ver. 463. ]
[Footnote 2:
----"so much the more
His wonder was to find unwaken'd Eve
With tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek,
As through unquiet rest: he on his side
Leaning, half raised, with looks of cordial love
Hung over her enamour'd, and beheld
Beauty, which, whether waking or asleep,
Shot forth peculiar graces; then, with voice
Mild, as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes,
Her hand soft touching, whisper'd thus: Awake,
My fairest," &c.
Book v. ver. 8. ]
[Footnote 3:
"But who is this, what thing of sea or land?
Female of sex it seems,
That so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay,
Comes this way sailing
Like a stately ship
Of Tarsus, bound for the isles
Of Javan or Gadire,
With all her bravery on, and tackle trim,
Sails fill'd, and streamers waving,
Courted by all the winds that hold them play;
An amber-scent of odorous perfume
Her harbinger, a damsel train behind! "]
August 9. 1832.
BAPTISMAL SERVICE. --JEWS' DIVISION OF THE SCRIPTURE. --SANSKRIT.
I think the baptismal service almost perfect. What seems erroneous
assumption in it to me, is harmless. None of the services of the church
affect me so much as this. I never could attend a christening without tears
bursting forth at the sight of the helpless innocent in a pious clergyman's
arms.
* * * * *
The Jews recognized three degrees of sanctity in their Scriptures:--first,
the writings of Moses, who had the [Greek: autopsia]; secondly, the
Prophets; and, thirdly, the Good Books. Philo, amusingly enough, places his
works somewhere between the second and third degrees.
* * * * *
The claims of the Sanskrit for priority to the Hebrew as a language are
ridiculous.
August 11. 1832.
HESIOD. --VIRGIL. --GENIUS METAPHYSICAL. --DON QUIXOTE.
I like reading Hesiod, meaning the Works and Days. If every verse is not
poetry, it is, at least, good sense, which is a great deal to say.
* * * * *
There is nothing real in the Georgies, except, to be sure, the verse. [1]
Mere didactics of practice, unless seasoned with the personal interests of
the time or author, are inexpressibly dull to me. Such didactic poetry as
that of the Works and Days followed naturally upon legislation and the
first ordering of municipalities.
[Footnote 1:
I used to fancy Mr. Coleridge _paulo iniquior Virgilio_, and told him so;
to which he replied, that, like all Eton men, I swore _per Maronem_. This
was far enough from being the case; but I acknowledge that Mr. C. 's
apparent indifference to the tenderness and dignity of Virgil excited my
surprise. --ED. ]
* * * * *
All genius is metaphysical; because the ultimate end of genius is ideal,
however it may be actualized by incidental and accidental circumstances.
* * * * *
Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the
imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard
the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. Sancho is the
common sense of the social man-animal, unenlightened and unsanctified by
the reason. You see how he reverences his master at the very time he is
cheating him.
_August_ 14. 1832.
STEINMETZ. --KEATS.
Poor dear Steinmetz is gone,--his state of sure blessedness accelerated;
or, it may be, he is buried in Christ, and there in that mysterious depth
grows on to the spirit of a just man made perfect! Could I for a moment
doubt this, the grass would become black beneath my feet, and this earthly
frame a charnel-house. I never knew any man so illustrate the difference
between the feminine and the effeminate.
* * * * *
A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. ---- and myself in a lane
near Highgate. ---- knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to
me, and staid a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came
back and said: "Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed
your hand! "--"There is death in that hand," I said to ----, when Keats was
gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself
distinctly.
_August_ 16. 1832.
CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. --BOWYER.
The discipline at Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan;--all
domestic ties were to be put aside. "Boy! " I remember Bowyer saying to me
once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, "Boy!
the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school
is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first
cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's
have no more crying! "
* * * * *
No tongue can express good Mrs. Bowyer. Val. Le Grice and I were once going
to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and Bowyer was thundering away at
us by way of prologue, when Mrs. B. looked in, and said, "Flog them
soundly, sir, I beg! " This saved us. Bowyer was so nettled at the
interruption that he growled out, "Away, woman! away! " and we were let off.
_August_ 28. 1832.
ST. PAUL'S MELITA.
The belief that Malta is the island on which St. Paul was wrecked is so
rooted in the common Maltese, and is cherished with such a superstitious
nationality, that the Government would run the chance of exciting a tumult,
if it, or its representatives, unwarily ridiculed it. The supposition
itself is quite absurd. Not to argue the matter at length, consider these
few conclusive facts:--The narrative speaks of the "barbarous people," and
"barbarians,"[1] of the island. Now, our Malta was at that time fully
peopled and highly civilized, as we may surely infer from Cicero and other
writers. [2] A viper comes out from the sticks upon the fire being lighted:
the men are not surprised at the appearance of the snake, but imagine first
a murderer, and then a god from the harmless attack. Now in our Malta there
are, I may say, no snakes at all; which, to be sure, the Maltese attribute
to St. Paul's having cursed them away. Melita in the Adriatic was a
perfectly barbarous island as to its native population, and was, and is
now, infested with serpents. Besides the context shows that the scene is in
the Adriatic.
[Footnote 1:
Acts xxviii. 2. and 4. Mr. C. seemed to think that the Greek words had
reference to something more than the fact of the islanders not speaking
Latin or Greek; the classical meaning of [Greek: Barbaroi]. -ED. ]
[Footnote 2:
Upwards of a century before the reign of Nero, Cicero speaks at
considerable length of our Malta in one of the Verrine orations. See Act.
ii. lib. iv. c. 46. "Insula est Melita, judices," &c. There was a town, and
Verres had established in it a manufactory of the fine cloth or cotton
stuffs, the _Melitensis vestis_, for which the island is uniformly
celebrated:--
"Fertilis est Melite sterili vicina Cocyrae
Insula, quam Libyci verberat unda freti. "
Ovid. Fast. iii. 567.
And Silius Italicus has--
----"telaque _superba_
_Lanigera_ Melite. "
Punic. xiv. 251.
Yet it may have been cotton after all--the present product of Malta. Cicero
describes an _ancient_ temple of Juno situated on a promontory near the
town, so famous and revered, that, even in the time of Masinissa, at least
150 years B. C. , that prince had religiously restored some relics which his
admiral had taken from it. The plunder of this very temple is an article of
accusation against Verres; and a deputation of Maltese (_legati
Melitenses_) came to Rome to establish the charge. These are all the facts,
I think, which can be gathered from Cicero; because I consider his
expression of _nudatae urbes_, in the working up of this article, a piece
of rhetoric. Strabo merely marks the position of Melita, and says that the
lap-dogs called [Greek: kunidia Melitaia] were sent from this island,
though some writers attribute them to the other Melite in the Adriatic,
(lib. vi. ) Diodorus, however, a Sicilian himself by birth, gives the
following remarkable testimony as to the state of the island in his time,
which, it will be remembered, was considerably before the date of St.
Paul's shipwreck. "There are three islands to the south of Sicily, each of
which has a city or town ([Greek: polin]), and harbours fitted for the safe
reception of ships. The first of these is Melite, distant about 800 stadia
from Syracuse, and possessing several harbours of surpassing excellence.
Its inhabitants are rich and luxurious ([Greek: tous katoikountas tais
ousiais eudaimonas]). There are artizans of every kind ([Greek: pantodapous
tais exgasias]); the best are those who weave cloth of a singular fineness
and softness. The houses are worthy of admiration for their superb
adornment with eaves and brilliant white-washing ([Greek: oikias axiologous
kai kateskeuasmenas philotimos geissois kai koniamasi pezittotezon]). "--
Lib. v. c. 12. Mela (ii. c. 7. ) and Pliny (iii. 14. ) simply mark the
position. --ED. ]
* * * * *
The Maltese seem to have preserved a fondness and taste for architecture
from the time of the knights--naturally enough occasioned by the
incomparable materials at hand. [1]
[Footnote 1:
The passage which I have cited from Diodorus shows that the origin was much
earlier. --ED. ]
_August_ 19. 1832.
ENGLISH AND GERMAN. --BEST STATE OF SOCIETY.
It may be doubted whether a composite language like the English is not a
happier instrument of expression than a homogeneous one like the German. We
possess a wonderful richness and variety of modified meanings in our Saxon
and Latin quasi-synonymes, which the Germans have not. For "the pomp and
_prodigality_ of Heaven," the Germans must have said "_the
spendthriftness_. "[1] Shakspeare is particularly happy in his use of the
Latin synonymes, and in distinguishing between them and the Saxon.
[Footnote 1: _Verschwendung_, I suppose.
