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THE POSTHUMOUS WORKS
OF
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
_EDITED FROM THE AUTHOR'S MSS., WITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES_
BY
ALEXANDER H. JAPP LL.D., F.R.S.E.
_VOLUME II._
LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1893
[_All rights reserved_]
CONVERSATION AND COLERIDGE
With Other Essays
_CRITICAL, HISTORICAL, BIOGRAPHICAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, IMAGINATIVE AND
HUMOROUS_
BY
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1893
PREFACE.
All that is needful for me to say by way of Preface is that, as in the
case of the first volume, I have received much aid from Mrs. Baird Smith
and Miss De Quincey, and that Mr. J. R. McIlraith has repeated his
friendly service of reading the proofs.
ALEXANDER H. JAPP.
LONDON,
_March 1st, 1893._
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
I. CONVERSATION AND S. T. COLERIDGE 7
II. MR. FINLAY'S HISTORY OF GREECE 60
III. THE ASSASSINATION OF CÆSAR 91
IV. CICERO (SUPPLEMENTARY TO PUBLISHED ESSAY) 95
V. MEMORIAL CHRONOLOGY 107
VI. CHRYSOMANIA; OR, THE GOLD-FRENZY IN ITS PRESENT STAGE 157
VII. DEFENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEERAGE 169
VIII. THE ANTI-PAPAL MOVEMENT 174
IX. THEORY AND PRACTICE 182
X. POPE AND DIDACTIC POETRY 189
XI. SHAKSPEARE AND WORDSWORTH 197
XII. CRITICISM ON SOME OF COLERIDGE'S CRITICISMS OF WORDSWORTH 201
XIII. WORDSWORTH AND SOUTHEY: AFFINITIES AND DIFFERENCES 208
XIV. PRONUNCIATION 213
XV. THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES COULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN IN NO MODERN ERA 221
XVI. DISPERSION OF THE JEWS, AND JOSEPHUS'S ENMITY TO CHRISTIANITY 225
XVII. CHRISTIANITY AS THE RESULT OF PRE-ESTABLISHED HARMONY 228
XVIII. THE MESSIANIC IDEA ROMANIZED 238
XIX. CONTRAST OF GREEK AND PERSIAN FEELING IN CERTAIN ASPECTS 241
XX. OMITTED PASSAGES AND VARIED READINGS 244
1. Dinner 244
2. Omitted Passages from the Review of Bennett's Ceylon 246
3. Gillman's Coleridge 255
4. Why Scripture does not Deal with Science ('Pagan Oracles') 257
5. Variation on a Famous Passage in 'The Daughter of Lebanon' 260
DE QUINCEY'S POSTHUMOUS WORKS.
_INTRODUCTION._
All that needs to be said in the way of introduction to this volume will
best take the form of notes on the articles which it contains.
I. '_Conversation and S. T. Coleridge._' This article, which was found
in a tolerably complete condition, may be regarded as an attempt to deal
with the subject in a more critical and searching, and at the same time
more sympathetic and inclusive spirit, than is apparent in any former
essay. It keeps clear entirely of the field of personal reminiscence;
and if it glances at matters on which dissent must be entered to the
views of Coleridge, it is still unvaryingly friendly and reverent
towards the subject. It is evidently of a later date than either the
'Reminiscences of Coleridge' in the 'Recollections of the Lakes' series,
or the article on 'Coleridge and Opium-Eating,' and may be accepted as
De Quincey's supplementary and final deliverance on Coleridge. The
beautiful apostrophe to the name of Coleridge, which we have given as a
kind of motto to the essay, was found attached to one of the sheets;
and, in spite of much mutilation and mixing of the pages with those of
other articles, as we originally found them, it was for the most part so
clearly written and carefully punctuated, that there can be no doubt,
when put together, we had it before us very much as De Quincey meant to
publish it had he found a fitting chance to do so. For such an article
as this neither _Tait_ nor _Hogg's Instructor_ afforded exactly the
proper medium, but rather some quarterly review, or magazine such as
_Blackwood_. We have given, in an appended note to this essay, some
corroboration from the poems of Coleridge of the truth of De Quincey's
words about the fatal effect on a nature like that of Coleridge of the
early and very sudden death of his father, his separation from his
mother, and his transference to Christ's Hospital, London.
II. _Mr. Finlay's_ '_History of Greece_.' This essay is totally
different, alike in the advances De Quincey makes to the subject, the
points taken up, and the general method of treatment, from the essay on
Mr. Finlay's volumes which appears in the Collected Works. It would seem
as though De Quincey, in such a topic as this, found it utterly
impossible to exhaust the points that had suggested themselves to him on
a careful reading of such a work, in the limits of one article; and
that, in this case, as in some others, he elaborated a second article,
probably with a view to finding a place for it in a different magazine
or review. In this, however, he either did not succeed, or, on his own
principle of the opium-eater never really finishing anything, retreated
from the practical work of pushing his wares with editors even after he
had finished them. At all events, we can find no trace of this article,
or any part of it, having ever been published. The Eastern Roman Empire
was a subject on which he might have written, not merely a couple of
review articles, but a volume, as we are sure anyone competent to judge
will, on carefully reading these articles, at once admit. This essay,
too, was found in a very complete condition, when the various pages had
been brought together and arranged. This is true of all save the last
few pages, which existed more in the form of notes, yet are perfectly
clear and intelligible; the leading thoughts being distinctly put,
though not followed out in any detail, or with the illustration which he
could so easily have given them.
III. '_The Assassination of Cæsar_.' This was clearly meant to be
inserted at the close of the first section of 'The Cæsars,' but was at
the last moment overlooked, though without it the text there, as it
stands in the Collected Works, is, for De Quincey, perhaps too hurried
and business-like.
IV. The little article on '_Cicero_' is evidently meant as a
supplementary note to the article on that eminent man, as it appears in
the Collected Works. Why De Quincey, when preparing these volumes for
the press, did not work it into his text is puzzling, as it develops
happily some points which he has there dwelt on, and presents in a very
effective and compact style the mingled feelings with which the great
Proconsul quitted his office in Cilicia, and his feelings on arriving at
Rome.
V. _Memorial Chronology._--This is a continuation of that already
published under the same title in the Collected Works. In a note from
the publishers, preceding the portion already given in the sixteenth
volume of the original edition, and the fourteenth of Professor Masson's
edition, it is said: 'This article was written about twenty years ago
[1850], and is printed here for the first time from the author's _MS_.
It was his intention to have continued the subject, but this was never
done.' From the essay we now present it will be seen that this last
statement is only in a modified sense true--the more that the portion
published in the Messrs. Black's editions is, on the whole, merely
introductory, and De Quincey's peculiar _technica memoria_ is not there
even indicated, which it is, with some degree of clearness, in the
following pages, and these may be regarded as presenting at least the
leading outlines of what the whole series would have been.
De Quincey's method, after having fixed a definite accepted point of
departure, was to link the memory of events to a period made signal by
identity of figures. Thus, he finds the fall of Assyria, the first of
the Olympiads, and the building of Rome to date from about the year 777
B.C. That is his starting-point in definite chronology. Then he takes up
the period from 777 to 555; from 555 to 333, and so on.
De Quincey was writing professedly for ladies only, and not for
scholars; and that his acknowledged leading obstacle was the
semi-mythical wilderness of all early oriental history is insisted on
with emphasis. The way in which he triumphs over this obstacle is
certainly characteristic and ingenious. Though the latter part is
fragmentary, it is suggestive; and from the whole a fair conception may
be formed of what the finished work would have been had De Quincey been
able to complete it, and of the eloquence with which he would have
relieved the mere succession of dates and figures.
It is clear that in the original form, though the papers were written
for ladies, the phantasy of a definite 'Charlotte' as fair
correspondent had not suggested itself to him; and that he had recourse
to this only in the final rewriting, and would have applied it to the
whole had he been spared to pursue his plan of recast and revision for
the Collected Works, as it was his intention to have done. Mrs. Baird
Smith remembers very clearly her father's many conversations on this
subject and his leading ideas--it was, in fact, a pet scheme of his; and
it is therefore the more to be regretted that his final revision only
embraced a small portion of the matter which he had already written.
It only needs to be added that, at the time De Quincey wrote,
exploration in Assyria and Egypt, not to speak of discovery in Akkad,
had made but little way compared with what has now been accomplished,
else certain passages in this essay would no doubt have been somewhat
modified.
VI. The article entitled '_Chrysomania; or the Gold Frenzy at its
Present Stage_', was evidently written after the two articles which
appeared in _Hogg's Instructor_. Not improbably it was felt that the
readers of _Hogg's Instructor_ had already had enough on the Gold Craze,
and this it was deemed better not to publish; but it has an interest as
supplementing much that De Quincey had said in these papers, and is a
happy illustration of his style in dealing with such subjects. Evidently
the editor of _Hogg's Instructor_ was hardly so attracted by these
papers as by others of De Quincey's; for we find that he had excised
some of the notes.
VII. '_The Defence of the English Peerage_' is printed because, although
it does not pretend to much detail or research, it shows anew De
Quincey's keen interest in the events of English history, and his vivid
appreciation of the peerage as a means of quickening and reviving in
the minds of the people the memorable events with which the earlier
bearers of these ancient titles had been connected.
VIII. The '_Anti-Papal Movement_' may be taken to attest once more De
Quincey's keen interest in all the topics of the day, political, social,
and ecclesiastical.
IX. The section on literature more properly will be interesting to many
as exhibiting some new points of contact with Wordsworth and Southey.
X. The articles on the '_Dispersion of the Jews_,' and on '_Christianity
as the result of a Pre-established Harmony_,' will, we think, be found
interesting by theologians as well as by readers generally, as attesting
not only the keen interest of De Quincey in these and allied subjects,
but also his penetration and keen grasp, and his faculty of felicitous
illustration, by which ever and anon he lights up the driest subjects.
_I. CONVERSATION AND S. T. COLERIDGE._
Oh name of Coleridge, that hast mixed so much with the
trepidations of our own agitated life, mixed with the
beatings of our love, our gratitude, our trembling hope;
name destined to move so much of reverential sympathy and so
much of ennobling strife in the generations yet to come, of
our England at home, of our other Englands on the St.
Lawrence, on the Mississippi, on the Indus and Ganges, and
on the pastoral solitudes of Austral climes!
What are the great leading vices of conversation as generally
managed?--vices that are banished from the best society by the
legislation of manners, not by any intellectual legislation, but in
other forms of society, and exactly as it approaches to the character of
vulgarism, disturbing all approaches to elegance in conversation, and
disorganizing it as a thing capable of unity or of progress? These vices
are, first, disputation; secondly, garrulity; thirdly, the spirit of
interruption.
I. I lay it down as a rule, but still reserving their peculiar rights
and exceptions to young Scotchmen for whom daily disputing is a sort of
daily bread, that the man who disputes is a monster, and that he ought
to be expelled from civilized society. Or could not a compromise be
effected for disputatious people, by allowing a private disputing room
in all hotels, as they have private rooms for smoking? I have heard of
two Englishmen, gentlemanly persons, but having a constitutional _furor_
for boxing, who quieted their fighting instincts in this way. It was
not glory which they desired, but mutual punishment, given and taken
with a hearty goodwill. Yet, as their feelings of refinement revolted
from making themselves into a spectacle of partisanship for the public
to bet on, they retired into a ball-room, and locked the doors, so that
nothing could transpire of the campaigns within except from the
desperate rallies and floorings which were heard, or from the bloody
faces which were seen on their issuing. A limited admission, it was
fancied, might have been allowed to select friends; but the courteous
refusal of both parties was always 'No; the pounding was strictly
confidential.' Now, pray, gentlemen disputers, could you not make your
pounding 'strictly confidential'? My chief reasons for doing so I will
mention:
1. That disputing is in bad tone; it is vulgar, and essentially the
resource of uncultured people.
2. It argues want of intellectual power, or, in any case, want of
intellectual development. It is because men find it easier to talk by
disputing than by _not_ disputing that so many people resort to this
coarse expedient for calling the wind into the sails of conversation. To
move along in the key of contradiction is the cheapest of all devices
for purchasing a power that is not your own. You are then carried along
by a towing-line attached to another vessel. There is no free power.
Always your antagonist predetermines the course of your own movement;
and you his. What _he_ says, you unsay. He affirms, you deny. He knits,
you unknit. Always you are servile to _him_; and he to _you_. Yet even
that system of motion in reverse of another motion, of mere antistrophe
or dancing backward what the strophe had danced forward, is better after
all, you say, than standing stock still. For instance, it might have
been tedious enough to hear Mr. Cruger disputing every proposition that
Burke advanced on the Bristol hustings; yet even _that_ some people
would prefer to Cruger's single observation, viz., 'I say _ditto_ to Mr.
Burke.' Every man to his taste: I, for one, should have preferred Mr.
Cruger's _ditto_.[1] But why need we have a _ditto_, a simple _affirmo_,
because we have _not_ an eternal _nego_? The proper spirit of
conversation moves in the general key of assent, but still not therefore
of mere iteration, but still each bar of the music is different. Nature
surely does not repeat herself, yet neither does she maintain the
eternal variety of her laughing beauty by constantly contradicting
herself, and quite as little by monotonously repeating herself. Her
samenesses are differences.
II. Of the evils of garrulity, which, like the ceaseless droppings
of water, will eat into the toughest rock of patience and
self-satisfaction, I have spoken at considerable length elsewhere. Its
evils are so evident that they hardly call for further illustration. The
garrulous man, paradoxical as it may seem to say it, is a kind of
pickpocket without intending to steal anything--nay, rather he is fain
to please you by placing something in your pocket--though too often it
is like the egg of the cuckoo in the nest of another bird.
III. Now, as to _Interruption_, what's to be done? It is a question that
I have often considered. For the evil is great, and the remedy occult. I
look upon a man that interrupts another in conversation as a monster
far less excusable than a cannibal; yet cannibals (though,
comparatively with _interrupters_, valuable members of society) are
rare, and, even where they are _not_ rare, they don't practise as
cannibals every day: it is but on sentimental occasions that the
exhibition of cannibalism becomes general. But the monsters who
interrupt men in the middle of a sentence are to be found everywhere;
and they are always practising. Red-letter days or black-letter days,
festival or fast, makes no difference to _them_. This enormous nuisance
I feel the more, because it is one which I never retaliate. Interrupted
in every sentence, I still practise the American Indian's politeness of
never interrupting. What, absolutely _never_? Is there _no_ case in
which I should? If a man's nose, or ear, as sometimes happens in high
latitudes, were suddenly and visibly frost-bitten, so as instantly to
require being rubbed with snow, I conceive it lawful to interrupt that
man in the most pathetic sentence, or even to ruin a whole paragraph of
his prose. You can never indeed give him back the rhetoric which you
have undermined; _that_ is true; but neither could he, in the
alternative case, have given back to himself the nose which you have
saved.
I contend also, against a great casuist in this matter, that had you
been a friend of Æschylus, and distinctly observed that absurd old
purblind eagle that mistook (or pretended to mistake) the great poet's
bald head--that head which created the Prometheus and the Agamemnon--for
a white tablet of rock, and had you interrupted the poet in his talk at
the very moment when the bird was dropping a lobster on the sacred
cranium, with the view of unshelling the lobster, but unaware that at
the same time he was unshelling a great poet's brain, you would have
been fully justified. An impertinence it would certainly have been to
interrupt a sentence as undeniable in its Greek as any which that
gentleman can be supposed to have turned out, but still the eagle's
impertinence was greater.[2] That would have been your excuse. Æschylus,
or my friend the casuist, is not to be listened to in his very learned
arguments _contra_.
Short of these cases, nothing can justify an interruption; and such
cases surely cannot be common, since how often can we suppose it to
happen that an eagle has a lobster to break just at the moment when a
tragic poet is walking abroad without his hat? What the reader's
experience may have been, of course, is unknown to me; but, for my own
part, I hardly meet with such a case twice in ten years, though I know
an extensive circle of tragic poets, and a reasonable number of bald
heads; eagles certainly not so many--they are but few on my visiting
list; and indeed, if that's their way of going on--cracking literary
skulls without leave asked or warning given--the fewer one knows the
better. If, then, a long life hardly breeds a case in which it is
strictly lawful to interrupt a co-dialogist, what are we to think of
those who move in conversation by the very principle of interruption?
And a variety of the nuisance there is, which I consider equally bad.
Men, that do not absolutely interrupt you, are yet continually _on the
fret_ to do so, and undisguisedly on the fret all the time you are
speaking. To invent a Latin word which ought to have been invented
before my time, 'non interrumpunt at _interrupturiunt_.' You can't talk
in peace for such people; and as to prosing, which I suppose you've a
right to do by _Magna Charta_, it is quite out of the question when a
man is looking in your face all the time with a cruel expression in his
eye amounting to 'Surely, that's enough!' or a pathetic expression which
says, '_Have_ you done?' throwing a dreadful reproach into the _Have_.
In Cumberland, at a farmhouse where I once had lodgings for a week or
two, a huge dog as high as the dining-table used to plant himself in a
position to watch all my motions at dinner. Being alone, and either
reading or thinking, at first I did not observe him; but as soon as I
did, and noticed that he pursued each rising and descent of my fork as
the poet 'with wistful eyes pursues the setting sun,' that unconsciously
he mimicked and rehearsed all the notes and _appoggiaturas_ that make up
the successive bars in the music of eating one's dinner, I was compelled
to rise, and say, 'My good fellow, I can't stand this; will you do me
the favour to accept anything on my plate at this moment? And to-morrow
I'll endeavour to arrange for your being otherwise employed at this hour
than in watching _me_.' It seems a weakness, but I really cannot eat
anything under the oppression of an envious _surveillance_ like that
dog's. A man said to me, 'Oh, what need you care about _him_? He has had
_his_ dinner long ago.' True, at twelve or one o'clock; but at six he
might want another; but, if he thinks so himself, the result is the
same. And that result is what the whole South of Frankistan[3] calls the
_evil eye_. Wanting dinner, when he sees another person in the very act
of dining, the dog (though otherwise an excellent creature) must be
filled with envy; and envy is so contagiously allied to malice, that in
elder English one word expresses both those dark modifications of
hatred. The dog's eye therefore, without any consciousness on his own
part, becomes in such a case _an evil eye_: upon me, at least, it fell
with as painful an effect as any established eye of that class could do
upon the most superstitious Portuguese.
Now, such exactly is the eye of any man that, without actually
interrupting one, threatens by his impatient manner as often as one
begins to speak. It has a blighting effect upon one's spirits. And the
only resource is to say frankly (as I said to the dog), 'Would you
oblige me, sir, by taking the whole of the talk into your own hands? Do
not for ever threaten to do so, but at once boldly lay an interdict upon
any other person's speaking.'
To those who suffer from nervous irritability, the man that suspends
over our heads his _threat_ of interruption by constant impatience, is
even a more awful person to face than the actual interrupter. Either of
them is insufferable; and in cases where the tone of prevailing manners
is not vigorous enough to put such people down, or where the individual
monster, being not _couchant_ or _passant_, but (heraldically speaking)
_rampant_, utterly disregards all restraints that are not enforced by a
constable, the question comes back with greater force than ever, which I
stated at the beginning of this article, 'What's to be done?'
I really cannot imagine. Despair seizes me 'with her icy fangs,' unless
the reader can suggest something; or unless he can improve on a plan of
my own sketching.
As a talker for effect, as a _bravura_ artist in conversation, no one
has surpassed Coleridge. There is a Spanish proverb, that he who has not
seen Seville, has seen nothing. And I grieve to inform the present
unfortunate generation, born under an evil star, coming, in fact, into
the world a day after the fair, that, not having heard Coleridge, they
have _heard_--pretty much what the strangers to Seville have _seen_,
which (you hear from the Spaniards) amounts to nothing. _Nothing_ is
hardly a thing to be proud of, and yet it has its humble advantages. To
have heard Coleridge was a thing to remember with pride as a trophy, but
with pain as a trophy won by some personal sacrifice. To have heard
Coleridge has now indeed become so great a distinction, that if it were
transferable, and a man could sell it by auction, the biddings for it
would run up as fast as for a genuine autograph of Shakespeare. The
story is current under a thousand forms of the man who piqued himself on
an interview which he had once enjoyed with royalty; and, being asked
what he could repeat to the company of his gracious Majesty's remarks,
being an honest fellow he confessed candidly that the King, happening to
be pressed for time, had confined himself to saying, 'Dog, stand out of
my horse's way'; and many persons that might appear as claimants to the
honour of having conversed with Coleridge could perhaps report little
more of personal communication than a courteous request from the great
man not to interrupt him. Inevitably, however, from this character of
the Coleridgean conversation arose certain consequences, which are too
much overlooked by those who bring it forward as a model or as a
splendid variety in the proper art of conversation. And speaking myself
as personally a witness to the unfavourable impression left by these
consequences, I shall not scruple in this place to report them with
frankness.
At the same time, having been heretofore publicly misrepresented and
possibly because misunderstood as to the temper in which I spoke of
Coleridge, and as though I had violated some duty of friendship in
uttering a truth not flattering after his death, I wish so far to
explain the terms on which we stood as to prevent any similar
misconstruction. It would be impossible in any case for me to attempt a
Plinian panegyric, or a French _éloge_. Not that I think such forms of
composition false, any more than an advocate's speech, or a political
partisan's: it is understood from the beginning that they are one-sided;
but still true according to the possibilities of truth when caught from
an angular and not a central station. There is even a pleasure as from a
gorgeous display, and a use as from a fulness of unity, in reading a
grand or even pompous laudatory oration upon a man like Leibnitz, or
Newton, which neglects all his errors or blemishes. This abstracting
view I could myself adopt as to a man whom I had learned to know from
books, but not as to one whom I knew also from personal intercourse. His
faults and his greatness are then too much intertwisted. There is still
something unreal in the knowledge of men through books; with which is
compatible a greater flexibility of estimate. But the absolute realities
of life acting upon any mind of deep sincerity do not leave the same
liberty of suppression or concealment. In that case, the reader may
perhaps say, and wherever the relations of the writer to a deceased man
prescribe many restraints of tenderness or delicacy, would it not be
better to forbear speaking at all? Certainly; and I go on therefore to
say that my own relations to Coleridge were not of that nature. I had
the greatest admiration for his intellectual powers, which in one
direction I thought and think absolutely unrivalled on earth; I had also
that sort of love for him which arises naturally as a rebound from
intense admiration, even where there is little of social congeniality.
But, in any stricter sense of the word, _friends_ we were not. For years
we met at intervals in society; never once estranged by any the
slightest shadow of a quarrel or a coolness. But there were reasons,
arising out of original differences in our dispositions and habits,
which would probably have forever prevented us, certainly _did_ prevent
us, from being confidential friends. Yet, if we had been such, even the
more for that reason the sincerity of my nature would oblige me to speak
freely if I spoke at all of anything which I might regard as amongst his
errors. For the perfection of genial homage, one may say, in the
expression of Petronius Arbiter, _Præcipitandus est liber spiritus_, the
freedom of the human spirit must be thrown headlong through the whole
realities of the subject, without picking or choosing, without garbling
or disguising. It yet remains as a work of the highest interest, to
estimate (but for that to display) Coleridge in his character of great
philosophic thinker, in which character he united perfections that never
_were_ united but in three persons on this earth, in himself, in Plato
(as many suppose), and in Schelling, viz., the utmost expansion and in
some paths the utmost depths of the searching intellect with the utmost
sensibility to the powers and purposes of Art: whilst, as a creator in
Art, he had pretensions which neither Plato nor Schelling could make.
His powers as a Psychologist (not as a Metaphysician) seem to me
absolutely unrivalled on earth. And had his health been better, so as
to have sustained the natural cheerfulness towards which his nature
tended, had his pecuniary embarrassments been even moderately lightened
in their pressure, and had his studies been more systematically directed
to one end--my conviction is that he would have left a greater
philosophic monument of his magnificent mind than Aristotle, or Lord
Bacon, or Leibnitz.
With these feelings as to the pretensions of Coleridge, I am not likely
to underrate anything which he did. But a thing may be very difficult to
do, very splendid when done, and yet false in its principles, useless in
its results, memorable perhaps by its impression at the time, and yet
painful on the whole to a thoughtful retrospect. In dancing it is but
too common that an intricate _pas seul_, in funambulism that a dangerous
feat of equilibration, in the Grecian art of _desultory_ equitation
(where a single rider governs a plurality of horses by passing from one
to another) that the flying contest with difficulty and peril, may
challenge an anxiety of interest, may bid defiance to the possibility of
inattention, and yet, after all, leave the jaded spectator under a sense
of distressing tension given to his faculties. The sympathy is with the
difficulties attached to the effort and the display, rather than with
any intellectual sense of power and skill genially unfolded under
natural excitements. It would be idle to cite Madame de Staël's remark
on one of these meteoric exhibitions, viz., that Mr. Coleridge possessed
the art of monologue in perfection, but not that of the dialogue; yet it
comes near to hitting the truth from her point of view. The habit of
monologue which Coleridge favoured lies open to three fatal objections:
1. It is antisocial in a case expressly meant by its final cause for the
triumph of sociality; 2. It refuses all homage to women on an arena
expressly dedicated to their predominance; 3. It is essentially fertile
in _des longueurs_. Could there be imagined a trinity of treasons
against the true tone of social intercourse more appalling to a Parisian
taste?
In a case such as this, where Coleridge was the performer, I myself
enter less profoundly into the brilliant woman's horror, for the reason
that, having originally a necessity almost morbid for the intellectual
pleasures that depend on solitude, I am constitutionally more careless
about the luxuries of conversation. I see them; like them in the rare
cases where they flourish, but do not require them. Not sympathizing,
therefore, with the lady's horror in its intensity, I yet find my
judgment in harmony with hers. The evils of Coleridgean talk, even
managed by a Coleridge, were there, and they fixed themselves
continually on my observation:
I. It defeats the very end of social meetings. Without the excitement
from a reasonable number of auditors, and some novelty in the
composition of his audience, Coleridge was hardly able to talk his best.
Now, at the end of some hours, it struck secretly on the good sense of
the company. Was it reasonable to have assembled six, ten, or a dozen
persons for the purpose of hearing a prelection? Would not the time have
been turned to more account, even as regarded the object which they had
substituted for _social_ pleasure, in studying one of Coleridge's
printed works?--since there his words were stationary and not flying, so
that notes might be taken down, and questions proposed by way of letter,
on any impenetrable difficulties; whereas in a stream of oral teaching,
which ran like the stream of destiny, impassive to all attempts at
interruption, difficulties for ever arose to irritate your nervous
system at the moment, and to vex you permanently by the recollection
that they had prompted a dozen questions, every one of which you had
forgotten through the necessity of continuing to run alongside with the
speaker, and through the impossibility of saying, 'Halt, Mr. Coleridge!
Pull up, I beseech you, if it were but for two minutes, that I may try
to fathom that last sentence.' This in all conversation is one great
evil, viz., the substitution of an alien purpose for the natural and
appropriate purpose. Not to be intellectual in a direct shape, but to be
intellectual through sociality, is the legitimate object of a social
meeting. It may be right, medically speaking, that a man should be
shampooed; but it cannot be right that, having asked him to dine, you
should decline dinner and substitute a shampooing. This a man would be
apt to call by the shorter name of a _sham_.
II. It diminishes the power of the talking performer himself. Seeming to
have more, the man has less. For a man is never thrown upon his mettle,
nor are his true resources made known even to himself, until to some
extent he finds himself resisted (or at least modified) by the reaction
of those around him. That day, says Homer, robs a man of half his value
which sees him made a slave. But to be an autocrat is as perilous as to
be a slave. And supposing Homer to have been introduced to Coleridge
(a supposition which a learned man at my elbow pronounces
intolerable--'It's an anachronism, sir, a base anachronism!' Well, but
one may _suppose_ anything, however base), Homer would have observed to
me, as we came away from the _soirée_, 'In my opinion, our splendid
friend S. T. C. would have been the better for a few kicks on the
shins. That day takes away half of a man's talking value which raises
him into an irresponsible dictator to his company.'
III. It diminishes a man's power in another way less obvious, but not
less certain. I had often occasion to remark how injurious it was to the
impression of Coleridge's finest displays where the minds of the hearers
had been long detained in a state of passiveness. To understand fully,
to sympathise deeply, it was essential that they should react. Absolute
inertia produced inevitable torpor. I am not supposing any indocility,
or unwillingness to listen. Generally it might be said that merely to
find themselves in that presence argued sufficiently in the hearers a
cheerful dedication of themselves to a dutiful patience.
The mistake, in short, is to suppose that the particular power of talk
Coleridge had was a _nuance_ or modification of what is meant by
conversational power; whereas it was the direct antithesis: it differed
diametrically. So much as he had of his own peculiar power, so much more
alien and remote was he from colloquial power. This remark should be
introduced by observing that Madame de Staël's obvious criticism passes
too little unvalued or unsearched either by herself or others. She
fancied it an accidental inclination or a caprice, or a sort of
self-will or discourtesy or inattention. No; it was a faculty in polar
opposition to the true faculty of conversation.
Coleridge was copious, and not without great right, upon the subject of
Art. It is a subject upon which we personally are very impatient, and
(as Mrs. Quickly expresses it) peevish, as peevish as Rugby in his
prayers.[4] Is this because we know too much about Art? Oh, Lord bless
you, no! We know too little about it by far, and our wish is--to know
more. But _that_ is difficult; so many are the teachers, who by accident
had never any time to learn; so general is the dogmatism; and, worse
than all, so inveterate is the hypocrisy, wherever the graces of liberal
habits and association are supposed to be dependent upon a particular
mode of knowledge. To know nothing of theology or medicine has a sort of
credit about it; so far at least it is clear that you are not
professional, and to that extent the chances are narrowed that you get
your bread out of the public pocket. To be sure, it is still possible
that you may be a stay-maker, or a rat-catcher. But these are
out-of-the-way vocations, and nobody adverts to such narrow
possibilities. Now, on the other hand, to be a connoisseur in painting
or in sculpture, supposing always that you are no practising artist, in
other words, supposing that you know nothing about the subject, implies
that you must live amongst _comme-il-faut_ people who possess pictures
and casts to look at; else how the deuce could you have got your
knowledge--or, by the way, your ignorance, which answers just as well
amongst those who are not peevish. We, however, _are_ so, as we have
said already. And what made us peevish, in spite of strong original
_stamina_ for illimitable indulgence to all predestined bores and
nuisances in the way of conversation, was--not the ignorance, not the
nonsense, not the contradictoriness of opinion--no! but the false,
hypocritical enthusiasm about objects for which in reality they cared
not the fraction of a straw. To hear these bores talk of educating the
people to an acquaintance with what they call 'high art'! Ah, heavens,
mercifully grant that the earth may gape for us before _our_ name is
placed on any such committee! 'High art,' indeed! First of all, most
excellent bores, would you please to educate the people into the high
and mysterious art of boiling potatoes. We, though really owning no
particular duty or moral obligation of boiling potatoes, really _can_
boil them very decently in any case arising of public necessity for our
services; and if the art should perish amongst men, which seems likely
enough, so long as _we_ live, the public may rely upon it being
restored. But as to women, as to the wives of poor hard-working men, not
one in fifty can boil a potato into a condition that is not ruinous to
the digestion. And we have reason to know that the Chartists, on their
great meditated outbreak, having hired a six-pounder from a pawnbroker,
meant to give the signal for insurrection at dinner-time, because (as
they truly observed) cannon-balls, hard and hot, would then be plentiful
on every table. God sends potatoes, we all know; but _who_ it is that
sends the boilers of potatoes, out of civility to the female sex, we
decline to say.
Well, but this (you say) is a digression. Why, true; and a digression is
often the cream of an article. However, as you dislike it, let us
_re_gress as fast as possible, and scuttle back from the occult art of
boiling potatoes to the much more familiar one of painting in oil. Did
Coleridge really understand this art? Was he a sciolist, was he a
pretender, or did he really judge of it from a station of
heaven-inspired knowledge? A hypocrite Coleridge never was upon any
subject; he never affected to know when secretly he felt himself
ignorant. And yet, of the topics on which he was wont eloquently to hold
forth, there was none on which he was less satisfactory--none on which
he was more acute, yet none on which he was more prone to excite
contradiction and irritation, if that had been allowed.
Here, for example, is a passage from one of his lectures on art:
'It is sufficient that philosophically we understand that in all
imitations two elements must coexist, and not only coexist, but must be
perceived as existing. Those two constituent elements are likeness and
unlikeness, or sameness and difference, and in all genuine creations of
art there must be a union of these disparates. The artist may take this
point of view where he pleases, provided that the desired effect be
perceptibly produced, that there be likeness in the difference,
difference in the likeness, and a reconcilement of both in one. If there
be likeness to nature without any check of difference, the result is
disgusting, and the more complete the delusion the more loathsome the
effect. Why are such simulations of nature as wax-work figures of men
and women so disagreeable? Because, not finding the motion and the life
all we expected, we are shocked as by a falsehood, every circumstance of
detail, which before induced you to be interested, making the distance
from truth more palpable. You set out with a supposed reality, and are
disappointed and disgusted with the deception; whilst in respect to a
work of genuine imitation you begin with an acknowledged total
difference, and then every touch of nature gives you the pleasure of an
approximation to truth.'
In this exposition there must be some oversight on the part of
Coleridge. He tells us in the beginning that, if there be 'likeness to
nature without any check of difference, the result is disgusting.' But
the case of the wax-work, which is meant to illustrate this proposition,
does not at all conform to the conditions; the result is disgusting
certainly, but not from any want of difference to control the sameness,
for, on the contrary, the difference is confessedly too revolting; and
apparently the distinction between the two cases described is simply
this--that in the illegitimate case of the wax-work the likeness comes
first and the unlikeness last, whereas in the other case this order is
reversed. But that distinction will neither account _in fact_ for the
difference of effect; nor, if it _did_, would it account upon any reason
or ground suggested by Coleridge for such a difference. Let us consider
this case of wax-work a little more vigilantly, and then perhaps we may
find out both why it is that some men unaffectedly _are_ disgusted by
wax-work; and secondly, why it is that, if trained on just principles of
reflective taste, all men _would_ be so affected.
As a matter not altogether without importance, we may note that even the
frailty of the material operates to some extent in disgusting us with
wax-work. A higher temperature of the atmosphere, it strikes us too
forcibly, would dispose the waxen figures to melt; and in colder seasons
the horny fist of a jolly boatswain would 'pun[5] them into shivers'
like so many ship-biscuits. The grandeur of permanence and durability
transfers itself or its expression from the material to the impression
of the artifice which moulds it, and crystallizes itself in the effect.
We see continually very ingenious imitations of objects cut out in paper
filigree; there have been people who showed as much of an artist's eye
in this sort of work, and of an artist's hand, as Miss Linwood of the
last generation in her exquisite needlework; in both cases a trick, a
_tour-de-main_, was raised into the dignity of a fine art; and yet,
because the slightness of the material too emphatically proclaims the
essential perishableness of the result, nobody views such modes of art
with more even of a momentary interest than the morning wreaths of smoke
ascending so beautifully from a cottage chimney, or cares much to
preserve them. The traceries of hoar frost upon the windows of inhabited
rooms are not only beautiful in the highest degree, but have been shown
in several French memoirs to obey laws of transcendental geometry, and
also to obey physical laws of startling intricacy. These lovely forms of
almighty nature wear the grandeur of mystery, of floral beauty, and of
science (immanent science) not always fathomable.[6] They are anything
but capricious. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like _them_;
and yet, simply because the sad hand of mortality is upon them, because
they are dedicated to death, because on genial days they will have
passed into the oblivion of graves before the morning sun has mounted to
his meridian, we do not so much as honour them with a transient stare
from the breakfast-table. Ah, wretches that we are, the horrid
carnalities of tea and toast, or else the horrid bestialities in morning
journals of Chartists and Cobdenites at home, of Red Ruffians abroad,
draw off our attention from the chonchoids and the cycloids pencilled by
the Eternal Geometrician! and these celestial traceries of the dawn,
which neither Da Vinci nor Raphaello was able to have followed as a
mimic, far less as a rival, we regard as a nuisance claiming the
attentions of the window-cleaner; even as the spider's web, that might
absorb an angel into reverie, is honoured amongst the things banned by
the housemaid. But _the_ reason why the wax-work disgusts is that it
seeks to reproduce in literal detail the traits that should be softened
under a general diffusive impression; the likeness to nature is
presented in what is essentially fleeting and subsidiary, and the 'check
of difference' is found also in this very literality, and not in any
effort of the etherealizing imagination, as it is in all true works of
art; so that the case really stands the exact opposite of that which
Coleridge had given in his definition.[7]