Betwixt the cold bear and the raging lion
Lies my safe way.
Seward's note and alteration to--
'Twixt the cold bears, far from the raging lion--
This Mr. Seward is a blockhead of the provoking species. In his itch for
correction, he forgot the words--'lies my safe way!' The Bear is the
extreme pole, and thither he would travel over the space contained
between it and 'the raging lion.'
THE PILGRIM.
Act IV. sc. 2. Alinda's interview with her father is lively, and happily
hit off; but this scene with Roderigo is truly excellent. Altogether,
indeed, this play holds the first place in B. and F.'s romantic
entertainments, 'Lustspiele', which collectively are their happiest
performances, and are only inferior to the romance of Shakspeare in the
As you Like It, Twelfth Night, &c.
Ib.
'Alin'. To-day you shall wed Sorrow,
And Repentance will come to-morrow.
Read 'Penitence,' or else--
Repentance, she will come to-morrow.
THE QUEEN OF CORINTH.
Act II. sc. 1. Merione's speech. Had the scene of this tragi-comedy been
laid in Hindostan instead of Corinth, and the gods here addressed been
the Veeshnoo and Co. of the Indian Pantheon, this rant would not have
been much amiss.
In respect of style and versification, this play and the following of
Bonduca may be taken as the best, and yet as characteristic, specimens
of Beaumont and Fletcher's dramas. I particularly instance the first
scene of the Bonduca. Take Shakspeare's Richard II., and having selected
some one scene of about the same number of lines, and consisting mostly
of long speeches, compare it with the first scene in Bonduca,--not for
the idle purpose of finding out which is the better, but in order to see
and understand the difference. The latter, that of B. and F., you will
find a Avell arranged bed of flowers, each having its separate root, and
its position determined aforehand by the will of the gardener,--each
fresh plant a fresh volition. In the former you see an Indian fig-tree,
as described by Milton;--all is growth, evolution, [Greek
(transliterated): genesis];--each line, each word almost, begets the
following, and the will of the writer is an interfusion, a continuous
agency, and not a series of separate acts. Shakspeare is the height,
breadth, and depth of genius: Beaumont and Fletcher the excellent
mechanism, in juxta-position and succession, of talent.
THE NOBLE GENTLEMAN.
Why have the dramatists of the times of Elizabeth, James I. and the
first Charles become almost obsolete, with the exception of Shakspeare?
Why do they no longer belong to the English, being once so popular? And
why is Shakspeare an exception?--One thing, among fifty, necessary to
the full solution is, that they all employed poetry and poetic diction
on unpoetic subjects, both characters and situations, especially in
their comedy. Now Shakspeare is all, all ideal,--of no time, and
therefore for all times. Read, for instance, Marine's panegyric in the
first scene of this play:--
Know The eminent court, to them that can be wise,
And fasten on her blessings, is a sun, &c.
What can be more unnatural and inappropriate--(not only is, but must be
felt as such)--than such poetry in the mouth of a silly dupe? In short,
the scenes are mock dialogues, in which the poet _solus_ plays the
ventriloquist, but cannot keep down his own way of expressing himself.
Heavy complaints have been made respecting the transprosing of the old
plays by Cibber; but it never occurred to these critics to ask, how it
came that no one ever attempted to transprose a comedy of Shakspeare's.
THE CORONATION.
Act I. Speech of Seleucus:--
Altho' he be my enemy, should any
Of the gay flies that buz about the court,
_Sit_ to catch trouts i' the summer, tell me so,
I durst, &c.
Colman's note.
Pshaw! 'Sit' is either a misprint for 'set,' or the old and still
provincial word for 'set,' as the participle passive of 'seat' or 'set.'
I have heard an old Somersetshire gardener say:--"Look, Sir! I set these
plants here; those yonder I 'sit' yesterday."
Act ii. Speech of Arcadius:--
Nay, some will swear they love their mistress,
Would hazard lives and fortunes, &c.
Read thus:--
Nay, some will swear they love their mistress so,
They would hazard lives and fortunes to preserve
One of her hairs brighter than Berenice's,
Or young Apollo's; and yet, after this, &c.
'/They would HAzard/' [1]--furnishes an anapæst for an 'iambus'. 'And
yet,' which must be read, /'ANyet'/, is an instance of the enclitic
force in an accented monosyllable. /'And YET'/ is a complete 'iambus';
but 'anyet' is, like 'spirit', a dibrach u u, trocheized, however, by
the 'arsis' or first accent damping, though not extinguishing, the
second.
[Footnote 1: As noted earlier in this text, the words between / marks
are pronounced with stress on the upper-case syllables, and none on the
lower-case syllables. In the original text, stress is indicated by a
horizontal line over the syllable, and lack of stress by a u-shape, as
the u u later in this paragraph. text Ed.]
WIT AT SEVERAL WEAPONS.
Act I. Oldcraft's speech:
I'm arm'd at all points, &c.
It would be very easy to restore all this passage to metre, by supplying
a sentence of four syllables, which the reasoning almost demands, and by
correcting the grammar. Read thus:--
Arm'd at all points 'gainst treachery, I hold
My humor firm. If, living, I can see thee
Thrive by thy wits, I shall have the more courage,
Dying, to trust thee with my lands. If not,
The best wit, I can hear of, carries them.
For since so many in my time and knowledge,
Rich children of the city, have concluded
_For lack of wit_ in beggary, I'd rather
Make a wise stranger my executor,
Than a fool son my heir, and have my lands call'd
After my wit than name: and that's my nature!
Ib. Oldcraft's speech:--
To prevent which I have sought out a match for her.--
Read
Which to prevent I've sought a match out for her.
Ib. Sir Gregory's speech:--
--Do you think I'll have any of the wits hang upon me after I am
married once?
Read it thus:--
Do you think
That I'll have any of the wits to hang
Upon me after I am married once?
and afterwards--
Is it a fashion in London,
To marry a woman, and to never see her?
The superfluous 'to' gives it the Sir Andrew Ague-cheek character.
THE FAIR MAID OF THE INN.
Act II. Speech of Albertus:--
But, Sir,
By my life, I vow to take assurance from you,
That right-hand never more shall strike my son,
...
Chop his hand off!
In this (as, indeed, in all other respects; but most in this) it is that
Shakspeare is so incomparably superior to Fletcher and his friend,--in
judgment! What can be conceived more unnatural and motiveless than this
brutal resolve? How is it possible to feel the least interest in
Albertus afterwards? or in Cesario after his conduct?
THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN.
On comparing the prison scene of Palamon and Arcite, Act ii. sc. 2, with
the dialogue between the same speakers, Act i. sc. 2, I can scarcely
retain a doubt as to the first act's having been written by Shakspeare.
Assuredly it was not written by B. and F. I hold Jonson more probable
than either of these two.
The main presumption, however, for Shakspeare's share in this play rests
on a point, to which the sturdy critics of this edition (and indeed all
before them) were blind,--that is, the construction of the blank verse,
which proves beyond all doubt an intentional imitation, if not the
proper hand, of Shakspeare. Now, whatever improbability there is in the
former, (which supposes Fletcher conscious of the inferiority, the too
poematic _minus_-dramatic nature, of his versification, and of which
there is neither proof, nor likelihood,) adds so much to the probability
of the latter. On the other hand, the harshness of many of these very
passages, a harshness unrelieved by any lyrical inter-breathings, and
still more the want of profundity in the thoughts, keep me from an
absolute decision.
Act i. sc. 3. Emilia's speech:--
--Since his depart, his _sports_,
Tho' craving seriousness and skill, &c.
I conjecture 'imports,' that is, duties or offices of importance. The
flow of the versification in this speech seems to demand the trochaic
ending--/u/; while the text blends jingle and _hisses_ to the annoyance
of less sensitive ears than Fletcher's--not to say, Shakspeare's.
THE WOMAN HATER.
Act. I. sc. 2. This scene from the beginning is prose printed as blank
verse, down to the line--
E'en all the valiant stomachs in the court--
where the verse recommences. This transition from the prose to the verse
enhances, and indeed forms, the comic effect. Lazarillo concludes his
soliloquy with a hymn to the goddess of plenty.
ON THE PROMETHEUS OF ÆSCHYLUS:
An Essay, preparatory to a series of disquisitions respecting the
Egyptian, in connection with the sacerdotal, theology, and in contrast
with the mysteries of ancient Greece. Read at the Royal Society of
Literature, May 18, 1825.
The French 'savans' who went to Egypt in the train of Buonaparte, Denon,
Fourrier, and Dupuis, (it has been asserted), triumphantly vindicated
the chronology of Herodotus, on the authority of documents that cannot
lie;--namely, the inscriptions and sculptures on those enormous masses
of architecture, that might seem to have been built in the wish of
rivalling the mountains, and at some unknown future to answer the same
purpose, that is, to stand the gigantic tombstones of an elder world. It
is decided, say the critics, whose words I have before cited, that the
present division of the zodiac had been already arranged by the
Egyptians fifteen thousand years before the Christian era, and according
to an inscription 'which cannot lie' the temple of Esne is of eight
thousand years standing.
Now, in the first place, among a people who had placed their national
pride in their antiquity, I do not see the impossibility of an
inscription lying; and, secondly, as little can I see the improbability
of a modern interpreter misunderstanding it; and lastly, the
incredibility of a French infidel's partaking of both defects, is still
less evident to my understanding. The inscriptions may be, and in some
instances, very probably are, of later date than the temples
themselves,--the offspring of vanity or priestly rivalry, or of certain
astrological theories; or the temples themselves may have been built in
the place of former and ruder structures, of an earlier and ruder
period, and not impossibly under a different scheme of hieroglyphic or
significant characters; and these may have been intentionally, or
ignorantly, miscopied or mistranslated.
But more than all the preceding,--I cannot but persuade myself, that for
a man of sound judgment and enlightened common sense--a man with whom
the demonstrable laws of the human mind, and the rules generalized from
the great mass of facts respecting human nature, weigh more than any two
or three detached documents or narrations, of whatever authority the
narrator may be, and however difficult it may be to bring positive
proofs against the antiquity of the documents--I cannot but persuade
myself, I say, that for such a man, the relation preserved in the first
book of the Pentateuch,--and which, in perfect accordance with all
analogous experience, with all the facts of history, and all that the
principles of political economy would lead us to anticipate, conveys to
us the rapid progress in civilization and splendour from Abraham and
Abimelech to Joseph and Pharaoh,--will be worth a whole library of such
inferences.
I am aware that it is almost universal to speak of the gross idolatry of
Egypt; nay, that arguments have been grounded on this assumption in proof
of the divine origin of the Mosaic monotheism. But first, if by this we
are to understand that the great doctrine of the one Supreme Being was
first revealed to the Hebrew legislator, his own inspired writings supply
abundant and direct confutation of the position. Of certain astrological
superstitions,--of certain talismans connected with star-magic,--plates
and images constructed in supposed harmony with the movements and
influences of celestial bodies,--there doubtless exist hints, if not
direct proofs, both in the Mosaic writings, and those next to these in
antiquity. But of plain idolatry in Egypt, or the existence of a
polytheistic religion, represented by various idols, each signifying a
several deity, I can find no decisive proof in the Pentateuch; and when I
collate these with the books of the prophets, and the other inspired
writings subsequent to the Mosaic, I cannot but regard the absence of any
such proof in the latter, compared with the numerous and powerful
assertions, or evident implications, of Egyptian idolatry in the former,
both as an argument of incomparably greater value in support of the age
and authenticity of the Pentateuch; and as a strong presumption in favour
of the hypothesis on which I shall in part ground the theory which will
pervade this series of disquisitions;--namely, that the sacerdotal
religion of Egypt had, during the interval from Abimelech to Moses,
degenerated from the patriarchal monotheism into a pantheism, cosmotheism,
or worship of the world as God.
The reason, or pretext, assigned by the Hebrew legislator to Pharaoh for
leading his countrymen into the wilderness to join with their brethren,
the tribes who still sojourned in the nomadic state, namely, that their
sacrifices would be an abomination to the Egyptians, may be urged as
inconsistent with, nay, as confuting this hypothesis. But to this I
reply, first, that the worship of the ox and cow was not, in and of
itself, and necessarily, a contravention of the first commandment,
though a very gross breach of the second;--for it is most certain that
the ten tribes worshipped the Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, under the same or similar symbols:--secondly, that the cow, or
Isis, and the Io of the Greeks, truly represented, in the first
instance, the earth or productive nature, and afterwards the mundane
religion grounded on the worship of nature, or the [Greek
(transliterated): to pan], as God. In after times, the ox or bull was
added, representing the sun, or generative force of nature, according to
the habit of male and female deities, which spread almost over the whole
world,--the positive and negative forces in the science of
superstition;--for the pantheism of the sage necessarily engenders
polytheism as the popular creed. But lastly, a very sufficient reason
may, I think, be assigned for the choice of the ox or cow, as
representing the very life of nature, by the first legislators of Egypt,
and for the similar sacred character in the Brachmanic tribes of
Hindostan. The progress from savagery to civilization is evidently first
from the hunting to the pastoral state, a process which even now is
going on, within our own times, among the South American Indians in the
vast tracts between Buenos Ayres and the Andes: but the second and the
most important step, is from the pastoral, or wandering, to the
agricultural, or fixed, state. Now, if even for men born and reared
under European civilization, the charms of a wandering life have been
found so great a temptation, that few who have taken to it have been
induced to return, (see the confession in the preamble to the statute
respecting the gipsies); [1]--how much greater must have been the danger
of relapse in the first formation of fixed states with a condensed
population? And what stronger prevention could the ingenuity of the
priestly kings--(for the priestly is ever the first form of
government)--devise, than to have made the ox or cow the representatives
of the divine principle in the world, and, as such, an object of
adoration, the wilful destruction of which was sacrilege?--For this
rendered a return to the pastoral state impossible; in which the flesh
of these animals and the milk formed almost the exclusive food of
mankind; while, in the meantime, by once compelling and habituating men
to the use of a vegetable diet, it enforced the laborious cultivation of
the soil, and both produced and permitted a vast and condensed
population. In the process and continued subdivisions of polytheism,
this great sacred Word,--for so the consecrated animals were called,
[Greek (transliterated): ieroi logoi,]--became multiplied, till almost
every power and supposed attribute of nature had its symbol in some
consecrated animal from the beetle to the hawk. Wherever the powers of
nature had found a cycle for themselves, in which the powers still
produced the same phenomenon during a given period, whether in the
motions of the heavenly orbs, or in the smallest living organic body,
there the Egyptian sages predicated life and mind. Time, cyclical time,
was their abstraction of the deity, and their holidays were their gods.
The diversity between theism and pantheism may be most simply and
generally expressed in the following 'formula', in which the material
universe is expressed by W, and the deity by G.
W-G=O;
or the World without God is an impossible conception. This position is
common to theist and pantheist. But the pantheist adds the converse--
G-W=O;
for which the theist substitutes--
G-W=G;
or that--
G=G, anterior and irrelative to the existence of the world, is equal to
G+W. [2]
'Before the mountains were, Thou art.'--I am not about to lead the
society beyond the bounds of my subject into divinity or theology in the
professional sense. But without a precise definition of pantheism,
without a clear insight into the essential distinction between it and
the theism of the Scriptures, it appears to me impossible to understand
either the import or the history of the polytheism of the great
historical nations. I beg leave, therefore, to repeat, and to carry on
my former position, that the religion of Egypt, at the time of the
Exodus of the Hebrews, was a pantheism, on the point of passing into
that polytheism, of which it afterwards afforded a specimen, gross and
distasteful even to polytheists themselves of other nations.
The objects which, on my appointment as Royal Associate of the Royal
Society of Literature, I proposed to myself were,
1st. The elucidation of the purpose of the Greek drama, and the
relations in which it stood to the mysteries on the one hand, and to the
state or sacerdotal religion on the other:--
2nd. The connection of the Greek tragic poets with philosophy as the
peculiar offspring of Greek genius:--
3rd. The connection of the Homeric and cyclical poets with the popular
religion of the Greeks: and,
lastly from all these,--namely, the mysteries, the sacerdotal religion,
their philosophy before and after Socrates, the stage, the Homeric
poetry and the legendary belief of the people, and from the sources and
productive causes in the derivation and confluence of the tribes that
finally shaped themselves into a nation of Greeks--to give a juster and
more distinct view of this singular people, and of the place which they
occupied in the history of the world, and the great scheme of divine
providence, than I have hitherto seen,--or rather let me say, than it
appears to me possible to give by any other process.
The present Essay, however, I devote to the purpose of removing, or at
least invalidating, one objection that I may reasonably anticipate, and
which may be conveyed in the following question:--What proof have you of
the fact of any connection between the Greek drama, and either the
mysteries, or the philosophy, of Greece? What proof that it was the
office of the tragic poet, under a disguise of the sacerdotal religion,
mixed with the legendary or popular belief, to reveal as much of the
mysteries interpreted by philosophy, as would counteract the
demoralizing effects of the state religion, without compromising the
tranquillity of the state itself, or weakening that paramount reverence,
without which a republic, (such I mean, as the republics of ancient
Greece were) could not exist?
I know no better way in which I can reply to this objection, than by
giving, as my proof and instance, the Prometheus of Æschylus,
accompanied with an exposition of what I believe to be the intention of
the poet, and the mythic import of the work; of which it may be truly
said, that it is more properly tragedy itself in the plenitude of the
idea, than a particular tragic poem; and as a preface to this
exposition, and for the twin purpose of rendering it intelligible, and
of explaining its connexion with the whole scheme of my Essays, I
entreat permission to insert a quotation from a work of my own, which
has indeed been in print for many years, but which few of my auditors
will probably have heard of, and still fewer, if any, have read.
"As the representative of the youth and approaching manhood of the
human intellect we have ancient Greece, from Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus,
and the other mythological bards, or, perhaps, the brotherhoods
impersonated under those names, to the time when the republics lost
their independence, and their learned men sank into copyists of, and
commentators on, the works of their forefathers. That we include these
as educated under a distinct providential, though not miraculous,
dispensation, will surprise no one, who reflects, that in whatever has
a permanent operation on the destinies and intellectual condition of
mankind at large,--that in all which has been manifestly employed as a
co-agent in the mightiest revolution of the moral world, the
propagation of the Gospel, and in the intellectual progress of mankind
in the restoration of philosophy, science, and the ingenuous arts--it
were irreligion not to acknowledge the hand of divine providence. The
periods, too, join on to each other. The earliest Greeks took up the
religious and lyrical poetry of the Hebrews; and the schools of the
prophets were, however partially and imperfectly, represented by the
mysteries derived through the corrupt channel of the Phoenicians. With
these secret schools of physiological theology, the mythical poets
were doubtless in connexion, and it was these schools which prevented
polytheism from producing all its natural barbarizing effects. The
mysteries and the mythical hymns and pæans shaped themselves gradually
into epic poetry and history on the one hand, and into the ethical
tragedy and philosophy on the other. Under their protection, and that
of a youthful liberty, secretly controlled by a species of internal
theocracy, the sciences, and the sterner kinds of the fine arts, that
is, architecture and statuary, grew up together, followed, indeed, by
painting, but a statuesque, and austerely idealized, painting, which
did not degenerate into mere copies of the sense, till the process for
which Greece existed had been completed."[3]
The Greeks alone brought forth philosophy in the proper and
contra-distinguishable sense of the term, which we may compare to the
coronation medal with its symbolic characters, as contrasted with the
coins, issued under the same sovereign, current in the market. In the
primary sense, philosophy had for its aim and proper subject the [Greek
(transliterated): ta peri arch_on], 'de originibus rerum', as far as man
proposes to discover the same in and by the pure reason alone. This, I
say, was the offspring of Greece, and elsewhere adopted only. The
predisposition appears in their earliest poetry.
The first object, (or subject matter) of Greek philosophizing was in
some measure philosophy itself;--not, indeed, as the product, but as the
producing power--the productivity. Great minds turned inward on the fact
of the diversity between man and beast; a superiority of kind in
addition to that of degree; the latter, that is, the difference in
degree comprehending the more enlarged sphere and the multifold
application of faculties common to man and brute animals;--even this
being in great measure a transfusion from the former, namely, from the
superiority in kind;--for only by its co-existence with reason, free
will, self-consciousness, the contra-distinguishing attributes of man,
does the instinctive intelligence manifested in the ant, the dog, the
elephant, &c. become human understanding. It is a truth with which
Heraclitus, the senior, but yet contemporary, of Æschylus, appears, from
the few genuine fragments of his writings that are yet extant, to have
been deeply impressed,--that the mere understanding in man, considered
as the power of adapting means to immediate purposes, differs, indeed,
from the intelligence displayed by other animals, and not in degree
only; but yet does not differ by any excellence which it derives from
itself, or by any inherent diversity, but solely in consequence of a
combination with far higher powers of a diverse kind in one and the same
subject.
Long before the entire separation of metaphysics from poetry, that is,
while yet poesy, in all its several species of verse, music, statuary,
&c. continued mythic;--while yet poetry remained the union of the
sensuous and the philosophic mind;--the efficient presence of the latter
in the 'synthesis' of the two, had manifested itself in the sublime
'mythus peri geneseos tou nou en anthropois' concerning the 'genesis',
or birth of the 'nous' or reason in man. This the most venerable, and
perhaps the most ancient, of Grecian 'myth', is a philosopheme, the very
same in subject matter with the earliest record of the Hebrews, but most
characteristically different in tone and conception;--for the
patriarchal religion, as the antithesis of pantheism, was necessarily
personal; and the doctrines of a faith, the first ground of which and
the primary enunciation, is the eternal I AM, must be in part historic
and must assume the historic form. Hence the Hebrew record is a
narrative, and the first instance of the fact is given as the origin of
the fact.
That a profound truth--a truth that is, indeed, the grand and
indispensable condition of all moral responsibility--is involved in this
characteristic of the sacred narrative, I am not alone persuaded, but
distinctly aware. This, hovever, does not preclude us from seeing, nay,
as an additional mark of the wisdom that inspired the sacred historian,
it rather supplies a motive to us, impels and authorizes us, to see, in
the form of the vehicle of the truth, an accommodation to the then
childhood of the human race. Under this impression we may, I trust,
safely consider the narration,--introduced, as it is here introduced,
for the purpose of explaining a mere work of the unaided mind of man by
comparison,--as an [Greek (transliterated): eros hierogluphikon],--and
as such (apparently, I mean, not actually) a 'synthesis' of poesy and
philosophy, characteristic of the childhood of nations.
In the Greek we see already the dawn of approaching manhood. The
substance, the stuff, is philosophy; the form only is poetry. The
Prometheus is a _philosophema_ [Greek (transliterated): tautaegorikon],
--the tree of knowledge of good and evil,--an allegory, a [Greek
(transliterated): propaideuma], though the noblest and the most pregnant
of its kind.
The generation of the [Greek (transliterated): nous], or pure reason in
man.
1. It was superadded or infused, 'a supra' to mark that it was no mere
evolution of the animal basis;--that it could not have grown out of the
other faculties of man, his life, sense, understanding, as the flower
grows out of the stem, having pre-existed potentially in the seed:
2. The [Greek: nous], or fire, was 'stolen,'--to mark its 'helero'--or
rather its 'allo'-geneity, that is, its diversity, its difference in
kind, from the faculties which are common to man with the nobler
animals:
3. And stolen 'from Heaven,'--to mark its superiority in kind, as well
as its essential diversity:
4. And it was a 'spark,'--to mark that it is not subject to any
modifying reaction from that on which it immediately acts; that it
suffers no change, and receives no accession, from the inferior, but
multiplies it-self by conversion, without being alloyed by, or
amalgamated with, that which it potentiates, ennobles, and transmutes:
5. And lastly, (in order to imply the homogeneity of the donor and of
the gift) it was stolen by a 'god,' and a god of the race before the
dynasty of Jove,--Jove the binder of reluctant powers, the coercer arid
entrancer of free spirits under the fetters of shape, and mass, and
passive mobility; but likewise by a god of the same race and essence
with Jove, and linked of yore in closest and friendliest intimacy with
him. This, to mark the pre-existence, in order of thought, of the
'nous', as spiritual, both to the objects of sense, and to their
products, formed as it were, by the precipitation, or, if I may dare
adopt the bold language of Leibnitz, by a coagulation of spirit. In
other words this derivation of the spark from above, and from a god
anterior to the Jovial dynasty--(that is, to the submersion of spirits
in material forms),--was intended to mark the transcendancy of the
'nous', the contra-distinctive faculty of man, as timeless, [Greek
(transliterated): achronon ti,] and, in this negative sense, eternal. It
signified, I say, its superiority to, and its diversity from, all things
that subsist in space and time, nay, even those which, though spaceless,
yet partake of time, namely, souls or understandings. For the soul, or
understanding, if it be defined physiologically as the principle of
sensibility, irritability, and growth, together with the functions of
the organs, which are at once the representatives and the instruments of
these, must be considered 'in genere', though not in degree or dignity,
common to man and the inferior animals. It was the spirit, the 'nous',
which man alone possessed. And I must be permitted to suggest that this
notion deserves some respect, were it only that it can shew a semblance,
at least, of sanction from a far higher authority.
The Greeks agreed with the cosmogonies of the East in deriving all
sensible forms from the indistinguishable. The latter we find designated
as the [Greek: to amorphon], the [Greek: hudor prokosmikon], the [Greek:
chaos], as the essentially unintelligible, yet necessarily presumed,
basis or sub-position of all positions. That it is, scientifically
considered, an indispensable idea for the human mind, just as the
mathematical point, &c. for the geometrician;--of this the various
systems of our geologists and cosmogonists, from Burnet to La Place,
afford strong presumption. As an idea, it must be interpreted as a
striving of the mind to distinguish being from existence,--or potential
being, the ground of being containing the possibility of existence, from
being actualized. In the language of the mysteries, it was the
'esurience', the [Greek: pothos] or 'desideratum', the unfuelled fire,
the Ceres, the ever-seeking maternal goddess, the origin and
interpretation of whose name is found in the Hebrew root signifying
hunger, and thence capacity. It was, in short, an effort to represent
the universal ground of all differences distinct or opposite, but in
relation to which all 'antithesis' as well as all 'antitheta', existed
only potentially. This was the container and withholder, (such is the
primitive sense of the Hebrew word rendered darkness (Gen. 1. 2.)) out
of which light, that is, the 'lux lucifica', as distinguished from
'lumen seu lux phænomenalis', was produced;--say, rather, that which,
producing itself into light as the one pole or antagonist power,
remained in the other pole as darkness, that is, gravity, or the
principle of mass, or wholeness without distinction of parts.
And here the peculiar, the philosophic, genius of Greece began its f¦tal
throb. Here it individualized itself in contra-distinction from the
Hebrew archology, on the one side, and from the Ph¦nician, on the
other. The Ph¦nician confounded the indistinguishable with the
absolute, the 'Alpha' and 'Omega', the ineffable 'causa sui'. It
confounded, I say, the multeity below intellect, that is, unintelligible
from defect of the subject, with the absolute identity above all
intellect, that is, transcending comprehension by the plenitude of its
excellence. With the Phoenician sages the cosmogony was their theogony
and 'vice versa'. Hence, too, flowed their theurgic rites, their magic,
their worship ('cultus et apotheosis') of the plastic forces, chemical
and vital, and these, or their notions respecting these, formed the
hidden meaning, the soul, as it were, of which the popular and civil
worship was the body with its drapery.
The Hebrew wisdom imperatively asserts an unbeginning creative One, who
neither became the world; nor is the world eternally; nor made the world
out of himself by emanation, or evolution;--but who willed it, and it
was! [Greek: Ta athea egeneto, kai egeneto chaos,]--and this chaos, the
eternal will, by the spirit and the word, or express 'fiat',--again
acting as the impregnant, distinctive, and ordonnant power,--enabled to
become a world--[Greek: kosmeisthai.] So must it be when a religion,
that shall preclude superstition on the one hand, and brute indifference
on the other, is to be true for the meditative sage, yet intelligible,
or at least apprehensible, for all but the fools in heart.
The Greek philosopheme, preserved for us in the Æschylean Prometheus,
stands midway betwixt both, yet is distinct in kind from either. With
the Hebrew or purer Semitic, it assumes an X Y Z,--(I take these letters
in their algebraic application)--an indeterminate 'Elohim', antecedent
to the matter of the world, [Greek: hulae akosmos]--no less than to the
[Greek: hulae kekosmaemenae.] In this point, likewise, the Greek
accorded with the Semitic, and differed from the Phoenician--that it
held the antecedent X Y Z to be super-sensuous and divine. But on the
other hand, it coincides with the Ph¦nician in considering this
antecedent ground of corporeal matter,--[Greek: t_on s_omat_on kai tou
s_omatikou,]--not so properly the cause of the latter, as the occasion
and the still continuing substance. 'Maleria substat adliuc'. The
corporeal was supposed co-essential with the antecedent of its
corporeity. Matter, as distinguished from body, was a 'non ens', a simple
apparition, 'id quod mere videtur'; but to body the elder
physico-theology of the Greeks allowed a participation in entity. It was
'spiritus ipse, oppressus, dormiens, et diversis modis somnians'. In
short, body was the productive power suspended, and as it were, quenched
in the product. This may be rendered plainer by reflecting, that, in the
pure Semitic scheme there are four terms introduced in the solution of
the problem,
1. the beginning, self-sufficing, and immutable Creator;
2. the antecedent night as the identity, or including germ, of the light
and darkness, that is, gravity;
3. the chaos; and
4. the material world resulting from the powers communicated by the
divine 'fiat'. In the Phoenician scheme there are in fact but two--a
self-organizing chaos, and the omniforrn nature as the result. In the
Greek scheme we have three terms, 1. the 'hyle', [Greek: hulae], which
holds the place of the chaos, or the waters, in the true system; 2.
[Greek: ta s_omata], answering to the Mosaic heaven and earth; and 3. the
Saturnian [Greek: chronoi huperchonioi],--which answer to the antecedent
darkness of the Mosaic scheme, but to which the elder
physico-theologists attributed a self-polarizing power--a 'natura gemina
quæ fit et facit, agit et patitur'. In other words, the 'Elohim' of the
Greeks were still but a 'natura deorum', [Greek: to theion], in which a
vague plurality adhered; or if any unity was imagined, it was not
personal--not a unity of excellence, but simply an expression of the
negative--that which was to pass, but which had not yet passed, into
distinct form.
All this will seem strange and obscure at first reading,--perhaps
fantastic. But it will only seem so. Dry and prolix, indeed, it is to me
in the writing, full as much as it can be to others in the attempt to
understand it. But I know that, once mastered, the idea will be the key
to the whole cypher of the Æschylean mythology. The sum stated in the
terms of philosophic logic is this: First, what Moses appropriated to
the chaos itself: what Moses made passive and a 'materia subjecta et
lucis et tenebrarum', the containing [Greek: prothemenon] of the
'thesis' and 'antithesis';--this the Greek placed anterior to the
chaos;--the chaos itself being the struggle between the 'hyperchronia',
the [Greek: ideai pronomoi], as the unevolved, unproduced, 'prothesis',
of which [Greek: idea kai nomos]--(idea and law)--are the 'thesis' and
'antithesis'. (I use the word 'produced' in the mathematical sense, as a
point elongating itself to a bipolar line.) Secondly, what Moses
establishes, not merely as a transcendant 'Monas', but as an individual
[Greek: Henas] likewise;--this the Greek took as a harmony, [Greek:
Theoi hathanatoi, to theion], as distinguished from [Greek: o
Theos]--or, to adopt the more expressive language of the Pythagoreans
and cabalists 'numen numerantis'; and these are to be contemplated as
the identity.
Now according to the Greek philosopheme or 'mythus', in these, or in
this identity, there arose a war, schism, or division, that is, a
polarization into thesis and antithesis. In consequence of this schism
in the [Greek: to theion], the 'thesis' becomes 'nomos', or law, and the
'antithesis' becomes 'idea', but so that the 'nomos' is 'nomos',
because, and only because, the 'idea' is 'idea': the 'nomos' is not
idea, only because the idea has not become 'nomos'. And this 'not' must
be heedfully borne in mind through the whole interpretation of this most
profound and pregnant philosopheme. The 'nomos' is essentially idea, but
existentially it is idea 'substans', that is, 'id quod stat subtus',
understanding 'sensu generalissimo'. The 'idea', which now is no longer
idea, has substantiated itself, become real as opposed to idea, and is
henceforward, therefore, 'substans in substantiato'. The first product
of its energy is the thing itself: 'ipsa se posuit et jam facta est ens
positum'. Still, however, its productive energy is not exhausted in this
product, but overflows, or is effluent, as the specific forces,
properties, faculties, of the product. It reappears, in short, in the
body, as the function of the body. As a sufficient illustration, though
it cannot be offered as a perfect instance, take the following.
'In the world we see every where evidences of a unity, which the
component parts are so far from explaining, that they necessarily
presuppose it as the cause and condition of their existing as those
parts, or even of their existing at all. This antecedent unity, or
cause and principle of each union, it has since the time of Bacon and
Kepler, been customary to call a law. This crocus, for instance, or
any flower the reader may have in sight or choose to bring before his
fancy;--that the root, stem, leaves, petals, &c. cohere as one plant,
is owing to an antecedent power or principle in the seed, which
existed before a single particle of the matters that constitute the
size and visibility of the crocus had been attracted from the
surrounding soil, air, and moisture. Shall we turn to the seed? Here
too the same necessity meets us, an antecedent unity (I speak not of
the parent plant, but of an agency antecedent in order of operance,
yet remaining present as the conservative and reproductive power,)
must here too be supposed. Analyze the seed with the finest tools, and
let the solar microscope come in aid of your senses,--what do you
find?--means and instruments, a wondrous fairy-tale of nature,
magazines of food, stores of various sorts, pipes, spiracles,
defences,--a house of many chambers, and the owner and inhabitant
invisible.'[4]
Now, compare a plant, thus contemplated, with an animal. In the former,
the productive energy exhausts itself, and as it were, sleeps in the
product or 'organismus'--in its root, stem, foliage, blossoms, seed. Its
balsams, gums, resins, 'aromata', and all other bases of its sensible
qualities, are, it is well known, mere excretions from the vegetable,
eliminated, as lifeless, from the actual plant. The qualities are not
its properties, but the properties, or far rather, the dispersion and
volatilization of these extruded and rejected bases. But in the animal
it is otherwise. Here the antecedent unity--the productive and
self-realizing idea--strives, with partial success to re-emancipate
itself from its product, and seeks once again to become 'idea': vainly
indeed: for in order to this, it must be retrogressive, and it hath
subjected itself to the fates, the evolvers of the endless thread--to
the stern necessity of progression. 'Idea' itself it cannot become, but
it may in long and graduated process, become an image, an ANALOGON, an
anti-type of IDEA. And this [Greek: eid_olon] may approximate to a
perfect likeness. 'Quod est simile, nequit esse idem'. Thus, in the
lower animals, we see this process of emancipation commence with the
intermediate link, or that which forms the transition from properties to
faculties, namely, with sensation. Then the faculties of sense,
locomotion, construction, as, for instance, webs, hives, nests, &c. Then
the functions; as of instinct, memory, fancy, instinctive intelligence,
or understanding, as it exists in the most intelligent animals. Thus the
idea (henceforward no more idea, but irrecoverable by its own fatal act)
commences the process of its own transmutation, as 'substans in
substantiato', as the 'enteleche', or the 'vis formatrix', and it
finishes the process as 'substans e substantiato', that is, as the
understanding.
If, for the purpose of elucidating this process, I might be allowed to
imitate the symbolic language of the algebraists, and thus to regard the
successive steps of the process as so many powers and dignities of the
'nomos' or law, the scheme would be represented thus [N^1 represents N
superscript 1, i.e. N to the power of 1. text Ed.]:--
Nomos^1 = Product:
N^2 = Property:
N^3 = Faculty:
N^4 = Function:
N^5 = Understanding;--
which is, indeed, in one sense, itself a 'nomos', inasmuch as it is the
index of the 'nomos', as well as its highest function; but, like the
hand of a watch, it is likewise a 'nomizomenon'. It is a verb, but still
a verb passive.
On the other hand, idea is so far co-essential with 'nomos', that by its
co-existence--(not confluence)--with the 'nomos' [Greek: hen
nomizomenois] (with the 'organismus' and its faculties and functions in
the man,) it becomes itself a 'nomos'. But, observe, a 'nomos
autonomos', or containing its law in itself likewise;--even as the
'nomos' produces for its highest product the understanding, so the idea,
in its opposition and, of course, its correspondence to the 'nomos',
begets in itself an 'analogon' to product; and this is
self-consciousness. But as the product can never become idea, so neither
can the idea (if it is to remain idea) become or generate a distinct
product. This 'analogon' of product is to be itself; but were it indeed
and substantially a product, it would cease to be self. It would be an
object for a subject, not (as it is and must be) an object that is its
own subject, and 'vice versa'; a conception which, if the uncombining
and infusile genius of our language allowed it, might be expressed by
the term subject-object. Now, idea, taken in indissoluble connection
with this 'analogon' of product is mind, that which knows itself, and
the existence of which may be inferred, but cannot appear or become a
'phænomenon'.
By the benignity of Providence, the truths of most importance in
themselves, and which it most concerns us to know, are familiar to us,
even from childhood. Well for us if we do not abuse this privilege, and
mistake the familiarity of words which convey these truths for a clear
understanding of the truths themselves! If the preceding disquisition,
with all its subtlety and all its obscurity, should answer no other
purpose, it will still have been neither purposeless, nor devoid of
utility, should it only lead us to sympathize with the strivings of the
human intellect, awakened to the infinite importance of the inward
oracle [Greek: gn_othi seauton]--and almost instinctively shaping its
course of search in conformity with the Platonic intimation:--[Greek:
psuchaes phusin haxi_os logou katanoaesai oiei dunaton einai, haneu aes
tou holou phuse_os]; but be this as it may, the ground work of the
Æschylean 'mythus' is laid in the definition of idea and law, as
correlatives that mutually interpret each the other;--an idea, with the
adequate power of realizing itself being a law, and a law considered
abstractedly from, or in the absence of, the power of manifesting itself
in its appropriate product being an idea. Whether this be true
philosophy, is not the question. The school of Aristotle would, of
course, deny, the Platonic affirm it; for in this consists the
difference of the two schools. Both acknowledge ideas as distinct from
the mere generalizations from objects of sense: both would define an
idea as an 'ens rationale', to which there can be no adequate
correspondent in sensible experience. But, according to Aristotle, ideas
are regulative only, and exist only as functions of the mind:--according
to Plato, they are constitutive likewise, and one in essence with the
power and life of nature;--[Greek: hen log'o z'oae aen, kai hae z'oae
haen to ph'os t'on anthr'op'on]. And this I assert, was the philosophy
of the mythic poets, who, like Æschylus, adapted the secret doctrines of
the mysteries as the (not always safely disguised) antidote to the
debasing influences of the religion of the state.
But to return and conclude this preliminary explanation. We have only to
substitute the term will, and the term constitutive power, for _nomos_
or law, and the process is the same. Permit me to represent the identity
or 'prothesis' by the letter Z and the 'thesis' and 'antithesis' by X
and Y respectively. Then I say X by not being Y, but in consequence of
being the correlative opposite of Y, is will; and Y, by not being X, but
the correlative and opposite of X, is nature,--'natura naturans',
[Greek: no_mos physiko_s]. Hence we may see the necessity of
contemplating the idea now as identical with the reason, and now as one
with the will, and now as both in one, in which last case I shall, for
convenience sake, employ the term 'Nous', the rational will, the
practical reason.
We are now out of the holy jungle of transcendental mataphysics; if
indeed, the reader's patience shall have had strength and persistency
enough to allow me to exclaim--
Ivimus ambo
Per densas umbras: at tenet umbra Deum.
Not that I regard the foregoing as articles of faith, or as all true;--I
have implied the contrary by contrasting it with, at least, by shewing
its disparateness from, the Mosaic, which, 'bona fide', I do regard as
the truth. But I believe there is much, and profound, truth in it,
'supra captum [Greek: psilosoph'on], qui non agnoscunt divinum, ideoque
nec naturam, nisi nomine, agnoscunt; sed res cunctas ex sensuali
corporeo cogitant, quibus hac ex causa interiora clausa manent, et simul
cum illis exteriora quæ proxima interioribus sunt'! And with no less
confidence do I believe that the positions above given, true or false,
are contained in the Promethean 'mythus'.
In this 'mythus', Jove is the impersonated representation or symbol of
the 'nomos'--'Jupiter est quodcunque vides'. He is the 'mens agitans
molem', but at the same time, the 'molem corpoream ponens et
constituens'. And so far the Greek philosopheme does not differ
essentially from the cosmotheism, or identification of God with the
universe, in which consisted the first apostacy of mankind after the
flood, when they combined to raise a temple to the heavens, and which is
still the favored religion of the Chinese. Prometheus, in like manner,
is the impersonated representative of Idea, or of the same power as
Jove, but contemplated as independent and not immersed in the
product,--as law 'minus' the productive energy. As such it is next to be
seen what the several significances of each must or may be according to
the philosophic conception; and of which significances, therefore,
should we find in the philosopheme a correspondent to each, we shall be
entitled to assert that such are the meanings of the fable. And first of
Jove:--
Jove represents
1. 'Nomos' generally, as opposed to Idea or 'Nous':
2. 'Nomos archinomos', now as the father, now as the sovereign, and now
as the includer and representative of the 'nomoi ouoanioi kosmikoi', or
'dii majores', who, had joined or come over to Jove in the first schism:
3. 'Nomos damnaetaes'--the subjugator of the spirits, of the [Greek:
ideai pronomoi], who, thus subjugated, became '[Greek: nomoi huponomioi
hupospondoi], Titanes pacati, dii minores', that is, the elements
considered as powers reduced to obedience under yet higher powers than
themselves:
4. 'Nomos [Greek: politikos]', law in the Pauline sense, '[Greek: nomos
allotrionomos]' in antithesis to '[Greek: nomos autonomos]'.
[Footnote 1: The Act meant is probably the 5. Eliz. c. 20, enforcing the
two previous Acts of Henry VIII. and Philip and Mary, and reciting that
natural born Englishmen had 'become of the fellowship of the said
vagabonds, by transforming or disguising themselves in their apparel,'
&c.--Ed.]
[Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge was in the constant habit of expressing
himself on paper by the algebraic symbols. They have an uncouth look in
the text of an ordinary essay, and I have sometimes ventured to render
them by the equivalent words. But most of the readers of these volumes
will know that--means 'less by', or,' without'; + 'more by', or,' in
addition to'; = 'equal to', or, 'the same as'.--Ed].
[Footnote 3: Friend, III. Essay, 9.]
[Footnote 4: Aids to Reflection. Moral and Religious Aphorisms. Aphorism
VI. Ed.]
COROLLARY.
It is in this sense that Jove's jealous, ever-quarrelsome, spouse
represents the political sacerdotal 'cultus', the church, in short, of
republican paganism;--a church by law established for the mere purposes
of the particular state, unennobled by the consciousness of
instrumentality to higher purposes;--at once unenlightened and unchecked
by revelation. Most gratefully ought we to acknowledge that since the
completion of our constitution in 1688, we may, with unflattering truth,
elucidate the spirit and character of such a church by the contrast of
the institution, to which England owes the larger portion of its
superiority in that, in which alone superiority is an unmixed
blessing,--the diffused cultivation of its inhabitants. But previously
to this period, I shall offend no enlightened man if I say without
distinction of parties--'intra muros peccatur et extra';--that the
history of Christendom presents us with too many illustrations of this
Junonian jealousy, this factious harrassing of the sovereign power as
soon as the latter betrayed any symptoms of a disposition to its true
policy, namely, to privilege and perpetuate that which is best,--to
tolerate the tolerable,--and to restrain none but those who would
restrain all, and subjugate even the state itself. But while truth
extorts this confession, it, at the same time, requires that it should
be accompanied by an avowal of the fact, that the spirit is a relic of
Paganism; and with a bitter smile would an Æschylus or a Plato in the
shades, listen to a Gibbon or a Hume vaunting the mild and tolerant
spirit of the state religions of ancient Greece or Rome. Here we have
the sense of Jove's intrigues with Europa, Io, &c. whom the god, in his
own nature a general lover, had successively taken under his protection.
And here, too, see the full appropriateness of this part of the
'mythus', in which symbol fades away into allegory, but yet in reference
to the working cause, as grounded in humanity, and always existing
either actually or potentially, and thus never ceases wholly to be a
symbol or tautegory.
Prometheus represents,
1. 'sensu generali', Idea [Greek: pronomos,] and in this sense he is a
[Greek: 'theos homophulos'], a fellow-tribesman both of the 'dii
majores', with Jove at their head, and of the Titans or 'dii pacati':
2. He represents Idea [Greek: 'philonomos, nomodeiktaes';] and in this
sense the former friend and counsellor of Jove or 'Nous uranius':
3. [Greek: 'Logos philanthr'opos',] the divine humanity, the humane God,
who retained unseen, kept back, or (in the 'catachresis' characteristic
of the Phoenicio-Grecian mythology) stole, a portion or 'ignicula from
the living spirit of law, which remained with the celestial gods
unexpended [Greek: en t_o nomizesthai.] He gave that which, according to
the whole analogy of things, should have existed either as pure
divinity, the sole property and birth-right of the 'Dii Joviales', the
'Uranions', or was conceded to inferior beings as a 'substans in
substantiato'. This spark divine Prometheus gave to an elect, a favored
animal, not as a 'substans' or understanding, commensurate with, and
confined by, the constitution and conditions of this particular
organism, but as 'aliquid superstans, liberum, non subactum, invictum,
impacatum, [Greek: mae nouizomenon.] This gift, by which we are to
understand reason theoretical and practical, was therefore a [Greek:
'nomos autonomus']--unapproachable and unmodifiable by the animal
basis--that is, by the pre-existing 'substans' with its products, the
animal 'organismus' with its faculties and functions; but yet endowed
with the power of potentiating, ennobling, and prescribing to, the
substance; and hence, therefore, a [Greek: nomos nomopeithaes,] lex
legisuada':
4. By a transition, ordinary even in allegory, and appropriate to mythic
symbol, but especially significant in the present case--the transition,
I mean, from the giver to the gift--the giver, in very truth, being the
gift, 'whence the soul receives reason; and reason is her being,' says
our Milton. Reason is from God, and God is reason, 'mens ipsissima'.
5. Prometheus represents, [Greek: nous en anthr'op'o--nous ag'onistaes]'.
Thus contemplated, the 'Nous' is of necessity, powerless; for, all
power, that is, productivity, or productive energy, is in Law, that is,
[Greek: nomos allotrionomos]:[1] still, however, the Idea in the Law,
the 'numerus numerans' become [Greek: nomos], is the principle of the
Law; and if with Law dwells power, so with the knowledge or the Idea
'scientialis' of the Law, dwells prophecy and foresight. A perfect
astronomical time-piece in relation to the motions of the heavenly
bodies, or the magnet in the mariner's compass in relation to the
magnetism of the earth, is a sufficient illustration.
6. Both [Greek: nomos] and Idea (or 'Nous') are the 'verbum'; but, as in
the former, it is 'verbum fiat' 'the Word of the Lord,'--in the latter
it must be the 'verbum fiet', or, 'the Word of the Lord in the mouth of
the prophet.' 'Pari argumento', as the knowledge is therefore not power,
the power is not knowledge. The [Greek: nomos], the [Greek: Zeus
pantokrat'or], seeks to learn, and, as it were, to wrest the secret, the
hateful secret, of his own fate, namely, the transitoriness adherent to
all antithesis; for the identity or the absolute is alone eternal. This
secret Jove would extort from the 'Nous', or Prometheus, which is the
sixth representment of Prometheus.
7. Introduce but the least of real as opposed to 'ideal', the least
speck of positive existence, even though it were but the mote in a sun
beam, into the sciential 'contemplamen' or theorem, and it ceases to be
science. 'Ratio desinit esse pura ratio et fit discursus, stat subter et
fit [Greek: hypothetikon]:--non superstat'. The 'Nous' is bound to a
rock, the immovable firmness of which is indissolubly connected with its
barrenness, its non-productivity. Were it productive it would be
'Nomos'; but it is 'Nous', because it is not 'Nomos'.
8. Solitary [Greek: abat_o en eraemia]. Now I say that the 'Nous',
notwithstanding its diversity from the 'Nomizomeni', is yet, relatively
to their supposed original essence, [Greek: pasi tois nomizomenois
tantogenaes], of the same race or 'radix': though in another sense,
namely, in relation to the [Greek: pan theion]--the pantheistic
'Elohim', it is conceived anterior to the schism, and to the conquest
and enthronization of Jove who succeeded. Hence the Prometheus of the
great tragedian is [Greek: theos suggenaes]. The kindred deities come to
him, some to soothe, to condole; others to give weak, yet friendly,
counsels of submission; others to tempt, or insult. The most prominent
of the latter, and the most odious to the imprisoned and insulated
'Nous', is Hermes, the impersonation of interest with the entrancing and
serpentine 'Caduceus', and, as interest or motives intervening between
the reason and its immediate self-determinations, with the antipathies
to the [Greek: nomos autonomos]. The Hermes impersonates the eloquence
of cupidity, the cajolement of power regnant; and in a larger sense,
custom, the irrational in language, [Greek: rhaemata ta rhaetorika], the
fluent, from [Greek: rheo]--the rhetorical in opposition to [Greek:
logoi, ta noaeta]. But, primarily, the Hermes is the symbol of interest.
He is the messenger, the inter-nuncio, in the low but expressive phrase,
the go-between, to beguile or insult. And for the other visitors of
Prometheus, the elementary powers, or spirits of the elements, 'Titanes
pacati', [Greek: theoi huponomioi], vassal potentates, and their
solicitations, the noblest interpretation will be given, if I repeat the
lines of our great contemporary poet:--
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own:
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And e'en with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim, The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her inmate, Man
Forget the glories he hath known
And that imperial palace whence he came:--
WORDSWORTH.
which exquisite passage is prefigured in coarser clay, indeed, and with
a less lofty spirit, but yet excellently in their kind, and even more
fortunately for the illustration and ornament of the present commentary,
in the fifth, sixth, and seventh stanzas of Dr. Henry More's poem on the
Pre-existence of the Soul:--
Thus groping after our own center's near
And proper substance, we grew dark, contract,
Swallow'd up of earthly life! Ne what we were
Of old, thro' ignorance can we detect.
Like noble babe, by fate or friends' neglect
Left to the care of sorry salvage wight,
Grown up to manly years cannot conject
His own true parentage, nor read aright
What father him begot, what womb him brought to light.
So we, as stranger infants elsewhere born,
Cannot divine from what spring we did flow;
Ne dare these base alliances to scorn,
Nor lift ourselves a whit from hence below;
Ne strive our parentage again to know,
Ne dream we once of any other stock,
Since foster'd upon Rhea's [1] knees we grow,
In Satyrs' arms with many a mow and mock
Oft danced; and hairy Pan our cradle oft hath rock'd!
But Pan nor Rhea be our parentage!
We been the offspring of the all seeing Nous, &c.
To express the supersensual character of the reason, its abstraction
from sensation, we find the Prometheus [Greek: aterpae]--while in the
yearnings accompanied with the remorse incident to, and only possible in
consequence of the Nous being, the rational, self-conscious, and
therefore responsible will, he is [Greek: gupi diaknaiomenos]
If to these contemplations we add the control and despotism exercised on
the free reason by Jupiter in his symbolical character, as [Greek: nomos
politikos];--by custom (Hermes); by necessity, [Greek: bia kai
kratos];--by the mechanic arts and powers, [Greek: suggeneis t_o No_o]
though they are, and which are symbolized in Hephaistos,--we shall see
at once the propriety of the title, Prometheus, [Greek: desmotaes].
9. Nature, or 'Zeus' as the [Greek: nomos en nomizomenois], knows
herself only, can only come to a knowledge of herself, in man! And even
in man, only as man is supernatural, above nature, noetic. But this
knowledge man refuses to communicate; that is, the human understanding
alone is at once self-conscious and conscious of nature. And this high
prerogative it owes exclusively to its being an assessor of the reason.
Yet even the human understanding in its height of place seeks vainly to
appropriate the ideas of the pure reason, which it can only represent by
'idola'. Here, then, the 'Nous' stands as Prometheus [Greek: antipalos],
'renuens'--in hostile opposition to Jupitor 'Inquisitor'.
10. Yet finally, against the obstacles and even under the fostering
influences of the 'Nomos', [Greek: tou nomimou], a son of Jove himself,
but a descendant from Io, the mundane religion, as contra-distinguished
from the sacerdotal 'cultus', or religion of the state, an Alcides
'Liberator' will arise, and the 'Nous', or divine principle in man, will
be Prometheus [Greek: heleutheromenos].
Did my limits or time permit me to trace the persecutions, wanderings,
and migrations of the Io, the mundane religion, through the whole map
marked out by the tragic poet, the coincidences would bring the truth,
the unarbitrariness, of the preceding exposition as near to
demonstration as can rationally be required on a question of history,
that must, for the greater part, be answered by combination of scattered
facts. But this part of my subject, together with a particular
exemplification of the light which my theory throws both on the sense
and the beauty of numerous passages of this stupendous poem, I must
reserve for a future communication.
NOTES. [3]
v. 15. [Greek: pharaggi]:--'in a coomb, or combe.' v. 17. [Greek:
ex'oriazein gar patros logous baru]. [Greek: euoriazein], as the editor
confesses, is a word introduced into the text against the authority of
all editions and manuscripts. I should prefer [Greek: ex'oriazein],
notwithstanding its being a [Greek: hapax legomenon]. The [Greek:
eu]--seems to my tact too free and easy a word;--and yet our 'to trifle
with' appears the exact meaning.
[Footnote 1: I scarcely need say, that I use the word [Greek:
allotrionomos] as a participle active, as exercising law on another, not
as receiving law from another, though the latter is the classical force
(I suppose) of the word.]
[Footnote 2: Rhea (from [Greek: rheo], 'fluo'), that is, the earth as
the transitory, the ever-flowing nature, the flux and sum of
'phenomena', or objects of the outward sense, in contradistinction from
the earth as Vesta, as the firmamental law that sustains and disposes
the apparent world! The Satyrs represent the sports and appetences of
the sensuous nature ([Greek: phronaema sarkos])--Pan, or the total life
of the earth, the presence of all in each, the universal 'organismus' of
bodies and bodily energy.]
[Footnote 3: Written in Bp. Blomfield's edition, and communicated by Mr.
Cary. Ed.]
NOTE ON CHALMERS'S LIFE OF DANIEL.
The justice of these remarks cannot be disputed, though some of them
are rather too figurative for sober criticism.
Most genuine! A figurative remark! If this strange writer had any
meaning, it must be:--Headly's criticism is just throughout, but
conveyed in a style too figurative for prose composition. Chalmers's own
remarks are wholly mistaken;--too silly for any criticism, drunk or
sober, and in language too flat for any thing. In Daniel's Sonnets there
is scarcely one good line; while his Hymen's Triumph, of which Chalmers
says not one word, exhibits a continued series of first-rate beauties in
thought, passion, and imagery, and in language and metre is so
faultless, that the style of that poem may without extravagance be
declared to be imperishable English.
1820.
BISHOP CORBET.
I almost wonder that the inimitable humour, and the rich sound and
propulsive movement of the verse, have not rendered Corbet a popular
poet. I am convinced that a reprint of his poems, with illustrative and
chit-chat biographical notes, and cuts by Cruikshank, would take with
the public uncommonly well. September, 1823.
NOTES ON SELDEN'S TABLE TALK. [1]
There is more weighty bullion sense in this book, than I ever found in
the same number of pages of any uninspired writer.
OPINION.
Opinion and affection extremely differ. I may affect a woman best, but
it does not follow I must think her the handsomest woman in the world.
... Opinion is something wherein I go about to give reason why all the
world should think as I think. Affection is a thing wherein I look
after the pleasing of myself.
Good! This is the true difference betwixt the beautiful and the
agreeable, which Knight and the rest of that [Greek: plaethos atheon]
have so beneficially confounded, 'meretricibus scilicet et Plutoni'.
O what an insight the whole of this article gives into a wise man's
heart, who has been compelled to act with the many, as one of the many!
It explains Sir Thomas More's zealous Romanism, &c.
PARLIAMENT.
Excellent! O! to have been with Selden over his glass of wine, making
every accident an outlet and a vehicle of wisdom!
POETRY.
The old poets had no other reason but this, their verse was, sung to
music; otherwise it had been a senseless thing to have fettered up
themselves.
No one man can know all things: even Selden here talks ignorantly. Verse
is in itself a music, and the natural symbol of that union of passion
with thought and pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all poetry,
as contradistinguished from science, and distinguished from history
civil or natural. To Pope's Essay on Man,--in short, to whatever is mere
metrical good sense and wit, the remark applies.
Ib.
Verse proves nothing but the quantity of syllables; they are not meant
for logic.
True; they, that is, verses, are not logic; but they are, or ought to
be, the envoys and representatives of that vital passion, which is the
practical cement of logic; and without which logic must remain inert.
[Footnote 1: These remarks on Selden, Wheeler, and Birch, were
communicated by Mr. Gary. Ed.]
NOTE ON THEOLOGICAL LECTURES OF BENJAMIN WHEELER, D. D.
(Vol. I. p. 77.)
A miracle, usually so termed, is the exertion of a supernatural power
in some act, and contrary to the regular course of nature, &c.
Where is the proof of this as drawn from Scripture, from fact recorded,
or from doctrine affirmed? Where the proof of its logical
possibility,--that is, that the word has any representable sense?
Contrary to 2x2=4 is 2x2=5, or that the same fire acting at the same
moment on the same subject should burn it and not burn it.
The course of nature is either one with, or a reverential synonyme of,
the ever present divine agency; or it is a self-subsisting derivative
from, and dependent on, the divine will. In either case this author's
assertion would amount to a charge of self-contradiction on the Author
of all things. Before the spread of Grotianism, or the Old Bailey
'nolens volens' Christianity, such language was unexampled. A miracle is
either 'super naturam', or it is simply 'praeter experientiam.' If
nature be a collective term for the sum total of the mechanic
powers,--that is, of the act first manifested to the senses in the
conductor A, arriving at Z by the sensible chain of intermediate
conductors, B, C, D, &c.;--then every motion of my arm is 'super
naturam'. If this be not the sense, then nature is but a wilful synonyme
of experience, and then the first noticed aerolithes, Sulzer's first
observation of the galvanic arch, &c. must have been miracles.
As erroneous as the author's assertions are logically, so false are they
historically, in the effect, which the miracles in and by themselves did
produce on those, who, rejecting the doctrine, were eye-witnesses of the
miracles;--and psychologically, in the effect which miracles, as
miracles, are calculated to produce on the human mind. Is it possible
that the author can have attentively studied the first two or three
chapters of St. John's gospel?
There is but one possible tenable definition of a miracle,--namely, an
immediate consequent from a heterogeneous antecedent. This is its
essence. Add the words, 'praeter experientiam adhuc', or 'id temporis',
and you have the full and popular or practical sense of the term
miracle. [1]
[Footnote A: See The Friend, Vol. III. Essay 2. Ed.]
NOTE ON A SERMON
ON THE PREVALENCE OF INFIDELITY AND ENTHUSIASM, BY WALTER BIRCH, B. D.