_1810_
O dare I accuse
My earthly lot as guilty of my spleen,
Or call my destiny niggard! O no! no!
It is her largeness, and her overflow,
Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so!
S. T. C.
[Sidenote: A PIOUS ASPIRATION]
My own faculties, cloudy as they may be, will be a sufficient direction
to me in plain daylight, but my friend's wish shall be the pillar of
fire to guide me darkling in my nightly march through the wilderness.
[Sidenote: THOUGHT AND ATTENTION]
Thought and attention are very different things. I never expected the
former, (viz., _selbst-thätige Erzeugung dessen, wovon meine Rede war_)
from the readers of _The Friend_. I did expect the latter, and was
disappointed. Jan. 3, 1810.
This is a most important distinction, and in the new light afforded by
it to my mind, I see more plainly why mathematics cannot be a
substitute for logic, much less for metaphysics, that is,
transcendental logic, and why, therefore, Cambridge has produced so few
men of genius and original power since the time of Newton. Not only it
does not call forth the balancing and discriminating power [_that_ I saw
long ago] but it requires only _attention,_ not _thought_ or
self-production.
[Sidenote: LAW AND GOSPEL]
"The man who squares his conscience by the law" was, formerly, a phrase
for a prudent villain, an unprincipled coward. At present the law takes
in everything--the things most incongruous with its nature, as the moral
motive, and even the feelings of sensibility resulting from accidents of
cultivation, novel-reading for instance. If, therefore, _at all_ times,
the law would be found to have a much greater influence on the actions
of men than men generally suppose, or the agents were themselves
conscious of, this influence we must expect to find augmented at the
present time in proportion to the encroachments of the law on religion,
the moral sense, and the sympathies engendered by artificial rank.
Examine this and begin, for instance, with reviews, and so on through
the common legal immoralities of life, in the pursuits and pleasures of
the higher half of the middle classes of society in Great Britain.
[Sidenote: CATHOLIC REUNION]
"Hence (_i.e._, from servile and thrall-like fear) men came to scan the
Scriptures by the letter and in the covenant of our redemption magnified
the external signs more than the quickening power of the
Spirit."--MILTON'S _Review of Church Government_, vol. i. p. 2.
It were not an unpleasing fancy, nor one wholly unworthy of a serious
and charitable Christianity, to derive a shadow of hope for the
conversion and purification of the Roman Apostasy from the conduct and
character of St. Peter as shadowing out the history of the Latin Church,
whose ruling pastor calls himself the successor of that saint. Thus, by
proud _humility_, he hazarded the loss of his heavenly portion in
objecting to Christ's taking upon himself a lowly office and character
of a servant (hence the pomps and vanities with which Rome has tricked
out her bishops, &c.), the eager drawing of the fleshly sword in defence
of Christ; the denying of Christ at the cross (in the apostasy); but,
finally, his bitter repentance at the third crowing of the cock (perhaps
Wickliffe and Huss the first, Luther the second, and the third yet to
come-or, perhaps Wickliffe and Luther the first, the second may be the
present state of humiliation, and the third yet to come). After this her
eyes will be opened to the heavenly vision of the universal acceptance
of Christ of all good men of all sects, that is, that faith is a moral,
not an intellectual act.
[Sidenote: THE IDEAL MARRIAGE]
On some delightful day in early spring some of my countrymen hallow the
anniversary of their marriage, and with love and fear go over the
reckoning of the past and the unknown future. The wife tells with
half-renewed modesty all the sweet feelings that she disguised and
cherished in the courting-time; the man looks with a tear full in his
eye and blesses the hour when for the first time (and oh! let it be the
last) he spake deep and solemn to a beloved being--"Thou art mine and I
am thine, and henceforward I shield and shelter [thee] against the
world, and thy sorrows shall be my sorrows, and though abandoned by all
men, we two will abide together in love and duty."
In the holy eloquent solitude where the very stars that twinkle seem to
be a _voice_ that suits the dream, a voice of a dream, a voice soundless
and yet for the _ear_ not the _eye_ of the soul, when the winged soul
passes over vale and mountain, sinks into glens, and then climbs with
the cloud, and passes from cloud to cloud, and thence from sun to
sun--never is she alone. Always one, the dearest, accompanies and even
when he melts, diffused in the blue sky, she melts at the same moment
into union with the beloved.
[Sidenote: A SUPERFLUOUS ENTITY]
That our religious faiths, by the instincts which lead us to
metaphysical investigation, are founded in a practical necessity, not a
mere intellectual craving after knowledge, and systematic conjecture, is
evinced by the interest which all men take in the questions of future
existence, and the being of God; while even among those who are
speculative by profession a few phantasts only have troubled themselves
with the questions of pre-existence, or with attempts to demonstrate the
_posse_ and _esse_ of a devil. But in the latter case more is involved.
Concerning pre-existence men in general have neither care nor belief;
but a devil is taken for granted, and, if we might trust words, with the
same faith as a Deity--"He neither believes God or devil." And yet,
while we are delighted in hearing proofs of the one, we never think of
asking a simple question concerning the other. This, too, originates in
a practical source. The Deity is not a mere solution of difficulties
concerning origination, but a truth which spreads light and joy and hope
and certitude through all things--while a devil _is_ a mere solution of
an enigma, an assumption to silence our uneasiness. That end answered
(and most easily are such ends answered), we have no further concern
with it.
[Sidenote: PSYCHOLOGY IN YOUTH AND MATURITY]
The _great change_--that in youth and early manhood we psychologise and
with enthusiasm but all out of ourselves, and so far ourselves only as
we descry therein some general law. Our own self is but the diagram, the
triangle which represents all triangles. Afterward we pyschologise out
of others, and so far as they differ from ourselves. O how hollowly!
[Sidenote: HAIL AND FAREWELL!]
We have been for many years at a great distance from each other, but
that may happen with no real breach of friendship. All intervening
nature is the _continuum_ of two good and wise men. We are now
separated. You have combined arsenic with your gold, Sir Humphry! You
are brittle, and I will rather dine with Duke Humphry than with you.
[Sidenote: A GENUINE "ANECDOTE"]
Sara Coleridge says, on telling me of the universal sneeze produced on
the lasses while shaking my carpet, that she wishes my snuff would
_grow_, as I sow it so plentifully!
[This points to the summer of 1810, the five months spent at Greta Hall
previous to the departure south with Basil Montagu.]
[Sidenote: SPIRITUAL RELIGION]
A thing cannot be one _and_ three at the same time! True! but _time_
does not apply to God. He is neither one in time nor three in time, for
he exists not in time at all--the Eternal!
The truly religious man, when he is not conveying his feelings and
beliefs to other men, and does not need the medium of words--O! how
little does he find in his religious sense either of form or of
number--it is _infinite_! Alas! why do we all seek by instinct for a
God, a supersensual, but because we feel the insufficiency, the
unsubstantiality of all _forms_, and formal being for itself. And shall
we explain _a_ by _x_ and then _x_ by _a_--give a soul to the body, and
then a body to the soul--_ergo_, a body to the body--feel the weakness
of the weak, and call in the strengthener, and then make the very
weakness the substratum of the strength? This is worse than the poor
Indian! Even he does not make the tortoise support the elephant, and yet
put the elephant under the tortoise!
But we are too social, we become in a sort idolaters--for the means we
are obliged to use to excite notions of truth in the minds of others we
by witchcraft of slothful association impose on ourselves for the truths
themselves. Our intellectual bank stops payment, and we pass an act by
acclamation that hereafter the paper promises shall be the gold and
silver itself--and ridicule a man for a dreamer and reviver of
antiquated dreams who believes that gold and silver exist. This may do
as well in the market, but O! for the universal, for the man himself the
difference is woeful.
[Sidenote: TRUTH]
The immense difference between being glad to find Truth _it_, and to
find _it_ TRUTH! O! I am ashamed of those who praise me! For I know that
as soon as I tell them my mind on another subject, they will shrink and
abhor me. For not because I enforced a truth were they pleased in the
first instance, but because I had supported a favourite notion of theirs
which they loved for its and their sake, and therefore would be glad to
find it true--not that loving Truth they loved this opinion as one of
its forms and consequences. The root! the root must be attacked!
[Sidenote: A TIME TO CRY OUT]
Among the evils that attend a conscientious author who writes in a
corrupt age, is the necessity he is under of exposing himself even to
plausible charges of envy, mortified vanity, and, above all, of
self-conceit before those whose bad passions would make even the most
improbable charges plausible.
What _can_ he do? Tell the truth, and the whole truth plainly, and with
the natural affection which it inspires, and keeping off (difficult
task!) all _scorn_ (for to suppress resentment is easy), let him trust
the bread to the waters in the firm faith that wisdom shall be justified
by her children. Vanity! self-conceit! What vanity, what self-conceit?
What say I more than this? Ye who think and feel the same will love and
esteem me by the law of sympathy, and _value_ me according to the
comparative effect I have made on your intellectual powers, in enabling
you better to defend before others, or more clearly to _onlook_
(_anschauen_) in yourselves the truths to which your noblest being bears
witness. The rest I leave to the judgment of posterity, utterly
unconcerned whether _my name_ be attached to these opinions or (_my_
writings forgotten) another man's.
But what can I say, when I have declared my abhorrence of the _Edinburgh
Review_? In vain should I tell my critics that were I placed on the rack
I could not remember ten lines of my own poems, and that on seeing my
own name in their abuse, I regard it only as a symbol of Wordsworth and
Southey, and that I am well aware that from utter disregard and oblivion
of anything and all things which they can know of me by experience, my
name is mentioned only because they have heard that I was Wordsworth's
and Southey's friend.
[Sidenote: HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"]
The brightest luminaries of earth give names to the dusky spots in the
selenography of Helvetius.
The intrepidity of a pure conscience and a simple principle [may be]
compared to a life-boat, and somewhat in the detail, stemming with a
little rudder the tumbling ruins of the sea, rebounding from the rocks
and shelves in fury.
Duns Scotus affirms that the certainty of faith is the greatest
certainty--a dark speech which is explained and proved by the dependence
of the theoretic powers on the practical. But Aristotle admits that
demonstrated truths are inferior in kind of certainty to the
indemonstrable out of which the former are deduced.
Faithful, confident reliance on man and on God is the last and hardest
virtue! And wherefore? Because we must first have earned a FAITH in
ourselves. Let the conscience pronounce: "Trust in thyself!" Let the
whole heart be able to say, "I trust in myself," and those whomever we
_love_ we shall rely on, in proportion to that love.
A testy patriot might be pardoned for saying with Falstaff, when Dame
Quickly told him "She came from the two parties, forsooth," "The Devil
take one party and his Dam the other." John Bull has suffered more for
their sake, more than even the supererogatory cullibility of his
disposition is able to bear.
Lavater fixed on the simplest physiognomy in his whole congregation, and
pitched his sermon to his comprehension. Narcissus either looks at or
thinks of his looking glass, for the same wise purpose I presume.
Reviewers resemble often the English jury and the Italian conclave, they
are incapable of eating till they have condemned or craned.
The Pope [may be compared to] an old lark, who, though he leaves off
soaring and singing in the height, yet has his spurs grow longer and
sharper the older he grows.
Let us not, because the foliage waves in necessary obedience to every
breeze, fancy that the tree shakes also. Though the slender branch bend,
one moment to the East and another to the West, its motion is
circumscribed by its connection with the unyielding trunk.
[Sidenote: A HINT FOR "CHRISTABEL"]
My first cries mingled with my mother's death-groan, and she beheld the
vision of glory, ere I the earthly sun. When I first looked up to Heaven
consciously, it was to look up after, or for, my mother.
[Sidenote: "ALL THOUGHTS ALL PASSIONS ALL DELIGHTS"]
The two sweet silences--first in the purpling dawn of love-troth, when
the heart of each ripens in the other's looks within the unburst calyx,
and fear becomes so sweet that it seems but a fear of losing hope in
certainty; the second, when the sun is setting in the calm eve of
confident love, and [the lovers] in mute recollection enjoy each other.
"I fear to speak, I fear to hear you speak, so deeply do I now enjoy
your presence, so totally possess you in myself, myself in you. The very
sound would break the union and separate _you-me_ into you and me. We
both, and this sweet room, its books, its furniture, and the shadows on
the wall slumbering with the low, quiet fire are all _our_ thought, one
harmonious imagery of forms distinct on the still substance of one deep
feeling, love and joy--a lake, or, if a stream, yet flowing so softly,
so unwrinkled, that its flow is life, not change--that state in which
all the individuous nature, the distinction without division of a vivid
thought, is united with the sense and substance of intensest reality."
And what if joy pass quick away? Long is the track of Hope before--long,
too, the track of recollection after, as in the Polar spring the sun [is
seen in the heavens] sixteen days before it really rises, and in the
Polar autumn ten days after it has set; so Nature, with Hope and
Recollection, pieces out our short summer.
[Sidenote: WORDS AND THINGS]
N.B.--In my intended essay in defence of punning (Apology for
Paronomasy, _alias_ Punning), to defend those turns of words--
Che l'onda chiara,
El'ombra non men cara--
in certain styles of writing, by proving that language itself is formed
upon associations of this kind--that possibly the _sensus genericus_ of
whole classes of words may be thus deciphered (as has indeed been
attempted by Mr. White, of Clare Hall), that words are not mere symbols
of things and thoughts, but themselves things, and that any harmony in
the things symbolised will perforce be presented to us more easily, as
well as with additional beauty, by a correspondent harmony of the
symbols with each other. Thus, _heri vidi fragilem frangi, hodie
mortalem mori_; Gestern seh ich was gebrechliches brechen, heute was
sterbliches sterben, compared with the English. This the beauty of
homogeneous languages. So _Veni, vidi, vici_.
[This note follows an essay on Giambattista Strozzi's Madrigals,
together with a transcription of twenty-seven specimens. The substance
of the essay is embodied in the text of Chapter xvi. of the "Biographia
Literaria," and a long footnote. The quotation is from the first
madrigal, quoted in the note, which is not included in those transcribed
in Notebook 17.--_Coleridge's Works_, iii. (Harper & Brothers, 1853),
pp. 388-393.]
[Sidenote: ASSOCIATION]
Important suggestion on 4th March, 1810 (Monday night). The law of
association clearly begins in common causality. How continued but by a
_causative power_ in the soul? What a proof of _causation_ and _power_
from the very law of mind, and cluster of facts adduced by Hume to
overthrow it!
[Sidenote: COROLLARY]
It is proud ignorance that, as a disease of the mind, alone superinduces
the necessity of the _medium_ of metaphysical philosophy. The errors
into which a sound, unaffected mind is led by the nature of things
(Thing as the substratum of power)--no errors at all, any more than the
motion of the sun. "So it _appears_"--and that is most true--but when
pride will work up these phenomena into a _system_ of _things in
themselves_, then they become most pernicious errors, and it is the duty
of true mind to examine these with all the virtues of the
intellect--patience, humility, etc.
[Sidenote: MOTHER WIT]
"By aid of a large portion of mother's wit, Paine, though an unlearned
man, saw the absurdity of the Christian religion." Mother's wit, indeed!
Wit from his mother the earth--the earthy and material wit of the
_flesh_ and its lusts. One ounce of mother-wit may be worth a pound of
learning, but a grain of the Father's wisdom is worth a ton of
mother-wit--yea! of both together.
[Sidenote: OF EDUCATION]
"O it is but an infant! 'tis but a child! he will be better as he grows
older." "O! she'll grow ashamed of it. This is but waywardness." Grant
all this--that _they_ will _out_grow these particular actions, yet with
what HABITS of _feeling_ will they arrive at youth and manhood?
Especially with regard to obedience, how is it possible that they should
struggle against the boiling passions of youth by means of obedience to
their own conscience who are to meet the dawn of conscience with the
broad meridian of disobedience and habits of self-willedness? Besides,
when are the rebukes, the chastisements to commence? Why! about nine or
ten, perhaps, when, for the father at least, [the child] is less a
plaything--when, therefore, anger is not healed up in its mind, either
by its own infant versatility and forgetfulness, or by after
caresses--when everything is remembered individually, and sense of
injustice felt. For the boy very well remembers the different treatment
when he was a child; but what has been so long permitted becomes a right
to him. Far better, in such a case, to have them sent off to others--a
strict schoolmaster--than to breed that contradiction of feeling toward
the same person which subverts the very _principle_ of our impulses.
Whereas, in a tender, yet obedience-exacting and improvement-enforcing
education, though very gradually, and by small doses at a time, yet
always going on--yea! even from a twelvemonth old--at six or seven the
child really has outgrown all things that annoy, just at the time when,
as the charm of infancy begins to diminish, they would begin really to
annoy.
[Sidenote: THE DANGERS OF ADAPTING TRUTH TO THE MINDS OF THE VULGAR]
There are, in every country, times when the few who know the truth have
clothed it for the vulgar, and addressed the vulgar in the vulgar
language and modes of conception, in order to convey any part of the
truth. This, however, could not be done with safety, even to the
_illuminati_ themselves in the first instance; but to their successors,
habit gradually turned lie into belief, partial and _stagnate_ truth
into ignorance, and the teachers of the vulgar (like the Franciscan
friars in the South of Europe) became a part of the vulgar--nay, because
the laymen were open to various impulses and influences, which their
instructors had built out (compare a brook in open air, liable to
rainstreams and rills from new-opened fountains, to the same running
through a mill guarded by sluice-gates and back-water), they became the
vulgarest of the vulgar, till, finally, resolute not to detach
themselves from the mob, the mob at length detaches itself from them,
and leaves the mill-race dry, the moveless, rotten wheels as
day-dormitories for bats and owls, and the old grindstones for wags and
scoffers of the taproom to whet their wits on.
[Sidenote: POETRY AND PROSE]
When there are few literary men, and the vast 999999/10000000 of the
population are ignorant, as was the case of Italy from Dante to
Metastasio, _from causes I need not here put down, there will be a
poetical language_; but that a poet ever uses a word as poetical--that
is, formally--which he, in the same mood and thought, would not use in
prose or conversation, Milton's Prose Works will assist us in
disproving. But as soon as literature becomes common, and critics
numerous in any country, and a large body of men seek to express
themselves habitually in the most precise, sensuous, and impassioned
words, the difference as to mere words ceases, as, for example, the
German prose writers. Produce to me _one_ word out of Klopstock,
Wieland, Schiller, Goethe, Voss, &c., which I will not find as
frequently used in the most energetic prose writers. The sole difference
in style is that poetry demands a severe keeping--it admits nothing that
prose may not often admit, but it oftener rejects. In other words, it
presupposes a more continuous state of passion. _N.B._--Provincialisms
of poets who have become the supreme classics in countries one in
language but under various states and governments have aided this false
idea, as, in Italy, the Tuscanisms of Dante, Ariosto, and Alfieri,
foolishly imitated by Venetians, Romans, and Neapolitans. How much this
is against the opinion of Dante, see his admirable treatise on "Lingua
Volgare Nobile," the first, I believe, of his prose or _prose and verse_
works; for the "Convito" and "La Vita Nuova" are, one-third, in metre.
[Sidenote: WORLDLY WISE]
I would strongly recommend Lloyd's "State Worthies" [_The Statesmen and
Favourites of England since the Reformation._ By David Lloyd. London,
1665-70] as the manual of every man who would rise in the world. In
every twenty pages it recommends contradictions, but he who cannot
reconcile them for himself, and discover which suits his plan, can never
rise in the world. _N.B._--I have a mind to draw a complete character of
a worldly-wise man out of Lloyd. He would be highly-finished, useful,
honoured, popular--a man revered by his children, his wife, and so
forth. To be sure, he must not expect to be _beloved_ by _one_
proto-friend; and, if there be truth in reason or Christianity, he will
go to hell--but, even so, he will doubtless secure himself a most
respectable place in the devil's chimney-corner.
[Sidenote: HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"]
The falseness of that so very common opinion, "Mathematics, aye, that is
something! that has been useful--but metaphysics!" Now fairly compare
the two, what each has really done.
But [be thou] only concerned to find out truth, which, on what side
soever it appears, is always _victory_ to every honest mind.
Christianity, too (as well as Platonism and the school of Pythagoras),
has its esoteric philosophy, or why are we forbidden to cast pearls
before swine? But who are the swine? Are they the poor and despised, the
unalphabeted in worldly learning? O, no! the rich whose hearts are
steeled by ignorance of misery and habits of receiving slavish
obedience--the dropsical learned and the St. Vitus' [bewitched]
sciolist.
In controversy it is highly useful to know whether you are really
addressing yourself to an opponent or only to partisans, with the
intention of preserving them firm. Either is well, but they should never
be commingled.
In her letter to Lord Willoughby Queen Elizabeth hath the word "eloign."
There is no exact equivalent in modern use. Neither "withdraw" or
"absent" are precisely synonymous.
We understand Nature just as if, at a distance, we looked at the image
of a person in a looking-glass, plainly and fervently discoursing, yet
what he uttered we could decipher only by the motion of the lips or by
his mien.
I must extract and transcribe from the preface to the works of
Paracelsus that eloquent defence of technical new words and of old words
used in a new sense. The whole preface is exceedingly lively, and
(excepting the mountebank defence of intentional obscurity and the
attack on logic, as if it were ever intended to be an organon of
discovery of material truth and directly, instead of a formal
preliminary assisting the mind indirectly, and showing what cannot be
truth, and what has not been proved truth,) very just.
The Chinese call the monsoon whirlwind, when more than usually fierce,
the elephant. This is a fine image--a mad wounded war-elephant.
The poor oppressed Amboynese, who bear with patience the extirpation of
their clove and nutmeg trees, in their fields and native woods, and the
cruel taxes on sugar, their staff of life, will yet, at once and
universally, rise up in rebellion and prepare to destroy in despair all
and everything, themselves included, if any attempt is made to destroy
any individual's Tatanaman, the clove-tree which each Amboynese plants
at the birth of each of his children. Very affecting!
[Sidenote: GENIUS]
The man of genius places things in a new light. This trivial phrase
better expresses the appropriate effects of genius than Pope's
celebrated distich--
"What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest."
It has been thought distinctly, but only possessed, as it were, unpacked
and unsorted. The poet not only displays what, though often seen in its
unfolded mass, had never been opened out, but he likewise adds
something, namely, light and relations. Who has not seen a rose, or
sprig of jasmine or myrtle? But behold those same flowers in a posy or
flower-pot, painted by a man of genius, or assorted by the hand of a
woman of fine taste and instinctive sense of beauty!
[Sidenote: LOVE]
To find our happiness incomplete without the happiness of some other
given person or persons is the definition of affection in general, and
applies equally to friendship, to the parental and to the conjugal
relations. But what is love? Love as it may subsist between two persons
of different senses? This--and what more than this? The mutual
dependence of their happiness, each on that of the other, each being at
once cause and effect. You, therefore, I--I, therefore you. The sense of
this reciprocity of well-being, is that which first stamps and
legitimates the name of happiness in all the other advantages and
favourable accidents of nature, or fortune, without which they would
change their essence and become like the curse of Tantalus, insulting
remembrances of misery, of that most unquiet of all miseries, means of
happiness blasted and transformed by incompleteness, nay, by the loss of
the sole organ through which we could enjoy them.
Suppose a wide and delightful landscape, and what the eye is to the
light, and the light to the eye, that interchangeably is the lover to
the beloved. "O best beloved! who lovest _me_ the best!" In strictest
propriety of application might he thus address her, if only she with
equal truth could echo the same sense in the same feeling. "Light of
mine eye! by which alone I not only see all I see, but which makes up
more than half the loveliness of the objects seen, yet, still, like the
rising sun in the morning, like the moon at night, remainest thyself and
for thyself, the dearest, fairest form of all the thousand forms that
derive from thee all their visibility, and borrow from thy presence
their chiefest beauty!"
[Sidenote: COTTLE'S "FREE VERSION OF THE PSALMS"]
Diamond + oxygen = charcoal. Even so on the fire-spark of his zeal did
Cottle place the King-David diamonds, and caused to pass over them the
oxygenous blast of his own inspiration, and lo! the diamond becomes a
bit of charcoal.
[Sidenote: FRIENDSHIP AND MARRIAGE]
"Ich finde alles eher auf der Erde, so gar Wahrheit und Freude,
als Freundschaft."--JEAN PAUL.[F]
This for the motto--to examine and attest the fact, and then to explain
the reason. First, then, there are the extraordinary qualifications
demanded for true friendship, arising from the multitude of causes that
make men delude themselves and attribute to friendship what is only a
similarity of pursuit, or even a mere dislike of feeling oneself alone
in anything. But, secondly, supposing the friendship to be as real as
human nature ordinarily permits, yet how many causes are at constant war
against it, whether in the shape of violent irruptions or unobserved yet
constant wearings away by dyspathy, &c. Exemplify this in youth and then
in manhood. First, there is the influence of wives, how frequently
deadly to friendship, either by direct encroach, or, perhaps,
intentional plans of alienation! Secondly, there is the effect of
families, by otherwise occupying the heart; and, thirdly, the action of
life in general, by the worldly-wise, chilling effects of prudential
anxieties.
Corollary. These reflections, however, suggest an argument in favour of
the existing indissolubility of marriage.
To be compelled to make it up, or consent to be miserable and
disrespected, is indeed a coarse plaister for the wounds of love, but so
it must be while the patients themselves are of coarse make and
unhealthy humours.
[Sidenote: IMAGINATION]
His imagination, if it must be so called, is at all events of the
pettiest kind--it is an _imaginunculation_. How excellently the German
_Einbildungskraft_ expresses this prime and loftiest faculty, the
power of co-adunation, the faculty that forms the many into
one--_In-eins-bildung!_ Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is
contradistinguished from fantasy, or the mirrorment, either catoptric or
metoptric--repeating simply, or by transposition--and, again,
involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will.
[See _Biog. Lit._, cap. x.; _Coleridge's Works_, iii. 272. See also
_Blackwood's Magazine_, March 1840, No. ccxciii., Art. The Plagiarisms
of S. T. Coleridge.]
[Sidenote: PUBLIC OPINION AND THE SERVICES]
Ministers, as in the Admiralty, or War Office, compared to managers of
theatres. The numerous absurd claims at length deaden their sense of
judgment to real merit, and superinduce in the mind an anticipation of
clamorous vanity. Hence the great importance of the public voice,
forcing them to be just. This, how illustrated by the life of
Nelson--the infamous coldness with which all his claims were
received--especially Mr. Wyndham's answer, July 21, 1795. And no wonder!
for such is the state of moral feeling even with the English public,
that an instance of credulity to an ingenious scheme which has failed in
the trial will weigh more heavily on a minister's character than to have
stifled in the birth half-a-dozen such men as Nelson or Cochrane, or
such schemes as that of a floating army. Nelson's life is a perpetual
comment on this.
[Sidenote: SERMONS ANCIENT AND MODERN]
Of moral discourses and fine moral discussions in the pulpit--"none of
your Methodist stuff for me." And, yet, most certain it is, that never
were either ministers or congregations so strict in all morality as at
the time when nothing but fine _moral_ discourses (that is calculations
in self-love) would have driven a preacher from the pulpit--and when
the clergy thought it their pulpit-duty to preach Christ and Him
crucified, and the why and the wherefore--and that the soberest,
law-obeying, most prudent nation in the world would need Him as much as
a nation of drunkards, thieves and profligates. How was this? Why, I
take it, those old parsons thought, very wisely, that the pulpit was the
place for truths that applied to all men, humbled all alike (not
mortified one or two, and sent the rest home, scandal-talking with
pharisaic "I thank thee, God, I am not as so and so, but I was glad to
hear the parson"), comforted all, frightened all, offended all, because
they were all _men_--that private vices depend so much on particular
circumstances, that without making the pulpit a lampoon shop, (or, even
supposing the genius of him who wrote Isaac Jenkins, without particulars
not suited to the pulpit) that it would be a cold generality affair--and
that, therefore, they considered the pulpit as _one_ part of their duty,
but to their whole congregation as _men_, and that the other part of
their duty, which they thought equally binding on them, was to each and
every member of that congregation as John Harris, or James Tomkins, in
private conversation--and, like that of Mr. Longford, sometimes to
rebuke and warn, sometimes to comfort, sometimes and oftener to
instruct, and render them capable of understanding his sermon. In short
they would _preach_ as Luther, and would converse as Mr. Longford to
Isaac Jenkins.
[_The History of Isaac Jenkins, a Moral Fiction._ By Thomas Beddoes,
M.D., 1793].
[Sidenote: HEAVINESS MAY ENDURE FOR A NIGHT]
With a loving generous man whose activity of intellect is exerted
habitually on truth and events of permanent, or, at least, general
interest still warmed and coloured by benevolent enthusiasm
self-unconsciously, and whose heart-movements are all the property of
the few, whom he dearly loves--with such a man, for the vast majority of
the wrongs met with in life, that at all affect him, a one-night's sleep
provides the oblivion and the cure--he awakes from his slumbers and his
resentment at the same moment. Yesterday is gone and the clouds of
yesterday. The sun is born again, and how bright and joyous! and I am
born again! But O! there may be wrongs, for which with our best efforts
for the most perfect suppression, with the absence, nay, the
impossibility of anger or hate, yet, longer, deeper sleep is required
for the heart's oblivion, and thence renewal--even the long total sleep
of death.
To me, I dare avow, even this connects a new soothing with the thought
of death, an additional lustre in anticipation to the confidence of
resurrection, that such sensations as I have so often had after small
wrongs, trifling quarrels, on first awaking in a summer morn after
refreshing sleep, I shall experience after death for those few wounds
too deep and broad for the _vis medicatrix_ of mortal life to fill
wholly up with new flesh--those that, though healed, yet left an
unsightly scar which, too often, spite of our best wishes, opened anew
at other derangements and indispositions of the mental health, even when
they were altogether unconnected with the wound itself or its
occasions--even as the scars of the sailor, the relics and remembrances
of sword or gun-shot wounds (first of all his bodily frame giving way to
ungenial influences from without or from within), ache and throb at the
coming in of rain or easterly winds, and open again and bleed anew, at
the attack of fever, or injury from deficient or unwholesome food--that
even for these I should enjoy the same delightful annihilation of them,
as of ordinary wrongs after sleep.
I would say to a man who reminded me of a friend's unkind words or deeds
which I had forgiven--Smoking is very well while we are all smoking,
even though the head is made dizzy by it and the candle of reason burns
red, dim and thick; but, for Heaven's sake, don't put an old pipe to my
nose just at breakfast time, among dews and flowers and sunshine.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote F: ["I find all things upon earth, even truth and joy, rather
than friendship."]]