_1814-1818_
Lynx amid moles! had I stood by thy bed,
Be of good cheer, meek soul! I would have said:
I see a hope spring from that humble fear.
S. T. C.
[Sidenote: SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY]
The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn
whether it could furnish him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or
tools, or ornaments, or _playwiths_, but who sought to know it for the
gratification of _knowing_; while he that first sought to _know_ in
order to _be_ was the first philosopher. I have read of two rivers
passing through the same lake, yet all the way preserving their streams
visibly distinct--if I mistake not, the Rhone and the Adar, through the
Lake of Geneva. In a far finer distinction, yet in a subtler union,
such, for the contemplative mind, are the streams of knowing and being.
The lake is formed by the two streams in man and nature as it exists in
and for man; and up this lake the philosopher sails on the junction-line
of the constituent streams, still pushing upward and sounding as he
goes, towards the common fountain-head of both, the mysterious source
whose being is knowledge, whose knowledge is being--the adorable I AM IN
THAT I AM.
[Sidenote: PETRARCH'S EPISTLES]
I have culled the following extracts from the First Epistle of the First
Book of Petrarch's Epistle, that "Barbato Salmonensi." [Basil, 1554, i.
76.]
Vultûs, heu, blanda severi
Majestas, placidæque decus pondusque senectæ!
Non omnia terræ
Obruta! vivit amor, vivit dolor! Ora negatum
Dulcia conspicere; at flere et meminisse relictum est.
Jamque observatio vitæ
Multa dedit--lugere nihil, ferre omnia; jamque
Paulatim lacrymas rerum experientia tersit.
[Heu! et spem quoque tersit]
Pectore nunc gelido calidos miseremur amantes,
Jamque arsisse pudet. Veteres tranquilla tumultus
Mens horret, relegensque alium putat esse locutum.
But, indeed, the whole of this letter deserves to be read and
translated. Had Petrarch lived a century later, and, retaining all his
_substantiality_ of head and heart, added to it the elegancies and manly
politure of Fracastorius, Flaminius, Vida and their corrivals, this
letter would have been a classical gem. To a translator of genius, and
who possessed the English language as unembarrassed property, the
defects of style in the original would present no obstacle; nay, rather
an honourable motive in the well-grounded hope of rendering the version
a finer poem than the original.
[Twelve lines of Petrarch's Ep. _Barbato Salmonensi_ are quoted in the
_Biog. Liter._ at the end of chapter x.; and a portion of the same poem
was prefixed as a motto to "Love Poems" in the _Sibylline Leaves_, 1817,
and the editions of _P. W._, 1828-9. _Coleridge's Works_, Harper &
Brother, 1853, iii. 314. See, too, _P. W._, 1893, _Editor's Note_, pp.
614, 634.]
[Sidenote: CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA]
A fine writer of bad principles or a fine poem on a hateful subject,
such as the "Alexis" of Virgil or the "Bathyllus" of Anacreon, I compare
to the flowers and leaves of the Stramonium. The flowers are remarkable
sweet, but such is the fetid odour of the leaves that you start back
from the one through disgust at the other.
[Sidenote: A BLISS TO BE ALIVE]
Zephyrs that captive roam among these boughs,
Strive ye in vain to thread the leafy maze?
Or have ye lim'd your wings with honey-dew?
Unfelt ye murmur restless o'er my head
And rock the feeding drone or bustling bees
That blend their eager, earnest, happy hum!
[Sidenote: WHAT MAN HAS MADE OF MAN]
Gravior terras infestat Echidna,
Cur sua vipereæ jaculantur toxica linguæ
Atque homini sit homo serpens. O prodiga culpæ
Germina, naturæque uteri fatalia monstra!
Queis nimis innocuo volupe est in sanguine rictus
Tingere, fraternasque fibras cognataque per se
Viscera, et arrosæ deglubere funera famæ.
Quæ morum ista lues!
25th Feb. 1819 Five years since the preceding lines were written on this
leaf!! Ah! how yet more intrusively has the hornet scandal since then
scared away the bee of poetic thought and silenced its "eager, earnest,
happy hum"!
[Sidenote: SAVE ME FROM MY FRIENDS]
The sore evil now so general, alas! only not universal, of supporting
our religion, just as a keen party-man would support his party in
Parliament. All must be defended which can give a momentary advantage
over any one opponent, no matter how naked it lays the cause open to
another, perhaps, more formidable opponent--no matter how incompatible
the two assumptions may be. We rejoice, not because our religion is the
truth, but because the truth appears to be our religion. Talk with any
dignified orthodoxist in the sober way of farther preferment and he will
concrete all the grounds of Socinianism, talk Paley and the Resurrection
as a proof and as the only proper _proof_ of our immortality, will give
to external evidence and miracles the same self-grounded force, the same
fundamentality. Even so the old Puritans felt towards the Papists.
Because so much was wrong, everything was wrong, and by denying all
reverence to the fathers and to the constant tradition of the Catholic
Churches, they undermined the wall of the city in order that it might
fall on the heads of the Romanists--thoughtless that by this very act
they made a Breach for the Arian and Socinian to enter.
[Sidenote: DRIP DRIP DRIP DRIP]
The ear-deceiving imitation of a steady soaking rain, while the sky is
in full uncurtainment of sprinkled stars and milky stream and dark blue
interspace. The rain had held up for two hours or more, but so deep was
the silence of the night that the _drip_ from the leaves of the garden
trees _copied_ a steady shower.
[Sidenote: REMEDIUM AMORIS]
So intense are my affections, and so despotically am I governed by them
(not indeed so much as I once was, but still far, far too much) that I
should be the most wretched of men if my love outlived my esteem. But
this, thank Heaven! is the antidote. The bitterer the tear of anguish at
the clear detection of misapplied attachment, the calmer I am
afterwards. It is a funeral tear for an object no more.
[Sidenote: THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER]
February 23, 1816.
I thought I expressed my thoughts well when I said, "There is no
superstition but what has a religion as its base [or radical], and
religion is only reason, seen perspectively by a finite intellect."
[Sidenote: THE POWER OF WORDS]
It is a common remark, in medical books for instance, that there are
certain niceties which words, from their always abstract and so far
general nature, cannot convey. Now this I am disposed to deny, that is,
in any comparative sense. In my opinion there is nothing which, being
equally known as any other thing, may not be conveyed by words with
equal clearness. But the question of the source of the remark is, to
whom? If I say that in jaundice the skin looks yellow, my words have no
meaning for a man who has no sense of colours. Words are but
remembrances, though remembrance may be so excited, as by the _a priori_
powers of the mind to produce a _tertium aliquid_. The utmost, therefore
that should be said is that every additament of perception requires a
new word, which (like all other words) will be intelligible to all who
have seen the subject recalled by it, and who have learnt that such a
word or phrase was appropriated to it; and this may be attained either
by a new word, as _platinum_, _titanium_, _osmium_, etc., for the new
metals, or an epithet peculiarising the application of an old word. For
instance, no one can have attended to the brightness of the eyes in a
healthy person in high spirits and particularly delighted by some
occurrence, and that of the eye of a person deranged or predisposed to
derangement, without observing the difference; and, in this case, the
phrase "a maniacal glitter of the eye" conveys as clear a notion as that
jaundice is marked by yellow. There is, doubtless, a difference, but no
other than that of the _commencement_ of particular knowledge by the
application of universal knowledge (that is to all who have the senses
and common faculties of men), and the next step of knowledge when it
particularises itself. But the defect is not in words, but in the
imperfect knowledge of those to whom they are addressed. Then proof is
obvious. Desire a physician or metaphysician, or a lawyer to mention
the most perspicuous book in their several knowledges. Then bid them
read that book to a sensible carpenter or shoemaker, and a great part
will be as unintelligible as a technical treatise on carpentering to the
lawyer or physician, who had not been brought up in a carpenter's shop
or looked at his tools.
I have dwelt on this for more reasons than one: first, because a remark
that seems at first sight the same, namely, that "everything clearly
perceived may be conveyed in simple common language," without taking in
the "to whom?" is the disease of the age--an arrogant pusillanimity, a
hatred of all information that cannot be obtained without thinking; and,
secondly, because the pretended imperfection of language is often a
disguise of muddy thoughts; and, thirdly, because to the mind itself it
is made an excuse for indolence in determining what the fact or truth is
which is the premise. For whether there does or does not exist a term in
our present store of words significant thereof--if not, a word must be
made--and, indeed, all wise men have so acted from Moses to Aristotle
and from Theophrastus to Linnæus.
The sum, therefore, is this. The conveyal of knowledge by words is in
direct proportion to the stores and faculties of observation (internal
or external) of the person who hears or reads them. And this holds
equally whether I distinguish the green grass from the white lily and
the yellow crocus, which all who have eyes understand, because all are
equal to me in the knowledge of the facts signified--or of the
difference between the apprehensive, perceptive, conceptive, and
conclusive powers which I might [try to enunciate to] Doctors of
Divinity and they would translate the words by _Abra Ca Dabra_.
[Sidenote: FLOWERS OF SPEECH Sunday, April 30, 1816]
Reflections on my four gaudy flower-pots, compared with the former
flower-poems. After a certain period, crowded with counterfeiters of
poetry, and illustrious with true poets, there is formed for common use
a vast _garden_ of language, all the showy and all the odorous words and
clusters of words are brought together, and to be plucked by mere
mechanic and passive memory. In such a state, any man of common poetical
reading, having a strong desire (to be?--O no! but--) to be thought a
poet will present a flower-pot gay and gaudy, but the _composition_!
That is wanting. We carry on judgment of times and circumstances into
our pleasures. A flower-pot which would have enchanted us before flower
gardens were common, for the very beauty of the component flowers, will
be rightly condemned as common-place, out of place (for such is a
common-place poet)--it involves a contradiction both in terms and
thought. So Homer's Juno, Minerva, etc., are read with delight--but
Blackmore? This is the reason why the judgment of those who are newlings
in poetic reading is not to be relied on. The positive, which belongs to
all, is taken as the comparative, which is the individual's praise. A
good ear which had never heard music--with what raptures would it praise
one of Shield's or Arne's Pasticcios and Centos! But it is the human
mind it praises, not the individual. Hence it may happen (I believe has
happened) that fashionableness may produce popularity. "The Beggar's
Petition" is a fair instance, and what if I dared to add Gray's "Elegy
in a Country Churchyard"?
[Sidenote: SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS]
Men who direct what they call their understanding or common-sense by
rules abstracted from sensuous experience in moral and super-sensuous
truths remind one of the zemmi (mus [Greek: typhlos] or _typhlus_), "a
kind of rat in which the skin (conjunctiva) is not even transparent over
the eye, but is there covered with hairs as in the rest of the body. The
eye (= the understanding), which is scarcely the size of the poppy-seed,
is perfectly useless." An eel (_muroena coecilia_) and the myxine
(_gastobranchus coecus_) are blind in the same manner, through the
opacity of the conjunctiva.
[Sidenote: INSECTS]
Sir G. Staunton asserts that, in the forests of Java, spiders' webs are
found of so strong a texture as to require a sharp-cutting instrument to
make way through them. Pity that he did not procure a specimen and bring
it home with him. It would be a pleasure to see a sailing-boat rigged
with them--twisting the larger threads into ropes and weaving the
smaller into a sort of silk canvas resembling the indestructible white
cloth of the arindy or _palma Christi_ silkworm.
The _Libellulidæ_ fly all ways without needing to turn their
bodies--onward, backward, right and left--with more than
swallow-rivalling rapidity of wing, readiness of evolution, and
indefatigable continuance.
The merry little gnats (_Tipulidæ minimæ_) I have myself often watched
in an April shower, evidently "dancing the hayes" in and out between the
falling drops, unwetted, or, rather, un-down-dashed by rocks of water
many times larger than their whole bodies.
[Sidenote: OF STYLE Sunday, January 25, 1817]
A valuable remark has just struck me on reading Milton's beautiful
passage on true eloquence, his apology for Smectymnuus. "For me, reader,
though I cannot say," etc.--first, to shew the vastly greater numbers
of admirable passages, in our elder writers, that may be gotten by
heart as the most exquisite poems; and to point out the great
intellectual advantage of this reading, over the gliding smoothly on
through a whole volume of equability. But still, it will be said, there
is an antiquity, an oddness in the style. Granted; but hear this same
passage from the Smectymnuus, or this, or this. Every one would know at
first hearing that they were not written by Gibbon, Hume, Johnson, or
Robertson. But why? Are they not pure English? Aye! incomparably more
so! Are not the words precisely appropriate, so that you cannot change
them without changing the force and meaning? Aye! But are they not even
now intelligible to man, woman, and child? Aye! there is no
riddle-my-ree in them. What, then, is it? The unnatural, false, affected
style of the moderns that makes sense and simplicity _oddness_.
[Sidenote: OBDUCTÂ FRONTE SENECTUS]
Even to a sense of shrinking, I felt in this man's face and figure what
a shape comes to view when age has dried away the mask from a bad,
depraved man, and flesh and colour no longer conceal or palliate the
traits of the countenance. Then shows itself the indurated nerve; stiff
and rigid in all its ugliness the inflexible muscle; then quiver the
naked lips, the cold, the loveless; then blinks the turbid eye, whose
glance no longer pliant _fixes_, abides in its evil expression. Then lie
on the powerless forehead the wrinkles of suspicion and fear, and
conscience-stung watchfulness. Contrast this with the countenance of
Mrs. Gillman's mother as she once described it to me. This for "Puff and
Slander,"[G] Highgate, 1817.
[Sidenote: A "KINGDOM-OF-HEAVENITE"]
When the little creature has slept out its sleep and stilled its hunger
at the mother's bosom (that very hunger a mode of love all made up of
kisses), and coos, and wantons with pleasure, and laughs, and plays
bob-cherry with his mother, that is all, all to it. It understands not
either itself or its mother, but it clings to her, and has an undeniable
right to cling to her, seeks her, thanks her, loves her without
forethought and without an afterthought.
[Sidenote: A DIVINE EPIGRAM]
_Nec mihi, Christe, tua sufficiunt sine te, nec tibi placent mea sine
me_, exclaims St. Bernard. _Nota Bene._--This single epigram is worth
(shall I say--O far rather--is a sufficient antidote to) a waggon-load
of Paleyan moral and political philosophies.
[Sidenote: SERIORES ROSÆ]
We all look up to the blue sky for comfort, but nothing appears there,
nothing comforts, nothing answers us, and so we die.
Lie with the ear upon a dear friend's grave.
On the same man, as in a vineyard, grow far different grapes--on the
sunny south nectar, and on the bleak north verjuice.
The blossom gives not only future fruit, but present honey. We may take
the one, the other nothing injured.
Like some spendthrift Lord, after we have disposed of nature's great
masterpiece and [priceless] heirloom, the wisdom of innocence, we hang
up as a poor copy our [own base] cunning.
[Sidenote: A PLEA FOR SCHOLASTIC TERMS]
The revival of classical literature, like all other revolutions, was not
an unmixed good. One evil was the passion for pure Latinity, and a
consequent contempt for the barbarism of the scholastic style and
terminology. For awhile the schoolmen made head against their
assailants; but, alas! all the genius and eloquence of the world was
against them, and by an additional misfortune the scholastic logic was
professed by those who had no other attainments, namely, the monks, and
these, from monkishness, were the enemies of all genius and liberal
knowledge. They were, of course, laughed out of the field as soon as
they lost the power of aiding their logic by the post-predicaments of
dungeon, fire, and faggot. Henceforward speculative philosophy must be
written classically, that is, without technical terms--therefore
popularly--and the inevitable consequence was that those sciences only
were progressive which were permitted by the apparent as well as real
necessity of the case to have a scientific terminology--as mathesis,
geometry, astronomy and so forth--while metaphysic sank and died, and an
empirical highly superficial psychology took its place. And so it has
remained in England to the present day. A man must have felt the pain of
being compelled to express himself either laxly or paraphrastically
(which latter is almost as great an impediment in intellectual
construction as the translation of letters and symbols into the thought
they represent would be in Algebra), in order to understand how much a
metaphysician suffers from not daring to adopt the _ivitates_ and
_eitates_ of the schoolmen as objectivity, subjectivity, negativity,
positivity. April 29, 1817, Tuesday night.
[Sidenote: THE BODY OF THIS DEATH]
The sentimental _cantilena_ respecting the benignity and loveliness of
nature--how does it not sink before the contemplation of the pravity of
nature, on whose reluctance and inaptness a form is forced (the mere
reflex of that form which is itself absolute substance!) and which it
struggles against, bears but for a while and then sinks with the
alacrity of self-seeking into dust or _sanies_, which falls abroad into
endless nothings or creeps and cowers in poison or explodes in havock!
What is the beginning? what the end? And how evident an alien is the
supernatural in the brief interval!
[Sidenote: SPIRITUALISM AND MYSTICISM]
There are many, alas! too many, either born or who have become deaf and
dumb. So there are too many who have perverted the religion of the
spirit into the superstition of spirits that mutter and mock and mow,
like deaf and dumb idiots. Plans of teaching the deaf and dumb have been
invented. For these the deaf and dumb owe thanks, and we for their
sakes. _Homines sumus et nihil humani a nobis alienum._ But does it
follow, therefore, that in _all_ schools these plans of teaching should
be followed? Yet in the other case this is insisted on--and the Holy
Ghost must not be our guide because mysticism and ghosts may come in
under this name. Why? Because the deaf and dumb have been promoted to
superintendents of education at large for all!
[Sidenote: IDEALISM AND SUPERSTITION]
Save only in that in which I have a right to demand of every man that he
should be able to understand me, the experience or inward witnessing of
the conscience, and in respect of which every man in real life (even the
very disputant who affects doubt or denial in the moment of metaphysical
arguing) would hold himself insulted by the supposition that he did not
understand it--save in this only, and in that which if it be at all must
be _unique_, and therefore cannot be supported by an analogue, and
which, if it be at all, must be first, and therefore cannot have an
antecedent, and therefore may be _monstrated_, but cannot be
_de_monstrated.--I am no ghost-seer, I am no believer in apparitions. I
do not contend for indescribable sensations, nor refer to, much less
ground my convictions on, blind feelings or incommunicable experiences,
but far rather contend against these superstitions in the mechanic sect,
and impeach you as guilty, habitually and systematically guilty, of the
same. Guilty, I say, of superstitions, which at worst are but exceptions
and _fits_ in the poor self-misapprehending pietists, with whom, under
the name mystics, you would fain confound and discredit _all_ who
receive and worship God in spirit and in truth, and in the former as
the only possible mode of the latter. According to your own account,
your own scheme, you know nothing but your own sensations, indescribable
inasmuch as they are sensations--for the appropriate expression even of
which we must fly not merely to the indeclinables in the lowest parts of
speech, but to human articulations that only (like musical notes) _stand
for_ inarticulate sounds--the [Greek: oi, oi, papai] of the Greek
tragedies, or, rather, Greek oratorios. You see nothing, but only by a
sensation that conjures up an image in your own brain, or optic nerve
(as in a nightmare), have an apparition, in consequence of which, as
again in the nightmare, you are _forced_ to believe for the moment, and
are _inclined_ to infer the existence of a corresponding reality out of
your brain, but by what intermediation you cannot even form an
intelligible conjecture. During the years of ill-health from disturbed
digestion, I saw a host of apparitions, and heard them too--but I
attributed them to an act in my brain. You, according to your own
showing, see and hear nothing but apparitions in your brain, and
strangely attribute them to things that _are_ outside your skull. Which
of the two notions is most like the philosopher, which the
superstitionist? The philosopher who makes my apparitions nothing but
apparitions--a brain-image nothing more than a brain-image--and affirm
_nihil super stare_--or you and yours who vehemently contend that it is
but a brain-image, and yet cry, "_ast superstitit aliquid. Est super
stitio alicujus quod in externo, id est, in apparenti non apparet_."
What is outness, external and the like, but either the generalisation of
apparence or the result of a given degree, a comparative intensity of
the same? "I see it in my mind's eye," exclaims Hamlet, when his
thoughts were in his own purview the same phantom, yea! in a higher
intensity, became his father's ghost and marched along the platform. I
quoted your own exposition, and dare you with these opinions charge
others with superstition? You who deny aught permanent in our being, you
with whom the soul, yea, the soul of the soul, our conscience and
morality, are but the _tune_ from a fragile barrel-organ played by air
and water, and whose life, therefore, must of course be a _pointing_
to--as of a Marcellus or a Hamlet--"Tis here! 'Tis gone!" Were it
possible that I could actually believe such a system, I should not be
scared from striking it, from its being so _majestical_!
[Sidenote: THE GREATER DAMNATION]
The old law of England punishes those who dig up the bones of the dead
for superstitious or magical purposes, that is, in order to injure the
living. What then are they guilty of who uncover the dormitories of the
departed, and throw their souls into hell, in order to cast odium on a
living truth?
[Sidenote: DARWIN'S BOTANICAL GARDEN]
Darwin possesses the _epidermis_ of poetry but not the _cutis_; the
_cortex_ without the _liber_, _alburnum_, _lignum_, or _medulla_. And no
wonder! for the inner bark or _liber_, alburnum, and wood are one and
the same substance, in different periods of existence.
[Sidenote: SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY YARDS NOT EXACTLY A MILE]
"It is a mile and a half in height." "How much is that in yards or
feet?" The mind rests satisfied in producing a correspondency in its own
thoughts, and in the exponents of those thoughts. This seems to be a
matter purely analytic, not yet properly synthetic. It is rather an
interchange of equivalent acts, but not the same acts. In the yard I am
prospective; in the mile I seem to be retrospective. Come, a hundred
strides more, and we shall have come a mile. This, if true, may be a
subtlety, but is it necessarily a trifle? May not many common but false
conclusions originate in the neglect of this distinction--in the
confounding of objective and subjective logic?
[Sidenote: OF A TOO WITTY BOOK]
I like salt to my meat so well that I can scarce say grace over meat
without salt. But salt to one's salt! Ay! a sparkling, dazzling, lit-up
saloon or subterranean minster in a vast mine of rock-salt--what of
it?--full of white pillars and aisles and altars of eye-dazzling salt.
Well, what of it?--'twere an uncomfortable lodging or boarding-house--in
short, _all my eye_. Now, I am content with a work if it be but my eye
and Betty Martin, because, having never heard any charge against the
author of the adage, candour obliges me to conclude that Eliza Martin is
"sense for certain." In short, never was a metaphor more lucky, apt,
ramescent, and fructiferous--a hundred branches, and each hung with a
different graft-fruit--than salt as typical of wit--the uses of both
being the same, not to nourish, but to season and preserve nourishment.
Yea! even when there is plenty of good substantial meat to incorporate
with, stout aitch-bone and buttock, still there may be too much; and
they who confine themselves to such meals will contract a scorbutic
habit of intellect (_i.e._, a scurvy taste), and, with loose teeth and
tender gums, become incapable of chewing and digesting hard matters of
mere plain thinking.
[Sidenote: SPOOKS]
It is thus that the Glanvillians reason. First, they assume the facts as
objectively as if the question related to the experimentable of our
senses. Secondly, they take the imaginative possibility--that is, that
the [assumed] facts involve no contradiction, [as if it were] a
scientific possibility. And, lastly, they [advocate] them as proofs of
a spiritual world and our own immortality. This last [I hold to] be the
greatest insult to conscience and the greatest incongruity with the
objects of religion.
N.B.--It is amusing, in all ghost stories, etc., that the recorders are
"the farthest in the world from being credulous," or "as far from
believing such things as any man."
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower
presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if
he found that flower in his hand when he awoke--Aye! and what then?
The more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be
the hand that plucks it.
Floods and general inundations render for the time even the purest
springs turbid.
For compassion a human heart suffices; but for full, adequate sympathy
with joy, an angel's.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote G: A projected satire, of which, perhaps, the lines headed "A
Character" were an instalment. See _P. W._, 1893, pp. 195-642. _Letters
of S. T. C._, 1895, ii. 631.]