The Zendavesta must, I think, have been copied in parts from the writings
of Moses. In the description of the creation, the first chapter of Genesis
is taken almost literally, except that the sun is created _before_ the
light, and then the herbs and the plants after the sun; which are precisely
the two points they did not understand, and therefore altered as errors.[1]
There are only two acts of creation, properly so called, in the Mosaic
account,--the material universe and man. The intermediate acts seem more as
the results of secondary causes, or, at any rate, of a modification of
prepared materials.
[Footnote 1:
The Zend, or Zendavesta, is the sacred book ascribed to Zoroaster, or
Zerdusht, the founder or reformer of the Magian religion. The modern
edition or paraphrase of this work, called the Sadda, written in the
Persian of the day, was, I believe, composed about three hundred years ago
--Ed.]
* * * * *
Pantheism and idolatry naturally end in each other; for all extremes meet.
The Judaic religion is the exact medium, the true compromise.
_May_ 1. 1823.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STORIES OF DREAMS AND GHOSTS.
--PHANTOM PORTRAIT.--WITCH
OF ENDOR.--SOCINIANISM.
There is a great difference in the credibility to be attached to stories of
dreams and stories of ghosts. Dreams have nothing in them which are absurd
and nonsensical; and, though most of the coincidences may be readily
explained by the diseased system of the dreamer, and the great and
surprising power of association, yet it is impossible to say whether an
inner sense does not really exist in the mind, seldom developed, indeed,
but which may have a power of presentiment. [1]
All the external senses have their correspondents in the mind; the eye can
see an object before it is distinctly apprehended;--why may there not be a
corresponding power in the soul? The power of prophecy might have been
merely a spiritual excitation of this dormant faculty. Hence you will
observe that the Hebrew seers sometimes seem to have required music, as in
the instance of Elisha before Jehoram:--"But now bring me a minstrel. And
it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came
upon him." [2] Every thing in nature has a tendency to move in cycles; and
it would be a miracle if, out of such myriads of cycles moving
concurrently, some coincidences did not take place. No doubt, many such
take place in the daytime; but then our senses drive out the remembrance of
them, and render the impression hardly felt; but when we sleep, the mind
acts without interruption. Terror and the heated imagination will, even in
the daytime, create all sorts of features, shapes, and colours out of a
simple object possessing none of them in reality.
But ghost stories are absurd. Whenever a real ghost appears,--by which I
mean some man or woman dressed up to frighten another,--if the supernatural
character of the apparition has been for a moment believed, the effects on
the spectator have always been most terrible,--convulsion, idiocy, madness,
or even death on the spot. Consider the awful descriptions in the Old
Testament of the effects of a spiritual presence on the prophets and seers
of the Hebrews; the terror, the exceeding great dread, the utter loss of
all animal power. But in our common ghost stories, you always find that the
seer, after a most appalling apparition, as you are to believe, is quite
well the next day. Perhaps, he may have a headach; but that is the outside
of the effect produced. Alston, a man of genius, and the best painter yet
produced by America, when he was in England told me an anecdote which
confirms what I have been saying. It was, I think, in the university of
Cambridge, near Boston, that a certain youth took it into his wise head to
endeavour to convert a Tom-Painish companion of his by appearing as a ghost
before him. He accordingly dressed himself up in the usual way, having
previously extracted the ball from the pistol which always lay near the
head of his friend's bed. Upon first awaking, and seeing the apparition,
the youth who was to be frightened, A., very coolly looked his companion
the ghost in the face, and said, "I know you. This is a good joke; but you
see I am not frightened. Now you may vanish!" The ghost stood still.
"Come," said A., "that is enough. I shall get angry. Away!" Still the ghost
moved not. "By ----," ejaculated A., "if you do not in three minutes go
away, I'll shoot you." He waited the time, deliberately levelled the
pistol, fired, and, with a scream at the immobility of the figure, became
convulsed, and afterwards died. The very instant he believed it _to be_ a
ghost, his human nature fell before it.
[Footnote 1:
See this point suggested and reasoned with extraordinary subtlety in the
third essay (marked C), in the Appendix to the Statesman's Manual, Or first
Lay Sermon, p. 19, &c. One beautiful paragraph I will venture to quote:--
"Not only may we expect that men of strong religious feelings, but little
religious knowledge, will occasionally be tempted to regard such
occurrences as supernatural visitations; but it ought not to surprise us if
such dreams should sometimes be confirmed by the event, as though they had
actually possessed a character of divination. For who shall decide how far
a perfect reminiscence of past experiences (of many, perhaps, that had
escaped our reflex consciousness at the time)--who shall determine to what
extent this reproductive imagination, unsophisticated by the will, and
undistracted by intrusions from the senses, may or may not be concentred
and sublimed into foresight and presentiment? There would be nothing herein
either to foster superstition on the one hand, or to justify contemptuous
disbelief on the other. Incredulity is but Credulity seen from behind,
bowing and nodding assent to the Habitual and the Fashionable"-ED.]
[Footnote 2: 2 Kings, iii. 15., and see 1 Sam. x. 5.--ED.]
* * * * *
[What follows in the text within commas was written about this time, and
communicated to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge.--ED.]
"Last Thursday my uncle, S. T. C., dined with us, and several men came to
meet him. I have heard him more brilliant, but he was very fine, and
delighted every one very much. It is impossible to carry off, or commit to
paper, his long trains of argument; indeed, it is not always possible to
understand them, he lays the foundation so deep, and views every question
in so original a manner. Nothing can be finer than the principles which he
lays down in morals and religion. His deep study of Scripture is very
astonishing; the rest of the party were but as children in his hands, not
merely in general views of theology, but in nice verbal criticism. He
thinks it clear that St. Paul did not write the Epistle to the Hebrews, but
that it must have been the work of some Alexandrian Greek, and he thinks
Apollos. It seemed to him a desirable thing for Christianity that it should
have been written by some other person than St. Paul; because, its
inspiration being unquestioned, it added another independent teacher and
expounder of the faith.
"We fell upon ghosts, and he exposed many of the stories physically and
metaphysically. He seemed to think it impossible that you should really see
with the bodily eye what was impalpable, unless it were a shadow; and if
what you fancied you saw with the bodily eye was in fact only an impression
on the imagination, then you were seeing something _out of your senses_,
and your testimony was full of uncertainty. He observed how uniformly, in
all the best-attested stories of spectres, the appearance might be
accounted for from the disturbed state of the mind or body of the seer, as
in the instances of Dion and Brutus. Upon some one's saying that he
_wished_ to believe these stories true, thinking that they constituted a
useful subsidiary testimony of another state of existence, Mr. C. differed,
and said, he thought it a dangerous testimony, and one not wanted: it was
Saul, with the Scriptures and the Prophet before him, calling upon the
witch of Endor to certify him of the truth! He explained very ingeniously,
yet very naturally, what has often startled people in ghost stories--such
as Lord Lyttelton's--namely, that when a real person has appeared, habited
like the phantom, the ghost-seer has immediately seen two, the real man and
the phantom. He said that such must be the case. The man under the morbid
delusion sees with the eye of the imagination, and sees with the bodily eye
too; if no one were really present, he would see the spectre with one, and
the bed-curtains with the other. When, therefore, a real person comes, he
sees the real man as he would have seen any one else in the same place, and
he sees the spectre not a whit the less: being perceptible by different
powers of vision, so to say, the appearances do not interfere with each
other.
"He told us the following story of the Phantom Portrait [1]:--
"A stranger came recommended to a merchant's house at Lubeck. He was
hospitably received; but, the house being full, he was lodged at night in
an apartment handsomely furnished, but not often used. There was nothing
that struck him particularly in the room when left alone, till he happened
to cast his eyes on a picture, which immediately arrested his attention. It
was a single head; but there was something so uncommon, so frightful and
unearthly, in its expression, though by no means ugly, that he found
himself irresistibly attracted to look at it. In fact, he could not tear
himself from the fascination of this portrait, till his imagination was
filled by it, and his rest broken. He retired to bed, dreamed, and awoke
from time to time with the head glaring on him. In the morning, his host
saw by his looks that he had slept ill, and inquired the cause, which was
told. The master of the house was much vexed, and said that the picture
ought to have been removed, that it was an oversight, and that it always
was removed when the chamber was used. The picture, he said, was, indeed,
terrible to every one; but it was so fine, and had come into the family in
so curious a way, that he could not make up his mind to part with it, or to
destroy it. The story of it was this:--'My father,' said he, 'was at
Hamburgh on business, and, whilst dining at a coffee-house, he observed a
young man of a remarkable appearance enter, seat himself alone in a corner,
and commence a solitary meal. His countenance bespoke the extreme of mental
distress, and every now and then he turned his head quickly round, as if he
heard something, then shudder, grow pale, and go on with his meal after an
effort as before. My father saw this same man at the same place for two or
three successive days; and at length became so much interested about him,
that he spoke to him. The address was not repulsed, and the stranger seemed
to find some comfort in the tone of sympathy and kindness which my father
used. He was an Italian, well informed, poor but not destitute, and living
economically upon the profits of his art as a painter. Their intimacy
increased; and at length the Italian, seeing my father's involuntary
emotion at his convulsive turnings and shuddering, which continued as
formerly, interrupting their conversation from time to time, told him his
story. He was a native of Rome, and had lived in some familiarity with, and
been much patronized by, a young nobleman; but upon some slight occasion
they had fallen out, and his patron, besides using many reproachful
expressions, had struck him. The painter brooded over the disgrace of the
blow. He could not challenge the nobleman, on account of his rank; he
therefore watched for an opportunity, and assassinated him. Of course he
fled from his country, and finally had reached Hamburgh. He had not,
however, passed many weeks from the night of the murder, before, one day,
in the crowded street, he heard his name called by a voice familiar to him:
he turned short round, and saw the face of his victim looking at him with a
fixed eye. From that moment he had no peace: at all hours, in all places,
and amidst all companies, however engaged he might be, he heard the voice,
and could never help looking round; and, whenever he so looked round, he
always encountered the same face staring close upon him. At last, in a mood
of desperation, he had fixed himself face to face, and eye to eye, and
deliberately drawn the phantom visage as it glared upon him; and _this_ was
the picture so drawn. The Italian said he had struggled long, but life was
a burden which he could now no longer bear; and he was resolved, when he
had made money enough to return to Rome, to surrender himself to justice,
and expiate his crime on the scaffold. He gave the finished picture to my
father, in return for the kindness which he had shown to him.'"
[Footnote 1:
This is the story which Mr. Washington Irving has dressed up very prettily
in the first volume of his "Tales of a Traveller," pp. 84-119.; professing
in his preface that he could not remember whence he had derived the
anecdote.--ED.]
* * * * *
I have no doubt that the Jews believed generally in a future state,
independently of the Mosaic law. The story of the witch of Endor is a proof
of it. What we translate "_witch_," or "familiar spirit," is, in the
Hebrew, Ob, that is, a bottle or bladder, and means a person whose belly is
swelled like a leathern bottle by divine inflation. In the Greek it is
[Greek: engastrimuthos], a ventriloquist. The text (1 Sam. ch. xxviii.) is
a simple record of the facts, the solution of which the sacred historian
leaves to the reader. I take it to have been a trick of ventriloquism, got
up by the courtiers and friends of Saul, to prevent him, if possible, from
hazarding an engagement with an army despondent and oppressed with bodings
of defeat. Saul is not said to have seen Samuel; the woman only pretends to
see him. And then what does this Samuel do? He merely repeats the prophecy
known to all Israel, which the true Samuel had uttered some years before.
Read Captain Lyon's account of the scene in the cabin with the Esquimaux
bladder, or conjurer; it is impossible not to be reminded of the witch of
Endor. I recommend you also to look at Webster's admirable treatise on
Witchcraft.
* * * * *
The pet texts of a Socinian are quite enough for his confutation with acute
thinkers. If Christ had been a mere man, it would have been ridiculous in
_him_ to call himself "the Son of man;" but being God and man, it then
became, in his own assumption of it, a peculiar and mysterious title. So,
if Christ had been a mere man, his saying, "My Father is greater than I,"
(John, xv. 28.) would have been as unmeaning. It would be laughable enough,
for example, to hear me say, "My 'Remorse' succeeded, indeed, but
Shakspeare is a greater dramatist than I." But how immeasurably more
foolish, more monstrous, would it not be for a _man_, however honest, good,
or wise, to say, "But Jehovah is greater than I!"
_May_ 8. 1824.
PLATO AND XENOPHON.--RELIGIONS OF THE GREEKS.--EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES.--
MILTON.--VIRGIL.
Plato's works are logical exercises for the mind. Little that is positive
is advanced in them. Socrates may be fairly represented by Plato in the
more moral parts; but in all the metaphysical disquisitions it is
Pythagoras. Xenophon's representation of his master is quite different.[1]
[Footnote 1: See p. 9. n.--ED.]
* * * * *
Observe the remarkable contrast between the religion of the tragic and
other poets of Greece. The former are always opposed in heart to the
popular divinities. In fact, there are the popular, the sacerdotal, and the
mysterious religions of Greece, represented roughly by Homer, Pindar, and
Æschylus. The ancients had no notion of a _fall_ of man, though they had of
his gradual degeneracy. Prometheus, in the old mythus, and for the most
part in AEschylus, is the Redeemer and the Devil jumbled together.
* * * * *
I cannot say I expect much from mere Egyptian antiquities. Almost every
thing really, that is, intellectually, great in that country seems to me of
Grecian origin.
* * * * *
I think nothing can be added to Milton's definition or rule of poetry,--
that it ought to be simple, sensuous, and impassioned; that is to say,
single in conception, abounding in sensible images, and informing them all
with the spirit of the mind.
Milton's Latin style is, I think, better and easier than his English. His
style, in prose, is quite as characteristic of him as a philosophic
republican, as Cowley's is of _him_ as a first-rate gentleman.
If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him?
* * * * *
_June_ 2. 1824.