1819-1828

S. T. C.

The moon, rushing onward through the coursing clouds, advances like an indignant warrior through a fleeing army; but the amber halo in which she moves—O! it is a circle of Hope. For what she leaves behind her has not lost its radiance as it is melting away into oblivion, while, still, the other semi-circle catches the rich light at her approach, and heralds her ongress.

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It is by strength of mind that we are to untwist the tie or copula of the besom of affliction, which not nature but the strength of imagination had twisted round it, and thus resolve it into its component twigs, and conquer in detail "one down and t'other come on"! Dividendo diminuitur—which forms the true ground of the advantage accruing from communicating our griefs to another. We enable ourselves to see them each in its true magnitude.

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After re-perusal of my inefficient, yet not feeble efforts in behalf of the poor little white slaves in the cotton-factories, I ask myself, "But still are we not better than the other nations of Christendom?" Yes—Perhaps. I don't know. I dare not affirm it. Better than the French certainly! Mammon versus Moloch and Belial. But Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Tyrol? No.

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There is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, whether bard, musician, or artist, than the vernal warmth to the feathered songsters during their nest-building or incubation—a sympathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in which the poet breathes, and without which the sense of power sinks back on itself like a sigh heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick man. Alas! alas! alas!

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Anonymity is now an artifice to acquire celebrity, as a black veil is worn to make a pair of bright eyes more conspicuous.

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For the same reasons that we cannot now act by impulses, but must think, so now must every legislator be a man of sound book-learning, because he cannot, if he would, think or act from the simple dictates of unimproved but undepraved common sense. Newspapers, reviews, and the conversation of men who derive their opinions from newspapers and reviews will secure for him artificial opinions, if he does not secure them for himself from purer and more authentic sources. There is now no such being as a country gentleman. Like their relation, the Dodo, the race is extinct, or if by accident one has escaped, it belongs to the Museum, not to active life, or the purposes of active life.

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The more I read and reflect on the arguments of the truly philosophical theists and atheists, the more I feel convinced that the ultimate difference is a moral rather than an intellectual one, that the result is an xyz, an acknowledged insufficiency of the known to account for itself, and, therefore, a something unknown—that to which, while the atheist leaves it a blank in the understanding, the theist dedicates his noblest feelings of love and awe, and with which, by a moral syllogism, he connects and unites his conscience and actions. For the words goodness and wisdom are clearly only reflexes of the effect, just as when we call the unknown cause of cold and heat by the name of its effects, and know nothing further. For if we mean that a Being like man, with human goodness and intellect, only magnified, is the cause, that is, that the First Cause is an immense man (as according to Swedenborg and Zinzendorf), then come the insoluble difficulties of the incongruity of qualities whose very essence implies finiteness, with a Being ex hypothesi infinite.

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An excellent instance of the abstraction [from objects of the sense] that results from the attention converging to any one object, is furnished by the oily rags, broken saucers, greasy phials, dabs, crusts, and smears of paints in the laboratory of a Raphael, or a Claude Lorraine, or a Van Huysum, or any other great master of the beautiful and becoming. In like manner, the mud and clay in the modelling hand of a Chantrey—what are they to him whose total soul is awake, in his eye as a subject, and before his eye as some ideal of beauty objectively? The various objects of the senses are as little the objects of his senses, as the ink with which the "Lear" was written, existed in the consciousness of a Shakspere.

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The humming-moth with its glimmer-mist of rapid unceasing motion before the humble-bee within the flowering bells and cups—and the eagle level with the clouds, himself a cloudy speck, surveys the vale from mount to mount. From the cataract flung on the vale, the broadest fleeces of the snowy foam light on the bank flowers or the water-lilies in the stiller pool below.

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The defect of Archbishop Leighton's reasoning is the taking eternity for a sort of time, a baro major, a baron of beef or quarter of lamb, out of which and off which time is cut, as a brisket or shoulder—while, even in common discourse, without any design of sounding the depth of the truth or of weighing the words expressing it in the hair-balance of metaphysics, it would be more convenient to consider eternity the simul et totum as the antitheton of time.

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The extraordinary florency of letters under the Spanish Caliphate in connection with the character and capabilities of Mohammedanism has never yet been treated as its importance requires. Halim II, founder of the University of Cordova, and of numerous colleges and libraries throughout Spain, is said to have possessed a library of six hundred thousand MSS., the catalogue filling forty-four volumes. Nor were his successors behind him in zeal and munificence. That the prime article of Islamism, the uni-personality of God, is one cause of the downfall, say rather of the merely meteoric existence of their literary age, I am persuaded, but the exclusive scene (in Spain) suggests many interesting views. With a learned class Mohammedanism could not but pass into Deism, and Deism never did, never can, establish itself as a religion. It is the doctrine of the tri-unity that connects Christianity with philosophy, gives a positive religion a specific interest to the philosopher, and that of redemption to the moralist and psychologist. Predestination, in the plenitude, in which it is equivalent to fatalism, was the necessary alternative and succedaneum of Redemption, and the Incarnation the only preservative against pantheism on one side, and anthropomorphism on the other. The Persian (Europeans in Asia) form of Mohammedanism is very striking in this point of view.

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It is not by individual character that an individual can derive just conclusions respecting a community or an age. Conclusions so drawn are the excuse of selfish, narrow and pusillanimous statesmen, who, by dwelling on the kindred baseness or folly of the persons with whom they come in immediate contact, lose all faith in human nature, ignorant that even in these a spark is latent which would light up and consume the worthless overlay in a national moment. The spirit of a race is the character of a people, the sleep or the awakening of which depends on a few minds, pre-ordained for this purpose, and sometimes by the mere removal of the dead weight of a degenerate Court or nobility pressing on the spring. So I doubt not would it be with the Turks, were the Porte and its seraglio conquered by Russia. But the spirit of a race ought never to be supposed extinct, but on the other hand no more or other ought to be expected than the race contains in itself. The true cause of the irrecoverable fall of Rome is to be found in the fact, that Rome was a city, a handful of men that multiplied its subjects incomparably faster than its citizens, so that the latter were soon dilute and lost in the former. On a similar principle colonists in modern times degenerate by excision from their race (the ancient colonies were buds). This, I think, applies to the Neapolitans and most of the Italian States. A nest of republics keep each other alive; but a patchwork of principalities has the effect of excision by insulation, or rather by compressure. How long did the life of Germany doze under these ligatures! Yet did we not despair wrongfully of the people? The spirit of the race survived, of which literature was a part. Hence I dare not despair of Greece, because it has been barbarised and enslaved, but not split up into puny independent governments under Princes of their own race. The Neapolitans have always been a conquered people, and degenerates in the original sense of the word, de genere—they have lost their race, though what it was is uncertain. Lastly, the individual in all things is the prerogative of the divine knowledge. What it is, our eyes can see only by what it has in common, and this can only be seen in communities where neither excision, nor ligature, nor commixture exists. Despotism and superstition will not extinguish the character of a race, as Russia testifies. But again, take care to understand that character, and expect no other fruit than the root contains in its nature.

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Had I proceeded, in concert with R. Southey, with the "Flight and Return of Mohammed," [1799] I had intended to introduce a disputation between Mahomet, as the representative of unipersonal Theism with the Judaico-Christian machinery of angels, genii, and prophets, an idolater with his gods, heroes, and spirits of the departed mighty, and a fetish-worshipper who adored the invisible alone, and held no religion common to all men or any number of men other than as they chanced at the same moment to be acted on by the same influence—even as when a hundred ant-hills are in motion under the same burst of sunshine. And, still, chiefly for the sake of the last scheme, I should like to do something of the kind. My enlightened fetish-divine would have been an Okenist, a zoo-magnetist and (a priest of) the night-side of Nature.

[For the fragment entitled "Mahomet," see P. W., 1893, p. 139, and editor's Note, p. 615.]

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Among the countless arguments against the Paleyans state, this too—Can a wise moral legislator have made prudence the true principle-ground, and guide of moral conduct, where in almost all cases in which there is contemplation to act wrong the first appearances of prudence are in favour of immorality, and, in order to ground the contrary on a principle of prudence, it is necessary to refine, to calculate, to look far onward into an uncertain future? Is this a guide, or primary guide, that for ever requires a guide against itself? Is it not a strange system which sets prudence against prudence? Compare this with the Law of Conscience—Is it not its specific character to be immediate, positive, unalterable? In short, a priori, state the requisites of a moral guide, and apply them first to prudence, and then to the law of pure reason or conscience, and ask if we need fear the result if the Judge is pure from all bribes and prejudices.

What then are the real dictates of prudence as drawn from every man's experience in late manhood, and so lured from the intoxication of youth, hope, and love? How cold, how dead'ning, what a dire vacuum they would leave in the soul, if the high and supreme sense of duty did not form a root out of which new prospects budded. What, I say, is the clear dictate of prudence in the matter of friendship? Assuredly to like only, and never to be so attached as to be stripped naked by the loss. A friend may be a great-coat, a beloved a couch, but never, never our necessary clothing, our only means of quiet heart-repose! And, yet, with this the mind of a generous man would be so miserable, that prudence itself would fight against prudence, and advise him to drink off the draught of Hope, spite of the horrid and bitter dregs of disappointment, with which the draught will assuredly finish.

Though I have said that duty is a consolation, I have not affirmed that the scar of the wound of disappointed love and insulted, betrayed fidelity would be removed in this life. No! it will not—nay, the very duty must for ever keep alive feelings the appropriate objects of which are indeed in another world; but yet our human nature cannot avoid at times the connection of those feelings with their original or their first forms and objects; and so far, therefore, from removing the scar, will often and often make the wound open and bleed afresh. But, still, we know that the feeling is not objectless, that the counterfeit has a correspondent genuine, and this is the comfort.

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Canzone XVIII. fra le Rime di Dante is a poem of wild and interesting images, intended as an enigma, and to me an enigma it remains, spite of all my efforts. Yet it deserves transcription and translation. A.D. 1806 [? 1807].

[After the four first lines the handwriting is that of my old, dear, and honoured friend, Mr. Wade, of Bristol.—S. T. C.]

Ramsgate, Sept. 2nd, 1819.—I begin to understand the above poem, after an interval from 1805, during which no year passed in which I did not reperuse, I might say construe, parse, and spell it, twelve times at least—such a fascination had it, spite of its obscurity! It affords a good instance, by the bye, of that soul of universal significance in a true poet's composition, in addition to the specific meaning.

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Great minds can and do create the taste of the age, and one of the contingent causes which warp the taste of nations and ages is, that men of genius in part yield to it, and in part are acted on by the taste of the age.

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Common minds may be compared to the component drops of the stream of life—men of genius to the large and small bubbles. What if they break? they are still as good as the rest—drops of water.

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In youth our happiness is hope; in age the recollection of the hopes of youth. What else can there be?—for the substantial mind, for the I, what else can there be? Pleasure? Fruition? Filter hope and memory from pleasure, and the more entire the fruition the more is it the death of the I. A neutral product results that may exist for others, but no longer for itself—a coke or a slag. To make the object one with us, we must become one with the object—ergo, an object. Ergo, the object must be itself a subject—partially a favourite dog, principally a friend, wholly God, the Friend. God is Love—that is, an object that is absolutely subject (God is a spirit), but a subject that for ever condescends to become the object for those that meet Him subjectively. [As in the] Eucharist, [He is] verily and truly present to the Faithful, neither [by a] trans nor con, but [by] substantiation.

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We might as well attempt to conceive more than three dimensions of space, as to imagine more than three kinds of living existence—God, man, and beast. And even of these the last (division) is obscure, and scarce endures a fixed contemplation without passing into an unripe or degenerated humanity.

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My mother told my wife that I was a year younger, and that there was a blunder made either in the baptismal register itself or in the transcript sent for my admission into Christ's Hospital; and Mrs. C., who is older than myself, believes me only 48. Be this as it may, in life, if not in years, I am, alas! nearer to 68.

[S. T. C. was born on October 21, 1772. Consequently, on October 20, 1819, he was not yet forty-seven. He entered his forty-eighth year October 21, 1819.]

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N.B.—A sonnet on the child collecting shells and pebbles on the sea-shore or lake-side, and carrying each with a fresh shout of delight and admiration to the mother's apron, who smiles and assents to each "This is pretty!" "Is not that a nice one?" and then when the prattler is tired of its conchozetetic labours lifts up her apron and throws them out on her apron. Such are our first discoveries both in science and philosophy.—S. T. Coleridge, Oct. 21, 1819.

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Found Mr. G. with Hartley in the garden, attempting to explain to himself and to Hartley a feeling of a something not present in Milton's works, that is, in "Paradise Lost,"Paradise Regained," and "Samson Agonistes," which he did feel delightedly in the "Lycidas," and (as I added afterwards) in the Italian sonnets compared with the English. And this appeared to me to be the poet appearing and wishing to appear as the poet, and, likewise, as the man, as much as, though more rare than, the father, the brother, the preacher, and the patriot. Compare with Milton, Chaucer's "Fall of the Leaf" and Spenser throughout, and you cannot but feel what Gillman meant to convey. What is the solution? This, I believe—but I must premise that there is a synthesis of intellectual insight including the mental object, the organ of the correspondent being indivisible, and this (O deep truth!) because the objectivity consists in the universality of its subjectiveness—as when it sees, and millions see even so, and the seeing of the millions is what constitutes to A and to each of the millions the objectivity of the sight, the equivalent to a common object—a synthesis of this, I say, and of proper external object which we call fact. Now, this it is which we find in religion. It is more than philosophical truth—it is other and more than historical fact; it is not made up by the addition of the one to the other, but it is the identity of both, the co-inherence.

Now, this being understood, I proceed to say, using the term objectivity (arbitrarily, I grant), for this identity of truth and fact, that Milton hid the poetry in or transformed (not trans-substantiated) the poetry into this objectivity, while Shakspere, in all things, the divine opposite or antithetic correspondent of the divine Milton, transformed the objectivity into poetry.

Mr. G. observed as peculiar to the Hamlet, that it alone, of all Shakspere's plays, presented to him a moving along before him; while in others it was a moving, indeed, but with which he himself moved equally in all and with all, and without any external something by which the motion was manifested, even as a man would move in a balloon—a sensation of motion, but not a sight of moving and having been moved. And why is this? Because of all the characters of Shakspere's plays Hamlet is the only character with which, by contra-distinction from the rest of the dramatis personÆ, the fit and capable reader identifies himself as the representation of his own contemplative and strictly proper and very own being (action, etc., belongs to others, the moment we call it our own)—hence the events of the play, with all the characters, move because you stand still. In the other plays, your identity is equally diffused over all. Of no parts can you say, as in Hamlet, they are moving. But ever it is we, or that period and portion of human action, which is unified into a dream, even as in a dream the personal unity is diffused and severalised (divided to the sight though united in the dim feeling) into a sort of reality. Even so [it is with] the styles of Milton and Shakspere—the same weight of effect from the exceeding felicity (subjectively) of Shakspere, and the exceeding propriety (extra arbitrium) of Milton.

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The best plan, I think, for a man who would wish his mind to continue growing is to find, in the first place, some means of ascertaining for himself whether it does or no; and I can think of no better than early in life, say after three-and-twenty, to procure gradually the works of some two or three great writers—say, for instance, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, and Kant, with the De RepublicÂ, De Legibus, the Sophistes and Politicus of Plato, and the Poetics, Rhetorics, and Politics of Aristotle—and amidst all other reading, to make a point of reperusing some one, or some weighty part of some one of these every four or five years, having from the beginning a separate note-book for each of these writers, in which your impressions, suggestions, conjectures, doubts and judgments are to be recorded with date of each, and so worded as to represent most sincerely the exact state of your convictions at the time, such as they would be if you did not (which this plan will assuredly make you do sooner or later) anticipate a change in them from increase of knowledge. "It is possible that I am in the wrong, but so it now appears to me, after my best attempts; and I must therefore put it down in order that I may find myself so, if so I am." It would make a little volume to give in detail all the various moral as well as intellectual advantages that would result from the systematic observation of the plan. Diffidence and hope would reciprocally balance and excite each other. A continuity would be given to your being, and its progressiveness ensured. All your knowledge otherwise obtained, whether from books or conversation or experience, would find centres round which it would organise itself. And, lastly, the habit of confuting your past self, and detecting the causes and occasions of your having mistaken or overlooked the truth, will give you both a quickness and a winning kindness, resulting from sympathy, in exposing the errors of others, as if you were an alter ego, of his mistake. And such, indeed, will your antagonist appear to you, another past self—in all points in which the falsity is not too plainly a derivation from a corrupt heart and the predominance of bad passion or worldly interests overlaying the love of truth as truth. And even in this case the liveliness with which you will so often have expressed yourself in your private note-books, in which the words, unsought for and untrimmed because intended for your own eye, exclusively, were the first-born of your first impressions, when you were either enkindled by admiration of your writer, or excited by a humble disputing with him reimpersonated in his book, will be of no mean rhetorical advantage to you, especially in public and extemporary debate or animated conversation.

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Did you deduce your own being? Even that is less absurd than the conceit of deducing the Divine being? Never would you have had the notion, had you not had the idea—rather, had not the idea worked in you like the memory of a name which we cannot recollect and yet feel that we have and which reveals its existence in the mind only by a restless anticipation and proves its a priori actuality by the almost explosive instantaneity with which it is welcomed and recognised on its re-emersion out of the cloud, or its re-ascent from the horizon of consciousness.

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I should like to know whether or how far the delight I feel, and have always felt, in adages or aphorisms of universal or very extensive application is a general or common feeling with men, or a peculiarity of my own mind. I cannot describe how much pleasure I have derived from "Extremes meet," for instance, or "Treat everything according to its nature," and, the last, "Be"! In the last I bring all inward rectitude to its test, in the former all outward morality to its rule, and in the first all problematic results to their solution, and reduce apparent contraries to correspondent opposites. How many hostile tenets has it enabled me to contemplate as fragments of truth, false only by negation and mutual exclusion?

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I have myself too often of late used the phrase "rational self-love" the same as "enlightened self-love." O no more of this! What have love, reason or light to do with self, except as the dark and evil spirit which it is given to them to overcome! Soul-love, if you please. O there is more stuff of thought in our simple and pious fore-elders' adjuration, "Take pity of your poor soul!" than in all the volumes of Paley, Rochefoucauld, and Helvetius!

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N.B.—The injurious manner in which men of genius are treated, not only as authors, but even when they are in social company. A is believed to be, or talked of as, a man of unusual talent. People are anxious to meet him. If he says little or nothing, they wonder at the report, never considering whether they themselves were fit either to excite, or if self-excited to receive and comprehend him. But with the simplicity of genius he attributes more to them than they have, and they put questions that cannot be answered but by a return to first principles, and then they complain of him as not conversing, but lecturing. "He is quite intolerable," "Might as well be hearing a sermon." In short, in answer to some objection, A replies, "Sir, this rests on the distinction between an idea and an image, and, likewise, its difference from a perfect conception." "Pray, sir, explain." Because he does not and cannot [state the case as concisely as if he had been appealed to about a hand at] whist, 'tis "Lord! how long he talks," and they never ask themselves, Did this man force himself into your company? Was he not dragged into it? What is the practical result? That the man of genius should live as much as possible with beings that simply love him, from relationship or old association, or with those that have the same feelings with himself; but in all other company he will do well to cease to be the man of genius, and make up his mind to appear dull or commonplace as a companion, to be the most silent except upon the most trivial subjects of any in the company, to turn off questions with a joke or a pun as not suiting a wine-table, and to trust only to his writings.

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Few die of a broken heart, and these few (the surgeons tell us) know nothing of it, and, dying suddenly, leave to the dissector the first discovery. O this is but the shallow remark of a hard and unthinking prosperity! Have you never seen a stick broken in the middle, and yet cohering by the rind? The fibres, half of them actually broken and the rest sprained and, though tough, unsustaining? O many, many are the broken-hearted for those who know what the moral and practical heart of the man is!

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Now the breeze through the stiff and brittle-becoming foliage of the trees counterfeits the sound of a rushing stream or water-flood suddenly sweeping by. The sigh, the modulated continuousness of the murmur is exchanged for the confusion of overtaking sounds—the self-evolution of the One, for the clash or stroke of ever-commencing contact of the multitudinous, without interspace, by confusion. The short gusts rustle and the ear feels the unlithesome dryness, before the eye detects the coarser, duller, though deeper green, deadened and not [yet] awakened into the hues of decay—echoes of spring from the sepulchral vault of winter. The aged year, conversant with the forms of its youth and forgetting all the intervals, feebly reproduces them [as it were, from], memory.

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"Constancy lives in realms above." This exclusion of constancy from the list of earthly virtues may be a poet's exaggeration, but, certainly, it is of far rarer occurrence in all relations of life than the young and warm-hearted are willing to believe, but in cases of exclusive attachment (that is, in Love, properly so-called, and yet distinct from Friendship), and in the highest form of the Virtue, it is so rare that I cannot help doubting whether an instance of mutual constancy in effect ever existed. For there are two sorts of constancy, the one negative, where there is no transfer of affection, where the bond of attachment is not broken though it may be attenuated to a thread—this may be met with, not so seldom, and, where there is goodness of heart, it may be expected—but the other sort, or positive constancy, where the affection endures in the same intensity with the same or increased tenderness and nearness, of this it is that I doubt whether once in an age an instance occurs where A feels it toward B, and B feels it towards A, and vice versÂ.

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Spring flowers, I have observed, look best in the day, and by sunshine: but summer and autumnal flower-pots by lamp or candle-light. I have now before me a flower-pot of cherry-blossoms, polyanthuses, double violets, periwinkles, wall-flowers, but how dim and dusky they look! The scarlet anemone is an exception, and three or four of them with all the rest of the flower-glass sprays of white blossoms, and one or two periwinkles for the sake of the dark green leaves, green stems, and flexible elegant form, make a lovely group both by sun and by candle-light.

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Grove, Highgate.

What an interval! Heard the singing birds this morning in our garden for the first time this year, though it rained and blew fiercely; but the long frost has broken up, and the wind, though fierce, was warm and westerly.

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To the right understanding of the most awfully concerning declaration of Holy Writ there has been no greater obstacle than the want of insight into the nature of Life—what it is and what it is not. But in order to this, the mind must have been raised to the contemplation of the Idea—the life celestial, to wit—or the distinctive essence and character of the Holy Spirit. Here Life is Love—communicative, outpouring love. Ergo, the terrestrial or the Life of Nature ever the shadow and opposite of the Divine is appropriative, absorbing appetence. But the great mistake is, that the soul cannot continue without life; for, if so, with what propriety can the portion of the reprobate soul be called Death? What if the natural life have two possible terminations—true Being and the falling back into the dark Will?

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The painter-parson, Rev. Mr. Judkin, is about to show off a Romish priest converted to the Protestant belief, on Sunday next at his church, and asked of me (this day, at Mr. Gray's, Friday, 27th July, 1827) whether I knew of any form of recantation but that of Archbishop Tenison. I knew nothing of Tenison's or any other, but expressed my opinion that no other recantation ought to be required than a declaration that he admitted no outward authority superior to, or co-ordinate with, the canonical Scriptures, and no interpreter that superseded or stood in the place of the Holy Spirit, enlightening the mind of each true believer, according to his individual needs. I can conceive a person holding all the articles that distinguish the Romish from the Protestant conception, with this one exception; and, yet, if he did make this exception, and professed to believe them, because he thought they were contained in, or to be fairly inferred from, right reason and the Scriptures, I should consider him as true a Protestant as Luther, Knox, or Calvin, and a far better than Laud and his compeers, however meanly I might think of him as a philosopher and theologian. The laying so great a stress on transubstantiation I have long regarded as the great calamity or error of the Reformation—if not constrained by circumstances, the great error—or, if constrained, the great calamity.

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The sweet prattle of the chimes—counsellors pleading in the court of Love—then the clock, the solemn sentence of the mighty Judge—long pause between each pregnant, inappellable word, too deeply weighed to be reversed in the High-Justice-Court of Time and Fate. A more richly solemn sound than this eleven o'clock at Antwerp I never heard—dead enough to be opaque as central gold, yet clear enough to be the mountain air.

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