Kitabı oku: «Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge», sayfa 6

May 8. 1830

HORNE TOOKE.—JACOBINS

Horne Tooke said that his friends might, if they pleased, go as far as Slough,—he should go no farther than Hounslow; but that was no reason why he should not keep them company so far as their roads were the same. The answer is easy. Suppose you know, or suspect, that a man is about to commit a robbery at Slough, though you do not mean to be his accomplice, have you a moral right to walk arm in arm with him to Hounslow, and, by thus giving him your countenance, prevent his being taken up? The history of all the world tells us, that immoral means will ever intercept good ends.

* * * * *

Enlist the interests of stern morality and religious enthusiasm in the cause of political liberty, as in the time of the old Puritans, and it will be irresistible; but the Jacobins played the whole game of religion, and morals, and domestic happiness into the hands of the aristocrats. Thank God! that they did so. England was saved from civil war by their enormous, their providential, blundering.

* * * * *

Can a politician, a statesman, slight the feelings and the convictions of the whole matronage of his country? The women are as influential upon such national interests as the men.

* * * * *

Horne Tooke was always making a butt of Mr. Godwin; who, nevertheless, had that in him which Tooke could never have understood. I saw a good deal of Tooke at one time: he left upon me the impression of his being a keen, iron man.

May 9. 1830

PERSIAN AND ARABIC POETRY.—MILESIAN TALES

I must acknowledge I never could see much merit in the Persian poetry, which I have read in translation. There is not a ray of imagination in it, and but a glimmering of fancy. It is, in fact, so far as I know, deficient in truth. Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least. The Arabian Nights' Tales are a different thing —they are delightful, but I cannot help surmising that there is a good deal of Greek fancy in them. No doubt we have had a great loss in the Milesian Tales.⁴⁷ The book of Job is pure Arab poetry of the highest and most antique cast.

Think of the sublimity, I should rather say the profundity, of that passage in Ezekiel,⁴⁸ "Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest." I know nothing like it.

May 11. 1830

SIR T. MONRO.—SIR S. RAFFLES.—CANNING

Sir Thomas Monro and Sir Stamford Raffles were both great men; but I recognise more genius in the latter, though, I believe, the world says otherwise.

* * * * *

I never found what I call an idea in any speech or writing of –'s. Those enormously prolix harangues are a proof of weakness in the higher intellectual grasp. Canning had a sense of the beautiful and the good; – rarely speaks but to abuse, detract, and degrade. I confine myself to institutions, of course, and do not mean personal detraction. In my judgment, no man can rightly apprehend an abuse till he has first mastered the idea of the use of an institution. How fine, for example, is the idea of the unhired magistracy of England, taking in and linking together the duke to the country gentleman in the primary distribution of justice, or in the preservation of order and execution of law at least throughout the country! Yet some men never seem to have thought of it for one moment, but as connected with brewers, and barristers, and tyrannical Squire Westerns! From what I saw of Homer, I thought him a superior man, in real intellectual greatness.

* * * * *

Canning flashed such a light around the constitution, that it was difficult to see the ruins of the fabric through it.

May 12. 1830

SHAKSPEARE.—MILTON.—HOMER

Shakspeare is the Spinosistic deity—an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed,– epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out. No one can understand Shakspeare's superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, all that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shakspeare's own. His rhythm is so perfect, that you may be almost sure that you do not understand the real force of a line, if it does not run well as you read it. The necessary mental pause after every hemistich or imperfect line is always equal to the time that would have been taken in reading the complete verse.

* * * * *

I have no doubt whatever that Homer is a mere concrete name for the rhapsodies of the Iliad.⁴⁹ Of course there was a Homer, and twenty besides. I will engage to compile twelve books with characters just as distinct and consistent as those in the Iliad, from the metrical ballads, and other chronicles of England, about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I say nothing about moral dignity, but the mere consistency of character. The different qualities were traditional. Tristram is always courteous, Lancelot invincible, and so on. The same might be done with the Spanish romances of the Cid. There is no subjectivity whatever in the Homeric poetry. There is a subjectivity of the poet, as of Milton, who is himself before himself in everything he writes; and there is a subjectivity of the persona, or dramatic character, as in all Shakspeare's great creations, Hamlet, Lear, &c.

May 14. 1830

REASON AND UNDERSTANDING.—WORDS AND NAMES OF THINGS

Until you have mastered the fundamental difference, in kind, between the reason and the understanding as faculties of the human mind, you cannot escape a thousand difficulties in philosophy. It is pre-eminently the Gradus ad Philosophiam.

* * * * *

The general harmony between the operations of the mind and heart, and the words which express them in almost all languages, is wonderful; whilst the endless discrepancies between the names of things is very well deserving notice. There are nearly a hundred names in the different German dialects for the alder-tree. I believe many more remarkable instances are to be found in Arabic. Indeed, you may take a very pregnant and useful distinction between words and mere arbitrary names of things.

May 15. 1830

THE TRINITY.—IRVING

The Trinity is, 1. the Will; 2. the Reason, or Word; 3. the Love, or Life. As we distinguish these three, so we must unite them in one God. The union must be as transcendant as the distinction.

Mr. Irving's notion is tritheism,—nay, rather in terms, tri-daemonism. His opinion about the sinfulness of the humanity of our Lord is absurd, if considered in one point of view; for body is not carcass. How can there be a sinful carcass? But what he says is capable of a sounder interpretation. Irving caught many things from me; but he would never attend to any thing which he thought he could not use in the pulpit. I told him the certain consequence would be, that he would fall into grievous errors. Sometimes he has five or six pages together of the purest eloquence, and then an outbreak of almost madman's babble.⁵⁰

May 16. 1830

ABRAHAM.—ISAAC.—JACOB

How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure, if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, "the friend of God," Abraham was that man. We are not surprised that Abimelech and Ephron seem to reverence him so profoundly. He was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to God; in other respects, he takes fire, like an Arah sheikh, at the injuries suffered by Lot, and goes to war with the combined kinglings immediately.

* * * * *

Isaac is, as it were, a faint shadow of his father Abraham. Born in possession of the power and wealth which his father had acquired, he is always peaceful and meditative; and it is curious to observe his timid and almost childish imitation of Abraham's stratagem about his wife.⁵¹ Isaac does it before-hand, and without any apparent necessity.

* * * * *

Jacob is a regular Jew, and practises all sorts of tricks and wiles, which, according to our modern notions of honour, we cannot approve. But you will observe that all these tricks are confined to matters of prudential arrangement, to worldly success and prosperity (for such, in fact, was the essence of the birthright); and I think we must not exact from men of an imperfectly civilized age the same conduct as to mere temporal and bodily abstinence which we have a right to demand from Christians. Jacob is always careful not to commit any violence; he shudders at bloodshed. See his demeanour after the vengeance taken on the Schechemites.⁵² He is the exact compound of the timidity and gentleness of Isaac, and of the underhand craftiness of his mother Rebecca. No man could be a bad man who loved as he loved Rachel. I dare say Laban thought none the worse of Jacob for his plan of making the ewes bring forth ring-streaked lambs.

May 17. 1830

ORIGIN OF ACTS.—LOVE

If a man's conduct cannot be ascribed to the angelic, nor to the bestial within him, what is there left for us to refer to it, but the fiendish? Passion without any appetite is fiendish.

* * * * *

The best way to bring a clever young man, who has become sceptical and unsettled, to reason, is to make him feel something in any way. Love, if sincere and unworldly, will, in nine instances out of ten, bring him to a sense and assurance of something real and actual; and that sense alone will make him think to a sound purpose, instead of dreaming that he is thinking.

* * * * *

"Never marry but for love," says William Penn in his Reflexions and Maxims; "but see that thou lovest what is lovely."

May 18. 1830

LORD ELDON'S DOCTRINE AS TO GRAMMAR SCHOOLS.—DEMOCRACY

Lord Eldon's doctrine, that grammar schools, in the sense of the reign of Edward VI. and Queen Elizabeth, must necessarily mean schools for teaching Latin and Greek, is, I think, founded on an insufficient knowledge of the history and literature of the sixteenth century. Ben Jonson uses the term "grammar" without any reference to the learned languages.

* * * * *

It is intolerable when men, who have no other knowledge, have not even a competent understanding of that world in which they are always living, and to which they refer every thing.

* * * * *

Although contemporary events obscure past events in a living man's life, yet as soon as he is dead, and his whole life is a matter of history, one action stands out as conspicuously as another.

A democracy, according to the prescript of pure reason, would, in fact, be a church. There would he focal points in it, but no superior.

May 20. 1830

THE EUCHARIST.—ST. JOHN, xix. 11.—GENUINENESS OF BOOKS OF MOSES.– DIVINITY OF CHRIST.—MOSAIC PROPHECIES

No doubt, Chrysostom, and the other rhetorical fathers, contributed a good deal, by their rash use of figurative language, to advance the superstitious notion of the eucharist; but the beginning had been much earlier.⁵³ [1] In Clement, indeed, the mystery is treated as it was treated by Saint John and Saint Paul; but in Hermas we see the seeds of the error, and more clearly in Irenaeus; and so it went on till the idea was changed into an idol.

* * * * *

The errors of the Sacramentaries, on the one hand, and of the Romanists on the other, are equally great. The first have volatilized the eucharist into a metaphor; the last have condensed it into an idol.

Jeremy Taylor, in his zeal against transubstantiation, contends that the latter part of the sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel has no reference to the eucharist. If so, St. John wholly passes over this sacred mystery; for he does not include it in his notice of the last supper. Would not a total silence of this great apostle and evangelist upon this mystery be strange? A mystery, I say; for it is a mystery; it is the only mystery in our religious worship. When many of the disciples left our Lord, and apparently on the very ground that this saying was hard, he does not attempt to detain them by any explanation, but simply adds the comment, that his words were spirit. If he had really meant that the eucharist should he a mere commemorative celebration of his death, is it conceivable that he would let these disciples go away from him upon such a gross misunderstanding? Would he not have said, "You need not make a difficulty; I only mean so and so?"

* * * * *

Arnauld, and the other learned Romanists, are irresistible against the low sacramentary doctrine.

* * * * *

The sacrament of baptism applies itself, and has reference to the faith or conviction, and is, therefore, only to be performed once;—it is the light of man. The sacrament of the eucharist is a symbol of all our religion;– it is the life of man. It is commensurate with our will, and we must, therefore, want it continually.

* * * * *

The meaning of the expression, [Greek: ei m_e _en soi didomenon an_othen], "except it were given thee from above," in the 19th chapter of St. John, ver. 11., seems to me to have been generally and grossly mistaken. It is commonly understood as importing that Pilate could have no power to deliver Jesus to the Jews, unless it had been given him by God, which, no doubt, is true; but if that is the meaning, where is the force or connection of the following clause, [Greek: dia touto], "therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin?" In what respect were the Jews more sinful in delivering Jesus up, because Pilate could do nothing except by God's leave? The explanation of Erasmus and Clarke, and some others, is very dry- footed. I conceive the meaning of our Lord to have been simply this, that Pilate would have had no power or jurisdiction—[Greek: exousian]—over him, if it had not been given by the Sanhedrin, the [Greek: an_o boul_e], and therefore it was that the Jews had the greater sin. There was also this further peculiar baseness and malignity in the conduct of the Jews. The mere assumption of Messiahship, as such, was no crime in the eyes of the Jews; they hated Jesus, because he would not be their sort of Messiah: on the other hand, the Romans cared not for his declaration that he was the Son of God; the crime in their eyes was his assuming to be a king. Now, here were the Jews accusing Jesus before the Roman governor of that which, in the first place, they knew that Jesus denied in the sense in which they urged it, and which, in the next place, had the charge been true, would have been so far from a crime in their eyes, that the very gospel history itself, as well as all the history to the destruction of Jerusalem, shows it would have been popular with the whole nation. They wished to destroy him, and for that purpose charge him falsely with a crime which yet was no crime in their own eyes, if it had been true; but only so as against the Roman domination, which they hated with all their souls, and against which they were themselves continually conspiring!

* * * * *

Observe, I pray, the manner and sense in which the high-priest understands the plain declaration of our Lord, that he was the Son of God. [Footnote: Matt. xxvi. v. 63. Mark, xiv. 61.] "I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God," or "the Son of the Blessed," as it is in Mark. Jesus said, "I am,—and hereafter ye shall see the Son of man (or me) sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." Does Caiaphas take this explicit answer as if Jesus meant that he was full of God's spirit, or was doing his commands, or walking in his ways, in which sense Moses, the prophets, nay, all good men, were and are the sons of God? No, no! He tears his robes in sunder, and cries out, "He hath spoken blasphemy. What further need have we of witnesses? Behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy." What blasphemy, I should like to know, unless the assuming to be the "Son of God" was assuming to be of the divine nature?

* * * * *

One striking proof of the genuineness of the Mosaic books is this,—they contain precise prohibitions—by way of predicting the consequences of disobedience—of all those things which David and Solomon actually did, and gloried in doing,—raising cavalry, making a treaty with Egypt, laying up treasure, and polygamising. Now, would such prohibitions have been fabricated in those kings' reigns, or afterwards? Impossible.

* * * * *

The manner of the predictions of Moses is very remarkable. He is like a man standing on an eminence, and addressing people below him, and pointing to things which he can, and they cannot, see. He does not say, You will act in such and such a way, and the consequences will be so and so; but, So and so will take place, because you will act in such a way!

May 21. 1830

TALENT AND GENIUS.—MOTIVES AND IMPULSES

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never.

* * * * *

Motives imply weakness, and the existence of evil and temptation. The angelic nature would act from impulse alone. A due mean of motive and impulse is the only practicable object of our moral philosophy.

May 23. 1830

CONSTITUTIONAL AND FUNCTIONAL LIFE.—HYSTERIA.—HYDRO-CARBONIC GAS.– BITTERS AND TONICS.—SPECIFIC MEDICINES

It is a great error in physiology not to distinguish between what may be called the general or fundamental life—the principium vitae, and the functional life—the life in the functions. Organization must presuppose life as anterior to it: without life, there could not be or remain any organization; but then there is also a life in the organs, or functions, distinct from the other. Thus, a flute presupposes,—demands the existence of a musician as anterior to it, without whom no flute could ever have existed; and yet again, without the instrument there can be no music.

* * * * *

It often happens that, on the one hand, the principium vitae, or constitutional life, may be affected without any, or the least imaginable, affection of the functions; as in inoculation, where one pustule only has appeared, and no other perceptible symptom, and yet this has so entered into the constitution, as to indispose it to infection under the most accumulated and intense contagion; and, on the other hand, hysteria, hydrophobia, and gout will disorder the functions to the most dreadful degree, and yet often leave the life untouched. In hydrophobia, the mind is quite sound; but the patient feels his muscular and cutaneous life forcibly removed from under the control of his will.

* * * * *

Hysteria may be fitly called mimosa, from its counterfeiting so many diseases,—even death itself.

* * * * *

Hydro-carbonic gas produces the most death-like exhaustion, without any previous excitement. I think this gas should be inhaled by way of experiment in cases of hydrophobia.

There is a great difference between bitters and tonics. Where weakness proceeds from excess of irritability, there bitters act beneficially; because all bitters are poisons, and operate by stilling, and depressing, and lethargizing the irritability. But where weakness proceeds from the opposite cause of relaxation, there tonics are good; because they brace up and tighten the loosened string. Bracing is a correct metaphor. Bark goes near to be a combination of a bitter and a tonic; but no perfect medical combination of the two properties is yet known.

* * * * *

The study of specific medicines is too much disregarded now. No doubt the hunting after specifics is a mark of ignorance and weakness in medicine, yet the neglect of them is proof also of immaturity; for, in fact, all medicines will be found specific in the perfection of the science.

May 25. 1830

EPISTLES TO THE EPHESIANS AND COLOSSIANS.—OATHS

The Epistle to the Ephesians is evidently a catholic epistle, addressed to the whole of what might be called St. Paul's diocese. It is one of the divinest compositions of man. It embraces every doctrine of Christianity;– first, those doctrines peculiar to Christianity, and then those precepts common to it with natural religion. The Epistle to the Colossians is the overflowing, as it were, of St. Paul's mind upon the same subject.

* * * * *

The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, a sin to do so. The Jews' oath is an adjuration by the judge to the witness: "In the name of God, I ask you." There is an express instance of it in the high-priest's adjuring or exorcising Christ by the living God, in the twenty-sixth chapter of Matthew, and you will observe that our Lord answered the appeal.⁵⁴

You may depend upon it, the more oath-taking, the more lying, generally among the people.