266 Course of Lectures case, and perhaps Swift's ; though Swift again would require a separate classification. 2. In the traits of human nature, which so easily assume a particular cast and colour from individual character. Hence this excellence and the pathos connected with it quickly pass into humour, and form the ground of it. See particularly the beautiful passage, so well known, of Uncle Toby's catching and liberating the fly : " Go," — says he, one day at dinner, to an overgrown one which had buzzed about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner- time, and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him ; — " I'll not hurt thee," says my Uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room, with the fly in his hand, — " I'll not hurt a hair of thy head : — " Go," says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape ; — " go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee ? This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me." Vol. ii. ch. 12. Observe in this incident how individual character may be given by the mere delicacy of presentation and elevation in degree of a common good quality, humanity, which in itself would not be characteristic at all. 3. In Mr. Shandy's character, — the essence of which is a craving for sympathy in exact proportion to the oddity and unsympathizability of what he proposes ; — this coupled with an instinctive desire to be at least disputed with, or rather both in one, to dispute and yet to agree — and holding as worst of all — to acquiesce without either resistance or sjmipathy. This is charmingly, indeed, pro- foundly conceived, and is psychologically and ethically true of all Mr. Shandies. Note, too, how the contrasts of character, which are always either balanced or remedied, increase the love between the brothers. 4. No writer is so happy as Sterne in the unexaggerated and truly natural representation of that species of slander, which consists in gossiping about our neighbours, as whet- stones of our moral discrimination ; as if they were conscience-blocks which we used in our apprenticeship, in order not to waste such precious materials as our own consciences in the trimming and shaping of ourselves by self-examination : — Alas o'day ! — had Mrs. Shandy, (poor gentlewoman !) had but her wish in going up to town just to lie in and come down again ; Lecture IX. 267 which, they say, she begged and prayed for upon her bare knees, and which, in my opinion, considering the fortune which Mr. Shandy got with her, was no such mighty matter to have complied with, the lady and her babe might both of them have been alive at this hour. Vol. i. c. i8. 5. When you have secured a man's Hkings and pre- judices in your favour, you may then safely appeal to his impartial judgment. In the following passage not only is acute sense shrouded in wit, but a life and a character are added which exalt the whole into the dramatic : — " I see plainly. Sir, by your looks " (or as the case happened) my father would say — " that you do not heartily subscribe to this opinion of mine — which, to those," he would add, " who have not carefully sifted it to the bottom, — I own has an air more of fancy than of solid reasoning in it ; and yet, my dear Sir, if I may pre- sume to know your character, I am morally assured I should hazard little in stating a case to you, not as a party in the dispute, but as a judge, and trusting my appeal upon it to your good sense and candid disquisition in this matter ; you are a persoA free from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men ; and, if I may presume to penetrate farther into you, of a liberality of genius above bearing down an opinion, merely because it wants friends. Your son, — your dear son, — from whose sweet and open temper you have so much to expect, — your Billy, Sir ! — would you, for the world, have called him Judas ? Would you, my dear Sir," he would say, laying his hand upon your breast, with the genteelest address, — and in that soft and irresistible piano of voice, which the nature of the argumentum ad hominem absolutely re- quires, — " Would you, Sir, if a Jew of a godfather had proposed the name for your child, and offered you his purse along with it, would you have consented to such a desecration of him ? O my God ! " he would say, looking up, " if I know your temper rightly. Sir, you are incapable of it ; — you would have trampled upon the offer ; — you would have thrown the temptation at the tempter's head with abhorrence. Your greatness of mind in this action, which I admire, with that generous contempt of money, which you show me in the whole transaction, is really noble ; — and what renders it more so, is the principle of it ; — the workings of a parent's love upon the truth and conviction of this very hypothesis, namely, that were your son called Judas, — the sordid and treacherous idea, so inseparable from the name, would have accompanied him through life like his shadow, and in the end made a miser and a rascal of him, in spite. Sir, of your example." Vol. i. c. 19. 6. There is great physiognomic tact in Sterne. See it particularly displayed in his description of Dr. Slop, accompanied with all that happiest use of drapery and attitude, which at once give reality by individualizing and vividness by unusual, yet probable, combinations : — Imagine to yourself a little squat uncourtly figure of a Doctor 268 Course of Lectures Slop, of about four feet and a half perpendicular height, with a breadth of back, and a sesquipedality of belly, which might have done honour to a serjeant in the horseguards. « * K * * Imagine such a one ; — for such, I say, were the outlines of Doctor Slop's figure, coming slowly along, foot by foot, waddling through the dirt upon the vertebrce of a little diminutive pony, of a pretty colour — but of strength, — alack ! scarce able to have made an amble of it, under such a fardel, had the roads been in an ambling condition ; — they were not. Imagine to yourself Obadiah mounted upon a strong monster of a coach-horse, pricked into a full gallop, and making all practicable speed the adverse way. Vol. ii. c. 9. 7. I think there is more humour in the single remark, which I have quoted before — " Learned men, brother Toby, don't write dialogues upon long noses for nothing ! " — than in the whole Slawkenburghian tale that follows, which is mere oddity interspersed with drollery. ^ 8. Note Sterne's assertion of, and faith in a moral good in the characters of Trim, Toby, &c. as contrasted with the cold scepticism of motives which is the stamp of the Jacobin spirit. Vol. v. c. 9. 9. You must bear in mind, in order to do justice to Rabelais and Sterne, that by right of humoristic univer- sality each part is essentially a whole in itself. Hence the digressive spirit is not mere wantonness, but in fact the very form and vehicle of their genius. The connection, such as was needed, is given by the continuity of the characters. Instances of different forms of wit, taken largely : 1. " Why are you reading romances at your age ? " — " Why, 1 used to be fond of history, but I have given it up, — it was so grossly improbable." 2. " Pray, sir, do it ! — although you have promised me." 3. The Spartan's mother — " Return with, or on, thy shield." " My sword is too short ! " — " Take a step forwarder." 4. The Gasconade : — " I believe you, Sir ! but you will excuse my repeating it on account of my provincial accent." 5. Pasquil on Pope Urban, who had employed a com- mittee to rip up the old errors of his predecessors. Some one placed a pair of spurs on the heels of the Lecture X. 269 statue of St. Peter, and a label from the opposite statue of St. Paul, on the same bridge ; — St. Paul. " Whither then are you bound ? " Si. Peter. " I apprehend danger here ; — they'll soon call me in question for denying my Master." St. Paul. " Nay, then, I had better be off too ; for they'll question me for having persecuted the Christians, before my conversion." 6. Speaking of the small German potentates, I dictated the phrase, — officious for equivalents. This my amanu- ensis wrote, — fishing for elephants ; — which, as I observed at the time, was a sort of Noah's angling, that could hardly have occurred, except at the commencement of the Deluge. LECTURE X. Donne — Dante — Milton — Paradise Lost. DONNE.i Born in London, 1573. — Died, 1631. With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots, Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots ; Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue, Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw. II. See lewdness and theology combin'd, — A cynic and a sycophantic mind ; A fancy shar'd party per pale between Death's heads and skeletons, and Aretine ! — Not his peculiar defect or crime, But the true current mintage of the time. Such were the establish'd signs and tokens given To mark a loyal churchman, sound and even. Free from papistic and fanatic leaven. The wit of Donne, the wit of Butler, the wit of Pope, the wit of Congreve, the wit of Sheridan — how many disparate things are here expressed by one and the same word. Wit ! 1 Nothing remains of what was said on Donne in this Lecture. Here, therefore, as in previous like instances, the gap is filled up with some notes written by Mr. Coleridge in a volume of Chalmers' Poets, belonging to Mr. Gillman. The verses were added in 270 Course of Lectures — Wonder-exciting vigour, intenseness and peculiarity of thought, using at will the almost boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects, where we have no right to expect it — this is the wit of Donne ! The four others I am just in the mood to describe and inter- distinguish ; — what a pity that the marginal space will not let me ! My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plain hearts do in the faces rest ; Where can we find two fitter hemispheres Without sharp north, without decHning west ? Good -Morrow, v. 15, &c. The sense is ; — Our mutual loves may in many respects be fitly compared to corresponding hemispheres ; but as no simile squares [nihil simile est idem), so here the simile fails, for there is nothing in our loves that corresponds to the cold north, or the declining west, which in two hemi- spheres must necessarily be supposed. But an ellipse of such length will scarcely rescue the line from the charge of nonsense or a bull. January, 1829. Woman's constancy. A misnomer. The title ought to be — Mutual Inconstancy. WTiether both th' Indias of spice and mine, &c. Sun Rising, v. 17. And see at night thy western land of mine, &c. Progress of the Soul, i Song, 2. st. This use of the word mim specifically for mines of gold, silver, or precious stones, is, I believe, peculiar to Donne. DANTE. Bom at Florence, 1265. — Died, 1321. As I remarked in a former Lecture on a different subject (for subjects the most diverse in literature have still their tangents), the Gothic character, and its good and evil fruits, appeared less in Italy than in any other part of European Christendom. There was accordingly much less romance, as that word is commonly understood ; or, pencil to the collection of commendatory lines ; No. I. is Mr. C.'s ; the publication of No. II. I trust the all-accomplished author will, under the circumstances, pardon. Numerous and elaborate notes by Mr. Coleridge on Donne's Sermons are in exktence, and will be published hereafter. EtJ. Lecture X. 271 perhaps, more truly stated, there was romance instead of chivalry. In Italy, an earlier imitation of, and a more evident and intentional blending with, the Latin hterature took place than elsewhere. The operation of the feudal system, too, was incalculably weaker, of that singular chain of independent interdependents, the principle of which was a confederacy for the preservation of individual, consistently with general, freedom. In short, Italy, in the time of Dante, was an after-birth of eldest Greece, a renewal or a reflex of the old Italy under its kings and first Roman consuls, a net-work of free little republics, with the same domestic feuds, civil wars, and party spirit, — the same vices and virtues produced on a similarly narrow theatre, — the existing state of things being, as in all small democracies, under the working and direction of certain individuals, to whose will even the laws were swayed ; — whilst at the same time the singular spectacle was ex- hibited amidst aU this confusion of the flourishing of commerce, and the protection and encouragement of letters and arts. Never was the commercial spirit so well reconciled to the nobler principles of social pohty as in Florence. It tended there to union and permanence and elevation, — not as the overbalance of it in England is now doing, to dislocation, change and moral degradation. The intensest patriotism reigned in these communities, but confined and attached exclusively to the small locality of the patriot's birth and residence ; whereas in the true Gothic feudalism, country was nothing but the preserva- tion of personal independence. But then, on the other hand, as a counterbalance to these disuniting elements, there was in Dante's Italy, as in Greece, a much greater uniformity of religion common to all than amongst the northern nations. Upon these hints the history of the repubhcan seras of ancient Greece and modern Italy ought to be written. There are three kinds or stages of historic narrative ; — I. that of the annalist or chronicler, who deals merely in facts and events arranged in order of time, having no prin- ciple of selection, no plan of arrangement, and whose work properly constitutes a supplement to the poetical writings of romance or heroic legends : — 2. that of the writer who takes his stand on some moral point, and selects a series of events for the express purpose of illustrating it, and in 272 Course of Lectures whose hands the narrative of the selected events is modified by the principle of selection ; — as Thucydides, whose object was to describe the evils of democratic and aristocratic partizanships ; — or Polybius, whose design was to show the social benefits resulting from the triumph and grandeur of Rome, in public institutions and military discipline ; — or Tacitus, whose secret aim was to exhibit the pressure and corruptions of despotism ; — in all which writers and others hke them, the ground-object of the historian colours with artificial lights the facts which he relates : — 3. and which in idea is the grandest — the most truly founded in philosophy — there is the Herodotean history, which is not composed with reference to any particular causes, but attempts to describe human nature itself on a great scale as a portion of the drama of providence, the free will of man resisting the destiny of events, — for the individuals often succeeding against it, but for the race always yielding to it, and in the resistance itself invariably affording means towards the completion of the ultimate result. Mitford's history is a good and useful work ; but in his zeal against democratic government, Mitford forgot, or never saw, that ancient Greece was not, nor ought ever to be considered, a per- manent thing, but that it existed, in the disposition of pro- vidence, as a proclaimer of ideal truths, and that everlast- ing proclamation being made, that its functions were naturally at an end. However, in the height of such a state of society in Italy, Dante was born and flourished ; and was himself eminently a picture of the age in which he lived. But of more im- portance even than this, to a right understanding of Dante, is the consideration that the scholastic philosophy was then at its acme even in itself ; but more especially in Italy, where it never prevailed so exclusively as northward of the Alps. It is impossible to understand the genius of Dante, and difficult to understand his poem, without some knowledge of the characters, studies, and writings of the schoolmen of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. For Dante was the living link between religion and philosophy ; he philosophized the religion and chris- tianized the philosophy of Italy ; and, in this poetic union of religion and philosophy, he became the ground of tran- sition into the mixed Platonism and Aristotelianism of the Schools, under which, by numerous minute articles of faith Lecture X. 273 and ceremony, Christianity became a craft of hair-splitting, and was ultimately degraded into a complete fetisch worship, divorced from philosophy, and made up of a faith without thought, and a credulity directed by passion. Afterwards, indeed, philosophy revived under condition of defending this very superstition ; and, in so doing, it necessarily led the way to its subversion, and that in exact proportion to the influence of the philosophic schools. Hence it did its work most completely in Germany, then in England, next in France, then in Spain, least of all in Italy. We must, therefore, take the poetry of Dante as chris- tianized, but without the further Gothic accession of proper chivalry. It was at a somewhat later period, that the importations from the East, through the Venetian com- merce and the crusading armaments, exercised a pecu- liarly strong influence on Italy. In studying Dante, therefore, we must consider carefully the differences produced, first, by allegory being sub- stituted for polytheism ; and secondly and mainly, by the opposition of Christianity to the spirit of pagan Greece, which receiving the very names of its gods from Egypt, soon deprived them of all that was universal. The Greeks changed the ideas into finites, and these finites into anthro- pomorphi, or forms of men. Hence their religion, their poetry, nay, their very pictures, became statuesque. With them the form was the end. The reverse of this was the natural effect of Christianity ; in which finites, even the human form, must, in order to satisfy the mind, be brought into connexion with, and be in fact s3mibolical of, the infinite ; and must be considered in some enduring, how- ever shadowy and indistinct, point of view, as the vehicle or representative of moral truth. Hence resulted two great effects ; a combination of poetry with doctrine, and, by turning the mind inward on its own essence instead of letting it act only on its outward circumstances and communities, a combination of poetry with sentiment. And it is this inwardness or subjectivity, which principally and most fundamentally distinguishes all the classic from all the modern poetry. Compare the passage in the Iliad (Z". vi. 119 — 236) in which Diomed and Glaucus change arms, — Xe?pds t' aSXrjKtJiv Xa^iTrjv Kal inaTwcavTO — They took each other by the hand, and pledged friendship — 274 Course of Lectures with the scene in Ariosto (Orlando Furioso, c. i. st. 20-22), where Rinaldo and Ferrauto fight and afterwards make it up : — Al Pagan la proposta non dispiacque : Cosl fu difierita la tenzone ; E tal tregua tra lor subito nacque, 81 r odio e 1' ira va in oblivione, Che '1 Pagano al partir dalle fresche acque Non lascio a piede il buon figliuol d' Amone ; Con preghi invita, e al tin lo toglie in groppa, E per r orme d' Angelica galoppa. Here Homer would have left it. But the Christian poet has his own feelings to express, and goes on : — Oh gran bonta de' cavalieri antiqui I Eran rivali, eran di fe diversi, E si sentian degli aspri colpi iniqui Per tutta la persona anco dolersi ; E pur per selve oscure e calli obbliqui Insieme van senza sospetto aversi ! And here you will observe, that the reaction of Ariosto's own feelings on the image or act is more fore-grounded (to use a painter's phrase) than the image or act itself. The two different modes in which the imagination is acted on by the ancient and modern poetry, may be illus- trated by the parallel effects caused by the contemplation of the Greek or Roman-Greek architecture, compared with the Gothic. In the Pantheon, the whole is perceived in a perceived harmony with the parts which compose it ; and generally you will remember that where the parts preserve any distinct individuality, there simple beauty, or beauty simply, arises ; but where the parts melt undistinguished into the whole, there majestic beaut}^ or majesty, is the result. In York Minster, the parts, the grotesques, are in themselves very sharply distinct and separate, and this distinction and separation of the parts is counterbalanced only by the multitude and variety of those parts, by which the attention is bewildered ; — whilst the whole, or that there is a whole produced, is altogether a feeling in which the several thousand distinct impressions lose themselves as in a universal solvent. Hence in a Gothic cathedral, as in a prospect from a mountain's top, there is, indeed, a unity, an awful oneness ; — but it is, because all distinction Lecture X. 275 evades the eye. And just such is the distinction between, the Antigone of Sophocles and the Hamlet of Shakspeare.^ The Divina Commedia is a system of moral, political, and theological truths, with arbitrary personal exempli- fications, which are not, in my opinion, allegorical. I do not even feel convinced that the punishments in the Inferno are strictly allegorical. I rather take them to have been in Dante's mind quasi-a.]le§oncal, or conceived in analogy to pure allegory. I have said, that a combination of poetry with doctrines, is one of the characteristics of the Christian muse ; but I think Dante has not succeeded in effecting this combination nearly so well as Milton. This comparative failure of Dante, as also some other peculiarities of his mind, in malam partem, must be im- mediately attributed to the state of North Italy in his time, which is vividly represented in Dante's life; a state of intense democratical partizanship, in which an exaggerated importance was attached to individuals, and which whilst it afforded a vast field for the intellect, opened also a bound- less arena for the passions, and in which envy, jealousy, hatred, and other malignant feelings could and did as- sume the form of patriotism, even to the individual's own conscience. All this common, and, as it were, natural partizanship, was aggravated and coloured by the Guelf and GhibeUine factions ; and, in part explanation of Dante's adherence to the latter, you must particularly remark, that the Pope had recently territorialized his authority to a great extent, and that this increase of territorial power in the church, was by no means the same beneficial movement for the citizens of free republics, as the parallel advance in other countries was for those who groaned as vassals under the oppression of the circumjacent baronial castles. ^ By way of preparation to a satisfactory perusal of the Divina Commedia, I will now proceed to state what I consider to be Dante's chief excellences as a poet. And I begin with I. Style — the vividness, logical connexion, strength and energy of which cannot be surpassed. In this I think 1 See Lect. I. p. 218, and note: and compere with Schlegel's Dram. VorUsung. Essay on Shakspeare, p. 12. 2 Mr. Coleridge here notes : " I will, If I can, here make an hbtorical movement, and pay a proper compliment, tu Mr. f^Iallam." Ed. 276 Course of Lectures Dante superior to Milton ; and his style is accordingly more imitable than Milton's, and does to this day exercise a greater influence on the literature of his count^3^ You cannot read Dante without feeling a gush of manliness of thought within j^ou. Dante was very sensible of his own excellence in this particular, and speaks of poets as guardians of the vast armory of language, which is the intermediate something between matter and spirit : — Or se' tu quel Virgilio, e quella fonte, Che spande di parlar si largo fiume ? Risposi lui con vergognosa fronte. O degli altri poeti onore e lume, Vagliami '1 lungo studio e '1 grande amore, Che m' han fatto cercar lo tuo volume. Tu se' lo mio maestro, e '1 mio autore : Tu se' solo colui, da cii' to tolsi Lo hello stile, che m' ha fatto onore. Inf. c. I. V. 79. " And art thou then that Virgil, that well-spring, From which such copious floods of eloquence Have issued ? " I, with front abash'd, replied : " Glory and light of all the tuneful train ! May it avail me, that I long with zeal Have sought thy volume, and with love immense Have conn'd it o'er. My master, thou, and guide I Thou he from whom I have alone derived That style, ivhich for its beauty into fame Exalts me," Gary. Indeed there was a passion and a miracle of words in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, after the long slumber of language in barbarism, which gave an almost romantic character, a virtuous quality and power, to what was read in a book, independently of the thoughts or images con- tained in it. This feeling is very often perceptible in Dante. II. The Images in Dante are not only taken from obvious nature, and are all intelligible to all, but are ever conjoined with the universal feeling received from nature, and therefore affect the general feelings of all men. And in this respect, Dante's excellence is very great, and may be contrasted with the idiosyncracies of some meritorious modern poets, who attempt an eruditeness, the result of particular feelings. Consider the simplicity, I may say plainness, of the following simile, and how differently we should in all probability deal with it at the present day : Lecture X. 277 Quale i fioretti dal notturno gelo Chinati e chiusi, poi che '1 sol gl' imbianca, Si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo, — Fal mi fee' io di mia virtute stanca : Inf. c. 2. V. 127. As florets, by the frosty air of night Bent down and clos'd, when day has blanch'd their leaves. Rise all unfolded on their spiry stems, — So was my fainting vigour new restor'd. Cary.^ III. Consider the wonderful profoundness of the whole third canto of the Inferno ; and especially of the inscription over Hell gate : Per me si va, &c. — which can only be explained by a meditation on the true nature of religion ; that is, — reason plus the understand- ing. I say profoundness rather than sublimity ; for Dante does not so much elevate your thoughts as send them down deeper. In this canto all the images are distinct, and even vividly distinct ; but there is a total impression of infinity ; the wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in an inner feeling of totality, and absolute being. IV. In picturesqueness, Dante is beyond all other poets, modern, or ancient, and more in the stern style of Pindar, than of any other. Michael Angelo is said to have made a design for every page of the Divina Commedia. As superexcellent in this respect, I would note the conclusion of the third canto of the Inferno : Ed ecco verso noi venir per nave Un vecchio bianco per antico pelo Gridaudo : guai a voi anime prave : &c. Ycx. S2. &c. ****** And lo ! toward us in a bark Comes on an old man, hoary white with eld. Crying, " Woe to you, wicked spirits ! " ****** Cary. Caron dimonio con occhi di bragia Loro accennando, tutte le raccoglie : Batte col remo qualunque s' adagia. Come d' autunno si levan le foglie 1 Mr. Coleridge here notes : " Here to speak of Mr. Gary's translation. —Ed, 278 Course of Lectures L' una appresso dell' altra, infin che '1 ramo Rende alia terra tutte le sue spoglie ; Similemente il mal seme d' Adamo, Gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una Per cenni, com' augel per suo richiamo. Ver. roo, &c. Charon, demoniac form. With eyes of burning coal, collects them all, Beck'ning, and each that lingers, with his oar Strikes. As fall off the light autumnal leaves, One still another following, till the bough Strews all its honours on the earth beneath ; — E'en in like manner Adam's evil brood Cast themselves one by one down from the shore Each at a beck, as falcon at his call. Cary. And this passage, which I think admirably picturesque Ma poco valse, che 1' ale al sospetto Non potero avanzar : quegli ando sotto. E quei drizzo, volando, suso il petto : Non altrimenti 1' anitra di botto, Quando '1 falcon s' appressa, giu s' attuffa, Ed ei ritoma su crucciato e rotto. Irato Calcabrina della buffa, Volando dietro gli tenne, invaghito, Che quei campasse, per aver la zuffa : E come '1 barattier fu disparito, Cosi volse gli artigli al suo compagno, E fu con lui sovra '1 fosso ghermito. Ma r altro fu bene sparvier grifagno Ad artigliar ben lui, e amedue Cadder nel mezzo del bollente stagno. Lo caldo sghermidor subito fue : Ma pero di levarsi era niente. Si aveano inviscate 1' ale sue. Infer, c. xxii. ver. 127, &c. But little it avail'd : terror outstripp'd His following flight : the other plung'd beneath. And he with upward pinion rais'd his breast : E'en thus the water-fowl, when she perceives The falcon near, dives instant down, while he Enrag'd and spent retires. That mockery In Calcabrina fury stirr'd, who flew After him, with desire of strife inflam'd ; And, for the barterer had 'scap'd, so tum'd His talons on his comrade. O'er the dyke In grapple close they join'd ; but th' other prov'd A goshawk, able to rend well his foe ; And in the boiling lake both fell. The heat Was umpire soon between them, but in vain lo lift themselves they strove, so fast were glued Their pennons. Cary, Lecture X. 279 V. Very closely connected with this picturesqueness, is the topographic reaUty of Dante's journey through Hell. You should note and dwell on this as one of his great charms, and which gives a striking peculiarity to his poetic power. He thus takes the thousand delusive forms of a nature worse than chaos, having no reality but from the passions which they excite, and compels them into the service of the permanent. Observe the exceeding truth of these lines : Noi ricidemmo '1 cerchio all' altra riva, Sovr' una fonte che bolle, e riversa, Per un fossato che da lei diriva. L' acqua era buja molto piu che persa : E noi in compagnia dell' onde bige Entrammo giu per una via diversa, Una palude fa, ch' ha nome Stige, Questo tristo ruscel, quando e disceso Al pie delle maligne piagge grige. Ed io che di mirar mi stava inteso, — Vidi genti fangose in quel pantano Ignude tutte, e con sembiante offeso. Questi si percotean non pur con mano. Ma con la testa, e col petto, e co' piedi, Troncandosi co' denti a brano a brano. » * * « * « Cosl girammo della lorda pozza Grand' arco tra la ripa secca e '1 mezzo, Con gli occhi volti a chi del fango ingozza : Venimmo appie d' una torre al dassezzo. C. vii. ver. lOO and 127, We the circle cross' d To the next steep, arriving at a well. That boiling pours itself down to a foss Sluic'd from its source. Far murkier was the wave Than sablest grain : and we in company Of th' inky waters, journeying by their side, Enter'd, though by a different track, beneath. Into a lake, the Stygian nam'd, expands The dismal stream, when it hath reach'd the foot Of the grey wither'd cliffs. Intent I stood To gaze, and in the marsh sunk, descried A miry tribe, all naked, and with looks Betok'ning rage. They with their hands alone Struck not, but with the head, the breast, the feet, Cutting each other piecemeal with their fangs. Our route Thus compass'd, we a segment widely stretch'd Between the dry embankment and the cove 28o Course of Lectures Of the loath' d pool, turning meanwhile our eyes Downward on those who gulp'd its muddy lees ; Nor stopp'd, till to a tower's low base we came. Gary. VI. For Dante's power, — his absolute mastery over, although rare exhibition of, the pathetic, I can do no more than refer to the passages on Francesca di Rimini (Infer. C. v. ver. 73 to the end) and on Ugolino, (Infer. C. xxxiii. ver. i to 75.) They are so well known, and rightly so admired, that it would be pedantry to analyze their composition ; but you will note that the first is the pathos of passion, the second that of affection ; and yet even in the first, you seem to perceive that the lovers have sacrificed their passion to the cherishing of a deep and rememberable impression. VII. As to going into the endless subtle beauties of Dante, that is impossible ; but I cannot help citing the first triplet of the 29th canto of the Inferno : La molta gente e le diverse piaghe Avean le luci mie si inebriate, Che dello stare a piangere eran vaghe. So were mine eyes inebriate with the view Of the vast multitude, whom various wounds Disfigur'd, that they long'd to stay and weep. Cary. Nor have I now room for any specific comparison of Dante with Milton. But if I had, I would institute it upon the ground of the last canto of the Inferno from the ist to the 69th line, and from the io6th to the end. And in this comparison I should notice Dante's occasional fault of becoming grotesque from being too graphic without imagination ; as in his Lucifer compared with Milton's Satan. Indeed he is sometimes horrible rather than terrible, — falling into the fiidrirbv instead of the dsmv of Longinus ; ^ in other words, many of his images excite bodily disgust, and not moral fear. But here, as in other cases, you may perceive that the faults of great authors are generally excellencies carried to an excess. 1 De Subl. I ix. Lecture X. 281 MILTON. Born in London, 1608. — Died, 1674. If we divide the period from the accession of Elizabeth to the Protectorate of Cromwell into two unequal portions, the first ending with the death of James I. the other com- prehending the reign of Charles and the brief glories of the Republic, we are forcibly struck with a difference in the character of the illustrious actors, by whom each period is rendered severally memorable. Or rather, the difference in the characters of the great men in each period, leads us to make this division. Eminent as the intellectual powers were that were displayed in both ; yet in the number of great men, in the various sorts of excellence, and not merely in the variety but almost diversity of talents united in the same individual, the age of Charles falls short of its pre- decessor ; and the stars of the ParUament, keen as their radiance was, in fulness and richness of lustre, yield to the constellation at the court of Elizabeth ; — which can only be paralleled by Greece in her brightest moment, when the titles of the poet, the philosopher, the historian, the states- man and the general not seldom formed a garland round the same head, as in the instances of our Sidneys and Raleighs. But then, on the other hand, there was a vehemence of will, an enthusiasm of principle, a depth and an earnestness of spirit, which the charms of individual fame and personal aggrandisement could not pacify, — an aspiration after reality, permanence, and general good, — in short, a moral grandeur in the latter period, with which the low intrigues, Machiavellic maxims, and selfish and servile ambition of the former, stand in painful contrast. The causes of this it belongs not to the present occasion to detail at length ; but a mere allusion to the quick succession of revolutions in religion, breeding a political indifference in the mass of men to religion itself, the enormous increase of the royal power in consequence of the humiliation of the nobility and the clergy — the transference of the papal authority to the crown, — the unfixed state of Elizabeth's own opinions, whose inclinations were as popish as her interests were protestant — the controversial extravagance and practical imbecility of her successor — 282 Course of Lectures will help to explain the former period ; and the persecu- tions that had given a life-and-soul-interest to the disputes so imprudently fostered by James, — the ardour of a conscious increase of power in the Commons, and the greater austerity of manners and maxims, the natural product and most formidable weapon of religious dis- putation, not merely in conjunction, but in closest com- bination, with newly awakened political and republican zeal, these perhaps account for the character of the latter sera. In the close of the former period, and during the bloom of the latter, the poet Milton was educated and formed ; and he survived the latter, and all the fond hopes and aspirations which had been its life ; and so in evil days, standing as the representative of the combined excellence of both periods, he produced the Paradise Lost as by an after-throe of nature. " There are some persons," (ob- serves a divine, a contemporary of Milton's) " of whom the grace of God takes early hold, and the good spirit inhabiting them, carries them on in an even constancy through innocence into virtue, their Christianity bearing equal date with their manhood, and reason and religion, like warp and woof, running together, make up one web of a wise and exemplary life. This (he adds) is a most happy case, wherever it happens ; for, besides that there is no sweeter or more lovely thing on earth than the early buds of piety, which drew from our Saviour signal affection to the beloved disciple, it is better to have no wound than to experience the most sovereign balsam, which, if it work a cure, yet usually leaves a scar behind." Although it was and is my intention to defer the consideration of Milton's own character to the conclusion of this Lecture, yet I could not prevail on myself to approach the Paradise Lost without impressing on your minds the conditions under which such a work was in fact producible at all, the original genius having been assumed as the immediate agent and efficient cause ; and these conditions I find in the character of the times and in his own character. The age in which the foundations of his mind were laid, was congenial to it as one golden aera of profound erudition and individual genius ; — that in which the superstructure was carried up, was no less favourable to it by a sternness of discipline and a show of self-control, highly flattering to the imaginative dignity Lecture X. 283 of an heir of fame, and which won Milton over from the dear-loved delights of academic groves and cathedral aisles to the anti-prelatic party. It acted on him, too, no doubt, and modified his studies by a characteristic con- troversial spirit, (his presentation of God is tinted with it) — a spirit not less busy indeed in political than in theological and ecclesiastical dispute, but carrying on the former almost always, more or less, in the guise of the latter. And so far as Pope's censure ^ of our poet, — that he makes God the Father a school divine — is just, we must attribute it to the character of his age, from which the men of genius, who escaped, escaped by a worse disease, the licentious in- difference of a Frenchified court. Such was the nidus or soil, which constituted, in the strict sense of the word, the circumstances of Milton's mind. In his mind itself there were purity and piety absolute ; an imagination to which neither the past nor the present were interesting, except as far as they called forth and enlivened the great ideal, in which and for which he hved ; a keen love of truth, which, after many weary pursuits, found a harbour in a sublime listening to the still voice in his own spirit, and as keen a love of his country, which, after a disappointment still more depressive, expanded and soared into a love of man as a probationer of immortality. These were, these alone could be, the conditions under which such a work as the Paradise Lost could be con- ceived and accomplished. By a life-long study Milton had known — What was of use to know, What best to say could say, to do had done. His actions to his words agreed, his words To his large heart gave utterance due, his heart Contain'd of good, wise, fair, the perfect shape ; and he left the imperishable total, as a bequest to the ages coming, in the Paradise Lost.^ Difficult as I shall find it to turn over these leaves with- out catching some passage, which would tempt me to stop, I propose to consider, ist, the general plan and arrangement of the work ; — 2ndly, the subject with its difficulties and 1 Table Talk, vol. ii. p. 264. 2 Here Mr. C. notes : "Not perhaps here, but towards, or as, the conclusion, to chastise the fashionable notion that poetry is a relaxation or amusement, one of the superfluous toys and luxuries of the intellect ! To contrast the permanence of poems with the transiency and fleeting moral effects of empires, and what are called, rreat events " Ed. 284 Course of Lectures advantages ; — 3rdly, the poet's object, the spirit in the letter, the Iv&xj/miov h ij.ii6(ji, the true school-divinity ; and lastly, the characteristic excellencies of the poem, in what they consist, and by what means they were produced. 1. As to the plan and ordonnance of the Poem. Compare it with the Iliad, many of the books of which might change places without any injury to the thread of the story. Indeed, I doubt the original existence of the Iliad as one poem ; it seems more probable that it was put together about the time of the Pisistratidae. The Iliad — and, more or less, all epic poems, the subjects of which are taken from history — have no rounded conclusion ; they remain, after all, but single chapters from the volume of history, although they are ornamental chapters. Consider the exquisite simplicity of the Paradise Lost. It and it alone really possesses a beginning, a middle, and an end ; it has the totality of the poem as distinguished from the ah ovo birth and parentage, or straight line, of history. 2. As to the subject. In Homer, the supposed importance of the subject, as the first effort of confederated Greece, is an after-thought of the critics ; and the interest, such as it is, derived from the events themselves, as distinguished from the manner of representing them, is very languid to aU but Greeks. It is a Greek poem. The superiority of the Paradise Lost is obvious in this respect, that the interest transcends the limits of a nation. But we do not generally dwell on this excellence of the Paradise Lost, because it seems attribut- able to Christianity itself ; — yet in fact the interest is wider than Christendom, and comprehends the Jewish and Mohammedan worlds ; — nay, still further, inasmuch as it represents the origin of evil, and the combat of evil and good, it contains matter of deep interest to all mankind, as forming the basis of aU religion, and the true occasion of all philosophy whatsoever. The Fall of man is the subject ; Satan is the cause ; man's blissful state the immediate object of his enmity and attack ; man is warned by an angel who gives him an account of all that was requisite to be known, to make the warning at once intelligible and awful, then the temptation ensues, and the Fall ; then the immediate sensible con- sequence ; then the consolation, wherein an angel presents a vision of the history of men with the ultimate triumph Lecture X. 285 of the Redeemer. Nothing is touched in this vision but what is of general interest in rehgion ; any thing else would have been improper. The inferiority of Klopstock's Messiah is inexpressible. I admit the prerogative of poetic feeling, and poetic faith ; but I cannot suspend the judgment even for a moment. A poem may in one sense be a dream, but it must be a waking dream. In Milton you have a religious faith combined with the moral nature ; it is an efflux ; you go along with it. In Klopstock there is a wilfulness ; he makes things so and so. The feigned speeches and events in the Messiah shock us like falsehoods ; but nothing of that sort is felt in the Paradise Lost, in which no parti- culars, at least very few indeed, are touched which can come into collision or juxta-position with recorded matter. But notwithstanding the advantages in Milton's subject, there were concomitant insuperable difficulties, and Milton has exhibited marvellous skill in keeping most of them out of sight. High poetry is the translation of reality into the ideal under the predicament of succession of time only. The poet is an historian, upon condition of moral power being the only force in the universe. The very grandeur of his subject ministered a difficulty to Milton. The statement of a being of high intellect, warring against the supreme Being, seems to contradict the idea of a supreme Being. Milton precludes our feeling this, as much as possible, by keeping the peculiar attributes of divinity less in sight, making them to a certain extent allegorical only. Again poetry implies the language of excitement ; yet how to reconcile such language with God ! Hence Milton confines the poetic passion in God's speeches to the language of scripture ; and once only allows the passio vera, or quasi humana to appear, in the passage, where the Father contemplates his own likeness in the Son before the battle :— Go then, thou Mightiest, in thy Father's might. Ascend my chariot, guide the rapid wheels That shake Heaven's basis, bring forth all my war, My bow and thunder ; my almighty arms Gird on, and sword upon thy puissant thigh ; Pursue these sons of darkness, drive them out From all Heaven's bounds into the utter deep : There let them learn, as likes them, to despise God and Messiah his anointed king. B. VI. V. 710. 286 Course of Lectures 3. As to Milton's object : It was to justify the ways of God to man ! The con- troversial spirit observable in many parts of the poem, especially in God's speeches, is immediately attributable to the great controversy of that age, the origination of evil. The Arminians considered it a mere calamity. The Calvinists took away all human will. Milton asserted the will, but declared for the enslavement of the will out of an act of the will itself. There are three powers in us, which distinguish us from the beasts that perish ; — i, reason ; 2, the power of viewing universal truth ; and 3, the power of contracting universal truth into particulars. Religion is the will in the reason, and love in the will. The character of Satan is pride and sensual indulgence, finding in self the sole motive of action. It is the character so often seen in little on the political stage. It exhibits all the restlessness, temerity, and cunning which have marked the mighty hunters of mankind from Nimrod to Napoleon. The common fascination of men is, that these great men, as they are called, must act from some great motive. Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. To place this lust of self in opposition to denial of self or duty, and to show what exertions it would make, and what pains endure to accomplish its end, is Milton's particular object in the character of Satan. But around this character he has thrown a singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance, and a ruined splendour, which constitute the very height of poetic sublimity. Lastly, as to the execution : — The language and versification of the Paradise Lost are peculiar in being so much more necessarily correspondent to each than those in any other poem or poet. The connexion of the sentences and the position of the words are exquisitely artificial ; but the position is rather according to the logic of passion or universal logic, than to the logic of grammar. Milton attempted to make the Enghsh language obey the logic of passion, as perfectly as the Greek and Latin. Hence the occasional harshness in the construction. Sublimity is the pre-eminent characteristic of the Paradise Lost. It is not an arithmetical sublime like Lecture X. 287 Klopstock's, whose rule always is to treat what we might think large as contemptibly small. Klopstock mistakes bigness for greatness. There is a greatness arising from images of effort and daring, and also from those of moral endurance ; in Milton both are united. The fallen angels are human passions, invested with a dramatic reality. The apostrophe to light at the commencement of the third book is particularly beautiful as an intermediate link between Hell and Heaven ; and observe, how the second and third book support the subjective character of the poem. In all modern poetry in Christendom there is an under consciousness of a sinful nature, a fleeting away of external things, the mind or subject greater than the object, the reflective character predominant. In the Paradise Lost the sublimest parts are the revelations of Milton's own mind, producing itself and evolving its own greatness ; and this is so truly so, that when that which is merely entertaining for its objective beauty is introduced, it at first seems a discord. In the description of Paradise itself, you have Milton's sunny side as a man ; here his descriptive powers are exercised to the utmost, and he draws deep upon his Italian resources. In the description of Eve, and through- out this part of the poem, the poet is predominant over the theologian. Dress is the symbol of the Fall, but the mark of intellect ; and the metaphysics of dress are, the hiding what is not symbolic and displaying by discrimination what is. The love of Adam and Eve in Paradise is of the highest merit — not phantomatic, and yet removed from every thing degrading. It is the sentiment of one rational being towards another made tender by a specific difference in that which is essentially the same in both ; it is a union of opposites, a giving and receiving mutually of the permanent in either, a completion of each in the other. Milton is not a picturesque, but a musical, poet ; al- though he has this merit, that the object chosen by him for any particular foreground always remains prominent to the end, enriched, but not incumbered, by the opulence of descriptive details furnished by an exhaustless imagination. I wish the Paradise Lost were more carefully read and studied than I can see any ground for believing it is, especially those parts which, from the habit of always looking for a story in poetry, are scarcely read at all, — as 288 Course of Lectures for example, Adam's vision of future events in the nth and I2th books. No one can rise from the perusal of this immortal poem without a deep sense of the grandeur and the purity of Milton's soul, or without feeling how sus- ceptible of domestic enjoyments he really was, notwith- standing the discomforts which actually resulted from an apparently unhappy choice in marriage. He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man ; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own tran- scendant ideal. Notes on Milton. 1807.1 (Hayley quotes the following passage : — ) " Time serves not now, and, perhaps, I might seem too profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuit of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting ; whether that epic form, whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief, model." p. 69. These latter words deserve particular notice. I do not doubt that Milton intended his Paradise Lost as an epic of the first class, and that the poetic dialogue of the Book of Job was his model for the general scheme of his Paradise Regained. Readers would not be disappointed in this latter poem, if they proceeded to a perusal of it with a proper preconception of the kind of interest intended to be excited in that admirable work. In its kind it is the most perfect poem extant, though its kind may be inferior in interest — being in its essence didactic — to that other sort, in which instruction is conveyed more effectively, because less directly, in connection with stronger and more pleasurable emotions, and thereby in a closer affinity with action. But might we not as rationally object to an accom- plished woman's conversing, however agreeably, because it has happened that we have received a keener pleasure from her singing to the harp ? Si genus sit proho et 1 These notes were written by Mr. Coleridge in a copy of Hayley's Life of Milton, <4to. 1796), belonging to Mr. Poole. By him they were communicated, and this seems the fittest place for their publication. Ed. Lecture X. 289 sapienti viro haud indignum, et si poeina sit in suo genera perfectum, satis est. Quod si hoc aiictor idem altioribus numeris et carmini diviniori ipsum per se divinum super- addiderit, mehercule satis est, et plusquam satis. I cannot, however, but wish that the answer of Jesus to Satan in the 4th book (v. 285) — Think not but that I know these things ; or think I know them not, not therefore am I short Of knowing what I ought, &c. had breathed the spirit of Hayley's noble quotation rather than the narrow bigotry of Gregory the Great. The passage is, indeed, excellent, and is partially true ; but partial truth is the worst mode of conveying falsehood. Hayley, p. 75. "The sincerest friends of Milton may here agree with Johnson, who speaks of his controversial ■merriment as dis- gusting." The man who reads a work meant for immediate effect on one age with the notions and feelings of another, may be a refined gentleman, but must be a sorry critic. He who possesses imagination enough to live with his forefathers, and, leaving comparative reflection for an after moment, to give himself up during the first perusal to the feelings of a contemporary, if not a partizan, will, I dare aver, rarely find any part of Milton's prose works disgusting. (Hayley, p. 104. Hayley is speaking of the passage in Milton's Answer to Icon Basilice, in which he accuses Charles of taking his Prayer in captivity from Pamela's prayer in the 3rd book of Sidney's Arcadia. The passage begins, — " But this king, not content with that which, although in a thing holy, is no holy theft, to attribute to his own making other men's whole prayers," &c. Symmons' ed. 1806, p. 407.) Assuredly, I regret that Milton should have written this passage ; and yet the adoption of a prayer from a romance on such an occasion does not evince a delicate or deeply sincere mind. We are the creatures of association. There are some excellent moral and even serious lines in Hudi- bras ; but what if a clergyman should adorn his sermon with a quotation from that poem ! Would the abstract propriety of the verses leave him " honourably acquitted ? " The Christian baptism of a line in Virgil is so far from being K ^QO Course of Lectures a parallel, that it is ridiculously inappropriate, — an absurdity as glaring as that of the bigoted Puritans, who objected to some of the noblest and most scriptural prayers ever dictated by wisdom and piety, simply because the Roman Catholics had used them. Hayley, p. 107. " The ambition of Milton," &c. I do not approve the so frequent use of this word re- latively to Milton. Indeed the fondness for ingrafting a good sense on the word ** ambition," is not a Christian impulse in general. Hayley, p. no. "Milton himself seems to have thought it allowable in literary contention to vilify, &c. the character of an opponent ; but surely this doctrine is unworthy," &c. If ever it were allowable, in this case it was especially so. But these general observations, without meditation on the particular times and the genius of the times, are most often as unjust as they are always superficial. (Hayley, p. 133. Hayley is speaking of Milton's panegyric on Cromwell's government : — ) Besides, however Milton might and did regret the immediate necessity, yet what alternative was there ? Was it not better that Cromwell should usurp power, to protect religious freedom at least, than that the Pres- byterians should usurp it to introduce a religious per- secution, — extending the notion of spiritual concerns so far as to leave no freedom even to a man's bedchamber ? (Hayley, p. 250. Hayley's conjectures on the origin of the Paradise Lost : — ) If Milton borrowed a hint from any writer, it was more probably from Strada's Prolusions, in which the Fall of the Angels is pointed out as the noblest subject for a Christian poet.i The more dissimilar the detailed images are, the more likely it is that a great genius should catch the general idea. (Hayl. p. 294. Extracts from the Adamo of Andreini :) " Lucifero. Che dal mio centro oscuro Mi chiama a rimirar cotanta luce ? 1 The reference seems generally to be to the 5th Prolusion of the ist Book. Hie arcui hac tela, quibus dim in niagno illo Superunt tumUltu princeps artnorum Michael confixit auctoretn proditionis ; hie fulmina humana mentis terror. * * * *. In nubibus armatas bcllo legiones instruatn, atque inde pro re nata auxiliares ad terram capias evocabo. *••*«. Hie mihi Califes, guos essi ferunt eletnentorum tuteiares, pritna ilia corpora tnisiebunt. Sect. 4, Ed. Lecture XI. 291 Who from my dark abyss Calls me to gaze on this excess of light ? " The words in italics are an unfair translation. They ma}^ suggest that Milton really had read and did imitate this drama. The original is 'in so great light.' Indeed the whole version is affectedly and inaccurately Miltonic. lb. V. II. Che di fango opre festi — Forming thy works of dust (no, dirt. — ) lb. V. 17. Tessa pur stella a stella, V aggiunga e luna, e sole. — Let him unite above Star upon star, moon, sun. Let him weave star to star, Then join both moon arid sun ! lb. V. 21. Ch 'al fin con biasmo e scorno Vana I'opra sara, vano il sudore I Since in the end division Shall prove his works and all his efforts vain. Since finally with censure and disdain Vain shall the work be, and his toil be vain ! 1796.1 The reader of Milton must be always on his duty : he is surrounded with sense ; it rises in every line ; every word is to the purpose. There are no lazy intervals ; all has been considered, and demands and merits observation. If this be called obscurity, let it be remembered that it is such an obscurity as is a compliment to the reader ; not that vicious obscurity v/hich proceeds from a muddled head. LECTURE XI.2 Asiatic and Greek Mythologies — Robinson Crusoe — Use of works of Imagination in Education. A CONFOUNDING of God with Nature, and an incapacity of finding unity in the manifold and infinity in the individual, — these are the origin of polytheism. The most perfect 1 From a common-place book of Mr. C.'s, communicated by Mr. J. M. Gutch. Ed, 2 Partly from Mr. Green's note. Ed. 292 Course of Lectures instance of this kind of theism is that of early Greece ; other nations seem to have either transcended, or come short of, the old Hellenic standard, — a mythology in itself fundamentally allegorical, and typical of the powers and functions of nature, but subsequently mixed up with a deification of great men and hero-worship, — so that finally the original idea became inextricably combined with the form and attributes of some legendary individual. In Asia, probably from the greater unity of the government and the still surviving influence of patriarchal tradition, the idea of the unity of God, in a distorted reflection of the Mosaic scheme, was much more generally preserved ; and accordingly all other super or ultra-human beings could only be represented as ministers of, or rebels against, his will. The Asiatic genii and fairies are, therefore, always endowed with moral qualities, and distinguishable as malignant or benevolent to man. It is this uniform attribution of fixed moral qualities to the supernatural agents of eastern mythology that particularly separates them from the divinities of old Greece. Yet it is not altogether improbable that in the Samo- thracian or Cabeiric mysteries the link between the Asiatic and Greek popular schemes of mythology lay concealed. Of these mysteries there are conflicting accounts, and, perhaps, there were variations of doctrine in the lapse of ages and intercourse with other systems. But, upon a review of all that is left to us on this subject in the writings of the ancients, we may, I think, make out thus much of an interesting fact, — that Cabiri, impliedly at least, meant socii, complices, having a hypostatic or fundamental union with, or relation to, each other ; that these mysterious divinities were, ultimately at least, divided into a higher and lower triad ; that the lower triad, primi qida infimi, consisted of the old Titanic deities or powers of nature, under the obscure names of Axieros, Axiokersos, and Axiokersa, representing symbolically different modifica- tions of animal desire or material action, such as hunger, thirst, and fire, without consciousness ; that the higher triad, uUimi quia superior es, consisted of Jupiter (Pallas, or Apollo, or Bacchus, or Mercury, mystically cafled Cadmilos) and Venus, representing, as before, the vovg or reason, the Xoyoc or word or communicative power, and the ipug or love ; — that the Cadmilos or Mercury, the mani- Lecture XI. 293 fested, communicated, or sent, appeared not only in his proper person as second of the higher triad, but also as a mediator between the higher and lower triad, and so there were seven divinities ; and, indeed, according to some authorities, it might seem that the Cadmilos acted once as a mediator of the higher, and once of the lower, triad, and that so there were eight Cabeiric divinities. The lower or Titanic powers being subdued, chaos ceased, and creation began in the reign of the divinities of mind and love ; but the chaotic gods still existed in the abyss, and the notion of evoking them was the origin, the idea, of the Greek necromancy. These mysteries, like all the others, were certainly in connection with either the Phoenician or Egyptian systems, perhaps with both. Hence the old Cabeiric powers were soon made to answer to the corresponding popular divinities ; and the lower triad was called by the un- initiated, Ceres, Vulcan or Pluto, and Proserpine, and the Cadmilos became Mercury. It is not without ground that I direct your attention, under these circumstances, to the probable derivation of some portion of this most remark- able system from patriarchal tradition, and to the connec- tion of the Cabeiri with the Kabbala. The Samothracian mysteries continued in celebrity till some time after the commencement of the Christian era.^ But they gradually sank with the rest of the ancient system of mythology, to which, in fact, they did not properly belong. The peculiar doctrines, however, were preserved in the memories of the initiated, and handed down by individuals. No doubt they were propagated in Europe, and it is not improbable that Paracelsus received many of his opinions from such persons, and I think a connection may be traced between him and Jacob Behmen. The Asiatic supernatural beings are all produced by imagining an excessive magnitude, or an excessive small- ness combined with great power ; and the broken associa- tions, which must have given rise to such conceptions, are the sources of the interest which they inspire, as exhibiting, through the working of the imagination, the idea of power in the will. This is delightfully exemplified in the Arabian 1 In the reign of Tiberius, a.d. i8, Germanicns attempted to visit Samothrace ; — ilium in regressn sacra Samothracum viscre nitentejn obvii aquitoncs depulere. Tacit. Ann. II. c. 54. Ed. 294 Course of Lectures Nights' Entertainments, and indeed, more or less, in other works of the same kind. In all these there is the same activity of mind as in dreaming, that is — an exertion of the fancy in the combination and recombination of familiar objects so as to produce novel and wonderful imagery. To this must be added that these tales cause no deep feeling of a moral kind — whether of religion or love ; but an impulse of motion is communicated to the mind without excitement, and this is the reason of their being so generally read and admired. I think it not unlikely that the Milesian Tales contained the germs of many of those now in the Arabian Nights ; indeed it is scarcely possible to doubt that the Greek Empire must have left deep impression on the Persian intellect. So also many of the Roman Catholic legends are taken from Apuleius. In that exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche, the allegory is of no injury to the dramatic vividness of the tale. It is evidently a philosophic attempt to parry Christianity with a qnasi-Fl3itonic account of the fall and redemption of the soul. The charm of De Foe's works, especially of Robinson Crusoe, is founded on the same principle. It always interests, never agitates. Crusoe himself is merely a representative of humanity in general ; neither his intel- lectual nor his moral qualities set him above the middle degree of mankind ; his only prominent characteristic is the spirit of enterprise and wandering, which is, never- theless, a very common disposition. You will observe that all that is wonderful in this tale is the result of external circumstances — of things which fortune brings to Crusoe's hand. NOTES ON ROBINSON CRUSOE.^ Vol. L p. 17. But my ill fate pushed me on now with an obstinacy that nothing could resist ; and though I had several times loud calls from my reason, and my more composed judgment, to go home, yet I had no power to do it. I know not what to call this, nor will I urge that it is a secret over-ruling decree that hurries us on to be the instruments of our own destruction, even though it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our eyes open. The wise only possess ideas ; the greater part of man- kind are possessed by them. Robinson Crusoe was not 1 These notes were written by Mr. C. in Mr. Gillman's copy of Robinson Crusoe, in the summer of 1830. The references in the text are to Major's edition, 1831. Ed. Lecture XI. 295 conscious of the master impulse, even because it was his master, and had taken, as he says, full possession of him. When once the mind, in despite of the remonstrating conscience, has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse or idea, then whatever tends to give depth and vividness to this idea or indefinite imagination, increases its despotism, and in the same proportion renders the reason and free will ineffectual. Now, fearful calamities, sufferings, horrors, and hair-breadth escapes will have this effect, far more than even sensual pleasure and prosperous incidents. Hence the evil consequences of sin in such cases, instead of retracting or deterring the sinner, goad him on to his destruction. This is the moral of Shak- speare's Macbeth, and the true solution of this paragraph, — not any overruling decree of divine wrath, but the tyranny of the sinner's own evil imagination, which he has voluntarily chosen as his master. Compare the contemptuous Swift with the contemned De Foe, and how superior will the latter be found ! But by what test ? — Even by this ; that the writer who makes me sympathize with his presentations with the whole of my being, is more estimable than he who calls forth, and appeals but to, a part of my being — my sense of the ludicrous, for instance. De Foe's excellence it is, to make me forget my specific class, character, and circumstances, and to raise me while I read him, into the universal man. P. 80. I smiled to myself at the sight of this money : " O drug ! " said I aloud, &c. However upon second thonohts, I took it away ; and wrapping all this in a piece of canvas, &c. Worthy of Shakspeare ! — and yet the simple semicolon after it, the instant passing on without the least pause of reflex consciousness, is more exquisite and masterlike than the touch itself. A meaner writer, a Marmontel, would have put an (!) after 'away,' and have commenced a fresh paragraph. 30th July, 1830. P. III. And I must confess, my religious thankfulness to God's providence began to abate too, upon the discovering that all this was nothing but what was common ; though I ought to have been as thankful for so strange and unforeseen a providence, as if it had been miraculous. To make men feel the truth of this is one characteristic object of the miracles v/orked by Moses ; — in them the providence is miraculous, the miracles providential. 296 Course of Lectures p. 126. The growing up of the com, as is hinted in my Journal, had, at first, some httle influence upon me, and began to affect me with seriousness, as long as I thought it had something miraculous in it, &c. By far the ablest vindication of miracles which I have met with. It is indeed the true ground, the proper purpose and intention of a miracle. P. 141. To think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, &c. By the by, what is the law of England respecting this ? Suppose I had discovered, or been wrecked on an un- inhabited island, would it be mine or the king's ? P. 223. I considered — that as I could not foresee what the ends of divine wisdom might be in all this, so I was not to dispute his sovereignty, who, as I was his creature, had an undoubted right, by creation, to govern and dispose of me absolutely as he thought fit, &c. I could never understand this reasoning, grounded on a complete misapprehension of St. Paul's image of the potter, Rom. ix,, or rather I do fully understand the absurdit}^ of it. The susceptibility of pain and pleasure, of good and evil, constitutes a right in every creature endowed there- with in relation to every rational and moral being, — a fortiori therefore, to the Supreme Reason, to the absolutely good Being. Remember Davenant's verses ; — Doth it our reason's mutinies appease To say, the potter may his own clay mould To every use, or in what shape he please. At first not counsell'd, nor at last controll'd ? Power's hand can neither easy be, nor strict To lifeless clay, which ease nor torment knows, And where it cannot favour or afiflict. It neither justice or injustice shows. But souls have life, and life eternal too : Therefore if doom'd before they can offend. It seems to show what heavenly power can do, But does not in that deed that power commend. Death of Astragon, st. 88, &c. P. 232-3. And this I must observe with grief too, that the dis- composure of my mind had too great impressions also upon the religious parts of my thoughts, — praying to God being properly an act of the mind, not of the body. As justly conceived as it is beautifully expressed. And Lecture XL 297 a mighty motive for habitual prayer ; for this cannot but greatly facilitate the performance of rational prayer even in moments of urgent distress. P. 244. That this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in. all their barbarities practised in America. De Foe was a true philanthropist, who had risen above the antipathies of nationality ; but he was evidently partial to the Spanish character, which, however, it is not, I fear, possible to acquit of cruelty. Witness the Nether- lands, the Inquisition, the late Guerilla warfare, &c. P. 249. That I shall not discuss, and perhaps cannot account for ; but certainly they are a proof of the converse of spirits, &c. This reminds me of a conversation I once overheard. " How a statement so injurious to Mr. A. and so contrary to the truth, should have been made to you by Mr. B. I do not pretend to account for ; — only I know of my own knowledge that B. is an inveterate liar, and has long borne malice against Mr. A. ; and I can prove that he has repeatedly declared that in some way or other he would do Mr. A. a mischief." P. 254. The place I was in was a most delightful cavity or grotto of its kind, as could be expected, though perfectly dark ; the floor was dry and level, and had a sort of small loose gravel on it, &c. How accurate an observer of nature De Foe was ! The reader will at once recognise Professor Buckland's caves and the diluvial gravel. P. 308. I entered into a long discourse with him about the devil, the original of him, his rebellion against God, his enmity to man, the reason of it, his setting himself up in the dark parts of the world to be worshipped instead of God, &c. I presume that Milton's Paradise Lost must have been bound up with one of Crusoe's Bibles ; otherwise I should be puzzled to know where he found all this history of the Old Gentleman. Not a word of it in the Bible itself, I am quite sure. But to be serious. De Foe did not reflect that all these difficulties are attached to a mere fiction, or, at the best, an allegory, supported by a few popular phrases and figures of speech used incidentally or dramati- cally by the Evangelists. — and that the existence of a personal, intelligent, evil being, the counterpart and 298 Course of Lectures antagonist of God, is in direct contradiction to the most express declarations of Holy Writ. " Shall there he evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it ? " Amos iii. 6. " I make peace and create evil." Isa. xlv. 7. This is the deep m37stery of the abyss of God. Vol. ii. p. 3- I tiave often heard persons of good judgment say, * * * that there is no such thing as a spirit appearing, a ghost walking, and the like, &c. I cannot conceive a better definition of Body than " spirit appearing," or of a flesh-and-blood man than a rational spirit apparent. But a spirit per se appearing is tantamount to a spirit appearing without its appear- ances. And as for ghosts, it is enough for a man of common sense to observe, that a ghost and a shadow are concluded in the same definition, that is, visibility without tangibiUty. P, 9. She was, in a few words, the stay of all my affairs, the centre of all my enterprises, &c. The stay of his affairs, the centre of his interests, the regulator of his schemes and movements, whom it soothed his pride to submit to, and in complying with whose wishes the conscious sensation of his acting will increased the impulse, while it disguised the coercion, of duty ! — the clinging dependent, yet the strong supporter — the comforter, the comfort, and the soul's living home ! This is De Foe's comprehensive character of the wife, as she should be ; and, to the honour of womanhood be it spoken, there are few neighbourhoods in which one name at least might not be found for the portrait. The exquisite paragraphs in this and the next page, in addition to others scattered, though with a sparing hand, through his novels, afford sufficient proof that De Foe was a first-rate master of periodic style ; but with sound judgment, and the fine tact of genius, he has avoided it as adverse to, nay, incompatible with, the every-day mattei of fact realness, which forms the charm and the character of all his romances. The Robinson Crusoe is like the \dsion of a happy night-mair, such as a denizen of Elysium might be supposed to have from a little excess in his nectar and ambrosia supper. Our imagination is kept in full play, excited to the highest ; yet all the while we are touching, or touched by, common flesh and blood. Lecture XI. 299 p. 67. The ungrateful creatures began to be as insolent and troublesome as before, &c. How should it be otherwise ? They were idle ; and when we will not sow corn, the devil will be sure to sow weeds, night-shade, henbane, and devil's bit. P. 82. That hardened villain was so far from denying it, that he said it was true, and him they would do it still before they had done with them. Observe when a man has once abandoned himself to wickedness, he cannot stop, and does not join the devils till he has become a devil himself. Rebelling against his conscience he becomes the slave of his own furious will. One excellence of De Foe, amongst many, is his sacrifice of lesser interest to the greater because more universal. Had he (as without any improbability he might have done) given his Robinson Crusoe any of the turn for natural history, which forms so striking and delightful a feature in the equally uneducated Dampier ; — had he made him lind out qualities and uses in the before (to him) unknown plants of the island, discover, for instance, a substitute for hops, or describe birds, &c. — many delightful pages and incidents might have enriched the book ; — but then Crusoe would have ceased to be the universal representa- tive, the person for whom every reader could substitute himself. But now nothing is done, thought, suffered, or desired, but what every man can imagine himself doing, thinking, feeling, or wishing for. Even so very easy a problem as that of finding a substitute for ink, is with exquisite judgment made to baffle Crusoe's inventive faculties. And in what he does, he arrives at no excel- lence ; he does not make basket work hke Will Atkins ; the carpentering, tailoring, pottery, &c. are all just what will answer his purposes, and those are confined to needs that all men have, and comforts that all men desire. Crusoe rises only to the point to which all men may be made to feel that they might, and that they ought to, rise in religion, — to resignation, dependence on, and thankful acknowledgment of, the divine mercy and goodness. In the education of children, love is first to be instilled, and out of love obedience is to be educed. Then impulse 300 Course of Lectures and power should be given to the intellect, and the ends of a moral being be exhibited. For this object thus much is effected by works of imagination ; — that they carry the mind out of self, and show the possible of the good and the great in the human character. The height, whatever it may be, of the imaginative standard will do no harm ; we are commanded to imitate one who is inimitable. We should address ourselves to those faculties in a child's mind, which are first awakened by nature, and conse- quently first admit of cultivation, that is to say, the memory and the imagination. ^ The comparing pov/er, the judgment, is not at that age active, and ought not to be forcibly excited, as is too frequently and mistakenly done in the modern systems of education, which can only lead to selfish views, debtor and creditor principles of virtue, and an inflated sense of merit. In the imagination of man exist the seeds of all moral and scientific improve- ment ; chemistry was first alchemy, and out of astrology sprang astronomy. In the childhood of those sciences the imagination opened a way, and furnished materials, on which the ratiocinative powers in a maturer state operated with success. The imagination is the distin- guishing characteristic of man as a progressive being ; and I repeat that it ought to be carefully guided and strengthened as the indispensable means and instrument of continued amelioration and refinement. Men of genius and goodness are generally restless in their minds in the present, and this, because they are by a law of their nature unremittingly regarding themselves in the future, and contemplating the possible of moral and intellectual advance towards perfection. Thus we live by hope and faith ; thus we are for the most part able to realize what we win, and thus we accomplish the end of our being. The contemplation of futurity inspires humility of soul in our judgment of the present. I think the memory of children cannot, in reason, be too much stored with the objects and facts of natural history. God opens the images of nature, like the leaves of a book, before the eyes of his creature, Man — and teaches him all 1 He (Sir W. Scott) " detested and despised the whole generation of modern children's books in which the attempt is made to convey accurate notions of scientific minutiae, delighting cordially on the other hand in those of the preceding age. which addressing themselves chiefly to the imagination obtain through it, as he believed, the best chance of stirring our graver faculties also." — Li/e of Scott. Lecture XII. 301 that is grand and beautiful in the foaming cataract, the glassy lake, and the floating mist. The common modern novel, in which there is no imagi- nation, but a miserable struggle to excite and gratify mere curiosity, ought, in my judgment, to be wholly forbidden to children. Novel-reading of this sort is especially injurious to the growth of the imagination, the judgment, and the morals, especially to the latter, because it excites mere feelings without at the same time ministering an impulse to action. Women are good novelists, but indifferent poets ; and this because they rarely or never thoroughly distinguish between fact and fiction. In the jumble of the two lies the secret of the modern novel, which is the medium aliquid between them, having just so much of fiction as to obscure the fact, and so much of fact as to render the fiction insipid. The perusal of a fashionable lady's novel, is to me very much like looking at the scenery and decora- tions of a theatre by broad daylight. The source of the common fondness for novels of this sort rests in that dislike of vacancy, and that love of sloth, which are inherent in the human mind ; they afford excitement without pro- ducing reaction. By reaction I mean an activity of the intellectual faculties, which shows itself in consequent reasoning and observation, and originates action and conduct according to a principle. Thus, the act of thinking presents two sides for contemplation, — that of external causality, in which the train of thought may be considered as the result of outward impressions, of accidental com- binations, of fancy, or the associations of the memory, — and on the other hand, that of internal causality, or of the energy of the will on the mind itself. Thought, therefore, might thus be regarded as passive or active ; and the same faculties may in a popular sense be expressed as per- ception or observation, fancy or imagination, memory or recollection. LECTURE XII. Dreams — Apparitions — Alchemists — Personality of the Evil Being — Bodily Identity. It is a general, but, as it appears to me, a mistaken opinion, that in our ordinary dreams we judge the objects to be real. I say our ordinary dreams ; — because as to the night-mair 302 Course of Lectures the opinion is to a considerable extent just. But the night-mair is not a mere dream, but takes place when the waking state of the brain is recommencing, and most often during a rapid alternation, a twinkling, as it were, of sleeping and waking ; — while either from pressure on, or from some derangement in, the stomach or other digestive organs acting on the external skin (which is still in sympathy with the stomach and bowels), and benumbing it, the sensations sent up to the brain by double touch (that is, when my own hand touches my side or breast) are so faint as to be merely equivalent to the sensation given by single touch, as when another person's hand touches me. The mind, therefore, which at all times, with and without our distinct consciousness, seeks for, and assumes, some outward cause for every impression from without, and which in sleep, by aid of the imaginative faculty, converts its judgments respecting the cause into a personal image as being the cause, — the mind, I say, in this case, deceived by past experience, attributes the painful sensation received to a correspondent agent, — an assassin, for instance, stabbing at the side, or a goblin sitting on the breast. Add too that the impressions of the bed, curtains, room, &c. received by the eyes in the half-moments of their opening, blend with, and give vividness and appropriate distance to, the dream image which returns when they close again ; and thus we unite the actual perceptions, or their immediate reliques, with the phantoms of the inward sense ; and in this manner so confound the half-waking, half-sleeping, reasoning power, that we actually do pass a positive judg- ment on the reality of what we see and hear, though often accompanied by doubt and self-questioning, which, as I have myself experienced, will at times become strong enough, even before we awake, to convince us that it is what it is — namely, the night-mair. In ordinary dreams we do not judge the objects to be real ; — we simply do not determine that they are unreal. The sensations which they seem to produce, are in truth the causes and occasions of the images ; of which there are two obvious proofs : first, that in dreams the strangest and most sudden metamorphoses do not create any sensa- tion of surprise : and the second, that as to the most dreadful images, which during the dream were accompanied with agonies of terror, we merely awake, or turn round on Lecture XII. 303 the other side, and off fly both image and agony, which would be impossible if the sensations were produced by the images. This has always appeared to me an absolute demonstration of the true nature of ghosts and appari- tions — such I mean of the tribe as were not pure inven- tions. Fifty years ago, (and to this day in the ruder parts of Great Britain and Ireland, in almost every kitchen and in too many parlours it is nearly the same,) you might meet persons who would assure you in the most solemn manner, so that you could not doubt their veracity at least, that they had seen an apparition of such and such a person, — in many cases, that the apparition had spoken to them ; and they would describe themselves as having been in an agony of terror. The}^ would tell you the story in perfect health. Now take the other class of facts, in which real ghosts have appeared ; — I mean, where figures have been dressed up for the purpose of passing for apparitions : — in every instance I have known or heard of (and I have collected very many) the consequence has been either sudden death, or fits, or idiocy, or mania, or a brain fever. Whence comes the difference ? evidently from this, — that in the one case the whole of the nervous system has been by slight internal causes gradually and all together brought into a certain state, the sensation of which is extravagantly exaggerated during sleep, and of which the images are the mere effects and exponents, as the motions of the weather- cock are of the wind ; — while in the other case, the image rushing through the senses upon a nervous system, wholly unprepared, actually causes the sensation, which is some- times powerful enough to produce a total check, and almost always a lesion or inflammation. Who has not witnessed the difference in shock when we have leaped down half-a- dozen steps intentionally, and that of having missed a single stair ? How comparatively severe the latter is ! The fact really is, as to apparitions, that the terror produces the image instead of the contrary ; for in omnem actum perceptionis influit imaginatio, as says Wolfe. O, strange is the self-power of the imagination — when painful sensations have made it their interpreter, or return- ing gladsomeness or convalescence has made its chilled and evanished figures and landscape bud, blossom, and live in scarlet, green, and snowy white (like the fire-screen in- scribed with the nitrate and muriate of cobalt,) — strange is 304 Course of Lectures the power to represent the events and circumstances, even to the anguish or the triumph of the quasi-credent soul, while the necessary conditions, the only possible causes of such contingencies, are known to be in fact quite hopeless ; — yea, when the pure mind would recoil from the eve- lengthened shadow of an approaching hope, as from a crime : — and yet the effect shall have place, and substance, and living energy, and, on a blue islet of ether, in a whole sky of blackest cloudage, shine like a firstling of creation 1 To return, however, to apparitions, and by way of an amusing illustration of the nature and value of even con- temporary testimony upon such subjects, I will present you with a passage, literally translated by my friend, Mr. Southey, from the well known work of Bernal Dias, one of the companions of Cortez, in the conquest of Mexico : Here it is that Gomara says, that Francisco de Morla rode forward on a dappled grey horse, before Cortes and the cavalry came up, and that the apostle St. lago, or St. Peter, was there. I must say that all our works and victories are by the hand of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that in this battle there were for each of us so many Indians, that they could have covered us with handfuls of earth, if it had not been that the great mercy of God helped us in every thing. And it may be that he of whom Gomara speaks, was the glorious Santiago or San Pedro, and I, as a sinner, was not worthy to see him ; but he whom I saw there and knew, was Francisco de Morla on a chesnut horse, who came up with Cortes. And it seems to me that now while I am writing this, the whole war is represented before these sinful eyes, just in the manner as we then went through it. And though I, as an unworthy sinner, might not deserve to see either of these glorious apostles, there were in our company above fovir hundred soldiers and Cortes, and many other knights ; and it would have been talked of and testified, and they would have made a church when they peopled the town, which would have been called Santiago de la Vittoria, or San Pedro de la Vittoria, as it is now called, Santa Maria de la Vittoria. And if it was, as Gomara says, bad Christians must we have been when our Lord God sent us his holy apostles, not to acknowledge his great mercy, and venerate his church daily. And would to God, it had been, as the Chronicler says ! — but till I read his Chronicle, I never heard such a thing from any of the conquerors who were there. Now, what if the odd accident of such a man as Bernal Dias' writing a history had not taken place ! Gomara's account, the account of a contemporary, which yet must have been read by scores who were present, would ha\'e remained uncontradicted. I remember the story of a man, whom the devil met and talked with, but left at a particular lane ; — the man followed him with his eyes, and when the Lecture XII. 305 devil got to the turning or bend of the lane, he vanished ! The devil was upon this occasion drest in a blue coat, plush waistcoat, leather breeches and boots, and talked and looked just like a common man, except as to a particular lock of hair which he had. " And how do you know then that it was the devil ? " " How do I know," replied the fellow, — " why, if it had not been the devil, being drest as he was, and looking as he did, why should I have been sore stricken with fright when I first saw him ? and why should I be in such a tremble all the while he talked ? And, more- over, he had a particular sort of a kind of a look, and when I groaned and said, upon every question he asked me, Lord have mercy upon me ! or, Christ have mercy upon me ! it was plain enough that he did not like it, and so he left me ! " — The man was quite sober when he related this story ; but as it happened to him on his return from market, it is probable that he was then muddled. As for myself, I was actually seen in Newgate in the winter of 1798 ; — the person who saw me there, said he had asked my name of Mr. A. B. a known acquaintance of mine, who told him that it was young Coleridge, who had married the eldest Miss . " Will you go to Newgate, Sir ? " said my friend ; for I assure you that Mr. C. is now in Germany." ** Very willingly," replied the other, and away they went to Newgate, and sent for A. B. " Coleridge," cried he, " in Newgate ! God forbid ! " I said, " young Col who married the eldest Miss ." The names were something similar. And yet this person had himself really seen me at one of my lectures. I remember, upon the occasion of my inhaling the nitrous oxide at the Royal Institution, about five minutes afterwards, a gentleman came from the other side of the theatre and said to me, — " Was it not ravishingly delight- ful, Sir ? " — " It was highly pleasurable, no doubt." — ** Was it not very like sweet music ? " — " I cannot say I perceived any analogy to it." — " Did you not say it was very like Mrs. Billington singing by your ear ! " — " No, Sir, I said that while I was breathing the gas, there was a singing in my ears." To return, however, to dreams, I not only believe, for the reasons given, but have more than once actually experienced that the most fearful forms, when produced simply by association, instead of causing fear, operate no 3o6 Course of Lectures other effect than the same would do if they had passed through my mind as thoughts, while I was composing a faery tale ; the whole depending on the wise and gracious law in our nature, that the actual bodily sensations, called forth according to the law of association by thoughts and images of the mind, never greatly transcend the limits of pleasurable feeling in a tolerably healthy frame, unless when an act of the judgment supervenes and interprets them as purporting instant danger to ourselves. 1 There have been very strange and incredible stories told of and by the alchemists. Perhaps in some of them there may have been a specific form of mania, originating in the constant intension of the mind on an imaginary end, associated with an immense variety of means, all of them substances not familiar to men in general, and in forms strange and unlike to those of ordinary nature. Some- times, it seems as if the alchemists wrote like the Pytha- goreans on music, imagining a metaphysical and inaudible music as the basis of the audible. It is clear that by sulphur they meant the solar rays or light, and by mercury the principle of ponderability, so that their theory was the same with that of the Heraclitic physics, or the modern German N atur-philosophie, which deduces all things from light and gravitation, each being bipolar ; gravitation = north and south, or attraction and repulsion ; light = east and west, or contraction and dilation ; and gold being the tetrad, or interpenetration of both, as water was the dyad of light, and iron the dyad of gravitation. It is, probably, unjust to accuse the alchemists generally of dabbling with attempts at magic in the common sense of the term. The supposed exercise of magical power always involved some moral guilt, directly or indirectly, as in stealing a piece of meat to lay on warts, touching humours with the hand of an executed person, &c. Rites of this sort and other practices of sorcery have always been regarded with trembling abhorrence by all nations, even the most ignorant, as by the Africans, the Hudson's Bay people and others. The alchemists were, no doubt, often considered as dealers in art magic, and many of them were not unwilling that such a belief should be prevalent ; and the more earnest among them evidently looked at their association of substances, fumigations, and other chemical 1 From Mr. Green's note. Lecture XII. 307 operations as merely ceremonial, and seem, therefore, to have had a deeper meaning, that of evoking a latent power. It would be profitable to make a collection of all the cases of cures by magical charms and incantations ; much useful information might, probably, be derived from it ; for it is to be observed that such rites are the form in which medical knowledge would be preserved amongst a barbarous and ignorant people. Note.^ June, 1827. The apocryphal book of Tobit consists of a very simple, but beautiful and interesting, family-memoir, into which some later Jewish poet or fabulist of Alexandria wove the ridiculous and frigid machinery, borrowed from the popular superstitions of the Greeks (though, probably, of Egyptian origin), and accommodated, clumsily enough, to the purer monotheism of the Mosaic law. The Rape of the Lock is another instance of a simple tale thus enlarged at a later period, though in this case by the same author, and with a very different result. Now unless Mr. Hillhouse is Romanist enough to receive this nursery-tale garnish of a domestic incident as grave history, and holy writ, (for which, even from learned Roman Catholics, he would gain more credit as a very obedient child of the Church than as a biblical critic,) he will find it no easy matter to support this asser- tion of his by the passages of Scripture here referred to, consistently with any sane interpretation of their import and purpose. I. The Fallen Spirits. This is the mythological form, or, if you will, the sym- bolical representation, of a profound idea necessary as the prcB-suppositum of the Christian scheme, or a postulate of reason, indispensable, if we would render the existence of a world of finites compatible with the assumption of a super-mundane God, not one with the world. In short, this idea is the condition under which alone the reason of man can retain the doctrine of an infinite and absolute Being, and yet keep clear of pantheism as ex- hibited by Benedict Spinosa. II. The Egyptian Magicians. This whole narrative is probably a relic of the old 1 Written in a copy of Mr. Hillhouse's Hadad. Ed. 3o8 Course of Lectures diplomatic lingua-arcana, or state-symbolique — in which the prediction of events is expressed as the immediate causing of them. Thus the prophet is said to destroy the city, the destruction of which he predicts. The word which our version renders by " enchantments " signifies " flames or burnings," by which it is probable that the Egyptians were able to deceive the spectators, and sub- stitute serpents for staves. See Parkhurst in voce. And with regard to the possessions in the Gospels, bear in mind first of all, that spirits are not necessarily souls or Fs (ich-keiten or self-consciousnesses), and that the most ludicrous absurdities would follow from taking them as such in the Gospel instances ; and secondly, that the Evangelist, who has recorded the most of these incidents, himself speaks of one of these possessed persons as a lunatic ; — (^as7^r,vid^srai — s^7JX6iv octt avrov to da,i/j.6viov. Matt. xvii. 15, 18) while St. John names them not at all, but seems to include them under the description of diseased or deranged persons. That madness may result from spiritual causes, and not only or principally from physical ailments, may readily be admitted. Is not our will itself a spiritual power ? Is it not the spirit of the man ? The mind of a rational and responsible being {that is, of a free- agent) is a spirit, though it does not follow that aU spirits are minds. Who shall dare determine what spiritual influences may not arise out of the collective evil wills of wicked men ? Even the bestial life, sinless in animals and their nature, may when awakened in the man and by his own act admitted into his will, become a spiritual influence. He receives a nature into his will, which by this very act becomes a corrupt will ; and vice versa, this will becomes his nature, and thus a corrupt nature. This may be con- ceded ; and this is aU that the recorded words of our Saviour absolutely require in order to receive an appro- priate sense ; but this is altogether different from making spirits to be devils, and devils self-conscious individuals. Lecture XII. 309 Notes. ^ March, 1824. A Christian's conflicts and conquests, p, 459. By the devil we are to understand that apostate spirit which fell from God, and is always designing to hale down others from God also. The Old Dragon (mentioned in the Revelation) with his tail drew down the third part of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. How much it is to be regretted, that so enlightened and able a divine as Smith, had not philosophically and scripturally enucleated this so difficult yet important question, — respecting the personal existence of the evil principle ; that is, whether as ro kTov of paganism is ^log in Christianity, so the t6 'rrovriphv is to be 6 Tovripog, — and whether this is an express doctrine of Christ, and not merely a Jewish dogma left undisturbed to fade away under the increasing light of the Gospel, instead of assuming the former, and confirming the position by a verse from a poetic tissue of visual symbols, — a verse alien from the subject, and by which the Apocalypt enigmatized the Neronian persecutions and the apostasy through fear occasioned by it in a large number of converts. lb. p. 463. When we say, the devil is continually busy with us, I mean not only some apostate spirit as one particular being, but that spirit of apostasy which is lodged in all men's natures ; and this may seem particularly to be aimed at in this place, if we observe the context : — as the scripture speaks of Christ not only as a parti- cular person, but as a divine principle in holy souls. Indeed the devil is not only the name of one particular thing, but a nature. May I not venture to suspect that this was Smith's own belief and judgment ? and that his conversion of the Satan, that is, circuitor, or minister of police (what our Sterne calls the accusing angel) in the prologue to Job into the devil was a mere condescension to the prevailing pre- judice ? Here, however, he speaks like himself, and like a true religious philosopher, who felt that the personality of evil spirits is a trifling question, compared with the personality of the evil principle. This is indeed most momentous. 1 Written in a copy of " Select Discourses by John Smith, of Queen's College, Cambridge, 1660," and communicated by the Rev. Edward Coleridge. Ed, 3IO Course of Lectures Note on a Passage in the Life of Henry, Earl of Morland. 20th June, 1827. The defect of this and all similar theories that I am acquainted with, or rather, let me say, the desideratum, is the neglect of a previous definition of the term " body." What do you mean by it ? The immediate grounds of a man's size, visibihty, tangibihty, &c. ? — But these are in a continual flux even as a column of smoke. The material particles of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, lime, phosphorus, sulphur, soda, iron, that constitute the ponderable organism in May, 1827, at the moment of Pollio's death in his 70th year, have no better claim to be called his " body," than the numerical particles of the same names that constituted the ponderable mass in May, 1787, in Pollio's prime of manhood in his 30th year ; — the latter no less than the former go into the grave, that is, suffer dissolution, the one in a series, the other simultan- eously. The result to the particles is precisely the same in both, and of both therefore we must say with holy Paul, — " Thou fool ! that which thou sow est, thou sow est not that body that shall be," &c. Neither this nor that is the body that abideth. Abideth, I say ; for that which riseth again must have remained, though perhaps in an inert state. — It is not dead, but sleepeth ; — that is, it is not dissolved any more than the exterior or phenomenal organism appears to us dissolved when it lieth in apparent inactivity during our sleep. Sound reasoning this, to the best of my judgment, as far as it goes. But how are we to explain the reaction of this fluxional body on the animal ? In each moment the particles by the informing force of the living principle con- stitute an organ not only of motion and sense, but of con- sciousness. The organ plays on the organist. How is this conceivable ? The solution requires a depth, stillness, and subtlety of spirit not only for its discovery, but even for the understanding of it when discovered, and in the most appropriate words enunciated. I can merely give a hint. The particles themselves must have an interior and gravitate being, and the multeity must be a removable or at least suspensible accident. Lecture XIII. 311 LECTURE XIII. On Poesy or Art. Man communicates by articulation of sounds, and para- mountly by the memory in tne ear ; nature by the im- pression of bounds and surfaces on the eye, and through the eye it gives significance and appropriation, and thus the conditions of memory, or the capabihty of being re- membered, to sounds, smells, &c. Now, Art, used col- lectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into every thing which is the object of his contemplation ; colour, form, motion and sound are the elements which it combines, and it stamps them into unity in the mould of a moral idea. The primary art is writing ; — primary, if we regard the purpose abstracted from the different modes of realizing it, those steps of progression of which the instances are still visible in the lower degrees of civilization. First, there is mere gesticulation ; then rosaries or wampun ; then picture-language ; then hieroglyphics, and finally alpha- betic letters. These aU consist of a translation of man into nature, of a substitution of the visible for the audible. The so called music of savage tribes as little deserves the name of art for the understanding as the ear warrants it for music. Its lowest state is a mere expression of passion by sounds which the passion itself necessitates ; — the highest amounts to no more than a voluntary reproduction ol these sounds in the absence of the occasioning causes, so as to give the pleasure of contrast, — for example, by the various outcries of battle in the song of security and triumph. Poetry also is purely human ; for aU its materials are from the mind, and all its products are for the mind. But it is the apotheosis of the former state, in which by excitement of the associative power passion itself imitates order, and the order resulting produces a pleasurable passion, and thus it elevates the mind by making its feelings the o! ject of its reflexion. So likewise, whilst it recalls the sights and sounds that had accompanied the occasions of the original 312 Course of Lectures passions, poetry impregnates them with an interest not their own by means of the passions, and yet tempers the passion by the calming power which all distinct images exert on the human soul. In this way poetry is the pre- paration for art, inasmuch as it avails itself of the forms of nature to recall, to express, and to modify the thoughts and feelings of the mind. Still, however, poetry can only act through the intervention of articulate speech, which is so peculiarly human, that in all languages it constitutes the ordinary phrase by which man and nature are contra- distinguished. It is the original force of the word 'brute' ; and even 'mute,' and 'dumb' do not convey the absence of sound, but the absence of articulated sounds. As soon as the human mind is intelligibly addressed by an outward image exclusively of articulate speech, so soon does art commence. But please to observe that I have laid particular stress on the words ' human mind, ' meaning to exclude thereby aU results common to man and all other sentient creatures, and consequently confining myself to the effect produced by the congruity of the animal im- pression with the reflective powers of the mind ; so that not the thing presented, but that which is represented by the thing shall be the source of the pleasure. In this sense nature itself is to a religious observer the art of God ; and for the same cause art itself might be defined as of a middle quality between a thought and a thmg ; or, as I said before, the union and reconciliation of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human. It is the figured lan- guage of thought, and is distinguished from nature by the unity of all the parts in one thought or idea. Hence nature itself would give us the impression of a work of art if we could see the thought which is present at once in the whole and in every part ; and a work of art will be just in pro- portion as it adequately conveys the thought, and rich in proportion to the variety of parts which it holds in unity. If, therefore, the term 'mute' be taken as opposed not to sound but to articulate speech, the old definition of painting will in fact be the true and best definition of the Fine Arts in general, that is, muta poesis, mute poesy, and so of course poesy. And, as all languages perfect themselves by a gradual process of desynonymizing words originally equivalent, I have cherished the wish to use the Lecture XIII. 313 word 'poesy' as the generic or common term, and to dis- tinguish that species of poesy which is not muta poesis by its usual name 'poetry ;' while of all the other species which collectively form the Fine Arts, there would remain this as the common definition, — that they all, like poetry, are to express intellectual purposes, thoughts, conceptions, and sentiments which have their origin in the human mind, not, however, as poetry does, by means of articulate speech, but as nature or the divine art does, by form, co our, magnitude, proportion, or by sound, that is, silently or musically. Well ! it may be said — but who has ever thought other- wise ! We all know that art is the imitatress of nature. And, doubtless, the truths which I hope to convey, would be barren truisms, if all men meant the same by the words 'imitate' and 'nature.' But it would be flattering mankind at large, to presume that such is the fact. First, to imitate. The impression on the wax is not an imita- tion, but a copy, of the seal ; the seal itself is an imitation. But, further, in order to form a philosophic conception, we must seek for the kind, as the heat in ice, invisible light, &c. whilst, for practical purposes, we must have reference to the degree. It is sufficient that philosophically we under- stand that in all imitation two elements must coexist, and not only coexist, but must be perceived as coexisting. These two constituent elements are likeness and unlikeness, or sameness and difference. And in all genuine creations of art there must be a union of these disparates. The artist may take his point of viev/ where he pleases, provided that the desired effect be perceptibly produced, — that there be likeness in the difference, difference in the likeness, and a reconcilement of both in one. If there be likeness to nature without any check of difference, the result is disgusting, and the more complete the delusion, the more loathsome the effect. Why are such simulations of nature, as wax-work figures of men and women, so disagreeable ? Because, not finding the motion and the life which we expected, we are shocked as by a falsehood, every circum- stance of detail, which before induced us to be interested, making the distance from truth more palpable. You set out with a supposed reality and are disappointed and dis- gusted with the deception ; whilst, in respect to a work of genuine imitation, you begin with an acknowledged total 314 Course of Lectures difference, and then every touch of nature gives you the pleasure of an approximation to truth. The fundamental principle of all this is undoubtedly the horror of falsehood and the love of truth inherent in the human breast. The Greek tragic dance rested on these principles, and I can deeply sympathize in imagination with the Greeks in this favourite part of their theatrical exhibitions, when I call to mind the pleasure I felt in beholding the combat of the Horatii and Curiatii most exquisitely danced in Italy to the music of Cimarosa. Secondly, as to nature. We must imitate nature ! yes, but what in nature, — all and everything ? No, the beautiful in nature. And what then is the beautiful ? What is beauty ? It is, in the abstract, the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse ; in the con- crete, it is the unian of the shapely {formosum) with the vital. In the dead organic it depends on regularity of form, the first and lowest species of which is the triangle with all its modifications, as in crystals, architecture, &c. ; in the living organic it is not mere regularity of form, which would produce a sense of formalit}^ ; neither is it sub- servient to any thing beside itself. It may be present in a disagreeable object, in which the proportion of the parts constitutes a whole ; it does not arise from associa- tion, as the agreeable does, but sometimes lies in the rupture of association ; it is not different to different individuals and nations, as has been said, nor is it connected with the ideas of the good, or the fit, or the useful. The sense of beauty is intuitive, and beauty itself is all that inspires pleasure without, and aloof from, and even con- trarily to, interest. If the artist copies the mere nature, the natura naturata, what idle rivalry ! If he proceeds only from a given form, which is supposed to answer to the notion of beauty, what an emptiness, what an unreality there always is in his pro- ductions, as in Cipriani's pictures ! Believe me, you must master the essence, the natura natiirans, which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man. The wisdom in nature is distinguished from that in man, by the co-instantaneit}^ of the plan and the execution ; the thought and the product are one, or are given at once ; but there is no reflex act, and hence there is no moral Lecture XIII. 315 responsibility. In man there is reflexion, freedom, and choice ; he is, therefore, the head of the visible creation. In the objects of nature are presented, as in a mirror, all the possible elements, steps, and processes of intellect antecedent to consciousness, and therefore to the full development of the intelligential act ; and man's mind is the very focus of all the rays of intellect which are scattered throughout the images of nature. Now so to place these images, totalized, and fitted to the limits of the human mind, as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflexions to which they approximate, to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature, — this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts. Dare I add that the genius must act on the feeling, that body is but a striving to become mind, that it is mind in its essence ! In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the ex- ternal with the internal ; the conscious is so impressed on the unconscious as to appear in it ; as compare mere letters inscribed on a tomb with figures themselves con- stituting the tomb. He who combines the two is the man of genius ; and for that reason he must partake of both. Hence there is in genius itself an unconscious activity ; nay, that is the genius in the man of genius. And this is the true exposition of the rule that the artist must first eloign himself from nature in order to return to her with full effect. Why this ? Because if he were to begin by mere painful copying, he would produce masks only, not forms breathing life. He must out of his own mind create forms according to the severe laws of the intellect, in order to generate in himself that co-ordination of freedom and law, that in- volution of obedience in the prescript, and of the prescript in the impulse to obey, which assimilates him to nature, and enables him to understand her. He merely absents him- self for a season from her, that his own spirit, which has the same ground with nature, may learn her unspoken language in its main radicals, before he approaches to her endless compositions of them. Yes, not to acquire cold notions — lifeless technical rules — but living and life- producing ideas, which shall contain their own evidence, the certainty that they are essentially one with the germinal causes in nature — his consciousness being the focus and mirror of both, — for this does the artist for a time abandon 3i6 Course of Lectures the external real in order to return to it with a complete sympathy with its internal and actual. For of all we see, hear, feel and touch the substance is and must be in our- selves ; and therefore there is no alternative in reason between the dreary (and thank heaven ! almost impossible) belief that every thing around us is but a phantom, or that the life which is in us is in them likewise ; ^ and that to know is to resemble, when we speak of objects out of our- selves, even as within ourselves to learn is, according to Plato, only to recollect ; — the only effective answer to which, that I have been fortunate enough to meet with, is that which Pope has consecrated for future use in the line — And coxcombs vanquish Berkeley with a grin ! The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols — the Natur-geist, or spirit of nature, as we unconsciously imitate those whom we love ; for so only can he hope to produce any work truly natural in the object and truly human in the effect. The idea which puts the form together cannot itself be the form. It is above form, and is its essence, the universal in the individual, or the individuality itself, — the glance and the exponent of the indwelling power. Each thing that lives has its moment of self-exposition, and so has each period of each thing, if we remove the dis- turbing forces of accident. To do this is the business of ideal art, whether in images of childhood, youth, or age, in man or in woman. Hence a good portrait is the abstract of the personal ; it is not the likeness for actual comparison, but for recollection. This explains why the likeness of a very good portrait is not always recognized ; because some persons never abstract, and amongst these are especially to be numbered the near relations and friends of the subject, in consequence of the constant pressure and check exercised on their minds by the actual presence of the original. And each thing that only appears to live has also its possible position of relation to life, as nature herself testifies, who, where she cannot be, prophesies her being in the crystallized metal, or the inhaling plant. The charm, the indispensable requisite, of sculpture is 1 See the Biographia Literaria of Mr. Coleridge, chap, xii., and Schclllng's Transcendental Idealism. Lecture XIII. 317 unity of effect. But painting rests in a material remoter from nature, and its compass is therefore greater. Light and shade give external, as well as internal, being even with all its accidents, whilst sculpture is confined to the latter. And here I may observe that the subjects chosen for works of art, whether in sculpture or painting, should be such as really are capable of being expressed and con- veyed within the limits of those arts. Moreover they ought to be such as will affect the spectator by their truth, their beauty, or their sublimity, and therefore they may be addressed to the judgment, the senses, or the reason. The peculiarity of the impression which they may make, may be derived either from colour and form, or from proportion and fitness, or from the excitement of the moral feelings ; or all these may be combined. Such works as do combine these sources of effect must have the preference in dignity. Imitation of the antique may be too exclusive, and may produce an injurious effect on modern sculpture ; — ist, generally, because such an imitation cannot fail to have a tendency to keep the attention fixed on externals rather than on the thought within ; — 2ndly, because, accordingly, it leads the artist to rest satisfied with that which is always imperfect, namely, bodily form, and circumscribes his views of mental expression to the ideas of power and grandeur only ; — Srdly, because it induces an effort to combine together two incongruous things, that is to say, modern feelings in antique forms ; — 4thly, because it speaks in a language, as it were, learned and dead, the tones of which, being unfamiliar, leave the common spectator cold and unimpressed ; — and lastly, because it necessarily causes a neglect of thoughts, emotions and images of pro- founder interest and more exalted dignity, as motherly, sisterly, and brotherly love, piety, devotion, the divine become human, — the Virgin, the Apostle, the Christ. The artist's principle in the statue of a great man should be the illustration of departed merit ; and I cannot but think that a skilful adoption of modern habiliments would, in many instances, give a variety and force of effect which a bigoted adherence to Greek or Roman costume precludes. It is, I believe, from artists finding Greek models unfit for several important modern purposes, that we see so many allegorical figures on monuments and elsewhere. Painting was, as it were, a new art, and being unshackled by old 3i8 Course of Lectures models it chose its own subjects, and took an eagle's flight. And a new field seems opened for modern sculpture m the symbolical expression of the ends of life, as in Guy's monument, Chantrey's children in Worcester Cathe- dral, &c. Architecture exhibits the greatest extent of the difference from nature which may exist in works of art. It involves all the powers of design, and is sculpture and painting in- clusively. It shews the greatness of man, and should at the same time teach him humility. Music is the most entirely human of the fine arts, and has the fewest analoga in nature. Its first delightfulness is simple accordance with the ear ; but it is an associated thing, and recaUs the deep emotions of the past with an intellectual sense of proportion. Every human feeling is greater and larger than the exciting cause, — a proof, I think, that man is designed for a higher state of existence ; and this is deeply implied in music, in which there is always something more and beyond the immediate expression. With regard to works in all the branches of the fine arts, I may remark that the pleasure arising from novelty must of course be allowed its due place and weight. This pleasure consists in the identity of two opposite elements, that is to say — sameness and variety. If in the midst of the variety there be not some fixed object for the attention, the unceasing succession of the variety will prevent the mind from observing the difference of the individual objects ; and the only thing remaining will be the suc- cession, which will then produce precisely the same effect as sameness. This we experience when we let the trees or hedges pass before the fixed eye during a rapid movement in a carriage, or on the other hand, when we suffer a file of soldiers or ranks of men in procession to go on before us without resting the eye on any one in particular. In order to derive pleasure from the occupation of the mind, the principle of unity must always be present, so that in the midst of the multeity the centripetal force be never sus- pended, nor the sense be fatigued by the predominance of the centrifugal force. This unity in multeity I have else- where stated as the principle of beauty. It is equally the source of pleasure in variety, and in fact a higher term including both. What is the seclusive or distinguishing term between them ! Lecture XIV. 319 Remember that there is a difference between form as proceeding, and shape as superinduced ; — the latter is either the death or the imprisonment of the thing ; — the former is its self-witnessing and self-effected sphere of agency. Art would or should be the abridgment of nature. Now the fulness of nature is without character, as water is purest when without taste, smell, or colour ; but this is the highest, the apex only, — it is not the whole. The object of art is to give the whole ad hominem ; hence each step of nature hath its ideal, and hence the possibility of a climax up to the perfect form of a harmonized chaos. To the idea of life victory or strife is necessary ; as virtue consists not simply in the absence of vices, but in the overcoming of them. So it is in beauty. The sight of what is subordinated and conquered heightens the strength and the pleasure ; and this should be exhibited by the artist either inclusively in his figure, or else out of it and beside it to act by way of supplement and contrast. And with a view to this, remark the seeming identity of body and mind in infants, and thence the loveliness of the former ; the commencing separation in boyhood, and the struggle of equilibrium in youth : thence onward the body is first simply indifferent ; then demanding the translucency of the mind not to be worse than indifferent ; and finally all that presents the body as body becoming almost of an excremental nature. LECTURE XIV. On Style. I HAVE, I believe, formerly observed with regard to the character of the governments of the East, that their tendency was despotic, that is, towards unity ; whilst that of the Greek governments, on the other hand, leaned to the manifold and the popular, the unity in them being purely ideal, namely of all as an identification of the whole. In the northern or Gothic nations the aim and purpose of the government were the preservation of the rights and interests of the individual in conjunction with those of the whole. The individual interest was sacred. In the char- acter and tendency of the Greek and Gothic languages there 320 Course of Lectures is precisely the same relative difference. In Greek the sentences are long, and the structure architectural, so that each part or clause is insignificant when compared with the whole. The result is every thing, the steps and pro- cesses nothing. But in the Gothic and, generally, in what we call the modern, languages, the structure is short, simple, and complete in each part, and the connexion of the parts with the sum total of the discourse is maintained by the sequency of the logic, or the community of feelings excited between the writer and his readers. As an instance equally delightful and complete, of what may be called the Gothic structure as contradistinguished from that of the Greeks, let me cite a part of our famous Chaucer's char- acter of a parish priest as he should be. Can it ever be quoted too often ? A good man ther was of religioun That was a poure Parsone of a toun, But riche he WcLS of holy thought and werk ; He w£LS also a lerned man, a clerk, That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche ; His parishens ^ devoutly wolde he teche ; Benigne he was, and wonder ^ diligent, And in adversite ful patient, And swiche ^ he was ypreved * often sithes ^ ; Ful loth were him to cursen for his tithes, But rather wolde he yeven ^ out of doute Unto his poure parishens aboute Of his offring, and eke of his substance ; He coude in litel thing have suffisance : Wide was his parish, and houses fer asonder. But he ne ' left nought for no rain ne « thonder. In sikenesse and in mischief to visite The ferrest ^ in his parish moche and lite ^° Upon his fete, and in his hand a staf : This noble ensample to his shepe he yaf,'^ That first he wnrought, and afterward he taught, Out of the gospel he the wordes caught, And this figure he added yet thereto, That if gold ruste, what should iren do. He sette not his benefice to hire, And lette ^^ his shepe accombred ^^ in the mire. And ran unto London unto Seint Poules, To seken him a chanterie for soules. Or with a brotherhede to be withold, But dwelt at home, and kepte wel his fold, 1 Parishioners. " Wondrous. ' Such. * Proved. ^ Times. ^ Give or have given. 7 Not. 8 Nor. 8 Farthest. 10 Great and small. " Gave. ^ Left. 13 Encumbered Lecture XIV. 321 So that the wolf ne made it not miscarie : He was a shepherd and no mercenarie ; And though he holy were and vertuous. He was to sinful men not dispitous,^ Ne of his speche dangerous ne digne,'* But in his teching discrete and benigne, To drawen folk to heven with fairenesse, By good ensample was his besinesse ; But it were any persone obstinat, What so he were of high or low estat, Him wolde he snibben ^ sharply for the nones : A better preest I trowe that no wher non is ; He waited after no pompe ne reverence, He maked him no spiced conscience, But Cristes love and his apostles' twelve He taught, but first he folwed it himselve.* Such change as really took place in the style of our literature after Chaucer's time is with difficulty perceptible, on account of the death of writers, during the civil wars of the 15th century. But the transition was not very great ; and accordingly we find in Latimer and our other venerable authors about the time of Edward VI. as in Luther, the general characteristics of the earliest manner ; — that is, every part popular, and the discourse addressed to all degrees of intellect ; — the sentences short, the tone vehement, and the connexion of the whole produced by honesty and singleness of purpose, intensity of passion, and pervading importance of the subject. Another and a very different species of style is that which was derived from, and founded on, the admiration and cultivation of the classical writers, and which was more exclusively addressed to the learned class in society. I have previously mentioned Boccaccio as the original Italian introducer of this manner, and the great models of it in English are Hooker, Bacon, Milton, and Taylor, although it may be traced in many other authors of that age. In all these the language is dignified but plain, genuine English, although elevated and brightened by superiority of in- tellect in the writer. Individual words themselves are always used by them in their precise meaning, without either affectation or slipslop. The letters and state papers of Sir Francis Walsingham are remarkable for excellence in style of this description. In Jeremy Taylor the sentences are often extremely long, and yet are generally i Despiteous. - Proud. 3 Reprove. 4 Proloeue to Canterbury Tales. L 322 Course of Lectures so perspicuous in consequence of their logical structure, that they require no perusal to be understood ; and it is for the most part the same in Milton and Hooker. Take the following sentence as a specimen of the sort of style to which I have been alluding : — Concerning Faith, the principal object whereof is that eternal verity which hath discovered the treasures of hidden wisdom in Christ ; concerning Hope, the highest object whereof is that ever- lasting goodness which in Christ doth quicken the dead ; concerning Charity, the final object whereof is that incomprehensible beauty which shineth in the countenance of Christ, the Son of the living God : concerning these virtues, the first of which beginning here with a weak apprehension of things not seen, endeth with the intuitive vision of God in the world to come ; the second beginning here with a trembling expectation of things far removed, and as yet but only heard of, endeth with real and actual fruition of that which no tongue can express ; the third beginning here with a weak inclination of heart towards him unto whom we are not able to approach, endeth with endless union, the mystery whereof is higher than the reach of the thoughts of men ; concerning that Faith, Hope, and Charity, v.-ithout which there can be no salvation, was there ever any mention made saving only in that Law which God himself hath from Heaven revealed ? There is not in the world a syllable muttered with certain truth concerning any of these three, more than hath been supernaturally received from the mouth of the eternal God. Eccles. Pol. I. s. II. The unity in these writers is produced by the unity of the subject, and the perpetual growth and evolution of the thoughts, one generating, and explaining, and justifying, the place of another, not, as it is in Seneca, where the thoughts, striking as they are, are merely strung together like beads, without any causation or progression. The words are selected because they are the most appropriate, regard being had to the dignity of the total impression, and no merely big phrases are used where plain ones would have sufficed, even in the most learned of their works. There is some truth in a remark, which I believe was made by Sir Joshua Reynolds, that the greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation, and that the next greatest is he who corrupts it. The true classical style of Hooker and his fellows was easily open to corruption ; and Sir Thomas Brown it was, who, though a writer of great genius, first effectually injured the literary taste of the nation by his introduction of learned words, merely because they were learned. It would be difficult to describe Brown ade- Lecture XIV. 323 quately ; exuberant in conception and conceit, dignified, hyperlatinistic, a quiet and sublime enthusiast ; yet a fantast, a humourist, a brain with a twist ; egotistic Uke Montaigne, yet with a feehng heart and an active curiosity, which, however, too often degenerates into a hunting after oddities. In his Hydriotaphia and, indeed, almost all his "works the entireness of his mental action is very observable ; he metamorphoses every thing, be it what it may, into the subject under consideration. But Sir Thomas Brown with all his faults had a genuine idiom ; and it is the exist- ence of an individual idiom in each, that makes the prin- cipal writers before the Restoration the great patterns or integers of English style. In them the precise intended meaning of a word can never be mistaken ; whereas in the latter writers, as especially in Pope, the use of words is for the most part purely arbitrary, so that the context will rarely show the true specific sense, but only that something of the sort is designed. A perusal of the authorities cited by Johnson in his dictionary under any leading word, will give you a lively sense of this declension in etymologi- cal truth of expression in the writers after the Restora- tion, or perhaps, strictly, after the middle of the reign of Charles II. The general characteristic of the style of our literature down to the period which I have just mentioned, was gravity, and in Milton and some other writers of his day there are perceptible traces of the sternness of republican- ism. Soon after the Restoration a material change took place, and the cause of royalism was graced, sometimes disgraced, by every shade of lightness of manner. A free and easy style was considered as a test of loyalty, or at all events, as a badge of the cavalier party ; you may detect it occasionally even in Barrow, who is, however, in general remarkable for dignity and logical sequency of expression ; but in L' Estrange, CoUyer, and the writers of that class, this easy manner was carried out to the utmost extreme of slang and ribaldry. Yet still the works, even of these last authors, have considerable merit in one point of view ; their language is level to the understand- ings of all men ; it is an actual transcript of the collo- quialism of the day, and is accordingly full of life and reality. Roger North's life of his brother, the Lord Keeper, is the most valuable specimen of this class of our 324 Course of Lectures literature ; it is delightful, and much beyond any other of the writings of his contemporaries. From the common opinion that the English style attained its greatest perfection in and about Queen Ann's reign I altogether dissent ; not only because it is in one species alone in which it can be pretended that the writers of that age excelled their predecessors ; but also because the specimens themselves are not equal, upon sound prin- ciples of judgment, to much that had been produced before. The classical structure of Hooker — the impetuous, thought-agglomerating flood of Taylor — to these there is no pretence of a parallel ; and for mere ease and grace, is Cowley inferior to Addison, being as he is so much more thoughtful and full of fancy ? Cowley, with the omission of a quaintness here and there, is probably the best model of style for modern imitation in general. Taylor's periods have been frequently attempted by his admirers ; you may, perhaps, just catch the turn of a simile or single image, but to write in the real manner of Jeremy Taylor would require as mighty a mind as his. Many parts of Algernon Sidney's treatises afford excellent exemplars of a good modern practical style ; and Dryden in his prose works, is a still better model, if you add a stricter and purer grammar. It is, indeed, worthy of remark that all our great poets have been good prose writers, as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton ; and this probably arose from their just sense of metre. For a true poet will never confound verse and prose ; whereas it is almost characteristic of indifferent prose writers that they should be constantly slipping into scraps of metre. Swift's style is, in its line, perfect ; the manner is a complete expression of the matter, the terms appropriate, and the artifice concealed. It is simplicity in the true sense of the word. After the Revolution, the spirit of the nation became much more commercial, than it had been before ; a learned body, or clerisy, as such, gradually disappeared, and literature in general began to be addressed to the common miscellaneous public. That public had become accustomed to, and required, a strong stimulus ; and to meet the requisitions of the public taste, a style was produced which by combining triteness of thought with singularity and excess of manner of expression, was calcu- lated at once to soothe ignorance and to flatter vanity. Lecture XIV. 325 The thought was carefully kept down to the immediate apprehension of the commonest understanding, and the dress was as anxiously arranged for the purpose of making the thought appear something very profound. The essence of this style consisted in a mock antithesis, that is, an opposition of mere sounds, in a rage for personification, the abstract made animate, far-fetched metaphors, strange phrases, metrical scraps, in every thing, in short, but genuine prose. Style is, of course, nothing else but the art of conveying the meaning appropriately and with perspicuity, whatever that meaning may be, and one criterion of style is that it shall not be translateable with- out injury to the meaning. Johnson's style has pleased many from the very fault of being perpetually translate- able ; he creates an impression of cleverness by never saying any thing in a common way. The best specimen of this manner is in Junius, because his antithesis is less merely verbal than Johnson's. Gibbon's manner is the worst of all ; it has every fault of which this peculiar style is capable. Tacitus is an example of it in Latin ; in coming from Cicero you feel the falsetto immediately. In order to form a good style, the primary rule and condition is, not to attempt to express ourselves in language before we thoroughly know our own meaning : — when a man perfectly understands himself, appropriate diction will generally be at his command either in writing or speaking. In such cases the thoughts and the words are associated. In the next place preciseness in the use of terms is required, and the test is whether you can translate the phrase adequately into simpler terms, regard being had to the feeling of the whole passage. Try this upon Shak- speare, or Milton, and see if you can substitute other simpler words in any given passage without a violation of the meaning or tone. The source of bad writing is the desire to be something more than a man of sense, — the straining to be thought a genius ; and it is just the same in speech-making. If men would only say what they ha\e to say in plain terms, how much more eloquent they would be ! Another rule is to avoid converting mere abstractions into persons. I believe you will very rarely find in any great writer before the Revolution the possessive case of an inanimate noun used in prose instead of the dependent case, as 'the watch's hand,' for 'the hand of 326 Idea of the the watch. ' The possessive or Saxon genitive was confined to persons, or at least to animated subjects. And I cannot conclude this Lecture without insisting on the importance of accuracy of style as being near akin to veracity and truthful habits of mind ; he who thinks loosely will write loosely, and, perhaps, there is some moral inconvenience in the common forms of our grammars which give children so many obscure terms for material distinctions. Let me also exhort you to careful examination of what you read, if it be worthy any perusal at all ; such examination will be a safeguard from fanaticism, the universal origin of which is in the contemplation of phenomena without investigation into their causes. ON THE PROMETHEUS OF ^SCHYLUS : An Essay, preparatory to a series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian, in connexion with the sacerdotal, theology, and in contrast with the mysteries of ancient Greece. Read at the Royal Society of Literature, May i8, 1825. The French savans who went to Egypt in the train of Buonaparte, Denon, Fourrier, and Dupuis, (it has been asserted,) triumphantly vindicated the chronology of Herodotus, on the authority of documents that cannot lie ; — namely the inscriptions and sculptures on those enormous masses of architecture, that might seem to have been built in the wish of rivalling the mountains, and at some unknown future to answer the same purpose, that is, to stand the gigantic tombstones of an elder world. It is decided, say the critics, whose words I have before cited, that the present division of the zodiac had been already arranged by the Egyptians fifteen thousand years before the Christian era, and according to an inscription 'which cannot lie* the temple of Esne is of eight thousand years standing. Now, in the first place, among a people who had placed their national pride in their antiquity, I do not see the impossibility of an inscription lying ; and, secondly, as little can I see the improbability of a modern interpreter misunderstanding it ; and lastly, the incredibility of a Prometheus of ^schylus 327 French infidel's partaking of both defects, is still less evident to my understanding. The inscriptions may be, and in some instances, very probably are, of later date than the temples themselves, — the offspring of vanity or priestly rivalry, or of certain astrological theories ; or the temples themselves may have been built in the place of former and ruder structures, of an earlier and ruder period, and not impossibly under a different scheme of hieroglyphic or significant characters ; and these may have been intentionally, or ignorantly, miscopied or mis- translated. But more than all the preceding, — I cannot but persuade myself, that for a man of sound judgment and enlightened common sense — a man with whom the demonstrable laws of the human mind, and the rules generahzed from the great mass of facts respecting human nature, weigh more than any two or three detached documents or narrations, of whatever authority the narrator may be, and however difficult it may be to bring positive proofs against the antiquity of the documents — I cannot but persuade myself, I say, that for such a man, the relation preserved in the first book of the Pentateuch, — and which, in perfect accordance with all analogous experience, with all the facts of history, and all that the principles of political economy would lead us to anticipate, conveys to us the rapid progress in civilization and splendour from Abraham and Abimelech to Joseph and Pharaoh, — will be worth a whole library of such inferences. I am aware that it is almost universal to speak of the gross idolatry of Egypt ; nay, that arguments have been grounded on this assumption in proof of the divine origin of the Mosaic monotheism. But first, if by this we are to understand that the great doctrine of the one Supreme Being was first revealed to the Hebrew legislator, his own inspired writings supply abundant and direct confutation of the position. Of certain astrological superstitions, — of certain talismans connected with star-magic, — plates and images constructed in supposed harmony with the movements and influences of celestial bodies, — there doubtless exist hints, if not direct proofs, both in the Mosaic writings, and those next to these in antiquity. But of plain idolatry in Egypt, or the existence of a polytheistic religion, represented by various idols, each 328 Idea of the signif5dng a several deity, I can find no decisive proof in the Pentateuch ; and when I collate these with the books of the prophets, and the other inspired writings subse- quent to the Mosaic, I cannot but regard the absence of any such proof in the latter, compared with the numerous and powerful assertions, or evident impHcations, of Egyptian idolatry in the former, both as an argument of incomparably greater value in support of the age and authenticity of the Pentateuch ; and as a strong pre- sumption in favour of the hypothesis on which I shall in part ground the theory which will pervade this series of disquisitions ; — namely, that the sacerdotal religion of Egypt had, during the interval from Abimelech to Moses, degenerated from the patriarchal monotheism into a pan- theism, cosmotheism, or worship of the world as God. The reason or pretext, assigned by the Hebrew legislator to Pharaoh for leading his countrymen into the wilderness to join with their brethren, the tribes who still sojourned in the nomadic state, namely, that their sacrifices would be an abomination to the Egyptians, may be urged as inconsistent with, nay, as confuting this hypothesis. But to this I reply, first, that the worship of the ox and cow was not, in and of itself, and necessarily, a contravention of the first commandment, though a very gross breach of the second ; — for it is most certain that the ten tribes wor- shipped the Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, under the same or similar s3mibols : — secondly that the cow, or Isis, and the lo of the Greeks, truly repre- sented, in the first instance, the earth or productive nature, and afterwards the mundane religion grounded on the wor- ship of nature, or the to crai', as God. In after times, the ox or bull was added, representing the sun, or generative force of nature, according to the habit of male and female deities, which spread almost over the whole world, — the positive and negative forces in the science of superstition ; — for the pantheism of the sage necessarily engenders polytheism as the popular creed. But lastly, a very sufficient reason may, I think, be assigned for the choice of the ox or cow, as representing the very life of nature, by the first legislators of Egypt, and for the similar sacred character in the Brahmanic tribes of Hindostan. The progress from savagery to civilization is evidently first from the hunting to the pastoral state, a process which Prometheus of ^schylus 329 even now is going on, within our own times, among the South American Indians in the vast tracts between Buenos Ayres and the Andes : but the second and the most im- portant step, is from the pastoral, or wandering, to the agricultural, or fixed, state. Now, if even for men born and reared under European civilization, the charms of a wandering hfe have been found so great a temptation, that few who have taken to it have been induced to return (see the confession in the preamble to the statute respecting the gipsies) ; ^ — how much greater must have been the danger of relapse in the first formation of fixed states with a condensed population ? And what stronger prevention could the ingenuity of the priestly kings — (for the priestly is ever the first form of government) — devise, than to have made the ox or cow the representatives of the divine principle in the world, and, as such, an object of adoration, the wilful destruction of which was sacrilege ? — For this rendered a return to the pastoral state impossible ; in which the flesh of these animals and the milk formed almost the exclusive food of mankind ; while, in the meantime, by once compelling and habituating men to the use of a vegetable diet, it enforced the laborious cultivation of the soil, and both produced and permitted a vast and condensed population. In the process and continued sub-divisions of polytheism, this great sacred Word, — for so the consecrated animals were called, }spoi Xoyoi, — became multiplied, tiU almost every power and supposed attribute of nature had its symbol in some consecrated animal from the beetle to the hawk. Wherever the powers of nature had found a cycle for themselves, in which the powers still produced the same phenomenon during a given period, whether in the motions of the heavenly orbs, or in the smallest living organic body, there the Egyptian sages predicated life and mind. Time, cyclical time, was their abstraction of the deity, and their holidays were their gods. The diversity between theism and pantheism may be most simply and generally expressed in the following formula, in which the material universe is expressed by W, and the deity by G. W-G=0; 1 The Act meant is probably the 5. Eliz. c. 20, enforcing the two previous Acts of Henry VIII. and Philip and Mary, and reciting that natural born Englishmen had ' become of the fellowship of the said vagabonds, by transforming or disguising them* selves in their apparel,' &c. — Ed. 330 Idea of the or the World without God is an impossible conception. This position is common to theist and pantheist. But the pantheist adds the converse — G-\V = 0; for which the theist substitutes — G-W = G; or that — G = G, anterior and irrelative to the existence of the world, is equal to G + W.^ Before the mountains were, Thou art. — I am not about to lead the society beyond the bounds of my subject into divinity or theology in the professional sense. But with- out a precise definition of pantheism, without a clear insight into the essential distinction between it and the theism of the Scriptures, it appears to me impossible to understand either the import or the history of the poly- theism of the great historical nations. I beg leave, there- fore, to repeat, and to carry on my former position, that the religion of Egypt, at the time of the Exodus of the Hebrews, was a pantheism, on the point of passing into that polytheism, of which it afterwards afforded a specimen, gross and distasteful even to polytheists themselves of other nations. The objects which, on my appointment as Royal Associate of the Royal Society of Literature, I proposed to myself were, ist. The elucidation of the purpose of the Greek drama, and the relations in which it stood to the mysteries on the one hand, and to the state or sacerdotal religion on the other : — 2nd. The connection of the Greek tragic poets with philosophy as the peculiar offspring of Greek genius : — 3rd. The connection of the Homeric and cyclical poets with the popular religion of the Greeks : and, lastly from all these, — namely, the mysteries, the sacer- dotal religion, their philosophy before and after Socrates, the stage, the Homeric poetry and the legendary belief of the people, and from the sources and productive causes in the derivation and confluence of the tribes that finally shaped themselves into a nation of Greeks — to give a juster 1 Mr. Coleridge was in the constant habit of expres>ing himself on paper by the algebraic symbols. They have an uncouth look in the text of an ordinary essay, and I have sometimes ventured to render them by the equivalent words. But most of the readers of these volumes will know that - means less by, or, without; + nro^-e by, or. ifi addition to; = equal to, or, the same as. — E,i. Prometheus of ^schylus 331 and more distinct view of this singular people, and of the place which they occupied in the history of the world, and the great scheme of divine providence, than I have hitherto seen, — or rather let me say, than it appears to me possible to give by any other process. The present Essay, however, I devote to the purpose of removing, or at least invalidating, one objection that I may reasonably anticipate, and which may be conveyed in the following question : — What proof have you of the fact of any connection between the Greek drama, and either the mysteries, or the philosophy, of Greece ? What proof that it was the office of the tragic poet, under a disguise of the sacerdotal religion, mixed with the legendary or popular belief, to reveal as much of the mysteries interpreted by philosophy, as would counteract the demoralizing effects of the state religion, without compromising the tranquillity of the state itself, or weakening that paramount reverence, without which a republic, (such, I mean, as the republics of ancient Greece were) could not exist ? I know no better way in which I can reply to this objec- tion, than by giving, as my proof and instance, the Pro- metheus of iEschylus, accompanied with an exposition of what I believe to be the intention of the poet, and the mythic import of the work ; of which it may be truly said, that it is more properly tragedy itself in the plenitude of the idea, than a particular tragic poem ; and as a preface to this exposition, and for the twin purpose of rendering it intelligible, and of explaining its connection with the whole scheme of my Essays, I entreat permission to insert a quotation from a work of my own, which has indeed been in print for many years, but which few of my auditors will probably have heard of, and still fewer, if any, have read. " As the representative of the youth and approaching manhood of the human intellect we have ancient Greece, from Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus, and the other mythological bards, or, perhaps, the brotherhoods impersonated under those names, to the time when the republics lost their independence, and their learned men sank into copyists of, and commentators on, the works of their forefathers. That we include these as educated under a distinct providential, though not miraculous, dispensation, will surprise no one, who reflects, that in whatever has a permanent operation on the destinies and intellectual condition of mankind at 332 Idea of the large, — that in all which has been manifestly employed as a co-agent in the mightiest revolution of the moral world, the propagation of the Gospel, and in the intellectual pro- gress of mankind in the restoration of philosophy, science, and the ingenuous arts — it were irreligion not to acknow- ledge the hand of divine providence. The periods, too, join on to each other. The earliest Greeks took up the religious and lyrical poetry of the Hebrews ; and the schools of the prophets were, however partially and imper- fectly, represented by the mysteries derived through the corrupt channel of the Phoenicians ! With these secret schools of physiological theology, the mythical poets were doubtless in connexion, and it was these schools which pre- vented polytheism from producing all its natural barbariz- ing effects. The mysteries and the mythical hymns and paeans shaped themselves gradually into epic poetry and history on the one hand, and into the ethical tragedy and philosophy on the other. Under their protection, and that of a youthful liberty, secretly controlled by a species of internal theocracy, the sciences, and the sterner kinds of the fine arts, that is, architecture and statuary, grew up together, followed, indeed, by painting, but a statuesque, and austerely idealized, painting, which did not degenerate into mere copies of the sense, till the process for which Greece existed had been completed." ^ The Greeks alone brought forth philosophy in the proper and contra-distinguishable sense of the term, which we may compare to the coronation medal with its symbolic char- acters, as contrasted with the coins, issued under the same sovereign, current in the market. In the primary sense, philosophy had for its aim and proper subject the rd mpi cLpyZ^v, de originihus rermn, as far as man proposes to discover the same in and by the pure reason alone. This, I say, was the offspring of Greece, and elsewhere adopted only. The pre-disposition appears in their earliest poetry. The first object (or subject matter) of Greek philosophiz- ing was in some measure philosophy itself ; — not, indeed, as a product, but as the producing power — the produc- tivity. Great minds turned inward on the fact of the diversity between man and beast ; a superiority of kind in addition to that of degree ; the latter, that is, the difference in degree comprehending the more enlarged sphere and the 1 Friend, III. Essay 9. Prometheus of ^schylus 333 multifold application of faculties common to man and brute animals ; — even this being in great measure a trans- fusion from the former, namely, from the superiority in kind ; — for only by its co-existence with reason, free-will, self-consciousness, the contra-distinguishing attributes of man, does the instinctive intelligence manifested in the ant, the dog, the elephant, &c. become human understanding. It is a truth with which HeracUtus, the senior, but yet contemporary, of ^schylus, appears, from the few genuine fragments of his writings that are yet extant, to have been deeply impressed, — that the mere understanding in man, considered as the power of adapting means to immediate purposes, differs, indeed, from the intelligence displayed by other animals, and not in degree only ; but yet does not differ by any excellence which it derives from itself, or by any inherent diversity, but solely in consequence of a combination with far higher powers of a diverse kind in one and the same subject. Long before the entire separation of metaphysics from poetry, that is, while yet poesy, in all its several species of verse, music, statuary, &c. continued mythic ; — while yet poetry remained the union of the sensuous and the philosophic mind ; — the efficient presence of the latter in the synthesis of the two, had manifested itself in the sublime mythus 'rrspi ysvsfficug Tou i/eD h di'^poj'roTg, concern- ing the genesis, or birth of the vou? or reason in man. This the most venerable, and perhaps the most ancient, of Grecian mythi, is a philosopheme, the very same in subject matter with the earliest record of the Hebrews, but most characteristically different in tone and conception ; — for the patriarchal religion, as the antithesis of pantheism, was necessarily personal ; and the doctrines of a faith, the first ground of which and the primary enunciation, is the eternal I am, must be in part historic and must assume the historic form. Hence the Hebrew record is a narrative, and the first instance of the fact is given as the origin of the fact. That a profound truth — a truth that is, indeed, the grand and indispensable condition of all moral responsi- bility — is involved in this characteristic of the sacred narrative, I am not alone persuaded, but distinctly aware. This, however, does not preclude us from seeing, nay, as an additional mark of the wisdom that inspired the sacred 334 Idea of the historian, it rather supplies a motive to us, impels and authorizes us, to see, in the form of the vehicle of the truth, an accommodation to the then childhood of the human race. Under this impression we may, I trust, safely con- sider the narration, — introduced, as it is here introduced, for the purpose of explaining a mere work of the unaided mind of man by comparison, — as an sVog 'upoy'kvc^ixhv^ — and as such (apparently, I mean, not actually) a synthesis of poesy and philosophy, characteristic of the childhood of nations. In the Greek we see already the dawn of approaching manhood. The substance, the stuff, is philosophy ; the form only is poetry. The Prometheus is a philosophema ravrriycpixhv, — the tree of knowledge of good and evil, — an allegory, a cr^cra/^gy.aa, though the noblest and the most pregnant of its kind. The generation of the koD^, or pure reason in man. i. It was superadded or infused, a supra to mark that it was no mere evolution of the animal basis ; — that it could not have grown out of the other faculties of man, his life, sense, understanding, as the flower grows out of the stem, having pre-existed potentially in the seed : 2. The voZg, or fire, was 'stolen,' — to mark its hetero — or rather its a/^-geneity, that is, its diversity, its difference in kind, from the faculties which are common to man with the nobler animals : 3. And stolen 'from Heaven,' — to mark its superiority in kind, as well as its essential diversity : 4. And it was a 'spark,' — to mark that it is not subject to any modifying reaction from that on which it immedi- ately acts ; that it suffers no change, and receives no accession, from the inferior, but multiplies itself by con- version, without being alloyed by, or amalgamated with, that which it potentiates, ennobles, and transmutes : 5. And lastly, (in order to imply the homogeneity of the donor and of the gift) it was stolen by a 'god,' and a god of the race before the dynasty of Jove, — Jove the binder of reluctant powers, the coercer and entrancer of free spirits under the fetters of shape, and mass, and passive mobility ; but likewise by a god of the same race and essence with Jove, and linked of yore in closest and friendhest intimacy with him. This, to mark the pre- existence, in order of thought, of the nous, as spiritual, both to the objects of sense, and to their products, formed Prometheus of ^Eschylus 335 as it were, by the precipitation, or, if I may dare adopt the bold language of Leibnitz, by a coagulation of spirit.^ In other words this derivation of the spark from above, and from a god anterior to the Jovial dynasty — (that is, to the submersion of spirits in material forms), — was intended to mark the transcendency of the nous, the con- tra-distinctive faculty of man, as timeless, a-/^pov6v n, and, in this negative sense, eternal. It signified, I say, its superiority to, and its diversity from, all things that subsist in space and time, nay, even those which, though spaceless, yet partake of time, namely, souls or under- standings. For the soul, or understanding, if it be defined physiologically as the principle of sensibility, irritability, and growth, together with the functions of the organs, which are at once the representatives and the instruments of these, must be considered in genere, though not in degree or dignity, common to man and the inferior animals. It was the spirit, the nous, which man alone possessed. And I must be permitted to suggest that this notion deserves some respect, were it only that it can shew a semblance, at least, of sanction from a far higher authority. The Greeks agreed with the cosmogonies of the East in deriving all sensible forms from the indistinguishable. The latter we find designated as the rb aaopipov^ the vdup Tpoxoa/MKov, the p(;ao5 as, the essentially unintelligible, yet necessarily presumed, basis or sub-position of all positions. That it is, scientifically considered, an indis- pensable idea for the human mind, just as the mathe- matical point, &c. for the geometrician ; — of this the various systems of our geologists and cosmogonists, from Burnet to La Place, afford strong presumption. As an idea, it must be interpreted as a striving of the mind to distinguish being from existence, — or potential being, the ground of being containing the possibility of existence, from being actualized. In the language of the mysteries, it was the esurience, the -ro^os or desideratum, the unfuelled fire, the Ceres, the ever-seeking maternal goddess, the origin and interpretation of whose name is found in the Hebrew root signifying hunger, and thence capacity. It 1 Schelling ascribes this expression, which I have not been able to find in the works of Leibnitz, to Hemsterhuis: " When Leibnitz," says he, "calls matter the sleep-state of the Monads, or when Hemsterhuis calls it curdled spirit,— den g^gronnenen Geist.— !n fact, matter is no other than spirit contemplated in the equilibrium of its activities." Transl. Transfc. Ideal, p. 190. S. C. 33^ Idea of the was, in short, an effort to represent the universal ground of all differences distinct or opposite, but in relation to which all antithesis as well as all antitheta, existed only potentially. This was the container and withholder, (such is the primitive sense of the Hebrew word rendered darkness (Gen. i. 2)) out of which light, that is, the lux lucifica, as distinguished from hunen seu lux phcanomenalis , was produced ; — say, rather, that which, producing itself into light as the one pole or antagonist power, remained in the other pole as darkness, that is, gravity, or the principle of mass, or wholeness without distinction of parts. And here the pecuHar, the philosophic, genius of Greece began its foetal throb. Here it individualized itself in contra-distinction from the Hebrew archology, on the one side, and from the Phoenician, on the other. The Phoenician confounded the indistinguishable with the absolute, the Alpha and Omega, the ineffable causa sui. It confounded, I say, the multeity below intellect, that is, unintelligible from defect of the subject, with the absolute identity above all intellect, that is, transcending com- prehension by the plenitude of its excellence. With the Phoenician sages the cosmogony was their theogony and vice ve-rsa. Hence, too, flowed their theurgic rites, their magic, their worship (cultus et apotheosis) of the plastic forces, chemical and vital, and these, or their notions respecting these, formed the hidden meaning, the soul, as it were, of which the popular and civil worship was the body with its drapery. The Hebrew wisdom imperatively asserts an unbeginning creative One, who neither became the world ; nor is the world eternally ; nor made the world out of himself by emanation, or evolution ; — but who willed it, and it was ! Ta u9ia lyUiro, xa/ iyivsro x6,oq, — and this chaos, the eternal will, by the spirit and the word, or express fiat, — again acting as the impregnant, distinctive, and ordonnant power, — enabled to become a world — xo<r,as7(rt5a/. So must it be when a religion, that shall preclude superstition on the one hand, and brute indifference on the other, is to be true for the meditative sage, yet intelligible, or at least apprehensible, for all but the fools in heart. The Greek philosopheme, preser\^ed for us in the iEschy- lean Prometheus, stands midway betwixt both, yet is Prometheus of ^schylus 337 distinct in kind from either. With the Hebrew or purer Semitic, it assumes an X Y Z, — (I take these letters in their alegebraic appHcation) — an indeterminate Elohim, ante- cedent to the matter of the world, u>.>j a-Koaixog — no less than to the oXrj %ixoG[Mnfji,h7i. In this point, likewise, the Greek accorded with the Semitic, and differed from the Phoenician — that it held the antecedent X Y Z to be super- sensuous and divine. But on the other hand, it coincides with the Phoenician in considering this antecedent ground of corporeal matter, — ruv GMfMarov xa/ reD crw^ar/xoD, — not so properly the cause of the latter, as the occasion and the still continuing substance. Materia suhstat adhuc. The corporeal was supposed co-essential with the antecedent of its corporeity. Matter, as distinguished from body, was a non ens, a simple apparition, id quod mere videtiir ; but to body the elder physico-theology of the Greeks allowed a participation in entity. It was spiritus ipse, oppressus, dormiens, et diversis modis somnians. In short, body was the productive power suspended, and as it were, quenched in the product. This may be rendered plainer by reflecting, that, in the pure Semitic scheme there are four terms intro- duced in the solution of the problem, i. the beginning, self- sufficing, and immutable Creator ; 2. the antecedent night as the identity, or including germ, of the light and dark- ness, that is, gravity ; 3. the chaos ; and 4. the material world resulting from the powers communicated by the divine flat. In the Phoenician scheme there are in fact but two — a self-organizing chaos, and the omniform nature as the result. In the Greek scheme we have three terms, i. the hyle jXjj, which holds the place of the chaos, or the waters, in the true system ; 2. ra (Tw/^ara, answering to the Mosaic heaven and earth ; and 3. the Saturnian ;<^/'o^o/ uTipyjo'jioi, — which answer to the antecedent darkness of the Mosaic scheme, but to which the elder physico-theo- logists attributed a self-polarizing power — a natnra gemina qucB fit et facit, agit et patitur. In other words, the Elohim of the Greeks were still but a natnra deorum, to km, in which a vague plurality adhered ; or if any unity was imagined, it was not personal — not a unity of excellence, but simply an expression of the negative — that which was to pass, but whicli had not yet passed, into distinct form. All this will seem strange and obscure at first reading, — perhaps fantastic. But it will only seem so. Dry and 338 Idea of the prolix, indeed, it is to me in the writing, full as much as it can be to others in the attempt to understand it. But I know that, once mastered, the idea will be the key to the whole cypher of the ^schylean mythology. The sum stated in the terms of philosophic logic is this : First, what Moses appropriated to the chaos itself : what Moses made passive and a materia subjecta et lucis et tenehrarum, the containing vpods/j.evov of the thesis and antithesis ; — this the Greek placed anterior to the chaos ; — the chaos itself being the struggle between the hyper chrojiia, the Idiat 'n-povo/j^oi, as the unevolved, unproduced, prothesis, of which ihia xa/ v6[j.og — (idea and law) — are the thesis and antithesis. (I use the word 'produced' in the mathematical sense, as a point elongating itself to a bi-polar line.) Secondly, what Moses establishes, not merely as a transcendant Monas, but as an individual 'E^dg likewise ; — this the Greek took as a harmony, dsoi d&dvaroi, to dim, as distinguished from o khg — or, to adopt the more expressive language of the Pytha- goreans and cabalists numen numerantis ; and these are to be contemplated as the identity. Now according to the Greek philosopheme or mythiis, in these, or in this identity, there arose a war, schism, or division, that is, a polarization into thesis and antithesis. In consequence of this schism in the rh dsTov, the thesis be- comes nomos, or law, and the antithesis becomes idea, but so that the nomos is nomos, because, and only because, the idea is idea : the nomos is not idea, only because the idea has not become nomos. And this not must be heedfully borne in mind through the whole interpretation of this most profound and pregnant philosopheme. The nomos is essentially idea, but existentially it is idea, suhstans, that is, id quod stat subtus, understanding sensu generalissimo. The idea, which now is no longer idea, has substantiated itself, become real as opposed to idea, and is henceforward, therefore, substans in substantiate. The first product of its energy is the thing itself : ipsa se posuit et jam facta est ens positum. Still, however, its productive energy is not exhausted in this product, but overflows, or is effluent, as the specific forces, properties, faculties, of the product. It reappears, in short, in the body, as the function of the body. As a sufficient illustration, though it cannot be offered as a perfect instance, take the followinp^. 'In the world we see every where evidences of a unity. Prometheus of ^schylus 339 which the component parts are so far from explaining, that they necessarily presuppose it as the cause and condition of their existing as those parts, or even of their existing at all. This antecedent unity, or cause and principle of each union, it has since the time of Bacon and Kepler, been customary to call a law. This crocus, for instance, or any flower the reader may have in sight or choose to bring before his fancy ; — that the root, stem, leaves, petals, &c. cohere as one plant, is owing to an antecedent power or principle in the seed, which existed before a single particle of the matters that constitute the size and visibility of the crocus had been attracted from the surrounding soil, air, and moisture. Shall we turn to the seed ? Here too the same necessity meets us, an antecedent unity (I speak not of the parent plant, but of an agency antecedent in order of operance, yet remaining present as the conservative and reproductive power,) must here too be supposed. Analyze the seed with the finest tools, and let the solar microscope come in aid of your senses, — what do you find ? — means and instruments, a wondrous fairy-tale of nature, maga- zines of food, stores of various sorts, pipes, spiracles, de- fences, — a house of many chambers, and the owner and inhabitant invisible.' ^ Now, compare a plant thus con- templated with an animal. In the former, the productive energy exhausts itself, and as it were, sleeps in the product or organismus — in its root, stem, foliage, blossoms, seed. Its balsams, gums, resins, aromata, and all other bases of its sensible qualities, are, it is v/ell known, mere excretions from the vegetable, eliminated, as lifeless, from the actual plant. The qualities are not its properties, but the pro- perties, or far rather, the dispersion and volatilization of these extruded and rejected bases. But in the animal it is otherwise. Here the antecedent unity — the productive and self-realizing idea — strives, with partial success to re- emancipate itself from its product, and seeks once again to become idea : vainly indeed : for in order to this, it must be retrogressive, and it hath subjected itself to the fates, the evolvers of the endless thread — to the stern necessity of progression. Idea itself it cannot become, but it may in long and graduated process, become an image, an ana- logon, an anti-type of idea. And this s'/dcoXov may ap- proximate to a perfect likeness. Quod est simile, nequit 1 Aids to Reflection. Moral and Religious Aphorisms. Aphorism VI. £d. 340 Idea of the esse idem. Thus, in the lower animals, we see this process of emancipation commence with the intermediate link, or that which forms the transition from properties to faculties, namely, with sensation. Then the faculties of sense, locomotion, construction, as, for instance, webs, hives, nests, &c. Then the functions ; as of instinct, memory, fancy, instinctive intelligence, or understanding, as it exists in the most intelligent animals. Thus the idea (hence- forward no more idea, but irrecoverable by its own fatal act) commences the process of its own transmutation, as substans in suhstantiato , as the enteleche, or the vis for- matrix, and it finishes the process as substans e suhstantiato, that is, as the understanding. If, for the purpose of elucidating this process, I might be allowed to imitate the symbolic language of the algebraists, and thus to regard the successive steps of the process as so many powers and dignities of the nomos or law, the scheme would be represented thus : — Nomos^ = Product : N^ = Property : N^ = Faculty : N^ = Function : N-'^ = Understanding ; — which is, indeed, in one sense, itself a nomos, inasmuch as it is the index of the nomos, as well as its highest function ; but, like the hand of a watch, it is likewise a nomizomenon. It is a verb, but still a verb passive. On the other hand, idea is so far co-essential with nomos, that by its co-existence — (not confluence) — with the nomos sv vo,u.i^ofMsvoig (with the organismus and its faculties and func- tions in the man,) it becomes itself a nomos. But, observe, a nomos auto nomos, or containing its law in itself likewise ; — even as the nomos produces for its hi'^^hest product the understanding, so the idea, in its opposition and, of course, its correspondence to the nomos, begets in itself an analogon to product ; and this is self-consciousness. But as the product can never become idea, so neither can the idea (if it is to remain idea) become or generate a distinct product. This analogon of product is to be itself ; but were it indeed and substantially a product, it would cease to be self. It would be an object for a subject, not (as it is and must be) an object that is its own subject, and vice versa ; a concep- tion which, if the uncombining and infusile genius of our language allowed it, might be expressed by the term sub- Prometheus of ^schylus 341 ject-object. Now, idea, taken in indissoluble connection with this analogon of product is mind, that which knows itself, and the existence of which may be inferred, but cannot appear or become a phenomenon. By the benignity of Providence, the truths of most im- portance in themselves, and which it most concerns us to know, are familiar to us, even from childhood. Well for us if we do not abuse this privilege, and mistake the famili- arity of words which convey these truths, for a clear under- standing of the truths themselves ! If the preceding dis- quisition, with all its subtlety and all its obscurity, should answer no other purpose, it will still have been neither purposeless, nor devoid of utility, should it only lead us to sympathize with the strivings of the human intellect, awakened to the infinite importance of the inward oracle yvudi ffsavro^ — and almost instinctively shaping its course of search in conformity with the Platonic intimation : — v^i/y^c (pliffiv d^icijg Xoyov y^aravorjGrn o'in dvvarov fivai, a\'fj TTjg Tou oXov <pu6eu; ; but be this as it may, the ground- work of the iEschylean mythus is laid in the definition of idea and law, as correlatives that mutually interpret each the other ; — an idea, with the adequate power of realizing itself being a law, and a law considered abstractedly from, or in the absence of, the power of manifesting itself in its appropriate product being an idea. Whether this be true philosophy, is not the question. The school of Aristotle would, of course, deny, the Platonic affirm it ; for in this consists the difference of the two schools. Both acknow- ledge ideas as distinct from the mere generalizations from objects of sense : both would define an idea as an ens rationale, to which there can be no adequate correspondent in sensible experience. But, according to Aristotle, ideas are regulative only, and exist only as functions of the mind : — according to Plato, they are constitutive likewise, and one in essence with the power and life of nature ; — iv y.oyu) ^(H7i i]v^ xai i] ^oiTi rjv to (pojg tuv av&pojrruv. And this I cLSsert, was the philosophy of the mythic poets, who, like ^schylus, adapted the secret doctrines of the mysteries as the (not always safely disguised) antidote to the debasing influences of the religion of the state. But to return and conclude this preliminary explanation. We have only to substitute the term will, and the term con- stitutive power, for nomos or law, and the process is the 342 Idea of the same. Permit me to represent the identity or prothesis by the letter Z and the thesis and antithesis by X and Y re- spectively. Then I say X by not being Y, but in con- i sequence of being the correlative opposite of Y, is will ; and Y, by not being X, but the correlative and opposite of ! X, is nature, — natura naturans, vC/j^og (p'jgixog. Hence we may see the necessity of contemplating the idea now as identical with the reason, and now as one with the will, and ' now as both in one, in which last case I shall, for conveni- ence sake, employ the term Nous, the rational will, the practical reason. We are now out of the holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics ; if indeed, the reader's patience shall have had strength and persistency enough to allow me to exclaim — Ivimus ambo Per densas umbras : at tenet umbra Deum. Not that I regard the foregoing as articles of faith, or as all true ; — I have implied the contrary by contrasting it with, at least, by shewing its disparateness from, the Mosaic, which, bona fide, I do regard as the truth. But I believe there is much, and profound, truth in it, supra captum '^t'koff6(puv, qui non agnoscunt divinum, ideoque nee naturam, nisi nomine, agnoscunt; sed res cunctas ex sensuali cor- poreo cogitant, quibus hac ex causa interiora clausa manent, et simul cum illis exteriora qucB proxima interioribus sunt ! And with no less confidence do I believe that the positions above given, true or false, are contained in the Promethean my thus. In this my thus, Jove is the impersonated representation or symbol of the nomos — Jupiter est quodcunque vides. He is the mejts agitans molem, but at the same time, the molem corpoream ponens et constituens. And so far the Greek philosopheme does not differ essentially from the cosmo- theism, or identification of God with the universe, in which consisted the first apostacy of mankind after the flood, when they combined to raise a temple to the heavens, and which is still the favored religion of the Chinese. Pro- metheus, in like manner, is the impersonated representative of Idea, or of the same power as Jove, but contemplated as independent and not immersed in the product, — as law minus the productive energy. As such it is next to be Prometheus of ^schylus 343 seen what the several significances of each must or may be according to the philosophic conception ; and of which significances, therefore, should we find in the philosopheme a correspondent to each, we shall be entitled to assert that such are the meanings of the fable. And first of Jove : — Jove represents i. Nomos generally, as opposed to Idea or Nous : 2. Nomos archinomos, now as the father, now as the sovereign, and now as the includer and representative of the foV*/ o-jpduot -/.oGiMiKoi, or dii majores, who, had joined or come over to Jove in the first schism : 3. Nomos da/M^rjTrn — the subjugator of the spirits, of the id's at •zpovtfj.oi^ who, thus subjugated, became voi^oi ■j-7:o\'6!J.tot vTroff'xovdoi, Titanes pacati, dii minores, that is, the elements considered as powers re- duced to obedience under yet higher powers than them- selves : 4. Nomos croX/r/xog, law in the Pauline sense, vo/iog d/\.XoTf>i6vo/xog in antithesis to vo/u.og avTovo/MOf. COROLLARY. It is in this sense that Jove's jealous, ever-quarrelsome, spouse represents the political sacerdotal cultus, the church, in short, of republican paganism ; — a church by law estab- lished for the mere purposes of the particular state, un- ennobled by the consciousness of instrumentality to higher purposes ; — at once unenlightened and unchecked by revelation. Most gratefully ought we to acknowledge that since the completion of our constitution in 1688, we may, with unflattering truth, elucidate the spirit and character of such a church by the contrast of the institution, to which England owes the larger portion of its superiority in that, in which alone superiority is an unmixed blessing, — the diffused cultivation of its inhabitants. But pre- viously to this period, I shall offend no enlightened man if I say without distinction of parties — intra muros pec- catur et extra ; — that the history of Christendom presents us with too many illustrations of this Junonian jealousy, this factious harassing of the sovereign power as soon as the latter betrayed any symptoms of a disposition to its true policy, namely, to privilege and perpetuate that which is best, — to tolerate the tolerable, — and to restrain none but those who would restrain all, and subjugate even 344 Idea of the the state itself. But while truth extorts this confession, it, at the same time, requires that it should be accompanied by an avowal of the fact, that the spirit is a rehc of Pagan- ism ; and with a bitter smile would an iEschylus or a Plato in the shades, listen to a Gibbon or a Hume vaunting the mild and tolerant spirit of the state religions of ancient Greece or Rome. Here we have the sense of Jove's in- trigues with Europa, lo, &c. whom the god, in his own nature a general lover, had successively taken under his protection. And here, too, see the full appropriateness of Ij this part of the mythus, in which symbol fades away into allegory, but yet in reference to the working cause, as grounded in humanity, and always existing either actually or potentially, and thus never ceases wholly to be a symbol or tautegory. Prometheus represents, i. sensii generali, Idea '7rp6'JO[j/)g^ and in this sense he is a &io; 6/a,6f i;Xog, a fellow-tribesman both of the dii ma j ores, with Jove at their head, and of the Titans or dii pacati : 2. He represents Idea (pi\miMi, yaiMhiUrr^g ; and in this sense the former friend and counsellor of Jove or ISlous uranius : 3. Aoyog ^iXdvdpctj'Troc, the divine humanity, the humane God, who retained unseen, kept back, or (in the catachresis characteristic of the Phoenicio-Grecian mythology) stole, a portion or ignicida from the living spirit of law, which remained with the celestial gods unexpended h r^j voiulicoai. He gave that which, according to the whole analogy of things, should have existed either as pure divinity, the sole property and birthright of the Dii Joviales, the Uranions, or was conceded to inferior beings as a suhstans in substantiato. This spark divine Prometheus gave to an elect, a favored animal, not as a suhstans or understand- ing, commensurate with, and confined by, the constitution and conditions of this particular organism, but as aliquid superstans, liberum, non suhactiim, invictum, iynpacatum, fhYi vo!J.tl^6iMiv(iv. This gift, by which we are to understand reason theoretical and practical, was therefore a vofiog ahrovoiMo- — unapproachable and unmodiiiable by the animal basis — that is, by the pre-existing suhstans with its products, the animal organismus with its faculties and functions ; but yet endowed with the power of potentiat- ing, ennobling, and prescribing to, the substance ; and hence, therefore, a vo/j^^g vofMOTs/dvig, lex legisuada : 4. By Prometheus of ^schylus 345 a transition, ordinary even in allegory, and appropriate to mythic symbol, but especially significant in the present case — the transition, I mean, from the giver to the gift — the giver, in very truth, being the gift, 'whence the soul receives reason ; and reason is her being,' says our Milton. Reason is from God, and God is reason, mens ipsissima. 5. Prometheus represents. Nous h av^pdj-Trw — voO? aymi6Tric. Thus contemplated, the Nous is of necessity, powerless ; for aU power, that is, productivity, or pro- ductive energy, is in Law, that is, vofMog aWorpiovoiJjog : ^ still, however, the Idea in the Law, the numerus numerans become vof/^og, is the principle of the Law ; and if with Law dwells power, so with the knowledge or the Idea scientialis of the Law, dwells prophecy and foresight. A perfect astronomical time-piece in relation to the motions of the heavenly bodies, or the magnet in the mariner's compass in relation to the magnetism of the earth, is a sufficient illustration. 6. Both voiMog and Idea (or Nous) are the verbum ; but, as in the former, it is verbum fiat 'the Word of the Lord,' — in the latter it must be the verbum fiet or, 'the Word of the Lord in the mouth of the prophet.' Pari argumento, as the knowledge is therefore not power, the power is not knowledge. The ^ofj^og, the ZsD^ Travroxpdrojp, seeks to learn, and, as it were, to wrest the secret, the hateful secret, of his own fate, namely, the transitoriness adherent to all antithesis ; for the identity or the absolute is alone eternal. This secret Jove would extort from the Noiis, or Prometheus, which is the sixth representment of Prometheus. 7. Introduce but the least of real as opposed to ideal, the least speck of positive existence, even though it were but the mote in a sunbeam, into the sciential contemplamen or theorem, and it ceases to be science. Ratio desinit esse pura ratio et fit discursus, stat subter et fU u'Trohrixov : — non superstat. The Nous is bound to a rock, the im- movable firmness of which is indissolubly connected with its barrenness, its non-productivity. Were it productive it would be Nomos ; but it is Nous, because it is not Nomos. 1 I scarcely need say, that I use the word &WoTpi6vo/xos as a participle active, as exercising law on another, not as rectivLng law from another, though the latter is the classical force (I suppose) of the word. 346 Idea of the 8. Solitary d/3arw iv IpniJ^ia. Now I say that the Nous, notwithstanding its diversity from the Nomizomeni, is yet, relatively to their supposed original essence, rraat roTg voiMiZ^oixsMoig ravroyiv^g, of the same race or radix : though in another sense, namely, in relation to the -rav h?bv — the pantheistic Elohim, it is conceived anterior to the schism, and to the conquest and enthronization of Jove who succeeded. Hence the Prometheus of the great tragedian is khg 6-jyyivr,g. The kindred deities come to him, some to soothe, to condole ; others to give weak, yet friendly, counsels of submission ; others to tempt, or insult. The most prominent of the latter, and the most odious to the imprisoned and insulated Nous, is Hermes, the impersonation of interest with the entranc- ing and serpentine Caduceus, and, as interest or motives intervening between the reason and its immediate self- determinations, with the antipathies to the vo/j^og avrovo^u^og. The Hermxcs impersonates the eloquence of cupidity, the cajolement of power regnant ; and in a larger sense, custom, the irrational in language, p^iMara ra priroptxa, the fluent, from pzM — the rhetorical in opposition to A070/, ra vorird. But, primarily, the Hermes is the symbol of interest. He is the messenger, the inter-nuncio, in the low but expressive phrase, the go-between, to beguile or insult. And for the other visitors of Prometheus, the elementary powers, or spirits of the elements, Titanes pacati, hoi -jriovoixioi, vassal potentates, and their solicita- tions, the noblest interpretation will be given, if I repeat the lines of our great contemporary poet : — Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own ; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind. And e'en with something of a mother's mind, And no unworthy aim, The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her inmate, Man Forget the glories he hath known And that imperial palace whence he came : — Wordsworth. which exquisite language is prefigured in coarser clay, indeed, and with a less lofty spirit, but yet excellently in their kind, and even more fortunately for the illustration and ornament of the present commentary, in the fifth, sixth, and seventh stanzas of Dr. Henry More's poem on the Pre-existence of the Soul : — Prometheus of ^schylus 347 Thus groping after our own center's near And proper substance, we grew dark, contract, Swallow' d up of earthly life ! Ne what we were Of old, thro' ignorance can we detect. Like noble babe, by fate or friends' neglect Left to the care of sorry salvage wight. Grown up to manly years cannot conject His own true parentage, nor read aright What father him begot, what womb him brought to light. So we, as stranger infants elsewhere born. Cannot divine from what spring we did flow ; Ne dare these base alliances to scorn, Nor lift ourselves a whit from hence below ; Ne strive our parentage again to know, Ne dream we once of any other stock. Since foster' d upon Rhea's ^ knees we grow, In Satyrs' arms with many a mow and mock Oft danced ; and hairy Pan our cradle oft hath rock'd ! But Pan nor Rhea be our parentage ! We been the offspring of the all seeing Nous, &c. To express the supersensual character of the reason, its ibstraction from sensation, we find the Prometheus arsp-ryi, —while in the yearnings accompanied with the remorse ncident to, and only possible in consequence of the Nous Deing, the rational, self-conscious, and therefore responsible iVill, he is yvri diaKvato/j^syog. If to these contemplations we add the control and des- potism exercised on the free reason by Jupiter in his syrn- Dolical character, as v6,(/.og croX/r/xog ; — by custom (Hermes) ; Dy necessity, /5/a jcai xparhg ; — by the mechanic arts and DOwers, avyysvsTc T'jj ^ouj though they are, and which are ;ymbolized in Hephaistos, — we shall see at once the pro- priety of the title, Prometheus, bia,'MU)Trig. 9. Nature, or Zeus as the voiJ^og h i/o/x/^o/xbo/{, knows herself )nly, can only come to a knowledge of herself, in man I \nd even in man, only as man is supernatural, above nature, loetic. But this knowledge man refuses to communicate ; ;hat is, the human understanding alone is at once self- conscious and conscious of nature. And this high pre- ogative it owes exclusively to its being an assessor of the 1 Rhea (from pioiy/luo), that is, the earth as the transitory, the ever-flowing nature, he flux and sum oi phenomena, or objects of the outward sense, in contradistinction roiTi the earth as Vesta, as the firmamcntal law that sustains and disposes the apparent .rorld ! The Satyrs represent the sports and appetences of the sensuous nature <Ppbvt)y.a o-apK6s)—Pa.n, or the total life of the earth, the presence of all in each, the niversal organistrtus of bodies and bodily energy. 1^ 348 Idea of the Prometheus of ^schylusji reason. Yet even the human understanding in its height|j| of place seeks vainly to appropriate the ideas of the pure:;? reason, which it can only represent by idola. Here, then, ; the Nous stands as Prometheus dvT/-TaXog,renuens — in hostileb i opposition to Jupiter Inquisitor. ID. Yet finally, against the obstacles and even under the fostering influences of the Nomos, roZ vo!J.ifj.ov, a son of Jove himself, but a descendant from lo, the mundane religion, as contra-distinguished from the sacerdotal cultus, or religion of the state, an Alcides Liberator will arise, and the Nous or divine principle in man, will be Prometheus iXsvhpdj/xsvog. Did my limits or time permit me to trace the persecu- tions, wanderings, and migrations of the lo, the mundane religion, through the whole map marked out by the tragic poet, the coincidences would bring the truth, the unarbit- rariness, of the preceding exposition as near to demonstra- tion as can rationally be required on a question of history, that must, for the greater part, be answered by combination of scattered facts. But this part of my subject, together with a particular exemplification of the light which my theory throws both on the sense and the beauty of numerous passages of this stupendous poem, I must reserve for a future communication. NOTES.i V. 15. (pdpccyyi : — 'in a coomb, or combe.* V. 17. i^iopid^eip yap Trarpbs \6yovs ^api. svupjd^siv, as the editor confesses, is a word introduced in- to the text against the authority of all editions and manu- scripts. I should prefer ggw^/a^g/t/, notwithstanding its being a d-TraE, Xeyo/j.evov. The iv — seems to my tact too free and easy a word ; — and yet our *to trifle with' appears the exact meaning. 1 Written in Bp. Blomfield's editioD, aad communicated by Mr. Gary. £d. I Mysteries in Greek Tragedy 349 SUMMARY OF AN ESSAY ON THE FUNDAMENTAL POSITION OF THE MYSTERIES IN RELATION TO GREEK TRAGEDY. The Position, to tlie establishment of which Mr. Coleridge regards his essay as the Prolegomena, is : that the Greek Tragedy stood in th«^ same relation to the Mysteries, as the Epic Song, and the Fine Arts to the Temple Worship, or the Religion of the State ; that the proper function of the Tragic Poet was under the disguise of popular super- stitions, and using the popular Mythology as his stuff and drapery to communicate so much and no more of the doctrines preserved in the Mysteries as should counteract the demoralizing influence of the state religion, without disturbing the public tranquillity, or weakening the re- verence for the laws, or bringing into contempt the ancestral and local usages and traditions on which the patriotism of the citizens mainly rested, or that nationality in its in- tensest form which was little less than essential in the con- stitution of a Greek republic. To establish this position it was necessary to explain the nature of these secret doctrines, or at least the fundamental principles of the faith and philosophy of Elensis and Samothrace. The Samothracian M3/steries Mr. Coleridge supposes to have been of Phoenician origin, and both these and the Elensi- nian to have retained the religious belief of the more ancient inhabitants of the Peloponnesus, prior to their union with the Hellenes and the Egyptian colonies : that it comprised sundry relics and fragments of the Patri- archal Faith, the traditions historical and prophetic of the Noetic Family, though corrupted and depraved by their combination with the system of Pantheism, or the Worship of the Universe as God [Jupiter est quodcunque vides) which Mr. Coleridge contends to have been the first great Apostacy of the Ancient World. But a religion founded on Pan- theism, is of necessity a religion founded on philosophy, i.e. an attempt to determine the origin of nature by the unaided strength of the human intellect, however unsound and false that philosophy may have been. And of this the sacred books of the Indian Priests afford at once proof and instance. Again : the earlier the date of any philo- 350 Mysteries in Greek Tragedy sophic scheme, the more subjective will it be found — in other words the earliest reasoners sought in their own minds the form, measure and substance of all other power. Abstracting from whatever was individual and accidental, from whatever distinguished one human mind from another, they fixed their attention exclusively on the char- acters which belong to all rational beings, and which there- fore they contemplated as mind itself, mind in its essence. And however averse a scholar of the present day may be to these first-fruits of speculative thought, as metaphysics, a knowledge of their contents and distinctive tenets is indis- pensable as history. At all events without this knov/ledge he will in vain attempt to understand the spirit and genius of the arts, institutions and governing minds of ancient Greece. The difficulty of comprehending any scheme of opinion is proportionate to its greater or lesser unlikeness to the principles and modes of reasoning in which our own minds have been formed. Where the difference is so great as almost to amount to contrariety, no clearness in the exhibition of the scheme will remove the sense, or rather, perhaps the sensation, of strangeness from the hearer's mind. Even beyond its utmost demerits it will appear obscure, unreal, visionary. This difficulty the author anti- cipates as an obstacle to the ready comprehension of the first principles of the eldest philosophy, and the esoteric doctrines of the Mysteries ; but to the necessity of over- coming this the only obstacle, the thoughtful inquirer must resign himself, as the condition under which alone he may expect to solve a series of problems the most interesting of all that the records of ancient history propose or suggest. The fundamental position of the Mysteries, Mr. Coleridge contends, consists in affirming that the productive powers or laws of nature are essentially the same with the active powers of the mind — in other words that mind, or Nous, under which term they combine the universal attributes of reason and will, is a principle of forms or patterns, endued with a tendency to manifest itself as such ; and that this mind or eternal essence exists in two modes of being. Namely, either the form and the productive power, which gives it outward and phoenomenal reality, are united in equal and adequate proportions, in which case it is what the eldest philosophers, and the moderns in imitation of them, call a law of nature : or the form remaining the same. Fragment of an Essay on Taste 351 but with the productive power in unequal or inadequate proportions, whether the diminution be effected by the mind's own act or original determination not to put forth this inherent power, or whether the power have been re- pressed, and as it were driven inward by the violence of a superior force from without, — and in this case it was called by the most Ancient School " Intelligible Number," by a later School " Idea," or Mind — xar' s^oy^Tiv. To this position a second was added, namely, that the form could not put forth its productive or self -realizing power without ceasing at the same moment to exist for itself, — i.e. to exist, and know itself as existing. The formative power was as it were alienated from itself and absorbed in the product. It existed as an instinctive, essentially intelligential, but not self-knowing, power. It was law, Jupiter, or (when con- templated plurally) the Dii Majores. On the other hand, to possess its own being consciously, the form must remain single and only inwardly productive. To exist for itself, it must continue to exist by itself. It must be an idea ; but an idea in the primary sense of the term, the sense attached to it by the oldest Italian School and by Plato, — not as a synonyme of, but in contra-distinction from, image, conception or notion : as a true entity of all en- tities the most actual, of all essences the most essential. Now on this Antithesis of idea and law, that is of mind as an unproductive but self-knowing power, and of mind as a productive but unconscious power, the whole religion of pantheism as disclosed in the Mysteries turns, as on its axis, bi-polar. FRAGMENT OF AN ESSAY ON TASTE. 1810. The same arguments that decide the question, whether taste has any fixed principles, may probably lead to a determination of what those principles are. First then, what is taste in its metaphorical sense, or, which will be the easiest mode of arriving at the same solution, what is there in the primary sense of the word, which may give to its metaphorical meaning an import different from that of sight or hearing, on the one hand, and of touch or 352 Fragment of an Essay on Taste smell on the other ? And this question seems the more natural, because in correct language we confine beauty, the main subject of taste, to objects of sight and combina- tions of sounds, and never, except sportively or by abuse 'of words, speak of a beautiful flavour, or a beautiful scent. Now the analysis of our senses in the commonest books of anthrof)ology has drawn our attention to the distinction between the perfectly organic, and the mixed senses ; — the first presenting objects, as distinct from the perception ; — the last as blending the perception with the sense of the object. Our eyes and ears — (I am not now considering what is or is not the case really, but only that of which we are regularly conscious as appearances,) our eyes most often appear to us perfect organs of the sentient principle, and wholly in action, and our hearing so much more so than the three other senses, and in all the ordinary exer- tions of that sense, perhaps, equally so with the sight, that all languages place them in one class, and express their different modifications by nearly the same metaphors. The three remaining senses appear in part passive, and combine with the perception of the outward object a distinct sense of our own life. Taste, therefore, as opposed to vision and sound, will teach us to expect in its meta- phorical use a certain reference of any given object to our own being, and not merely a distinct notion of the object as in itself, or in its independent properties. From the sense of touch, on the other hand, it is distinguishable by adding to this reference to our vital being some degree of enjoyment, or the contrary, — some perceptible impulse from pleasure or pain to complacency or dishke. The sense of smell, indeed, might perhaps have furnished a metaphor of the same import with that of taste ; but the latter was naturally chosen by the majority of civilized nations on account of the greater frequency, importance, and dignity of its employment or exertion in human nature. By taste, therefore, as applied to the fine arts, we must be supposed to mean an intellectual perception of any object blended with a distinct reference to our own sensi- bility of pain or pleasure, or, vice versa, a sense of enjoy- ment or dislike co-instantaneously combined with, and appearing to proceed from, some intellectual perception of the object ; — intellectual perception, I say ; for other- Fragment of an Essay on Taste 353 wise it would be a definition of taste in its primary rather than in its metaphorical sense. Briefly, taste is a metaphor taken from one of our mixed senses, and applied to objects of the more purely organic senses, and of our moral sense, when we would imply the co-existence of immediate personal dislike or complacency. In this definition of taste, there- fore, is involved the definition of fine arts, namely, as being such the chief and discriminative purpose of which it is to gratify the taste, — that is, not merely to connect, but to combine and unite, a sense of immediate pleasure in ourselves, with the perception of external arrangement. The great question, therefore, whether taste in any one of the fine arts has any fixed principle or ideal, will find its solution in the ascertainment of two facts : — first, whether in every determination of the taste concerning any work of the fine arts, the individual does not, with or even against the approbation of his general judgment, involuntarily claim that all other minds ought to think and feel the same ; whether the common expressions, *I dare say I may be wrong, but that is my particular taste ;' — are uttered as an oft'ering of courtesy, as a sacrifice to the undoubted fact of our individual fallibility, or are spoken with perfect sincerity, not only of the reason but of the whole feeling, with the same entireness of mind and heart, with which we concede a right to every person to differ from another in his preference of bodily tastes and flavours. If we should find ourselves compelled to deny this, and to admit that, notwithstanding the consciousness of our liability to error, and in spite of all those many individual experiences which may have strengthened the consciousness, each man does at the moment so far legislate for aU men, as to believe of necessity that he is either right or wrong, and that if it be right for him, it is universally right, — we must then proceed to ascertain : — secondly, whether the source of these phenomena is at all to be found in those parts of our nature, in which each intellect is representative of all, — and whether wholly, or partially. No person of common reflection demands even in feeling, that what tastes pleasant to him ought to produce the same effect on all living beings ; but every man does and must expect and demand the universal acquiescence of all intelligent beings in every conviction of his understanding. * ♦ * ♦ ♦ 354 Fragment of an Essay on Beauty FRAGMENT OF AN ESSAY ON BEAUTY. 1818. The only necessary, but this the absolutely necessary, pre-requisite to a full insight into the grounds of the beauty in the objects of sight, is — the directing of the attention to the action of those thoughts in our own mind which are not consciously distinguished. Every man may understand this, if he will but recall the state of his feelings in endeavouring to recollect a name, which he is quite sure that he remembers, though he cannot force it back into consciousness. This region of unconscious thoughts, oftentimes the more working the more indistinct they are, may, in reference to this subject, be conceived as forming an ascending scale from the most universal associations of motion with the functions and passions of hfe, — as when, on passing out of a crowded city into the fields on a day in June, we describe the grass and king- cups as nodding their heads and dancing in the breeze, — up to the half perceived, yet not fixable, resemblance of a form to some particular object of a diverse class, which resemblance we need only increase but a little, to destroy, or at least injure, its beauty-enhancing effect, and to make it a fantastic intrusion of the accidental and the arbitrary, and consequently a disturbance of the beautiful. This might be abundantly exemplified and illustrated from the paintings of Salvator Rosa. I am now using the term beauty in its most comprehen- sive sense, as including expression and artistic interest, — that is, I consider not only the living balance, but likewise all the accompaniments that even by disturbing are neces- sary to the renewal and continuance of the balance. And in this sense I proceed to show, that the beautiful in the object may be referred to two elements, — lines and colours ; the first belonging to the shapely [forma, formalis, for- mosus), and in this, to the law, and the reason ; and the second, to the lively, the free, the spontaneous, and the self-justifying. As to lines, the rectilineal are in themselves the lifeless, the determined ab extra, but still in immediate union with the cycloidal. which are expressive of function. The curve line is a modification of the force from without Fragment of an Essay on Beauty 355 by the force from within, or the spontaneous. These are not arbitrary symbols, but the language of nature, universal and intuitive, by virtue of the law by which man is impelled to explain visible motions by imaginary causa- tive powers analogous to his own acts, as the Dryads, Hamadryads, Naiads, &c. The better way of applying these principles will be by a brief and rapid sketch of the history of the fine arts, — in which it will be found, that the beautiful in nature has been appropriated to the works of man, just in proportion as the state of the mind in the artists themselves approached to the subjective beauty. Determine what predominance in the minds of the men is preventive of the living balance of excited faculties, and you will discover the exact counter- part in the outward products. Egypt is an illustration of this. Shapeliness is intellect without freedom ; but colours are significant. The introduction of the arch is not less an epoch in the fine than in the useful arts. Order is beautiful arrangement without any purpose ad extra ; — therefore there is a beauty of order, or order may be contemplated exclusively as beauty. The form given in every empirical intuition, — the stuff, that is, the quality of the stuff, determines the agreeable : but when a thing excites us to receive it in such and such a mould, so that its exact correspondence to that mould is what occupies the mind, — this is taste or the sense of beauty. WTiether dishes full of painted wood or exquisite viands were laid out on a table in the same arrangement, would be indifferent to the taste, as in ladies patterns ; but surely the one is far more agreeable than the other. Hence observe the disinterestedness of all taste ; and hence also a sensual perfection with intellect is occasionally possible without moral feeling. So it may be in music and painting, but not in poetry. How far it is a real preference of the refined to the gross pleasures, is another question, upon the sup- position that pleasure, in some form or other, is that alone which determines men to the objects of the former ; — whether experience does not show that if the latter were equally in our power, occasioned no more trouble to enjoy, and caused no more exhaustion of the power of enjoying them by the enjoyment itself, we should in real practice prefer the grosser pleasure. It is not, therefore, any ex- cellence in the quality of the refined pleasures themselves. 356 Notes on Chapman's Homer but the advantages and facilities in the means of enjoying them, that give them the pre-eminence. This is, of course, on the supposition of the absence of all moral feeling. Suppose its presence, and then there w'ill accrue an excellence even to the quality of the pleasures themselves ; not only, however, of the refined, but also of the grosser kinds, — inasmuch as a larger sweep of thoughts will be associated with each enjoyment, and with each thought will be associated a number of sensations ; and so, consequently, each pleasure will become more the pleasure of the whole being. This is one of the earthly rewards of our being what we ought to be, but which would be annihilated, if we attempted to be it for the sake of this increased enjoyment. Indeed it is a contradiction to suppose it. Yet this is the common argumentum in circitlo, in which the eudaemonists flee and pursue. NOTES ON CHAPMAN'S HOMER. Extract of a Letter sent with the Volume} 1807. Chapman I have sent in order that you might read the Odyssey ; the Iliad is fine, but less equal in the translation, as weU as less interesting in itself. What is stupidly said of Shakspeare, is really true and appropriate of Chapman ; mighty faults counterpoised by mighty beauties. Except- ing his quaint epithets which he affects to render literally from the Greek, a language above all others blest in the " happy marriage of sweet words," and which in our lan- guage are mere printer's compound epithets — such as quaffed divine ]oy-in-the-heart-of -man-infusing wine, (the undermarked is to be one word, because one sweet meUi- fiuous word expresses it in Homer) ; — excepting this, it has no look, no air, of a translation. It is as truly an original poem as the Faery Queene ; — it will give you smaU idea of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope's epigrams, or Cowper's cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. For Chapman writes and feels as a poet, — as Homer might have written had he Uved in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In short, it is an exquisite poem, in spite of its frequent and perverse quaintnesses and harsh- 1 Coaununicated through Mr. Wordsworth. £d. Notes on Chapman's Homer 357 nesses, which are, however, amply repaid by aknost un- exampled sweetness and beauty of language, all over spirit and feeling. In the main it is an English heroic poem, the tale of which is borrowed from the Greek. The dedication to the Iliad is a noble copy of verses, especially those sublime lines beginning, — O ! 'tis wondrous much (Through nothing prisde) that the right vertuous touch Of a well written soule, to vertue moves. Nor haue we soules to purpose, if their loves Of fitting objects be not so inflam'd. How much then, were this kingdome's maine soul maim'd. To want this great infiamer of all powers That move in humane soules ! All realmes but yours, Are honor' d with him ; and hold blest that state That have his workes to reade and contemplate. In which, humanitie to her height is raisde ; Which all the world (yet, none enough) hath praisde. Seas, earth, and heaven, he did in verse comprize ; Out sung the Muses, and did equalise Their king Apollo ; being so farre from cause Of princes light thoughts, that their gravest lawes May finde stuffe to be fashioned by his lines. Through all the pompe of kingdomes still he shines And graceth all his gracers. Then let lie Your lutes, and viols, and more loftily Make the heroiques of your Homer sung, To drums and trumpets set his Angels tongue : And with the princely sports of haukes you use. Behold the kingly flight of his high Muse : And see how like the Phoenix she renues Her age, and starrie feathers in your sunne ; Thousands of yeares attending ; everie one Blowing the holy fire, and throwing in Their seasons, kingdomes, nations that have bin Subverted in them ; lawes, religions, all Ofierd to change, and greedie funerall ; Yet still your Homer lasting, living, raigning. — and likewise the ist, the nth, and last but one, of the pre- fatory sonnets to the Odyssey. Could I have foreseen any other speedy opportunity, I should have begged your acceptance of the volume in a somewhat handsomer coat ; but as it is, it will better represent the sender, — to quote from myself — A man disherited, in form and face. By nature and mishap, of outward grace. Chapman in his moral heroic verse, as in this dedication and the prefatory sonnets to his Odyssey, stands above 358 Notes on Chapman's Homer Ben Jonson ; there is more dignity, more lustre, and equal Dedication Strength ; but not midway quite between him and toVrince°" the sonnets of Milton. I do not know whether I Henry. gj^.^ ]-^jj^ ^^le higher praise, in that he reminds me of Ben Jonson with a sense of his superior excellence, or that he brings Milton to memory notwithstanding his in- feriority. His moral poems are not quite out of books like Jonson's, nor yet do the sentiments so wholly grow up out of his own natural habit and grandeur of thought, as in Milton. The sentiments have been attracted to him by a natural afl&nity of his intellect, and so combined ; — but Jonson has taken them by individual and successive acts of choice. All this and the precedmg is well felt and vigorously, though harshly, expressed, respecting sublime poetry in genere ; but in reading Homer I look about me, D?Scatorie ^ud ask how does all this apply here. For surely Od ^^-^e • never was there plainer writing , there are a ^^^^^' thousand charms of sun and moonbeam, ripple, and wave, and stormy billow, but all on the surface. Had Chapman read Proclus and Porphjnry ? — and did he really believe them, — or even that they believed themselves ? They felt the immense power of a Bible, a Shaster, a Koran. There was none in Greece or Rome, and they tried therefore by subtle allegorical accommodations to conjure the poem of Homer into the /SZ/SX/ov hoTapddorov of Greek faith. Chapman's identification of his fate with Homer's, and his complete forgetfulness of the distinction between Chris- tianity and idolatry, under the general feeling of DedStorie ^omc rcligiou, is very interesting. It is amusing to the to observe, how familiar Chapman's fancy has be- omachia°"'^" comc with Homcr, his life and its circumstances, though the very existence of any such individupJ, at least with regard to the Iliad and the Hymns, is more than problematic. N.B. The rude engraving in the page was designed by no vulgar hand. It is full of spirit and passion. I am so dull, that neither in the original nor in any translation could I ever find any wit or wise purpose in ^ , r ^ this poem. The whole humour seems to lie in the End of the t^i i- i • j. x Batrachomy- uamcs. Thc frogs aud mice are not frogs or mice, omachia. ^^^ mcu, and yet they do nothing that conveys any satire. In the Greek there is much beauty of language, Notes on Barclay's Argenis 359 but the joke is very flat. This is always the catse in rude ages ; — their serious vein is inimitable, — their comic low and low indeed. The psychological cause is easily stated, and copiously exemplifiable. NOTE IN CASAUBON'S PERSIUS. 1807. There are six hundred and sixteen pages in this volume, of which twenty-two are text ; and five hundred and ninety-four commentary and introductory matter. Yet when I recollect, that I have the whole works of Cicero, Livy, and Ouinctilian, with many others, — the whole works of each in a single volume, either thick quarto with thin paper and small yet distinct print, or thick octavo or duodecimo of the same character, and that they cost me in the proportion of a shilling to a guinea for the same quantity of worse matter in modern books, or editions, — I am a poor man, yet one whom (SiS/Jojv xT'/iszc^g Ik 'TTuidccpiov diivog s^pdryjas -Trodog, feel the liveliest gratitude for the age, which produced such editions, and for the education, which by enabling me to understand and taste the Greek and Latin writers, has thus put it in my power to collect on my own shelves, for my actual use, almost all the best books in spite of my small income. Somewhat too I am indebted to the ostentation of expense among the rich, which has occasioned these cheap editions to become so disproportionately cheap. NOTES ON BARCLAY'S ARGENIS. 1803.^ Heaven forbid that this work should not exist in its present form and language ! Yet I cannot avoid the wish that it had, during the reign of James I., been moulded into an heroic poem in English octave stanza, or epic blank verse ; — which, however, at that time had not been invented, and which, alas ! still remains the sole property of the inventor, as if the Muses had given him an unevad- able patent for it. Of dramatic blank verse we have many 1 Communicaujd by the Rev. Dcrwent Coleridge. 360 Notes on Barclay's Argenis and various specimens ; — for example, Shakspeare's as compared with Massinger's, both excellent in their kind : — of lyric, and of what may be called Orphic, or philosophic, blank verse, perfect models may be found in Wordsworth : of colloquial blank verse there are excellent, though not perfect, examples in Cowper ; — but of epic blank verse, since Milton, there is not one. It absolutely distresses me when I reflect that this work, admired as it has been by great men of all ages, and lately, I hear, by the poet Cowper, should be only not unknown to general readers. It has been translated into English two or three times — how, I know not, wretchedly, I doubt not. It affords matter for thought that the last transla- tion (or rather, in all probability, miserable and faithless abridgment of some former one) was given under another name. What a mournful proof of the incelebrity of this great and amazing work among both thepubhc and the people ! For as Wordsworth, the greater of the two great men of this age, — (at least, except Davy and him, I have known, read of, heard of, no others) — for as Wordsworth did me the honour of once observing to me, the people and the public are two distinct claisses, and, as things go, the former is Hkely to retain a better taste, the less it is acted on by the latter. Yet Telemachus is in every mouth, in every schoolboy's and schoolgirl's hand ! It is awful to say of a work, like the Argenis, the style and Latinity of which, judged (not according to classical pedantry, which pronounces every sentence right which can be found in any book prior to Boetius, however vicious the age, or affected the author, and every sentence wrong, however natural and beautiful, which has been of the author's own combination, — but) according to the universal logic of thought as modified by feeling, is equal to that of Tacitus in energy and genuine conciseness, and is as perspicuous as that of Livy, whilst it is free from the affectations, obscurities, and lust to surprise of the former, and seems a sort of antithesis to the slowness and prolixity of the latter ; — (this remark does not, however, impeach even the classi- cality of the language, which, when the freedom and originality, the easy motion and perfect command of the thoughts, are considered, is truly wonderful) : — of such a work it is awful to say, that it would have been well if Bishop Corbet 361 it had been written in English or Italian verse ! Yet the event seems to justify the notion. Alas ! it is now too late. What modern work, even of the size of the Paradise Lost — much less of the Faery Queene — would be read in the present day, or even bought or be likely to be bought, unless it were an instructive work, as the phrase is, like Roscoe's quartos of Leo X., or entertaining like Boswell's three of Dr. Johnson's conversations ? It may be fairly objected — what work of surpassing merit has given the proof ? — Certainly, none. Yet still there are ominous facts, sufficient, I fear, to afford a certain prophecy of its reception, if such were produced. NOTES ON CHALMERS'S LIFE OF SAMUEL DANIEL. The justice of these remarks cannot be disputed, though some oi them are too figurative for sober criticism. Most genuine ! a figurative remark ! If this strange writer had any meaning, it must be : — Headly's criticism is just throughout, but conveyed in a style too figurative for prose composition. Chalmers's own remarks are wholly mistaken ; too silly for any criticism, drunk or sober, and in language too flat for any thing. In Daniel's Sonnets there is scarcely one good line ; while his Hymen's Triumph, of which Chalmers says not one word, exhibits a continued series of first-rate beauties in thought, passion, and imagery, and in language and metre is so faultless, that the style of that poem may without extravagance be declared to be imperishable English. 1820. BISHOP CORBET. I ALMOST wonder that the inimitable humour, and the rich sound and propulsive movement of the verse, have not rendered Corbet a popular poet. I am convinced that a reprint of his poems, with illustrative and chit-chat bio- graphical notes, and cuts by Cruikshank, would take with the pubhc uncommonly weU. September, 1823. 362 Notes on Selden's Table Talk NOTES ON SELDEN'S TABLE TALK.i There is more weighty bullion sense in this book, than I ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer. OPINION. Opinion and affection extremely differ. I may affect a woman best, but it does not follow I must think her the handsomest woman in the world. * * * Opinion is something wherein I go about to give reason why all the world should think as I think Affection is a thing wherein I look after the pleasing of myself. Good ! This is the true difference betwixt the beautiful and the agreeable, which Knight and the rest of that 'TrXr^dog akov have SO beneficially confounded, meretricibus scilicet et Pliitoni. O what an insight the whole of this article gives into a wise man's heart, who has been compelled to act with the many, as one of the many ! It explains Sir Thomas More's zealous Romanism, &c. PARLIAMENT. Excellent ! O ! to have been with Selden over his glass of wine, making every accident an outlet and a vehicle of wisdom ! POETRY. The old poets had no other reason but this, their verse was sung to music ; otherwise it had been a senseless thing to have fettered up themselves. No man can know all things : even Selden here talks ignorantly. Verse is in itself a music, and the natural symbol of that union of passion with thought and pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all poetry, as contra- distinguished from science, and distinguished from history civil or natural. To Pope's Essay on Man, — in short, to whatever is mere metrical good sense and wit, the remark applies. lb. Verse proves nothing but the quantity of syllables ; they axe oot meant for logic. 1 These remarks on Selden were communicated by Mr. Ciry. Ed. Notes on Tom Jones 363 True ; they, that is, verses, are not logic ; but they are, or ought to be, the envoys and representatives of that vital passion, which is the practical cement of logic ; and without which logic must remain inert. NOTES ON TOM JONES.* Manners change from generation to generation, and with manners morals appear to change, — actually change with some, but appear to change with all but the abandoned. A young man of the present day who should act as Tom Jones is supposed to act at Upton, with Lady Bellaston, &c. would not be a Tom Jones ; and a Tom Jones of the present day, without perhaps being in the ground a better man, would have perished rather than submit to be kept by a harridan of fortune. Therefore this novel is, and, indeed, pretends to be, no exemplar of conduct. But, not- withstanding all this, I do loathe the cant which can recommend Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe as strictly moral, though they poison the imagination of the young with con- tinued doses of tinct. lyttcB, while Tom Jones is prohibited as loose. I do not speak of young women ; — but a young man whose heart or feelings can be injured, or even his passions excited, by aught in this novel, is already thoroughly corrupt. There is a cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit that prevails everywhere, strongly contrasted with the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson. Every indis- cretion, every immoral act, of Tom Jones, (and it must be remembered that he is in every one taken by surprise — his inward principles remaining firm — ) is so instantly punished by embarrassment and unanticipated evil consequences of his folly, that the reader's mind is not left for a moment to dwell or run riot on the criminal indulgence itself. In short, let the requisite allowance be made for the increased refinement of our manners, — and then I dare believe that no young man who consulted his heart and conscience only, without adverting to what the world would say — could rise from the perusal of Fielding's Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, or Amelia, without feeling himself a better man ; — at least, without an intense conviction that he could not be guilty of a base act. 1 Communicated by Mr. Gillman. Ed. 364 Notes on Tom Jones If I want a servant or mechanic, I wish to know what he does : — but of a friend, I must know what he is. And in no writer is this momentous distinction so finely brought forward as by Fielding. We do not care what Blifil does ; — the deed, as separate from the agent, may be good or ill ; but Blifil is a villain ; — and we feel him to be so from the very moment he, the boy Blifil, restores Sophia's poor captive bird to its native and rightful liberty. Book xiv. ch. 8. Notwithstanding the sentiment of the Roman satirist, which denies the divinity of fortune ; and the opinion of Seneca to the same purpose ; Cicero, who was, I believe, a wiser man than either of them, expressly holds the contrary ; and certain it is there are some incidents in life so very strange and unaccountable, that it seems to require more than human skill and foresight in producing them. Surely Juvenal, Seneca, and Cicero, all meant the same thing, namely, that there was no chance, but instead of it providence, either human or divine. Book XV. ch. 9. The rupture with Lady Bellaston, Even in the most questionable part of Tom Jones, I cannot but think, after frequent reflection, that an addi- tional paragraph, more fully and forcibly unfolding Tom Jones's sense of self-degradation on the discovery of the true character of the relation in which he had stood to Lady Bellaston, and his awakened feeling of the dignity of manly chastity, would have removed in great measure any just objections, — at all events relatively to Fielding himself, and with regard to the state of manners in his time. Book xvi. ch. 5. That refined degree of Platonic affection which is absolutely detached from the flesh, and is indeed entirely and purely spiritual, is a gift confined to the female part of the creation ; many of whom I have heard declare (and doubtless with great truth) that they would, with the utmost readiness, resign a lover to a rival, when such resignation was proved to be necessary for the temporal interest of such lover. I firmly believe that there are men capable of such a sacrifice, and this, without pretending to, or even admiring or seeing any virtue in, this absolute detachment from the flesh. Notes on Tom Jones 365 ANOTHER SET OF NOTES ON TOM JONES. Book i. ch. 4. ** Beyond this the country gradually rose into a ridge of wild mountains, the tops of which were above the clouds." As this is laid in Somersetshire, the clouds must have been unusually low. One would be more apt to think of Skiddaw or Ben Nevis, than of Quantock or Mendip Hills. Book xi. ch. I. " Nor can the Devil receive a guest more worthy of him, nor possibly more welcome to him than a slanderer." The very word Devil, Diabolus, means a slanderer. Book xii. ch. 12. " And here we will make a concession, which would not perhaps have been expected from us ; That no limited form of government is capable of rising to the same degree of perfection, or of pro- ducing the same benefits to society with this. Mankind has never been so happy, as when the greatest part of the then known world was under the dominion of a single master ; and this state of their felicity continued under the reign of five successive Princes." Strange that such a lover of political hberty as Fielding should have forgotten that the glaring infamy of the Roman morals and manners immediately on the ascent of Corn- modus prove, that even five excellent despots in suc- cession were but a mere temporary palliative of the evils inherent in despotism and its causes. Think you that all the sub-despots were Trojans and Antonines ? No ! Rome was left as it was found by them, incapable of freedom. Book xviii. ch. 4. Plato himself concludes his Phaedon with declaring, that his best argument amounts only to raise a probability ; and Cicero himself seems rather to profess an inclination to believe, than any actual belief, in the doctrines of immortality. No ! Plato does not say so, but speaks as a philosophic Christian would do of the best arguments of the scientific intellect. The assurance is derived from a higher principle. If this be Methodism Plato and Socrates were arrant 366 Jonathan Wild Methodists and New Light men ; but I would ask Fielding what ratiocinations do more than raise a high degree of probability. But assuredly an historic belief is far different from Christian faith. No greater proof can be conceived of the strength of the instinctive anticipation of a future state than that it was believed at all by the Greek Philosophers, with their vague and (Plato excepted) Pantheistic conception of the First Cause. S. T. C. JONATHAN WILD.i Jonathan Wild is assuredly the best of all the fictions in which a villain is throughout the prominent character. But how impossible it is by any force of genius to create a sustained attractive interest for such a ground-work, and how the mind wearies of, and shrinks from, the more than painful interest, the //,/<r?jrof, of utter depravity, — Fielding himself felt and endeavoured to mitigate and remedy by the (on all other principles) far too large a proportion, and too quick recurrence, of the interposed chapters of moral reflection, like the chorus in the Greek tragedy, — admirable specimens as these chapters are of profound irony and philosophic satire. Chap. VI. Book 2, on Hats,^ — brief as it is, exceeds any thing even in Swift's Lilliput, or Tale of the Tub. How forcibly it applies to the WTiigs, Tories, and Radicals of our own times. Whether the transposition of Fielding's scorching wit (as B. HI. c. xiv.) to the mouth of his hero be objectionable on the ground of increduhcs odi, or is to be admired as answering the author's purpose by unrealizing the story, in order to give a deeper reality to the truths intended, — I must leave doubtful, yet myself inclining to the latter judgment. 27th Feb. 1832 1 Communicated by Mr. Gillman. Ed. 2 ' In which our hero makes a speech well worthy to be celebrated ; and the behaviour ctf one of the gang, perhaps more unnatural than any other part of this history.' Notes on Junius 367 NOTES ON JUNIUS. 1807. Stat nominis umbra. As he never dropped the mask, so he too often used the poisoned dagger of an assassin. Dedication to the English nation. The whole of this dedication reads hke a string of aphor- isms arranged in chapters, and classified by a resemblance of subject, or a cento of points. lb. If an honest, and I may truly affirm a laborious, zeal for the public service has given me any weight in your esteem, let me exhort and conjure you never to suffer an invasion of your political constitution, however minute the instance may appear, to pass by, without a determined persevering resistance. A longer sentence and proportionately inelegant. lb. If you reflect that in the changes of administration which have marked and disgraced the present reign, although your warmest patriots have, in their turn, been invested with the law- ful and unlawful authority of the crown, and though other reliefs or improvements have been held forth to the people, yet that no one man in office has ever promoted or encouraged a bill for shorten- ing the duration of parliaments, but that (whoever was minister) the opposition to this measure, ever since the septennial act passed, has been constant and uniform on the part of government. Long, and as usual, inelegant. Junius cannot manage a long sentence ; it has all the ins and outs of a snappish figure-dance. Preface. An excellent preface, and the sentences not so snipt as in the dedication. The paragraph near the conclusion begin- ning with " some opinion may now be expected," &c. and ending with " relation between guilt and punishment," deserves to be quoted as a master-piece of rhetorical ratio- cination in a series of questions that permit no answer ; or (as Junius says) carry their own answer along with them. The great art of Junius is never to say too much, and to avoid with equal anxiety a common-place manner, and matter that is not common-place. If ever he deviates into any originality of thought, he takes care that it shall be such as excites surprise for its acuteness, rather than admira- 368 Notes on Junius tion for its profundity. He takes care ? say rather that nature took care for him. It is impossible to detract from the merit of these Letters : they are suited to their purpose, and perfect in their kind. They impel to action, not thought. Had they been profound or subtle in thought, or majestic and sweeping in composition, they would have been adapted for the closet of a Sydney, or for a House of Lords such as it was in the time of Lord Bacon ; but they are plain and sensible whenever the author is in the right, and whether right or wrong, always shrewd and epigrammatic, and fitted for the coffee-house, the exchange, the lobby of the House of Commons, and to be read aloud at a public meeting. When connected, dropping the forms of connexion, desultory without abruptness or appearance of disconnexion, epigrammatic and antithetical to excess, sententious and personal, regardless of right or wrong, yet well-skilled to act the part of an honest warm-hearted man, and even when he is in the right, saying the truth but never proving it, much less attempting to bottom it, — this is the character of Junius ; — and on this character, and in the mould of these writings must every man cast himself, who would wish in factious times to be the important and long remembered agent of a faction. I believe that I could do all that Junius has done, and surpass him by doing many things which he has not done : for example, — by an occasional induction of starthng facts, in the manner of Tom Paine, and lively illustrations and witty applications of good stories and appropriate anecdotes in the manner of Home Tooke. I believe I could do it if it were in my nature to aim at this sort of excellence, or to be enamoured of the fame, and immediate influence, which would be its consequence and reward. But it is not in my nature. I not only love truth, but I have a passion for the legitimate investigation of truth. The love of truth conjoined with a keen delight in a strict and skilful yet impassioned argu- mentation, is my master-passion, and to it are subordinated even the love of liberty and all my public feelings — and to it whatever I labour under of vanity, ambition, and all my inward impulses. Letter L From this Letter all the faults and excel- lencies of Junius may be exemplified. The moral and pohtical aphorisms are just and sensible, the irony in which his personal satire is conveyed is fine, yet always intellig- Notes on Junius 369 ible ; but it approaches too nearly to the nature of a sneer ; the sentences are cautiously constructed without the forms of connection ; the he and it every where substituted for the who and which ; the sentences are short, laboriously balanced, and the antitheses stand the test of analysis much better than Johnson's. These are all excellencies in their kind ; — where is the defect ? In this ; — there is too much of each, and there is a defect of many things, the presence of which would have been not only valuable for their own sakes, but for the relief and variety which they would have given. It is observable too that every Letter adds to the faults of these Letters, while it weakens the effect of their beauties. L. III. A capital letter, addressed to a private person, and intended as a sharp reproof for intrusion. Its short sentences, its witty perversions and deductions, its ques- tions and omissions of connectives, all in their proper places are dramatically good. L. V. For my own part, I willingly leave it to the public to determine whether your vindication of your friend has been as able and judicious as it was certainly well intended ; and you, I think, may be satisfied with the warm acknowledgments he already owes you for making him the principal figure in a piece in which, but for your amicable assistance, he might have passed without particular notice or distinction. A long sentence and, as usual, inelegant and cumbrous. This Letter is a faultless composition with exception of the one long sentence. I,. VII. These are the gloomy companions of a disturbed imagination ; the melancholy madness of poetry, without the inspiraiion. The rhyme is a fault. 'Fancy' had been better ; though but for the rhyme, imagination is the fitter word. lb. Such a question might perhaps discompose the gravity of his muscles, but I believe it would little atiect the tranquillity of his conscience. A false antithesis, a mere verbal balance ; there are far, far too many of these. However, with these few exceptions, this Letter is a blameless composition. Junius may be safely studied as a model for letters where he truly writes letters. Those to the Duke of Grafton and others, are smaU pamphlets in the form of letters. 370 Notes on Junius L. VIII. To do justice to your Grace's humanity, you felt for Mac Quick as you ought to do ; and, if you had been contented to assist him indirectly, without a notorious denial of justice, or openly insulting the sense of the nation, you might have satisfied every duty of political friendship, without committing the honour of your sovereign, or hazarding the reputation of his government. An inelegant cluster of withouts. Junius asks questions incomparably well ; — but ne quid nimis. L. IX. Perhaps the fair way of considering these Letters would be as a kind of satirical poems ; the short, and for ever balanced, sentences constitute a true metre ; and the connexion is that of satiric poetry, a witty logic, an association of thoughts by amusing semblances of cause and effect, the sophistry of which the reader has an interest in not stopping to detect, for it flatters his love of mischief, and makes the sport. L. XII. One of Junius's arts, and which gives me a high notion of his genius, as a poet and satirist, is this : — ^he takes for granted the existence of a character that never did and never can exist, and then employs his wit, and sur- prises and amuses his readers with analyzing its incom- patibilities. L. XIV. Continual sneer, continual irony, aU excellent, if it were not for the 'all' ; — but a countenance, with a malignant smile in statuary fixure on it, becomes at length an object of aversion, however beautiful the face, and how- ever beautiful the smile. We are relieved, in some measure, from this by frequent just and well expressed moral aphor- isms ; but then the preceding and following irony gives them the appearance of proceeding from the head, not from the heart. This objection would be less felt, when the Letters were first published at considerable intervals ; but Junius wrote for posterity. L. XXIII. Sneer and irony continued with such gross violation of good sense, as to be perfectly nonsense. The man who can address another on his most detestable vices in a strain of cold continual irony, is himself a wretch. L. XXXV. To honour them with a determined predilection and confidence in exclusion of your English subjects, who placed your family, and, in spite of treachery and rebellion, have supported it upon the throne, is a mistake too gross even for the unsuspecting generosity of youth. The words 'upon the throne,' stand unfortunately for Wonderfulness of Prose 371 the harmonious effect of the balance of 'placed* and 'supported. ' This address to the king is almost faultless in composi- tion, and has been evidently tormented with the file. But it has fewer beauties than any other long letter of Junius ; and it is utterly undramatic. There is nothing in the style, the transitions, or the sentiments, which represents the passions of a man emboldening himself to address his sovereign personally. Like a Presbyterian's prayer, you may substitute almost every where the third for the second I person without injury. The newspaper, his closet, and his own person were alone present to the author's intention and imagination. This makes the composition vapid. It possesses an Isocratic correctness, when it should have had the force and drama of an oration of Demosthenes. From this, however, the paragraph beginning with the words 'As to the Scotch,' and also the last two paragraphs must be honourably excepted. They are, perhaps, the finest passages in the whole collection. WONDERFULNESS OF PROSE. It has just struck my feelings that the Pherecydean origin of prose being granted, prose must have struck men with greater admiration than poetry. In the latter it was the language of passion and emotion : it is what they them- selves spoke and heard in moments of exultation, indigna- tion, &c. But to hear an evolving roll, or a succession of leaves, talk continually the language of deliberate reason in a form of continued preconception, of a Z already possessed when A was being uttered, — this must have appeared godlike. I feel myself in the same state, when in the perusal of a sober, yet elevated and harmonious succession of sentences and periods, I abstract my mind from the particular passage and sympathize with the wonder of the common people, who say of an eloquent man : — 'He talks like a book ! ' 372 Notes on Herbert's Temple NOTES ON HERBERT'S TEMPLE AND HARVEY'S SYNAGOGUE. G. Herbert is a true poet, but a poet sui generis, the merits of whose poems will never be felt wdthout a sym- pathy with the mind and character of the man. To appreciate this volume, it is not enough that the reader possesses a cultivated judgment, classical taste, or even poetic sensibility, unless he be likewise a Christian, and both a zealous and an orthodox, both a devout and a devotional Christian. But even this will not quite suffice. He must be an affectionate and dutiful child of the Church, and from habit, conviction, and a constitutional pre- disposition to ceremoniousness, in piety as in manners, find her forms and ordinances aids of religion, not sources of formality ; for religion is the element in which he lives, and the region in which he moves. The Church, say rather the Churchmen of England, under the two first Stuarts, has been charged with a yearning after the Romish fopperies, and even the papistic usurpa- tions ; but we shall decide more correctly, as well as more charitably, if for the Romish and papistic we substitute the patristic leaven. There even was (natural enough from their distinguished learning, and knowledge of ecclesi- astical antiquities) an overrating of the Church and of the Fathers, for the first five or even six centuries ; these lines on the Egyptian monks, " Holy Macarius and great Anthony " (p. 205) supply a striking instance and illustra- tion of this. P. 10. If thou be single, all thy goods and ground Submit to love ; but yet not more than all. Give one estate as one life. None is bound To work for two, who brought himself to thrall. God made me one man ; love makes me no more. Till labour come, and make my weakness score. I do not understand this stanza. p. 41. My flesh began unto my soul in pain. Sicknesses clave my bones, &c. Either a misprint, or a noticeable idiom of the word and Harvey's Synagogue 373 ** began ? " Yes ! and a very beautiful idiom it is : the first colloquy or address of the flesh. P. 46. What though my body run to dust ? Faith cleaves unto it, counting every grain, With an exact and most particular trust, Reserving all for flesh again. I find few historical facts so difficult of solution as the continuance, in Protestantism, of this anti-scriptural superstition. P. 54. Second poem on The Holy Scriptures. This verse marks that, and both do make a motion Unto a third that ten leaves off doth lie. The spiritual unity of the Bible = the order and connec- tion of organic forms in which the unity of life is shewn, though as widely dispersed in the world of sight as the text. lb. Then as dispersed herbs do watch a potion, These three make up some Christian's destiny. Som.e misprint. P. 87. Sweet Spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie. Nest. P. 92. Man. Each thing is full of duty : Waters united are our navigation : Distinguished, our habitation ; Below, our drink ; above, our meat : Both are our cleanliness. Hath one such beauty ? Then how are all things neat ! 'Distinguished.' I understand this but imperfectly. Did they form an island ? and the next lines refer perhaps to the then belief that all fruits grow and are nourished by water. But then how is the ascending sap " our clean- liness ? " Perhaps, therefore, the rains. P. 140. But he doth bid us take his blood for wine. Nay, the contrary ; take wine to be blood, and the blood of a man who died 1800 years ago. This is the faith 374 Notes on Herbert's Temple which even the Church of England demands ; ^ for con- substantiation only adds a mystery to that of Transub- stantiation, which it implies. P. 175. The Flower. A delicious poem. lb. How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clear Are thy returns I e'en as the flowers in spring ; To which, besides their own demean, The late past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away. Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing. "The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring." u — uu — u — Epitritus primus + Dactyl + Trochee + a long word — syllable, which, together with the pause intervening between it and the word — trochee, equals u u u - form a pleasing variety in the Pentameter Iambic with rhjnnes. Ex. gr. The late past frosts | tributes of | pleasure | bring. N.B. First, the difference between -u | — and an amphimacer - u - | and this not always or necessarily arising out of the latter being one word. It may even consist of three words, yet the effect be the same. It is the pause that makes the difference. Secondly, the expedi- ency, if not necessity, that the iirst syllable both of the Dactyl and the Trochee should be short by quantity, and only = - by force of accent or position — the Epitrite being true lengths. — Whether the last syllable be - or = - the force of the rhymes renders indifferent. Thus, .... 1 This is one of my father's marginalia, which I can hardly persuade myself he would have re-written just as it stands. Where does the Church of England affirm that the w'mt. per se literally is the blood shed 1800 years ago? The language of our Church is that " we receiving these creatures of bread and wine, &c. may be partakers of His most blessed body and blood : " that " to such as rightly receive the same the cup of blessing is a partaking of the blood of Christ." Does not this language intimate, that the blood of Christ is spiritually produced in the soul through a faithful reception of the appointed symbols, rather than that the wine itself, apart from the soul, has become the blood? In one sense, indeed, it is the blood of Christ to the soul : it may be metaphorically called so, if, by means of it, the blood is really, though spiritually, partaken. More than this is surely not affirmed in our formularies, nor taught by our great divines in general. I do not write these words by way of arg-unient, but because I cannot re-print such a note of my father's, which has excited surprise in some of his studious readers, without a protest. S. C and Harvey's Synagogue 375 " As if there were no such cold thing." Had been no ch thin^ P. 181. such thing Thou who condemnest Jewish hate, &c. Call home thine eye, (that busy wanderer,) That choice may be thy story. Their choice. P. 184. Nay, thou dost make me sit and dine E'en in my enemies' sight. Foemen's. P. 201. Judgment. Almighty Judge, how shall poor wretches brook Thy dreadful look, &c. "What others mean to do, I know not well ; Yet I here tell. That some will turn thee to some leaves therein So void of sin. That they in merit shall excel. I should not have expected from Herbert so open an avowal of Romanism in the article of merit. In the same spirit is *' Holy Macarius, and great Anthony," p. 205.^ P. 237. The Communion Table. And for the matter whereof it is made. The matter is not much. Although it be of tuch, Or wood, or metal, what will last, or fade ; So vanity And superstition avoided be. i Herbert however adds : '* But I resolve, when thou shalt call for mine, That to decline, And thrust a Testament into thy hand : Let that be scann'd ; There thou shalt find my faults are thine." Martin Luther himself might have penned this concluding stanza. Since I wrote the above, a note in Mr. Pickering's edition of Herbert has been pointed out to me. " The Rev. Dr. BHss has kindly furnished the following judicious remark, and which is proved to be correct, as the word is printed * heare ' in the first edition {1630." He says, " Let mc take this opportunity of mentioning what a very learned and able friend pointed out on this note. The fact is, Coleridge has been misled by an error of the press. What others mean to do, I know not well, Yet I here tell, &c. &c. should be hear tell. The sense is then obvious, and Herbert is not made to do that which he was the last man in the world to have done, namely, to avow ' Romanism in the article of merit.'" This suggestion once occurred to myself, and appears to be right, as it is verified by the first edition : but at the time it seemed to me so obvious, that surely the correction would have been made before if there had not been some rea.son against it. S. C. 376 Notes on Herbert's Temple Tuch rhyming to much, from the German tuch, cloth, 1 never met with before, as an EngUsh word. So I find platt for foliage in Stanley's Hist, of Philosophy, p. 22. P. 252. The Synagogue, by Christopher Harvey. The Bishop. But who can show of old that ever any Presbyteries without their bishops were : Though bishops without presbyteries many, &c. An instance of proving too much. If Bishop without Presb. B. = Presb. i.e. no Bishop. P. 253. The Bishop. To rule and to be ruled are distinct. And several duties, severally belong To several persons. Functions of times, but not persons, of necessity ? Ex. Bishop to Archbishop. P. 255. Church Festivals. Who loves not you, doth but in vain profess That he loves God, or heaven, or happiness. Equally unthinking and uncharitable ; — I approve of them ; — but yet remember Roman Catholic idolatry, and that it originated in such high-flown metaphors as these. P. 255. The Sabbath, or Lord's Day. Hail Vail Holy Wholly King of days, &c. To thy praise, &c. Make it sense and lose the rhyme ; or make it rhyme and lose the sense. P. 258. The Nativity, or Christmas Day. Unfold thy face, unmask thy ray, Shine forth, bright sun, double the day. Let no malignant misty fume, tic. The only poem in The Synagogue which possesses poetic merit ; with a few changes and additions this would be a striking poem. Substitute the following for the fifth to the eighth line. To sheath or blunt one happy ray, That wins new splendour from the day. This day that gives thee power to rise. And shine on hearts as well as eyes : Extract from a Letter 377 This birth-day of all souls, when first On eyes of flesh and blood did burst That primal great lucific light, That rays to thee, to us gave sight. P. 267. Whit-Sunday. Nay, startle not to hear that rushing wind, WTierewith this place is shaken, &c. To hear at once so great variety Of language from them come, &c. The Spiritual miracle was the descent of the Holy Ghost : the outward the wind and the tongues : and so St. Peter himself explains it. That each individual obtained the power of speaking all languages, is neither contained in, nor fairly deducible from, St. Luke's account. P. 269. Trinity Sunday. The Trinity In Unity, And Unity In Trinity, All reason doth transcend. Most true, but not contradict. Reason is to faith, as the eye to the telescope. EXTRACT FROM A LETTER OF S. T. COLERIDGE TO W. COLLINS, R.A. PRINTED IN THE LIFE OF COLLINS BY HIS SON. VOL. I. December, 1818. To feel the full force of the Christian religion it is perhaps necessary, for many tempers, that they should first be made to feel, experimentally, the hollowness of human friendship, the presumptuous emptiness of human hopes. I find more substantial comfort now in pious George Herbert's Temple, which I used to read to amuse myself with his quaintness, in short, only to laugh at, than in all the poetry since the poems of Milton. If you have not read Herbert I can recommend the book to you con- fidently. The poem entitled " The Flower " is especiaDy 378 Notes on Gray j affecting, and to me such a phrase as " and relish versing " expresses a sincerity and reaUty, which I would unwiUingly exchange for the more dignified " and once more love the Muse," &c. and so with many other of Herbert's homely phrases. NOTES ON MATHIAS' EDITION OF GRAY. O71 a distant prospect of Eton College. Vol. i. p. 9. Wanders the hoary Thames along His silver-winding way. Gray We want, methinks, a little treatise from some man of flexible good sense, and weU versed in the Greek poets, especially Homer, the choral, and other lyrics, containing first a history of compound epithets, and then the laws and licenses. I am not so much disposed as I used to be to quarrel with such an epithet as " silver-winding ; " un- grammatical as the hyphen is, it is not wholly illogical, for the phrase conveys more than silvery and winding. It gives, namely, the unity of the impression, the co- inherence of the brightness, the motion, and the hne of motion. P. ID. Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen Full many a sprightly race Disporting on thy margent green. The paths of pleasure trace ; Who foremost now delight to cleave. With pliant arm, thy glassy wave ? The captive linnet which enthral ? What idle progeny succeed To chase the rolling circle's speed, Or urge the flying ball ? Gray. This is the only stanza that appears to me very objection- able in point of diction. This, I must confess, is not only falsetto throughout, but is at once harsh and feeble, and very far the worst ten lines in all the works of Mr. Gray, English or Latin, prose or verse. Notes on Gray 379 p. 12. And envy wan, and faded care,^ Grim-visaged comfortless despair,^ And sorrow's piercing dart.-^ ^ Bad in the first, ^ in the second, ^ in the last degree. p. 15. The proud are taught to taste of pain. Gray. There is a want of dignity — a sort of irony in this phrase to my feeling that would be more proper in dramatic than in lyric composition. On Gray's Platonica, vol. 1. p. 299. — 547. Whatever might be expected from a scholar, a gentle- man, a man of exquisite taste, as the quintessence of sane and sound good sense, Mr. Gray appears to me to have per- formed. The poet Plato, the orator Plato, Plato the ex- quisite dramatist of conversation, the seer and the painter of character, Plato the high-bred, highly-educated, aristo- cratic republican, the man and the gentleman of quality stands full before us from behind the curtain as Gray has drawn it back. Even so does Socrates, the social wise old man, the practical moralist. But Plato the philosopher, but the divine Plato, was not to be comprehended within the field of vision, or be commanded by the fixed immove- able telescope of Mr. Locke's human understanding. The whole sweep of the best philosophic reflections of French or English fabric in the age of our scholarly bard, was not commensurate with the mighty orb. The little, according to my convictions at least, the very little of proper Platon- ism contained in the written books of Plato, who himself, in an epistle, the authenticity of which there is no tenable ground for doubting, as I was rejoiced to find Mr. Gray acknowledge, has declared all he had written to be sub- stantially Socratic, and not a fair exponent of his own tenets,^ even this little, Mr. Gray has either misconceived or honestlyconfessed that,as he was not one of the initiated, it was utterly beyond his comprehension. Finally, to repeat the explanation with which I closed the last page of these notes and extracts, Volsimi e vidi Plato (ma non quel Plato) 1 See Plato's second epistle (ppaffTeof 87) aot, di alPiy/xivv k. t. X. and towards the end rk dt vvv \ey6fieya Sw/fparouj iffrl, k. t. X. See also the 7th Eptstle, p. 341. 380 Notes on Gray Che'n quella schiera ando piu presso a! segno, Al qual' aggiunge, a chi dal Cielo e dato.^ S. T. Coleridge, 18 19. P. 385. Hippias Major. We learn from this dialogue in how poor a condition the art of reasoning on moral and abstracted subjects was before the time of Socrates : for it is impossible that Plato should introduce a sophist of the first reputation for eloquence and knowledge in several kinds, talking in a manner below the absurdity and weakness of a child ; unless he had really drawn after the life. No less than twenty-four pages are here spent in vain, only to force it into the head of Hippias that there is such a thing as a general idea ; and that, before we can dispute on any subject, we should give a defini- tion of it. Is not this, its improbability out of the question, contra- dicted by the Protagoras of Plato's own drawing ? Are there no authors, no physicians in London at the present moment, of " the first reputation," i.e. whom a certain class cry up : for in no other sense is the phrase historically applicable to Hippias, whom a Sydenham redivivus or a new Stahl might not exhibit as pompous ignoramuses ? no one Hippias amongst them ? But we need not flee to con- jectures. The ratiocination assigned by Aristotle and Plato himself to Gorgias and then to the Eleatic School, are positive proofs that Mr. Gray has mistaken the satire of an individual for a characteristic of an age or class. May I dare whisper to the reeds without proclaiming that I am in the state of Midas, — may I dare to hint that Mr. Gray himself had not, and through the spectacles of Mr. Locke and his followers, could not have seen the difficulties which Hippias found in a general idea, secundum Pla- tonem ? S. T. C. P. 386. Notes 289. Passages of Heraclitus. ' KvdpC)Triav 6 <ro0wroTOS irpbs Qeov iridTjKOS (paueTrai. This latter passage is undoubtedly the original of that famous thought in Pope's Essaj^ on xMan, B. 2 : " And shewed a Newton as we shew an ape." I remember to have met nearly the same words in one of our elder Poets. P. 390—91- That a sophist wais a kind of merchant, or rather a retailer oi ^ Petrarch's 'J'rioti/o deUa l<ama, cap. terz. v. 4-6. Notes on Gray 381 food for the soul, and, like other shopkeepers, would exert his eloquence to recommend his own goods. The misfortune was, we could not carry them off, like corporeal viands, set them by a while, and consider them at leisure, whether they were wholesome or not, before we tasted them : that in this case we have no vessel but the soul to receive them in, which will necessarily retain a tincture, and perhaps, much to its prejudice, of all which is instilled into it. Query, if Socrates, himself a scholar of the sophists, is accurate, did not the change of 6 co^pig into 6 i.o(pi6r'!)g, in the single case of Solon, refer to the wisdom-causing influences of his legislation ? Mem : — to examine whether ^ptvTKS-rr.i was, or was not, more generally used at first in malum sensum, or rather the proper force originally of the termina- tion /Vry;j, dffTTjg — whether (as it is evidently verbal) it imply a reflex or a transitive act. P. 399. 'Or/ 'A//tat)/a. This is the true key and great moral of the dialogue, that know- ledge alone is the source of virtue, and ignorance the source of vice ; it was Plato's own principle, see Plat. Epist. 7. p. 336. 'A/xadia, i^^s iravTa ko-ko, vracnv t^pi^wTat /cai ^Xaffrdvei /cat els varepov diroTeXel Kapirov TOLS yevwiqaacTL TriKpdraToy. See also Sophist, p. 228 and 229, and Euthydemus from p. 278 to 281, and De Legib. L. 3. p. 688.) and probably it was also the principle of Socrates : the consequence of it is, that virtue may be taught, and may be acquired : and that philosophy alone can point us out the way to it. More than our word. Ignorance, is contained in the' A,aa^/a of Plato. I, however, freely acknowledge, that this was the point of view, from which Socrates did for the most part contemplate moral good and evil. Now and then he seems to have taken a higher station, but soon quitted it for the lower, more generally intelligible. Hence the vacillation of Socrates himself : hence, too, the immediate opposition of his disciples, Antisthenes and Aristippus. But that this was Plato's own principle I exceedingly doubt. That it was not the principle of Platonism, as taught by the first Academy under Speusippus, I do not doubt at all. See the xivth Essay, p. 129-39 of The Friend, vol. i. In the sense in which d,aat)/a$ 'rrdvra xaxa epp/^urai^ x.t.X. is maintained in that Essay, so and no otherwise can it be truly asserted, and so and no otherwise did ug t/^ot yi dozsT, Plato teach it. 382 Barry Cornwall BARRY CORNWALL.i Barry Cornwall is a poet, me saltern judice : and in that sense of the term, in which I apply it to C. Lamb and W. Wordsworth. There are poems of i^reat merit, the authors of which I should yet not leei impelled so to designate. The faults of these poems are no less things of hope, than the beauties ; both are just what they ought to be, — that is, now. If B. C. be faithful to his genius, it in due time will warn him, that as poetry is the identity of all other knowledges, so a poet cannot be a great poet, but as being likewise inclusively an historian and naturalist, in the light, as well as the life, of philosophy : all other men's worlds are his chaos. Hints obiter are : — not to permit delicacy and exquisite- ness to seduce into effeminacy. Not to permit beauties by repetition to become mannerisms. To be jealous of frag- mentary composition, — as epicurism of genius, and apple- pie made all of quinces. Item, that dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in thought and passion, — not thought or passion disguised in the dress of poetry. Lastly, to be economic and withholding in similes, figures, &c. They will all find their place, sooner or later, each as the luminary of a sphere of its own. There can be no galaxy in poetry, because it is language, — ergo processive, — ergo every the smallest star must be seen singly. There are not five metrists in the kingdom, whose works are known by me, to whom I could have held myself allowed to have spoken so plainly. But B. C. is a man of genius, and it depends on himself — (competence protecting him from gnawing or distracting cares) — to become a rightful poet, — that is, a great man. Oh ! for such a man worldly prudence is transfigured into the highest spiritual duty ! How generous is self- interest in him, whose true self is all that is good and hope- ful in all ages, as far as the language of Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton shall become the mother-tongue ! A map of the road to Paradise, drawn in Purgatory, on the confines of Hell, by S. T. C. July 30, 1819. 1 Written in Mr. Lamb's copy of the ' Dramatic Scenes.' Ed. On the Mode of Studying Kant 383 ON THE MODE OF STUDYING KANT. EXTRACT FROM A LETTER OF MR. COLERIDGE TO J. GOODEN, ESQ.l Accept my thanks for the rules of the harmony. I per- ceive that the members are chiefly merchants ; but yet it were to be wished, that such an enlargement of the society could be brought about as, retaining all its present purposes, might add to them the groundwork of a library of northern literature, and by bringing together the many gentlemen who are attached to it be the means of eventually making both countries better acquainted with the valuable part of each other ; especially, the English with the German, for our most sensible men look at the German Muses through a film of prejudice and utter misconception. With regard to philosophy, there are half a dozen things, good and bad, that in this country are so nick-named, but in the only accurate sense of the term, there neither are, have been, or ever will be but two essentially different schools of philosophy, the Platonic, and the Aristotelian. To the latter but with a somewhat nearer approach to the Platonic, Emanuel Kant belonged ; to the former Bacon and Leibnitz, and, in his riper and better years, Berkeley. And to this I profess myself an adherent — nihil novum, vel inauditum audemus ; though, as every man has a face of his own, without being more or less than a man, so is every true philosopher an original, without ceasing to be an inmate of Academus or of the Lyceum. But as to caution, I will just tell you how I proceeded myself twenty years and more ago, when I first felt a curiosity about Kant, and was fully aware that to master his meaning, as a system, would be a work of great labour and long time. First, I asked myself, have I the labour and the time in my power ? Secondly, if so, and if it would be of adequate importance to me if true, by what means can I arrive at a rational pre- sumption for or against ? I inquired after all the more popular writings of Kant — read them with delight. I then read the Prefaces of several of his systematic works, as the Prolegomena, &c. Here too every part, I understood, and 1 This letter and the following notes on Jean Paul were communicated by Mr. H. C. Robinson. S. C 384 On the Mode of Studying Kant that was nearly the whole, was replete with sound and plain, though bold and to me novel truths ; and I followed Socrates' adage respecting Heraclitus : all I understand is excellent, and I am bound to presume that the rest is at least worth the trouble of trying whether it be not equally so. In other words, until I understand a writer's ignor- ance, I presume myself ignorant of his understanding. Permit me to refer you to a chapter on this subject in my Literary Life.^ Yet I by no means recommend to you an extension of your philosophic researches beyond Kant. In him is con- tained all that can be learned, and as to the results, you have a firm faith in God, the responsible Will of Man and Im- mortahty ; and Kant will demonstrate to you, that this faith is acquiesced in, indeed, nay, confirmed by the Reason and Understanding, but grounded on Postulates authorized and substantiated solely by the Moral Being. There are likewise mine : and whether the Ideas are regulative only, as Aristotle and Kant teach, or constitutive and actual, as Pythagoras and Plato, is of living interest to the philo- sopher by profession alone. Both systems are equally true, if only the former abstain from denying universally what is denied indi\'idually. He, for whom Ideas are con- stitutive, win in effect be a Platonist ; and in those for whom they are regulative only, Platonism is but a hollow affectation. Dryden could not have been a Platonist : Shakspeare, Milton, Dante, Michael Angelo and Rafael could not have been other than Platonists. Lord Bacon, who never read Plato's works, taught pure Platonism in his great work, the Novum Organum, and abuses his divine predecessor for fantastic nonsense, which he had been the first to explode. Accept my best respects, &c. S. T. COLERIDGE. 14 Jan. 18 14. Highgate. 1 Biographia Literarfa. vol. i. chap xii. p. ?.t2. S. C Notes on Jean Paul 385 NOTES ON THE PALINGENESIEN OF JEAN PAUL. Written in the blank leaf at the beginning. S ist zu merken, dass die Sprache in diesem Buch nicht sey wie in gewohnlich Bette, darin der Gedankenstrom ordentlich and chrbar hinstromt, sondern wie cin Ver- wiistung in Damm and Deichen.^ Preface, p. xxxi. Two Revolutions, the Gallican, which sacrifices the individuals to the Idea or to the State, and in time of need, even the latter themselves ; — and the Kantian-Moralist (Kantisch-Moralische), which abandons the affection of human Love altogether, because it can so little be described as merit ; these draw and station us forlorn human creatures ever further and more lonesomely one from another, each on a frosty uninhabited island : nay the Gallican which excites and arms feelings against feelings, does it less than the Critical, which teaches us to disarm and to dispense with them altogether ; and which neither allows Love to pass for the spring of virtiie, nor virtue for the source of Love.^ Transl. But surely Kant's aim was not to give a full Sittenlehre, or system of practical material morality, but the a priori form — Ethice formalis : which was then a most necessary work, and the only mode of quelling at once both Necessi- tarians and Meritmongers, and the idol common to both, Eudcemonism. If his followers have stood still in lazy adoration, instead of following up the road thus opened out to them, it is their fault not Kant's. S. T. C. 1 It is observable that the language in this book is not as in an ordinary channel, wherein the stream of thought flows on in a seemly and regular manner, but like a violent flood rushing against dyke and mole. 2 Zwei Revoluzionen, die gallische, welche der Idee oder dem Staate die Individtien, and im Nothsal diesen selber opfert, und die kantisch-moralische, welche den Aflfekt der Menschenliebe liegen lasset, weil er so wenig wie Verdienste geboten werden kan, diese ziehen und stellen uus verlas-ene Menschen immer weiter und einsamer aus cinander, jeden nur auf ein fro^tiges unbewohntes Eiland ; ja die gallische, die nur Gefiihle gegen Gefiihle bewafnet und aufhezt, thut es weniger als die kritische, die sie entwafnen und entbehren lehrt, und die weder die Liibe als Quelle der Tugend noch diese als Quelle von jener gelten lassen kan. L'ENVOY. He was one who with long and large arm still collected precious armfuls in whatever direction he pressed forward, yet still took up so much more than he could keep together, that those who followed him gleaned more from his continual droppings than he himself brought home ; — nay, made stately corn-ricks therewith, while the reaper himself was still seen only with a strutting armful of newly-cut sheaves. But I should misinform you grossly if I left you to infer that his collections were a heap of incoherent miscellanea. No ! the very contrary. Their variet}^ conjoined with the too great coherency, the too great both desire and power of referring them in systematic, nay, genetic subordination, was that which rendered his schemes gigantic and impracticable, as an author, and his conversation less instructive as a man. Auditor em inopem ipsa copia fecit. — Too much was given, all so weighty and brilliant as to preclude a chance of its being all received, — so that it not seldom passed over the hearer's mind like a roar of many waters. 386 I LECTURES ON SHAKSPEARE AND MILTON. THE FIRST LECTURE. I CANNOT avoid the acknowledgment of the difficulty of the task I have undertaken ; yet I have undertaken it voluntarily, and I shall discharge it to the best of my abilities, requesting those who hear me to allow for de- ficiencies, -.md to bear in mind the wide extent of my subject. The field is almost boundless as the sea, yet full of beauty and variety as the land : I feel in some sort oppressed by abundance ; inopem me copia fecit. What I most rely upon is your sympathy ; and, as I proceed, I trust that I shall interest you : sympathy and interest are to a lecturer like the sun and the showers to nature — absolutely necessary to the production of blossoms and fruit. May I venture to observe that my own life has been employed more in reading and conversation — in collecting and reflecting, than in printing and publishing ; for I never felt the desire, so often experienced by others, of becoming an author. It was accident made me an author in the first instance : I was caUed a poet almost before I knew I could write poetry. In what I have to offer I shall speak freely, whether of myself or of my contemporaries, when it is necessary : conscious superiority, if indeed it be superior, need not fear to have its self-love or its pride wounded ; and contempt, the most absurd and debasing feeling that can actuate the human mind, must be far below the sphere in which lofty intellects live and move and have their being. On the first examination of a work, especially a work of fiction and fancy, it is right to inquire to what feeling or passion it addresses itself — to the benevolent, or to the vindictive ? whether it is calculated to excite emula- tion, or to produce envy, under the common mask of scorn ? and, in the next place, whether the pleasure we receive from it has a tendency to keep us good, to make us better, or to reward us for being good. 389 390 The First Lecture It will be expected of me, as my prospectus indicates, that I should say something of the causes of false criticism, particularly as regards poetry, though I do not mean to confine myself to that only : in doing so, it will be necessary for me to point out some of the obstacles which impede, and possibly prevent, the formation of a correct judgment. These are either — 1. Accidental causes, arising out of the particular circumstances of the age in which we live ; or — 2. Permanent causes, flowing out of the general prin- ciples of our nature. Under the first head, accidental causes, may be classed — I. The events that have occurred in our ov/n day, which, from their importance alone, have created a world of readers. 2. The practice of public speaking, which encourages a too great desire to be understood at once, and at the first blush. 3. The prevalence of reviews, magazines, newspapers, novels, &c. Of the last, and of the perusal of them, I will run the risk of asserting, that where the reading of novels prevails as a habit, it occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind : it is such an utter loss to the reader, that it is not so much to be called pass-time as kill-time. It conveys no trustworthy information as to facts ; it produces no improvement of the intellect, but fills the mind with a mawkish and morbid sensibility, which is directly hostile to the cultivation, invigoration, and enlargement of the nobler faculties of the under- standing. Reviews are generally pernicious, because the writers determine without reference to fixed principles — because reviews are usually filled with personalities ; and, above all, because they teach people rather to judge than to consider, to decide than to reflect : thus they encourage superficiality, and induce the thoughtless and the idle to adopt sentiments conveyed under the authoritative We, and not, by the working and subsequent clearing of their own minds, to form just original opinions. In older times writers were looked up to almost as intermediate beings, between angels and men ; afterwards they were regarded as venerable and, perhaps, inspired teachers ; subsequently they descended to the level of learned and instructive friends ; but in modern days they are deemed culprits The First Lecture 391 more than benefactors : as culprits they are brought to the bar of self-erected and self-satisfied tribunals. If a person be now seen reading a new book, the most usual question is — " What trash have you there ? " I admit that there is some reason for this difference in the estimate ; for in these times, if a man fail as a tailor, or a shoe- maker, and can read and write correctly (for spelling is still of some consequence) he becomes an author.^ The crying sin of modern criticism is that it is over- loaded with personality. If an author commit an error, there is no wish to set him right for the sake of truth, but for the sake of triumph — that the reviewer may show how much wiser, or how much abler he is than the writer. Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, &c., if they could : they have tried their talents at one or at the other, and have failed ; therefore they turn critics, and, like the Roman emperor, a critic most hates those who excel in the particu- lar department in which he, the critic, has notoriously been defeated. This is an age of personality and political gossip, when insects, as in ancient Egypt, are worshipped in proportion to the venom of their stings — when poems, and especially satires, are valued according to the number of living names they contain ; and where the notes, how- ever, have this comparative excellence, that they are generally more poetical and pointed than the text. This style of criticism is at the present moment one of the chief pillars of the Scotch professorial court ; and, as to personality in poems, I remember to have once seen an epic advertised, and strongly recommended, because it con- tained more than a hundred names of living characters. How derogatory, how degrading, this is to true poetry I need not say. A very wise writer has maintained that there is more difference between one man and another, than between man and a beast : I can conceive of no lower state of human existence than that of a being who, insensible to the beauties of poetry himself, endeavours to reduce others to his own level. What Hooker so eloquently claims for law I say of poetry — " Her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world ; all things 1 Here my shorthand note informs me that Coleridge made a quotation from Jeremy Taylor, but from what work, or of what import, does not appear. He observed, that "although Jeremy Taylor wrote only in prose, according to some definitions of poetry he might be considered one of our noblest poets." — J. P. C. 392 The First Lecture in heaven and on earth do her homage." It is the language of heaven, and in the exquisite dehght we derive from poetry we have, as it were, a type, a foretaste, and a prophecy of the joys of heaven. Another cause of false criticism is the greater purity of morality in the present age, compared even with the last. Our notions upon this subject are sometimes carried to excess, particularly among those who in print affect to enforce the value of a high standard. Far be it from me to depreciate that value ; but let me ask, who now will venture to read a number of the Spectator, or of the Tatler, to his wife and daughters, without first examining it to make sure that it contains no word which might, in our day, offend the delicacy of female ears, and shock feminine susceptibility ? Even our theatres, the repre- sentations at which usually reflect the morals of the period, have taken a sort of domestic turn, and while the performances at them may be said, in some sense, to improve the heart, there is no doubt that they vitiate the taste. The effect is bad, however good the cause. Attempts have been made to compose and adapt systems of education ; but it appears to me something like putting Greek and Latin grammars into the hands of boys, before they understand a word of Greek or Latin. These grammars contain instructions on all the minutiae and refinements of language, but of what use are they to persons who do not comprehend the first rudiments ? Why are you to furnish the means of judging, before you give the capacity to judge? These seem to me to be among the principal accidental causes of false criticism. Among the permanent causes, I may notice — First, the great pleasure we feel in being told of the know- ledge we possess, rather than of the ignorance we suffer. Let it be our first duty to teach thinking, and then what to think about. You cannot expect a person to be able to go through the arduous process of thinking, who has never exercised his faculties. In the Alps we see the chamois hunter ascend the most perilous precipices without danger, and leap from crag to crag over vast chasms without dread or difficulty, and who but a fool, if unpractised, would attempt to follow him ? it is not intrepidity alone that is necessary, but he who would imitate the hunter must have gone through the same process for the acquisition of The First Lecture 393 strength, skill, and knowledge : he must exert, and be capable of exerting, the same muscular energies, and dis- play the same perseverance and courage, or all his efforts will be worse than fruitless : they will lead not only to disappointment, but to destruction. Systems have been invented with the avowed object of teaching people how to think ; but in my opinion the proper title for such a work ought to be " The Art of teaching how to think without thinking." Nobody endeavours to instruct a man how to leap, until he has first given him vigour and elasticity. Nothing is more essential — nothing can be more im- portant, than in every possible way to cultivate and im- prove the thinking powers : the mind as much requires exercise as the body, and no man can fully and adequately discharge the duties of whatever station he is placed in without the power of thought. I do not, of course, say that a man may not get through life without much thinking, or much power of thought ; but if he be a carpenter, with- out thought a carpenter he must remain : if he be a weaver, without thought a weaver he must remain. — On man God has not only bestowed gifts, but the power of giving : he is not a creature born but to live and die : he has had faculties communicated to him, which, if he do his duty, he is bound to communicate and make beneficial to others. Man, in a secondary sense, may be looked upon in part as his own creator, for by the improvement of the faculties bestowed upon him by God, he not only enlarges them, but may be said to bring new ones into existence. The Almighty has thus condescended to communicate to man, in a high state of moral cultivation, a portion of his own great attributes. A second permanent cause of false criticism is connected with the habit of not taking the trouble to think : it is the custom which some people have established of judging of books by books. — Hence to such the use and value of reviews. Why has nature given limbs, if they are not to be applied to motion and action ; why abilities, if they are to lie asleep, while we avail ourselves of the eyes, ears, and understandings of others ? As men often employ servants, to spare them the nuisance of rising from their seats and walking across a room, so men employ reviews in order to save themselves the trouble of exercising their own powers of judging : it is only mental slothfulness and sluggishness 394 The First Lecture that induce so many to adopt, and take for granted the opinions of others. I may illustrate this moral imbecility by a case which came within my own knowledge. A friend of mine had seen it stated somewhere, or had heard it said, that Shak- speare had not made Constance, in " King John," speak the language of nature, when she exclaims on the loss of Arthur, " Grief fills the room up of my absent child. Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me ; Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form : Then have I reason to be fond of grief." King John, Act iii.. Scene 4. Within three months after he had repeated the opinion (not thinking for himself) that these lines were out of nature, my friend died. I called upon his mother, an affectionate, but ignorant woman, who had scarcely heard the name of Shakspeare, much less read any of his plays. Like Philip, I endeavoured to console her, and among other things I told her, in the anguish of her sorrow, that she seemed to be as fond of grief as she had been of her son. What was her reply ? Almost a prose parody on the very language of Shakspeare — the same thoughts in nearly the same words, but with a different arrangement. An attestation like this is worth a thousand criticisms. As a third permanent cause of false criticism we may notice the vague use of terms. And here I may take the liberty of impressing upon my hearers, the fitness, if not the necessity, of employing the most appropriate words and expressions, even in common conversation, and in the ordinary tra.nsactions of life. If you want a substantive do not take the first that comes into your head, but that which most distinctly and peculiarly conveys your mean- ing : if an adjective, remember the grammatical use of that part of speech, and be careful that it expresses some quality in the substantive that you wish to impress upon your hearer. Reflect for a moment on the vague and uncertain manner in which the word " taste " has been often employed ; and how such epithets as " sublime," " majestic," " grand," " striking," " picturesque," &c., The First Lecture 395 have been misapplied, and how they have been used on the most unworthy and inappropriate occasions. I was one day admiring one of the falls of the Clyde ; and ruminating upon what descriptive term could be most fitly applied to it, I came to the conclusion that the epithet " majestic " was the most appropriate. While I was still contemplating the scene a gentleman and a lady came up, neither of whose faces bore much of the stamp of superior intelligence, and the first words the gentleman uttered were ** It is very majestic." I was pleased to find such a confirmation of my opinion, and I complimented the spectator upon the choice of his epithet, saying that he had used the best word that could have been selected from our language : " Yes, sir," replied the gentleman, " I say it is very majestic : it is sublime, it is beautiful, it is grand, it is picturesque." — " Ay " (added the lady), "it is the prettiest thing I ever saw." I own that I was not a little dis- concerted. You will see, by the terms of my prospectus, that I intend my lectures to be, not only " in illustration of the principles of poetry," but to include a statement of the application of those principles, " as grounds of criticism on the most popular works of later English poets, those of the living included." If I had thought this task pre- sumptuous on my part, I should not have voluntarily undertaken it ; and in examining the merits, whether positive or comparative, of my contemporaries, I shall dismiss aU feelings and associations which might lead me from the formation of a right estimate. I shall give talent and genius its due praise, and only bestow censure where, as it seems to me, truth and justice demand it. I shall, of course, carefuUy avoid falling into that system of false criticism, which I condemn in others ; and, above all, whether I speak of those whom I know, or of those whom I do not know, of friends or of enemies, of the dead or of the living, my great aim will be to be strictly impartial. No man can truly apply principles, who displays the slightest bias in the application of them ; and I shall have much greater pleasure in pointing out the good, than in exposing the bad. I fear no accusation of arrogance from the amiable and the wise : I shall pity the weak, and despise the malevolent. END OF THE FIRST LECTURE.