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May 25. 1834

HIGH PRIZES AND REVENUES OF THE CHURCH

Your argument against the high prizes in the church might be put strongly thus:—Admit that in the beginning it might have been fairly said, that some eminent rewards ought to be set apart for the purpose of stimulating and rewarding transcendant merit; what have you to say now, after centuries of experience to the contrary?—Have the high prizes been given to the highest genius, virtue, or learning? Is it not rather the truth, as Jortin said, that twelve votes in a contested election will do more to make a man a bishop than an admired commentary on the twelve minor prophets?—To all which and the like I say again, that you ought not to reason from the abuse, which may be rectified, against the inherent uses of the thing. Appoint the most deserving—and the prize will answer its purpose. As to the bishops' incomes,—in the first place, the net receipts—that which the bishops may spend—have been confessedly exaggerated beyond measure; but, waiving that, and allowing the highest estimate to be correct, I should like to have the disposition of the episcopal revenue in any one year by the late or the present Bishop of Durham, or the present Bishops of London or Winchester, compared with that of the most benevolent nobleman in England of any party in politics. I firmly believe that the former give away in charity of one kind or another, public, official, or private, three times as much in proportion as the latter. You may have a hunks or two now and then; but so you would much more certainly, if you were to reduce the incomes to 2000_l_. per annum. As a body, in my opinion the clergy of England do in truth act as if their property were impressed with a trust to the utmost extent that can be demanded by those who affect to believe, ignorantly or not, that lying legend of a tripartite or quadripartite division of the tithe by law.

May 31. 1834

SIR C. WETHERELL'S SPEECH.—NATIONAL CHURCH.—DISSENTERS.—PAPACY.– UNIVERSITIES

I think Sir Charles Wetherell's speech before the Privy Council very effective. I doubt if any other lawyer in Westminster Hall could have done the thing so well.

* * * * *

The National Church requires, and is required by, the Christian Church, for the perfection of each. For if there were no national Church, the mere spiritual Church would either become, like the Papacy, a dreadful tyranny over mind and body;—or else would fall abroad into a multitude of enthusiastic sects, as in England in the seventeenth century. It is my deep conviction that, in a country of any religion at all, liberty of conscience can only be permanently preserved by means and under the shadow of a national church—a political establishment connected with, but distinct from, the spiritual Church.

* * * * *

I sometimes hope that the undisguised despotism of temper of the Dissenters may at last awaken a jealousy in the laity of the Church of England. But the apathy and inertness are, I fear, too profound—too providential.

* * * * *

Whatever the Papacy may have been on the Continent, it was always an unqualified evil to this country. It destroyed what was rising of good, and introduced a thousand evils of its own. The Papacy was and still is essentially extra-national;—it affects, temporally, to do that which the spiritual Church of Christ can alone do—to break down the natural distinctions of nations. Now, as the Roman Papacy is in itself local and peculiar, of course this attempt is nothing but a direct attack on the political independence of other nations.

The institution of Universities was the single check on the Papacy. The Pope always hated and maligned the Universities. The old coenobitic establishments of England were converted—perverted, rather—into monasteries and other monking receptacles. You see it was at Oxford that Wicliffe alone found protection and encouragement.

June 2. 1834

SCHILLER'S VERSIFICATION.—GERMAN BLANK VERSE

Schiller's blank verse is bad. He moves in it as a fly in a glue bottle. His thoughts have their connection and variety, it is true, but there is no sufficiently corresponding movement in the verse. How different from Shakspeare's endless rhythms!

There is a nimiety—a too-muchness—in all Germans. It is the national fault. Leasing had the best notion of blank verse. The trochaic termination of German words renders blank verse in that language almost impracticable. We have it in our dramatic hendecasyllable; but then we have a power of interweaving the iambic close ad libitum.

June 14. 1834

ROMAN CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION.—DUKE OF WELLINGTON.—CORONATION OATH

The Roman Catholic Emancipation Act—carried in the violent, and, in fact, unprincipled manner it was—was in effect a Surinam toad;—and the Reform Bill, the Dissenters' admission to the Universities, and the attack on the Church, are so many toadlets, one after another detaching themselves from their parent brute.

* * * * *

If you say there is nothing in the Romish religion, sincerely felt, inconsistent with the duties of citizenship and allegiance to a territorial Protestant sovereign, cadit quæstio. For if that is once admitted, there can be no answer to the argument from numbers. Certainly, if the religion of the majority of the people be innocuous to the interests of the nation, the majority have a natural right to be trustees of the nationalty—that property which is set apart for the nation's use, and rescued from the gripe of private hands. But when I say—for the nation's use.—I mean the very reverse of what the Radicals mean. They would convert it to relieve taxation, which I call a private, personal, and perishable use. A nation's uses are immortal.

* * * * *

How lamentable it is to hear the Duke of Wellington expressing himself doubtingly on the abominable sophism that the Coronation Oath only binds the King as the executive power—thereby making a Highgate oath of it. But the Duke is conscious of the ready retort which his language and conduct on the Emancipation Bill afford to his opponents. He is hampered by that affair.

June 20. 1834

CORN LAWS.—MODERN POLITICAL ECONOMY

In the argument on the Corn Laws there is a [Greek: metazasis eis allo gevos]. It may be admitted that the great principles of commerce require the interchange of commodities to be free; but commerce, which is barter, has no proper range beyond luxuries or conveniences;—it is properly the complement to the full existence and development of a state. But how can it be shown that the principles applicable to an interchange of conveniences or luxuries apply also to an interchange of necessaries? No state can be such properly, which is not self-subsistent at least; for no state that is not so, is essentially independent. The nation that cannot even exist without the commodity of another nation, is in effect the slave of that other nation. In common times, indeed, pecuniary interest will prevail, and prevent a ruinous exercise of the power which the nation supplying the necessary must have over the nation which has only the convenience or luxury to return; but such interest, both in individuals and nations, will yield to many stronger passions. Is Holland any authority to the contrary? If so, Tyre and Sidon and Carthage were so! Would you put England on a footing with a country, which can be overrun in a campaign, and starved in a year?

* * * * *

The entire tendency of the modern or Malthusian political economy is to denationalize. It would dig up the charcoal foundations of the temple of Ephesus to burn as fuel for a steam-engine!

June 21. 1834

Mr. –, in his poem, makes trees coeval with Chaos;—which is next door to Hans Sachse¹⁹³ who, in describing Chaos, said it was so pitchy dark, that even the very cats ran against each other!

June 23. 1834

SOCINIANISM.—UNITARIANISM.—FANCY AND IMAGINATION

Faustus Socinus worshipped Jesus Christ, and said that God had given him the power of being omnipresent. Davidi, with a little more acuteness, urged that mere audition or creaturely presence could not possibly justify worship from men;—that a man, how glorified soever, was no nearer God in essence than the vulgarest of the race. Prayer, therefore, was inapplicable. And how could a man be a mediator between God and man? How could a man with sins himself offer any compensation for, or expiation of, sin, unless the most arbitrary caprice were admitted into the counsels of God?—And so, at last, you see, it was discovered by the better logicians amongst the Socinians, that there was no such thing as sin at all.

It is wonderful how any Socinian can read the works of Philo Judæus without some pause of doubt in the truth of his views as to the person of Christ. Whether Philo wrote on his own ground as a Jew, or borrowed from the Christians, the testimony as to the then Jewish expectation and belief, is equally strong. You know Philo calls the Logos [Greek: yios Theoy], the Son of God, and [Greek: agap_athon te non], beloved Son. He calls him [Greek: arhchierheus], high priest, [Greek: deuterhos Thehos], second divinity, [Greek: ei an Theoy], image of God, and describes him as [Greek: eggutat_o m_adenhos ovtos methorhioy diast_amatos], the nearest possible to God without any intervening separation. And there are numerous other remarkable expressions of the same sort.

My faith is this:—God is the Absolute Will: it is his Name and the meaning of it. It is the Hypostasis. As begetting his own Alterity, the Jehovah, the Manifested—He is the Father; but the Love and the Life—the Spirit— proceeds from both.

I think Priestley must be considered the author of the modern Unitarianism. I owe, under God, my return to the faith, to my having gone much further than the Unitarians, and so having come round to the other side. I can truly say, I never falsified the Scripture. I always told them that their interpretations of the Scripture were intolerable upon any principles of sound criticism; and that, if they were to offer to construe the will of a neighbour as they did that of their Maker, they would be scouted out of society. I said then plainly and openly, that it was clear enough that John and Paul were not Unitarians. But at that time I had a strong sense of the repugnancy of the doctrine of vicarious atonement to the moral being, and I thought nothing could counterbalance that. "What care I," I said, "for the Platonisms of John, or the Rabbinisms of Paul?– My conscience revolts!" That was the ground of my Unitarianism.

Always believing in the government of God, I was a fervent Optimist. But as I could not but see that the present state of things was not the best, I was necessarily led to look forward to some future state.

* * * * *

You may conceive the difference in kind between the Fancy and the Imagination in this way,—that if the check of the senses and the reason were withdrawn, the first would become delirium, and the last mania. The Fancy brings together images which have no connection natural or moral, but are yoked together by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence; as in the well-known passage in Hudibras:

 
"The sun had long since in the lap
Of Thetis taken out his nap,
And like a lobster boyl'd, the morn
From black to red began to turn."¹⁹⁴
 

The Imagination modifies images, and gives unity to variety; it sees all things in one, il più nell' uno. There is the epic imagination, the perfection of which is in Milton; and the dramatic, of which Shakspeare is the absolute master. The first gives unity by throwing back into the distance; as after the magnificent approach of the Messiah to battle¹⁹⁵, the poet, by one touch from himself—

 
—"far off their coming shone!"—
 

makes the whole one image.

And so at the conclusion of the description of the appearance of the entranced angels, in which every sort of image from all the regions of earth and air is introduced to diversify and illustrate,—the reader is brought back to the single image by—

 
"He call'd so loud, that all the hollow deep
Of Hell resounded."¹⁹⁶
 

The dramatic imagination does not throw back, but brings close; it stamps all nature with one, and that its own, meaning, as in Lear throughout.

* * * * *

At the very outset, what are we to think of the soundness of this modern system of political economy, the direct tendency of every rule of which is to denationalize, and to make the love of our country a foolish superstition?

June 28. 1834

MR. COLERIDGE'S SYSTEM.—BIOGRAPHIA LITERAHIA.—DISSENTERS

You may not understand my system, or any given part of it,—or by a determined act of wilfulness, you may, even though perceiving a ray of light, reject it in anger and disgust:—but this I will say,—that if you once master it, or any part of it, you cannot hesitate to acknowledge it as the truth. You cannot be sceptical about it.

The metaphysical disquisition at the end of the first volume of the "Biographia Literaria" is unformed and immature;—it contains the fragments of the truth, but it is not fully thought out. It is wonderful to myself to think how infinitely more profound my views now are, and yet how much clearer they are withal. The circle is completing; the idea is coming round to, and to be, the common sense.

* * * * *

The generation of the modern worldly Dissenter was thus: Presbyterian, Arian, Socinian, and last, Unitarian.

* * * * *

Is it not most extraordinary to see the Dissenters calling themselves the descendants of the old Nonconformists, and yet clamouring for a divorce of Church and State? Why—Baxter, and the other great leaders, would have thought a man an atheist who had proposed such a thing. They were rather for merging the State in the Church. But these our modern gentlemen, who are blinded by political passion, give the kiss of alliance to the harlot of Rome, and walk arm in arm with those who deny the God that redeemed them, if so they may but wreak their insane antipathies on the National Church! Well! I suppose they have counted the cost, and know what it is they would have, and can keep.

July 5. 1834

LORD BROOKE.—BARROW AND DRYDEN.—PETER WILKINS AND STOTHARD.—FIELDING AND RICHARDSON.—BISHOP SANDFORD.—ROMAN CATHOLIC RELIGION

I do not remember a more beautiful piece of prose in English than the consolation addressed by Lord Brooke (Fulke Greville) to a lady of quality on certain conjugal infelicities. The diction is such that it might have been written now, if we could find any one combining so thoughtful a head with so tender a heart and so exquisite a taste.

* * * * *

Barrow often debased his language merely to evidence his loyalty. It was, indeed, no easy task for a man of so much genius, and such a precise mathematical mode of thinking, to adopt even for a moment the slang of L'Estrange and Tom Brown; but he succeeded in doing so sometimes. With the exception of such parts, Barrow must be considered as closing the first great period of the English language. Dryden began the second. Of course there are numerous subdivisions.

* * * * *

Peter Wilkins is to my mind a work of uncommon beauty; and yet Stothard's illustrations have added beauties to it. If it were not for a certain tendency to affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high for Stothard's designs. They give me great pleasure. I believe that Robinson Crusoe and Peter Wilkins could only have been written by islanders. No continentalist could have conceived either tale. Davis's story is an imitation of Peter Wilkins; but there are many beautiful things in it; especially his finding his wife crouching by the fireside—she having, in his absence, plucked out all her feathers—to be like him!

It would require a very peculiar genius to add another tale, ejusdem generis, to Robinson Crusoe and Peter Wilkins. I once projected such a thing; but the difficulty of a pre-occupied ground stopped me. Perhaps La Motte Fouqué might effect something; but I should fear that neither he, nor any other German, could entirely understand what may be called the "desert island" feeling. I would try the marvellous line of Peter Wilkins, if I attempted it, rather than the real fiction of Robinson Crusoe.

* * * * *

What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Alchemist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots ever planned. And how charming, how wholesome, Fielding always is! To take him up after Richardson, is like emerging from a sick room heated by stoves, into an open lawn, on a breezy day in May.

* * * * *

I have been very deeply interested in the account of Bishop Sandford's life, published by his son. He seems to have been a thorough gentleman upon the model of St. Paul, whose manners were the finest of any man's upon record.

* * * * *

I think I could have conformed to the then dominant Church before the Reformation. The errors existed, but they had not been riveted into peremptory articles of faith before the Council of Trent. If a Romanist were to ask me the question put to Sir Henry Wotton,¹⁹⁷ I should content myself by answering, that I could not exactly say when my religion, as he was pleased to call it, began—but that it was certainly some sixty or seventy years before his, at all events—which began at the Council of Trent.

July 10. 1834

EUTHANASIA

I am, dying, but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently by-gone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope— those twin realities of this phantom world! I do not add Love,—for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and so seen as one? I say realities; for reality is a thing of degrees, from the Iliad to a dream; [Greek: *ai g_or t onar e Di s esti]. Yet, in a strict sense, reality is not predicable at all of aught below Heaven. "Es enim in coelis, Pater noster, qui tu vere es!" Hooker wished to live to finish his Ecclesiastical Polity;—so I own I wish life and strength had been spared to me to complete my Philosophy. For, as God hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and design in my heart were to exalt the glory of his name; and, which is the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind. But visum aliter Deo, and his will be done.

* * * * *

** This note may well finish the present specimens. What followed was for the memory of private friends only. Mr. Coleridge was then extremely ill; but certainly did not believe his end to be quite so near at hand as it was.—ED.

The following Recollections of Mr. Coleridge, written in May, 1811, have been also communicated to me by my brother, Mr. Justice Coleridge:—

"20_th April_, 1811, at Richmond.

"We got on politics, and he related some curious facts of the Prince and Perceval. Then, adverting to the present state of affairs in Portugal, he said that he rejoiced not so much in the mere favourable turn, as in the end that must now be put to the base reign of opinion respecting the superiority and invincible skill of the French generals. Brave as Sir John Moore was, he thought him deficient in that greater and more essential manliness of soul which should have made him not hold his enemy in such fearful respect, and which should have taught him to care less for the opinion of the world at home.

"We then got, I know not how, to German topics. He said that the language of their literature was entirely factitious, and had been formed by Luther from the two dialects, High and Low German; that he had made it, grammatically, most correct, more so, perhaps, than any other language; it was equal to the Greek, except in harmony and sweetness. And yet the Germans themselves thought it sweet;—Klopstock had repeated to him an ode of his own to prove it, and really had deceived himself, by the force of association, into a belief that the harsh sounds, conveying, indeed, or being significant of, sweet images or thoughts, were themselves sweet. Mr. C. was asked what he thought of Klopstock. He answered, that his fame was rapidly declining in Germany; that an Englishman might form a correct notion of him by uniting the moral epigram of Young, the bombast of Hervey, and the minute description of Richardson. As to sublimity, he had, with all Germans, one rule for producing it;—it was, to take something very great, and make it very small in comparison with that which you wish to elevate. Thus, for example, Klopstock says,—'As the gardener goes forth, and scatters from his basket seed into the garden; so does the Creator scatter worlds with his right hand.' Here worlds, a large object, are made small in the hands of the Creator; consequently, the Creator is very great. In short, the Germans were not a poetical nation in the very highest sense. Wieland was their best poet: his subject was bad, and his thoughts often impure; but his language was rich and harmonious, and his fancy luxuriant. Sotheby's translation had not at all caught the manner of the original. But the Germans were good metaphysicians and critics: they criticised on principles previously laid down; thus, though they might be wrong, they were in no danger of being self-contradictory, which was too often the case with English critics.

"Young, he said, was not a poet to be read through at once. His love of point and wit had often put an end to his pathos and sublimity; but there were parts in him which must be immortal. He (Mr. C.) loved to read a page of Young, and walk out to think of him.

"Returning to the Germans, he said that the state of their religion, when he was in Germany, was really shocking. He had never met one clergyman a Christian; and he found professors in the universities lecturing against the most material points in the Gospel. He instanced, I think, Paulus, whose lectures he had attended. The object was to resolve the miracles into natural operations; and such a disposition evinced was the best road to preferment. He severely censured Mr. Taylor's book, in which the principles of Paulus were explained and insisted on with much gratuitous indelicacy. He then entered into the question of Socinianism, and noticed, as I recollect, the passage in the Old Testament; 'The people bowed their faces, and worshipped God and the king.' He said, that all worship implied the presence of the object worshipped: the people worshipped, bowing to the sensuous presence of the one, and the conceived omnipresence of the other. He talked of his having constantly to defend the Church against the Socinian Bishop of Llandaff, Watson. The subject then varied to Roman Catholicism, and he gave us an account of a controversy he had had with a very sensible priest in Sicily on the worship of saints. He had driven the priest from one post to another, till the latter took up the ground, that though the saints were not omnipresent, yet God, who was so, imparted to them the prayers offered up, and then they used their interference with Him to grant them. 'That is, father, (said C. in reply)—excuse my seeming levity, for I mean no impiety—that is; I have a deaf and dumb wife, who yet understands me, and I her, by signs. You have a favour to ask of me, and want my wife's interference; so you communicate your request to me, who impart it to her, and she, by signs back again, begs me to grant it.' The good priest laughed, and said, 'Populus milt decipi, et decipiatur!'

"We then got upon the Oxford controversy, and he was decidedly of opinion that there could be no doubt of Copleston's complete victory. He thought the Review had chosen its points of attack ill, as there must doubtless be in every institution so old much to reprehend and carp at. On the other hand, he thought that Copleston had not been so severe or hard upon them as he might have been; but he admired the critical part of his work, which he thought very highly valuable, independently of the controversy. He wished some portion of mathematics was more essential to a degree at Oxford, as he thought a gentleman's education incomplete without it, and had himself found the necessity of getting up a little, when he could ill spare the time. He every day more and more lamented his neglect of them when at Cambridge,

"Then glancing off to Aristotle, he gave a very high character of him. He said that Bacon objected to Aristotle the grossness of his examples, and Davy now did precisely the same to Bacon: both were wrong; for each of those philosophers wished to confine the attention of the mind in their works to the form of reasoning only, by which other truths might be established or elicited, and therefore the most trite and common-place examples were in fact the best. He said that during a long confinement to his room, he had taken up the Schoolmen, and was astonished at the immense learning and acute knowledge displayed by them; that there was scarcely any thing which modern philosophers had proudly brought forward as their own, which might not be found clearly and systematically laid down by them in some or other of their writings. Locke had sneered at the Schoolmen unfairly, and had raised a foolish laugh against them by citations from their Quid libet questions, which were discussed on the eyes of holydays, and in which the greatest latitude was allowed, being considered mere exercises of ingenuity. We had ridiculed their quiddities, and why? Had we not borrowed their quantity and their quality, and why then reject their quiddity, when every schoolboy in logic must know, that of every thing may be asked, Quantum est? Quale est? and Quid est? the last bringing you to the most material of all points, its individual being. He afterwards stated, that in a History of Speculative Philosophy which he was endeavouring to prepare for publication, he had proved, and to the satisfaction of Sir James Mackintosh, that there was nothing in Locke which his best admirers most admired, that might not be found more clearly and better laid down in Descartes or the old Schoolmen; not that he was himself an implicit disciple of Descartes, though he thought that Descartes had been much misinterpreted.

"When we got on the subject of poetry and Southey, he gave us a critique of the Curse of Kehama, the fault of which he thought consisted in the association of a plot and a machinery so very wild with feelings so sober and tender: but he gave the poem high commendation, admired the art displayed in the employment of the Hindu monstrosities, and begged us to observe the noble feeling excited of the superiority of virtue over vice; that Kehama went on, from the beginning to the end of the poem, increasing in power, whilst Kailyal gradually lost her hopes and her protectors; and yet by the time we got to the end, we had arrived at an utter contempt and even carelessness of the power of evil, as exemplified in the almighty Rajah, and felt a complete confidence in the safety of the unprotected virtue of the maiden. This he thought the very great merit of the poem.

"When we walked home with him to the inn, he got on the subject of the English Essay for the year at Oxford, and thought some consideration of the corruption of language should he introduced into it.

[Footnote: On Etymology.] It originated, he thought, in a desire to abbreviate all expression as much as possible; and no doubt, if in one word, without violating idiom, I can express what others have done in more, and yet be as fully and easily understood, I have manifestly made an improvement; but if, on the other hand, it becomes harder, and takes more time to comprehend a thought or image put in one word by Apuleius than when expressed in a whole sentence by Cicero, the saving is merely of pen and ink, and the alteration is evidently a corruption."

"April 21.—Richmond.

"Before breakfast we went into Mr. May's delightful book-room, where he was again silent in admiration of the prospect. After breakfast, we walked to church. He seemed full of calm piety, and said he always felt the most delightful sensations in a Sunday church-yard,—that it struck him as if God had given to man fifty-two springs in every year. After the service, he was vehement against the sermon, as common-place, and invidious in its tone towards the poor. Then he gave many texts from the lessons and gospel of the day, as affording fit subjects for discourses. He ridiculed the absurdity of refusing to believe every thing that you could not understand; and mentioned a rebuke of Dr. Parr's to a man of the name of Frith, and that of another clergyman to a young man, who said he would believe nothing which he could not understand:—'Then, young man, your creed will be the shortest of any man's I know.'

"As we walked up Mr. Cambridge's meadows towards Twickenham, he criticised Johnson and Gray as poets, and did not seem to allow them high merit. The excellence of verse, he said, was to be untranslatable into any other words without detriment to the beauty of the passage;—the position of a single word could not be altered in Milton without injury. Gray's personifications, he said, were mere printer's devils' personifications— persons with a capital letter, abstract qualities with a small one. He thought Collins had more genius than Gray, who was a singular instance of a man of taste, poetic feeling, and fancy, without imagination. He contrasted Dryden's opening of the 10th satire of Juvenal with Johnson's:—

 
"'Let observation, with extensive view,
Survey mankind from Ganges to Peru.'
 

which was as much as to say,—

 
"'Let observation with extensive observation observe mankind.'
 

"After dinner he told us a humorous story of his enthusiastic fondness for Quakerism, when he was at Cambridge, and his attending one of their meetings, which had entirely cured him. When the little children came in, he was in raptures with them, and descanted upon the delightful mode of treating them now, in comparison with what he had experienced in childhood. He lamented the haughtiness with which Englishmen treated all foreigners abroad, and the facility with which our government had always given up any people which had allied itself to us, at the end of a war; and he particularly remarked upon our abandonment of Minorca. These two things, he said, made us universally disliked on the Continent; though, as a people, most highly respected. He thought a war with America inevitable; and expressed his opinion, that the United States were unfortunate in the prematureness of their separation from this country, before they had in themselves the materials of moral society—before they had a gentry and a learned class,—the former looking backwards, and giving the sense of stability—the latter looking forwards, and regulating the feelings of the people.