Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I call Persius hard—not obscure. He had a bad style; but I dare say, if he had lived178, he would have learned to express himself in easier language. There are many passages in him of exquisite felicity, and his vein of thought is manly and pathetic.

Prudentius179 is curious for this,—that you see how Christianity forced allegory into the place of mythology. Mr. Frere [Greek: ho philokalos, ho kalokagathos] used to esteem the Latin Christian poets of Italy very highly, and no man in our times was a more competent judge than he.

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How very pretty are those lines of Hermesianax in Athenaeus about the poets and poetesses of Greece!180

September 4. 1833

DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM.—EPIC POEM.—GERMAN AND ENGLISH.—MODERN TRAVELS.—PARADISE LOST

I have already told you that in my opinion the destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now left for an epic poem of the highest kind. Yet, with all its great capabilities, it has this one grand defect—that, whereas a poem, to be epic, must have a personal interest,—in the destruction of Jerusalem no genius or skill could possibly preserve the interest for the hero from being merged in the interest for the event. The fact is, the event itself is too sublime and overwhelming.

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In my judgment, an epic poem must either be national or mundane. As to Arthur, you could not by any means make a poem on him national to Englishmen. What have we to do with him? Milton saw this, and with a judgment at least equal to his genius, took a mundane theme—one common to all mankind. His Adam and Eve are all men and women inclusively. Pope satirizes Milton for making God the Father talk like a school divine.181 Pope was hardly the man to criticize Milton. The truth is, the judgment of Milton in the conduct of the celestial part of his story is very exquisite. Wherever God is represented as directly acting as Creator, without any exhibition of his own essence, Milton adopts the simplest and sternest language of the Scriptures. He ventures upon no poetic diction, no amplification, no pathos, no affection. It is truly the Voice or the Word of the Lord coming to, and acting on, the subject Chaos. But, as some personal interest was demanded for the purposes of poetry, Milton takes advantage of the dramatic representation of God's address to the Son, the Filial Alterity, and in those addresses slips in, as it were by stealth, language of affection, or thought, or sentiment. Indeed, although Milton was undoubtedly a high Arian in his mature life, he does in the necessity of poetry give a greater objectivity to the Father and the Son, than he would have justified in argument. He was very wise in adopting the strong anthropomorphism of the Hebrew Scriptures at once. Compare the Paradise Lost with Klopstock's Messiah, and you will learn to appreciate Milton's judgment and skill quite as much as his genius.

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The conquest of India by Bacchus might afford scope for a very brilliant poem of the fancy and the understanding.

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It is not that the German can express external imagery more fully than English; but that it can flash more images at once on the mind than the English can. As to mere power of expression, I doubt whether even the Greek surpasses the English. Pray, read a very pleasant and acute dialogue in Schlegel's Athenaeum between a German, a Greek, a Roman, Italian, and a Frenchman, on the merits of their respective languages.

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I wish the naval and military officers who write accounts of their travels would just spare us their sentiment. The Magazines introduced this cant. Let these gentlemen read and imitate the old captains and admirals, as Dampier, &c.

October 15. 1833

THE TRINITY.—INCARNATION.—REDEMPTION.—EDUCATION

The Trinity is the idea: the Incarnation, which implies the Fall, is the fact: the Redemption is the mesothesis of the two—that is—the religion.

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If you bring up your children in a way which puts them out of sympathy with the religious feelings of the nation in which they live, the chances are, that they will ultimately turn out ruffians or fanatics—and one as likely as the other.

October 23. 1833

ELEGY.—LAVACRUM PALLADOS.—GREEK AND LATIN PENTAMETER.—MILTON'S LATIN POEMS.—POETICAL FILTER.—GRAY AND COTTON

Elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. It may treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject for itself; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself. As he will feel regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow and love become the principal themes of elegy. Elegy presents every thing as lost and gone, or absent and future. The elegy is the exact opposite of the Homeric epic, in which all is purely external and objective, and the poet is a mere voice.

The true lyric ode is subjective too; but then it delights to present things as actually existing and visible, although associated with the past, or coloured highly by the subject of the ode itself.

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I think the Lavacrum Pallados of Callimachus very beautiful indeed, especially that part about the mother of Tiresias and Minerva.182 I have a mind to try how it would bear translation; but what metre have we to answer in feeling to the elegiac couplet of the Greeks?

I greatly prefer the Greek rhythm of the short verse to Ovid's, though, observe, I don't dispute his taste with reference to the genius of his own language. Augustus Schlegel gave me a copy of Latin elegiacs on the King of Prussia's going down the Rhine, in which he had almost exclusively adopted the manner of Propertius. I thought them very elegant.

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You may find a few minute faults in Milton's Latin verses; but you will not persuade me that, if these poems had come down to us as written in the age of Tiberius, we should not have considered them to be very beautiful.

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I once thought of making a collection,—to be called "The Poetical Filter,"—upon the principle of simply omitting from the old pieces of lyrical poetry which we have, those parts in which the whim or the bad taste of the author or the fashion of his age prevailed over his genius. You would be surprised at the number of exquisite wholes which might be made by this simple operation, and, perhaps, by the insertion of a single line or half a line, out of poems which are now utterly disregarded on account of some odd or incongruous passages in them;—just as whole volumes of Wordsworth's poems were formerly neglected or laughed at, solely because of some few wilfulnesses, if I may so call them, of that great man—whilst at the same time five sixths of his poems would have been admired, and indeed popular, if they had appeared without those drawbacks, under the name of Byron or Moore or Campbell, or any other of the fashionable favourites of the day. But he has won the battle now, ay! and will wear the crown, whilst English is English.

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I think there is something very majestic in Gray's Installation Ode; but as to the Bard and the rest of his lyrics, I must say I think them frigid and artificial. There is more real lyric feeling in Cotton's Ode on Winter.183

November 1. 1833

HOMERIC HEROES IN SHAKSPEARE.—DRYDEN.—DR. JOHNSON.—SCOTT'S NOVELS.– SCOPE OF CHRISTIANITY

Compare Nestor, Ajax, Achilles, &c. in the Troilus and Cressida of Shakspeare with their namesakes in the Iliad. The old heroes seem all to have been at school ever since. I scarcely know a more striking instance of the strength and pregnancy of the Gothic mind.

Dryden's genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels get hot by driving fast.

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Dr. Johnson seems to have been really more powerful in discoursing vivâ voce in conversation than with his pen in hand. It seems as if the excitement of company called something like reality and consecutiveness into his reasonings, which in his writings I cannot see. His antitheses are almost always verbal only; and sentence after sentence in the Rambler may be pointed out to which you cannot attach any definite meaning whatever. In his political pamphlets there is more truth of expression than in his other works, for the same reason that his conversation is better than his writings in general. He was more excited and in earnest.

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When I am very ill indeed, I can read Scott's novels, and they are almost the only books I can then read. I cannot at such times read the Bible; my mind reflects on it, but I can't bear the open page.

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Unless Christianity be viewed and felt in a high and comprehensive way, how large a portion of our intellectual and moral nature does it leave without object and action!

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Let a young man separate I from Me as far as he possibly can, and remove Me till it is almost lost in the remote distance. "I am me," is as bad a fault in intellectuals and morals as it is in grammar, whilst none but one—God— can say, "I am I," or "That I am."

November 9. 1833

TIMES OF CHARLES I

How many books are still written and published about Charles the First and his times! Such is the fresh and enduring interest of that grand crisis of morals, religion, and government! But these books are none of them works of any genius or imagination; not one of these authors seems to be able to throw himself back into that age; if they did, there would be less praise and less blame bestowed on both sides.

December 21. 1833

MESSENGER OF THE COVENANT—PROPHECY.—LOGIC OF IDEAS AND OF SYLLOGISMS

When I reflect upon the subject of the messenger of the covenant, and observe the distinction taken in the prophets between the teaching and suffering Christ,—the Priest, who was to precede, and the triumphant Messiah, the Judge, who was to follow,—and how Jesus always seems to speak of the Son of Man in a future sense, and yet always at the same time as identical with himself; I sometimes think that our Lord himself in his earthly career was the Messenger; and that the way is now still preparing for the great and visible advent of the Messiah of Glory. I mention this doubtingly.

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What a beautiful sermon or essay might be written on the growth of prophecy!—from the germ, no bigger than a man's hand, in Genesis, till the column of cloud gathers size and height and substance, and assumes the shape of a perfect man; just like the smoke in the Arabian Nights' tale, which comes up and at last takes a genie's shape.184

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The logic of ideas is to that of syllogisms as the infinitesimal calculus to common arithmetic; it proves, but at the same time supersedes.

January 1. 1834

LANDOR'S POETRY.—BEAUTY.—CHRONOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT OF WORKS

What is it that Mr. Landor wants, to make him a poet? His powers are certainly very considerable, but he seems to be totally deficient in that modifying faculty, which compresses several units into one whole. The truth is, he does not possess imagination in its highest form,—that of stamping il più nell' uno. Hence his poems, taken as wholes, are unintelligible; you have eminences excessively bright, and all the ground around and between them in darkness. Besides which, he has never learned, with all his energy, how to write simple and lucid English.

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The useful, the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good, are distinguishable. You are wrong in resolving beauty into expression or interest; it is quite distinct; indeed it is opposite, although not contrary. Beauty is an immediate presence, between (inter) which and the beholder nihil est. It is always one and tranquil; whereas the interesting always disturbs and is disturbed. I exceedingly regret the loss of those essays on beauty, which I wrote in a Bristol newspaper. I would give much to recover them.

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After all you can say, I still think the chronological order the best for arranging a poet's works. All your divisions are in particular instances inadequate, and they destroy the interest which arises from watching the progress, maturity, and even the decay of genius.

January 3. 1834

TOLERATION.—NORWEGIANS

I have known books written on Tolerance, the proper title of which would be—intolerant or intolerable books on tolerance. Should not a man who writes a book expressly to inculcate tolerance learn to treat with respect, or at least with indulgence, articles of faith which tens of thousands ten times told of his fellow-subjects or his fellow-creatures believe with all their souls, and upon the truth of which they rest their tranquillity in this world, and their hopes of salvation in the next,—those articles being at least maintainable against his arguments, and most certainly innocent in themselves?—Is it fitting to run Jesus Christ in a silly parallel with Socrates—the Being whom thousand millions of intellectual creatures, of whom I am a humble unit, take to be their Redeemer, with an Athenian philosopher, of whom we should know nothing except through his glorification in Plato and Xenophon?—And then to hitch Latimer and Servetus together! To be sure there was a stake and a fire in each case, but where the rest of the resemblance is I cannot see. What ground is there for throwing the odium of Servetus's death upon Calvin alone?—Why, the mild Melancthon wrote to Calvin185, expressly to testify his concurrence in the act, and no doubt he spoke the sense of the German reformers; the Swiss churches advised the punishment in formal letters, and I rather think there are letters from the English divines, approving Calvin's conduct!– Before a man deals out the slang of the day about the great leaders of the Reformation, he should learn to throw himself back to the age of the Reformation, when the two great parties in the church were eagerly on the watch to fasten a charge of heresy on the other. Besides, if ever a poor fanatic thrust, himself into the fire, it was Michael Servetus. He was a rabid enthusiast, and did every thing he could in the way of insult and ribaldry to provoke the feeling of the Christian church. He called the Trinity triceps monstrum et Cerberum quendam tripartitum, and so on.

Indeed, how should the principle of religious toleration have been acknowledged at first?—It would require stronger arguments than any which I have heard as yet, to prove that men in authority have not a right, involved in an imperative duty, to deter those under their control from teaching or countenancing doctrines which they believe to be damnable, and even to punish with death those who violate such prohibition. I am sure that Bellarmine would have had small difficulty in turning Locke round his fingers' ends upon this ground. A right to protection I can understand; but a right to toleration seems to me a contradiction in terms. Some criterion must in any case be adopted by the state; otherwise it might be compelled to admit whatever hideous doctrine and practice any man or number of men may assert to be his or their religion, and an article of his or their faith. It was the same Pope who commanded the Romanists of England to separate from the national church, which previously their own consciences had not dictated, nor the decision of any council,—and who also commanded them to rebel against Queen Elizabeth, whom they were bound to obey by the laws of the land; and if the Pope had authority for one, he must have had it for the other. The only true argument, as it seems to me, apart from Christianity, for a discriminating toleration is, that it is of no use to attempt to stop heresy or schism by persecution, unless, perhaps, it be conducted upon the plan of direct warfare and massacre. You cannot preserve men in the faith by such means, though you may stifle for a while any open appearance of dissent. The experiment has now been tried, and it has failed; and that is by a great deal the best argument for the magistrate against a repetition of it.

I know this,—that if a parcel of fanatic missionaries were to go to Norway, and were to attempt to disturb the fervent and undoubting Lutheranism of the fine independent inhabitants of the interior of that country, I should be right glad to hear that the busy fools had been quietly shipped off—any where. I don't include the people of the seaports in my praise of the Norwegians;—I speak of the agricultural population. If that country could be brought to maintain a million more of inhabitants, Norway might defy the world; it would be [Greek: autarhk_as] and impregnable; but it is much under-handed now.

January 12. 1834

ARTICLES OF FAITH.—MODERN QUAKERISM.—DEVOTIONAL SPIRIT.—SECTARIANISM.—ORIGEN

I have drawn up four or perhaps five articles of faith, by subscription, or rather by assent, to which I think a large comprehension might take place. My articles would exclude Unitarians, and I am sorry to say, members of the church of Rome, but with this difference—that the exclusion of Unitarians would be necessary and perpetual; that of the members of the church of Rome depending on each individual's own conscience and intellectual light. What I mean is this:—that the Romanists hold the faith in Christ,—but unhappily they also hold certain opinions, partly ceremonial, partly devotional, partly speculative, which have so fatal a facility of being degraded into base, corrupting, and even idolatrous practices, that if the Romanist will make them of the essence of his religion, he must of course be excluded. As to the Quakers, I hardly know what to say. An article on the sacraments would exclude them. My doubt is, whether Baptism and the Eucharist are properly any parts of Christianity, or not rather Christianity itself;—the one, the initial conversion or light,—the other, the sustaining and invigorating life;—both together the [Greek: ph_os ahi z_oh_a], which are Christianity. A line can only begin once; hence, there can be no repetition of baptism; but a line may be endlessly prolonged by continued production; hence the sacrament of love and life lasts for ever.

But really there is no knowing what the modern Quakers are, or believe, excepting this—that they are altogether degenerated from their ancestors of the seventeenth century. I should call modern Quakerism, so far as I know it as a scheme of faith, a Socinian Calvinism. Penn himself was a Sabellian, and seems to have disbelieved even the historical fact of the life and death of Jesus;—most certainly Jesus of Nazareth was not Penn's Christ, if he had any. It is amusing to see the modern Quakers appealing now to history for a confirmation of their tenets and discipline—and by so doing, in effect abandoning the strong hold of their founders. As an imperium in imperio, I think the original Quakerism a conception worthy of Lycurgus. Modern Quakerism is like one of those gigantic trees which are seen in the forests of North America,—apparently flourishing, and preserving all its greatest stretch and spread of branches; but when you cut through an enormously thick and gnarled bark, you find the whole inside hollow and rotten. Modern Quakerism, like such a tree, stands upright by help of its inveterate bark alone. Bark a Quaker, and he is a poor creature.

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How much the devotional spirit of the church has suffered by that necessary evil, the Reformation, and the sects which have sprung up subsequently to it! All our modern prayers seem tongue-tied. We appear to be thinking more of avoiding an heretical expression or thought than of opening ourselves to God. We do not pray with that entire, unsuspecting, unfearing, childlike profusion of feeling, which so beautifully shines forth in Jeremy Taylor and Andrewes and the writings of some of the older and better saints of the Romish church, particularly of that remarkable woman, St. Theresa.186 And certainly Protestants, in their anxiety to have the historical argument on their side, have brought down the origin of the Romish errors too late. Many of them began, no doubt, in the Apostolic age itself;—I say errors— not heresies, as that dullest of the fathers, Epiphanius, calls them. Epiphanius is very long and fierce upon the Ebionites. There may have been real heretics under that name; but I believe that, in the beginning, the name was, on account of its Hebrew meaning, given to, or adopted by, some poor mistaken men—perhaps of the Nazarene way—who sold all their goods and lands, and were then obliged to beg. I think it not improbable that Barnabas was one of these chief mendicants; and that the collection made by St. Paul was for them. You should read Rhenferd's account of the early heresies. I think he demonstrates about eight of Epiphanius's heretics to be mere nicknames given by the Jews to the Christians. Read "Hermas, or the Shepherd," of the genuineness of which and of the epistle of Barnabas I have no doubt. It is perfectly orthodox, but full of the most ludicrous tricks of gnostic fancy—the wish to find the New Testament in the Old. This gnosis is perceptible in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but kept exquisitely within the limit of propriety. In the others it is rampant, and most truly "puffeth up," as St. Paul said of it.

What between the sectarians and the political economists, the English are denationalized. England I see as a country, but the English nation seems obliterated. What could redintegrate us again? Must it be another threat of foreign invasion?

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I never can digest the loss of most of Origen's works: he seems to have been almost the only very great scholar and genius combined amongst the early Fathers. Jerome was very inferior to him.

January 20. 1834

SOME MEN LIKE MUSICAL GLASSES.—SUBLIME AND NONSENSE.—ATHEIST

Some men are like musical glasses;—to produce their finest tones, you must keep them wet.

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Well! that passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense.

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How did the Atheist get his idea of that God whom he denies?

February 22. 1834

PROOF OF EXISTENCE OF GOD.—KANT'S ATTEMPT.—PLURALITY OF WORLDS

Assume the existence of God,—and then the harmony and fitness of the physical creation may be shown to correspond with and support such an assumption;—but to set about proving the existence of a God by such means is a mere circle, a delusion. It can be no proof to a good reasoner, unless he violates all syllogistic logic, and presumes his conclusion.

Kant once set about proving the existence of God, and a masterly effort it was.* But in his later great work, the "Critique of the Pure Reason," he saw its fallacy, and said of it—that if the existence could he proved at all, it must be on the grounds indicated by him.

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I never could feel any force in the arguments for a plurality of worlds, in the common acceptation of that term. A lady once asked me—"What then could be the intention in creating so many great bodies, so apparently useless to us?" I said—I did not know, except perhaps to make dirt cheap. The vulgar inference is in alio genere. What in the eye of an intellectual and omnipotent Being is the whole sidereal system to the soul of one man for whom Christ died?

March 1. 1834

A REASONER

I am by the law of my nature a reasoner. A person who should suppose I meant by that word, an arguer,187 would not only not understand me, but would understand the contrary of my meaning. I can take no interest whatever in hearing or saying any thing merely as a fact—merely as having happened. It must refer to something within me before I can regard it with any curiosity or care. My mind is always energic—I don't mean energetic; I require in every thing what, for lack of another word, I may call propriety,—that is, a reason why the thing is at all, and why it is there or then rather than elsewhere or at another time.

March 5. 1834

SHAKSPEARE'S INTELLECTUAL ACTION.—CRABBE AND SOUTHEY.—PETER SIMPLE AND TOM CRINGLE'S LOG

Shakspeare's intellectual action is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakspeare goes on creating, and evolving B. out of A., and C. out of B., and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength.