Anima Poetae Part 17

[Sidenote: THOUGHT AND THINGS]

Thought and reality are, as it were, two distinct corresponding sounds, of which no man can say positively which is the voice and which the echo.

Oh, the beautiful fountain or natural well at Upper Stowey! The images of the weeds which hung down from its sides appear as plants growing up, straight and upright, among the water-weeds that really grow from the bottom of the well, and so vivid was the image, that for some moments, and not till after I had disturbed the water, did I perceive that their roots were not neighbours, and they side-by-side companions. So ever, then I said, so are the happy man's thoughts and things, [or in the language of the modern philosophers] his ideas and impressions.

[Sidenote: SUPERSt.i.tION]

The two characteristics which I have most observed in Roman Catholic mummery processions, baptisms, etc., are, first, the immense _noise_ and jingle-jingle as if to frighten away the daemon common-sense; and, secondly, the unmoved, stupid, uninterested faces of the conjurers. I have noticed no exception. Is not the very nature of superst.i.tion in general, as being utterly sensuous, _cold_ except where it is _sensual_?

Hence the older form of idolatry, as displayed in the Greek mythology, was, in some sense, even preferable to the Popish. For whatever life did and could exist in superst.i.tion it brought forward and sanctified in its rites of Bacchus, Venus, etc. The papist by pretence of suppression warps and denaturalises. In the pagan [ritual, superst.i.tion] burnt with a bright flame, in the popish it consumes the soul with a smothered fire that stinks in darkness and smoulders like gum that burns but is incapable of light.

[Sidenote: ILLUSION Sunday Midnight, May 12, 1805]

At the Treasury, La Valetta, Malta, in the room the windows of which directly face the piazzas and vast saloon built for the archives and Library and now used as the Garrison Ball-room, sitting at one corner of a large parallelogram table well-littered with books, in a red arm-chair, at the other corner of which (diagonally) {_C}[rec]^D Mr.

Dennison had been sitting--he and I having conversed for a long time, he bade me good night, and retired--I meaning to retire too, however sunk for five minutes or so into a doze and on suddenly awaking up I saw him as distinctly sitting in the chair, as I had, really, some ten minutes before. I was startled, and thinking of it, sunk into a second doze, out of which awaking as before I saw again the same appearance; not more distinct indeed, but more of his form--for at the first time I had seen only his face and bust--but now I saw as much as I could have seen if he had been really there. The appearance was very nearly that of a person seen through thin smoke distinct indeed, but yet a sort of distinct _shape_ and _colour_, with a diminished sense of _substantiality_--like a face in a clear stream. My nerves had been violently agitated yesterday morning by the attack of three dogs as I was mounting the steps of Captain Pasley's door--two of them savage Bedouins, who wounded me in the calf of my left leg. I have noted this down, not three minutes having intervened since the illusion took place.

Often and often I have had similar experiences and, therefore, resolved to write down the particulars whenever any new instance should occur, as a weapon against superst.i.tion, and an explanation of ghosts--Banquo in "Macbeth" the very same thing. I once told a lady the reason why I did not believe in the existence of ghosts, etc., was that I had seen too many of them myself. N.B. There were on the table a common black wine-bottle, a decanter of water, and, between these, one of the half-gallon gla.s.s flasks which Sir G. Beaumont had given me (four of these full of port), the cork in, covered with leather, and having a white plated ring on the top. I mention this because since I wrote the former pages, on blinking a bit a third time, and opening my eyes, I clearly _detected_ that this high-shouldered hypochondriacal bottle-man had a great share in producing the effect. The metamorphosis was clearly beginning, though I snapped the spell before it had a.s.sumed a recognisable form. The red-leather arm-chair was so placed at the corner that the flask was exactly between me and it--and the lamp being close to my corner of the large table, and not giving much light, the chair was rather obscure, and the bra.s.s nails where the leather was fastened to the outward wooden rim reflecting the light more copiously were seen almost for themselves. What if instead of immediately checking the sight, and then pleased with it as a philosophical _case_, I had been frightened and encouraged it, and my understanding had joined _its vote_ to that of my senses?

My own shadow, too, on the wall not far from Mr. D.'s chair--the white paper, the sheet of Harbour Reports lying spread out on the table on the other side of the bottles--influence of mere colour, influence of shape--wonderful coalescence of scattered colours at distances, and, then, all going to some one shape, and the modification! Likewise I am more convinced by repeated observation that, perhaps, always in a very minute degree but a.s.suredly in certain states and postures of the eye, as in drowsiness, in the state of the brain and nerves after distress or agitation, especially if it had been accompanied by weeping, and in many others, we see our own faces, and project them according to the distance given them by the degree of indistinctness--that this may occasion in the highest degree the Wraith (_vide_ a hundred Scotch stories, but better than all, Wordsworth's most wonderful and admirable poem, Peter Bell, when he sees his own figure), and, still oftener, that it facilitates the formation of a human face out of some really present object, and from the alteration of the distance among other causes never suspected as the occasion and substratum.

S. T. C.

N.B.--This is a valuable note, re-read by me, Tuesday morning, May 14.

[Compare _Table Talk_ for January 3 and May 1, 1823, Bell & Co., 1884, pp. 20, 31-33. See, too, _The Friend_, First Landing Place Essay, iii., _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 134-137.]

[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]

Mem. always to bear in mind that profound sentence of Leibnitz that men's intellectual errors consist chiefly in _denying_. What they _affirm_ with _feeling_ is, for the most part, right--if it be a real affirmation, and not affirmative in form, negative in reality. As, for instance, when a man praises the French stage, meaning and implying his dislike of Shakspere [and the Elizabethan dramatists].

"Facts--stubborn facts! None of your theory!" A most entertaining and instructive essay might be written on this text, and the sooner the better. Trace it from the most absurd credulity--_e.g._, in Fracastorius' _De Sympathia_, cap. i. and the Alchemy Book--even to that of your modern agriculturists, relating their own facts and swearing against each other like s.h.i.+ps' crews. O! it is the relation of the facts--not the facts, friend!

Speculative men are wont to be condemned by the general. But who more speculative then Sir Walter Raleigh, and _he_, even he, brought the potato to Europe. Good heavens! let me never eat a roasted potato without dwelling on it, and detailing its train of consequences.

Likewise, too, _dubious_ to the philosopher, but to be clapped chorally by the commercial world, he, this mere wild speculatist, introduced tobacco.

For a nation to make peace only because it is tired of war, and, as it were, in order just to take breath, is in direct subversion of the end and object of the war which was its sole justification. 'Tis like a poor way-sore foot traveller getting up behind a coach that is going the contrary way to his.

The eye hath a two-fold power. It is, verily, a window through which you not only look _out_ of the house, but can look into it too. A statesman and diplomatist should for this reason always wear spectacles.

Worldly men gain their purposes with worldly men by that instinctive belief in sincerity. Hence (nothing immediately and pa.s.sionately contradicting it) the effect of the "with unfeigned esteem," "entire devotion," and the other smooth phrases in letters, all, in short, that sea-officers call _oil_, and of which they, with all their bluntness, well understand the use.

The confusion of metaphor with reality is one of the fountains of the many-headed Nile of credulity, which, overflowing its banks, covers the world with miscreations and reptile monsters, and feeds by its many mouths the sea of blood.

A ready command of a limited number of words is but a playing cat-cradle dexterously with language.

Plain contra-reasoning may be compared with boxing with fists.

Controversy with boxing is the cestus, that is, the lead-loaded glove, like the pugilists in the aeneid. But the stiletto! the envenomed stiletto is here. What worse? (a Germanism) Yes! the poisoned Italian glove of mock friends.h.i.+p.

The more I reflect, the more exact and close appears to me the a.n.a.logy between a watch and watches, and the conscience and consciences of men, on the one hand, and that between the sun and motion of the heavenly bodies in general and the reason and goodness of the Supreme on the other. Never goes quite right any one, no two go exactly the same; they derive their dignity and use as being subst.i.tutes and exponents of heavenly motions, but still, in a thousand instances, they are and must be our instructors by which we must act, in practice presuming a coincidence while theoretically we are aware of incalculable variations.

One lifts up one's eyes to heaven, as if to seek there what one had lost on earth--eyes, Whose half-beholdings through unsteady tears Gave shape, hue, distance to the inward dream.

[Sidenote: GREAT MEN THE CRITERION OF NATIONAL WORTH]

Schiller, disgusted with Kotzebuisms, deserts from Shakspere! What!

cannot we condemn a counterfeit and yet remain admirers of the original?

This is a sufficient proof that the first admiration was not sound, or founded on sound distinct perceptions [or, if sprung from], a sound feeling, yet clothed and manifested to the consciousness by false ideas.

And now the French stage is to be re-introduced. O Germany! Germany! why this endless rage for novelty? Why this endless looking out of thyself?

But stop, let me not fall into the pit against which I was about to warn others. Let me not confound the discriminating character and genius of a nation with the conflux of its individuals in cities and reviews. Let England be Sir Philip Sidney, Shakspere, Milton, Bacon, Harrington, Swift, Wordsworth; and never let the names of Darwin, Johnson, Hume, _fur_ it over. If these, too, must be England let them be another England; or, rather, let the first be old England, the spiritual, Platonic old England, and the second, with Locke at the head of the philosophers and Pope [at the head] of the poets, together with the long list of Priestleys, Paleys, Hayleys, Darwins, Mr. Pitts, Dunda.s.ses, &c., &c., be the representatives of commercial Great Britain. These have [indeed] their merits, but are as alien to me as the Mandarin philosophers and poets of China. Even so Leibnitz, Lessing, Voss, Kant, shall be _Germany_ to me, let whatever c.o.xcombs rise up, and _shrill_ it away in the gra.s.shopper vale of reviews. And so shall Dante, Ariosto, Giordano Bruno, be my Italy; Cervantes my Spain; and O! that I could find a France for my love. But spite of Pascal, Madame Guyon and Moliere, France is my Babylon, the mother of wh.o.r.edoms in morality, philosophy and taste. The French themselves feel a foreignness in these writers. How indeed is it possible at once to _love_ Pascal and Voltaire?

[Sidenote: AN INTELLECTUAL PURGATORY Tuesday morning, May 14, 1805]

With any distinct remembrance of a past life there could be no fear of death as death, no idea even of death! Now, in the next state, to meet with the Luthers, Miltons, Leibnitzs, Bernouillis, Bonnets, Shaksperes, etc., and to live a longer and better life, the good and wise entirely among the good and wise, might serve as a step to break the abruptness of an immediate Heaven? But it must be a human life; and though the faith in a hereafter would be more firm, more undoubting, yet, still, it must not be a sensuous remembrance of a death pa.s.sed over. No! [it would be] something like a dream that you had not died, but had been taken off; in short, the real events with the obscurity of a dream, accompanied with the notion that you had never died, but that death was yet to come. As a man who, having walked in his sleep, by rapid openings of his eyes--too rapid to be observable by others or rememberable by himself--sees and remembers the whole of his path, mixing it with many fancies _ab intra_, and, awaking, remembers, but yet as a dream.

[Sidenote: OF FIRST LOVES]

'Tis one source of mistakes concerning the merits of poems, that to those read in youth men attribute all that praise which is due to poetry in general, merely considered as select language in metre. (Little children should not be taught verses, in my opinion; better not to let them set eyes on verse till they are ten or eleven years old.) Now, poetry produces two kinds of pleasure, one for each of the two master-movements and impulses of man, the gratification of the love of variety, and the gratification of the love of uniformity--and that by a recurrence delightful as a painless and yet exciting act of memory--tiny breezelets of surprise, each one destroying the ripplets which the former had made--yet all together keeping the surface of the mind in a bright dimple-smile. So, too, a hatred of vacancy is reconciled with the love of rest. These and other causes often make [a first acquaintance with] poetry an overpowering delight to a lad of feeling, as I have heard Poole relate of himself respecting Edwin and Angelina. But so it would be with a man bred up in a wilderness by Unseen Beings, who should yet converse and discourse rationally with him--how beautiful would not the first other man appear whom he saw and knew to be a man by the resemblance to his own image seen in the clear stream; and would he not, in like manner, attribute to the man all the divine attributes of humanity, though, haply, he should be a very ordinary, or even a most ugly man, compared with a hundred others? Many of us who have felt this with respect to women have been bred up where few are to be seen; and I acknowledge that, both in persons and in poems, it is well _on the whole_ that we should retain our first love, though, alike in both cases, evils have happened as the consequence.

[Sidenote: THE MADDENING RAIN August 1, 1805]

The excellent fable of the maddening rain I have found in Drayton's "Moon Calf," most miserably marred in the telling! vastly inferior to Benedict Fay's Latin exposition of it, and that is no great thing.

_Vide_ his Lucretian Poem on the Newtonian System. Never was a finer tale for a satire, or, rather, to conclude a long satirical poem of five or six hundred lines.

[For excellent use of this fable, see _The Friend_, No. 1, June 9, 1809, _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, ii. 21, 22.]

[Sidenote: SENTIMENTS BELOW MORALS]

Pasley remarked last night (2nd August 1805), and with great precision and originality, that men themselves, in the present age, were not so much degraded as their sentiments. This is most true! almost all men nowadays act and feel more n.o.bly than they think--yet still the vile, cowardly, selfish, calculating ethics of Paley, Priestley, Locke, and other Erastians do woefully influence and determine our course of action.

[Sidenote: TIME AND ETERNITY]