Anima Poetae Part 33

[S. T. C. was born on October 21, 1772. Consequently, on October 20, 1819, he was not yet forty-seven. He entered his forty-eighth year October 21, 1819.]

[Sidenote: AN UNWRITTEN SONNET]

N.B.--A sonnet on the child collecting sh.e.l.ls and pebbles on the sea-sh.o.r.e or lake-side, and carrying each with a fresh shout of delight and admiration to the mother's ap.r.o.n, who smiles and a.s.sents to each "This is pretty!" "Is not that a nice one?" and then when the prattler is tired of its _conchozetetic_ labours lifts up her ap.r.o.n and throws them out on her ap.r.o.n. Such are our first discoveries both in science and philosophy.--S. T. Coleridge, Oct. 21, 1819.

[Sidenote: MILTON AND SHAKSPERE]

Found Mr. G. with Hartley in the garden, attempting to explain to himself and to Hartley a feeling of a something not present in Milton's works, that is, in "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regained," and "Samson Agonistes," which he _did_ feel delightedly in the "Lycidas," and (as I added afterwards) in the Italian sonnets compared with the English. And this appeared to me to be the _poet_ appearing and wis.h.i.+ng to appear as the poet, and, likewise, as the man, as much as, though more rare than, the father, the brother, the preacher, and the patriot. Compare with Milton, Chaucer's "Fall of the Leaf" and Spenser throughout, and you cannot but _feel_ what Gillman meant to convey. What is the solution?

This, I believe--but I must premise that there is a _synthesis_ of intellectual insight including the mental object, the organ of the correspondent being indivisible, and this (O deep truth!) because the objectivity consists in the universality of its subjectiveness--as when it _sees_, and millions _see_ even so, and the seeing of the millions is what const.i.tutes to _A_ and to each of the millions the _objectivity_ of the sight, the equivalent to a common object--a synthesis of _this_, I say, and of proper external object which we call _fact_. Now, this it is which we find in religion. It is more than philosophical truth--it is other and more than historical fact; it is not made up by the addition of the one to the other, but it is the _ident.i.ty_ of both, the co-inherence.

Now, this being understood, I proceed to say, using the term objectivity (arbitrarily, I grant), for this ident.i.ty of truth and fact, that Milton hid the poetry in or transformed (not trans-substantiated) the poetry into this objectivity, while Shakspere, in all things, the divine opposite or ant.i.thetic correspondent of the divine Milton, transformed the objectivity into poetry.

Mr. G. observed as peculiar to the Hamlet, that it alone, of all Shakspere's plays, presented to him a moving along _before_ him; while in others it was a moving, indeed, but with which he himself moved equally in all and with all, and without any external something by which the motion was manifested, even as a man would move in a balloon--a sensation of motion, but not a sight of moving and having been moved.

And why is this? Because of all the characters of Shakspere's plays Hamlet is the only character with which, by contra-distinction from the rest of the _dramatis personae_, the fit and capable reader identifies himself as the representation of his own contemplative and strictly proper and very own being (action, etc., belongs to others, the moment we call it our own)--hence the events of the play, with all the characters, move because you stand still. In the other plays, your ident.i.ty is equally diffused over all. Of no parts can you say, as in Hamlet, they are moving. But ever it is _we_, or that period and portion of human action, which is unified into a dream, even as in a dream the personal unity is diffused and severalised (divided to the sight though united in the dim feeling) into a sort of reality. Even so [it is with]

the styles of Milton and Shakspere--the same weight of effect from the exceeding _felicity_ (subjectively) of Shakspere, and the exceeding _propriety_ (_extra arbitrium_) of Milton.

[Sidenote: A ROYAL ROAD TO KNOWLEDGE]

The best plan, I think, for a man who would wish his mind to continue growing is to find, in the first place, some means of ascertaining for himself whether it does or no; and I can think of no better than early in life, say after three-and-twenty, to procure gradually the works of some two or three great writers--say, for instance, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, and Kant, with the _De Republica_, _De Legibus_, the _Sophistes_ and _Politicus_ of Plato, and the _Poetics_, _Rhetorics_, and _Politics_ of Aristotle--and amidst all other reading, to make a point of reperusing some one, or some weighty part of some one of these every four or five years, having from the beginning a separate note-book for each of these writers, in which your impressions, suggestions, conjectures, doubts and judgments are to be recorded with date of each, and so worded as to represent most sincerely the exact state of your convictions at the time, such as they would be if you did not (which this plan will a.s.suredly make you do sooner or later) antic.i.p.ate a change in them from increase of knowledge. "It is possible that I am in the wrong, but so it now appears to me, after my best attempts; and I must therefore put it down in order that I may find myself so, if so I am." It would make a little volume to give in detail all the various moral as well as intellectual advantages that would result from the systematic observation of the plan. Diffidence and hope would reciprocally balance and excite each other. A continuity would be given to your being, and its progressiveness ensured. All your knowledge otherwise obtained, whether from books or conversation or experience, would find centres round which it would organise itself. And, lastly, the habit of confuting your past self, and detecting the causes and occasions of your having mistaken or overlooked the truth, will give you both a quickness and a winning kindness, resulting from sympathy, in exposing the errors of others, as if you were an _alter ego_, of his mistake. And such, indeed, will your antagonist appear to you, another past self--in all points in which the falsity is not too plainly a derivation from a corrupt heart and the predominance of bad pa.s.sion or worldly interests overlaying the love of truth as truth. And even in this case the liveliness with which you will so often have expressed yourself in your private note-books, in which the words, unsought for and untrimmed because intended for your own eye, exclusively, were the first-born of your first impressions, when you were either enkindled by admiration of your writer, or excited by a humble disputing with him reimpersonated in his book, will be of no mean rhetorical advantage to you, especially in public and extemporary debate or animated conversation.

[Sidenote: THE IDEA OF G.o.d]

Did you deduce your own being? Even that is less absurd than the conceit of deducing the Divine being? Never would you have had the notion, had you not had the idea--rather, had not the idea worked in you like the memory of a name which we cannot recollect and yet feel that we have and which reveals its existence in the mind only by a restless antic.i.p.ation and proves its _a priori_ actuality by the almost explosive instantaneity with which it is welcomed and recognised on its re-emersion out of the cloud, or its re-ascent from the horizon of consciousness.

[Sidenote: APHORISMS AND ADAGES]

I should like to know whether or how far the delight I feel, and have always felt, in adages or aphorisms of universal or very extensive application is a general or common feeling with men, or a peculiarity of my own mind. I cannot describe how much pleasure I have derived from "Extremes meet," for instance, or "Treat everything according to its nature," and, the last, "Be"! In the last I bring all inward rect.i.tude to its test, in the former all outward morality to its rule, and in the first all problematic results to their solution, and reduce apparent contraries to correspondent opposites. How many hostile tenets has it enabled me to contemplate as fragments of truth, false only by negation and mutual exclusion?

[Sidenote: IGNORE THYSELF July 12, 1822]

I have myself too often of late used the phrase "rational self-love" the same as "enlightened self-love." O no more of this! What have love, reason or light to do with _self_, except as the dark and evil spirit which it is given to them to overcome! _Soul-love_, if you please. O there is more stuff of thought in our simple and pious fore-elders'

adjuration, "Take pity of your poor soul!" than in all the volumes of Paley, Rochefoucauld, and Helvetius!

[Sidenote: RUGIT LEO]

N.B.--The injurious manner in which men of genius are treated, not only as authors, but even when they are in social company. _A_ is believed to be, or talked of as, a man of unusual talent. People are anxious to meet him. If he says little or nothing, they wonder at the report, never considering whether they themselves were fit either to excite, or if self-excited to receive and comprehend him. But with the simplicity of genius he attributes more to them than they have, and they put questions that cannot be answered but by a return to first principles, and then they complain of him as not conversing, but lecturing. "He is quite intolerable," "Might as well be hearing a sermon." In short, in answer to some objection, _A_ replies, "Sir, this rests on the distinction between an _idea_ and an _image_, and, likewise, its difference from a perfect _conception_." "Pray, sir, explain." Because he does not and cannot [state the case as concisely as if he had been appealed to about a hand at] whist, 'tis "Lord! how long he talks," and they never ask themselves, Did this man force himself into your company? Was he not dragged into it? What is the practical result? That the man of genius should live as much as possible with beings that simply love him, from relations.h.i.+p or old a.s.sociation, or with those that have the same feelings with himself; but in all other company he will do well to cease to be the man of genius, and make up his mind to appear dull or commonplace as a companion, to be the most silent except upon the most trivial subjects of any in the company, to turn off questions with a joke or a pun as not suiting a wine-table, and to trust only to his writings.

[Sidenote: A BROKEN HEART]

Few die of a _broken heart_, and these few (the surgeons tell us) know nothing of it, and, dying suddenly, leave to the dissector the first discovery. O this is but the shallow remark of a hard and unthinking prosperity! Have you never seen a stick broken in the middle, and yet cohering by the rind? The fibres, half of them actually broken and the rest sprained and, though tough, unsustaining? O many, many are the broken-hearted for those who know what the moral and practical heart of the man is!

[Sidenote: VOX HIEMALIS Thursday, Sept. 30, 1824]

Now the breeze through the stiff and brittle-becoming foliage of the trees counterfeits the sound of a rus.h.i.+ng stream or water-flood suddenly sweeping by. The sigh, the modulated continuousness of the murmur is exchanged for the confusion of overtaking sounds--the self-evolution of the One, for the clash or stroke of ever-commencing contact of the mult.i.tudinous, without inters.p.a.ce, by confusion. The short gusts rustle and the ear feels the unlithesome dryness, before the eye detects the coa.r.s.er, duller, though deeper green, deadened and not [yet] awakened into the hues of decay--echoes of spring from the sepulchral vault of winter. The aged year, conversant with the forms of its youth and forgetting all the intervals, feebly reproduces them [as it were, from], memory.

[Sidenote: CONSTANCY Friday, June 9, 1826]

"Constancy lives in realms above." This exclusion of constancy from the list of earthly virtues may be a poet's exaggeration, but, certainly, it is of far rarer occurrence in _all_ relations of life than the young and warm-hearted are willing to believe, but in cases of _exclusive_ attachment (that is, in Love, properly so-called, and yet distinct from Friends.h.i.+p), and in the _highest_ form of the Virtue, it is _so_ rare that I cannot help doubting whether an instance of _mutual_ constancy in effect ever existed. For there are two sorts of constancy, the one negative, where there is no _transfer_ of affection, where the bond of attachment is not broken though it may be attenuated to a thread--this may be met with, not so seldom, and, where there is goodness of heart, it may be expected--but the other sort, or _positive_ constancy, where the affection endures in the same intensity with the same or increased tenderness and _nearness_, of this it is that I doubt whether once in an age an instance occurs where _A_ feels it toward _B_, and _B_ feels it towards _A_, and _vice versa_.

[Sidenote: FLOWERS AND LIGHT April 18, 1826]

Spring flowers, I have observed, look best in the day, and by suns.h.i.+ne: but summer and autumnal flower-pots by lamp or candle-light. I have now before me a flower-pot of cherry-blossoms, polyanthuses, double violets, periwinkles, wall-flowers, but how dim and dusky they look! The scarlet anemone is an exception, and three or four of them with all the rest of the flower-gla.s.s sprays of white blossoms, and one or two periwinkles for the sake of the dark green leaves, green stems, and flexible elegant form, make a lovely group both by sun and by candle-light.

Grove, Highgate.

[Sidenote: THE BREATH OF SPRING Feb. 28, 1827]

What an interval! Heard the singing birds this morning in our garden for the first time this year, though it rained and blew fiercely; but the long frost has broken up, and the wind, though fierce, was warm and westerly.

[Sidenote: THE IDEA OF LIFE May 5, 1827]

To the right understanding of the most awfully _concerning_ declaration of Holy Writ there has been no greater obstacle than the want of insight into the nature of Life--what it is and what it is not. But in order to this, the mind must have been raised to the contemplation of the _Idea_--the life celestial, to wit--or the distinctive essence and character of the Holy Spirit. Here Life is _Love_--communicative, outpouring love. _Ergo_, the terrestrial or the Life of Nature ever the shadow and opposite of the Divine is appropriative, absorbing _appetence_. But the great mistake is, that the soul cannot continue without life; for, if so, with what propriety can the portion of the reprobate soul be called Death? What if the natural life have two possible terminations--true Being and the falling back into the dark Will?

[Sidenote: A COMPREHENSIVE FORMULA]

The painter-parson, Rev. Mr. Judkin, is about to show off a Romish priest converted to the Protestant belief, on Sunday next at his church, and asked of me (this day, at Mr. Gray's, Friday, 27th July, 1827) whether I knew of any form of recantation but that of Archbishop Tenison. I knew nothing of Tenison's or any other, but expressed my opinion that no other recantation ought to be required than a declaration that he admitted no outward authority superior to, or co-ordinate with, the canonical Scriptures, and no interpreter that superseded or stood in the place of the Holy Spirit, enlightening the mind of each true believer, according to his individual needs. I can conceive a person holding all the articles that distinguish the Romish from the Protestant conception, with this one exception; and, yet, if he did make this exception, and professed to believe them, because he thought they were contained in, or to be fairly inferred from, right reason and the Scriptures, I should consider him as true a Protestant as Luther, Knox, or Calvin, and a far better than Laud and his compeers, however meanly I might think of him as a philosopher and theologian. The laying so great a stress on transubstantiation I have long regarded as the great calamity or error of the Reformation--if not constrained by circ.u.mstances, the great _error_--or, if constrained, the great _calamity_.

[Sidenote: THE NIGHT IS AT HAND August 1, 1828]

The sweet prattle of the chimes--counsellors pleading in the court of Love--then the clock, the solemn sentence of the mighty Judge--long pause between each pregnant, inappellable word, too deeply weighed to be reversed in the High-Justice-Court of Time and Fate. A more richly solemn sound than this eleven o'clock at Antwerp I never heard--dead enough to be opaque as central gold, yet clear enough to be the mountain air.