Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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I, for one, do not call the sod under my feet my country. But language, religion, laws, government, blood,—identity in these makes men of one country.

May 29. 1830

BOOK OF JOB

The Book of Job is an Arab poem, antecedent to the Mosaic dispensation. It represents the mind of a good man not enlightened by an actual revelation, but seeking about for one. In no other book is the desire and necessity for a Mediator so intensely expressed. The personality of God, the I AM of the Hebrews, is most vividly impressed on the book, in opposition to pantheism.

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I now think, after many doubts, that the passage, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," &c. may fairly be taken as a burst of determination, a quasi prophecy.[56 - Chap. xix. 25, 26.] "I know not how this can be; but in spite of all my difficulties, this I do know, that I shall be recompensed."

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It should be observed, that all the imagery in the speeches of the men is taken from the East, and is no more than a mere representation of the forms of material nature. But when God speaks, the tone is exalted; and almost all the images are taken from Egypt, the crocodile, the war-horse, and so forth. Egypt was then the first monarchy that had a splendid court.

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Satan, in the prologue, does not mean the devil, our Diabolus. There is no calumny in his words. He is rather the circuitor, the accusing spirit, a dramatic attorney-general. But after the prologue, which was necessary to bring the imagination into a proper state for the dialogue, we hear no more of this Satan.

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Warburton's notion, that the Book of Job was of so late a date as Ezra, is wholly groundless. His only reason is this appearance of Satan.

May 30. 1830

TRANSLATION OF THE PSALMS

I wish the Psalms were translated afresh; or, rather, that the present version were revised. Scores of passages are utterly incoherent as they now stand. If the primary visual images had been oftener preserved, the connection and force of the sentences would have been better perceived.[57 - Mr. Coleridge, like so many of the elder divines of the Christian church, had an affectionate reverence for the moral and evangelical portion of the Book of Psalms. He told me that, after having studied every page of the Bible with the deepest attention, he had found no other part of Scripture come home so closely to his inmost yearnings and necessities. During many of his latter years he used to read ten or twelve verses every evening, ascertaining (for his knowledge of Hebrew was enough for that) the exact visual image or first radical meaning of every noun substantive; and he repeatedly expressed to me his surprise and pleasure at finding that in nine cases out of ten the bare primary sense, if literally rendered, threw great additional light on the text. He was not disposed to allow the prophetic or allusive character so largely as is done by Horne and others; but he acknowledged it in some instances in the fullest manner. In particular, he rejected the local and temporary reference which has been given to the 110th Psalm, and declared his belief in its deep mystical import with regard to the Messiah. Mr. C. once gave me the following note upon the 22d Psalm written by him, I believe, many years previously, but which, he said, he approved at that time. It will find as appropriate a niche here as any where else:—"I am much delighted and instructed by the hypothesis, which I think probable, that our Lord in repeating Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani, really recited the whole or a large part of the 22d Psalm. It is impossible to read that psalm without the liveliest feelings of love, gratitude, and sympathy. It is, indeed, a wonderful prophecy, whatever might or might not have been David's notion when he composed it. Whether Christ did audibly repeat the whole or not, it is certain. I think, that he did it mentally, and said aloud what was sufficient to enable his followers to do the same. Even at this day to repeat in the same manner but the first line of a common hymn would be understood as a reference to the whole. Above all, I am thankful for the thought which suggested itself to my mind, whilst I was reading this beautiful psalm, namely, that we should not exclusively think of Christ as the Logos united to human nature, but likewise as a perfect man united to the Logos. This distinction is most important in order to conceive, much more, appropriately to feel, the conduct and exertions of Jesus."—ED.]

May 31. 1830

ANCIENT MARINER.—UNDINE.—MARTIN.—PILGRIM'S PROGRESS

Mrs. Barbauld once told me that she admired the Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it,—it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgment the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son.[58 - "There he found, at the foot of a great walnut-tree, a fountain of a very clear running water, and alighting, tied his horse to a branch of a tree, and sitting clown by the fountain, took some biscuits and dates out of his portmanteau, and, as he ate his dates, threw the shells about on both sides of him. When he had done eating, being a good Mussulman, he washed his hands, his face, and his feet, and said his prayers. He had not made an end, but was still on his knees, when he saw a genie appear, all white with age, and of a monstrous bulk; who, advancing towards him with a cimetar in his hand, spoke to him in a terrible voice thus:—'Rise up, that I may kill thee with this cimetar as you have killed my son!' and accompanied these words with a frightful cry. The merchant being as much frightened at the hideous shape of the monster as at these threatening words, answered him trembling:—'Alas! my good lord, of what crime can I be guilty towards you that you should take away my life?'—'I will,' replies the genie, 'kill thee, as thou hast killed my son!'—'O heaven!' says the merchant, 'how should I kill your son? I did not know him, nor ever saw him.'—'Did not you sit down when you came hither?' replies the genie. 'Did not you take dates out of your portmanteau, and, as you ate them, did not you throw the shells about on both sides?'—'I did all that you say,' answers the merchant, 'I cannot deny it.'—'If it be so,' replied the genie, 'I tell thee that thou hast killed my son; and the way was thus: when you threw the nutshells about, my son was passing by, and you threw one of them into his eye, which killed him, therefore I must kill thee.'—'Ah! my good lord, pardon me!' cried the merchant.—'No pardon,' answers the genie, 'no mercy! Is it not just to kill him that has killed another?'—'I agree to it,' says the merchant, 'but certainly I never killed your son, and if I have, it was unknown to me, and I did it innocently; therefore I beg you to pardon me, and suffer me to live.'—'No, no,' says the genie, persisting in his resolution, 'I must kill thee, since thou hast killed my son;' and then taking the merchant by the arm, threw him with his face upon the ground, and lifted up his cimetar to cut off his head!"—The Merchant and the Genie. First night.—Ed.]

I took the thought of "grinning for joy," in that poem, from my companion's remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon, and were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me,—"You grinned like an idiot!" He had done the same.

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Undine is a most exquisite work. It shows the general want of any sense for the fine and the subtle in the public taste, that this romance made no deep impression. Undine's character, before she receives a soul, is marvellously beautiful.[59 - Mr. Coleridge's admiration of this little romance was unbounded. He read it several times in German, and once in the English translation, made in America, I believe; the latter he thought inadequately done. Mr. C. said that there was something in Undine even beyond Scott,—that Scott's best characters and conceptions were composed; by which I understood him to mean that Baillie Nicol Jarvie, for example, was made up of old particulars, and received its individuality from the author's power of fusion, being in the result an admirable product, as Corinthian brass was said to be the conflux of the spoils of a city. But Undine, he said, was one and single in projection, and had presented to his imagination, what Scott had never done, an absolutely new idea—ED.]

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It seems to me, that Martin never looks at nature except through bits of stained glass. He is never satisfied with any appearance that is not prodigious. He should endeavour to school his imagination into the apprehension of the true idea of the Beautiful.[60 - Mr. Coleridge said this, after looking at the engravings of Mr. Martin's two pictures of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and the Celestial City, published in the beautiful edition of the Pilgrim's Progress by Messrs. Murray and Major, in 1830. I wish Mr. Martin could have heard the poet's lecture: he would have been flattered, and at the same time, I believe, instructed; for in the philosophy of painting Coleridge was a master.—ED.]

The wood-cut of Slay-good[61 - P. 350., by S. Mosses from a design by Mr. W. Harvey. "When they came to the place where he was, they found him with one Feeble-mind in his hand, whom his servants had brought unto him, having taken him in the way. Now the giant was rifling him, with a purpose, after that, to pick his bones; for he was of the nature of flesh eaters."—ED.] is admirable, to be sure; but this new edition of the Pilgrim's Progress is too fine a book for it. It should be much larger, and on sixpenny coarse paper.

The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

This wonderful work is one of the few books which may be read over repeatedly at different times, and each time with a new and a different pleasure. I read it once as a theologian—and let me assure you, that there is great theological acumen in the work—once with devotional feelings—and once as a poet. I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colours.[62 - I find written on a blank leaf of my copy of this edition of the P.'s P. the following note by Mr. C.:—"I know of no book, the Bible excepted as above all comparison, which I, according to my judgment and experience, could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim's Progress. It is, in my conviction, incomparably the best summa theologiae evangalicae ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired." June 14. 1830.—ED.]

June 1. 1830

PRAYER.—CHURCH-SINGING.—HOOKER.—DREAMS

There are three sorts of prayer:—1. Public; 2. Domestic; 3. Solitary. Each has its peculiar uses and character. I think the church ought to publish and authorise a directory of forms for the latter two. Yet I fear the execution would be inadequate. There is a great decay of devotional unction in the numerous books of prayers put out now-a-days. I really think the hawker was very happy, who blundered New Form of Prayer into New former Prayers.[63 - "I will add, at the risk of appearing to dwell too long on religious topics, that on this my first introduction to Coleridge he reverted with strong compunction to a sentiment which he had expressed in earlier days upon prayer. In one of his youthful poems, speaking of God, he had said——'Of whose all-seeing eyeAught to demand were impotence of mind.'This sentiment he now so utterly condemned, that, on the contrary, he told me, as his own peculiar opinion, that the act of praying was the very highest energy of which the human heart was capable, praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties; and the great mass of worldly men and of learned men he pronounced absolutely incapable of prayer."—Tait's Magazine, September, 1834, p. 515.Mr. Coleridge within two years of his death very solemnly declared to me his conviction upon the same subject. I was sitting by his bedside one afternoon, and he fell, an unusual thing for him, into a long account of many passages of his past life, lamenting some things, condemning others, but complaining withal, though very gently, of the way in which many of his most innocent acts had been cruelly misrepresented. "But I have no difficulty," said he, "in forgiveness; indeed, I know not how to say with sincerity the clause in the Lord's Prayer, which asks forgiveness as we forgive. I feel nothing answering to it in my heart. Neither do I find, or reckon, the most solemn faith in God as a real object, the most arduous act of the reason and will. O no, my dear, it is to pray, to pray as God would have us; this is what at times makes me turn cold to my soul. Believe me, to pray with all your heart and strength, with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that God will listen to your voice through Christ, and verily do the thing he pleaseth thereupon—this is the last, the greatest achievement of the Christian's warfare upon earth. Teach us to pray, O Lord!" And then he burst into a flood of tears, and begged me to pray for him. O what a sight was there!—ED.]

I exceedingly regret that our church pays so little attention to the subject of congregational singing. See how it is! In that particular part of the public worship in which, more than in all the rest, the common people might, and ought to, join,—which, by its association with music, is meant to give a fitting vent and expression to the emotions,—in that part we all sing as Jews; or, at best, as mere men, in the abstract, without a Saviour. You know my veneration for the Book of Psalms, or most of it; but with some half dozen exceptions, the Psalms are surely not adequate vehicles of Christian thanksgiving and joy! Upon this deficiency in our service, Wesley and Whitfield seized; and you know it is the hearty congregational singing of Christian hymns which keeps the humbler Methodists together. Luther did as much for the Reformation by his hymns as by his translation of the Bible. In Germany, the hymns are known by heart by every peasant: they advise, they argue from the hymns, and every soul in the church praises God, like a Christian, with words which are natural and yet sacred to his mind. No doubt this defect in our service proceeded from the dread which the English Reformers had of being charged with introducing any thing into the worship of God but the text of Scripture.

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Hooker said,—That by looking for that in the Bible which it is impossible that any book can have, we lose the benefits which we might reap from its being the best of all books.

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You will observe, that even in dreams nothing is fancied without an antecedent quasi cause. It could not be otherwise.

June 4. 1830

JEREMY TAYLOR.—ENGLISH REFORMATION

Taylor's was a great and lovely mind; yet how much and injuriously was it perverted by his being a favourite and follower of Laud, and by his intensely popish feelings of church authority.[64 - Mr. Coleridge placed Jeremy Taylor amongst the four great geniuses of old English literature. I think he used to reckon Shakspeare and Bacon, Milton and Taylor, four-square, each against each. In mere eloquence, he thought the Bishop without any fellow. He called him Chrysostom. Further, he loved the man, and was anxious to find excuses for some weak parts in his character. But Mr. Coleridge's assent to Taylor's views of many of the fundamental positions of Christianity was very limited; and, indeed, he considered him as the least sound in point of doctrine of any of the old divines, comprehending, within that designation, the writers to the middle of Charles II.'s reign. He speaks of Taylor in "The Friend" in the following terms:—"Among the numerous examples with which I might enforce this warning, I refer, not without reluctance, to the most eloquent, and one of the most learned, of our divines; a rigorist, indeed, concerning the authority of the church, but a latitudinarian in the articles of its faith; who stretched the latter almost to the advanced posts of Socinianism, and strained the former to a hazardous conformity with the assumptions of the Roman hierarchy." Vol. ii. p. 108.—ED.] His Liberty of Prophesying is a work of wonderful eloquence and skill; but if we believe the argument, what do we come to? Why to nothing more or less than this, that—so much can be said for every opinion and sect,—so impossible is it to settle any thing by reasoning or authority of Scripture,—we must appeal to some positive jurisdiction on earth, ut sit finis controversiarum. In fact, the whole book is the precise argument used by the Papists to induce men to admit the necessity of a supreme and infallible head of the church on earth. It is one of the works which preeminently gives countenance to the saying of Charles or James II., I forget which:—"When you of the Church of England contend with the Catholics, you use the arguments of the Puritans; when you contend with the Puritans, you immediately adopt all the weapons of the Catholics." Taylor never speaks with the slightest symptom of affection or respect of Luther, Calvin, or any other of the great reformers—at least, not in any of his learned works; but he saints every trumpery monk and friar, down to the very latest canonizations by the modern popes. I fear you will think me harsh, when I say that I believe Taylor was, perhaps unconsciously, half a Socinian in heart. Such a strange inconsistency would not be impossible. The Romish church has produced many such devout Socinians. The cross of Christ is dimly seen in Taylor's works. Compare him in this particular with Donne, and you will feel the difference in a moment. Why are not Donne's volumes of sermons reprinted at Oxford?[65 - Why not, indeed! It is really quite unaccountable that the sermons of this great divine of the English church should be so little known as they are, even to very literary clergymen of the present day. It might have been expected, that the sermons of the greatest preacher of his age, the admired of Ben Jonson, Selden, and all that splendid band of poets and scholars, would even as curiosities have been reprinted, when works, which are curious for nothing, are every year sent forth afresh under the most authoritative auspices. Dr. Donne was educated at both universities, at Hart Hall, Oxford, first, and afterwards at Cambridge, but at what college Walton does not mention—ED.]

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In the reign of Edward VI., the Reformers feared to admit almost any thing on human authority alone. They had seen and felt the abuses consequent on the popish theory of Christianity; and I doubt not they wished and intended to reconstruct the religion and the church, as far as was possible, upon the plan of the primitive ages? But the Puritans pushed this bias to an absolute bibliolatry. They would not put on a corn-plaster without scraping a text over it. Men of learning, however, soon felt that this was wrong in the other extreme, and indeed united itself to the very abuse it seemed to shun. They saw that a knowledge of the Fathers, and of early tradition, was absolutely necessary; and unhappily, in many instances, the excess of the Puritans drove the men of learning into the old popish extreme of denying the Scriptures to be capable of affording a rule of faith without the dogmas of the church. Taylor is a striking instance how far a Protestant might be driven in this direction.

June 6. 1830

CATHOLICITY.—GNOSIS.—TERTULLIAN.—ST. JOHN

In the first century, catholicity was the test of a book or epistle— whether it were of the Evangelicon or Apostolicon—being canonical. This catholic spirit was opposed to the gnostic or peculiar spirit,—the humour of fantastical interpretation of the old Scriptures into Christian meanings. It is this gnosis, or knowingness, which the Apostle says puffeth up,—not knowledge, as we translate it. The Epistle of Barnabas, of the genuineness of which I have no sort of doubt, is an example of this gnostic spirit. The Epistle to the Hebrews is the only instance of gnosis in the canon: it was written evidently by some apostolical man before the destruction of the Temple, and probably at Alexandria. For three hundred years, and more, it was not admitted into the canon, especially not by the Latin church, on account of this difference in it from the other Scriptures. But its merit was so great, and the gnosis in it is so kept within due bounds, that its admirers at last succeeded, especially by affixing St. Paul's name to it, to have it included in the canon; which was first done, I think, by the council of Laodicea in the middle of the fourth century. Fortunately for us it was so.

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I beg Tertullian's pardon; but amongst his many bravuras, he says something about St. Paul's autograph. Origen expressly declares the reverse.

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It is delightful to think, that the beloved apostle was born a Plato. To him was left the almost oracular utterance of the mysteries of the Christian religion while to St. Paul was committed the task of explanation, defence, and assertion of all the doctrines, and especially of those metaphysical ones touching the will and grace;[66 - "The imperative and oracular form of the inspired Scripture is the form of reason itself, in all things purely rational and moral."—Statesman's Manual, p. 22.] for which purpose his active mind, his learned education, and his Greek logic, made him pre-eminently fit.

June 7. 1830

PRINCIPLES OF A REVIEW.—PARTY-SPIRIT

Notwithstanding what you say, I am persuaded that a review would amply succeed even now, which should be started upon a published code of principles, critical, moral, political, and religious; which should announce what sort of books it would review, namely, works of literature as contradistinguished from all that offspring of the press, which in the present age supplies food for the craving caused by the extended ability of reading without any correspondent education of the mind, and which formerly was done by conversation, and which should really give a fair account of what the author intended to do, and in his own words, if possible, and in addition, afford one or two fair specimens of the execution,—itself never descending for one moment to any personality. It should also be provided before the commencement with a dozen powerful articles upon fundamental topics to appear in succession. You see the great reviewers are now ashamed of reviewing works in the old style, and have taken up essay writing instead. Hence arose such publications as the Literary Gazette and others, which are set up for the purpose—not a useless one—of advertizing new books of all sorts for the circulating libraries. A mean between the two extremes still remains to be taken.