Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

That is a very odd and funny picture of the Connoisseurs at Rome[89 - "Portraits of distinguished Connoisseurs painted at Rome,"—belonging to Lord Burlington.—ED.] by Reynolds.

* * * * *

The more I see of modern pictures, the more I am convinced that the ancient art of painting is gone, and something substituted for it,—very pleasing, but different, and different in kind and not in degree only. Portraits by the old masters,—take for example the pock-fritten lady by Cuyp[90 - I almost forget, but have some recollection that the allusion is to Mr. Heneage Finch's picture of a Lady with a Fan.—ED.]—are pictures of men and women: they fill, not merely occupy, a space; they represent individuals, but individuals as types of a species.

Modern portraits—a few by Jackson and Owen, perhaps, excepted—give you not the man, not the inward humanity, but merely the external mark, that in which Tom is different from Bill. There is something affected and meretricious in the Snake in the Grass[91 - Sir Robert Peel's.—ED.] and such pictures, by Reynolds.

July 25. 1831

CHILLINGWORTH.—SUPERSTITION OF MALTESE, SICILIANS, AND ITALIANS

It is now twenty years since I read Chillingworth's book[92 - "The Religion of Protestants a safe Way to Salvation; or, an Answer to a Booke entitled 'Mercy and Truth; or, Charity maintained by Catholicks,' which pretends to prove the contrary."]; but certainly it seemed to me that his main position, that the mere text of the Bible is the sole and exclusive ground of Christian faith and practice, is quite untenable against the Romanists. It entirely destroys the conditions of a church, of an authority residing in a religious community, and all that holy sense of brotherhood which is so sublime and consolatory to a meditative Christian. Had I been a Papist, I should not have wished for a more vanquishable opponent in controversy. I certainly believe Chillingworth to have been in some sense a Socinian. Lord Falkland, his friend, said so in substance. I do not deny his skill in dialectics; he was more than a match for Knott[93 - Socinianism, or some inclination that way, is an old and clinging charge against Chillingworth. On the one hand, it is well known that he subscribed the articles of the church of England, in the usual form, on the 20th of July, 1638; and on the other, it is equally certain that within two years immediately previous, he wrote the letter to some unnamed correspondent, beginning "Dear Harry," and printed in all the Lives of Chillingworth, in which letter he sums up his arguments upon the Arian doctrine in this passage:—"In a word, whosoever shall freely and impartially consider of this thing, and how on the other side the ancient fathers' weapons against the Arrians are in a manner only places of Scripture (and these now for the most part discarded as importunate and unconcluding), and how in the argument drawn from the authority of the ancient fathers, they are almost always defendants, and scarse ever opponents, he shall not choose but confesses or at least be very inclinable to beleeve, that the doctrine of Arrius is eyther a truth, or at least no damnable heresy." The truth is, however, that the Socinianism of Chillingworth, such as it may have been, had more reference to the doctrine of the redemption of man than of the being of God.Edward Knott's real name was Matthias Wilson.—ED.] to be sure.

I must be bold enough to say, that I do not think that even Hooker puts the idea of a church on the true foundation.

* * * * *

The superstition of the peasantry and lower orders generally in Malta, Sicily, and Italy exceeds common belief. It is unlike the superstition of Spain, which is a jealous fanaticism, having reference to their catholicism, and always glancing on heresy. The popular superstition of Italy is the offspring of the climate, the old associations, the manners, and the very names of the places. It is pure paganism, undisturbed by any anxiety about orthodoxy, or animosity against heretics. Hence, it is much more good-natured and pleasing to a traveller's feelings, and certainly not a whit less like the true religion of our dear Lord than the gloomy idolatry of the Spaniards.

* * * * *

I well remember, when in Valetta in 1805, asking a boy who waited on me, what a certain procession, then passing, was, and his answering with great quickness, that it was Jesus Christ, who lives here (sta di casa qui), and when he comes out, it is in the shape of a wafer. But, "Eccelenza," said he, smiling and correcting himself, "non è Cristiano."[94 - The following anecdote related by Mr. Coleridge, in April, 1811, was preserved and communicated to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge:—"As I was descending from Mount AEtna with a very lively talkative guide, we passed through a village (I think called) Nicolozzi, when the host happened to be passing through the street. Every one was prostrate; my guide became so; and, not to be singular, I went down also. After resuming our journey, I observed in my guide an unusual seriousness and long silence, which, after many hums and hahs, was interrupted by a low bow, and leave requested to ask a question. This was of course granted, and the ensuing dialogue took place. Guide. "Signor, are you then a Christian?" Coleridge. "I hope so." G. "What! are all Englishmen Christians?" C. "I hope and trust they are." G. "What! are you not Turks? Are you not damned eternally?" C. "I trust not, through Christ." G. "What! you believe in Christ then?" C. "Certainly." This answer produced another long silence. At length my guide again spoke, still doubting the grand point of my Christianity. G. "I'm thinking, Signor, what is the difference between you and us, that you are to be certainly damned?" C. "Nothing very material; nothing that can prevent our both going to heaven, I hope. We believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." G. (interrupting me) "Oh those damned priests! what liars they are! But (pausing) we can't do without them; we can't go to heaven without them. But tell me, Signor, what are the differences?" C. "Why, for instance, we do not worship the Virgin." G. "And why not, Signor?" C. "Because, though holy and pure, we think her still a woman, and, therefore, do not pay her the honour due to God." G. "But do you not worship Jesus, who sits on the right hand of God?" C. "We do." G. "Then why not worship the Virgin, who sits on the left?" C. "I did not know she did. If you can show it me in the Scriptures, I shall readily agree to worship her." "Oh," said my man, with uncommon triumph, and cracking his fingers, "sicuro, Signor! sicuro, Signor!""—ED.]

July 30. 1831

ASGILL.—THE FRENCH

Asgill was an extraordinary man, and his pamphlet[95 - "An argument proving, that, according to the covenant of eternal life, revealed in the Scriptures, man may be translated from hence, without passing through death, although the human nature of Christ himself could not be thus translated, till he had passed through death." Asgill died in the year 1738, in the King's Bench prison, where he had been a prisoner for debt thirty years.—ED.] is invaluable. He undertook to prove that man is literally immortal; or, rather, that any given living man might probably never die. He complains of the cowardly practice of dying. He was expelled from two Houses of Commons for blasphemy and atheism, as was pretended;—really I suspect because he was a staunch Hanoverian. I expected to find the ravings of an enthusiast, or the sullen snarlings of an infidel; whereas I found the very soul of Swift—an intense half self-deceived humorism. I scarcely remember elsewhere such uncommon skill in logic, such lawyer-like acuteness, and yet such a grasp of common sense. Each of his paragraphs is in itself a whole, and yet a link between the preceding and following; so that the entire series forms one argument, and yet each is a diamond in itself.

* * * * *

Was there ever such a miserable scene as that of the exhibition of the Austrian standards in the French house of peers the other day?[96 - When the allies were in Paris in 1815, all the Austrian standards were reclaimed. The answer was that they had been burnt by the soldiers at the Hôtel des Invalides. This was untrue. The Marquis de Semonville confessed with pride that he, knowing of the fraud, had concealed these standards, taken from Mack at Ulm in 1805, in a vault under the Luxemburg palace. "An inviolable asylum," said the Marquis in his speech to the peers, "formed in the vault of this hall has protected this treasure from every search. Vainly, during this long space of time, have the most authoritative researches endeavoured to penetrate the secret. It would have been culpable to reveal it, as long as we were liable to the demands of haughty foreigners. No one in this atmosphere of honour is capable of so great a weakness," &c.—ED.] Every other nation but the French would see that it was an exhibition of their own falsehood and cowardice. A man swears that the property intrusted to him is burnt, and then, when he is no longer afraid, produces it, and boasts of the atmosphere of "honour," through which the lie did not transpire.

Frenchmen are like grains of gunpowder,—each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed.

August 1. 1831

As there is much beast and some devil in man; so is there some angel and some God in him. The beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed.

* * * * *

I will defy any one to answer the arguments of a St. Simonist, except on the ground of Christianity—its precepts and its assurances.

August 6. 1831

THE GOOD AND THE TRUE.—ROMISH RELIGION

There is the love of the good for the good's sake, and the love of the truth for the truth's sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good's sake; but very few, indeed, and scarcely one woman, love the truth for the truth's sake. Yet; without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of persecution of the truth,—the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry. To see clearly that the love of the good and the true is ultimately identical—is given only to those who love both sincerely and without any foreign ends.

* * * * *

Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.

August 8. 1831

ENGLAND AND HOLLAND

The conduct of this country to King William of Holland has been, in my judgment, base and unprincipled beyond any thing in our history since the times of Charles the Second. Certainly, Holland is one of the most important allies that England has; and we are doing our utmost to subject it, and Portugal, to French influence, or even dominion! Upon my word, the English people, at this moment, are like a man palsied in every part of his body but one, in which one part he is so morbidly sensitive that he cannot bear to have it so much as breathed upon, whilst you may pinch him with a hot forceps elsewhere without his taking any notice of it.

August 8. 1831

IRON.—GALVANISM.—HEAT

Iron is the most ductile of all hard metals, and the hardest of all ductile metals. With the exception of nickel, in which it is dimly seen, iron is the only metal in which the magnetic power is visible. Indeed, it is almost impossible to purify nickel of iron.

* * * * *

Galvanism is the union of electricity and magnetism, and, by being continuous, it exhibits an image of life;—I say, an image only: it is life in death.

* * * * *

Heat is the mesothesis or indifference of light and matter.

August 14. 1831

NATIONAL COLONIAL CHARACTER, AND NAVAL DISCIPLINE

The character of most nations in their colonial dependencies is in an inverse ratio of excellence to their character at home. The best people in the mother-country will generally be the worst in the colonies; the worst at home will be the best abroad. Or, perhaps, I may state it less offensively thus:—The colonists of a well governed-country will degenerate; those of an ill-governed country will improve. I am now considering the natural tendency of such colonists if left to themselves; of course, a direct act of the legislature of the mother-country will break in upon this. Where this tendency is exemplified, the cause is obvious. In countries well governed and happily conditioned, none, or very few, but those who are desperate through vice or folly, or who are mere trading adventurers, will be willing to leave their homes and settle in another hemisphere; and of those who do go, the best and worthiest are always striving to acquire the means of leaving the colony, and of returning to their native land. In ill-governed and ill-conditioned countries, on the contrary, the most respectable of the people are willing and anxious to emigrate for the chance of greater security and enlarged freedom; and if they succeed in obtaining these blessings in almost any degree, they have little inducement, on the average, to wish to abandon their second and better country. Hence, in the former case, the colonists consider themselves as mere strangers, sojourners, birds of passage, and shift to live from hand to mouth, with little regard to lasting improvement of the place of their temporary commerce; whilst, in the latter case, men feel attached to a community to which they are individually indebted for otherwise unattainable benefits, and for the most part learn to regard it as their abode, and to make themselves as happy and comfortable in it as possible. I believe that the internal condition and character of the English and French West India islands of the last century amply verified this distinction; the Dutch colonists most certainly did, and have always done.

Analogous to this, though not founded on precisely the same principle, is the fact that the severest naval discipline is always found in the ships of the freest nations, and the most lax discipline in the ships of the most oppressed. Hence, the naval discipline of the Americans is the sharpest; then that of the English;[97 - This expression needs explanation. It looks as if Mr. Coleridge rated the degree of liberty enjoyed by the English, after that of the citizens of the United States; but he meant no such thing. His meaning was, that the form of government of the latter was more democratic, and formally assigned more power to each individual. The Americans, as a nation, had no better friend in England than Coleridge; he contemplated their growth with interest, and prophesied highly of their destiny, whether under their present or other governments. But he well knew their besetting faults and their peculiar difficulties, and was most deliberately of opinion that the English had, for 130 years last past, possessed a measure of individual freedom and social dignity which had never been equalled, much less surpassed, in any other country ancient or modern. There is a passage in Mr. Coleridge's latest publication (Church and State}, which clearly expresses his opinion upon this subject: "It has been frequently and truly observed that in England, where the ground-plan, the skeleton, as it were, of the government is a monarchy, at once buttressed and limited by the aristocracy (the assertions of its popular character finding a better support in the harangues and theories of popular men, than in state documents, and the records of clear history), afar greater degree of liberty is, and long has been, enjoyed, than ever existed in, the ostensibly freest, that is, most democratic, commonwealths of ancient or modern times; greater, indeed, and with a more decisive predominance of the spirit of freedom, than the wisest and most philanthropic statesmen of antiquity, or than the great commonwealth's men,—the stars of that narrow interspace of blue sky between the black clouds of the first and second Charles's reigns—believed compatible, the one with the safety of the state, the other with the interests of morality. Yes! for little less than a century and a half, Englishmen have, collectively and individually, lived and acted with fewer restraints on their free-agency, than the citizens of any known republic, past or present." (p. 120.) Upon which he subjoins the following note: "It will be thought, perhaps, that the United States of North America should have been excepted. But the identity of stock, language, customs, manners, and laws scarcely allows us to consider this an exception, even though it were quite certain both that it is and that it will continue such. It was at all events a remark worth remembering, which I once heard from a traveller (a prejudiced one, I must admit), that where every man may take, liberties, there is little liberty for any man; or, that where every man takes liberties, no man can enjoy any." (p. 121.) See also a passage to the like effect in the Friend, vol. i. p. 129—ED.] then that of the French (I speak as it used to be); and on board a Spanish ship, there is no discipline at all.

At Genoa, the word "Liberty" is, or used to be, engraved on the chains of the galley-slaves, and the doors of the dungeons.

August 15. 1831

ENGLAND.—HOLLAND AND BELGIUM

I cannot contain my indignation at the conduct of our government towards Holland. They have undoubtedly forgotten the true and well-recognized policy of this country in regard to Portugal in permitting the war faction in France to take possession of the Tagus, and to bully the Portuguese upon so flimsy—indeed, false—a pretext[98 - Meaning, principally, the whipping, so richly deserved, inflicted on a Frenchman called Bonhomme, for committing a disgusting breach of common decency in the cathedral of Coimbra, during divine service in Passion Week.—ED.] yet, in this instance, something may be said for them.

Miguel is such a wretch, that I acknowledge a sort of morality in leaving him to be cuffed and insulted; though, of course, this is a poor answer to a statesman who alleges the interest and policy of the country. But, as to the Dutch and King William: the first, as a nation, the most ancient ally, the alter idem of England, the best deserving of the cause of freedom and religion and morality of any people in Europe; and the second, the very best sovereign now in Christendom, with, perhaps, the single exception of the excellent king of Sweden[99 - "Every thing that I have heard or read of this sovereign has contributed to the impression on my mind, that he is a good and a wise man, and worthy to be the king of a virtuous people, the purest specimen of the Gothic race."—Church and State, p. 125. n.—ED.]—was ever any thing so mean and cowardly as the behaviour of England!

The Five Powers have, throughout this conference, been actuated exclusively by a selfish desire to preserve peace—I should rather say, to smother war —at the expense of a most valuable but inferior power. They have over and over again acknowledged the justice of the Dutch claims, and the absurdity of the Belgian pretences; but as the Belgians were also as impudent as they were iniquitous,—as they would not yield their point, why then—that peace may be preserved—the Dutch must yield theirs! A foreign prince comes into Belgium, pending these negotiations, and takes an unqualified oath to maintain the Belgian demands:—what could King William or the Dutch do, if they ever thereafter meant to call themselves independent, but resist and resent this outrage to the uttermost? It was a crisis in which every consideration of state became inferior to the strong sense and duty of national honour. When, indeed, the French appear in the field, King William retires. "I now see," he may say, "that the powers of Europe are determined to abet the Belgians. The justice of such a proceeding I leave to their conscience and the decision of history. It is now no longer a question whether I am tamely to submit to rebels and a usurper; it is no longer a quarrel between Holland and Belgium: it is an alliance of all Europe against Holland,—in which case I yield. I have no desire to sacrifice my people."

* * * * *

When Leopold said that he was called to "reign over four millions of noble Belgians," I thought the phrase would have been more germane to the matter, if he had said that he was called to "rein in four million restive asses."

August 20. 1831