Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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War in republican Rome was the offspring of its intense aristocracy of spirit, and stood to the state in lieu of trade. As long as there was any thing ab extra to conquer, the state advanced: when nothing remained but what was Roman, then, as a matter of course, civil war began.

June 10. 1832

CHARM FOR CRAMP

When I was a little hoy at the Blue-coat School, there was a charm for one's foot when asleep; and I believe it had been in the school since its foundation, in the time of Edward the Sixth. The march of intellect has probably now exploded it. It ran thus:—

Foot! foot! foot! is fast asleep!
Thumb! thumb! thumb! in spittle we steep:
Crosses three we make to ease us,
Two for the thieves, and one for Christ Jesus!

And the same charm served for a cramp in the leg, with the following substitution:—

The devil is tying a knot in my leg!
Mark, Luke, and John, unloose it I beg!—
Crosses three, &c.

And really upon getting out of bed, where the cramp most frequently occurred, pressing the sole of the foot on the cold floor, and then repeating this charm with the acts configurative thereupon prescribed, I can safely affirm that I do not remember an instance in which the cramp did not go away in a few seconds.

I should not wonder if it were equally good for a stitch in the side; but I cannot say I ever tried it for that.

July 7. 1832

GREEK.—DUAL, NEUTER PLURAL, AND VERB SINGULAR.—THETA

It is hardly possible to conceive a language more perfect than the Greek. If you compare it with the modern European tongues, in the points of the position and relative bearing of the vowels and consonants on each other, and of the variety of terminations, it is incalculably before all in the former particulars, and only equalled in the last by German. But it is in variety of termination alone that the German surpasses the other modern languages as to sound; for, as to position, Nature seems to have dropped an acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian prose is excessively monotonous.

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It is very natural to have a dual, duality being a conception quite distinct from plurality. Most very primitive languages have a dual, as the Greek, Welch, and the native Chilese, as you will see in the Abbé Raynal.

The neuter plural governing, as they call it, a verb singular is one of the many instances in Greek of the inward and metaphysic grammar resisting successfully the tyranny of formal grammar. In truth, there may be Multeity in things; but there can only be Plurality in persons.

Observe also that, in fact, a neuter noun in Greek has no real nominative case, though it has a formal one, that is to say, the same word with the accusative. The reason is—a thing has no subjectivity, or nominative case: it exists only as an object in the accusative or oblique case.

It is extraordinary that the Germans should not have retained or assumed the two beautifully discriminated sounds of the soft and hard theta; as in thy thoughts—the thin ether that, &c. How particularly fine the hard theta is in an English termination, as in that grand word—Death— for which the Germans gutturize a sound that puts you in mind of nothing but a loathsome toad.

July 8. 1832

TALENTED

I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable talented, stealing out of the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications of the day. Why not shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced, &c.? The formation of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is to justify such attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from America.[113 - See "eventuate," in Mr. Washington Irving's "Tour On the Prairies," passim.—ED.]

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Never take an iambus as a Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do very well. Edith and Rotha are my favourite names for women.

July 9. 1832

HOMER.—VALCKNAER

I have the firmest conviction that Homer is a mere traditional synonyme with, or figure for, the Iliad. You cannot conceivefor a moment any thing about the poet, as you call him, apart from that poem. Difference in men there was in a degree, but not in kind; one man was, perhaps, a better poet than another; but he was a poet upon the same ground and with the same feelings as the rest.

The want of adverbs in the Iliad is very characteristic. With more adverbs there would have been some subjectivity, or subjectivity would have made them.

The Greeks were then just on the verge of the bursting forth of individuality.

Valckenaer's treatise[114 - Diatribe de Aristobulo Judaeo.—ED.] on the interpolation of the Classics by the later Jews and early Christians is well worth your perusal as a scholar and critic.

July 13. 1832

PRINCIPLES AND FACTS.—SCHMIDT

I have read all the famous histories, and, I believe, some history of every country and nation that is, or ever existed; but I never did so for the story itself as a story. The only thing interesting to me was the principles to be evolved from, and illustrated by, the facts.[115 - "The true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of evidence which can compel our belief; so many are the disturbing forces which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the present case; that there will never be wanting answers, and explanations, and specious flatteries of hope, to persuade and perplex its government, that the history of the past is inapplicable to their case. And no wonder, if we read history for the facts, instead of reading it for the sake of the general principles, which are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree to its leaves: and no wonder if history so read should find a dangerous rival in novels; nay, if the latter should be preferred to the former, on the score even of probability. I well remember that, when the examples of former Jacobins, as Julius Caesar, Cromwell, and the like, were adduced in France and England, at the commencement of the French consulate, it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to fear a repetition of usurpation and military despotism at the close of the enlightened eighteenth century! Even so, in the very dawn of the late tempestuous day, when the revolutions of Corcyra, the proscriptions of the reformers Marius, Cæsar, &c., and the direful effects of the levelling tenets in the peasants' war in Germany (differenced from the tenets of the first French constitution only by the mode of wording them, the figures of speech being borrowed in the one instance from theology, and in the other from modern metaphysics), were urged on the convention and its vindicators; the magi of the day, the true citizens of the world, the plusquam perfecti of patriotism, gave us set proofs that similar results were impossible, and that it was an insult to so philosophical an age, to so enlightened a nation, to dare direct the public eye towards them as to lights of warning."—Statesman's Manual, p. 14.] After I had gotten my principles, I pretty generally left the facts to take care of themselves. I never could remember any passages in books, or the particulars of events, except in the gross. I can refer to them. To be sure, I must be a different sort of man from Herder, who once was seriously annoyed with himself, because, in recounting the pedigree of some German royal or electoral family, he missed some one of those worthies and could not recall the name.

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Schmidt[116 - Michael Ignatius Schmidt, the author of the History of the Germans. He died in the latter end of the last century.—ED.] was a Romanist; but I have generally found him candid, as indeed almost all the Austrians are. They are what is called good Catholics; but, like our Charles the Second, they never let their religious bigotry interfere with their political well-doing. Kaiser is a most pious son of the church, yet he always keeps his papa in good order.

July 20. 1832

PURITANS AND JACOBINS

It was God's mercy to our age that our Jacobins were infidels and a scandal to all sober Christians. Had they been like the old Puritans, they would have trodden church and king to the dust—at least for a time.

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For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance,—that, with all my gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head of a mountain in blue air and sunshine.

July 21. 1832

WORDSWORTH

I have often wished that the first two books of the Excursion had been published separately, under the name of "The Deserted Cottage." They would have formed, what indeed they are, one of the most beautiful poems in the language.

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Can dialogues in verse be defended? I cannot but think that a great philosophical poet ought always to teach the reader himself as from himself. A poem does not admit argumentation, though it does admit development of thought. In prose there may be a difference; though I must confess that, even in Plato and Cicero, I am always vexed that the authors do not say what they have to say at once in their own persons. The introductions and little urbanities are, to be sure, very delightful in their way; I would not lose them; but I have no admiration for the practice of ventriloquizing through another man's mouth.

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I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen books on the growth of an individual mind—superior, as I used to think, upon the whole, to the Excursion. You may judge how I felt about them by my own poem upon the occasion.[117 - Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 206. It is not too much to say of this beautiful poem, and yet it is difficult to say more, that it is at once worthy of the poet, his subject, and his object:—"An Orphic song indeed,A song divine of high and passionate thoughts,To their own music chanted."—ED.] Then the plan laid out, and, I believe, partly suggested by me, was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man, —a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration. Something of this sort was, I think, agreed on. It is, in substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy.

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I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position, which is peculiarly—perhaps I might say exclusively—fitted for him. His proper title is Spectator ab extra.