Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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July 23. 1832

FRENCH REVOLUTION

No man was more enthusiastic than I was for France and the Revolution: it had all my wishes, none of my expectations. Before 1793, I clearly saw and often enough stated in public, the horrid delusion, the vile mockery, of the whole affair.[118 - "Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams!I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament,From bleak Helvetia's icy cavern sent—I hear thy groans upon her blood-stain'd streams!Heroes, that for your peaceful country perish'd,And ye that, fleeing, spot your mountain snowsWith bleeding wounds; forgive me, that I cherish'dOne thought that ever blest your cruel foes!To scatter rage and traitorous guilt,Where Peace her jealous home had built;A patriot race to disinheritOf all that made her stormy wilds so dear:And with inexpiable spiritTo taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer—O France, that mockest Heaven, adult'rous, blind,And patriot only in pernicious toils,Are these thy boasts, champion of human-kind?To mix with kings in the low lust of sway,Yell in the hunt and share the murderous prey—To insult the shrine of Liberty with spoilsFrom freemen torn—to tempt and to betray?—The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain,Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad gameThey burst their manacles, and wear the nameOf freedom, graven on a heavier chain!O Liberty! with profitless endeavourHave I pursued thee many a weary hour;But thou nor swell'st the victor's train, nor everDidst breathe thy soul in forms of human power.Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee,(Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee,)Alike from priestcraft's harpy minions,And factious blasphemy's obscener slaves,Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions,The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!"France, an Ode. Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 130.]

When some one said in my brother James's presence[119 - A soldier of the old cavalier stamp, to whom the King was the symbol of the majesty, as the Church was of the life, of the nation, and who would most assuredly have taken arms for one or the other against all the Houses of Commons or committees of public safety in the world.—ED.] that I was a Jacobin, he very well observed,—"No! Samuel is no Jacobin; he is a hot-headed Moravian!" Indeed, I was in the extreme opposite pole.

July 24. 1832

INFANT SCHOOLS

I have no faith in act of parliament reform. All the great—the permanently great—things that have been achieved in the world have been so achieved by individuals, working from the instinct of genius or of goodness. The rage now-a-days is all the other way: the individual is supposed capable of nothing; there must be organization, classification, machinery, &c., as if the capital of national morality could be increased by making a joint stock of it. Hence you see these infant schools so patronized by the bishops and others, who think them a grand invention. Is it found that an infant-school child, who has been bawling all day a column of the multiplication-table, or a verse from the Bible, grows up a more dutiful son or daughter to its parents? Are domestic charities on the increase amongst families under this system? In a great town, in our present state of society, perhaps such schools may be a justifiable expedient—a choice of the lesser evil; but as for driving these establishments into the country villages, and breaking up the cottage home education, I think it one of the most miserable mistakes which the well-intentioned people of the day have yet made; and they have made, and are making, a good many, God knows.

July 25. 1832

MR. COLERIDGE'S PHILOSOPHY.—SUBLIMITY.—SOLOMON.—MADNESS.—C. LAMB—SFORZA's DECISION

The pith of my system is to make the senses out of the mind—not the mind out of the senses, as Locke did.

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Could you ever discover any thing sublime, in our sense of the term, in the classic Greek literature? never could. Sublimity is Hebrew by birth.

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I should conjecture that the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes were written, or, perhaps, rather collected, about the time of Nehemiah. The language is Hebrew with Chaldaic endings. It is totally unlike the language of Moses on the one hand, and of Isaiah on the other.

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Solomon introduced the commercial spirit into his kingdom. I cannot think his idolatry could have been much more, in regard to himself, than a state protection or toleration of the foreign worship.

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When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad. A madman is properly so defined.

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Charles Lamb translated my motto Sermoni propriora by—properer for a sermon!

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I was much amused some time ago by reading the pithy decision of one of the Sforzas of Milan, upon occasion of a dispute for precedence between the lawyers and physicians of his capital;—Paecedant fures—sequantur carnifices. I hardly remember a neater thing.

July 28. 1832

FAITH AND BELIEF

The sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the church; but the faith of the individual, centered in his heart, is or may be collateral to them.[120 - Mr. Coleridge used very frequently to insist upon the distinction between belief and faith. He once told me, with very great earnestness, that if he were that moment convinced—a conviction, the possibility of which, indeed, he could not realize to himself—that the New Testament was a forgery from beginning to end—wide as the desolation in his moral feelings would be, he should not abate one jot of his faith in God's power and mercy through some manifestation of his being towards man, either in time past or future, or in the hidden depths where time and space are not. This was, I believe, no more than a vivid expression of what he always maintained, that no man had attained to a full faith who did not recognize in the Scriptures a correspondency to his own nature, or see that his own powers of reason, will, and understanding were preconfigured to the reception of the Christian doctrines and promises.—ED.]

Faith is subjective. I throw myself in adoration before God; acknowledge myself his creature,—simple, weak, lost; and pray for help and pardon through Jesus Christ: but when I rise from my knees, I discuss the doctrine of the Trinity as I would a problem in geometry; in the same temper of mind, I mean, not by the same process of reasoning, of course.

August 4. 1832

DOBRIZHOFFER.[121 - "He was a man of rarest qualities,Who to this barbarous region had confinedA spirit with the learned and the wiseWorthy to take its place, and from mankindReceive their homage, to the immortal mindPaid in its just inheritance of fame.But he to humbler thoughts his heart inclined:From Gratz amid the Styrian hills he came,And Dobrizhofter was the good man's honour'd name."It was his evil fortune to beholdThe labours of his painful life destroyed;His flock which he had brought within the foldDispers'd; the work of ages render'd void,And all of good that Paraguay enjoy'dBy blind and suicidal power o'erthrown.So he the years of his old age employ'd,A faithful chronicler, in handing downNames which he lov'd, and things well worthy to be known."And thus when exiled from the dear-loved scene,In proud Vienna he beguiled the painOf sad remembrance: and the empress-queen,That great Teresa, she did not disdainIn gracious mood sometimes to entertainDiscourse with him both pleasurable and sage;And sure a willing ear she well might deignTo one whose tales may equally engageThe wondering mind of youth, the thoughtful heart of age."But of his native speech, because well-nighDisuse in him forgetfulness had wrought,In Latin he composed his history;A garrulous, but a lively tale, and fraughtWith matter of delight, and food for thought.And if he could in Merlin's glass have seenBy whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught,The old man would have felt as pleased, I ween,As when he won the ear of that great empress-queen."Little he deem'd, when with his Indian bandHe through the wilds set forth upon his way,A poet then unborn, and in a landWhich had proscribed his order, should one dayTake up from thence his moralizing lay,And, shape a song that, with no fiction drest,Should to his worth its grateful tribute pay,And sinking deep in many an English breast,Foster that faith divine that keeps the heart at rest."Southey's Tale of Paraguay, canto iii. st. 16.]

I hardly know any thing more amusing than the honest German Jesuitry of Dobrizhoffer. His chapter on the dialects is most valuable. He is surprised that there is no form for the infinitive, but that they say,—I wish, (go, or eat, or drink, &c.) interposing a letter by way of copula,—forgetting his own German and the English, which are, in truth, the same. The confident belief entertained by the Abipones of immortality, in connection with the utter absence in their minds of the idea of a God, is very remarkable. If Warburton were right, which he is not, the Mosaic scheme would be the exact converse. My dear daughter's translation of this book[122 - "An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, From the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer, eighteen Years a Missionary in that Country."—Vol. ii. p. 176.] is, in my judgment, unsurpassed for pure mother English by any thing I have read for a long time.

August 6. 1832

SCOTCH AND ENGLISH.—CRITERION OF GENIUS.—DRYDEN AND POPE

I have generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The Scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the English; the English have a morbid habit of petting and praising foreigners of any sort, to the unjust disparagement of their own worthies.

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You will find this a good gage or criterion of genius,—whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri,—Shaftesbury and Buckingham; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas, in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized. In like manner compare Charles Lamb's exquisite criticisms on Shakspeare with Hazlitt's round and round imitations of them.

August 7. 1832

MILTON'S DISREGARD OF PAINTING

It is very remarkable that in no part of his writings does Milton take any notice of the great painters of Italy, nor, indeed, of painting as an art; whilst every other page breathes his love and taste for music. Yet it is curious that, in one passage in the Paradise Lost, Milton has certainly copied the fresco of the Creation in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. I mean those lines,—

——"now half appear'd
The tawny lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds,
And rampant shakes his brinded mane;—"&c.[123 - Par. Lost, book vii. ver. 463.]

an image which the necessities of the painter justified, but which was wholly unworthy, in my judgment, of the enlarged powers of the poet. Adam bending over the sleeping Eve in the Paradise Lost[124 - ——"so much the moreHis wonder was to find unwaken'd EveWith tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek,As through unquiet rest: he on his sideLeaning, half raised, with looks of cordial loveHung over her enamour'd, and beheldBeauty, which, whether waking or asleep,Shot forth peculiar graces; then, with voiceMild, as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes,Her hand soft touching, whisper'd thus: Awake,My fairest," &c.Book v. ver. 8.] and Dalilah approaching Samson, in the Agonistes[125 - "But who is this, what thing of sea or land?Female of sex it seems,That so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay,Comes this way sailingLike a stately shipOf Tarsus, bound for the islesOf Javan or Gadire,With all her bravery on, and tackle trim,Sails fill'd, and streamers waving,Courted by all the winds that hold them play;An amber-scent of odorous perfumeHer harbinger, a damsel train behind!"] are the only two proper pictures I remember in Milton.

August 9. 1832

BAPTISMAL SERVICE.—JEWS' DIVISION OF THE SCRIPTURE.—SANSKRIT

I think the baptismal service almost perfect. What seems erroneous assumption in it to me, is harmless. None of the services of the church affect me so much as this. I never could attend a christening without tears bursting forth at the sight of the helpless innocent in a pious clergyman's arms.

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The Jews recognized three degrees of sanctity in their Scriptures:—first, the writings of Moses, who had the [Greek: autopsia]; secondly, the Prophets; and, thirdly, the Good Books. Philo, amusingly enough, places his works somewhere between the second and third degrees.

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The claims of the Sanskrit for priority to the Hebrew as a language are ridiculous.

August 11. 1832