Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I was just now reading Sir John Cam Hobhouse's answer to Mr. Hume, I believe, upon the point of transferring the patronage of the army and navy from the Crown to the House of Commons. I think, if I had been in the House of Commons, I would have said, "that, ten or fifteen years ago, I should have considered Sir J. C. H.'s speech quite unanswerable,—it being clear constitutional law that the House of Commons has not, nor ought to have, any share, directly or indirectly, in the appointment of the officers of the army or navy. But now that the King had been reduced, by the means and procurement of the Honourable Baronet and his friends, to a puppet, which, so far from having any independent will of its own, could not resist a measure which it hated and condemned, it became a matter of grave consideration whether it was not necessary to vest the appointment of such officers in a body like the House of Commons, rather than in a junta of ministers, who were obliged to make common cause with the mob and democratic press for the sake of keeping their places."

March 9. 1833

PENAL CODE IN IRELAND.—CHURCHMEN

The penal code in Ireland, in the beginning of the last century, was justifiable, as a temporary mean of enabling government to take breath and look about them; and if right measures had been systematically pursued in a right spirit, there can be no doubt that all, or the greater part, of Ireland would have become Protestant. Protestantism under the Charter Schools was greatly on the increase in the early part of that century, and the complaints of the Romish priests to that effect are on record. But, unfortunately, the drenching-horn was itself substituted for the medicine.

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There seems to me, at present, to be a curse upon the English church, and upon the governors of all institutions connected with the orderly advancement of national piety and knowledge; it is the curse of prudence, as they miscall it—in fact, of fear.

Clergymen are now almost afraid to explain in their pulpits the grounds of their being Protestants. They are completely cowed by the vulgar harassings of the press and of our Hectoring sciolists in Parliament. There should be no party politics in the pulpit to be sure; but every church in England ought to resound with national politics,—I mean the sacred character of the national church, and an exposure of the base robbery from the nation itself—for so indeed it is[136 - "That the maxims of a pure morality, and those sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which a Plato found it hard to learn, and more difficult to reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the unlettered they sound as common-place; this is a phenomenon which must withhold all but minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services even of the pulpit and the reading-desk. Yet he who should confine the efficiency of an established church to these, can hardly be placed in a much higher rank of intellect. That to every parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten; a model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate imitation; this unobtrusive, continuous agency of a Protestant church establishment, this it is, which the patriot and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of peace with the faith in the progressive amelioration of mankind, cannot estimate at too high a price. 'It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. No mention shall be made of coral or of pearls; for the price of wisdom is above rubies.'—The clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbour and family man, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent visitor of the farm-house and the cottage. He is, or he may become, connected with the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage. And among the instances of the blindness, or at best of the short-sightedness, which it is the nature of cupidity to inflict, I know few more striking than the clamours of the farmers against church property. Whatever was not paid to the clergyman would inevitably at the next lease be paid to the landholder; while, as the case at present stands, the revenues of the church are in some sort the reversionary property of every family that may have a member educated for the church, or a daughter that may marry a clergyman. Instead of being foreclosed and immovable, it is, in fact, the only species of landed property that is essentially moving and circulative. That there exist no inconveniences who will pretend to assert?—But I have yet to expect the proof, that the inconveniences are greater in this than in any other species; or that either the farmers or the clergy would be benefited by forcing the latter to become either Trullibers or salaried placemen."—Church and State, p. 90.]—about to be committed by these ministers, in order to have a sop to throw to the Irish agitators, who will, of course, only cut the deeper, and come the oftener. You cannot buy off a barbarous invader.

March 12. 1833

CORONATION OATHS

Lord Grey has, in Parliament, said two things: first, that the Coronation Oaths only bind the King in his executive capacity; and, secondly, that members of the House of Commons are bound to represent by their votes the wishes and opinions of their constituents, and not their own. Put these two together, and tell me what useful part of the constitutional monarchy of England remains. It is clear that the Coronation Oaths would be no better than Highgate oaths. For in his executive capacity the King cannot do any thing, against the doing of which the oaths bind him; it is only in his legislative character that he possesses a free agency capable of being bound. The nation meant to bind that.

March 14. 1833

DIVINITY.—PROFESSIONS AND TRADES

Divinity is essentially the first of the professions, because it is necessary for all at all times; law and physic are only necessary for some at some times. I speak of them, of course, not in their abstract existence, but in their applicability to man.

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Every true science bears necessarily within itself the germ of a cognate profession, and the more you can elevate trades into professions the better.

March 17. 1833

MODERN POLITICAL ECONOMY

What solemn humbug this modern political economy is! What is there true of the little that is true in their dogmatic books, which is not a simple deduction from the moral and religious credenda and agenda of any good man, and with which we were not all previously acquainted, and upon which every man of common sense instinctively acted? I know none. But what they truly state, they do not truly understand in its ultimate grounds and causes; and hence they have sometimes done more mischief by their half- ignorant and half-sophistical reasonings about, and deductions from, well- founded positions, than they could have done by the promulgation of positive error. This particularly applies to their famous ratios of increase between man and the means of his subsistence. Political economy, at the highest, can never be a pure science. You may demonstrate that certain properties inhere in the arch, which yet no bridge-builder can ever reduce into brick and mortar; but an abstract conclusion in a matter of political economy, the premisses of which neither exist now, nor ever will exist within the range of the wildest imagination, is not a truth, but a chimera—a practical falsehood. For there are no theorems in political economy—but problems only. Certain things being actually so and so; the question is, how to do so and so with them. Political philosophy, indeed, points to ulterior ends, but even those ends are all practical; and if you desert the conditions of reality, or of common probability, you may show forth your eloquence or your fancy, but the utmost you can produce will be a Utopia or Oceana.

You talk about making this article cheaper by reducing its price in the market from 8_d_. to 6_d_. But suppose, in so doing, you have rendered your country weaker against a foreign foe; suppose you have demoralized thousands of your fellow-countrymen, and have sown discontent between one class of society and another, your article is tolerably dear, I take it, after all. Is not its real price enhanced to every Christian and patriot a hundred-fold?

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All is an endless fleeting abstraction; the whole is a reality.

March 31. 1833

NATIONAL DEBT.—PROPERTY TAX.—DUTY OF LANDHOLDERS

What evil results now to this country, taken at large, from the actual existence of the National Debt? I never could get a plain and practical answer to that question. I do not advert to the past loss of capital, although it is hard to see how that capital can be said to have been unproductive, which produces, in the defence of the nation itself, the conditions of the permanence and productivity of all other capital. As to taxation to pay the interest, how can the country suffer by a process, under which the money is never one minute out of the pockets of the people? You may just as well say that a man is weakened by the circulation of his blood. There may, certainly, be particular local evils and grievances resulting from the mode of taxation or collection; but how can that debt be in any proper sense a burthen to the nation, which the nation owes to itself, and to no one but itself? It is a juggle to talk of the nation owing the capital or the interest to the stockholders; it owes to itself only. Suppose the interest to be owing to the Emperor of Russia, and then you would feel the difference of a debt in the proper sense. It is really and truly nothing more in effect than so much moneys or money's worth, raised annually by the state for the purpose of quickening industry.[137 - See the splendid essay in the Friend (vol. ii, p. 47.) on the vulgar errors respecting taxes and taxation."A great statesman, lately deceased, in one of his anti-ministerial harangues against some proposed impost, said, 'The nation has been already bled in every vein, and is faint with loss of blood.' This blood, however, was circulating in the mean time through the whole body of the state, and what was received into one chamber of the heart was instantly sent out again at the other portal. Had he wanted a metaphor to convey the possible injuries of taxation, he might have found one less opposite to the fact, in the known disease of aneurism, or relaxation of the coats of particular vessels, by a disproportionate accumulation of blood in them, which sometimes occurs when the circulation has been suddenly and violently changed, and causes helplessness, or even mortal stagnation, though the total quantity of blood remains the same in the system at large."But a fuller and fairer symbol of taxation, both in its possible good and evil effects, is to be found in the evaporation of waters from the surface of the earth. The sun may draw up the moisture from the river, the morass, and the ocean, to be given back in genial showers to the garden, to the pasture, and the corn field; but it may, likewise, force away the moisture from the fields of tillage, to drop it on the stagnant pool, the saturated swamp, or the unprofitable sand-waste. The gardens in the south of Europe supply, perhaps, a not less apt illustration of a system of finance judiciously conducted, where the tanks or reservoirs would represent the capital of a nation, and the hundred rills, hourly varying their channels and directions under the gardener's spade, give a pleasing image of the dispersion of that capital through the whole population by the joint effect of taxation and trade. For taxation itself is a part of commerce, and the government maybe fairly considered as a great manufacturing house, carrying on, in different places, by means of its partners and overseers, the trades of the shipbuilder, the clothier, the iron-founder," &c. &c.—ED.]

I should like to see a well graduated property tax, accompanied by a large loan.

One common objection to a property tax is, that it tends to diminish the accumulation of capital. In my judgment, one of the chief sources of the bad economy of the country now is the enormous aggregation of capitals.

When shall we return to a sound conception of the right to property— namely, as being official, implying and demanding the performance of commensurate duties! Nothing but the most horrible perversion of humanity and moral justice, under the specious name of political economy, could have blinded men to this truth as to the possession of land,—the law of God having connected indissolubly the cultivation of every rood of earth with the maintenance and watchful labour of man. But money, stock, riches by credit, transferable and convertible at will, are under no such obligations; and, unhappily, it is from the selfish autocratic possession of such property, that our landholders have learnt their present theory of trading with that which was never meant to be an object of commerce.

April 5. 1833

MASSINGER.—SHAKSPEARE.—HIERONIMO

To please me, a poem must be either music or sense; if it is neither, I confess I cannot interest myself in it.

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The first act of the Virgin Martyr is as fine an act as I remember in any play. The Very Woman is, I think, one of the most perfect plays we have. There is some good fun in the first scene between Don John, or Antonio, and Cuculo, his master[138 - Act iii. sc. 2.]; and can any thing exceed the skill and sweetness of the scene between him and his mistress, in which he relates his story?[139 - Act iv. sc. 3.:—"ANT. Not far from where my father lives, a lady,A neighbour by, bless'd with as great a beautyAs nature durst bestow without undoing,Dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then,And bless'd the home a thousand times she dwelt in.This beauty, in the blossom of my youth,When my first fire knew no adulterate incense,Nor I no way to flatter, but my fondness;In all the bravery my friends could show me,In all the faith my innocence could give me,In the best language my true tongue could tell me,And all the broken sighs my sick heart lent me,I sued and served: long did I love this lady,Long was my travail, long my trade to win her;With all the duty of my soul, I served her.ALM. How feelingly he speaks! (Aside.) And she loved you too?It must be so.ANT. I would it had, dear lady;This story had been needless, and this place,I think, unknown to me.ALM. Were your bloods equal?ANT. Yes; and I thought our hearts too.ALM. Then she must love.ANT. She did—but never me; she could not love me,She would not love, she hated; more, she scorn'd me,And in so poor and base a way abused me,For all my services, for all my bounties,So bold neglects flung on me—ALM. An ill woman!Belike you found some rival in your love, then?ANT. How perfectly she points me to my story! (Aside.)Madam, I did; and one whose pride and anger,Ill manners, and worse mien, she doted on,Doted to my undoing, and my ruin.And, but for honour to your sacred beauty,And reverence to the noble sex, though she fall,As she must fall that durst be so unnoble,I should say something unbeseeming me.What out of love, and worthy love, I gave her,Shame to her most unworthy mind! to fools,To girls, and fiddlers, to her boys she flung,And in disdain of me.ALM. Pray you take me with you.Of what complexion was she?ANT. But that I dare notCommit so great a sacrilege 'gainst virtue,She look'd not much unlike—though far, far short,Something, I see, appears—your pardon, madam—Her eyes would smile so, but her eyes could cozen;And so she would look sad; but yours is pity,A noble chorus to my wretched story;Hers was disdain and cruelty.ALM. Pray heaven,Mine be no worse! he has told me a strange story, (Aside.)" &c.—ED.] The Bondman is also a delightful play. Massinger is always entertaining; his plays have the interest of novels.

But, like most of his contemporaries, except Shakspeare, Massinger often deals in exaggerated passion. Malefort senior, in the Unnatural Combat, however he may have had the moral will to be so wicked, could never have actually done all that he is represented as guilty of, without losing his senses. He would have been, in fact, mad. Regan and Goneril are the only pictures of the unnatural in Shakspeare; the pure unnatural—and you will observe that Shakspeare has left their hideousness unsoftened or diversified by a single line of goodness or common human frailty. Whereas in Edmund, for whom passion, the sense of shame as a bastard, and ambition, offer some plausible excuses, Shakspeare has placed many redeeming traits. Edmund is what, under certain circumstances, any man of powerful intellect might be, if some other qualities and feelings were cut off. Hamlet is, inclusively, an Edmund, but different from him as a whole, on account of the controlling agency of other principles which Edmund had not.

It is worth while to remark the use which Shakspeare always makes of his bold villains as vehicles for expressing opinions and conjectures of a nature too hazardous for a wise man to put forth directly as his own, or from any sustained character.

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The parts pointed out in Hieronimo as Ben Jonson's bear no traces of his style; but they are very like Shakspeare's; and it is very remarkable that every one of them re-appears in full form and development, and tempered with mature judgment, in some one or other of Shakspeare's great pieces.[140 - By Hieronimo Mr. Coleridge meant The Spanish Tragedy, and not the previous play, which is usually called The First Part of Jeronimo. The Spanish Tragedy is, upon the authority of Heywood, attributed to Kyd. It is supposed that Ben Jonson originally performed the part of Hieronimo, and hence it has been surmised that certain passages and whole scenes connected with that character, and not found in some of the editions of the play, are, in fact, Ben Jonson's own writing. Some of these supposed interpolations are amongst the best things in the Spanish Tragedy; the style is singularly unlike Jonson's, whilst there are turns and particular images which do certainly seem to have been imitated by or from Shakspeare. Mr. Lamb at one time gave them to Webster. Take this, passage, in the fourth act:—"HIERON. What make you with your torches in the dark?PEDRO. You bid us light them, and attend you here.HIERON. No! you are deceived; not I; you are deceived.Was I so mad to bid light torches now?Light me your torches at the mid of noon,When as the sun-god rides in all his glory;Light me your torches then.PEDRO. Then we burn day-light.HIERON. Let it be burnt; Night is a murd'rous slut,That would not have her treasons to be seen;And yonder pale-faced Hecate there, the moon,Doth give consent to that is done in darkness;And all those stars that gaze upon her faceAre aglets on her sleeve, pins on her train;And those that should be powerful and divine,Do sleep in darkness when they most should shine.PEDRO. Provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting words.The heavens are gracious, and your miseries and sorrowMake you speak you know not whatHIERON. Villain! thou liest, and thou dost noughtBut tell me I am mad: thou liest, I am not mad;I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques;I'll prove it thee; and were I mad, how could I?Where was she the same night, when my Horatio was murder'd!She should have shone then; search thou the book:Had the moon shone in my boy's face, there was a kind of grace,That I know—nay, I do know, had the murderer seen him,His weapon would have fallen, and cut the earth,Had he been framed of nought but blood and death," &c.Again, in the fifth act:—"HIERON. But are you sure that they are dead?CASTILE. Ay, slain, too sure.HIERON. What, and yours too?VICEROY. Ay, all are dead; not one of them survive.HIBRON. Nay, then I care not—come, we shall be friends;Let us lay our heads together.See, here's a goodly noose will hold them all.VICEROY. O damned devil! how secure he is!HIERON. Secure! why dost thou wonder at it? I tell thee, Viceroy, this day I've seen Revenge, d in that sight am grown a prouder monarch Than ever sate under the crown of Spain. Had I as many lives at there be stars,, As many heavens to go to as those lives, I'd give them all, ay, and my soul to boot, But I would see thee ride in this red pool. Methinks, since I grew inward with revenge, I cannot look with scorn enough on death.KING. What! dost thou mock us, slave? Bring tortures forth.HIERON. Do, do, do; and meantime I'll torture you.You had a son as I take it, and your sonShould have been married to your daughter: ha! was it not so?You had a son too, he was my liege's nephew.He was proud and politic—had he lived,He might have come to wear the crown of Spain:I think 't was so—'t was I that killed him;Look you—this same hand was it that stabb'dHis heart—do you see this hand?For one Horatio, if you ever knew him—A youth, one that they hang'd up in his father's garden—One that did force your valiant son to yield," &c.—ED.]

April 7. 1833

LOVE'S LABOUR LOST.—GIFFORD'S MASSINGER.—SHAKSPEARE.—THE OLD DRAMATISTS

I think I could point out to a half line what is really Shakspeare's in Love's Labour Lost, and some other of the not entirely genuine plays. What he wrote in that play is of his earliest manner, having the all-pervading sweetness which he never lost, and that extreme condensation which makes the couplets fall into epigrams, as in the Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece.[141 - "In Shakspeare's Poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length, in the drama, they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly, and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current, and with one voice."—Biog. Lit. vol. ii. p. 21.] In the drama alone, as Shakspeare soon found out, could the sublime poet and profound philosopher find the conditions of a compromise. In the Love's Labour Lost there are many faint sketches of some of his vigorous portraits in after-life—as for example, in particular, of Benedict and Beatrice.[142 - Mr. Coleridge, of course, alluded to Biron and Rosaline; and there are other obvious prolusions, as the scene of the masque with the courtiers, compared with the play in A Midsummer Night's Dream.—ED.]

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Gifford has done a great deal for the text of Massinger, but not as much as might easily be done. His comparison of Shakspeare with his contemporary dramatists is obtuse indeed.[143 - See his Introduction to Massinger, vol.i. p. 79., in which, amongst other most extraordinary assertions, Mr. Gifford pronounces that rhythmical modulation is not one of Shakspeare's merits!—ED.]

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In Shakspeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere; yet, when the creation in its outline is once perfect, then he seems to rest from his labour, and to smile upon his work, and tell himself that it is very good. You see many scenes and parts of scenes which are simply Shakspeare's, disporting himself in joyous triumph and vigorous fun after a great achievement of his highest genius.

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The old dramatists took great liberties in respect of bringing parties in scene together, and representing one as not recognizing the other under some faint disguise. Some of their finest scenes are constructed on this ground. Shakspeare avails himself of this artifice only twice, I think,—in Twelfth Night, where the two are with great skill kept apart till the end of the play; and in the Comedy of Errors, which is a pure farce, and should be so considered. The definition of a farce is, an improbability or even impossibility granted in the outset, see what odd and laughable events will fairly follow from it!

April 8. 1833

STATESMEN.—BURKE

I never was much subject to violent political humours or accesses of feelings. When I was very young, I wrote and spoke very enthusiastically, but it was always on subjects connected with some grand general principle, the violation of which I thought I could point out. As to mere details of administration, I honestly thought that ministers, and men in office, must, of course, know much better than any private person could possibly do; and it was not till I went to Malta, and had to correspond with official characters myself, that I fully understood the extreme shallowness and ignorance with which men of some note too were able, after a certain fashion, to carry on the government of important departments of the empire. I then quite assented to Oxenstiern's saying, Nescis, mi fili, quam parva sapientia regitur mundus.

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Burke was, indeed, a great man. No one ever read history so philosophically as he seems to have done. Yet, until he could associate his general principles with some sordid interest, panic of property, jacobinism, &c., he was a mere dinner bell. Hence you will find so many half truths in his speeches and writings. Nevertheless, let us heartily acknowledge his transcendant greatness. He would have been more influential if he had less surpassed his contemporaries, as Fox and Pitt, men of much inferior minds in all respects.