Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848

Now this reference to the word experience, as one which would be more familiar to the religious reader, is pure affectation; because he must have known that religious people never use that term in the wide or general sense of states of consciousness, but restrict its meaning to a very peculiar class of feelings. As to the distinction which is here laid down, we thought we agreed with Coleridge till we came to the illustration that was to make all clear. He who has to learn arithmetic, or geometry must assuredly exercise thought as well as attention. It is by that "voluntary reproduction" of the ideas presented to him, by which Coleridge defines thought, that he can alone fully understand and make the subject his own.

At other times this erratic genius rejoices in astonishing all philosophically-minded individuals by some extravagance got from the remotest regions of the religious world. What but some morbid caprice could have induced him to pen such a paragraph as this: —

"It might be the means of preventing many unhappy marriages, if the youth of both sexes had it early impressed on their minds that marriage contracted between Christians is a true and perfect Symbol or Mystery; that is, the actualising Faith being supposed to exist in the receivers, it is an outward sign co-essential with that which it signifies, or a living part of that, the whole of which it represents."

Coleridge never did seriously think – of that we may be sure – that the repetition of this abracadabra could be the means "of preventing many unhappy marriages."

The author of the Aids to Reflection had, however, this undoubted merit – that he was a thinker – that, in his own fitful method, he gave himself from time to time to strenuous meditation. He lacked, indeed, the calm, and serene, and patient thought which characterises the successful inquirer into philosophic truth. He could plunge boldly in, and dive deeply down; but the tranquillity of mind which the diver should possess in those depths where the light is so faint – this he failed in; so that, from his perilous enterprises, he often rose with tangled weeds instead of treasure, spasmodically clasped in both his hands, and held aloft with a shout of triumph. This energy of mind makes itself felt through all the cumbrous obscurity of his exposition, and is the real secret of the influence which he exerted over many, to whom he imparted a noble but irregular impulse, and a sense of proud achievement where nothing complete had been accomplished. His disciples are therefore distinguished, as we have remarked, by undisciplined efforts of thought, and a fancied superiority to the age in which they live, – a notion that they stand upon an intellectual eminence they have neither attained nor fairly toiled for.

But we are in danger of forgetting that it is not the Aids to Reflection, but the Guesses at Truth, we are at present concerned with. Guesses at Truth! You think, of course, that the modest inquirer is about to give us the conclusions to which he has arrived upon the great questions of philosophy, – to collect together the results of his investigations into first principles and the eternal problems of human life. But these results, whatever they may be, are rather assumed than expressed throughout the whole book. As you read on, you find the page still occupied with some trifling discussion about words – strictures upon the contemporary tastes – odd bits of criticism and politics – quibble and conundrum. Over all, indeed, is seen hanging the beetle-brow of the pre-eminent sage, and you are to presume that the meditative man is unbending, and merely at his sport. But he is unbent always: the bow is never strung, or nothing flies from it; the great thinker never sets himself earnestly to work. At last you conclude that there is no work in him– that he never did, and never will work; and that it is useless to wait any longer for this nodding image, with its eternal smile of self-complacency, to turn into an oracle of wisdom.

If, indeed, the writer or writers were verily sportive, – if there were wit or amusement in this unbent condition of the bow, most readers might think there was very little reason to complain: there would be mirth, if not wisdom, to be had. But there is no such compensation. With few exceptions, nothing can be more heavy or cumbrous than their efforts at pleasantry. The illustrations, intended to be humorous and sprightly, have no gaiety in them; and the satirical observations have rarely any other characteristic of satire than their evident injustice.

The manner in which these writers appear to have proceeded, in the excogitation of their detached remarks, is after this fashion, – on all occasions, trivial or important, to carp at any thing that assumes the shape of a commonplace truth, any thing that is generally said or admitted. By this means some merit of originality may surely be obtained, and a lofty character for independence secured. Open the book at the first page: —

"The heart has often been compared to the needle for its constancy: has it ever been so for its variations?"

Why should it? Why should the magnetic needle, which is a popular illustration for constancy of purpose, be chosen as an emblem also for our mutability? Are there not the winds, and the clouds, and the feather blown in the air, and a thousand other similes for this phase of our nature? But "true as the needle to the pole" had been said so long that it was time to see whether the saying could not be reversed. We may as well quote the rest of the passage.

"Yet were any man to keep minutes of his feelings from youth to age, what a table of variations would they present! how numerous! how diverse! how strange! This is just what we find in the writings of Horace. If we consider his occasional effusions – and such they almost all are – as merely expressing the piety or the passion, the seriousness or the levity of the moment, we shall have no difficulty in accounting for those discrepancies in their features which have so much puzzled professional commentators. Their very contradictions prove their truth. Or, could the face even of Ninon de l'Enclos at seventy be just what it was at seventeen? Nay, was Cleopatra before Augustus the same as Cleopatra with Antony? or Cleopatra with Antony the same as with the great Julius?"

A section half a page in length, and on so trite a subject, ought at least to have boasted a greater distinctness of thought. One would hardly have anticipated that the shifting humours of Horace and the decline of Ninon's beauty (of whom it seems to be gravely asked, whether she could be just the same at seventy as at seventeen,) would be put in the same category. The form of composition adopted by the author has not prevented a frequent confusion of ideas, though it has rendered such a fault less excusable. His mode of progression is "like a peacock's walk, a stride and a stand," yet he often fails to take his single step with firmness and decision.

In a work of this kind, we know not how better to proceed than to examine some of the sections in the order they occur; and, as we have begun at the first page, we shall turn over the leaves of the book, and, without too much anxiety of selection, extract for our comment such as appear best to characterise the authors. Nor shall we attempt to make any distinction between the writers. The larger portion, and to which no signature is affixed, is the composition of Archdeacon Hare; those signed U, are by his brother; and there are occasionally other signatures, as A. and L., and A. and O. L., but what names these stand for we are not informed, – nor are we anxious to know. It is as a specimen of a certain class or coterie of thinkers we have been induced to notice the work, and we would at all times rather assail the thing said than the person who says it. It is remarkable that there is as much harmony between the several parts of the work as if the whole had been written by the same individual; and where inconsistencies appear, they will generally be found in the portions which bear the same signature, and which are the composition therefore of the same writer.

"Philosophy, like every thing else, in a Christian nation, should be Christian. We throw away the better half of our means, when we neglect to avail ourselves of the advantages which starting in the right road gives us. It is idle to urge that unless we do this, anti-Christians will deride us. Curs bark at gentlemen on horseback; but who, except a hypochondriac, ever gave up riding on that account?"

To say that philosophy should be Christian, is very much like saying that truth should be Christian. The philosophy of a genuine Christian will be Christian, we presume, unless he be capable of believing contradictory propositions. Or does the writer mean that that alone is Christian philosophy of which Coleridge has given us a slight specimen, and where the attempt is made to deduce from human reason alone the revealed mysteries of Christianity? What follows is as carelessly penned as it is pointless and vapid. "It is idle to urge that unless we do this anti-Christians will deride us." It would be impossible from the mere rules of grammar to know what it is that anti-Christians would deride us for doing, – whether for going right or wrong. But the illustration, by no means very elegant, which follows, comes to our assistance. As the anti-Christians, are the curs, and the gentleman on horseback the Christian philosopher, and as riding on horseback is certainly a very commendable thing, we discover that it is for going right that the anti-Christians would deride us.

The next is an instance how an observation, good in itself, may be run to death.

"'I am convinced that jokes are often accidental. A man in the course of conversation throws out a remark at random, and is as much surprised as any of the company, on hearing it, to find it witty.'

"For the substance of this observation I am indebted to one of the pleasantest men I ever knew, who was doubtless giving the results of his own experience. He might have carried his remark some steps further with ease and profit. It would have done our pride no harm to be reminded, how few of our best and wisest, and even of our newest thoughts, do really and wholly originate in ourselves, – how few of them are voluntary, or at least intentional. Take away all that has been suggested or improved by the hints and remarks of others, – all that has fallen from us accidentally, all that has been struck out by collision, all that has been prompted by a sudden impulse, or has occurred to us when least looking for it – and the remainder, which alone can be claimed as the fruit of our thought and study, will in every man form a small portion of his store, and in most men will be little worth preserving."

This is carrying his friend's observation "a little further with ease and profit!" It is carrying it to where it is utterly lost in mere absurdity. "Take away all that has been suggested," &c. – (take away all that we have ever learned) – "take away all that has been prompted," &c. – (take away all excitement to thinking, as well as all materials of thought) – and we should be glad to know what "remainder" can be left at all. The paragraph continues thus —

"We can no more make thoughts than seeds. How absurd, then, for a man to call himself a poet or maker! The ablest writer is a gardener first, and then a cook," (two very industrious professions at all events.) "His tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and, when they are ripe, to dress them wholesomely, and so that they may have a relish."

A very succulent image. The next sentence which our eye falls upon is pretty, and we willingly extract it: —

"Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable; they even dance: yet God has made them part of the oak. In so doing, he has given us a lesson not to deny the stout-heartedness within, because we see the lightsomeness without."

The following truism we should have hardly thought deserving of a place amidst Guesses at Truth; but, being admitted, the section devoted to it might surely have been preserved from obscurity to the close: —

"Time is no agent, as some people appear to think, that it should accomplish any thing of itself. Looking at a heap of stones for a thousand years will do no more toward building a house of them, than looking at them for a moment. For time, when applied to works of any kind, being only a succession of relevant acts, each furthering the work, it is clear that even an infinite succession of irrelevant and therefore inefficient acts would no more achieve or forward the completion, than an infinite number of jumps on the same spot would advance a man toward his journey's end. There is a motion, without progress in time as well as in space; where a thing often remains stationary, which appears to us to recede, while we are leaving it behind."

Plain sailing enough till we come to the last sentence. We dare not say that "we do not understand this" – these writers tell us so often that the critic fails in understanding simply from his own want of apprehension – but we may venture to hint that whatever meaning it contains might have been more clearly expressed. The hapless critic, by the way, is severely dealt with by this school of philosophers. He is told that "Coleridge's golden rule —Until you understand an author's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding– should be borne in mind by all writers who feel an itching in their forefinger and thumb to be carping at their wisers and betters." (P. 161) Our wisers should have informed the critic how he is to fathom an author's ignorance except by examining the accuracy and intelligibility of the positive statements he makes. "A Reviewer's business," we are assured in another part, "is to have positive opinions upon all subjects, without need of steadfast principles or thoroughgoing knowledge upon any: and he belongs to the hornet class, unproductive of any thing useful or sweet, but ever ready to sally forth and sting." Hard measure this. But we must not be judges in our own cause.

Meanwhile nothing pleases our amiable writers so much as to gird at the times in which they live, and find error in every general belief.

"Another form of the same materialism, which cannot comprehend or conceive any thing, except as the product of some external cause, is the spirit so general in these times, which attaches an inordinate importance to mechanical inventions, and accounts them the great agents in the history of mankind. It is a common opinion with these exoteric philosophers that the invention of printing was the chief cause of the Reformation – that the invention of the compass brought about the discovery of America – and that the vast changes in the military and political state of Europe since the middle ages have been wrought by the invention of gunpowder. It would be almost as rational to say that the cock's crowing, makes the sun rise. U." (P. 85.)

Now it is not the common opinion that the invention of printing was the chief cause of the Reformation, but that it afforded to the reformers a great and very opportune assistance. It is not the common opinion that the invention of the compass brought about of itself the discovery of America, but it is a very general belief that Columbus would have hardly sailed due west over the broad ocean without a compass. It is not the common opinion that the vast changes, meaning thereby all the changes that have taken place in the military and political affairs of Europe since the middle ages, have been the result of the invention of gunpowder; but it is a conviction generally entertained that the use of fire-arms has had something more to do with certain changes in our military and political condition than the crowing of the cock with the rising of the sun.

Having in this candid manner exposed the popular errors upon this subject, he substitutes in their stead this very luminous proposition, that "the utility of an invention depends upon our making use of it!"

"These very inventions had existed, the greatest of them for many centuries, in China, without producing any result. For why? Because the utility of an invention depends on our making use of it. There is no power, none at least for good [why this qualification?] in any instrument or weapon, except so far as there is power in him who wields it: nor does the sword guide or move the hand, but the hand the sword. Nay," he adds in a tone of triumphant discovery, "it is the hand that fashions the sword."

"Or," continues the writer, starting afresh, "we may look at the matter in another light. We may conceive that, whenever any of the great changes ordained by God's providence in the destinies of mankind are about to take place, the means requisite for the effecting of those changes are likewise prepared by the same Providence."

What is this but the general opinion of mankind? which, however, as entertained in the minds of others, is a vulgar materialism. What are all the world saying, but simply this, that the inventions of the printing press, of the compass, and of gunpowder, are great means ordained by God's providence for the advancement of human affairs?

The beauties of inanimate nature have their turn to be descanted on; and here our selecter spirits have a double task to perform: first, to throw contempt on those who do not feel them; and, secondly, on those who do. For, explain it how you will, they and their few friends are evidently the only people who have an accurate perception of beauty as well as of truth.

"It is an uncharitable error to ascribe the delight with which unpoetical persons often speak of a mountain-tour, to affectation. The delight is as real as mutton and beef, with which it has a closer connexion than the travellers themselves suspect; arising, in great measure, from the good effects of mountain air, regular exercise, and wholesome diet, upon the spirits. This is sensual, indeed, though not improperly so; but it is no concession to the materialist. I do not deny that my neighbour has a soul, by referring a particular pleasure in him to the body." (P. 35.)

So much for the unpoetic traveller with staff and knapsack, glorying, it may be, in his feats of pedestrianism. He is permitted, in spite of his grossness, to have a soul within his body. But the more poetic fraternity are not therefore to pass scatheless.

"The noisiest streams are the shallowest. It is an old saying, but never out of season, least of all in an age the fit symbol of which would not be, like the Ephesian personification of nature, multimamma– for it neither brings forth nor nourishes – but multilingua. Your amateur will talk by the ell, or, if you wish it, by the mile, about the inexpressible charms of nature; but I never heard that his love had caused him the slightest uneasiness.

"It is only," continues the writer, in a style which becomes suddenly overclouded with a strange metaphysical obscurity, – "it is only by the perception of some contrast that we become conscious of our feelings. The feelings, however, may exist for centuries, without the consciousness; and still, when they are mighty, they will overpower consciousness; when they are deep, it will be unable to fathom them. Love has been called 'loquacious as a vernal bird,' and with truth; but his loquacity comes on him mostly in the absence of his beloved. Here too the same illustration holds: the deep stream is not heard until some obstacle opposes it. But can anybody, when floating down the Rhine, believe that the builders and dwellers in those castles, with which every rock is crested, were blind to all the beauties around them? Is it quite impossible that they should have felt almost as much as the sentimental tourist, who returns to his parlour in some metropolis, and puffs out the fumes of his admiration through his quill? Has the moon no existence independent of the halo about her? [sic] or does the halo even flow from her? Is it not produced by the dimness and density of the atmosphere through which she has to shine? Give me the love of the bird that broods over her own nest, rather than of one who lays her eggs in the nest of another, albeit she warble about parental affection as loudly as Rousseau or Lord Byron." (P. 50.)

Nevertheless, we should not adopt the present writer, with all his two-fold fastidiousness, as our guide to enlighten us upon the highest sort of pleasure which scenery produces. He lays far more stress than to us seems due on the pictorial art as a means of cultivating a taste for the beauties of nature. It is quite true that a person familiar with the art of painting will see in an ordinary landscape points of interest which another would overlook. But as the sublimer objects in nature cannot be represented in pictures, so as to convey an impression of sublimity, it is not here that we can learn how to appreciate them. You paint a river and all the amenities of the landscape through which it flows; you cannot paint the sea and its grandeur. On no canvass can you transfer a mountain so as to bring with it the true impression of its sublimity.

That which we call the love of nature must exist in very different forms in minds of different habits and culture. The professional artist notes the various forms, the various colours, how they blend and contrast; he likes to see the whole field of vision richly and harmoniously filled. The poet, after spending a whole day in rapture amongst the mountains, could scarcely give you the exact outline of a single peak; he cannot fill you a solitary canvass; he has grouped all that his memory retains by the law only of his own feelings; he can describe the scene only by the emotions it has called forth.

There is also, no doubt, a simpler love of natural objects that never seeks to express itself either with the pencil or the pen. And this may, as our writer suggests, form a component part of that love of their country for which mountaineers are particularly distinguished. Yet, having ourselves had occasion to notice how very destitute of what is called sentiment, the peasantry of the noblest country are found to be, we should rather attribute the passionate love of home that is remarkable in the Swiss or the Norwegian to this, – that the causes which make home dear to all men are aggravated in their case by the mountainous seclusion in which they live. One who has resided in the same valley all his life, knows every one in that valley, and knows no one beyond it. The whole of the inhabitants form, as it were, one family. And though the sublimity of the mountains around him affects his mind but little, yet their lofty summits present to him (merely as so much matter and form) great physical objects to which he gets familiarised and attached. Each time he raises his eyes, he sees them there eternal in the heavens he can go no where to escape them; and they enclose for him whatever he possesses in common with all other countrymen – his own field, its hedge, its stile, – the village church, – the bridge over the torrent stream on which he played when a boy, and stood and gossipped when a man.

"When I was in the lake of Zug," says our author, "which lies bosomed among such grand mountains, the boatman, after telling some stories about Suwarrow's march through the neighbourhood, asked me, —Is it true that he came from a country where there is not a mountain to be seen?Yes, I replied; you may go hundreds of miles without coming to a hillock.That must be beautiful! he exclaimed: das muss schön seyn… This very man, however, had he been transported to the plains he sighed for, – even though they had been as flat as Burnet's Paradise, or the tabula rasa which Locke supposed to be the paradisiacal state of the human mind– (why is this piece of folly introduced? or what wit or sense can there be in attributing this childish absurdity to Locke?) would probably have been seized with the homesickness which is so common among his countrymen, as it is also among the Swedes and Norwegians, but which I believe is hardly found, except in the natives of a mountainous and beautiful country."[13 - We have not thought it worth while to adhere in our quotations to the somewhat affected manner of spelling which the brothers Hare have adopted. For instance, asked and wished are spelt askt and wisht: we have but one l in traveller, and the French word ragouts is rather oddly travestied into ragoos. The substitution of t for ed in the participle of many verbs, is the most systematic alteration attempted. Now the d and the t, as is very well known, slide into one another by such fine gradations that it is impossible to determine, in many cases, which of these two letters most accurately represents the pronunciation in general use. As the termination ed is what is understood by grammarians as the regular form, and is, moreover, in possession of the ground, it seems very futile to take any pains to alter it. In the instances we have already mentioned, wisht for wished, askt for asked, the new orthography is no nearer to the actual daily pronunciation of the words than the old and received mode of spelling. We do not pronounce wished and asked as we do the word waft. Give the full sound of the t in these words, and a pronunciation is introduced quite as novel as the mode of spelling.]

We have said that the prevailing characteristic of these semi-philosophers is the love of contradicting whatever to the majority of men seems a simple and intelligible truth. We will give two very short instances of this spirit of contradiction. We need not say that they are religious men, or that the want of piety in the world is their frequent subject of animadversion. "I was surprised just now," says one of the brothers, "to see a cobweb round a knocker: for it was not on the gate of heaven." You would suppose, therefore, that a man could not be too earnest in knocking at this gate that it might be opened to him. But this is what all the religious world is saying, and to float with the stream would be intolerable. It is discovered, therefore, that the religious world make of salvation, of the entrance into heaven, a matter of too much personal interest. "Catholic religion has wellnigh been split up into personal, so that the very idea of the former has almost been lost; and it is the avowed principle of what is called the Religious World that every body's paramount, engrossing duty is to take care his own soul." (P. 194.) What is called the Religious World world be a little surprised to hear itself censured by the archdeacon on such a ground as this.

Our next, which is very brief, is a still more striking instance of this contradictious and exclusive spirit. "The glories of their country," – he is speaking of the ancient Greeks, – "inspired them with enthusiastic patriotism; and an aristocratical religion – (which, until it was supplanted by a vulgar philosophy, was revered in spite of all its errors) – gave them," &c. It was a "vulgar philosophy" that doubted of the truth of Paganism! It is, at all events, a very commonplace philosophy at the present day which discredits the gods of Olympus, and is therefore to be spoken of with due contempt.

Instead of being intelligible and vulgar, how much better to wrap up our Christian philosophy in a style as rare and curious, and undecipherable, as the hieroglyphic cerements of an Egyptian mummy!

"The precepts of Christianity are holy and imperative; its mysteries vast, undiscoverable, unimaginable; and, what is still worthier of consideration, these two limbs of our religion are not severed, or even laxly joined, but, after the workmanship of the God of nature, so 'lock in with and over-wrap one another' that they cannot be torn asunder without rude force. Every mystery is the germ of a duty: every duty has its motive in a mystery. So that if I may speak of these things in the symbolical language of ancient wisdom, every thing divine being circular, every right thing human straight – the life of the Christian may be compared to a chord, each end of which is supported by the arc it proceeds from and terminates in." (P. 214.)

Literary criticism occupies a portion of these pages. Here also there is a singular air of pretension, but nothing done. A vague indefinite claim is made to very superior taste, and an exclusive appreciation of the great poets, but nothing is ever attempted to support this claim. The solitary criticism on a passage in Milton, where the poet says of the great palace of Pandemonium, that it "rose like an exhalation," is the only instance we remember where these authors have put forth any positive criticism; and this example does not appear to evince any very delicate or refined appreciation of poetic imagery. A comparison is drawn (where there is very little room for one) between this passage and the expression νυκτι εοικως, which Homer uses in describing the coming of Apollo, – and the ηυτ' ομιχλη, which he employs when speaking of Thetis rising from the sea. "How inferior," says the writer, "in grandeur, in simplicity, in beauty and grace, to the Homeric! which moreover has better caught the spirit and sentiment of the natural appearances. For Apollo does come with the power and majesty, and with the terrors of night; and the soft waviness of an exhalation is a much fitter image for the rising of the goddess, than for the massiness and hard stiff outline of a building." It is the hard stiff outline which the very image of Milton conceals from us, as the angel-built structure rises gradually, continuously, like an exhalation from the earth.

Of Shakspeare we are, of course, told that neither we, nor any other Englishmen, understand him.

"How many Englishmen admire Shakspeare? Doubtless all who understand him, and, it is to be hoped, a few more; for how many Englishmen understand Shakspeare? Were Diogenes to set out on his search through the land, I trust he would bring home many hundreds, not to say thousands, for every one I should put up. To judge from what has been written about him, the Englishmen who understand Shakspeare are little more numerous than those who understand the language spoken in Paradise. You will now and then meet with ingenious remarks on particular passages, and even in particular characters, or rather in particular features in them. But these remarks are mostly as incomplete and unsatisfactory as the description of a hand or foot would be, unless received with reference to the whole body. He who wishes to trace the march and to scan the operations of this most marvellous genius, and to discern the mysterious organisation of his wonderful works, will find little help but what comes from beyond the German Ocean." (P. 267.)

We are very much disposed to think that the age which follows ours, though still admiring Shakspeare as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of poets, will look upon this present age as eminently distinguished for having talked a marvellous deal of nonsense about that great man – whether with or without help from beyond the German Ocean. There is, however, confessedly some light to be got from another quarter, though still a very remote one. We are rather affectedly told in the preceding page: —

"Were nothing else to be learnt from the rhetoric and ethics of Aristotle, they should be studied by every educated Englishman as the best of commentaries on Shakspeare."