Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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The land imagery of the north of Devon is most delightful.

September 27. 1830

LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP OPPOSED.—MARRIAGE.—CHARACTERLESSNESS OF WOMEN

A person once said to me, that he could make nothing of love, except that it was friendship accidentally combined with desire. Whence I concluded that he had never been in love. For what shall we say of the feeling which a man of sensibility has towards his wife with her baby at her breast! How pure from sensual desire! yet how different from friendship!

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.

Luther has sketched the most beautiful picture of the nature, and ends, and duties of the wedded life I ever read. St. Paul says it is a great symbol, not mystery, as we translate it.76

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"Most women have no character at all," said Pope77 and meant it for satire. Shakspeare, who knew man and woman much better, saw that it, in fact, was the perfection of woman to be characterless.

Every one wishes a Desdemona or Ophelia for a wife,—creatures who, though they may not always understand you, do always feel you, and feel with you.

September 28. 1830

MENTAL ANARCHY

Why need we talk of a fiery hell? If the will, which is the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel, from the anarchy of our powers. It would be conscious madness—a horrid thought!

October 5. 1830

EAR AND TASTE FOR MUSIC DIFFERENT.–ENGLISH LITURGY.–BELGIAN REVOLUTION

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

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An ear for music is a very different thing from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad. Naldi, a good fellow, remarked to me once at a concert, that I did not seem much interested with a piece of Rossini's which had just been performed. I said, it sounded to me like nonsense verses. But I could scarcely contain myself when a thing of Beethoven's followed.

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I never distinctly felt the heavenly superiority of the prayers in the English liturgy, till I had attended some kirks in the country parts of Scotland, I call these strings of school boys or girls which we meet near London—walking advertisements.

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The Brussels riot—I cannot bring myself to dignify it with a higher name —is a wretched parody on the last French revolution. Were I King William, I would banish the Belgians, as Coriolanus banishes the Romans in Shakspeare.78

It is a wicked rebellion without one just cause.

October 8. 1830

GALILEO, NEWTON, KEPLER, BACON

Galileo was a great genius, and so was Newton; but it would take two or three Galileos and Newtons to make one Kepler.79 It is in the order of Providence, that the inventive, generative, constitutive mind—the Kepler— should come first; and then that the patient and collective mind—the Newton—should follow, and elaborate the pregnant queries and illumining guesses of the former. The laws of the planetary system are, in fact, due to Kepler. There is not a more glorious achievement of scientific genius upon record, than Kepler's guesses, prophecies, and ultimate apprehension of the law80 of the mean distances of the planets as connected with the periods of their revolutions round the sun. Gravitation, too, he had fully conceived; but, because it seemed inconsistent with some received observations on light, he gave it up, in allegiance, as he says, to Nature. Yet the idea vexed and haunted his mind; "Vexat me et lacessit," are his words, I believe.

We praise Newton's clearness and steadiness. He was clear and steady, no doubt, whilst working out, by the help of an admirable geometry, the idea brought forth by another. Newton had his ether, and could not rest in—he could not conceive—the idea of a law. He thought it a physical thing after all. As for his chronology, I believe, those who are most competent to judge, rely on it less and less every day. His lucubrations on Daniel and the Revelations seem to me little less than mere raving.

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Personal experiment is necessary, in order to correct our own observation of the experiments which Nature herself makes for us—I mean, the phenomena of the universe. But then observation is, in turn, wanted to direct and substantiate the course of experiment. Experiments alone cannot advance knowledge, without observation; they amuse for a time, and then pass off the scene and leave no trace behind them.

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Bacon, when like himself—for no man was ever more inconsistent—says, "Prudens qiuestio—dimidium scientiæ est."

October 20. 1830

THE REFORMATION

At the Reformation, the first reformers were beset with an almost morbid anxiety not to be considered heretical in point of doctrine. They knew that the Romanists were on the watch to fasten the brand of heresy upon them whenever a fair pretext could be found; and I have no doubt it was the excess of this fear which at once led to the burning of Servetus, and also to the thanks offered by all the Protestant churches, to Calvin and the Church of Geneva, for burning him.

November 21. 1830

HOUSE OF COMMONS

—– never makes a figure in quietude. He astounds the vulgar with a certain enormity of exertion; he takes an acre of canvass, on which he scrawls every thing. He thinks aloud; every thing in his mind, good, bad, or indifferent, out it comes; he is like the Newgate gutter, flowing with garbage, dead dogs, and mud. He is preeminently a man of many thoughts, with no ideas: hence he is always so lengthy, because he must go through every thing to see any thing.

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It is a melancholy thing to live when there is no vision in the land. Where are our statesmen to meet this emergency? I see no reformer who asks himself the question, What is it that I propose to myself to effect in the result?

Is the House of Commons to be re-constructed on the principle of a representation of interests, or of a delegation of men? If on the former, we may, perhaps, see our way; if on the latter, you can never, in reason, stop short of universal suffrage; and in that case, I am sure that women have as good a right to vote as men.81

March 20. 1831

GOVERNMENT.—EARL GREY

Government is not founded on property, taken merely as such, in the abstract; it is founded on unequal property; the inequality is an essential term in the position. The phrases—higher, middle, and lower classes, with reference to this point of representation—are delusive; no such divisions as classes actually exist in society. There is an indissoluble blending and interfusion of persons from top to bottom; and no man can trace a line of separation through them, except such a confessedly unmeaning and unjustifiable line of political empiricism as 10_l_. householders. I cannot discover a ray of principle in the government plan, —not a hint of the effect of the change upon the balance of the estates of the realm,—not a remark on the nature of the constitution of England, and the character of the property of so many millions of its inhabitants. Half the wealth of this country is purely artificial,—existing only in and on the credit given to it by the integrity and honesty of the nation. This property appears, in many instances, a heavy burthen to the numerical majority of the people, and they believe that it causes all their distress: and they are now to have the maintenance of this property committed to their good faith—the lamb to the wolves!

Necker, you remember, asked the people to come and help him against the aristocracy. The people came fast enough at his bidding; but, somehow or other, they would not go away again when they had done their work. I hope Lord Grey will not see himself or his friends in the woeful case of the conjuror, who, with infinite zeal and pains, called up the devils to do something for him. They came at the word, thronging about him, grinning, and howling, and dancing, and whisking their long tails in diabolic glee; but when they asked him what he wanted of them, the poor wretch, frightened out his of wits, could only stammer forth,—"I pray you, my friends, be gone down again!" At which the devils, with one voice, replied,—

"Yes! yes! we'll go down! we'll go down!—But we'll take you with us to swim or to drown!"82* * * * *

June 25. 1831

GOVERNMENT.—POPULAR REPRESENTATION

The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are,—1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to acquirers; and; 3. Hope to all.

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A nation is the unity of a people. King and parliament are the unity made visible. The king and the peers are as integral portions of this manifested unity as the commons.83

In that imperfect state of society in which our system of representation began, the interests of the country were pretty exactly commensurate with its municipal divisions. The counties, the towns, and the seaports, accurately enough represented the only interests then existing; that is say,—the landed, the shop-keeping or manufacturing, and the mercantile. But for a century past, at least, this division has become notoriously imperfect, some of the most vital interests of the empire being now totally unconnected with any English localities. Yet now, when the evil and the want are known, we are to abandon the accommodations which the necessity of the case had worked out for itself, and begin again with a rigidly territorial plan of representation! The miserable tendency of all is to destroy our nationality, which consists, in a principal degree, in our representative government, and to convert it into a degrading delegation of the populace. There is no unity for a people but in a representation of national interests; a delegation from the passions or wishes of the individuals themselves is a rope of sand. Undoubtedly it is a great evil, that there should be such an evident discrepancy between the law and the practice of the constitution in the matter of the representation. Such a direct, yet clandestine, contravention of solemn resolutions and established laws is immoral, and greatly injurious to the cause of legal loyalty and general subordination in the minds of the people. But then a statesman should consider that these very contraventions of law in practice point out to him the places in the body politic which need a remodelling of the law. You acknowledge a certain necessity for indirect representation in the present day, and that such representation has been instinctively obtained by means contrary to law; why then do you not approximate the useless law to the useful practice, instead of abandoning both law and practice for a completely new system of your own?

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The malignant duplicity and unprincipled tergiversations of the specific Whig newspapers are to me detestable. I prefer the open endeavours of those publications which seek to destroy the church, and introduce a republic in effect: there is a sort of honesty in that which I approve, though I would with joy lay down my life to save my country from the consummation which is so evidently desired by that section of the periodical press.

June 26. 1831

NAPIER.—BUONAPARTE.—SOUTHEY

I have been exceedingly impressed with the evil precedent of Colonel Napier's History of the Peninsular War. It is a specimen of the true French military school; not a thought for the justice of the war,—not a consideration of the damnable and damning iniquity of the French invasion. All is looked at as a mere game of exquisite skill, and the praise is regularly awarded to the most successful player. How perfectly ridiculous is the prostration of Napier's mind, apparently a powerful one, before the name of Buonaparte! I declare I know no book more likely to undermine the national sense of right and wrong in matters of foreign interference than this work of Napier's.

If A. has a hundred means of doing a certain thing, and B. has only one or two, is it very wonderful, or does it argue very transcendant superiority, if A. surpasses B.? Buonaparte was the child of circumstances, which he neither originated nor controlled. He had no chance of preserving his power but by continual warfare. No thought of a wise tranquillization of the shaken elements of France seems ever to have passed through his mind; and I believe that at no part of his reign could be have survived one year's continued peace. He never had but one obstacle to contend with—physical force; commonly the least difficult enemy a general, subject to courts- martial and courts of conscience, has to overcome.

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Southey's History84 is on the right side, and starts from the right point; but he is personally fond of the Spaniards, and in bringing forward their nationality in the prominent manner it deserves, he does not, in my judgment, state with sufficient clearness the truth, that the nationality of the Spaniards was not founded on any just ground of good government or wise laws, but was, in fact, very little more than a rooted antipathy to all strangers as such.

In this sense every thing is national in Spain. Even their so called Catholic religion is exclusively national in a genuine Spaniard's mind; he does not regard the religious professions of the Frenchman or Italian at all in the same light with his own.

July 7. 1831

PATRONAGE OF THE FINE ARTS.—OLD WOMEN

The darkest despotisms on the Continent have done more for the growth and elevation of the fine arts than the English government. A great musical composer in Germany and Italy is a great man in society, and a real dignity and rank are universally conceded to him. So it is with a sculptor, or painter, or architect. Without this sort of encouragement and patronage such arts as music and painting will never come into great eminence. In this country there is no general reverence for the fine arts; and the sordid spirit of a money-amassing philosophy would meet any proposition for the fostering of art, in a genial and extended sense, with the commercial maxim,—Laissez faire. Paganini, indeed, will make a fortune, because he can actually sell the tones of his fiddle at so much a scrape; but Mozart himself might have languished in a garret for any thing that would have been done for him here.

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There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided:—1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch.

July 24. 1831

PICTURES.85

Observe the remarkable difference between Claude and Teniers in their power of painting vacant space. Claude makes his whole landscape a plenum: the air is quite as substantial as any other part of the scene. Hence there are no true distances, and every thing presses at once and equally upon the eye. There is something close and almost suffocating in the atmosphere of some of Claude's sunsets. Never did any one paint air, the thin air, the absolutely apparent vacancy between object and object, so admirably as Teniers. That picture of the Archers86 exemplifies this excellence. See the distances between those ugly louts! how perfectly true to the fact!

But oh! what a wonderful picture is that Triumph of Silenus!87 It is the very revelry of hell. Every evil passion is there that could in any way be forced into juxtaposition with joyance. Mark the lust, and, hard by, the hate. Every part is pregnant with libidinous nature without one spark of the grace of Heaven. The animal is triumphing—not over, but—in the absence, in the non-existence, of the spiritual part of man. I could fancy that Rubens had seen in a vision—

All the souls that damned beLeap up at once in anarchy,Clap their hands, and dance for glee!

That landscape88 on the other side is only less magnificent than dear Sir George Beaumont's, now in the National Gallery. It has the same charm. Rubens does not take for his subjects grand or novel conformations of objects; he has, you see, no precipices, no forests, no frowning castles,– nothing that a poet would take at all times, and a painter take in these times. No; he gets some little ponds, old tumble-down cottages, that ruinous château, two or three peasants, a hay-rick, and other such humble images, which looked at in and by themselves convey no pleasure and excite no surprise; but he—and he Peter Paul Rubens alone—handles these every- day ingredients of all common landscapes as they are handled in nature; he throws them into a vast and magnificent whole, consisting of heaven and earth and all things therein. He extracts the latent poetry out of these common objects,—that poetry and harmony which every man of genius perceives in the face of nature, and which many men of no genius are taught to perceive and feel after examining such a picture as this. In other landscape painters the scene is confined and as it were imprisoned;—in Rubens the landscape dies a natural death; it fades away into the apparent infinity of space.

So long as Rubens confines himself to space and outward figure—to the mere animal man with animal passions—he is, I may say, a god amongst painters. His satyrs, Silenuses, lions, tigers, and dogs, are almost godlike; but the moment he attempts any thing involving or presuming the spiritual, his gods and goddesses, his nymphs and heroes, become beasts, absolute, unmitigated beasts.

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The Italian masters differ from the Dutch in this—that in their pictures ages are perfectly ideal. The infant that Raffael's Madonna holds in her arms cannot be guessed of any particular age; it is Humanity in infancy. The babe in the manger in a Dutch painting is a fac-simile of some real new-born bantling; it is just like the little rabbits we fathers have all seen with some dismay at first burst.

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Carlo Dolce's representations of our Saviour are pretty, to be sure; but they are too smooth to please me. His Christs are always in sugar-candy.

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That is a very odd and funny picture of the Connoisseurs at Rome89 by Reynolds.

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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 Cuyp90—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 Grass91 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 book92; 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 Knott93 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.

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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.

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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

July 30. 1831

ASGILL.—THE FRENCH

Asgill was an extraordinary man, and his pamphlet95 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.

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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 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.

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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.

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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.