Chapter VIII: Preface (8)

"But of his native speech, because well-nigh
Disuse in him forgetfulness had wrought,
In Latin he composed his history;
A garrulous, but a lively tale, and fraught
With matter of delight, and food for thought.
And if he could in Merlin's glass have seen
By 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 band
He through the wilds set forth upon his way,
A poet then unborn, and in a land
Which had proscribed his order, should one day
Take 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.]

[Footnote 2: "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.]

_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.

* * * * *

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.[1]

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[2] and Dalilah approaching Samson, in the Agonistes[3] are the only two proper pictures I remember in Milton.

[Footnote 1: Par. Lost, book vii. ver. 463.]

[Footnote 2:

----"so much the more
His wonder was to find unwaken'd Eve
With tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek,
As through unquiet rest: he on his side
Leaning, half raised, with looks of cordial love
Hung over her enamour'd, and beheld
Beauty, which, whether waking or asleep,
Shot forth peculiar graces; then, with voice
Mild, as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes,
Her hand soft touching, whisper'd thus: Awake,
My fairest," &c.

Book v. ver. 8.]

[Footnote 3:

"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 sailing
Like a stately ship
Of Tarsus, bound for the isles
Of 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 perfume
Her harbinger, a damsel train behind!"]

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.

* * * * *

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.

* * * * *

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

August 11. 1832.

HESIOD.--VIRGIL.--GENIUS METAPHYSICAL.--DON QUIXOTE.

I like reading Hesiod, meaning the Works and Days. If every verse is not poetry, it is, at least, good sense, which is a great deal to say.

* * * * *

There is nothing real in the Georgies, except, to be sure, the verse.[1] Mere didactics of practice, unless seasoned with the personal interests of the time or author, are inexpressibly dull to me. Such didactic poetry as that of the Works and Days followed naturally upon legislation and the first ordering of municipalities.

[Footnote 1: I used to fancy Mr. Coleridge _paulo iniquior Virgilio_, and told him so; to which he replied, that, like all Eton men, I swore _per Maronem_. This was far enough from being the case; but I acknowledge that Mr. C.'s apparent indifference to the tenderness and dignity of Virgil excited my surprise.--ED.]

* * * * *

All genius is metaphysical; because the ultimate end of genius is ideal, however it may be actualized by incidental and accidental circumstances.

* * * * *

Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. Sancho is the common sense of the social man-animal, unenlightened and unsanctified by the reason. You see how he reverences his master at the very time he is cheating him.

_August_ 14. 1832.

STEINMETZ.--KEATS.

Poor dear Steinmetz is gone,--his state of sure blessedness accelerated; or, it may be, he is buried in Christ, and there in that mysterious depth grows on to the spirit of a just man made perfect! Could I for a moment doubt this, the grass would become black beneath my feet, and this earthly frame a charnel-house. I never knew any man so illustrate the difference between the feminine and the effeminate.

* * * * *

A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. ---- and myself in a lane near Highgate.---- knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and staid a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back and said: "Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!"--"There is death in that hand," I said to ----, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.

_August_ 16. 1832.

CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.--BOWYER.

The discipline at Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan;--all domestic ties were to be put aside. "Boy!" I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, "Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying!"

* * * * *

No tongue can express good Mrs. Bowyer. Val. Le Grice and I were once going to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and Bowyer was thundering away at us by way of prologue, when Mrs. B. looked in, and said, "Flog them soundly, sir, I beg!" This saved us. Bowyer was so nettled at the interruption that he growled out, "Away, woman! away!" and we were let off.

_August_ 28. 1832.

ST. PAUL'S MELITA.

The belief that Malta is the island on which St. Paul was wrecked is so rooted in the common Maltese, and is cherished with such a superstitious nationality, that the Government would run the chance of exciting a tumult, if it, or its representatives, unwarily ridiculed it. The supposition itself is quite absurd. Not to argue the matter at length, consider these few conclusive facts:--The narrative speaks of the "barbarous people," and "barbarians,"[1] of the island. Now, our Malta was at that time fully peopled and highly civilized, as we may surely infer from Cicero and other writers.[2] A viper comes out from the sticks upon the fire being lighted: the men are not surprised at the appearance of the snake, but imagine first a murderer, and then a god from the harmless attack. Now in our Malta there are, I may say, no snakes at all; which, to be sure, the Maltese attribute to St. Paul's having cursed them away. Melita in the Adriatic was a perfectly barbarous island as to its native population, and was, and is now, infested with serpents. Besides the context shows that the scene is in the Adriatic.

[Footnote 1: Acts xxviii. 2. and 4. Mr. C. seemed to think that the Greek words had reference to something more than the fact of the islanders not speaking Latin or Greek; the classical meaning of [Greek: Barbaroi].-ED.]

[Footnote 2: Upwards of a century before the reign of Nero, Cicero speaks at considerable length of our Malta in one of the Verrine orations. See Act. ii. lib. iv. c. 46. "Insula est Melita, judices," &c. There was a town, and Verres had established in it a manufactory of the fine cloth or cotton stuffs, the _Melitensis vestis_, for which the island is uniformly celebrated:--

"Fertilis est Melite sterili vicina Cocyrae
Insula, quam Libyci verberat unda freti."

Ovid. Fast. iii. 567.

And Silius Italicus has--

----"telaque _superba_
_Lanigera_ Melite."

Punic. xiv. 251.

Yet it may have been cotton after all--the present product of Malta. Cicero describes an _ancient_ temple of Juno situated on a promontory near the town, so famous and revered, that, even in the time of Masinissa, at least 150 years B.C., that prince had religiously restored some relics which his admiral had taken from it. The plunder of this very temple is an article of accusation against Verres; and a deputation of Maltese (_legati Melitenses_) came to Rome to establish the charge. These are all the facts, I think, which can be gathered from Cicero; because I consider his expression of _nudatae urbes_, in the working up of this article, a piece of rhetoric. Strabo merely marks the position of Melita, and says that the lap-dogs called [Greek: kunidia Melitaia] were sent from this island, though some writers attribute them to the other Melite in the Adriatic, (lib. vi.) Diodorus, however, a Sicilian himself by birth, gives the following remarkable testimony as to the state of the island in his time, which, it will be remembered, was considerably before the date of St. Paul's shipwreck. "There are three islands to the south of Sicily, each of which has a city or town ([Greek: polin]), and harbours fitted for the safe reception of ships. The first of these is Melite, distant about 800 stadia from Syracuse, and possessing several harbours of surpassing excellence. Its inhabitants are rich and luxurious ([Greek: tous katoikountas tais ousiais eudaimonas]). There are artizans of every kind ([Greek: pantodapous tais exgasias]); the best are those who weave cloth of a singular fineness and softness. The houses are worthy of admiration for their superb adornment with eaves and brilliant white-washing ([Greek: oikias axiologous kai kateskeuasmenas philotimos geissois kai koniamasi pezittotezon])."-- Lib. v. c. 12. Mela (ii. c. 7.) and Pliny (iii. 14.) simply mark the position.--ED.]

* * * * *

The Maltese seem to have preserved a fondness and taste for architecture from the time of the knights--naturally enough occasioned by the incomparable materials at hand.[1]

[Footnote 1: The passage which I have cited from Diodorus shows that the origin was much earlier.--ED.]

_August_ 19. 1832.

ENGLISH AND GERMAN.--BEST STATE OF SOCIETY.

It may be doubted whether a composite language like the English is not a happier instrument of expression than a homogeneous one like the German. We possess a wonderful richness and variety of modified meanings in our Saxon and Latin quasi-synonymes, which the Germans have not. For "the pomp and _prodigality_ of Heaven," the Germans must have said "_the spendthriftness_."[1] Shakspeare is particularly happy in his use of the Latin synonymes, and in distinguishing between them and the Saxon.

[Footnote 1: _Verschwendung_, I suppose.--ED.]

* * * * *

That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy of the man.

September 1. 1832.

GREAT MINDS ANDROGYNOUS.--PHILOSOPHER'S ORDINARY LANGUAGE.

In chemistry and nosology, by extending the degree to a certain point, the constituent proportion may be destroyed, and a new kind produced.

* * * * *

I have known _strong_ minds with imposing, undoubting, Cobbett-like manners, but I have never met a _great_ mind of this sort. And of the former, they are at least as often wrong as right. The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous. Great minds--Swedenborg's for instance--are never wrong but in consequence of being in the right, but imperfectly.

* * * * *

A philosopher's ordinary language and admissions, in general conversation or writings _ad populum_, are as his watch compared with his astronomical timepiece. He sets the former by the town-clock, not because he believes it right, but because his neighbours and his cook go by it.

_January_ 2. 1833.

JURIES.--BARRISTERS' AND PHYSICIANS' FEES.--QUACKS.--CAESAREAN OPERATION.-- INHERITED DISEASE.

I certainly think that juries would be more conscientious, if they were allowed a larger discretion. But, after all, juries cannot be better than the mass out of which they are taken. And if juries are not honest and single-minded, they are the worst, because the least responsible, instruments of judicial or popular tyranny.

I should he sorry to see the honorary character of the fees of barristers and physicians done away with. Though it seems a shadowy distinction, I believe it to be beneficial in effect. It contributes to preserve the idea of a profession, of a class which belongs to the public,--in the employment and remuneration of which no law interferes, but the citizen acts as he likes _in foro conscientiae_.

* * * * *

There undoubtedly ought to be a declaratory act withdrawing expressly from the St. John Longs and other quacks the protection which the law is inclined to throw around the mistakes or miscarriages of the regularly educated practitioner.

* * * * *

I think there are only two things wanting to justify a surgeon in performing the Caesarean operation: first, that he should possess infallible knowledge of his art: and, secondly, that he should be infallibly certain that he is infallible.

* * * * *

Can any thing he more dreadful than the thought that an innocent child has inherited from you a disease or a weakness, the penalty in yourself of sin or want of caution?

* * * * *

In the treatment of nervous cases, he is the best physician, who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

_January_ 3. 1833.

MASON'S POETRY.

I cannot bring myself to think much of Mason's poetry. I may be wrong; but all those passages in the Caractacus, which we learn to admire at school, now seem to me one continued _falsetto_.

_January_ 4. 1833.

NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN STATES OF THE AMERICAN UNION.--ALL AND THE WHOLE.

Naturally one would have thought that there would have been greater sympathy between the northern and north-western states of the American Union and England, than between England and the Southern states. There is ten times as much English blood and spirit in New England as in Virginia, the Carolinas, &c. Nevertheless, such has been the force of the interests of commerce, that now, and for some years past, the people of the North hate England with increasing bitterness, whilst, amongst those of the south, who are Jacobins, the British connection has become popular. Can there ever be any thorough national fusion of the Northern and Southern states? I think not. In fact, the Union will be shaken almost to dislocation whenever a very serious question between the states arises. The American Union has no _centre_, and it is impossible now to make one. The more they extend their borders into the Indians' land, the weaker will the national cohesion be. But I look upon the states as splendid masses to be used, by and by, in the composition of two or three great governments.

* * * * *

There is a great and important difference, both in politics and metaphysics, between _all_ and _the whole_. The first can never be ascertained as a standing quantity; the second, if comprehended by insight into its parts, remains for ever known. Mr. Huskisson, I thought, satisfactorily refuted the ship owners; and yet the shipping interest, who must know where the shoe pinches, complain to this day.

_January_ 7, 1833.

NINTH ARTICLE.--SIN AND SINS.--OLD DIVINES.--PREACHING EXTEMPORE.

"Very far gone," is _quam longissime_ in the Latin of the ninth article,-- as far gone as possible, that is, as was possible for _man_ to go; as far as was compatible with his having any redeemable qualities left in him. To talk of man's being _utterly_ lost to good, is absurd; for then he would be a devil at once.

* * * * *

One mistake perpetually made by one of our unhappy parties in religion,-- and with a pernicious tendency to Antinomianism,--is to confound _sin_ with _sins_. To tell a modest girl, the watchful nurse of an aged parent, that she is full of _sins_ against God, is monstrous, and as shocking to reason as it is unwarrantable by Scripture. But to tell her that she, and all men and women, are of a sinful nature, and that, without Christ's redeeming love and God's grace, she cannot be emancipated from its dominion, is true and proper.[1]

[Footnote 1: In a marginal scrap Mr. C. wrote:--"What are the essential doctrines of our religion, if not sin and original sin, as the necessitating occasion, and the redemption of sinners by the Incarnate Word as the substance of the Christian dispensation? And can these be intelligently believed without knowledge and steadfast meditation. By the unlearned, they may be worthily received, but not by the unthinking and self-ignorant, Christian."--ED.]

* * * * *

No article of faith can be truly and duly preached without necessarily and simultaneously infusing a deep sense of the indispensableness of a holy life.

* * * * *

How pregnant with instruction, and with knowledge of all sorts, are the sermons of our old divines! in this respect, as in so many others, how different from the major part of modern discourses!

* * * * *

Every attempt, in a sermon, to cause emotion, except as the consequence of an impression made on the reason, or the understanding, or the will, I hold to be fanatical and sectarian.

* * * * *

No doubt preaching, in the proper sense of the word, is more effective than reading; and, therefore, I would not prohibit it, but leave a liberty to the clergyman who feels himself able to accomplish it. But, as things now are, I am quite sure I prefer going to church to a pastor who reads his discourse: for I never yet heard more than one preacher without book, who did not forget his argument in three minutes' time; and fall into vague and unprofitable declamation, and, generally, very coarse declamation too. These preachers never progress; they eddy round and round. Sterility of mind follows their ministry.

_January_ 20. 1833.

CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

When the Church at the Reformation ceased to be extra-national, it unhappily became royal instead; its proper bearing is intermediate between the crown and the people, with an inclination to the latter.

* * * * *

The present prospects of the Church weigh heavily on my soul. Oh! that the words of a statesman-like philosophy could win their way through the ignorant zealotry and sordid vulgarity of the leaders of the day!

_February_ 5. 1833.

UNION WITH IRELAND.

If any modification of the Union takes place, I trust it will be a total divorce _a vinculo matrimonii_. I am sure we have lived a cat and dog life of it. Let us have no silly saving of one crown and two legislatures; that would be preserving all the mischiefs without any of the goods, if there are any, of the union.

I am deliberately of opinion, that England, in all its institutions, has received injury from its union with Ireland. My only difficulty is as to the Protestants, to whom we owe protection. But I cannot forget that the Protestants themselves have greatly aided in accelerating the present horrible state of things, by using that as a remedy and a reward which should have been to them an opportunity.[1]

If the Protestant Church in Ireland is removed, of course the Romish Church must be established in its place. There can be no resisting it in common reason.

How miserably imbecile and objectless has the English government of Ireland been for forty years past! Oh! for a great man--but one really great man,-- who could feel the weight and the power of a principle, and unflinchingly put it into act! But truly there is no vision in the land, and the people accordingly perisheth. See how triumphant in debate and in action O'Connell is! Why? Because he asserts a broad principle, and acts up to it, rests all his body on it, and has faith in it. Our ministers--true Whigs in that-- have faith in nothing but expedients _de die in diem_. Indeed, what principles of government can _they_ have, who in the space of a month recanted a life of political opinions, and now dare to threaten this and that innovation at the huzza of a mob, or in pique at a parliamentary defeat?

[Footnote 1: "Whatever may be thought of the settlement that followed the battle of the Boyne and the extinction of the war in Ireland, yet when this had been made and submitted to, it would have been the far wiser policy, I doubt not, to have provided for the safety of the constitution by improving the quality of the elective franchise, leaving the eligibility open, or like the former, limited only by considerations of property. Still, however, the scheme of exclusion and disqualification had its plausible side. The ink was scarcely dry on the parchment-rolls and proscription-lists of the Popish parliament. The crimes of the man were generalized into attributes of his faith; and the Irish catholics collectively were held accomplices in the perfidy and baseness of the king. Alas! his immediate adherents had afforded too great colour to the charge. The Irish massacre was in the mouth of every Protestant, not as an event to be remembered, but as a thing of recent expectation, fear still blending with the sense of deliverance. At no time, therefore, could the disqualifying system have been enforced with so little reclamation of the conquered party, or with so little outrage on the general feeling of the country. There was no time, when it was so capable of being indirectly useful as a _sedative_ in order to the application of the remedies directly indicated, or as a counter-power reducing to inactivity whatever disturbing forces might have interfered with their operation. And had this use been made of these exclusive laws, and had they been enforced as the precursors and negative conditions,--but, above all, as _bonâ fide_ accompaniments, of a process of _emancipation_, properly and worthily so named, the code would at this day have been remembered in Ireland only as when, recalling a dangerous fever of our boyhood, we think of the nauseous drugs and drenching-horn, and congratulate ourselves that our doctors now-a-days know how to manage these things less coarsely. But this angry code was neglected as an opportunity, and mistaken for a _substitute_: _et hinc illae* lacrymae!_"--Church and State, p. 195.]

* * * * *

I sometimes think it just possible that the Dissenters may once more be animated by a wiser and nobler spirit, and see their dearest interest in the church of England as the bulwark and glory of Protestantism, as they did at the Revolution. But I doubt their being able to resist the low factious malignity to the church which has characterized them as a body for so many years.

_February_ 16. 1833.

FAUST.----MICHAEL SCOTT, GOETHE, SCHILLER, AND WORDSWORTH.

Before I had ever seen any part of Goethe's Faust[1], though, of course, when I was familiar enough with Marlowe's, I conceived and drew up the plan of a work, a drama, which was to be, to my mind, what the Faust was to Goethe's. My Faust was old Michael Scott; a much better and more likely original than Faust. He appeared in the midst of his college of devoted disciples, enthusiastic, ebullient, shedding around him bright surmises of discoveries fully perfected in after-times, and inculcating the study of nature and its secrets as the pathway to the acquisition of power. He did not love knowledge for itself--for its own exceeding great reward--but in order to be powerful. This poison-speck infected his mind from the beginning. The priests suspect him, circumvent him, accuse him; he is condemned, and thrown into solitary confinement: this constituted the _prologus_ of the drama. A pause of four or five years takes place, at the end of which Michael escapes from prison, a soured, gloomy, miserable man. He will not, cannot study; of what avail had all his study been to him? His knowledge, great as it was, had failed to preserve him from the cruel fangs of the persecutors; he could not command the lightning or the storm to wreak their furies upon the heads of those whom he hated and contemned, and yet feared. Away with learning! away with study! to the winds with all pretences to knowledge! We _know_ nothing; we are fools, wretches, mere beasts. Anon I began to tempt him. I made him dream, gave him wine, and passed the most exquisite of women before him, but out of his reach. Is there, then, no knowledge by which these pleasures can be commanded? _That way_ lay witchcraft, and accordingly to witchcraft Michael turns with all his soul. He has many failures and some successes; he learns the chemistry of exciting drugs and exploding powders, and some of the properties of transmitted and reflected light: his appetites and his curiosity are both stimulated, and his old craving for power and mental domination over others revives. At last Michael tries to raise the Devil, and the Devil comes at his call. My Devil was to be, like Goethe's, the universal humorist, who should make all things vain and nothing worth, by a perpetual collation of the great with the little in the presence of the infinite. I had many a trick for him to play, some better, I think, than any in the Faust. In the mean time, Michael is miserable; he has power, but no peace, and he every day more keenly feels the tyranny of hell surrounding him. In vain he seems to himself to assert the most absolute empire over the Devil, by imposing the most extravagant tasks; one thing is as easy as another to the Devil. "What next, Michael?" is repeated every day with more imperious servility. Michael groans in spirit; his power is a curse: he commands women and wine! but the women seem fictitious and devilish, and the wine does not make him drunk. He now begins to hate the Devil, and tries to cheat him. He studies again, and explores the darkest depths of sorcery for a receipt to cozen hell; but all in vain. Sometimes the Devil's finger turns over the page for him, and points out an experiment, and Michael hears a whisper--"Try _that_, Michael!" The horror increases; and Michael feels that he is a slave and a condemned criminal. Lost to hope, he throws himself into every sensual excess,--in the mid-career of which he sees Agatha, my Margaret, and immediately endeavours to seduce her. Agatha loves him; and the Devil facilitates their meetings; but she resists Michael's attempts to ruin her, and implores him not to act so as to forfeit her esteem. Long struggles of passion ensue, in the result of which his affections are called forth against his appetites, and, love-born, the idea of a redemption of the lost will dawns upon his mind. This is instantaneously perceived by the Devil; and for the first time the humorist becomes severe and menacing. A fearful succession of conflicts between Michael and the Devil takes place, in which Agatha helps and suffers. In the end, after subjecting him to every imaginable horror and agony, I made him triumphant, and poured peace into his soul in the conviction of a salvation for sinners through God's grace.

The intended theme of the Faust is the consequences of a misology, or hatred and depreciation of knowledge caused by an originally intense thirst for knowledge baffled. But a love of knowledge for itself, and for pure ends, would never produce such a misology, but only a love of it for base and unworthy purposes. There is neither causation nor progression in the Faust; he is a ready-made conjuror from the very beginning; the _incredulus odi_ is felt from the first line. The sensuality and the thirst after knowledge are unconnected with each other. Mephistopheles and Margaret are excellent; but Faust himself is dull and meaningless. The scene in Auerbach's cellars is one of the best, perhaps the very best; that on the Brocken is also fine; and all the songs are beautiful. But there is no whole in the poem; the scenes are mere magic-lantern pictures, and a large part of the work is to me very flat. The German is very pure and fine.

The young men in Germany and England who admire Lord Byron, prefer Goethe to Schiller; but you may depend upon it, Goethe does not, nor ever will, command the common mind of the people of Germany as Schiller does. Schiller had two legitimate phases in his intellectual character:--the first as author of the Robbers--a piece which must not be considered with reference to Shakspeare, but as a work of the mere material sublime, and in that line it is undoubtedly very powerful indeed. It is quite genuine, and deeply imbued with Schiller's own soul. After this he outgrew the composition of such plays as the Robbers, and at once took his true and only rightful stand in the grand historical drama--the Wallenstein;--not the intense drama of passion,--he was not master of that--but the diffused drama of history, in which alone he had ample scope for his varied powers. The Wallenstein is the greatest of his works; it is not unlike Shakspeare's historical plays--a species by itself. You may take up any scene, and it will please you by itself; just as you may in Don Quixote, which you read _through_ once or twice only, but which you read _in_ repeatedly. After this point it was, that Goethe and other writers injured by their theories the steadiness and originality of Schiller's mind; and in every one of his works after the Wallenstein you may perceive the fluctuations of his taste and principles of composition. He got a notion of re-introducing the characterlessness of the Greek tragedy with a chorus, as in the Bride of Messina, and he was for infusing more lyric verse into it. Schiller sometimes affected to despise the Robbers and the other works of his first youth; whereas he ought to have spoken of them as of works not in a right line, but full of excellence in their way. In his ballads and lighter lyrics Goethe is most excellent. It is impossible to praise him too highly in this respect. I like the Wilhelm Meister the best of his prose works. But neither Schiller's nor Goethe's prose style approaches to Lessing's, whose writings, for _manner_, are absolutely perfect.

Although Wordsworth and Goethe are not much alike, to be sure, upon the whole; yet they both have this peculiarity of utter non-sympathy with the subjects of their poetry. They are always, both of them, spectators _ab extra_,--feeling _for_, but never _with_, their characters. Schiller is a thousand times more _hearty_ than Goethe.

I was once pressed--many years ago--to translate the Faust; and I so far entertained the proposal as to read the work through with great attention, and to revive in my mind my own former plan of Michael Scott. But then I considered with myself whether the time taken up in executing the translation might not more worthily be devoted to the composition of a work which, even if parallel in some points to the Faust, should be truly original in motive and execution, and therefore more interesting and valuable than any version which I could make; and, secondly, I debated with myself whether it became my moral character to render into English--and so far, certainly, lend my countenance to language--much of which I thought vulgar, licentious, and blasphemous. I need not tell you that I never put pen to paper as a translator of Faust.

I have read a good deal of Mr. Hayward's version, and I think it done in a very manly style; but I do not admit the argument for prose translations. I would in general rather see verse attempted in so capable a language as ours. The French cannot help themselves, of course, with such a language as theirs.

[Footnote 1: "The poem was first published in 1790, and forms the commencement of the seventh volume of _Goethe's Schriften, Wien und Leipzig, bey J. Stahel and G. J. Goschen_, 1790. This edition is now before me. The poem entitled, _Faust, ein Fragment_ (not _Doktor Faust, ein Trauerspiel_, as Döring says), and contains no prologue or dedication of any sort. It commences with the scene in Faust's study, _antè_, p. 17., and is continued, as now, down to the passage ending, _antè_, p. 26. line 5. In the original, the line--

"Und froh ist, wenn er Regenwürmer findet,"

ends the scene.

The next scene is one between Faust and Mephistopheles, and begins thus:--

"Und was der ganzen Menschheit zugetheilt ist,"

_i. e._ with the passage (_antè_, p. 70.) beginning, "I will enjoy, in my own heart's core, all that is parcelled out among mankind," &c. All that intervenes, in later editions, is wanting. It is thenceforth continued, as now, to the end of the cathedral scene (_antè_, p. (170)), except that the whole scene, in which Valentine is killed, is wanting. Thus Margaret's prayer to the Virgin and the cathedral scene come together, and form the conclusion of the work. According to Düring's Verzeichniss, there was no new edition of Faust until 1807. According to Dr. Sieglitz, the first part of Faust first appeared, in its present shape, in the collected edition of Goethe's works, which was published in 1808.--_Hayward's Translation of Faust_, second edition, note, p. 215.]

_February_ 17. 1833.

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.--BEN JONSON.--MASSINGER.

In the romantic drama Beaumont and Fletcher are almost supreme. Their plays are in general most truly delightful. I could read the Beggar's Bush from morning to night. How sylvan and sunshiny it is! The Little French Lawyer is excellent. Lawrit is conceived and executed from first to last in genuine comic humour. Monsieur Thomas is also capital. I have no doubt whatever that the first act and the first scene of the second act of the Two Noble Kinsmen are Shakspeare's. Beaumont and Fletcher's plots are, to be sure, wholly inartificial; they only care to pitch a character into a position to make him or her talk; you must swallow all their gross improbabilities, and, taking it all for granted, attend only to the dialogue. How lamentable it is that no gentleman and scholar can he found to edit these beautiful plays![1] Did the name of criticism ever descend so low as in the hands of those two fools and knaves, Seward and Simpson? There are whole scenes in their edition which I could with certainty put back into their original verse, and more that could he replaced in their native prose. Was there ever such an absolute disregard of literary fame as that displayed by Shakspeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher?[2]

[Footnote 1: I believe Mr. Dyce could edit Beaumont and Fletcher as well as any man of the present or last generation; but the truth is, the limited sale of the late editions of Ben Jonson, Shirley, &c., has damped the spirit of enterprise amongst the respectable publishers. Still I marvel that some cheap reprint of B. and F. is not undertaken.--ED.]

[Footnote 2: "The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works, or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper, in all that related to themselves. In the inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned, with regard to immediate reputation."

* * * * *

"Shakspeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to Mr. Pope, when he asserted, that our great bard 'grew immortal in his own despite.'"--_Biog. Lit._ vol. i, p. 32.]

* * * * *

In Ben Jonson you have an intense and burning art. Some of his plots, that of the Alchemist, for example, are perfect. Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher would, if united, have made a great dramatist indeed, and yet not have come near Shakspeare; but no doubt Ben Jonson was the greatest man after Shakspeare in that age of dramatic genius.

The styles of Massinger's plays and the Sampson Agonistes are the two extremes of the arc within which the diction of dramatic poetry may oscillate. Shakspeare in his great plays is the midpoint. In the Samson Agonistes, colloquial language is left at the greatest distance, yet something of it is preserved, to render the dialogue probable: in Massinger the style is differenced, but differenced in the smallest degree possible, from animated conversation by the vein of poetry.

There's such a divinity doth hedge our Shakspeare round, that we cannot even imitate his style. I tried to imitate his manner in the Remorse, and, when I had done, I found I had been tracking Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger instead. It is really very curious. At first sight, Shakspeare and his contemporary dramatists seem to write in styles much alike: nothing so easy as to fall into that of Massinger and the others; whilst no one has ever yet produced one scene conceived and expressed in the Shakspearian idiom. I suppose it is because Shakspeare is universal, and, in fact, has no _manner_; just as you can so much more readily copy a picture than Nature herself.

_February_ 20. 1833.

HOUSE OF COMMONS APPOINTING THE OFFICERS OF THE ARMY AND NAVY.

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.

* * * * *

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[1]--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.

[Footnote 1: "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.]

_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.

* * * * *

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?

* * * * *

_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.[1]

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.

[Footnote 1: 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.]

_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.