Chapter IX: Preface (9)

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The first act of the Virgin Martyr is as fine an act as I remember in any play. The Very Woman is, I think, one of the most perfect plays we have. There is some good fun in the first scene between Don John, or Antonio, and Cuculo, his master[1]; and can any thing exceed the skill and sweetness of the scene between him and his mistress, in which he relates his story?[2] The Bondman is also a delightful play. Massinger is always entertaining; his plays have the interest of novels.

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

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

[Footnote 1: Act iii. sc. 2.]

[Footnote 2: Act iv. sc. 3.:--

"ANT. Not far from where my father lives, a lady, A neighbour by, bless'd with as great a beauty As nature durst bestow without undoing, Dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then, And bless'd the home a thousand times she dwelt in. This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, When my first fire knew no adulterate incense, Nor I no way to flatter, but my fondness; In all the bravery my friends could show me, In all the faith my innocence could give me, In the best language my true tongue could tell me, And all the broken sighs my sick heart lent me, I sued and served: long did I love this lady, Long was my travail, long my trade to win her; With all the duty of my soul, I served her.

ALM. How feelingly he speaks! (_Aside_.) And she loved you too?
It must be so.

ANT. I would it had, dear lady; This story had been needless, and this place, I think, unknown to me.

ALM. Were your bloods equal?

ANT. Yes; and I thought our hearts too.

ALM. Then she must love.

ANT. She did--but never me; she could not love me, She would not love, she hated; more, she scorn'd me, And in so poor and base a way abused me, For all my services, for all my bounties, So bold neglects flung on me--

ALM. An ill woman!
Belike you found some rival in your love, then?

ANT. How perfectly she points me to my story! (_Aside_.) Madam, I did; and one whose pride and anger, Ill manners, and worse mien, she doted on, Doted to my undoing, and my ruin. And, but for honour to your sacred beauty, And reverence to the noble sex, though she fall, As she must fall that durst be so unnoble, I should say something unbeseeming me. What out of love, and worthy love, I gave her, Shame to her most unworthy mind! to fools, To girls, and fiddlers, to her boys she flung, And in disdain of me.

ALM. Pray you take me with you.
Of what complexion was she?

ANT. But that I dare not Commit so great a sacrilege 'gainst virtue, She look'd not much unlike--though far, far short, Something, I see, appears--your pardon, madam-- Her eyes would smile so, but her eyes could cozen; And so she would look sad; but yours is pity, A noble chorus to my wretched story; Hers was disdain and cruelty.

ALM. Pray heaven,
Mine be no worse! he has told me a strange story, (_Aside_.)" &c.--ED.]

* * * * *

The parts pointed out in Hieronimo as Ben Jonson's bear no traces of his style; but they are very like Shakspeare's; and it is very remarkable that every one of them re-appears in full form and development, and tempered with mature judgment, in some one or other of Shakspeare's great pieces.[1]

[Footnote 1: By Hieronimo Mr. Coleridge meant The Spanish Tragedy, and not the previous play, which is usually called The First Part of Jeronimo. The Spanish Tragedy is, upon the authority of Heywood, attributed to Kyd. It is supposed that Ben Jonson originally performed the part of Hieronimo, and hence it has been surmised that certain passages and whole scenes connected with that character, and not found in some of the editions of the play, are, in fact, Ben Jonson's own writing. Some of these supposed interpolations are amongst the best things in the Spanish Tragedy; the style is singularly unlike Jonson's, whilst there are turns and particular images which do certainly seem to have been imitated by or from Shakspeare. Mr. Lamb at one time gave them to Webster. Take this, passage, in the fourth act:--

"HIERON. What make you with your torches in the dark?

PEDRO. You bid us light them, and attend you here.

HIERON. No! you are deceived; not I; you are deceived. Was I so mad to bid light torches now? Light me your torches at the mid of noon, When as the sun-god rides in all his glory; Light me your torches then.

PEDRO. Then we burn day-light.

HIERON. _Let it be burnt; Night is a murd'rous slut, That would not have her treasons to be seen; And yonder pale-faced Hecate there, the moon, Doth give consent to that is done in darkness; And all those stars that gaze upon her face Are aglets on her sleeve, pins on her train; And those that should be powerful and divine, Do sleep in darkness when they most should shine._

PEDRO. Provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting words. The heavens are gracious, and your miseries and sorrow Make you speak you know not what

HIERON. _Villain! thou liest, and thou dost nought But tell me I am mad: thou liest, I am not mad; I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques; I'll prove it thee; and were I mad, how could I? Where was she the same night, when my Horatio was murder'd! She should have shone then; search thou the book: Had the moon shone in my boy's face, there was a kind of grace, That I know--nay, I do know, had the murderer seen him, His weapon would have fallen, and cut the earth, Had he been framed of nought but blood and death," &c._

Again, in the fifth act:--

"HIERON. But are you sure that they are dead?

CASTILE. Ay, slain, too sure.

HIERON. What, and yours too?

VICEROY. Ay, all are dead; not one of them survive.

HIBRON. Nay, then I care not--come, we shall be friends; Let us lay our heads together. See, here's a goodly noose will hold them all.

VICEROY. O damned devil! how secure he is!

HIERON. Secure! why dost thou wonder at it? _I tell thee, Viceroy, this day I've seen Revenge, d in that sight am grown a prouder monarch Than ever sate under the crown of Spain. Had I as many lives at there be stars,_, _As many heavens to go to as those lives, I'd give them all, ay, and my soul to boot, But I would see thee ride in this red pool. Methinks, since I grew inward with revenge, I cannot look with scorn enough on death._

KING. What! dost thou mock us, slave? Bring tortures forth.

HIERON. _Do, do, do; and meantime I'll torture you. You had a son as I take it, and your son Should have been married to your daughter: ha! was it not so? You had a son too, he was my liege's nephew. He was proud and politic--had he lived, He might have come to wear the crown of Spain: I think 't was so--'t was I that killed him; Look you--this same hand was it that stabb'd His heart--do you see this hand? For one Horatio, if you ever knew him-- A youth, one that they hang'd up in his father's garden-- One that did force your valiant son to yield_," &c.--ED. ]

_April_ 7. 1833.

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

I think I could point out to a half line what is really Shakspeare's in Love's Labour Lost, and some other of the not entirely genuine plays. What he wrote in that play is of his earliest manner, having the all-pervading sweetness which he never lost, and that extreme condensation which makes the couplets fall into epigrams, as in the Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece. [1] In the drama alone, as Shakspeare soon found out, could the sublime poet and profound philosopher find the conditions of a compromise. In the Love's Labour Lost there are many faint sketches of some of his vigorous portraits in after-life--as for example, in particular, of Benedict and Beatrice.[2]

[Footnote 1: "In Shakspeare's _Poems_ the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length, in the drama, they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly, and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current, and with one voice."--_Biog. Lit._ vol. ii. p. 21.]

[Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge, of course, alluded to Biron and Rosaline; and there are other obvious prolusions, as the scene of the masque with the courtiers, compared with the play in A Midsummer Night's Dream.--ED.]

* * * * *

Gifford has done a great deal for the text of Massinger, but not as much as might easily be done. His comparison of Shakspeare with his contemporary dramatists is obtuse indeed.[1]

[Footnote 1: See his _Introduction to Massinger, vol_.i. p. 79., in which, amongst other most extraordinary assertions, Mr. Gifford pronounces that _rhythmical modulation is not one of Shakspeare's merits!_--ED.]

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

_April _8. 1833.

STATESMEN.--BURKE.

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

As a telegraph supposes a correspondent telescope, so a scientific lecture requires a scientific audience.

_April _9. 1833.

PROSPECT OF MONARCHY OR DEMOCRACY.--THE REFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS.

I have a deep, though paradoxical, conviction that most of the European nations are more or less on their way, unconsciously indeed, to pure monarchy; that is, to a government in which, under circumstances of complicated and subtle control, the reason of the people shall become efficient in the apparent will of the king.[1] As it seems to me, the wise and good in every country will, in all likelihood, become every day more and more disgusted with the representative form of government, brutalized as it is, and will be, by the predominance of democracy in England, France, and Belgium. The statesmen of antiquity, we know, doubted the possibility of the effective and permanent combination of the three elementary forms of government; and, perhaps, they had more reason than we have been accustomed to think.

[Footnote 1: This is backing Vico against Spinosa. It must, however, be acknowledged that at present the prophet of democracy has a good right to be considered the favourite.--ED.]

* * * * *

You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it--low, vulgar, meddling with every thing, assuming universal competency, flattering every base passion, and sneering at every thing noble, refined, and truly national! The direct and personal despotism will come on by and by, after the multitude shall have been gratified with the ruin and the spoil of the old institutions of the land. As for the House of Lords, what is the use of ever so much fiery spirit, if there be no principle to guide and to sanctify it?

_April _10. 1833.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.--CAPTAIN B. HALL.--NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN STATES. --DEMOCRACY WITH SLAVERY.--QUAKERS.

The possible destiny of the United States of America,--as a nation of a hundred millions of freemen,--stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakspeare and Milton, is an august conception. Why should we not wish to see it realized? America would then be England viewed through a solar microscope; Great Britain in a state of glorious magnification! How deeply to be lamented is the spirit of hostility and sneering which some of the popular books of travels have shown in treating of the Americans! They hate us, no doubt, just as brothers hate; but they respect the opinion of an Englishman concerning themselves ten times as much as that of a native of any other country on earth. A very little humouring of their prejudices, and some courtesy of language and demeanour on the part of Englishmen, would work wonders, even as it is, with the public mind of the Americans.

* * * * *

Captain Basil Hall's book is certainly very entertaining and instructive; but, in my judgment, his sentiments upon many points, and more especially his mode of expression, are unwise and uncharitable. After all, are not most of the things shown up with so much bitterness by him mere national foibles, parallels to which every people has and must of necessity have?

* * * * *

What you say about the quarrel in the United States is sophistical. No doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally, or apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. In such cases there is a hardship; but, in the long run, the matter is fully compensated to the over-taxed class. For example, take the householders of London, who complain so bitterly of the house and window taxes. Is it not pretty clear that, whether such householder be a tradesman, who indemnifies himself in the price of his goods,--or a letter of lodgings, who does so in his rent, --or a stockholder, who receives it back again in his dividends,--or a country gentleman, who has saved so much fresh levy on his land or his other property,--one way or other, it comes at last pretty nearly to the same thing, though the pressure for the time may be unjust and vexatious, and fit to be removed? But when New England, which may be considered a state in itself, taxes the admission of foreign manufactures in order to cherish manufactures of its own, and thereby forces the Carolinians, another state of itself, with which there is little intercommunion, which has no such desire or interest to serve, to buy worse articles at a higher price, it is altogether a different question, and is, in fact, downright tyranny of the worst, because of the most sordid, kind. What would you think of a law which should tax every person in Devonshire for the pecuniary benefit of every person in Yorkshire? And yet that is a feeble image of the actual usurpation of the New England deputies over the property of the Southern States.

* * * * *

There are two possible modes of unity in a State; one by absolute coordination of each to all, and of all to each; the other by subordination of classes and offices. Now, I maintain that there never was an instance of the first, nor can there be, without slavery as its condition and accompaniment, as in Athens. The poor Swiss cantons are no exception.

The mistake lies in confounding a state which must be based on classes and interests and unequal property, with a church, which is founded on the person, and has no qualification but personal merit. Such a community _may_ exist, as in the case of the Quakers; but, in order to exist, it must be compressed and hedged in by another society--_mundus mundulus in mundo immundo_.

* * * * *

The free class in a slave state is always, in one sense, the most patriotic class of people in an empire; for their patriotism is not simply the patriotism of other people, but an aggregate of lust of power and distinction and supremacy.

_April _11. 1833.

LAND AND MONEY.

Land was the only species of property which, in the old time, carried any respectability with it. Money alone, apart from some tenure of land, not only did not make the possessor great and respectable, but actually made him at once the object of plunder and hatred. Witness the history of the Jews in this country in the early reigns after the Conquest.

* * * * *

I have no objection to your aspiring to the political principles of our old Cavaliers; but embrace them all fully, and not merely this and that feeling, whilst in other points you speak the canting foppery of the Benthamite or Malthusian schools.

_April _14. 1833.

METHODS OF INVESTIGATION.

There are three ways of treating a subject:--

In the first mode, you begin with a definition, and that definition is necessarily assumed as the truth. As the argument proceeds, the conclusion from the first proposition becomes the base of the second, and so on. Now, it is quite impossible that you can be sure that you have included all the necessary, and none but the necessary, terms in your definition; as, therefore, you proceed, the original speck of error is multiplied at every remove; the same infirmity of knowledge besetting each successive definition. Hence you may set out, like Spinosa, with all but the truth, and end with a conclusion which is altogether monstrous; and yet the mere deduction shall be irrefragable. Warburton's "Divine Legation" is also a splendid instance of this mode of discussion, and of its inability to lead to the truth: in fact, it is an attempt to adopt the mathematical series of proof, in forgetfulness that the mathematician is sure of the truth of his definition at each remove, because he _creates _it, as he can do, in pure figure and number. But you cannot _make _any thing true which results from, or is connected with, real externals; you can only _find _it out. The chief use of this first mode of discussion is to sharpen the wit, for which purpose it is the best exercitation.

2. The historical mode is a very common one: in it the author professes to find out the truth by collecting the facts of the case, and tracing them downwards; but this mode is worse than the other. Suppose the question is as to the true essence and character of the English constitution. First, where will you begin your collection of facts? where will you end it? What facts will you select, and how do you know that the class of facts which you select are necessary terms in the premisses, and that other classes of facts, which you neglect, are not necessary? And how do you distinguish phenomena which proceed from disease or accident from those which are the genuine fruits of the essence of the constitution? What can be more striking, in illustration of the utter inadequacy of this line of investigation for arriving at the real truth, than the political treatises and constitutional histories which we have in every library? A Whig proves his case convincingly to the reader who knows nothing beyond his author; then comes an old Tory (Carte, for instance), and ferrets up a hamperful of conflicting documents and notices, which proves _his _case _per contra_. A. takes this class of facts; B. takes that class: each proves something true, neither proves _the_ truth, or any thing like _the _truth; that is, the whole truth.

3. You must, therefore, commence with the philosophic idea of the thing, the true nature of which you wish to find out and manifest. You must carry your rule ready made, if you wish to measure aright. If you ask me how I can know that this idea--my own invention--is the truth, by which the phenomena of history are to be explained, I answer, in the same way exactly that you know that your eyes were made to see with; and that is, because you _do _see with them. If I propose to you an idea or self-realizing theory of the constitution, which shall manifest itself as in existence from the earliest times to the present,--which shall comprehend within it _all _the facts which history has preserved, and shall give them a meaning as interchangeably causals or effects;--if I show you that such an event or reign was an obliquity to the right hand, and how produced, and such other event or reign a deviation to the left, and whence originating,--that the growth was stopped here, accelerated there,--that such a tendency is, and always has been, corroborative, and such other tendency destructive, of the main progress of the idea towards realization;--if this idea, not only like a kaleidoscope, shall reduce all the miscellaneous fragments into order, but shall also minister strength, and knowledge, and light to the true patriot and statesmen for working out the bright thought, and bringing the glorious embryo to a perfect birth;--then, I think, I have a right to say that the idea which led to this is not only true, but the truth, the only truth. To set up for a statesman upon historical knowledge only, is as about as wise as to set up for a musician by the purchase of some score flutes, fiddles, and horns. In order to make music, you must know how to play; in order to make your facts speak truth, you must know what the truth is which _ought_ to be proved,--the ideal truth,--the truth which was consciously or unconsciously, strongly or weakly, wisely or blindly, intended at all times.[1]

[Footnote 1: I have preserved this passage, conscious, the while, how liable it is to be misunderstood, or at least not understood. The readers of Mr. Coleridge's works generally, or of his "Church and State" in particular, will have no difficulty in entering into his meaning; namely, that no investigation in the non-mathematical sciences can be carried on in a way deserving to be called philosophical, unless the investigator have in himself a mental initiative, or, what comes to the same thing, unless he set out with an intuition of the ultimate aim or idea of the science or aggregation of facts to be explained or interpreted. The analysis of the Platonic and Baconian methods in "The Friend," to which I have before referred, and the "Church and State," exhibit respectively a splendid vindication and example of Mr. Coleridge's mode of reasoning on this subject.--ED.]

_April _18. 1833.

CHURCH OF ROME.--CELIBACY OF THE CLERGY.

In my judgment, Protestants lose a great deal of time in a false attack when they labour to convict the Romanists of false doctrines. Destroy the _Papacy_, and help the priests to wives, and I am much mistaken if the doctrinal errors, such as there really are, would not very soon pass away. They might remain _in terminis_, but they would lose their sting and body, and lapse back into figures of rhetoric and warm devotion, from which they, most of them,--such as transubstantiation, and prayers for the dead and to saints,--originally sprang. But, so long as the Bishop of Rome remains Pope, and has an army of Mamelukes all over the world, we shall do very little by fulminating against mere doctrinal errors. In the Milanese, and elsewhere in the north of Italy, I am told there is a powerful feeling abroad against the Papacy. That district seems to be something in the state of England in the reign of our Henry the Eighth.

How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, &c. prove it abundantly.

The Papal church has had three phases,--anti-Caesarean, extra-national, anti-Christian.

_April _20. 1833.

ROMAN CONQUEST OF ITALY.

The Romans would never have subdued the Italian tribes if they had not boldly left Italy and conquered foreign nations, and so, at last, crushed their next-door neighbours by external pressure.

_April _24. 1833.

WEDDED LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS.--TENNYSON'S POEMS.

Except in Shakspeare, you can find no such thing as a pure conception of wedded love in our old dramatists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. There is scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose _abilities_ are not discussed by the lady or her waiting-woman. In this, as in all things, how transcendant over his age and his rivals was our sweet Shakspeare!

* * * * *

I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson,--indeed without it he can never be a poet in act,--is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well-known and strictly defined metres, such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octo-syllabic measure of the Allegro and Penseroso. He would, probably, thus get imbued with a sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is, I can scarcely scan some of his verses.

_May _1. 1833.

RABELAIS AND LUTHER.--WIT AND MADNESS.

I think with some interest upon the fact that Rabelais and Luther were born in the same year.[1] Glorious spirits! glorious spirits!

----"Hos utinam inter
Heroas natum me!"

[Footnote 1: They were both born within twelve months of each other, I believe; but Luther's birth was in November, 1484, and that of Rabelais is generally placed at the end of the year preceding.--ED.]

* * * * *

"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,"

says Dryden, and true so far as this, that genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power, which detached from the discriminative and reproductive power, might conjure a platted straw into a royal diadem: but it would be at least as true, that great genius is most alien from madness,--yea, divided from it by an impassable mountain,-- namely, the activity of thought and vivacity of the accumulative memory, which are no less essential constituents of "great wit."

_May _4. 1833.

COLONIZATION.--MACHINERY.--CAPITAL.

Colonization is not only a manifest expedient for, but an imperative duty on, Great Britain. God seems to hold out his finger to us over the sea. But it must be a national colonization, such as was that of the Scotch to America; a colonization of hope, and not such as we have alone encouraged and effected for the last fifty years, a colonization of despair.

* * * * *

The wonderful powers of machinery can, by multiplied production, render the mere _arte facta _of life actually cheaper: thus money and all other things being supposed the same in value, a silk gown is five times cheaper now than in Queen Elizabeth's time; but machinery cannot cheapen, in any thing like an equal degree, the immediate growths of nature or the immediate necessaries of man. Now the _arte facta _are sought by the higher classes of society in a proportion incalculably beyond that in which they are sought by the lower classes; and therefore it is that the vast increase of mechanical powers has not cheapened life and pleasure to the poor as it has done to the rich. In some respects, no doubt, it has done so, as in giving cotton dresses to maid-servants, and penny gin to all. A pretty benefit truly!

* * * * *

I think this country is now suffering grievously under an excessive accumulation of capital, which, having no field for profitable operation, is in a state of fierce civil war with itself.

_May _6. 1833.

ROMAN CONQUEST.--CONSTANTINE.--PAPACY AND THE SCHOOLMEN.

The Romans had no national clerisy; their priesthood was entirely a matter of state, and, as far back as we can trace it, an evident stronghold of the Patricians against the increasing powers of the Plebeians. All we know of the early Romans is, that, after an indefinite lapse of years, they had conquered some fifty or sixty miles round their city. Then it is that they go to war with Carthage, the great maritime power, and the result of that war was the occupation of Sicily. Thence they, in succession, conquered Spain, Macedonia, Asia Minor, &c., and so at last contrived to subjugate Italy, partly by a tremendous back blow, and partly by bribing the Italian States with a communication of their privileges, which the now enormously enriched conquerors possessed over so large a portion of the civilized world. They were ordained by Providence to conquer and amalgamate the materials of Christendom. They were not a national people; they were truly--

_Romanos rerum dominos--_

--and that's all.

* * * * *

Under Constantine the spiritual power became a complete reflex of the temporal. There were four patriarchs, and four prefects, and so on. The Clergy and the Lawyers, the Church and the State, were opposed.

* * * * *

The beneficial influence of the Papacy upon the whole has been much over- rated by some writers; and certainly no country in Europe received less benefit and more harm from it than England. In fact, the lawful kings and parliaments of England were always essentially Protestant in feeling for a national church, though they adhered to the received doctrines of the Christianity of the day; and it was only the usurpers, John, Henry IV., &c., that went against this policy. All the great English schoolmen, Scotus Erigena[1], Duns Scotus, Ockham, and others, those morning stars of the Reformation, were heart and soul opposed to Rome, and maintained the Papacy to be Antichrist. The Popes always persecuted, with rancorous hatred, the national clerisies, the married clergy, and disliked the universities which grew out of the old monasteries. The Papacy was, and is, essentially extra- national, and was always so considered in this country, although not believed to be anti-Christian.

[Footnote 1: John Scotus, or Erigena, was born, according to different authors, in Wales, Scotland, or Ireland; but I do not find any account making him an Englishman of Saxon blood. His death is uncertainly placed in the beginning of the ninth century. He lived in well-known intimacy with Charles the Bald, of France, who died about A. D. 874. He resolutely resisted the doctrine of transubstantiation, and was publicly accused of heresy on that account. But the king of France protected him--ED.]

_May_ 8. 1833.

CIVIL WAR OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.--HAMPDEN'S SPEECH.

I know no portion of history which a man might write with so much pleasure as that of the great struggle in the time of Charles I., because he may feel the profoundest respect for both parties. The side taken by any particular person was determined by the point of view which such person happened to command at the commencement of the inevitable collision, one line seeming straight to this man, another line to another. No man of that age saw _the_ truth, the whole truth; there was not light enough for that. The consequence, of course, was a violent exaggeration of each party for the time. The King became a martyr, and the Parliamentarians traitors, and _vice versâ_. The great reform brought into act by and under William the Third combined the principles truly contended for by Charles and his Parliament respectively: the great revolution of 1831 has certainly, to an almost ruinous degree, dislocated those principles of government again. As to Hampden's speech[1], no doubt it means a declaration of passive obedience to the sovereign, as the creed of an English Protestant individual: every man, Cromwell and all, would have said as much; it was the antipapistical tenet, and almost vauntingly asserted on all occasions by Protestants up to that time. But it implies nothing of Hampden's creed as to the duty of Parliament.

[Footnote 1: On his impeachment with the other four members, 1642. See the "Letter to John Murray, Esq. _touching_ Lord Nugent," 1833. It is extraordinary that Lord N. should not see the plain distinction taken by Hampden, between not obeying an unlawful command, and rebelling against the King because of it. He approves the one, and condemns the other. His words are, "to _yield obedience to_ the commands of a King, if against the true religion, against the ancient and fundamental laws of the land, is another sign of an ill subject:"--"To _resist_ the lawful power of the King; to raise insurrection against the King; admit him adverse in his religion; _to conspire against his sacred person, or any ways to rebel, though commanding things against our consciences in exercising religion, or against the rights and privileges of the subject_, is an absolute sign of the disaffected and traitorous subject."--ED.]

_May_ 10. 1833.

REFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS.

Well, I think no honest man will deny that the prophetic denunciations of those who seriously and solemnly opposed the Reform Bill are in a fair way of exact fulfilment! For myself, I own I did not expect such rapidity of movement. I supposed that the first parliament would contain a large number of low factious men, who would vulgarize and degrade the debates of the House of Commons, and considerably impede public business, and that the majority would be gentlemen more fond of their property than their politics. But really the truth is something more than this. Think of upwards of 160 members voting away two millions and a half of tax on Friday[1], at the bidding of whom, shall I say? and then no less than 70 of those very members rescinding their votes on the Tuesday next following, nothing whatever having intervened to justify the change, except that they had found out that at least seven or eight millions more must go also upon the same principle, and that the revenue was cut in two! Of course I approve the vote of rescission, however dangerous a precedent; but what a picture of the composition of this House of Commons!

[Footnote 1: On Friday, the 26th of April, 1833, Sir William Ingilby moved and carried a resolution for reducing the duty on malt from 28s. 8d. to l0s. per quarter. One hundred and sixty-two members voted with him. On Tuesday following, the 30th of April, seventy-six members only voted against the rescission of the same resolution.--ED.]

_May_ 13. 1833.

FOOD.--MEDICINE.--POISON.--OBSTRUCTION.

1. That which is digested wholly, and part of which is assimilated, and part rejected, is--Food.

2. That which is digested wholly, and the whole of which is partly assimilated, and partly not, is--Medicine.

3. That which is digested, but not assimilated, is--Poison.

4. That which is neither digested nor assimilated is--Mere Obstruction.

As to the stories of slow poisons, I cannot say whether there was any, or what, truth in them; but I certainly believe a man may be poisoned by arsenic a year after he has taken it. In fact, I think that is known to have happened.

May 14. 1833.

WILSON.--SHAKSPEARE'S SONNETS.--LOVE.

Professor Wilson's character of Charles Lamb in the last Blackwood, _Twaddle on Tweed-side_[1], is very sweet indeed, and gratified me much. It does honour to Wilson, to his head and his heart.

[Footnote 1: "Charles Lamb ought really not to abuse Scotland in the pleasant way he so often does in the sylvan shades of Enfield; for Scotland loves Charles Lamb; but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a Cockney is a better man even than Christopher North. But what will not Christopher forgive to genius and goodness! Even Lamb, bleating libels on his native land. Nay, he learns lessons of humanity even from the mild malice of Elia, and breathes a blessing on him and his household in their bower of rest."

Some of Mr. Coleridge's poems were first published with some of C. Lamb's at Bristol in 1797. The remarkable words on the title-page have been aptly cited in the New Monthly Magazine for February, 1835, p. 198.: "Duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitiae et similium junctarumque Camcoenarum,--quod utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longinquitas." And even so it came to pass after thirty seven years more had passed over their heads,--ED.]

* * * * *

How can I wish that Wilson should cease to write what so often soothes and suspends my bodily miseries, and my mental conflicts! Yet what a waste, what a reckless spending, of talent, ay, and of genius, too, in his I know not how many years' management of Blackwood! If Wilson cares for fame, for an enduring place and prominence in literature, he should now, I think, hold his hand, and say, as he well may,--

"Militavi non sine gloria:
Nunc arma defunctumque bello
Barbiton hic paries habebit."

Two or three volumes collected out of the magazine by himself would be very delightful. But he must not leave it for others to do; for some recasting and much condensation would be required; and literary executors make sad work in general with their testators' brains.

* * * * *

I believe it possible that a man may, under certain states of the moral feeling, entertain something deserving the name of love towards a male object--an affection beyond friendship, and wholly aloof from appetite. In Elizabeth's and James's time it seems to have been almost fashionable to cherish such a feeling; and perhaps we may account in some measure for it by considering how very inferior the women of that age, taken generally, were in education and accomplishment of mind to the men. Of course there were brilliant exceptions enough; but the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher-- the most popular dramatists that ever wrote for the English stage--will show us what sort of women it was generally pleasing to represent. Certainly the language of the two friends, Musidorus and Pyrocles, in the Arcadia, is such as we could not now use except to women; and in Cervantes the same tone is sometimes adopted, as in the novel of the Curious Impertinent. And I think there is a passage in the New Atlantis[1] of Lord Bacon, in which he speaks of the possibility of such a feeling, but hints the extreme danger of entertaining it, or allowing it any place in a moral theory. I mention this with reference to Shakspeare's sonnets, which have been supposed, by some, to be addressed to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom Clarendon calls[2] the most beloved man of his age, though his licentiousness was equal to his virtues.

I doubt this. I do not think that Shakespeare, merely because he was an actor, would have thought it necessary to veil his emotions towards Pembroke under a disguise, though he might probably have done so, if the real object had perchance been a Laura or a Leonora. It seems to me that the sonnets could only have come from a man deeply in love, and in love with a woman; and there is one sonnet which, from its incongruity, I take to be a purposed blind. These extraordinary sonnets form, in fact, a poem of so many stanzas of fourteen lines each; and, like the passion which inspired them, the sonnets are always the same, with a variety of expression,--continuous, if you regard the lover's soul,--distinct, if you listen to him, as he heaves them sigh after sigh.

These sonnets, like the Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, are characterized by boundless fertility and laboured condensation of thought, with perfection of sweetness in rhythm and metre. These are the essentials in the budding of a great poet. Afterwards habit and consciousness of power teach more ease--_praecipitandum liberum spiritum_.

[Footnote 1: I cannot fix upon any passage in this work, to which it can be supposed that Mr. Coleridge alluded, unless it be the speech of Joabin the Jew; but it contains nothing coming up to the meaning in the text. The only approach to it seems to be:--"As for masculine love, they have no touch of it; and yet there are not so faithful and inviolate friendships in the world again as are there; and to speak generally, as I said before, I have not read of any such chastity in any people as theirs."--ED.]

[Footnote 2: "William Earl of Pembroke was next, a man of another mould and making, and of another fame and reputation with all men, being the most universally beloved and esteemed of any man of that age." ......."He indulged to himself the pleasures of all kinds, almost in all excesses."--_Hist. of the Rebellion_, book i. He died in 1630, aged fifty years. The dedication by T. T. (Thomas Thorpe) is to "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W. H." and Malone is inclined to think that William Hughes is meant. As to Mr. W. H. being the _only_ begetter of these sonnets, it must be observed, that at least the last twenty-eight are beyond dispute addressed to a woman. I suppose the twentieth sonnet was the particular one conceived by Mr. C. to be a blind; but it seems to me that many others may be so construed, if we set out with a conviction that the real object of the poet was a woman.--ED.]

* * * * *

Every one who has been in love, knows that the passion is strongest, and the appetite weakest, in the absence of the beloved object, and that the reverse is the case in her presence.

_May_ 15. 1833.

WICLIFFE.--LUTHER.--REVERENCE FOR IDEAL TRUTHS.--JOHNSON THE WHIG.-- ASGILL.--JAMES I.

Wicliffe's genius was, perhaps, not equal to Luther's; but really the more I know of him from Vaughan and Le Bas, both of whose books I like, I think him as extraordinary a man as Luther upon the whole. He was much sounder and more truly catholic in his view of the Eucharist than Luther. And I find, not without some pleasure, that my own view of it, which I was afraid was original, was maintained in the tenth century, that is to say, that the body broken had no reference to the human body of Christ, but to the Caro Noumenon, or symbolical Body, the Rock that followed the Israelites.

Whitaker beautifully says of Luther;--_Felix ille, quem Dominus eo honore dignatus est, ut homines nequissimos suos haberet inimicos_.

* * * * *

There is now no reverence for any thing; and the reason is, that men possess conceptions only, and all their knowledge is conceptional only. Now as, to conceive, is a work of the mere understanding, and as all that can be conceived may be comprehended, it is impossible that a man should reverence that, to which he must always feel something in himself superior. If it were possible to conceive God in a strict sense, that is, as we conceive a horse or a tree, even God himself could not excite any reverence, though he might excite fear or terror, or perhaps love, as a tiger or a beautiful woman. But reverence, which is the synthesis of love and fear, is only due from man, and, indeed, only excitable in man, towards ideal truths, which are always mysteries to the understanding, for the same reason that the motion of my finger behind my back is a mystery to you now--your eyes not being made for seeing through my body. It is the reason only which has a sense by which ideas can be recognized, and from the fontal light of ideas only can a man draw intellectual power.

* * * * *

Samuel Johnson[1], whom, to distinguish him from the Doctor, we may call the Whig, was a very remarkable writer. He may be compared to his contemporary De Foe, whom he resembled in many points. He is another instance of King William's discrimination, which was so much superior to that of any of his ministers, Johnson was one of the most formidable advocates for the Exclusion Bill, and he suffered by whipping and imprisonment under James accordingly. Like Asgill, he argues with great apparent candour and clearness till he has his opponent within reach, and then comes a blow as from a sledge-hammer. I do not know where I could put my hand upon a book containing so much sense and sound constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson's Works; and what party in this country would read so severe a lecture in it as our modern Whigs!

A close reasoner and a good writer in general may be known by his pertinent use of connectives. Read that page of Johnson; you cannot alter one conjunction without spoiling the sense. It is a linked strain throughout. In your modern books, for the most part, the sentences in a page have the same connection with each other that marbles have in a bag; they touch without adhering.

Asgill evidently formed his style upon Johnson's, but he only imitates one part of it. Asgill never rises to Johnson's eloquence. The latter was a sort of Cobbett-Burke.

James the First thought that, because all power in the state seemed to proceed _from_ the crown, all power therefore remained in the crown;--as if, because the tree sprang from the seed, the stem, branches, leaves, and fruit were all contained in the seed. The constitutional doctrine as to the relation which the king bears to the other components of the state is in two words this:--He is a representative of the whole of that, of which he is himself a part.

[Footnote 1: Dryden's Ben Jochanan, in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel. He was born in 1649, and died in 1703. He was a clergyman. In 1686, when the army was encamped on Hounslow Heath, he published "A humble and hearty Address to all English Protestants in the present Army." For this he was tried and sentenced to be pilloried in three places, pay a fine, and be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. An attempt was also made to degrade him from his orders, but this failed through an informality. After the Revolution he was preferred.--ED.]

_May_ 17. 1833.

SIR P. SIDNEY.--THINGS ARE FINDING THEIR LEVEL.

When Sir Philip Sidney saw the enthusiasm which agitated every man, woman, and child in the Netherlands against Philip and D'Alva, he told Queen Elizabeth that it was the spirit of God, and that it was invincible. What is the spirit which seems to move and unsettle every other man in England and on the Continent at this time? Upon my conscience, and judging by St. John's rule, I think it is a special spirit of the devil--and a very vulgar devil too!

* * * * *

Your modern political economists say that it is a principle in their science--that all things _find_ their level;--which I deny; and say, on the contrary, that the true principle is, that all things are _finding_ their level like water in a storm.

_May_ 18. 1833.

GERMAN.--GOETHE.--GOD'S PROVIDENCE.--MAN'S FREEDOM.

German is inferior to English in modifications of expression of the affections, but superior to it in modifications of expression of all objects of the senses.

* * * * *

Goethe's small lyrics are delightful. He showed good taste in not attempting to imitate Shakspeare's Witches, which are threefold,--Fates, Furies, and earthly Hags o' the caldron.

* * * * *

Man does not move in cycles, though nature does. Man's course is like that of an arrow; for the portion of the great cometary ellipse which he occupies is no more than a needle's length to a mile.

In natural history, God's freedom is shown in the law of necessity. In moral history, God's necessity or providence is shown in man's freedom.

_June_ 8. 1833.

DOM MIGUEL AND DOM PEDRO.--WORKING TO BETTER ONE'S CONDITION.--NEGRO EMANCIPATION.--FOX AND PITT.--REVOLUTION.

There can be no doubt of the gross violations of strict neutrality by this government in the Portuguese affair; but I wish the Tories had left the matter alone, and not given room to the people to associate them with that scoundrel Dom Miguel. You can never interest the common herd in the abstract question; with them it is a mere quarrel between the men; and though Pedro is a very doubtful character, he is not so bad as his brother; and, besides, we are naturally interested for the girl.

* * * * *

It is very strange that men who make light of the direct doctrines of the Scriptures, and turn up their noses at the recommendation of a line of conduct suggested by religious truth, will nevertheless stake the tranquillity of an empire, the lives and properties of millions of men and women, on the faith of a maxim of modern political economy! And this, too, of a maxim true only, if at all, of England or a part of England, or some other country;--namely, that the desire of bettering their condition will induce men to labour even more abundantly and profitably than servile compulsion,--to which maxim the past history and present state of all Asia and Africa give the lie. Nay, even in England at this day, every man in Manchester, Birmingham, and in other great manufacturing towns, knows that the most skilful artisans, who may earn high wages at pleasure, are constantly in the habit of working but a few days in the week, and of idling the rest. I believe St.

Monday is very well kept by the workmen in London. The love of indolence is universal, or next to it.