Part 10 (1/2)
G.o.dwin and Holcroft went together to Underwood's chambers. ”Little Mr.
Underwood,” said they, ”we are perfectly acquainted with the subject of your studies, only ignorant of the particulars. What is the difference between a thermometer and a barometer?”
[Sidenote: THE ADOLESCENCE OF LOVE]
It is a pleasure to me to perceive the buddings of virtuous loves, to know their minutes of increase, their stealth and silent growings--
A pretty idea, that of a good soul watching the progress of an attachment from the first glance to the time when the lover himself becomes conscious of it. A poem for my ”Soother of Absence.”
[Sidenote: THE RAGE FOR MONITION]
To J. Tobin, Esq., April 10, 1804.
Men who habitually enjoy robust health have, too generally, the trick, and a very cruel one it is, of imagining that they discover the secret of all their acquaintances' ill health in some malpractice or other; and, sometimes, by gravely a.s.serting this, here there and everywhere (as who likes his penetration [hid] under a bushel?), they not only do all they can, without intending it, to deprive the poor sufferer of that sympathy which is always a comfort and, in some degree, a support to human nature, but, likewise, too often implant serious alarm and uneasiness in the minds of the person's relatives and his nearest and dearest connections. Indeed (but that I have known its inutility, that I should be ridiculously sinning against my own law which I was propounding, and that those who are most fond of advising are the least able to hear advice from others, as the pa.s.sion to command makes men disobedient) I should often have been on the point of advising you against the two-fold rage of advising and of discussing character, both the one and the other of which infallibly generates presumption and blindness to our own faults. Nay! more particularly where, from whatever cause, there exists a slowness to understand or an apt.i.tude to mishear and consequently misunderstand what has been said, it too often renders an otherwise truly good man a mischief-maker to an extent of which he is but little aware. Our friends' reputation should be a religion to us, and when it is lightly sacrificed to what self-adulation calls a love of telling the truth (in reality a l.u.s.t of talking something seasoned with the cayenne and capsic.u.m of personality), depend upon it, something in the heart is warped or warping, more or less according to the greater or lesser power of the counteracting causes. I confess to you, that being exceedingly low and heart-fallen, I should have almost sunk under the operation of reproof and admonition (the whole too, in my conviction, grounded on utter mistake) at the moment I was quitting, perhaps for ever! my dear country and all that makes it so dear--but the high esteem I cherish towards you, and my sense of your integrity and the reality of your attachment and concern blows upon me refres.h.i.+ngly as the sea-breeze on the tropic islander. Show me anyone made better by blunt advice, and I may abate of my dislike to it, but I have experienced the good effects of the contrary in Wordsworth's conduct to me; and, in Poole and others, have witnessed enough of its ill effects to be convinced that it does little else but harm both to the adviser and the advisee.
[See _Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, Letter cli., ii. 474, 475.]
[Sidenote: PLACES AND PERSONS, Thursday, April 19, 1804]
This is Spain! That is Africa! Now, then, I have seen Africa! &c., &c.
O! the power of names to give interest. When I first sate down, with Europe on my left and Africa on my right, both distinctly visible, I felt a quickening of the movements in the blood, but still it felt as a pleasure of _amus.e.m.e.nt_ rather than of thought or elevation; and at the same time, and gradually winning on the other, the nameless silent forms of nature were working in me, like a tender thought in a man who is hailed merrily by some acquaintance in his work, and answers it in the same tone. This is Africa! That is Europe! There is _division_, sharp boundary, abrupt change! and what are they in nature? Two mountain banks that make a n.o.ble river of the interfluent sea, not existing and acting with distinctness and manifoldness indeed, but at once and as one--no division, no change, no ant.i.thesis! Of all men I ever knew, Wordsworth himself not excepted, I have the faintest pleasure in things contingent and transitory. I never, except as a forced courtesy of conversation, ask in a stage-coach, Whose house is that? nor receive the least additional pleasure when I receive the answer. Nay, it goes to a disease in me. As I was gazing at a wall in Caernarvon Castle, I wished the guide fifty miles off that was telling me, In this chamber the Black Prince was born (or whoever it was). I am not certain whether I should have seen with any emotion the mulberry-tree of Shakspere. If it were a tree of no notice in itself, I am sure that I should feel by an effort--with self-reproach at the dimness of the feeling; if a striking tree, I fear that the pleasure would be diminished rather than increased, that I should have no unity of feeling, and find in the constant a.s.sociation of Shakspere having planted it an intrusion that prevented me from wholly (as a whole man) losing myself in the flexures of its branches and intertwining of its roots. No doubt there are times and conceivable circ.u.mstances in which the contrary would be true, in which the thought that under this rock by the sea-sh.o.r.e I know that Giordano Bruno hid himself from the pursuit of the enraged priesthood, and overcome with the power and sublimity of the truths for which they sought his life, thought his life therefore given him that he might bear witness to the truths, and _morti ultra occurrens_, returned and surrendered himself! So, here, on this bank Milton used to lie, in late May, when a young man, and familiar with all its primroses, made them yet dearer than their dear selves, by that sweetest line in the Lycidas, ”And the rathe primrose that forsaken dies:” or from this spot the immortal deer-stealer, on his escape from Warwicks.h.i.+re, had the first view of London, and asked himself, And what am I to do there? At certain times, uncalled and sudden, subject to no bidding of my own or others, these thoughts would come upon me like a storm, and fill the place with something more than nature. But these are not contingent or transitory, they are nature, even as the elements are nature--yea, more to the human mind, for the mind has the power of abstracting all agency from the former and considering [them] as mere effects and instruments. But a Shakspere, a Milton, a Bruno, exist in the mind as pure _action_, defecated of all that is material and pa.s.sive. And the great moments that formed them--it is a kind of impiety against a voice within us, not to regard them as predestined, and therefore things of now, for ever, and which were always. But it degrades the sacred feeling, and is to it what stupid superst.i.tion is to enthusiastic religion, when a man makes a pilgrimage to see a great man's s.h.i.+n-bone found unmouldered in his coffin. Perhaps the matter stands thus. I could feel amused by these things, and should be, if there had not been connected with the great name upon which the amus.e.m.e.nt wholly depends a higher and deeper pleasure, that will [not] endure the co-presence of so mean a companion; while the ma.s.s of mankind, whether from nature or (as I fervently hope) from error of rearing and the worldliness of their after-pursuits, are rarely susceptible of any other pleasures than those of _amus.e.m.e.nt_, gratification of curiosity, novelty, surprise, wonderment, from the glaring, the harshly-contrasted, the odd, the accidental, and find the reading of the _Paradise Lost_ a task somewhat alleviated by a few entertaining incidents, such as the pandemonium and self-endwarfment of the devils, the fool's paradise and the transformation of the infernal court into serpents and of their intended applauses into hisses.
[”Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious opposites in this--that every old ruin, hill, river or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical a.s.sociations; whereas, for myself, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features.”--_Table Talk_, August 4, 1833, Bell & Co., 1834, p. 242.]
[Sidenote: THE INTOLERANCE OF CONVERTS]
Why do we so very, very often see men pa.s.s from one extreme to the other? [Greek: stodkardia] [Stoddart, for instance]. Alas! they sought not the truth, but praise, self-importance, and above all [the sense of] something doing! Disappointed, they hate and persecute their former opinion, which no man will do who by meditation had adopted it, and in the course of unfeigned meditation gradually enlarged the circle and so get out of it. For in the perception of its falsehood he will form a perception of certain truths which had made the falsehood plausible, and can never cease to venerate his own sincerity of intention and Philalethie. For, perhaps, we never _hate_ any opinion, or can do so, till we have _impersonated_ it. We hate the persons because they oppose us, symbolise that opposition under the form and words of the opinion and then hate the person for the opinion and the opinion for the person.
[For some weeks after his arrival at Valetta Coleridge remained as the guest of Dr. John (afterwards Sir John) Stoddart, at that time H.M.
Advocate at Malta.]
[Sidenote: FACTS AND FICTION]
Facts! Never be weary of discussing and exposing the hollowness of these. [For, in the first place,] every man [is] an accomplice on one side or the other, [and, secondly, there is] _human testimony_. ”You were in fault, I hear,” said B to C, and B had heard it from A. [Now] A had said, ”And C, G.o.d bless her, was perhaps the innocent occasion”! But what a trifle this to the generality of blunders!
[Sidenote: CANDOUR ANOTHER NAME FOR CANT]
[I have no pity or patience for that], blindness which comes from putting out your own eyes and in mock humility refusing to form an opinion on the right and the wrong of a question. ”If we say so of the Sicilians, why may not Buonaparte say this of the Swiss?” and so forth.
As if England and France, Swiss and Sicilian were the x y z of Algebra, naked names of unknown quant.i.ties. [What is this but] to fix morals without morality, and [to allow] general rules to supersede all particular thought? And though it be never acted on in reality, yet the opinion is pernicious. It kills public spirit and deadens national effort.
[Sidenote: A SIMILE]