Part 15 (1/2)
I seem to feel that if France had been for ages a Protestant nation, and a Milton had been born in it, the French language would not have precluded the production of a ”Paradise Lost,” though it might, perhaps, that of a Hamlet or a Lear.
[Sidenote: THE ABSTRACT SELF On Friday night, Feb. 8, 1805]
On Friday Night, 8th Feb. 1805, my feeling, in sleep, of exceeding great love for my infant, seen by me in the dream!--yet so as it might be Sara, Derwent, or Berkley, and still it was an individual babe and mine.
”All look or likeness caught from earth, All accident of kin or birth, Had pa.s.s'd away. There seem'd no trace Of aught upon her brighten'd face, Upraised beneath the rifted stone, Save of one spirit all her own; She, she herself, and only she, Shone through her body visibly.”
_Poetical Works_, 1893, p. 172.
This abstract self is, indeed, in its nature a Universal personified, as Life, Soul, Spirit, etc. Will not this _prove_ it to be a _deeper_ feeling, and of such intimate affinity with ideas, so as to modify them and become one with them; whereas the appet.i.tes and the feelings of revenge and anger co-exist with the ideas, not combine with them, and alter the apparent effect of this form, not the forms themselves?
Certain modifications of fear seem to approach nearest to this love-sense in its manner of acting.
Those whispers just as you have fallen asleep--what are they, and whence?
[Sidenote: LITERA SCRIPTA MANET Monday, Feb 11, 1805]
I must own to a superst.i.tious dread of the destruction of paper worthy of a Mahometan. But I am also ashamed to confess to myself what pulling back of heart I feel whenever I wish to light a candle or kindle a fire with a Hospital or Harbour Report, and what a c.u.mulus lies on my table, I not able to conjecture of what use they can ever be, and yet trembling lest what I then destroyed might be of some use in the way of knowledge.
This seems to be the excess of a good feeling, but it is ridiculous.
[Sidenote: COWPER'S ”LINES TO MRS. UNWIN”]
It is not without a certain sense of self-reproof, as well as self-distrust, that I ask, or, rather, that my understanding suggests to me the query, whether this divine poem (in so original a strain of thought and feeling honourable to human nature) would not have been more perfect if the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas had been omitted, and the tenth and eleventh transposed so as to stand as the third and fourth. It is not, perhaps not at all, but, certainly, not princ.i.p.ally that I feel any meanness in the ”needles;” but, not to mention that the words ”once a s.h.i.+ning store” is a speck in the diamond (in a less dear poem I might, perhaps, have called it more harshly a _rhyme-botch_), and that the word ”restless” is rather too strong an impersonation for the serious tone, the _real_ness of the poem, and seems to tread too closely on the mock-heroic; but that it seems not true to poetic feeling to introduce the affecting circ.u.mstance of dimness of sight from decay of nature on an occasion so remote from the [Greek: to katholou], and that the fifth stanza, graceful and even affecting as the spirit of the playfulness is or would be, at least, in a poem having less depth of feeling, breaks in painfully here--the age and afflicting infirmities both of the writer and his subject seem abhorrent from such trifling of--scarcely fancy, for I fear, if it were a.n.a.lysed, that the whole effect would be found to depend on phrases hackneyed, and taken from the alms-house of the Muses. The test would be this: read the poem to a well-educated but natural woman, an unaffected, gentle being, endued with sense and sensibility--subst.i.tuting the tenth and eleventh stanzas for those three, and some days after shew her the poem as it now stands.
I seem to be sure that she would be shocked--an alien would have intruded himself, and be found sitting in a circle of dear friends whom she expected to have found _all to themselves_.
[Sidenote: ETYMOLOGY]
To say that etymology is a science--is to use this word in its laxest and improper sense. But our language, except, at least, in poetry, has dropped the word ”lore”--the _lehre_ of the Germans, the _logos_ of the Greek. Either we should have retained the word and ventured on _Root-lore_, _verse-lore_, etc., or have adopted the Greek as a single word as well as a word in combination. All novelties appear or are rather felt as ridiculous in language; but, if it had been once adopted, it would have been no stranger to have said that etymo_logy_ is a _logy_ which perishes from a plethora of probability, than that the _art_ of war is an _art_ apparently for the destruction and subjugation of particular states, but really for the lessening of bloodshed and the preservation of the liberties of mankind. Art and Science are both too much appropriated--our language wants terms of comprehensive generality, implying the kind, not the degree or species, as in that good and necessary word _sensuous_, which we have likewise dropped, opposed to sensual, sensitive, sensible, etc., etc. Chymistry has felt this difficulty, and found the necessity of having one word for the supposed cause, another for the effect, as in caloric or calorific, opposed to heat; and psychology has still more need of the reformation.
[Sidenote: SENTIMENT, AN ANTIDOTE TO CASUISTRY]
The Queen-bee in the hive of Popish Error, the great mother of the swarm, seems to me their tenet concerning Faith and Works, placing the former wholly in the rect.i.tude, nay, in the rightness of intellectual conviction, and the latter in the definite and, most often, the material action, and, consequently, the a.s.sertion of the dividuous nature and self-existence of works. Hence the doctrine of d.a.m.nation out of the Church of Rome--of the one visible Church--of the absolute efficiency _in se_ of all the Sacraments and the absolute merit of ceremonial observances. Consider the incalculable advantage of chiefly dwelling on the virtues of the heart, of habits of feeling and harmonious action, the music of the adjusted string at the impulse of the breeze, and, on the other hand, the evils of books concerning particular actions, minute cases of conscience, hair-splitting directions and decisions, O how ill.u.s.trated by the detestable character of most of the Roman Catholic casuists! No actions should be distinctly described but such as manifestly tend to awaken the heart to efficient feeling, whether of fear or of love--actions that, falling back on the fountain, keep it full, or clear out the mud from its pipes, and make it play in its abundance, s.h.i.+ning in that purity in which, at once, the purity and the light is each the cause of the other, the light purifying, and the purified receiving and reflecting the light, sending it off to others; not, like the polished mirror, by reflection from itself, but by transmission through itself.
[Sidenote: THE EMPYREAN]
Friday + Sat.u.r.day, 12-1 o'clock [March 2, 1805.]
What a sky! the not yet orbed moon, the spotted oval, blue at one edge from the deep utter blue of the sky--a Ma.s.s of _pearl_-white cloud below, distant, and travelling to the horizon, but all the upper part of the ascent and all the height such _profound_ blue, deep as a deep river, and deep in colour, and those two depths so entirely _one_, _as_ to give the meaning and explanation of the two different significations of the epithet. Here, so far from _divided_, they were scarcely _distinct_, scattered over with thin pearl-white cloudlets--hands and fingers--the largest not larger than a floating veil! Unconsciously I stretched forth my arms as to embrace the sky, and in a trance I had wors.h.i.+pped G.o.d in the moon--the spirit, not the form. I felt in how innocent a feeling Sabeism might have begun. Oh! not only the moon, but the depths of the sky! The moon was the _idea_; but deep sky is, of all visual impressions, the nearest akin to a feeling. It is more a feeling than a sight, or, rather, it is the melting away and entire union of feeling and sight!
[Sidenote: DISTEMPER'S WORST CALAMITY]
Monday morning, which I ought not to have known not to be Sunday night, 2 o'clock, March 4, 1805.
My dreams to-night were interfused with struggle and fear, though, till the very last, not victors; but the very last, which awoke me, was a completed night-mare, as it gave the _idea_ and _sensation_ of actual grasp or touch contrary to _my_ will and in apparent consequence of the malignant will of the external form, whether actually appearing or, as sometimes happened, believed to exist--in which latter case I have two or three times felt a horrid touch of hatred, a grasp, or a weight of hate and horror abstracted from all [conscious] form or supposal of form, an _abstract touch_, an _abstract_ grasp, an _abstract_ weight!