Part 17 (2/2)
A ready command of a limited number of words is but a playing cat-cradle dexterously with language.
Plain contra-reasoning may be compared with boxing with fists.
Controversy with boxing is the cestus, that is, the lead-loaded glove, like the pugilists in the aeneid. But the stiletto! the envenomed stiletto is here. What worse? (a Germanism) Yes! the poisoned Italian glove of mock friends.h.i.+p.
The more I reflect, the more exact and close appears to me the a.n.a.logy between a watch and watches, and the conscience and consciences of men, on the one hand, and that between the sun and motion of the heavenly bodies in general and the reason and goodness of the Supreme on the other. Never goes quite right any one, no two go exactly the same; they derive their dignity and use as being subst.i.tutes and exponents of heavenly motions, but still, in a thousand instances, they are and must be our instructors by which we must act, in practice presuming a coincidence while theoretically we are aware of incalculable variations.
One lifts up one's eyes to heaven, as if to seek there what one had lost on earth--eyes, Whose half-beholdings through unsteady tears Gave shape, hue, distance to the inward dream.
[Sidenote: GREAT MEN THE CRITERION OF NATIONAL WORTH]
Schiller, disgusted with Kotzebuisms, deserts from Shakspere! What!
cannot we condemn a counterfeit and yet remain admirers of the original?
This is a sufficient proof that the first admiration was not sound, or founded on sound distinct perceptions [or, if sprung from], a sound feeling, yet clothed and manifested to the consciousness by false ideas.
And now the French stage is to be re-introduced. O Germany! Germany! why this endless rage for novelty? Why this endless looking out of thyself?
But stop, let me not fall into the pit against which I was about to warn others. Let me not confound the discriminating character and genius of a nation with the conflux of its individuals in cities and reviews. Let England be Sir Philip Sidney, Shakspere, Milton, Bacon, Harrington, Swift, Wordsworth; and never let the names of Darwin, Johnson, Hume, _fur_ it over. If these, too, must be England let them be another England; or, rather, let the first be old England, the spiritual, Platonic old England, and the second, with Locke at the head of the philosophers and Pope [at the head] of the poets, together with the long list of Priestleys, Paleys, Hayleys, Darwins, Mr. Pitts, Dunda.s.ses, &c., &c., be the representatives of commercial Great Britain. These have [indeed] their merits, but are as alien to me as the Mandarin philosophers and poets of China. Even so Leibnitz, Lessing, Voss, Kant, shall be _Germany_ to me, let whatever c.o.xcombs rise up, and _shrill_ it away in the gra.s.shopper vale of reviews. And so shall Dante, Ariosto, Giordano Bruno, be my Italy; Cervantes my Spain; and O! that I could find a France for my love. But spite of Pascal, Madame Guyon and Moliere, France is my Babylon, the mother of wh.o.r.edoms in morality, philosophy and taste. The French themselves feel a foreignness in these writers. How indeed is it possible at once to _love_ Pascal and Voltaire?
[Sidenote: AN INTELLECTUAL PURGATORY Tuesday morning, May 14, 1805]
With any distinct remembrance of a past life there could be no fear of death as death, no idea even of death! Now, in the next state, to meet with the Luthers, Miltons, Leibnitzs, Bernouillis, Bonnets, Shaksperes, etc., and to live a longer and better life, the good and wise entirely among the good and wise, might serve as a step to break the abruptness of an immediate Heaven? But it must be a human life; and though the faith in a hereafter would be more firm, more undoubting, yet, still, it must not be a sensuous remembrance of a death pa.s.sed over. No! [it would be] something like a dream that you had not died, but had been taken off; in short, the real events with the obscurity of a dream, accompanied with the notion that you had never died, but that death was yet to come. As a man who, having walked in his sleep, by rapid openings of his eyes--too rapid to be observable by others or rememberable by himself--sees and remembers the whole of his path, mixing it with many fancies _ab intra_, and, awaking, remembers, but yet as a dream.
[Sidenote: OF FIRST LOVES]
'Tis one source of mistakes concerning the merits of poems, that to those read in youth men attribute all that praise which is due to poetry in general, merely considered as select language in metre. (Little children should not be taught verses, in my opinion; better not to let them set eyes on verse till they are ten or eleven years old.) Now, poetry produces two kinds of pleasure, one for each of the two master-movements and impulses of man, the gratification of the love of variety, and the gratification of the love of uniformity--and that by a recurrence delightful as a painless and yet exciting act of memory--tiny breezelets of surprise, each one destroying the ripplets which the former had made--yet all together keeping the surface of the mind in a bright dimple-smile. So, too, a hatred of vacancy is reconciled with the love of rest. These and other causes often make [a first acquaintance with] poetry an overpowering delight to a lad of feeling, as I have heard Poole relate of himself respecting Edwin and Angelina. But so it would be with a man bred up in a wilderness by Unseen Beings, who should yet converse and discourse rationally with him--how beautiful would not the first other man appear whom he saw and knew to be a man by the resemblance to his own image seen in the clear stream; and would he not, in like manner, attribute to the man all the divine attributes of humanity, though, haply, he should be a very ordinary, or even a most ugly man, compared with a hundred others? Many of us who have felt this with respect to women have been bred up where few are to be seen; and I acknowledge that, both in persons and in poems, it is well _on the whole_ that we should retain our first love, though, alike in both cases, evils have happened as the consequence.
[Sidenote: THE MADDENING RAIN August 1, 1805]
The excellent fable of the maddening rain I have found in Drayton's ”Moon Calf,” most miserably marred in the telling! vastly inferior to Benedict Fay's Latin exposition of it, and that is no great thing.
_Vide_ his Lucretian Poem on the Newtonian System. Never was a finer tale for a satire, or, rather, to conclude a long satirical poem of five or six hundred lines.
[For excellent use of this fable, see _The Friend_, No. 1, June 9, 1809, _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, ii. 21, 22.]
[Sidenote: SENTIMENTS BELOW MORALS]
Pasley remarked last night (2nd August 1805), and with great precision and originality, that men themselves, in the present age, were not so much degraded as their sentiments. This is most true! almost all men nowadays act and feel more n.o.bly than they think--yet still the vile, cowardly, selfish, calculating ethics of Paley, Priestley, Locke, and other Erastians do woefully influence and determine our course of action.
[Sidenote: TIME AND ETERNITY]
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