Part 27 (1/2)
I must extract and transcribe from the preface to the works of Paracelsus that eloquent defence of technical new words and of old words used in a new sense. The whole preface is exceedingly lively, and (excepting the mountebank defence of intentional obscurity and the attack on logic, as if it were ever intended to be an organon of discovery of material truth and directly, instead of a formal preliminary a.s.sisting the mind indirectly, and showing what cannot be truth, and what has not been proved truth,) very just.
The Chinese call the monsoon whirlwind, when more than usually fierce, the elephant. This is a fine image--a mad wounded war-elephant.
The poor oppressed Amboynese, who bear with patience the extirpation of their clove and nutmeg trees, in their fields and native woods, and the cruel taxes on sugar, their staff of life, will yet, at once and universally, rise up in rebellion and prepare to destroy in despair all and everything, themselves included, if any attempt is made to destroy any individual's Tatanaman, the clove-tree which each Amboynese plants at the birth of each of his children. Very affecting!
[Sidenote: GENIUS]
The man of genius places things in a new light. This trivial phrase better expresses the appropriate effects of genius than Pope's celebrated distich--
”What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest.”
It has been thought distinctly, but only possessed, as it were, unpacked and unsorted. The poet not only displays what, though often seen in its unfolded ma.s.s, had never been opened out, but he likewise adds something, namely, light and relations. Who has not seen a rose, or sprig of jasmine or myrtle? But behold those same flowers in a posy or flower-pot, painted by a man of genius, or a.s.sorted by the hand of a woman of fine taste and instinctive sense of beauty!
[Sidenote: LOVE]
To find our happiness incomplete without the happiness of some other given person or persons is the definition of affection in general, and applies equally to friends.h.i.+p, to the parental and to the conjugal relations. But what is love? Love as it may subsist between two persons of different senses? This--and what more than this? The mutual dependence of their happiness, each on that of the other, each being at once cause and effect. You, therefore, I--I, therefore you. The sense of this reciprocity of well-being, is that which first stamps and legitimates the name of happiness in all the other advantages and favourable accidents of nature, or fortune, without which they would change their essence and become like the curse of Tantalus, insulting remembrances of misery, of that most unquiet of all miseries, means of happiness blasted and transformed by incompleteness, nay, by the loss of the sole organ through which we could enjoy them.
Suppose a wide and delightful landscape, and what the eye is to the light, and the light to the eye, that interchangeably is the lover to the beloved. ”O best beloved! who lovest _me_ the best!” In strictest propriety of application might he thus address her, if only she with equal truth could echo the same sense in the same feeling. ”Light of mine eye! by which alone I not only see all I see, but which makes up more than half the loveliness of the objects seen, yet, still, like the rising sun in the morning, like the moon at night, remainest thyself and for thyself, the dearest, fairest form of all the thousand forms that derive from thee all their visibility, and borrow from thy presence their chiefest beauty!”
[Sidenote: COTTLE'S ”FREE VERSION OF THE PSALMS”]
Diamond + oxygen = charcoal. Even so on the fire-spark of his zeal did Cottle place the King-David diamonds, and caused to pa.s.s over them the oxygenous blast of his own inspiration, and lo! the diamond becomes a bit of charcoal.
[Sidenote: FRIENDs.h.i.+P AND MARRIAGE]
”Ich finde alles eher auf der Erde, so gar Wahrheit und Freude, als Freundschaft.”--JEAN PAUL.[F]
This for the motto--to examine and attest the fact, and then to explain the reason. First, then, there are the extraordinary qualifications demanded for true friends.h.i.+p, arising from the mult.i.tude of causes that make men delude themselves and attribute to friends.h.i.+p what is only a similarity of pursuit, or even a mere dislike of feeling oneself alone in anything. But, secondly, supposing the friends.h.i.+p to be as real as human nature ordinarily permits, yet how many causes are at constant war against it, whether in the shape of violent irruptions or un.o.bserved yet constant wearings away by dyspathy, &c. Exemplify this in youth and then in manhood. First, there is the influence of wives, how frequently deadly to friends.h.i.+p, either by direct encroach, or, perhaps, intentional plans of alienation! Secondly, there is the effect of families, by otherwise occupying the heart; and, thirdly, the action of life in general, by the worldly-wise, chilling effects of prudential anxieties.
Corollary. These reflections, however, suggest an argument in favour of the existing indissolubility of marriage.
To be compelled to make it up, or consent to be miserable and disrespected, is indeed a coa.r.s.e plaister for the wounds of love, but so it must be while the patients themselves are of coa.r.s.e make and unhealthy humours.
[Sidenote: IMAGINATION]
His imagination, if it must be so called, is at all events of the pettiest kind--it is an _imaginunculation_. How excellently the German _Einbildungskraft_ expresses this prime and loftiest faculty, the power of co-adunation, the faculty that forms the many into one--_In-eins-bildung!_ Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, or the mirrorment, either catoptric or metoptric--repeating simply, or by transposition--and, again, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will.
[See _Biog. Lit._, cap. x.; _Coleridge's Works_, iii. 272. See also _Blackwood's Magazine_, March 1840, No. ccxciii., Art. The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge.]
[Sidenote: PUBLIC OPINION AND THE SERVICES]
Ministers, as in the Admiralty, or War Office, compared to managers of theatres. The numerous absurd claims at length deaden their sense of judgment to real merit, and superinduce in the mind an antic.i.p.ation of clamorous vanity. Hence the great importance of the public voice, forcing them to be just. This, how ill.u.s.trated by the life of Nelson--the infamous coldness with which all his claims were received--especially Mr. Wyndham's answer, July 21, 1795. And no wonder!