Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, March 1885. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ Arnold in later times. According to this theory the Church and State are really identical, the Church being merely the State in its educational and religious aspect and organisation. But Coleridge's special theory is different from this, although allied to it. He distinguishes the Christian Church as such from any national church. The former is spiritual and catholic, the latter institutional and local. The former is opposed to the “world,” the latter is an estate of the realm. The former has nothing to do with states and kingdoms. It is in this respect identical with the “spiritual and invisible church known only to the Father of Spirits,” and the compensating counterpoise of all that is of the world. It is, in short, the Divine aggregate of what is really Divine in all Christian communities, and more or less ideally represented “in every true church.” A national church again is the incorporation of all the learning and knowledge – intellectual and spiritual – in a country. Every nation in order to its true health and civilisation requires not only a land-owning or permanent class along with a commercial, industrial, and progressive class, but moreover, an educative class to represent all higher knowledge, “to guard the treasures of past civilisation,” to bind the national life together in its past, present, and future, and to communicate to all citizens a clear understanding of their rights and duties. This third estate of the realm Coleridge denominated the “Clerisy,” and included not merely the clergy, but, in his own language, “the learned of all denominations.” The knowledge, which it was their function to cultivate and diffuse, embraced not only theology, although this pre-eminently as the head of all other knowledge, but law, music, mathematics, the physical sciences, “all the so-called liberal arts and sciences, the possession and cultivation of which constitute the civilisation of a country.”

      This is at any rate a large conception of a national church. It is put forth by its author with all earnestness, although he admitted that it had never been anywhere realised. But it was his object “to present the Idea of a national church as the only safe criterion by which we can judge of existing things.” It was only when “we are in full and clear possession of the ultimate aim of an institution” that we can ascertain how far “this aim has ever been attained in other ways.”

      These, very briefly explained, are the main lines along which Coleridge moved the national mind in the third decade of this century. They may seem to some rather impalpable lines, and hardly calculated to touch the general mind. But they were influential, as the course of Christian literature has since proved. Like his own genius, they were diffusive rather than concentrative. The Coleridgian ideas permeated the general intellectual atmosphere, modifying old conceptions in criticism as well as theology, deepening if not always clarifying the channels of thought in many directions, but especially in the direction of Christian philosophy. They acted in this way as a new circulation of spiritual air all around, rather than in conveying any new body of truth. The very ridicule of Carlyle testifies to the influence which they exercised over aspiring and younger minds. The very emphasis with which he repudiates the Coleridgian metaphysic probably indicates that he had felt some echo of it in his own heart. —Fortnightly Review.

      THE PORTRAIT

      A Story of the Seen and the Unseen

      At the period when the following incidents occurred I was living with my father at The Grove, a large old house in the immediate neighborhood of a little town. This had been his home for a number of years; and I believe I was born in it. It was a kind of house which, notwithstanding all the red and white architecture, known at present by the name of Queen Anne, builders nowadays have forgotten how to build. It was straggling and irregular, with wide passages, wide staircases, broad landings; the rooms large but not very lofty; the arrangements leaving much to be desired, with no economy of space; a house belonging to a period when land was cheap, and, so far as that was concerned, there was no occasion to economise. Though it was so near the town, the clump of trees in which it was environed was a veritable grove. In the grounds in spring the primroses grew as thickly as in the forest. We had a few fields for the cows, and an excellent walled garden. The place is being pulled down at this moment to make room for more streets of mean little houses, – the kind of thing, and not a dull house of faded gentry, which perhaps the neighborhood requires. The house was dull, and so were we, its last inhabitants; and the furniture was faded, even a little dingy, – nothing to brag of. I do not, however, intend to convey a suggestion that we were faded gentry, for that was not the case. My father, indeed, was rich, and had no need to spare any expense in making his life and his house bright if he pleased; but he did not please, and I had not been long enough at home to exercise any special influence of my own. It was the only home I had ever known; but except in my earliest childhood, and in my holidays as a schoolboy, I had in reality known but little of it. My mother had died at my birth, or shortly after, and I had grown up in the gravity and silence of a house without women. In my infancy, I believe, a sister of my father's had lived with us, and taken charge of the household and of me; but she, too, had died long, long ago, my mourning for her being one of the first things I could recollect. And she had no successor. There was, indeed, a housekeeper and some maids, – the latter of whom I only saw disappearing at the end of a passage, or whisking out of a room when one of “the gentlemen” appeared. Mrs. Weir, indeed, I saw nearly every day; but a curtsey, a smile, a pair of nice round arms which she caressed while folding them across her ample waist, and a large white apron, were all I knew of her. This was the only female influence in the house. The drawing-room I was aware of only as a place of deadly good order, into which nobody ever entered. It had three long windows opening on the lawn, and communicated at the upper end, which was rounded like a great bay, with the conservatory. Sometimes I gazed into it as a child from without, wondering at the needlework on the chairs, the screens, the looking-glasses which never reflected any living face. My father did not like the room, which probably was not wonderful, though it never occurred to me in those early days to inquire why.

      I may say here, though it will probably be disappointing to those who form a sentimental idea of the capabilities of children, that it did not occur to me either, in these early days, to make any inquiry about my mother. There was no room in life, as I knew it, for any such person; nothing suggested to my mind either the fact that she must have existed, or that there was need of her in the house. I accepted, as I believe most children do, the facts of existence, on the basis with which I had first made acquaintance with them, without question or remark. As a matter of fact, I was aware that it was rather dull at home; but neither by comparison with the books I read, nor by the communications received from my school-fellows, did this seem to me anything remarkable. And I was possibly somewhat dull too by nature, for I did not mind. I was fond of reading, and for that there was unbounded opportunity. I had a little ambition in respect to work, and that too could be prosecuted undisturbed. When I went to the university, my society lay almost entirely among men; but by that time and afterwards, matters had of course greatly changed with me, and though I recognised women as part of the economy of nature, and did not indeed by any means dislike or avoid them, yet the idea of connecting them at all with my own home never entered into my head. That continued to be as it had always been, when at intervals I descended upon the cool, grave, colorless place, in the midst of my traffic with the world; always very still, well-ordered, serious – the cooking very good, the comfort perfect – old Morphew, the butler, a little older (but very little older, perhaps on the whole less old, since in my childhood I had thought him a kind of Methuselah), and Mrs. Weir, less active, covering up her arms in sleeves, but folding and caressing them just as always. I remember looking in from the lawn through the windows upon that deadly-orderly drawing-room, with a humorous recollection of my childish admiration and wonder, and feeling that it must be kept so forever and ever, and that to go into it would break some sort of amusing mock mystery, some pleasantly ridiculous spell.

      But it was only at rare intervals that I went home. In the long vacation, as in my school holidays, my father often went abroad with me, so that we had gone over a great deal of the Continent together very pleasantly. He was old in proportion to the age of his son, being a man of sixty when I was twenty, but that did not disturb the pleasure of the relations between us. I don't know that they were ever very confidential. On my side there was but little to communicate, for I did not get into scrapes nor fall in love, the two СКАЧАТЬ