Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge Samuel Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ they did so. England was saved from civil war by their enormous, their providential, blundering.

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      Can a politician, a statesman, slight the feelings and the convictions of the whole matronage of his country? The women are as influential upon such national interests as the men.

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      Horne Tooke was always making a butt of Mr. Godwin; who, nevertheless, had that in him which Tooke could never have understood. I saw a good deal of Tooke at one time: he left upon me the impression of his being a keen, iron man.

      May 9. 1830

PERSIAN AND ARABIC POETRY.—MILESIAN TALES

      I must acknowledge I never could see much merit in the Persian poetry, which I have read in translation. There is not a ray of imagination in it, and but a glimmering of fancy. It is, in fact, so far as I know, deficient in truth. Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least. The Arabian Nights' Tales are a different thing —they are delightful, but I cannot help surmising that there is a good deal of Greek fancy in them. No doubt we have had a great loss in the Milesian Tales.47 The book of Job is pure Arab poetry of the highest and most antique cast.

      Think of the sublimity, I should rather say the profundity, of that passage in Ezekiel,48 "Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest." I know nothing like it.

      May 11. 1830

SIR T. MONRO.—SIR S. RAFFLES.—CANNING

      Sir Thomas Monro and Sir Stamford Raffles were both great men; but I recognise more genius in the latter, though, I believe, the world says otherwise.

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      I never found what I call an idea in any speech or writing of –'s. Those enormously prolix harangues are a proof of weakness in the higher intellectual grasp. Canning had a sense of the beautiful and the good; – rarely speaks but to abuse, detract, and degrade. I confine myself to institutions, of course, and do not mean personal detraction. In my judgment, no man can rightly apprehend an abuse till he has first mastered the idea of the use of an institution. How fine, for example, is the idea of the unhired magistracy of England, taking in and linking together the duke to the country gentleman in the primary distribution of justice, or in the preservation of order and execution of law at least throughout the country! Yet some men never seem to have thought of it for one moment, but as connected with brewers, and barristers, and tyrannical Squire Westerns! From what I saw of Homer, I thought him a superior man, in real intellectual greatness.

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      Canning flashed such a light around the constitution, that it was difficult to see the ruins of the fabric through it.

      May 12. 1830

SHAKSPEARE.—MILTON.—HOMER

      Shakspeare is the Spinosistic deity—an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed,– epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out. No one can understand Shakspeare's superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, all that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shakspeare's own. His rhythm is so perfect, that you may be almost sure that you do not understand the real force of a line, if it does not run well as you read it. The necessary mental pause after every hemistich or imperfect line is always equal to the time that would have been taken in reading the complete verse.

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      I have no doubt whatever that Homer is a mere concrete name for the rhapsodies of the Iliad.49 Of course there was a Homer, and twenty besides. I will engage to compile twelve books with characters just as distinct and consistent as those in the Iliad, from the metrical ballads, and other chronicles of England, about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I say nothing about moral dignity, but the mere consistency of character. The different qualities were traditional. Tristram is always courteous, Lancelot invincible, and so on. The same might be done with the Spanish romances of the Cid. There is no subjectivity whatever in the Homeric poetry. There is a subjectivity of the poet, as of Milton, who is himself before himself in everything he writes; and there is a subjectivity of the persona, or dramatic character, as in all Shakspeare's great creations, Hamlet, Lear, &c.

      May 14. 1830

REASON AND UNDERSTANDING.—WORDS AND NAMES OF THINGS

      Until you have mastered the fundamental difference, in kind, between the reason and the understanding as faculties of the human mind, you cannot escape a thousand difficulties in philosophy. It is pre-eminently the Gradus ad Philosophiam.

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      The general harmony between the operations of the mind and heart, and the words which express them in almost all languages, is wonderful; whilst the endless discrepancies between the names of things is very well deserving notice. There are nearly a hundred names in the different German dialects for the alder-tree. I believe many more remarkable instances are to be found in Arabic. Indeed, you may take a very pregnant and useful distinction between words and mere arbitrary names of things.

      May 15. 1830

THE TRINITY.—IRVING

      The Trinity is, 1. the Will; 2. the Reason, or Word; 3. the Love, or Life. As we distinguish these three, so we must unite them in one God. The union must be as transcendant as the distinction.

      Mr. Irving's notion is tritheism,—nay, rather in terms, tri-daemonism. His opinion about the sinfulness of the humanity of our Lord is absurd, if considered in one point of view; for body is not carcass. How can there be a sinful carcass? But what he says is capable of a sounder interpretation. Irving caught many things from me; but he would never attend to any thing which he thought he could not use in the pulpit. I told him the certain consequence would be, that he would fall into grievous errors. Sometimes he has five or six pages together of the purest eloquence, and then an outbreak of almost madman's babble.50

      May 16. 1830

ABRAHAM.—ISAAC.—JACOB

      How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure, if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, "the friend of God," Abraham was that man. We are not surprised that Abimelech and Ephron seem to reverence him so profoundly. He was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to God; in other respects, he takes fire, like an Arah sheikh, at the injuries suffered by Lot, and goes to war with the combined kinglings immediately.

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      Isaac is, as it were, a faint shadow of his father Abraham. Born in possession of the power and wealth which his father had acquired, he is always peaceful and meditative; and it is curious to observe his timid and almost childish imitation of Abraham's stratagem about his wife.51 Isaac does it before-hand, and without any apparent necessity.

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      Jacob is a regular Jew, and practises all sorts of tricks and wiles, which, according to our modern notions of honour, we cannot approve. But you will observe that all these tricks are confined to matters of prudential arrangement, to worldly success and prosperity (for such, in fact, was СКАЧАТЬ